Diagnosis

Bailey sits as still as she can in the doctor’s office stackable plastic chair, staring at the poster exhorting people not to run their hepatic cartridges past their stated lifespan, and wonders what the ransom on continued cyberliver function is. Okay, some people are always gonna need reminding — lazy or goddamn stupid or executive nonfunctional — but when it’s worth nagging everybody with posters you know the problem’s too widespread, and you know that means systemic.

She doesn’t even have a cyberliver. Just distracting herself. She tries to remember the outline of the script she read online; You need to ask your doctor for....

The nurse’s fingers tap over the keyboard, conforming Bailey to the needs of an indifferent set of text boxes, poorly laid out for screen use, no doubt modelled faithfully after some identically indifferent paper version. Obsolescent shittiness persisted in perpetuity for the fleeting convenience of unretrainable obsolescent shitheads. A cursory record that Bailey attended when she was told, answered when demanded, yielded no reason to enter deniable rubrics that she is a bad patient who should be punished by anyone who sees her records in future with manufactured disbelief and withheld treatment.

Her throat is tight around the careful lies she plans to tell.

“Any sensitivity issues?”

That’s her cue.

“I, uh, I — I actually wanted to ask,” she stammers, “about maybe uh retuning the sensitivity gain—” and shit she sounds like she’s reciting a script, badly, retuning sensitivity gain is accurate but the wrong jargon for the context. And she sounds incredibly guilty.

The nurse stops typing, and looks at her over the top of rectangular reading glasses.

“Have you been reading the Intensation website, Bailey,” she drawls, and Bailey blanches and stammers and manages a whole half-dozen fragmentary words in the general direction of who what never heard of it why I never.

The perpetual promise of cyberware is to do more, be more; the inevitable delivery is here’s a like-for-like functional replacement. Here’s what you need to bring you up to spec. Grats on being a fungible labour unit for capital’s benefit; go forth and work again. Intensation is a grubby little interstice burrowed into the seams of ontological prescriptivism’s capital-enforced squeamishness, its appeals to God and Nature and hubris and lack of data and controversy and whatever else excuse; kitchen-sink biohacking, hardware jailbreaking, reverse engineering, software patching, all in service of having the bespoke human experience one wants. Frontiers of sensation only reachable via technology, roped off by conservatism’s mall cops, armed with reactionary law and how dare you want.

“If you have sensory complaints, procedure says I should get you to fill out a self-assessment for neuropathy,” the nurse says pleasantly, not reaching for a form or clipboard or pen, and raises her eyebrows at Bailey.

“No,” Bailey says, appropriately squashed and shamed. “It’s fine actually.”

“I’ll give you some literature on warning signs to look out for,” the nurse says, and rummages in drawers for particular patronising leaflets; and then opens her handbag, digs out a business card case, wordlessly extracts a colourful card and tucks it into the leaflets, passes them to Bailey, and taps significantly on the bundle, once, twice, before letting go.

“Any other issues?” she says, terribly professionally.

The business card — a block of emphatic text on the reverse proclaiming it to be part of a free sample run by some website or other — points Bailey, in a way that’s less than self-explanatory, to an empty commercial unit downtown. Strata of weathered, half-removed and covered-over signs on the front tell a history of business failures; one day a month, a local makerspace hold a repair clinic in it, looking over peoples’ busted stuff and offering a free cup of shitty coffee while they mostly, painstakingly come to the enthusiastic-amateur conclusion that things are unrepairable by design.

Today is not that day of the month.

Bailey looks at the shuttered shop front; at the business card. Wanders tentatively down the alleyway to the back, picking around the spiny plants belligerently erupting from cracks in the paving, and the dingy puddles.

“Hello?” she calls.

The back door of the unit, the staff entrance, is open. Someone’s phone is tinnily playing music inside. As she gingerly approaches, a guy puts his head out, gives her a suspicious once-over.

“Yo,” he says shortly. “You lost?”

“No,” Bailey says, small and hesitant. “I — someone gave me a card?”

He runs his eyes over her again, slower, more careful. Holds his hand out in silent demand. She fumbles the card into his hand; he looks at that carefully, too, then hands it back and points her inside with a jerk of his chin.

The tiny stockroom is almost empty, save for the makerspace’s supply of shitty instant coffee and cups. There are partitioned-off nooks, almost too little to be called rooms, for a staff room, toilet, and manager’s office, all deserted; the door through to the shop floor is also propped open, and Bailey creeps through onto a floor scarred with ancient footfall patterns, the concentric scrapes of swinging counter doors, and rust-marked holes where shelving was once bolted down. Shelving, counters and all are long gone; just folded trestle tables and a pile of plastic chairs, stacked against one wall.

Five chairs are in a loose circle in the middle of the floor; one piled with cables and computer gadgets, three filled with strangers as suspicious-eyed as the one at the door, and in the final one sits the nurse. Off duty, she’s wearing denim dungaree shorts over fishnet tights, a battered pair of hiking boots, a flannel shirt.

“Hello, Bailey,” the nurse says, smiling in a sharp, unsettling way. She takes a deep hit on a joint and passes it on. “Come on over here where we can see you,” and Bailey takes step after halting step, afraid, into the circle of chairs. “There. We’re all friends here. You want to be friends, don’t you, Bailey?”

Bailey’s not very sure about that. Bailey’s not very sure what’s going on. She stammers.

One of the squinting strangers reaches out, joint proffered.

“I just,” Bailey says, looking from it to the nurse, “I just wanted my cyberware tweaked?” and hates the way her mouth makes it sound like a question.

The nurse nods at the pile of tech on the chair. “We can do that,” she says. “But we’re not doing medicine here, Bailey. We’re doing something more important. And the start of it looks ironically like an initial patient assessment.” She nods again, pointedly, at the joint. “Relax.”

Under the crowd of eyes, Bailey gingerly, with many misgivings, takes it.

“—Well,” she finds herself stumblingly explaining, some time later: “I just read…the firsthand accounts on Intensation are all full of, of poetry. Everyone gets hung up on the guy who was in the newspapers for taking his quarter-million-dollar cybereye out at the kitchen table, like, the whole self-surgery thing, and the fact he did it to take out the UV filter and see — I mean, not even much more; I read that the filter was mostly to prevent hardware degradation, the image sensor didn’t even have much past-blue pickup. But the, the sensory-gain modifications, the — ability to look at the world and have the basic experience of colours be more intense, the texture of everything you put your fingertips on, the — babies can’t develop human-normative cognition without mobility, you know? The experience of being in the world is so fundamental to us, so who can we become if we intensify — I mean, hasn’t that been the goal of, of so much mysticism? Psychedelia?” She gestures aimlessly; blushes. “I sound like every stoner apologist—”

The nurse smiles down at her. Bailey’s not quite sure how she’s come to be sitting on the floor in the ring of chairs, everyone looking down at her; she ducks her head.

“But you specifically,” the nurse says. “You want your sensory responses turned up. What do you want to get out of that?”

If Bailey had realised there would be an assessment, she’d have found a script online for it. She claws her memory frantically for the stoner apologia platitudes; about human transcendence, the limits of experience, feeling and becoming. Stammers.

“Bailey,” the nurse says, with just a touch of sternness, and Bailey is once again duly squashed. Crumpling, she leaks honesty.

“I read about people spending hours touching tree bark,” she says raggedly. “Drunk on the texture of cashmere. Overwhelmed by the feeling of rain running over their skin. And I want — if everything, if everything’s that much, then I just — it can’t matter any more if I’m touch starved.”

“Mm,” the nurse says, looking down at her. “Are you ticklish?”

”…What?” Bailey says blankly.

“Ticklish.”

“I don’t—” Bailey says, blank and fearful, and the nurse leans forward in her chair, face softening, and beckons her closer.

“Scoot over here,” she says, and when Bailey skittishly does as she’s told, reaches out — slowly enough not to spook her — to put hands on her shoulders. “You brought up mysticism,” the nurse says, squeezing Bailey’s shoulders slightly. It’s the first more-than-casual touch anywhere on her since her sad little half-a-dozen-friends birthday party last year; she shudders under it. “There’s a lot of that around the whole Intensation scene. Consciousness woo. People who want drug trips without the drugs. People do some irrecoverable fucked-up stuff to their nerves doing this, Bailey.”

Bailey puts her head down like a marionette with its strings cut, a hard and sudden plummet. Just another kind of screening; just another no.

“Hey,” the nurse says, and runs both her hands through Bailey’s hair, taking enough of a grip to drag her face back upright. “Listen. Think of this as a ritual, if it helps. Ritual initiation. I’m digging into what you need so I don’t give you the wrong fix.” She tilts Bailey’s pliable head back a little further. “Scenes like Intensation, they’re great at dismissing people who get damaged. No True Scotsman; weren’t really one of us. Poser. Amateur. I’m not having that here. Are you ticklish?”

“I don’t…normal? Normal amount?” Bailey guesses, voice wobbling.

The nurse looks at her like she’s a child, adorable; like she’s just said the most precious idiot thing ever. “Kick your shoes off for me,” she says.

Bailey hesitates for long moments, then slowly toes off one cheap sneaker, then the other.

“That’s Phoebe,” the nurse says, nodding to one side, and lets her hands slide out of Bailey’s hair so she can look. One side of Phoebe’s head is shaved to a naked shine, with several small chrome sockets interrupting the smooth skin; her eyes are ringed with thick, smeary black makeup, making her eyes look very white and maddened inside it.

“That’s abbreviated,” Phoebe says, showing teeth. “From Feral Bitch.”

“That’s Wilson.”

Wilson snakes her head from side to side, making med-grade servos somewhere inside her neck audibly purr, her long braid swaying. She gives Bailey a little wordless wave, a wiggle of her fingers, grinning crookedly.

“Titch,” the last one introduces herself, babyfaced, angelic. One of her hands is metal, and weirdly shaped; like an Olympic target pistol beside a regular gun, it’s still recognisably a limb, but very specialised. She nods down at it; probably as much routine as in response to Bailey’s staring. “For rock climbing,” she says, and adds wryly, “same way I ended up with it.”

Bailey feels like her subconscious has completed a jigsaw puzzle of the situation she’s in, faster than she can, and is unsubtly nudging in the back of the brain, pointing to the picture, yelling can you see this shit?

Phoebe’s evil smile. Bailey’s discarded shoes. Four of them, looking down at her. The nurse, demanding to assess her for the right fix, for Bailey’s actual problem. Touch starvation. Ritual initiation.

She’s so high.

Ticklish.

“Ticklish?” she says with uncertain dread, and the nurse slides forward out of her chair, eases Bailey backward and downward with a hand on her sternum, settles Bailey onto her bewildered back, head pillowed in a dungareed lap on the floor, a hand in her hair holding her steady.

Phoebe, skulking simultaneously like a horror-movie wolf, wraps a hand firmly around one of Bailey’s ankles, and Bailey yelps and kicks a little, a preemptive twitch.

“A normal amount,” Phoebe says mockingly, looking her dead in the eyes, and Bailey’s zeroed in so hard on her foot flexing in Phoebe’s grip that she misses Wilson gently settling beside her until fingers pet her side; exploratory, untentative. Bailey yips, torso twisting; and it’s blood in the water.

Hands gleefully descend from all around.

They are animals. They are monsters. They are torturers. Fiends. She can’t breathe, she can’t think. She yelps and wails and screams and laughs and laughs and laughs, giggling like a crazed and broken thing, thrashing and twitching and bucking.

At some point she twists enough to end up flipped over, face pressed into fishnet thigh, hands captured behind her back, hands firm in her hair still, Phoebe sitting on her legs; cruel fingers on her feet, her ribs, ultimately anyfuckingwhere does the same to her. Sensitised to the point where just a soft fingertip tap on her side sets off a paroxysm.

Don’t, she pleads in breathless sobbing fragments, don’t, you’ll make me pee myself— and they relent a bit, let her cool to the point where the nurse can run the heel of her hand down Bailey’s spine, down from the back rim of her skull, firm pressure, and it makes her twitch and shake and squeak but not hyperventilate.

“We could, you know,” the nurse says conversationally. “If we liked. Tickle you till you pee. Can you imagine how it would feel?”

Horrifying, Bailey thinks, spasming.

“Overtaxed to the point of loss of control,” the nurse says, tone intimate. “Full; straining; the physical relief of relaxation. Of release. A terrible trickle and then gushing wetness, hot, your internal temperature against your skin; soaking your clothes, puddling under you. Liquid losing temperature so quickly, wet things turning heavy and clammy, cold. But the shame only gets hotter inside you, doesn’t it?”

Bailey whimpers.

“I don’t think you need Intensation, Bailey,” the nurse says. “You’re in an altered state right now, even if it’s not the one you expected. If you came to me with scurvy and earnestly asking for something to aesthetically reconcile yourself to it, I wouldn’t give you that, either.”

And Bailey is in an altered state; like audio clipping because it’s too loud, she distorts when she feels too much, and it comes out as crazed giggling.

“Sweet thing,” the nurse says, condescendingly amused by it. “You should go home with Phoebe.”

“F-Feral Bitch?” Bailey manages to stammer out, and Phoebe laughs, low and long and genuine.

“Babe,” she drawls. “I’m self-explanatory starter crazy. These two nicer girls? Real freaks.”

One of them chuckles evilly, she’s not sure which, as if appreciatively confirming it.

You’re prescribing me Get Laid? Bailey doesn’t demand, because that feels like a lot to manage to say, and really it answers itself. Yes. (No: We’re not doing medicine here, Bailey.)

(Really: yes.)

She rolls her head, instead, on the nurse’s leg, smearing the evidence of her own helpless drooling across her chin, her cheek. Peers up at the nurse, as if to ask, oh, they’re freaks? What about you?

The nurse smiles down at her; scrubs her knuckles gently, fondly on the back of Bailey’s neck.

“Oh, I just get off on diagnosis,” she says.