TOUCHED

TOUCHED - Chapter 1

2 Am, April 11th, motor home park in Humbolt, CA

 

I had the nightmare again. She was alone and running from the soldiers, terrified and screaming for me. I couldn’t help her. I was above it all, watching and helpless. It always ends the same way. She finds a hiding place and just as she starts to feel safe again, the mutation is triggered.

I finally catch up to her but it’s like there is a glass wall between us. I am pounding my fists against it, trying to get through but I can’t. I can only watch as her eyes glaze over and first one hand, then the other starts to twitch. The twitching spreads to the rest of her body, while I beg her to hold on, to fight it. She convulses violently until finally going still, her last breath hitting me like a sonic boom.

The wall between us evaporates and I fall to the ground, crawling to her but it’s too late, she’s gone. The strangest instinct takes over and I reach out to finish closing her half open eyes. Just as my hand settles next to her temple, my thumb brushes her eye lid, I wake.

It’s not like normal waking up either. It’s like a huge bolt of lightning has struck me. It’s an explosion of light and sound and them I am awake and sweating in my sleeping bag, my heart racing, my stomach trying to empty itself.

I don’t know why I am finally writing this down except that I need to get the images out of my head. It is becoming such a familiar dream that I look at her in the waking world and see her die all over again. I have to make it stop but we are alone. There is nobody to ask.

I’ve been scouring every printed book I could find but it’s hard to get a clear picture of the past. All I know is, things used to be different. So alien in fact that, as strange and as foreign as it is to me, apparently people used to touch all of the time.

I found this one really old paper that talked about how much more civilized the world had become since the integration of Second Skin. There was something before it called underwear but it was just ordinary cloth. It talked about how, only a generation before, there had been this epidemic of sexual assaults. I’m not talking about someone hacking an Infinite Life Module, ILM’s or “Dream Boxes” as people call them, and corrupting programs. This was actual physical violations of the worst kind and they started when most people were still young.

The reporter threw out statistics that blew my mind; things like 897% increase in sexual assaults since the governments were purchased by the corporations. 97% of people polled had been a victim of, witness to or been involved in a sexual assault by the age of ten. I hope he was exaggerating but it would explain the harsh penalties for touch today. I keep trying to imagine a world where people’s only outlet was each other but I can’t wrap my brain around it. Maybe if they had just had ILM technology sooner, a safe place to act out fantasies without hurting anyone…

No, I know how wrong it is. I’ve known my whole life. So why would I do the worst possible thing I could imagine in an already terrible dream? Is it the stories I hunt down and read over and over again? I just can’t help but be fascinated by the people from back then but I am not finding answers.

They had this thing called marriage where any two people could sign a paper, similar to a bad partnership agreement, and they were stuck together until one of them died or paid a lot of money to break the contract. And the contract didn’t end in three years; it just went on and on until they hated each other. It was totally natural to fight over stuff and neglect their offspring while one of the tried to keep everything from the partnership.

They raised their own children from birth, sex births by the way. I can’t imagine a more horrible or violent way to be conceived. It was no small surprise people couldn’t end the cycle. Is that my problem? I was conceived illegally through violence and that nature is trying to assert itself? Is the dream trying to tell me that I am going to hurt her?

And then it was their birth parent’s responsibility to support Infant and Adolescent Assets for their whole lives; probably why the economy collapsed. The cultivation of a Human Asset is no small task. It takes training and resources and yet millions of their “families” lived in poverty to do it.

Of course, this was all before the United Nations began enforcing the Biological Assets Rights Act. It was back when corporations only paid in money, before they inverted the broken old system and made shelter, clothing, medical, food and recreation the pay with money being the benefits package. That must have been such a terrible way to live.

Everything I know about that time is a reminder of how poisonous, corrosive and violating touch obviously is. Only the most perverse and violent of people would succumb to such a weakness anymore but every now and then we hear stories. They all end the same way, rehabilitation or execution.

It’s gotten harder to stay hidden and away from the cities but unless one of us figures out how to learn a trade and blend in I don’t know what else to do. I watch her sleep and realize the toll this life is taking on her. It’s affecting us both but with the acceleration of the mutation it’s like the whole world is falling asleep faster than anyone can wake it.

I try not to think about what it was like a few years ago; when people bragged that the human race had finally achieved a Utopian existence. But every time I see an empty neighborhood or hide from a military transport I want it back. I want to go back to having my biggest problem be forging a Guardian ID to get work and wondering how to be an asset to some company, despite my origins.

Asleep is the only time I see her truly relax. I have to figure something else out, a cure, a safe haven, something for us before the mutation takes one or both of us.

I can’t decide which would be worse; to lose her to the mutation or to succumb myself and leave her to face the world unprotected and alone.

All we have left is each other.