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the god chip

Margaret Karmazin

    “Sydney, you be a big girl now. It won’t hurt and everyone who has parents who really care about them has it done. Nine is the age of Correction in the Eyes of God.”
    Eyes wide with fear, Sydney looked at her father. She could not imagine how they were going to implant a silicon chip in her head without it hurting horribly.
    Her mother came and quietly extended her hand. “It’ll be over before you know it,” she said.

    After the anesthesia wore off, Sydney had a mild headache, but that was it. Though she wasn’t permitted to go outside or visit a friend, she was allowed to watch a movie on a children’s channel.
    In one scene, a little blond girl held the hand of a brown boy as they ran from an orange monster. Suddenly, Sharon heard a voice that seemed to come from inside her head. It said, “People of different races should not get married.”
    Shocked, she called for her mother who came into the room, wiping her hands on a dishtowel.
    “Mommy, I heard a voice. It said something about people not getting married. But no one is getting married that I know of.”
    “What did it say exactly?” asked her mother.
    Sydney told her.
    “This is the Voice you must listen to from now on. It is God’s voice. He was telling you that the little girl and boy in the movie should never get married and that they should not even hold hands.”
     “That’s crazy,” Sidney said, but then she had to believe what her mother told her, since who else but God could be talking inside her head. Then she connected the implantation of the new chip with what had just happened. “Is it because of the chip?”
    “Very good, honey,” said her mother. “We didn’t tell you what would happen since it’s better to let the new experiencer hear the Voice on her own. After that, we explain. From now on, that Voice will direct you.”
    “Well, is it God or not?” asked Sydney. Her headache had amped up and she was growing nauseous. She didn’t see how holding hands could be wrong in God’s eyes, but there was little point in arguing with her mother; it never went anywhere.
    As if reading her mind, her mother said, “Holding hands leads to other things and from there possibly to marriage. It is better to pay attention to the Voice in the first place so that it prevents you from choosing an inappropriate person for later on.”
    Sydney soon learned that this discernment issue extended to potential friends as well. Her fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Sharp, had an eleven-year-old daughter. Alex attended a private school and occasionally had days off when Sydney did not. Sometimes, she accompanied her mother to school to help with classroom chores. To Sydney, the girl was chic and exciting. She wore fashionable clothes and had pierced ears. Sydney loved when Alex came to join them and was thrilled one day to have the older girl ask her to help decorate the holiday bulletin board.
    “Sure!” said Sydney, almost jumping out of her seat. Not only was Alex worldly, but clearly very intelligent and though only nine, Sydney already admired smart, sophisticated people. But then she heard the Voice and it sounded quite adamant. “This person is not good for you to have as a friend.”
    Deflated, she sat back down with an audible thump. Her heart pounded and her gut clenched. Without speaking, she shook her head no. Alex, looking confused, shrugged her shoulders and backed away, then went to sit near her mother, possibly for comfort.
    The Voice said, “Evil has many disguises.” Sydney felt something inside her shrink.
    Every so often, she disobeyed the Voice. The first time was after choosing a novel from the library shelf. As she was walking to the checkout desk, the Voice said, “Not a good choice of reading material.”
    She felt a hard ball of resistance form in her chest and kept walking. The Voice warned her again and again she resisted. Suddenly, she was flooded with a sickening sensation – a mixture of nausea and dread, as if something life threatening were about to befall her. Defeated, she turned around and placed the novel back on its shelf. An hour passed before the sickening feeling fully dissipated.
    In fifth grade, a girl in the class whose father was an environmental scientist at a state university wanted to start a project to inform people about climate issues. “A wonderful idea,” said their teacher, Mr. Guzman.
    He looked around at the class. “Who would like to help Hannah with this exciting idea? Some of you are excellent artists!”
    Sydney’s hand shot up. She loved to draw and had just received a giant box of colored pencils for her birthday. The Voice said, “You should not get involved. This idea is made up by people who have an agenda.”
    What on earth was it talking about? This made no sense to her. Disobeying, she continued to wave her hand. When Mr. Guzman happily pointed his finger at her and said, “Wonderful! Sydney will do a fine job helping Hannah with her excellent drawing skills,” that now familiar wave of dread and nausea swept over her. She almost threw up on her desk.
    Mr. Guzman rushed over. “Sydney, are you alright?”
    She straightened up, though still quite queasy. “I can’t do it after all,” she mumbled. She was embarrassed, but so ill, that it was futile to resist the Voice. She glanced around to see if people were staring.
    Mr. Guzman’s face took on an expression of sudden understanding. He stood back up and looked faintly disapproving. “I see,” he said. He walked back to the front of the room, shaking his head. “Someone else then?” he asked the class and soon had chosen other people for the project.
    Since the implantation of the chip, Sydney had been shy about bringing up the subject with others. She rarely saw her cousin Marcie, who’d been implanted at the same time, and the children of her parents’ friends did not mention it when the families got together. Sydney felt shy about bringing up the subject.
    She felt lonely regarding the Voice, while another part of her wondered if children without it were left to flounder without the advice of God. There seemed no one to ask. She’d had a best friend before the implantation, but had to let that friend (and a few others) go because apparently God did not approve of them.
    One day she overheard her parents whispering in the hall. “Kathy and Ted’s son was acting up,” said her mother. “They had to take him up to see Dr. Winlow.”
    “He changed the chip then?” said her father.
    “They replaced it with a stronger one. You know, the kind they use for hard cases.”
    Sydney didn’t want to think about what a chip for hard cases would feel like.
    By now, she was starting to feel an overwhelming lassitude, as if much of the fight had gone out of her. She pretty much could anticipate what the Voice would like or not like and so automatically made choices accordingly.
    “You’re turning into a fine young lady,” her father told her, and she accepted his warm pat on her shoulder, though not with any sense of joy. She seemed to have forgotten how the world had once seemed magical.
    “It would not be wise to read that article,” the Voice would say. Or, “Better not to walk through the woods, as who knows what could be lurking there.” and “That is not a subject a girl your age should be investigating.” By junior high, things had grown wearisome, as if she was walking along a narrow road that all looked the same.
    Her favorite teacher called her aside one day. There was something slightly avant-garde about Ms. Schmidt, though she dressed conservatively and was married to a doctor. Ms. Schmidt taught eighth grade social studies and sometimes got the class worked up enough to engage in heated debates. The Voice would often comment during these.
    Perched on the edge of her desk, Mrs. Schmidt called to Sydney as the class was filing out the door. The teacher’s glossy, dark hair fell over one eye. Sydney thought this looked sexy, which was not a good thought to have since the Voice grunted. Sometimes, that’s all it had to do. Ms. Schmidt said, “You seem depressed, Sidney. Would you like to talk?”
    The Voice geared up. “This is not an appropriate thing to discuss with this outsider. Keep your emotions private and share them only with your family or people they approve of.”
    Sydney felt a rush of rage, but this was met with a violent, almost physical punch to her stomach. She literally crossed her arms and hunched over.
    The teacher looked alarmed. “Are you all right? Honey, do you need to see the nurse? What can I do?”
    “No, no,” Sydney managed to gasp. “I-it must be something I ate.” That was a bald faced lie and she expected the Voice to protest, but it did not.

    But things were about to change. While Sydney appeared placid on the surface, a volcano festered underneath. Hormones were in full swing. Her forehead bloomed with acne, which she tried to hide with oily bangs. Her breasts had developed to a B cup and her menstrual period had started.
    The Voice would not allow her to use Tampons. She tried after a friend dared her to insert one. The resulting stab to her temple and nausea convinced her to stick with sanitary napkins. She accepted this, but the next day when the Voice objected to her telling the same friend that she would like to have her ears pierced, she experienced such fury that it terrified her. A war raged inside her. Her head filled with sparks and a strange, whooshing sound. She staggered into the girls’ room.
    Watching Sydney from the next sink was a ninth grade girl. Sydney knew the girl’s name was Alicia Glick, but that people called her Leesh. Leesh was the kind of girl that neither Sydney’s parents nor the Voice would want her to socialize with or even talk to. Leesh was edgy. She had short, shaggy black hair and wore heavy makeup around her large, green eyes. Her clothing reminded Sydney of rock stars, though she had only occasionally glimpsed photos of those on the covers of supermarket tabloids. Leesh wore silver bracelets up both arms and around her neck skulls and strange symbols hung on a leather cord. Her skin was pale as porcelain, which looked wickedly sexy.
    There was no one else in the lavatory but the two girls. Leesh said, “I know what’s the matter with you.”
    “What do you mean?” said Sydney. She heard the Voice grunt.
    “Why you look squashed and scared all the time. I know.”
    Though the Voice now growled, Sydney blurted, “What are you talking about?”
    Leesh tilted her head and regarded Sydney through slitted, knowing eyes. “You have one planted. You’re afraid to breathe. I know all about it.”
    The chip hit her with the hardest punch to the gut she had ever felt and she had to grab the edge of a sink to hold herself upright.
    Leesh opened her purse and pulled out a plastic bag. From the bag, she extracted a small, pink pill. As she leaned toward Sydney, it was all Sydney could do to keep from losing consciousness. She felt the other girl pry her mouth open with her fingers and push the pill under her tongue. Sydney was too ill to protest. The pill dissolved instantly and immediately, the horrible feeling dissipated. Like magic, Sydney suddenly was well.
    For the moment (and since the Voice was oddly silent), she forgot that Leesh was forbidden. “What was that? How did you do that?”
    The girl smiled, slow and confident, as if she had just handed to another person the key to the Universe. Which, possibly she had, for that was how Sydney felt. “That pill is your salvation. Some genius in Seattle made this in his little home lab to help the rest of us out here who’ve had our brains locked up. You take one a day and that freakin’ voice is turned off. Never again, is that piece of silicon crap allowed to run your life!”
    “How do I get them?” asked Sydney. She heard the bell ring and was supposed to be in her third period class.
    “From the same place I get them. I can set you up. But it costs.”
    “How much?”
    “Sixty dollars a month.”
    Sydney shook her head. “How would I get the money?”
    “Don’t your parents give you an allowance? Or get a job. I work at Jodi’s three nights a week.”
    Jodi’s was a diner a few streets from the school. “What do you do there?” asked Sydney. She worried about being late and what Mr. Katz would say. Sydney had never been late to anything.
    “I wash dishes, sweep up, whatever. It’s not fun but sure worth what it buys for me.”
    Sydney was thinking. Her mind, now that the Voice was temporarily silent, flashed over countless times in her past when it had squelched her spirit. Anything, she decided would be worth doing to stop that. It was amazing how clearly she was thinking.
    “Can you get me a job there?”
    “I don’t think so. I mean they don’t need any more people, but I’ll check.”
    Sydney was madly calculating. She had eight dollars in her purse and some of that was for lunch. But she dug it out and handed the crumpled pile to Leesh. “Whatever that pays for, I’ll take it,” she said. “I’ll get the rest somehow.”
    Leesh smiled and took the money. “You won’t regret this,” she said.
    The drug, Sydney later learned from the internet, (which she could now use without the Voice interfering and oh, there were so many things to learn!) was very underground and classified as not safe, though she found no references to anyone dying from using it. She suspected the supposed danger might be manufactured by chip installing parents.
    She found message boards and chat sites with parents whose kids had chips inserted but who were behaving rebelliously. Some of these parents had found their kids’ stashes and destroyed them, then grounded the kids, even to the point of yanking them out of school and beginning home schooling. She would have to be very careful. She hollowed out part of an old dictionary to store some of the pills, but knew she would need to spread them out in case her mother found one of her hiding places. She kept a few under the lining in her purse, more inside a fat pen in her desk drawer and others inside the back of a picture frame.
    Fortunately, she was in charge of cleaning her own room except for vacuuming, which her mother did once a week.
    To obtain the money for the drug, Sydney had to steal. She tried to space it out so that people wouldn’t notice, though one time, her father set her heart to pounding when she heard him bellow, “Linda! Were you in my desk? If you need money, just ask me! That was set aside for the golf tournament.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Richard. I have plenty of money, see?” She must have opened her wallet and shown him.
    “Well,” he said, backing down, “maybe I’m mistaken. I’ve had a lot on my mind at work.”
    It would never occur to them to imagine that Sydney could have taken anything. After all, she was controlled by the chip.
    She was careful to appear under that control, though once she slipped while helping her father carry in firewood. He was ranting a bit about the Middle East situation and Sydney made the observation that if people there claimed they had an historical right to the land, wouldn’t the same apply in American? That the Indians were here first and therefore we should return our land to them? She had forgotten that the Voice would have censored such a thought.
    Her father shot her a startled look. “I’m not sure you’re thinking logically,” he said.
    Scared that he might suggest they have a doctor check her out, she quickly added, “I shouldn’t have said that,” and pretended to be sick, grabbing her stomach and wincing.
    Her father nodded, but wore a quizzical expression. She knew what he was thinking, that by now such slips should have been trained out of her.
    “The price has gone up,” said Leesh one day at school. They had managed to synchronize leaving their separate classes to meet in the girls’ room. “Seventy-five dollars now.”
    It crossed Sydney’s mind to wonder if Leesh was taking a cut, but what choice did she have? “I definitely need a job,” she said.
    Soon she would turn fifteen, but that was still too young for working papers. No one in her neighborhood had kids to babysit and her parents wouldn’t let her work on Saturdays. They wanted her to help with chores around the house. Her allowance was only twelve dollars a week, though she saw online that for someone her age, it should be fifteen. Negotiating with her father resulted in nothing but a sullen retreat on her part. She could not risk reacting in any overt fashion or he would again suspect something had gone wrong with the implant.
    If an opportunity presented itself, she would take money from someone’s open purse or out of a teacher’s drawer, but these occasions were rare and she could not risk being caught. The thought of having them tamper with her brain again gave her nightmares. It crossed her mind to sell the drug herself, but that would involve infringing on Leesh’s territory. They’d become friends of a sort, though there was no chance of letting her parents meet Leesh, not the way she dressed. Besides, Sydney did not know for certain who did or did not have the implant. Some people were obvious – cringing goody-goods, but others were not. To approach them like a dealer on a street corner seemed beyond her scope. Eventually, she shared her problem with Leesh.
     “I’ll see what I can do,” said Leesh. The next day, she met Sydney in the student parking lot after school, accompanied by a senior boy. “This is Mike,” said Leesh. “He can help with the money issue.”
    Sydney had a feeling she was about to step off a cliff. “How can he help?” she said softly.
    Leesh glanced at Mike, then back at Sydney. “Um, well, if you do something for him when he wants it, he’ll pay you.”
    “Do what?” asked Sydney, flooded with dread. The feeling was almost as bad as when she disobeyed the Voice before the pill.
    Mike looked away. “Sort of, um, service him,” said Leesh. “You don’t have to have actual sex, just oral when he wants it.”
    Sydney’s heart thumped so hard it was painful. “How often?” she mumbled.
    Mike laughed nervously. “About once a day. Monday to Fridays.”
    Sydney was outraged. “Where exactly would we do this? I can’t go out at night; my parents would get suspicious. They’re very strict, don’t you get it?”
    “I have a truck,” said Mike. He motioned with his head toward a Ford pickup near where they were standing.
    “No,” said Sydney firmly. She walked away as fast as her shaky legs could carry her.
    But by the following week, she was desperate. A new neighbor who needed a babysitter ended up getting someone else. The old woman across the street, about to hire Sydney to clean out her garage, was suddenly widowed and her son had arrived to handle things. Sydney’s pills ran out and the Voice returned with a vengeance. By now, she was used to thinking as she pleased and had amassed mental habits it vehemently opposed. She was spending most of her time cramping, vomiting or enduring a pounding head. Life was unbearable.
    Unable to look him in the eye, Sydney found Mike and mumbled, “I’ll do it.” And so it began. She met him after school; they would park somewhere in his truck and she would do what she had to do. He was dependable and never failed to hand over the money. The only problem, beside the fact that she felt humiliated, was that he was graduating that school year and going to away to college. But for four more months, she was assured of a steady pill supply.
    “How’s it going with Mike?” asked Leesh. They ate lunch together now. The fact that Sydney was doing this thing had caused Leesh to open up more. Maybe, Sydney thought, she’d also had to do distasteful things herself.
    “It’s okay,” said Sydney. Her sandwich tasted dry and she wished that she and Leesh were somewhere else, in a diner maybe, with lots of money and no worries.
    “Okay?” said Leesh, giving Sydney a perplexed look. “Are you sure?”
    “He’s not so bad,” said Sydney. What she didn’t say was that now when she saw him, her heart fluttered. Sometimes he gently put his hand on her head and sometimes rubbed her hair. On a few occasions, he said he just wanted to talk. Often they did both.
    Leesh gave her a long, steady stare. “Look. He has a girlfriend. She goes to Central. They’ve been together for, I don’t know, two years? Don’t get any ideas. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
    The news hit Sydney in the gut as hard as the Voice would. She set the sandwich down and couldn’t bring herself to respond.

    In May, Mike told her he was going to be working that summer and wouldn’t have a chance to meet with her. He was kind and remote. “But don’t worry,” said, “I’ve taken care of it. Justin Brown will take over. He might have a friend, in case you want to make more than just the seventy-five. I gave him a good reference for you.” He chuckled and she felt as filthy as if she’d fallen into an outhouse toilet.

    Occasionally, she wondered how others who’d been implanted were doing. It appeared to her that the children of her parents’ friends had grown into dull-eyed sycophants. It was hard to tell which of the quiet kids at school were victims. But it was easy to identify who did not have the chip – those who enthusiastically spoke up in class and were unafraid to argue a point or take a hypothesis to radical conclusions. The avant-garde kids who considered themselves artists or musicians, or the geeks with their unabashed excitement over cyber speculations and developments. Kids who believed their minds were free.
    “My birthday is next week,” she told Leesh as they stole a quick smoke in the field behind the school. She had already finished her chore with one of the boys. The other was absent that day.
    “The big sixteen, huh?” said Leesh. She dragged hard on her Marlboro.
    “That’s right,” said Sydney. “Working papers. If my father will let me.”
    “Why wouldn’t he?”
    “He has strange ideas about women. My mother just goes along with it. Maybe there’s a chip in her brain too.”
    “If he’s old school, wouldn’t he be for self-reliance and all that shit?” asked Leesh.
    “You’ve got a point,” said Sydney.
    “You get the application from the guidance department.”
    “Yeah, but a parent has to sign it,” said Sydney.

    Sydney could not use usual teen tactics to persuade her father. No tantrums, crying or slamming of doors, since any of that would immediately alert him to the chip not working. The only recourse was persistent reasoning. Eventually, she broke him down, got the papers and immediately set to finding a job that she could reach by foot or bike. A lady who ran a consignment shop needed someone to sort goods, clean the store and run errands - minimum wage, but definitely enough to cover the pills price, which had now risen to eighty-five a month.
    “I won’t be able to take care of you now,” she told the two boys. “I’ll be working.”
    One took it all right. “If you change your mind, just signal,” he said. But the other was nasty. “Yeah?” he said. “How ‘bout you still fit me in? Or I’ll let everyone know what a skank you are.”
    She lowered her head and considered what he’d said. By now, Sydney was an expert at concealing her thoughts and emotions. She had learned how to reason while her emotions were violent. “I’m still technically a virgin. But I suppose it would be hard to prove that to all the assholes. I could fit you in maybe once a week, but other than that, there’s no time to do it. My parents know exactly what hours I’m working and when I should be home.”
    He looked like a bull shooting steam out of his nose. Maybe others considered him good looking, but she knew now that what was inside a person soon leaked out. “Once a week then and it had better be good,” he said gruffly.
    Two more years of high school to go, one more year for this selfish boy. She nodded and got out of his car.
    “You know,” Sydney said, after reporting this all to Leesh, “I never understood how you get away with looking the way you do. Why doesn’t it tip off your parents? And how come you don’t get harassed by boys when you’re the one who set me up?”
    Leesh gave her a long look before replying. “My father left a couple of years after I got implanted and my mother went nuts. They have her all drugged up. I’m lucky she remembers to do anything. I buy the food and do the cooking and most everything else. She forgot all about the damn chip. As for the boys, I did the same thing you do, but by the time I got that job and was able to stop, I had enough on them to shut them up. You can threaten to tell their girlfriends, their mothers. Any time you want, you can mess them up too.”
    The job in the consignment shop was dull but pleasant. Her boss, Mrs. Conrad, was like a gentle aunt. No pressure or judgment about anything, no intrusive questions. She let Sydney talk if she wanted and if not, supplied harmless gossip or comments about local or national news. The people who came in to shop were polite, the ones who needed the clothes sometimes embarrassed and the ones who wanted them for a fashion statement confident and cheerful. The shop became Sydney’s real home, especially after a pleasant summer with expanded hours.
    Now a junior and, in spite of her problems, keeping her grades up – they had to be maintained to prevent raising any suspicions or concern, Sydney began to worry how she would get the pill once she went away to college.
    “What are we going to do?” she asked Leesh, who was now a senior.
    “I’m not going away,” said her friend. “It’s community college or nothing for me. There isn’t any money.”
    “The rest of our lives, we have to drug ourselves?” said Sydney indignantly. “Does the freakin’ chip never shut up? Look what it’s done to Krista and Rita.” They were two girls in their classes, one of which had committed suicide and the other was preaching piously in the halls.
    “No one knows if you can remove it,” said Leesh. “Without killing the host, I mean.
    “Wow,” said Sydney. Her heart sank. “It feels hopeless.”
    One day, Sydney was sneaking a cigarette in her and Leesh’s usual spot. Leesh was absent that day. Tyler Rowe, a boy Sydney only knew by sight – he was new to the school – appeared out of nowhere and said her name. She recoiled, heart pounding. Had he heard about her “specialty”?
    “I’m sorry I startled you,” he said. “Didn’t mean to.”
    “What do you want?” she asked gruffly. Though he was attractive, her stomach turned.
    “To talk to you.” He seemed innocent; seemed not to grasp why she was so on edge.
    “What?”
    He moved closer, which caused her to jerk back. “What’s the matter? Listen, there’s something you need to know. We don’t need pills anymore.”
    For a moment, she was too stunned to speak. “We? What do you mean by ‘we’?”
    He pointed to his head. She would never have known. He so didn’t seem the type.
    “You too, huh?” she said, her voice softer.
    “Yeah.”
    “How did you know about me?”
    “Never mind,” he said. “It’s not important. What is is that this kid at Penn State figured out how to neutralize the things. He did it to himself, then his roommate, then a bunch of others. And get this, he doesn’t charge. He passed it on and it spread like wild fire and a bunch of us did it to ourselves Sunday night. We’re telling other people about it now. You need to come to Cody Butler’s house after school. He’s got the software. Tell Leesh.”
    For the first time in her life, Sydney willingly kissed a boy. He didn’t know what hit him and staggered back, but she was all over him. He’d never been and never would be kissed like that again in his life.
    After a quick call to Mrs. Conrad to tell her she had to miss work that afternoon and another call to Leesh, Sydney let Tyler drive her to Cody’s house. At least twenty kids had already arrived. Leesh rushed in and her and Sidney’s eyes met across the room.
    Cody introduced them to a slightly older kid. “This is Chris. He’s a friend of the guy who invented this. We’re not using last names. Chris was good enough to come all this way. This is an underground organization. We take an oath of silence before we begin. The procedure is painless and simply involves holding a programmed device next to the spot where you were implanted and punching in the code. We ask you to refrain from using the pills after this. If for any reason you again hear the Voice or suffer any repercussions, get in touch with me and we’ll get you to Penn State somehow to re-neutralize. Let us hold hands and take the oath.”
    As she walked out with Leesh after, her friend reminded her, “You’ll still have to act like a saint around your parents.” She sighed. “In a way, I’m glad I don’t need to bother.”
    Sidney put her arm around Leesh. “We have each other,” she said. “And we’re free. No matter what, we have that. Let’s go read something dangerous.”
    They laughed hysterically.

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