Free Doomware by Nathan Kuzack Page B

expose him for what he was. Cybernetics were able to – they called it a human right now – scan their immediate surroundings for other brainware signals. The scan took the form of a readout that materialised in their field of vision, summoned with a thought. It had been intended to be a seldom-used security measure, but a surprisingly large number of paranoiacs kept the readout in view at all times. Of course he, as an acybernetic, didn’t appear on such scans, provoking reactions that ranged from mild curiosity and confusion to outright fear and a flight away from him that was as ungainly as it was unnecessary.
    On a chain around his neck he wore a disk announcing that he was a registered non-mon, a term that had its roots in police work and was a contraction of “non-monitorable”. Since brainware recorded everything a person saw, heard and did, once the appropriate search warrant had been obtained anybody could be checked to see if they had committed a crime. They were “monitorable”, and could be “caught red-headed”, as the saying went. Non-mon had originated as a straightforward policing term, but had since become a derogatory label, courtesy of the fact that it lent itself to being said with the tongue rammed into the lower lip, giving the impression of someone who was mentally defective. Depending on how it was pronounced, non-mon joined the long list of insulting names for those with his condition: deadhead, lamebrain, no-brainer, numbskull, brain-dead, a-head, sap (from Homo sapiens).
    The monitorial capabilities of brainware had proved to be a boon to crime-fighting, and had been met with a suitably radical solution: tampering with brainware to, in effect, switch it off. The procedure itself – some dubbed it “self-lobotomy”, though more often it was called “going offline” – was fraught with danger, rendered a person susceptible to pain, and was irreversible, meaning it was undertaken only by those who were either desperate to be beyond the law, or who were simply beyond desperate. Brainware gifted a person with far too many benefits to be given up lightly. Elective non-mons were generally hardened criminals, whose crimes were so serious they would have gotten the death penalty if exposed by brainware, or the marginalised on the peripheral tips of society, who felt they had nothing to lose by not conforming to societal norms. As a consequence of all this, people who didn’t know him often presumed he was some sort of criminal, this presumption unaffected by his usual working dress of a suit and tie. Even crims attend funerals, as somebody had once told him.
    If it wasn’t the criminal connotations of acyberneticism that scared them it was the perceived link with disease. Cybernetics were so accustomed to the control over illness and infection and pain their brainware afforded them they couldn’t conceive of how a person survived without it. It didn’t matter that he’d never suffered more than a severe cold and a mild case of tonsillitis his entire life; the perception was there, firmly rooted.
    Either way – old-style lawbreaker or new-style leper – he was a member of a secretive and discomfiting underworld, and sometimes this could be blackly amusing. When he was in a foul mood he almost enjoyed his phoney bad boy image, staring down wary Tube travellers and jumping queues without fear of confrontation. But other times he wore the disk over his clothing so that it was prominently displayed, feeling the way a Jew wearing their Star of David must have felt in Nazi Germany. Once he’d asked why they couldn’t make him a disk that mimicked a brainware signal, and had been met with a shrug of the shoulders and a retort along the lines of “what’s the point of that?” It was virtually impossible for anyone other than a fellow acybernetic to understand what it was like. He was a different species altogether. A subspecies, to be exact, one the superior race regarded as deviant and