233/365 --Playlist Story-- inspired by "Rehab" by Amy Winehouse

I always take the stairs--elevators mute the signal. Faraday cages. Mind prisons, and I feel lost and trapped inside them--like most of my brain, most of my memories, are cut off. I have great calves because I live fifty-five stories up.

Not everybody understands. My family doesn't. The typical interchange is this:

"We love you Jess! You've got to disconnect--"

"Nope," I say, "because you don't know what it feels like. You don't know what this gives me--you think euphoria is a good feeling? You have no fucking idea what its like to feel like you know everything all the time."

"But it's dangerous--"

"Says who? I've got access to the research--you won't even bother to look it up on your primitive terminals--"

"But the surgery--"

"It's my fucking brain!"

I usually scream that last part. Sometimes regretfully, sometimes not. It's my body, not theirs. None of their business, right? I assume the risk and reap the gains. Not them. Then their response is inevitably:

"But it's not natural!"

And the I say:

"Sewers aren't natural! Medicine isn't natural! Cutting your hair isn't natural!"

I mean, pretty much anything humans have experienced in the last three hundred years isn't natural. They scoff at this argument, but never have a decent response. I can't convince them though. They just think it's evil, even though that's just the usual default label for anything they fear.

"You're just not willing to self-evolve!"

That's usually my last word on the subject. A jab to disgust them and give me a little nugget of self-satisfaction.

It's all futile though. I'm pretty sure they're planning to rip Ray out of me. It may be legal these days, but there are still surgical clinics out there that are willing to lobotomize people like me, just so their so-called loved ones can sleep at night knowing their child or friend is exactly like them.

Oh, Ray is what I call my neural implants. He's my connection. My third brain after my subconscious and conscious. Probably shouldn't anthropomorphize him, but shit, he's basically my best friend. He knows what I'm thinking before I think it--and instantly I have exactly the info I want, whenever I need it. It freaks out my family. I can go on any tangent, at any depth, and have eidetic memory. Everything they've ever said to me (since I got Ray at least) is cataloged and indexed, and I can regurgitate conversations that lasted for hours, in totality (although I usually just bring up the choice bits that prove they're hypocrites). I think they think it makes me possessed. Maybe I am.