He glanced this way and that. No sign of the men who’d come after him. He ran down the stairs toward the man fixing the drone. The man looked up as Ben reached him.
“Can you help me?” Ben asked, trying to catch his breath again.
“What’s wrong?” The man put down his tools.
“Men are after me!”
“After you?” The man’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“They mean to repurpose me.”
The repairman stared at him, noticing the network jack in the side of his head. “You’re from the living pods?” he asked, looking amazed.
“Yes.”
“And you aren’t plugged in?”
Ben glanced at the others. They took no notice, just continued their work.
“I thought you couldn’t live without being plugged in.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s when the corpse cleaners come. When someone has unplugged from the network.”
Ben shook his head. His mouth had gone dry.
“You die without it.”
He backed away. “I don’t think it works like that.” He’d been unplugged for days now, and he was fine.
“The men will come and plug you back in,” the repairman assured him.
Ben turned. He had to get out of there.
He ran back toward the stairs, but just then the door banged open. The three men from his living pod stood on the platform, pinpointing him on the busy warehouse floor. He pivoted and ran the other way, but not before two more men entered through a different door.
Closing in from all sides, they homed in on him. Panic swelled up inside him. He made a dash toward all the people folding laundry and making food. He sped through them, his pursuers close behind. Then one of the Repurposers tackled him, sending him sprawling across the floor. In an instant the rest fell on him, grabbing Ben’s hands, wrists, and legs. He thrashed, crying out for help. The workers stared down at him, and one advanced, but the Repurposer waved her off.
“No need,” he told her. “He unplugged from the network and is going a little crazy. We need to take him back to his pod and reconnect him.”
She nodded and went back to folding laundry.
“No!” Ben shouted. He kicked his legs, but still they carried him toward the metal door. They lifted him up the stairs and dragged him outside. As he thrashed in horror they retraced his footsteps, hauling him back to his building, down the hallway toward his living pod, in through his neighbor’s place, and through the hole.
“It’s not killing me to be disconnected! You’ve got it wrong!” he screamed.
The men remained stoic. They pulled him into his bathroom. He thrashed, knocking over his supply cabinet, spilling towels into the shower. A vase fell off the sink and shattered. Still they held him tightly. None of them made eye contact. He wasn’t a person. Just a thing.
“Hold him down,” one said. They flipped him onto his stomach, and one knelt on his back.
He felt the man’s gloved hand on his head, pressing down, parting his hair over the network jack in his skull. The man brought out a gleaming metal instrument with a circular saw on one end.
Ben kicked out on the cold tile, but the others held down his arms and legs.
The man brought the tool up to his head jack, and Ben felt a blistering pain in his head. Everything went gray, then black-and-white. All their voices became muffled.
“The jack is corrupted,” he heard the man say. “I don’t think we’ll be able to repurpose him. There’s dust in here, some weird debris. What has this guy been up to?” He felt the men readjust their weight on him. “I’ll give it a try.”
He brought the tool in again, and a searing flash of heat erupted inside Ben’s head. He flailed, fought against them, but all he could smell was burning flesh. Suddenly a white-hot eruption filled his eyes, and his brain felt too big for his skull. He screamed as it swelled, his teeth cracking against the tile. He squeezed his eyes shut. An agonizing pain racked his body. His legs skittered on the floor. His fingers opened and closed. His eyes fluttered, and he couldn’t breathe. Blood leaked out of his eyes, drowning out his vision. Then the black came, seeping over him, filling up all the cracks in his view. His body went slack. “We’re losing him,” one of the men commented.
“Looks that way,” said the one with the tool.
Air rushed out of Ben’s lungs as the black took over his mind.
Chapter 2
H124 waited outside the door, closing her eyes and concentrating on the theta wave receiver by the door lock. She mentally sent the message “unlock,” and the door hissed open. Quietly she stepped inside with her gear, then stopped as she heard noise coming from the main room. Someone still lived in this pod. Her employers had told her that the only way to access the corpse was through the neighboring pod. Weird, but she didn’t ask questions. Maybe the deceased’s lock was broken. Still, she’d never been inside someone’s place while they still occupied it, and she felt uncomfortable, a stranger in someone’s home.
She crept into the main room. Her instructions told her they’d created a hole in the wall there. A light flickered on the wall as she moved forward. Not wanting to disturb the occupant, she stepped lightly in her work boots. She knew she’d get in trouble if she interrupted him. She stepped around the corner and saw him, seated before his display, his button pad shimmering in midair just below his hands. The light from his display hovered in the air before him.
She knew about these display setups and button pads that most people were equipped with. But she’d only been in these living pods to clean out the previous tenants after they’d passed on, so she’d never seen the equipment turned on before.
Just ahead, she could see the ragged, dark hole in the wall, but her eyes returned to the floating display.
She’d never seen anything so beautiful. She knew she wasn’t supposed to, but she stopped before stepping through the hole. Unable to help herself, she stared at the display. Six windows filled the screen, and the man’s eyes darted from one to the other. Both hands fluttered over the button pad, fingers pressing down in such a rapid sequence, she didn’t know how he could possibly make sense of what he was doing. In one window he controlled an image of a little man who moved through different rooms of a building, pulling levers and pressing buttons on walls. In another flashed a sequence of unintelligible numbers. Another window held an animated avatar of someone else, a woman, with text flying across the screen just beneath her face. Every few seconds, his hands would stream over the buttons and more text would fly by. A group of people talked in yet another window, sitting around a table chattering about someone named Phil, and how they couldn’t believe that he had opted for the small swimming pool when he could have had the bigger one. Along the bottom of the screen scrolled more text: THIS YEAR’S MOST IMPORTANT DECISION! Pick the right candidate! Vote wisely! Watch the candidates’ videos! Yes! Vote for your favorite reality TV star in this all-important election to determine which show will be renewed!
In yet another window a little graph fluctuated up and down, beeping out sounds every