I want to kill myself.
I want to kill myself.
I want to kill myself.
The words kept ringing in her head.
I want to kill myself.
There was no escape. The microchip she knew, despite heavy denial by The Party, was implanted in her brain at age two kept sending these signals to her conscious.
I want to kill myself.
She tried fighting it. She tried reasoning with it. Arguing with it.
It was no use.
I want to kill myself.
She knew why The Party issued these chips. Population was getting out of control and one-child-policies and other measures didn’t curb it enough.
I want to kill myself.
The earth had twelve billion human inhabitants now. The poles were melting. People started to move inlands from coastal cities.
I want to kill myself.
She rummaged in her drawers, trying to cover what she was doing from the cameras she knew were hidden in the walls.
I want to kill myself.
Living in the city was hell on earth. There were just so many people, she actually had trouble coping with standing on the street, amid the shoving and pushing of her fellow human beings.
She was never diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, this was just the normal human experience now, stepping out the door to not understanding how there could be so many fucking people.
I want to kill myself.
To be allowed to conceive a child with your partner, you had to fill out mountains of paperwork and join a wait list and even then most of her girl friends weren’t allowed to have one. She knew this was reasonable. But it still felt wrong.
I want to kill myself.
The Party knew best. It was run by the most competent people of the continent after all, backed by the best artificial intelligence human kind has ever programmed. Still, sometimes she felt like the voice in her head was right. This life was not worth living.
It was so artificial it hurt.
I want to kill myself.
Sometimes she wondered, was she in a simulation? Surely, when human kind cracked the 10 billion mark and made huge advances in virtual reality, some countries must have thought about placing its inhabitants in Oculus-tanks ™, putting the tanks in huge factory-like buildings and be done with the walking,talking, annoyance of a biomass a human being turned out to be.
I want to kill myself.
Ah, there it was.
She found the scalpel and the other various equipment she smuggled into her home. It wasn’t easy, she had to do it over months, very careful to always have an excuse ready why she might need a certain instrument.
I want to kill myself.
She dabbed a cotton ball into rubbing alcohol and applied the liquid to where she suspected the device to be located in her skull. The thoughts increased, as if they knew their time was up.
I want to kill myself.
I want to kill myself.
I want to kill myself.
“No I don’t, you piece of garbage.”, she told herself, to no avail.
I want to kill myself.
With trembling fingers, she picked up the scalpel and tested its sharpness on her finger. A tiny trickle of blood emerged.
Across the street for attention, down the road for results.
“Shut up.”, she gnarled. Slowly she put the scalpel near her skull while watching the process with pale eyes in her tiny mirror.
Not your head, stupid, your wrist!
She ignored the thought pumping through her conscious and cut.
Just when she did, she heard an ear-splitting noise from the door to her apartment.
She couldn’t see. The room filled with some sort of gas.
This is it. This is what happens when you betray The Party. And we just wanted the best for you.
It was a new voice in her head, one she never heard before.
“Go fuck yourself.”, she said.
The voice laughed.
I will. See you in hell.
She vaguely heard feet trampling into her room and someone shouting “Get on the ground!” and “She’s resisting!”
Then everything went black.
