🍀 Disassemania
In solitude the real desires surround me.... (Kernel bonus piece, + NYC launch this Saturday!)
Launch week is over, but if you’re looking for more Kernel, you’re in luck — today we’re sharing a bonus piece, a short story by Jeff Sauer. There’s still a chance for you to get a gold foil cover btw…
Disassemania
by Jeff Sauer. You can also read it online here.
“When did you first start disassembling yourself?” Dr. Hallopeau asked.
“I can’t remember,” I responded. “Maybe that sounds evasive, but I’m not lying.”
All my memories are scarred by disassembly. Even now, in my regular session with Dr. Hallopeau, I am scratching at one of the biosensors implanted in my pointer finger. The skin is starting to pull back, barely revealing the metallic pins embedded between flesh and bone.
Disassembly is always a gamble. Every few scratches I could flick the pins just right and receive a pulse of soothing pleasure down my forearm. A synesthetic blend of sound as color. But most scratches led to pain. A burning from raw, wet tissue suddenly bare to the harsh conditions outside the body. That is the simple cycle of my compulsion—an endless loop between temporary euphoria and inevitable anguish.
Dr. Hallopeau noticed the tic, softly inquiring, “What are you thinking about right now?”
“I don’t know,” I said, equivocating, “It’s hard to explain.”
“Why don’t you try?” Dr Hallopeau responded.
She began to smile, casting a genuine warmth that was evident even through the intermittent desync of her hologram. A ray of sun amidst the icy digital winds. She wanted me to get better. But she had also seen me erode over the years. Several of my bio-augmentations were now permanently exposed, emanating a verdigris from the metal into the surrounding skin. The tell-tale sign of a disassembliac.
I must be disappointing her.
“You know how it goes, Dr. Hallopeau, it always starts the same. Yesterday I finished a long day of remote piloting. Could not get the feeling of sweat and dust and heat off me. The taste of sand in my mouth. Had to take a long shower.”
The sadness of the night returned with the telling of the story. Dr. Hallopeau was taking in the description with a dutiful nodding.
“But then I was alone with no plans for the evening. I could hear the other families in the building laughing and having a good time. I knew I should go outside, even wrote myself notes all over the apartment. Go for a walk, get fresh air, drink water, whatever, but I just couldn’t escape.”
“Thought I would check the Feed for a little bit to take the edge off,” I continued, “you know the Feed’s motto, ‘all the content you could ever want, all the time.’ Before I knew it, I was dosing. That empty-headed feeling took over. Like my brain was replaced with a bowl of the thickest, grossest, cement-flavored pudding you could imagine.”
“Then what happened?”
“My hands started to roam. I didn’t want them to, but they made their way up to my head and I started pulling, looking for imperfections.”
Even describing the process started to summon that unmistakable urge to disassemble. I wanted to close the connection with Dr. Hallopeau, rush to the bathroom, and go all out on my implants. Tweak the wires of the engineered eyes, randomly shuffling and editing the wavelengths making up my enhanced visible spectrum.
At times I told myself that there was a higher purpose in the disassembly. A kind of bodily scrying that was required to unlock new experiences—hidden colors like Jupiter sapphire or the subterranean emotions of Calvinic depravity. But there were other aspects to the compulsion that were more practical. Pulling circuits until I passed out. Rubbing pre-chain coins against silicon to fuzz the biolinks on the central nervous system. Total temporary disassociation that removed any anxiety, fear, or worry.
“Why do you call them imperfections?”
“I don’t know, it’s just a word I came up with. You know, the raised lines and bumps and tabs on the implants. The engineers try their best to hide it, but those imperfections are still there. Something about it, I can’t keep away. The touching turns to rubbing, and then the rubbing evolves into biting, scratching, pulling, and worse. Anything to get the implants out, you know…”
Dr. Hallopeau shifts in her seat, betraying a clear discomfort as we broach the bodily specifics of my disassemania. Yet she has lasted so much longer than any of the others. I remember the first, Dr. Francis, who helped me through my earliest episode. It happened one night when I was nine years old. Managed to bypass the child locks on my ADOLINK. Spent the entire night parsing low fidelity adult content on some of the rougher corners of the web before it was completely scrubbed. A classic case of ‘Feed Overdose’, not that the medical community had a clinical name for it yet. By the time my parents came to wake me up I was huddled in the corner of the bedroom, digging several small divots into my scalp in an enclosing circle around the cranial implant. Could not focus for weeks after that night. Dr. Francis had recommended machine-assisted EMDR plus a limited memory wipe. My parents hoped the night was a one-off incident. That the urges and the memories would dull with age. Soon you will be on your merry way, Dad had counseled. Sixteen years later I am having the thousandth version of the same conversation.
“Where did you go just now?” Dr. Hallopeau inquired.
“I’m sorry,” I responded, “couldn’t get out of my head.”
“It’s alright,” she reassured, “you’re back now.”
Dr. Hallopeau paused, adjusting her notebook before continuing, “So, why do you want to remove these imperfections?”
Her question glided past me. My focus was back on exposing one of the pins on the biosensor. I could feel that a pin was bent. Did my scratches do the bending, or had it been installed with a slight bend? I needed to check the crookedness. But the last scratch was too much. I dislodged the pin entirely and the titanium tore flesh on the way out. A small teardrop of blood was collecting in the crevice of the install location. My nerves started to scream. A familiar rhythm of pain was beginning.
If I was lucky a little pain would be the least of my worries. Sometimes the blood and bodily fluids could interfere with a damaged implant, forging unpleasant hallucinations and phantom sensations. Usually, the only remaining choice was to close your eyes, clench your teeth, and rip the implant clean out. Hard shutdown. But I could not carry out the emergency surgery in front of Dr. Hallopeau.
Trying to concentrate on the conversation, I offered a halfhearted explanation. “I don’t know, it’s complicated. There’s that nanosecond where it feels so good to remove the implant. That moment of release—when the capacitor splits from the board, when the wire comes loose, when I finally remove what feels like an alien inside me. That feeling of dislodgement, a release…” I trailed off again.
Dr. Hallopeau left the silence open, waiting to see if I would continue.
I was scratching harder at the remaining elements of the biosensor. The broken base of the pin jutted sharply out amongst the muscle fibers in the third digit. Each flick drew the shroud of disassociation further. The room seemed to shrink and darken. All my possessions were swallowed by the darkness brought on by disassemania. Soon it would be only me and the hologram of Dr. Hallopeau.
“Like when the stores switched completely over to bio-aug’ payments. Everyone was so excited,” I exclaimed, “but all I could think about was where they were going to install my tech and how I was going to dig it out.”
Dr. Hallopeau nodded. She had seen me that week. I had tried to excise the new implant with my nails. The engineers had done a fantastic job—a nearly clean seam embedding a penny-sized chip into the anterior surface of the radius. But the imperfect line between machine and body was still there, barely noticeable. Or maybe not. I could have been feeling a vein roll over the bone. I had to check for myself, so I moved on to excavating with stainless steel tweezers. I managed to get the whole implant out without a visit to the emergency room, and stored the remains of the implant in a plastic bag. The hardest part was the look the other customers gave me as I passed the bagged implant over the scanners at the grocery store.
Sensing my sadness, Dr. Hallopeau asked, “What about the habitat reversal therapy? Have you been practicing our exercises?”
She was trying to move the conversation along.
“Yes and no. They work for a day or two, but something will come along, something at work, a new bird to fly, and I start disassembling again…” I responded, growing agitated.
The last scratch at my biosensor had suddenly sent waves of uncontrollable fire shooting up my arm and into my shoulder. I shoved the damaged hand under my thigh to dull the throbs.
“Why don’t we try one of the exercises?” Dr. Hallopeau proposed, as if on cue.
“Okay, okay...”
“Take the scratching hand, ball it into a fist, and squeeze for sixty seconds. I’ll count out loud. You just follow along.” Dr. Hallopeau instructed.
I listened to Dr. Hallopeau enunciate the numbers. With each passing second, I squeezed harder until my entire arm was taut. She was never going to get all the way to sixty, I was sure of it.
I lost her voice somewhere around fifteen or twenty. My rapid breathing brought me back to summer runs in the park with my older sister. Towards the brink of exhaustion one of us would point to a distant bench to mark a spontaneous finish line, encouraging a final sprint. After one of these races, we ended on a bench overlooking a small field where children were playing on artificial turfgrass. One of my arm bandages was spotting red. Staring at the bandage, she asked, “Why do you do it? Why can’t you just stop?” I looked back at her and smiled. Her own implants were undetectable, a suite of corporate-sponsored productivity tools that kept her connected to the mainframe. She had never come into contact with the raw Feed.
I came back to the session with Dr. Hallopeau shouting my name. Gasping, I unclenched my arm.
“How long did I make it?” I asked between rasping breaths.
“We made it about thirty seconds. Are you okay?”
I sat silently, feeling my face warm from embarrassment. Thirty seconds could feel like an eternity in the Feed. I had glimpsed hundreds of images and words in less. With a full minute I could parse thousands of content blocks on a hyperscroll. And how much damage could I do to myself in such a short amount of time? At least expose a few wires, unearth a subcutaneous connector, maybe even rip out a small chip, depending on the implant.
Thirty seconds was nothing in the face of the hours and days of unsupervised isolation to come. An ever-eroding will to change was the only thing that stood between me, the Feed, and more disassembly.
“How are you feeling?”
“I feel ashamed. Pathetic. Worthless. What hope is there if I can’t even make it a minute?” I cried, losing control of any ability to measure my responses.
Dr. Hallopeau did not respond to the outburst, trying to maintain an austere medical demeanor. The conversation came to a standstill. Without thinking I brought my left hand up to my mouth and started gnawing on the edge of a smart tip finger cap. The saliva coated the cap, sinking into the connections at the edges, making me feel like my feet were submerged in a warm bath.
Dr. Hallopeau broke the silence with a rare misstep that sent me over the edge.
“What if we increased your medication? People with severe cases are eligible for up to double the regular amount of clomipramine. Though we would need approval from the Government Medical Office, of course.”
I broke down, tears streaming down my face. Dr. Hallopeau took on a regretful expression, “It was just an idea. What’s wrong?”
Through choked sobs I tried to find a few truthful words, “I don’t want more pills! I don’t want more harm guards! They’re never going to slow down the Feed. I just want to get better.”
A memory from my time at the Academy returned to me. A rudimentary harm guard coated my left arm. It was a flexible metal glove that covered from the tip of the fingers to the middle of the forearm. The harm guard was supposed to withstand any attack of disassemania. One particularly stressful night—after the Feed swelled in reaction to a political event, an election or assassination or something—I was determined to get the glove off. I turned the minifridge in my barrack into a makeshift disassembly station, plying at the glove with knives and tools of various sizes. When bunkmates returned I was passed out, surrounded by streaks of blood running down the side of the makeshift workbench. Later they told me that there was a clean meat cleaver on the floor. The memory shifts as I try to hold it. Quicksilver fragments that refuse to be contained. I remember waking up in the campus hospital, surrounded by nurses, school administrators, and the barrack director. A doctor comes to the foot of the bed and holds court, telling me how lucky I am that none of the implants were damaged.
“I don’t want to be like this anymore,” I continued, wiping the dribble from my nose.
“What do you want? What would make you happy?” Dr. Hallopeau asked, her warmth returning.
I contemplated responding with what Dr. Hallopeau wanted to hear—a safe answer that would allow our session to conclude with the usual relief from hard-fought catharsis. We were at those difficult final minutes of an appointment where the emotional faucet let loose over the past hour had to be artificially closed. Dr. Hallopeau needed a response that signaled I was okay, that she did not need to arrange the mandatory 48 hours of observation for high-risk patients.
I flashed to a later-in-life meeting with Dr. Francis. More than a decade had passed since the first episode of disassemania. I had just graduated high school and was traveling to Academy Basic Training. We ran into each other at the airport. I called out to her with a proud smile as I was on an exceptional six-month streak without any disassembly. We talked for a few minutes. I told her how well I was doing, how things were looking up, and more. She smiled and nodded, as she had always done, but she never said my name. It eventually occurred to me that Dr. Francis did not recognize me. Her eyes betrayed that vacant stare of someone running an assisted memory search. I could not blame her. Who was I? Merely the thousandth patient with the same diagnosis. I wondered if Dr. Hallopeau and I were doomed to suffer the same fate.
I searched for a few remaining shreds of self-composure, gathering myself and staring directly at the hologram of Dr. Hallopeau.
“I want to get better. Stop disassembling. Try to be a good person, help others, see the world, that kind of thing. Get out of this city so that I don’t go crazy with loneliness. Stop piloting, or at least stop piloting for the government. Get the tech removed—properly—and settle down somewhere. Maybe even find someone to share each day with. Yeah, I don’t know….”
Saccharine, but Dr. Hallopeau took the bait. Maybe she knew I was lying. Maybe we were stuck in a boot loop without any chance of ever reaching the home screen. Or maybe our session was just out of time.
“Those are wonderful aspirations. Why don’t you write them down in your journal, and we can talk more about them at our next session?”
“Yes, Dr. Hallopeau, that sounds great.”
“Excellent. And remember, there is always tomorrow. The future is ever brighter.”
With that pronouncement we began the regular concluding ritual. Dr. Hallopeau smiled and waved with one hand, discretely moving the other in an attempt to close the connection. Her initial motion commands did not take. After a few awkward moments her hologram finally vanished. The chair she had projected onto seemed more empty than before.
Alone once more, I listen to the garbled giggling and conversation of the neighbors through the wall. A stiffness creeps up my neck, urging me off the couch and into the kitchen to stretch. Opening a cabinet, I provide my retinal scan to the electronic pillbox and dry swallow two purple hexagons. Staring out the kitchen window I manage to catch the last moments of sunset and contemplate what to do next. Turning back towards the dark interior of the apartment, I try to avoid lingering on the magnetic rack of knives hanging above the oven. Another night with no plans.
I could never tell Dr. Hallopeau what I really wanted. Sometimes I did have hopeful thoughts about how I could change, the person I might become. Maybe I could show the world what I looked like without disassemania. Pristine implants, unchewed fingers, and an intact scalp. I could be the poster child for the newest and greatest biomod. A blissful smile accompanied by corporate Muzak.
But in solitude the real desires surround me. They call for a complete disassembly. Start with the eyes so that I can no longer see the Feed. The hands do not need sight anyways—they know the body innately. The dismemberment continues until all flesh and technology have been painstakingly removed and laid out on the ground. Each piece is arranged exactly where it should be. I am left as a wraith above the pieces, haunting the strange reflection of my former self.
Perfect self-disassembly. Then I would finally be free.
Jeff Sauer (he/him) is an applied scientist and writer based in New York. His work has appeared in Do Not Research, Social Science & Medicine, Geographical Analysis, and other publications.
One last reminder about the NY launch party — an anonymous SF launch party attendee said that they started experiencing lucky coincidences as soon as they RSVP’d. This could be you!
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