The Actor

At the hospital

Chris

The rest of the afternoon was spent at the hospital. "You did all you could," a nurse had told them. "Speed is everything with brain trauma, and help could not have got there any quicker than it did. He's in a stable condition, for now. An induced coma."

They asked her when he might be expected to wake up. Her hesitation told them more than her words. "I'm sorry. With a brain injury it's so hard to tell..."

So they waited at the bed side, were permitted to remain when a portable scanner was wheeled in and positioned over Travis's head. "Routine precaution," said the technician. "We're not expecting any change."

Sometime later Travis's parents arrived. Sensing their desire to be alone with their son, Jenny and Chris offered a few words, a quick summary of the facts as they knew them, then relocated to a small internal waiting room down the corridor and across from a nurses' station that remained forlornly empty the whole time they were there. They'd each loaded a copy of the Patient Supporters app to their phones, having been assured by the nurse that any status updates would arrive there as quickly as by any other means.

They sat together in silence. For a time Chris tried to blank his mind, hoping to attain that state of lassitude and satiety normally earned through physical exercise – also, he thought, reasonable to expect following the experience, and then removal, of a state of terror. The effort failed him; the terror, after all, had not yet abated. Thoughts whirled in his head, fragmentary words resolved themselves, only to dissolve again before he could give them voice.

Next to him, Jenny's attention appeared fixed on her phone. If their seating arrangement had been a little different, had he been able to rest his gaze upon her... Instead his visual field held nothing that might divert his attention. Just Jenny's hands upon her phone, her knees, the empty nurse's station, the corridor stretching off to left and right. The same high school ambience as the neuroscience building; the effect on him was strangely dislocating. The similarities between the two locations – all those shiny disinfected surfaces – left him feeling as if he hadn't gone anywhere. There was just that faint but detectable hospital smell, that know-it-when-you-smell-it odor, to remind him otherwise.

"I can't read this", said Jenny, breaking the silence. "My mind won't focus."

"What is it?"

"The manifesto you two were talking about." She twisted around to face him. "Finish it for him, will you? What Travis was saying back on the lawn? He wasn't just talking about the hackers, was he? He'd started to talk about himself."

Chris nodded, blinked, composed himself. Began to recite: "Society is unravelling. First it was the car. Separating us from any need to talk to our neighbors. Then high-rise apartments so we could all live alone. Mobile devices and social media to eliminate face to face contact. Now we've even automated the knowledge economy, stripped the middle classes of their need to get up in the morning and go to work. And in place of all this – on-demand distraction. Everyone huddled away, sustained by their network connections. Nobody planned it this way, it was all just one thing after another. A natural progression. Society tearing itself into smaller and smaller pieces."

"And these people, they want to stop this?"

"No." Chris emitted a short grudging laugh. "They want to accelerate it. Want neuroscience to complete the process."

"Their atom bomb?" said Jenny. "A technology that atomizes society?"

Chris nodded. "It's a loose affiliation of the libertarians and the tech-savvy. They have this deep hatred of collectivism. Of populism. Even democracy is too much as far as they're concerned – the dictatorship of the proletariat by other means. Most of all, they resent the necessity of it. The human need to huddle together to survive. The way they see it, the only way to achieve genuine freedom is to eliminate all reliance on other people. And the only way to do that is through technology – computing to eliminate the economic need, neuroscience to eliminate the psychological one."