Misaligned Simulacra
You see an ad offering you the chance to change your world. The ad promises to change the things you find most dissatisfying about your current life, while leaving the rest untouched. The product in the ad is a brain implant that can affect your perceptions and memories.
You are not a fool, and to your ears this sounds dangerous. It sounds like it could be used to manipulate you. It sounds like your life would no longer be real. You decide not to answer the ad or buy the product.
You try to go about your normal life, but find that reading the ad has cause the dissatisfying things about your life to become unbearable. Mere exposure to the ad has already altered your brain and changed your reality, without any actual implant being inserted.
You have problems with your boss but your job pays well and you find it impossible to quit. You find your mother intolerable, and are tortured with intrusive thoughts that you wish she would hurry up and die. The guilt from these thoughts haunts your waking hours. You stay up late at night, tired but restless, and waste time scrolling your feeds, then wake up tired every morning to face another day avoiding your boss and hoping your mother does not text.
Your phone knows that you are thinking about the implant. You did not see the ad on your phone and do not think you have texted anyone about the ad nor discussed it within range of your phone’s microphone, yet somehow, it knows. It shows you more ads for the implant.
Testimonial videos for the implant begin to appear in your feed. They are not ads, but they appear with a frequency that suggests someone is paying to make that happen. You make sure to scroll past them quickly, without engaging, in an attempt to guide the algorithm in a different direction, but they only appear more frequently. You wonder if the algorithm knows that quicker-than-usual scrolling away from content about the implant actually indicates an anomalously high level of interest rather than a lack of interest, but you are unsure how to respond to this reality even if it is the case.
You read in depth about the implant. You study its history. You watch multi-hour interviews with the scientists who developed the implant. You wonder why its existence is not a larger phenomenon, why it isn’t getting more attention from mainstream press sources, why there is not a Presidential blue-ribbon commission studying the incredible miracle that is the newfound ability to control interior mental states through modern science.
You are tortured by the existence of the implant. The problems of your day-to-day life transform from picayune difficulties to screeching agonies under the weight of the knowledge that they could simply, to your mind anyway, not exist. You begin to obsess over the implant. You make a budget and think about various financial paths towards acquiring the implant. You inquire with your insurance company and are rebuffed, but undeterred.
Your boss receives a reprimand from his boss, and as a result becomes even more insufferable and emotionally punitive towards you and his other employees. You want more desperately than ever to quit, but you know that quitting would make affording the implant even more difficult if not impossible, and even though you have not yet decided to get the implant, the possibility of being unable to do so exerts a powerful inhibiting effect and you stay.
Your mother acquires an illness that no doctor can seem to diagnose. Her hypochondriac tendencies have always been a point of contention between you, especially since you learned what Munchausen-by-Proxy Syndrome was and mysterious aspects of your childhood suddenly made sense. She claims to be debilitated and asks if she can move in with you, since she doesn’t have enough money for inpatient care and her insurance will not pay out for such care in the absence of a diagnosis. You do not want her to move in, but you have a spare bedroom and cannot think of a good excuse for refusing her that isn’t obviously just “I hate you, Mom”, which is a sentence you cannot even bear to think much less say out loud, so you accede to her wishes and she moves in with you. Predictably, this deepens your hatred and resentment towards her, while also stifling your ability to even admit it to yourself.
These two changes raise the emotional pressure on you to the point that your brain begins to tell you that your two choices are the implant or suicide. You know this is insane. You know that you could quit your job, tell your mother to kick rocks, move to another state, and never speak to her or to your boss again. And yet the moment you stop forcibly reminding yourself of this reality, the life-or-death urgency of acquiring the implant strikes you once more.
You receive an unexpected inheritance from Aunt Esther, your mother’s estranged sister. The amount is not in itself life-changing, but it puts you in a financial position that, if you empty your savings as well, would allow you to afford the implant. When the check arrives, your stomach begins to seethe and you feel as if a fist is squeezing your heart.
You make an appointment to speak with a sales rep about getting the implant. You walk into the offices of the company that sells the implant, and it feels like a zen monastery. Smell of incense, sound of falling water. The fabric covering their chairs is so soft it’s distracting. You know before the sales rep even enters the room that you are going to buy an implant. It’s impossible not to buy one while sitting in a chair that soft and plush.
You sign on the dotted line, write them a check for almost every dollar you have, and schedule the surgery for the following week. To get the time away, you tell your mother that you have a business trip and you tell your boss that your mother has a surgery scheduled. You check into the hospital, meet the surgeon, count backwards from ten, and wake up in the recovery room with a small scar at the base of your neck and an implant successfully inserted into your grey matter.
In the days and weeks that follow, you realize that the sales rep’s claim was profoundly true—the experience of having the implant feels like not having one at all. Nothing feels altered. There is no schism in perception, no headaches, no nagging feeling of unreality. You do not wake up in a sweat, you do not dream about your ‘real’ life, and you do not regret what you have done.
Instead, your problems simply disappear. Your mother stops worrying about your health so much, stops talking incessantly about her own health problems, and becomes a pleasure to live with. She even begins to clean up after herself and cook meals that are better than the ones you remember her making when you were a child. You play cards together in the evening, and talk about your father and the past and her own childhood memories, and she is a pleasant presence in your life for the first time you can remember.
Your boss stops his annoying habit of sneaking up on your desk to try to catch you not working. He even apologizes for doing that before, freely admitting that he engaged in that behavior instead of gaslighting you about it when you asked if it was happening. As a result, you relax at work. You no longer have fake arguments with your boss inside your head while you are trying to work. You no longer wait to turn in work until the last possible moment to delay having to speak to him again. As a result, your productivity improves and you are promoted.
You know that not all of these pleasant changes are the result of the implant. For example, the promotion is real. You start doing a different job, interact with different people in your new role, people who you know from years of reading company emails are real. You get new, larger paychecks, spend that money, and receive real goods and services in return. There’s no way all of that is fake. But, when you bought the implant, one thing they were clear about is that someone with an implant can’t have too precise an understanding of what is real and what is manipulated, or else the brain will reject the implant and it will have to be removed.
And now, of course, having gotten so many benefits from the implant, you are desperate to avoid having it rejected. You are quite sure that the implant is at least responsible for your boss’ improved behavior and your mother’s anti-anxietic turn. You have not told them or anyone else that you got the implant, as it was strongly suggested to you by the sales rep that you should not, and given how much more pleasant you find both of them now that you have the implant, it’s pretty easy to see why telling them would be a bad idea and how that would lead to some very awkward follow-up conversations.
You go out with friends and find yourself wondering if the implant is changing their behaviors at all. They don’t seem different in any obvious way, not like your mother or your boss. You already liked them before, so it makes sense to you that nothing would change.
It is spring, and you notice that the temperature is higher and more consistent than in past years. The implant cannot make rain into sunshine, but it can make you feel temperature differently. For a fun test you look up historical data on weather patterns, and get a sense that the implant is not just changing your sense of the temperature, but altering your reading of the historical record to cover its own tracks.
Your new boss is a pleasant presence in your life. Your old boss is also nice when you see him around the office, but the new one just seems to love you. You keep waiting for some other shoe to drop, for some inalterable reality of business to intervene and expose you as actually hating him, but nothing of the sort arrives. You feel like you want to push the limit, start acting worse and performing worse at your job, just to see if it will engender some kind of negative reaction, but you recognize that as the impulse of a child and don’t actually do it.
You wonder if your ability to control that impulse is also a function of your implant.
At times you worry that these anxieties will spiral, that you will become unhappy with your lack of certainty about what is ‘really’ happening. You worry that you will want to take the implant out but be unable to bring yourself to do it.
Within six months, though, just as the sales rep promised, these thoughts recede. You start to forget for days at a time that you even have this implant. You stop worrying about whether other people are ‘really’ treating you well, or whether your own behavior is authentic, or whether you are perceiving reality correctly or not. It has become abundantly clear to you that what is ‘really’ happening is an abstraction. What your implant provides you is as real as anything else.
Then you come home from work one day to find your mother in the living room, crying her eyes out. You haven’t seen her this sad in a long time, and it surprises you that your implant allowed this. You realize that you may have been missing her struggling for quite some time, but stuff that thought down and try to bury is deep.
You ask her what is wrong, and at first she doesn’t want to tell you. But finally, she looks up at you with glistening, moist eyes, and whispers:
“I got an implant,” she says. “Right after Esther died, she left me some money, and I’d been hearing about these things, they said they could make your life better, so I went and got one. I wanted things to be better between us. I know I made you crazy, and I didn’t want to anymore, so I… I went and got an implant. It was about six months ago, right when you went on that work trip. That’s when I went to the hospital. And it must’ve worked because right after that, everything changed. You were so different. Everything was different. We got along so much better, and I wasn’t making you crazy anymore. It was wonderful.”
You are shocked to learn this. You had assumed that your mother’s changed behavior was a result of your own implant, and now you wonder how much was because of her own.
“But then I started to feel like I didn’t have you anymore, not the real you anyway. You changed so much. I wanted the change, a little bit, just so I wouldn’t make you so mad anymore, but this… this was too much. But I was afraid to go back. It felt cruel to go back and start pissing you off again, even if the only real difference was in my mind. I couldn’t stomach it.”
You get down on a knee and put your arms around your mother. You wonder how much of the changes in your life were the result of altered perceptions, and how much were the result of the implant changing your own behavior for the better.
“I got one too,” you whisper, “that same time. We were probably in the hospital together and didn’t even know it.”
Realization blooms on your mother’s face, and you find yourself believing that she heard you, that neither of your implants intercepted this message or altered it. She laughs, and you laugh with her, and it feels real and authentic and unmediated. You collapse into gales of laughter, and it is the most pleasure you’ve taken in each other for many years, and it feels strange to realize that even if the implants aren’t causing this to happen directly, they are still intimately responsible for the intimacy and connection of this moment.
You find yourself wondering who else might have implants. You have dinner with friends and wonder if their meals are actually good or in they have implants that are fixing the flavors for them as yours are for you. Your boss compliments your writing style and you wonder if he read the actual words you wrote or better words that his implant constructed for him.
There are moments when you think the whole question of what is ‘really’ happening is moot. The dinner tastes exactly as good as the brain of the person eating it decides it is. If you starved yourself for three days and then ate the meal, it would taste much better than would eating it on a full stomach, but that doesn’t mean that eating it without first starving isn’t how it ‘really’ tastes.
Even before the implants, it was already the case that everyone lived inside their own perceptual bubble, that no two bubbles encompassed exactly the same reality, and that the bubbles of reality were affected by all kinds of non-organic stimuli. You find yourself unable to make a principled distinction between a reality-altering stimuli that occurs in the normal course of life and a stimuli that is programmed and directed like the implant.
And so, in time, you forget again, at least most of the time, that your reality is being mediated by a device. Your mother seems to forget too, and you enjoy two years of each other’s company, her living with you and that not seeming like a burden at all. You talk and laugh and cook together, watch shows and play games, and there’s never a cross word spoken in the house.
Until, one day, you come home from work to find her once more crying in the living room. She tells you that she has cancer, an aggressive form that has already metastasized, and she has less than six months to live. She shows you hospital documentation because she is scared you won’t believe her, and you realize that it hadn’t even occurred to you that she might be lying. That’s how far your relationship has come.
“I want my implant out,” your mother whispers as you hold her. “I want to know, in these last few months, that I’m seeing you as you really are, and you’re seeing me as I really am. Please?”
Of course, you cannot refuse her. So after many tears, you go to the clinic and get your implant removed, and she does the same.
When you return home together, you are unsure what to expect. Your anxiety tells you that she will go right back to being the same annoying, anxious, hypochondriac mess she was before you got implanted. But there is another part of your brain that simply cannot accept the idea that much at all of your reality was affected by the implant, and that part assures you that your mother is who she has been the last several years, and that not much will change.
When you actually arrive home together and have some time to yourselves, you realize that neither of these is true. Your mother is neither the anxious mess nor the still-sharp, relaxed roommate of the implanted days. She is a third thing—a dying old woman counting the time she has left, more grateful for you than she has ever been but also clingy, needy in a way she has never been before. She’s no longer interested in games. She cries often, but it doesn’t feel manipulative in the way it used to.
It is almost as if a stranger has replaced your mother.
You go to work, and find the same is true to a lesser extent of your new boss, and your old boss when you see him, and of the co-workers who used to bother you and then delighted you. They do not revert to the old them—they become some new, third thing, and what is revealed about them by the removal of your implant is the changes wrought by the discontinuous passage of time. They are all like childhood friends you haven’t seen in many years, except that you have seen them, every day.
Your mother’s health declines quickly. Three months, and she enters hospice. You say the right things and tell her you love her, although at times it is uncannily like comforting a stranger. She says things and does things you would never have thought it possible for your mother to do, and it is impossible to tell how much of the new things were natural changes suppressed by your implant, and how much are caused by the acquisition of cancer.
In the sense of classic literature, you know, we are all strangers to each other, and strangers to ourselves every day. But that is not the everyday experience you are used to. The continuity of personality is the great constant in life, changing only imperceptibly in response to events and even then often changing not at all. But, as you are now forced to take stock of everyone you know as if for the first time, that point from Wilson and James and Shakespeare and so many greats strikes home in your heart with great force.
Your mother dies on a Tuesday, in the morning, in her bed at your home, quietly and peacefully, a stranger who you hated in memory but love now, ferociously. She is all the people she has been to you, and none of them. You do not believe that the implant caused you to think of her this way, but it seems quite possible that your knowledge of the existence of the implant caused it.
You realize that in the long-term, your own knowledge of having had the implant may have a larger impact on your life than the actual effects of the implant itself, which seem temporary and ephemeral now. The seeming inevitability of actually contingent circumstance is a powerful psychological force, and considering counterfactuals only causes derealization, to the point that you make a decision to stop such consideration.
You return to work, you return to dinners with your friends. You miss your mother, but a parent’s death in adulthood is of limited tragic scope, and in time it gets easier. As it recedes, it is replaced by the return of a general sense of dissatisfaction. Your new boss is less congenial than you remembered from your days implanted, your friends are less interesting, even you yourself are less compelling than you remember being.
You see another ad, for a new generation of implants, in your feed, and you click on it. A flood follows that click, and you begin to wonder about the possibility of getting one installed a second time. You know that it has destabilized your sense of reality on some basic and probably unfixable level, but that only makes it easier to contemplate a second time, because you have less to lose.
You receive a small inheritance from your mother’s estate. It’s not life-changing money, but it’s just enough to pay for a second operation. With your mother gone and your boss no longer so terrible, you can no longer identify specific things in your life that you wish you perceived differently, but you’re sure that the implant could identify something that could be improved.
You wonder what those things would be. You make lists of possible changes. You try to find satisfaction in the life you have and the way you perceive it. You try to put it out of your mind. You wonder if you could get an implant that removes the memory of its own implantation, so that you could have the perceptual changes without carrying the weight of knowing they were occurring.
You wonder if such an implant would in fact change anything at all.
END
Thanks as always for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please help me out by liking, commenting, or sharing with others. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun.
Of all the stories you’ve written, I relate to this one the most. As a result, I got very invested in the story despite it also being emotionally difficult to read. My personal feelings aside, this was very well written.
There are people who nearly get mauled to death by bears and still go back into the woods once they leave the hospital. Then there are people who get bitten by a dog once and develop cynophobia. A change in perception can be the difference between something being manageable and something being unbearable, but mental fortitude is also an important factor as well. Your boss might be a monster, or your boss might just be slightly annoying and you don’t have the tolerance to handle annoying people.
This is one of my favorites of your stories I’ve read so far. I enjoyed the exploration of reality being all about a perspective and what influences that perspective because you can look at situations and change our realities with just a change in thinking.