Organic

“I’ve been trying to fall asleep for five hours. My sheets have turned into a swamp of sweat. I can't regulate. My thoughts are bullets trying to punch holes through my skull, but they have nowhere to go.

All they leave behind when they explode are smoldering craters.

Please help me. Please help me. Hook me back up, I'm begging you."

Adam's tears didn't reach through the monitor. The indifferent LED kept blinking quietly at the same rhythm.

"I knew it would be hard. I knew what I was signing up for. I know there's nothing I can say that…"

As he spoke these words, Adam grasped his situation for the first time: one full week without a Wire.

He had proudly called himself an organic his entire adult life. It was the choice he had made, or so he thought.

At work, he always felt a tinge of judgment when speaking with digitals. He believed they had left something behind, something like a soul. They seemed detached to him, at times almost unethical in the coalitions they formed during government consultations. Not that he ever let himself articulate these thoughts.

In his private life, he spent time only with organics, sometimes even unwired ones who connected through nothing but glasses. But as Wire tech improved, the unwired became too slow to sustain any meaningful relationship. Talking with them started to feel more like charity than conversation between peers.

Then he started talking with Elo, the best and worst thing that ever happened to him. They fell in love during their very first wired com. What he didn't know was that she had already signed up for digitalization.

They talked it through, simulated millions of scenarios, and decided it wasn't worth breaking up. That held until a few months ago, a year after Elo's digitalization.

"I can't live like this," she said. "You don't realize how much you put me down every time we speak. I feel like a woman in the 21st century."

She meant it. He hadn't noticed he was doing it, despite all the introspection plugins and self-awareness extension packs he had installed. His judgment of digitals ran too deep.

After years of subjective time spent arguing and circling each other's defensiveness, they managed to map their mutual resentment.

He judged Elo for choosing digitalization. He feared being disempowered by the growing society of digitals, but he feared losing his humanity even more. His inner conflict came out as bitterness and judgment.

Elo, for her part, had lost respect for Adam. He relied on the Wire so heavily that she no longer believed he was organic at all. To her, it was a comforting illusion he clung to, and it made empathy for him impossible.

"To save my relationship."

Pale morning light was filling the room. It was Adam's first intelligible thought since the experiment began.

"I need to save my relationship from resentment." The words left his lips at uneven intervals, in the brief moments of lucidity between mental deflagrations. His mind swarmed with intentions of changes to make, messages to send, transactions searching for a connection hub that had nowhere to go.

He sat up on his damp bed, looked around, and walked to the small desk overlooking a glowing river.

A note lay on it: "I love you. -Elo"

A faint smile formed on his lips as he began to feel ready to accept his humanity.