👁👁I Woke Up With a Migraine and a New Opinion👁👁
By Felonious Academic
They came for me last night, not with boots on the ground type of way, not with sirens, but with the soft hiss of static inside my lucid skull. I was dreaming, or so I told myself I was, fluorescent lights flickering like dying stars frying out. At the end stood a man in a suit the color of the reapers uniform, face smooth as a herion addict runway model, eyes two black opals. The presents didn't speak. He didn't need to. The words slid a hop, skip, and a jump into my mind like syringes finding the vien.
why are you still thinking about the passport ID?
Why do you dream of borders?
Why do you remember the old days, when air tasted like rain instead of code?
I tried to wake. Nothing, shear paralysis.My limbs were lead, my tongue a slab of swollenn meat. The air smelled of ozone, of burnt solder, of the inside of a microwave left running too long.
And then,slow, deliberate, he reached into my head. Not via metaphor. Not poetically justified. A cold finger tracing the outter folds of my cortex, flipping through memories like a deck of marked cards. He lingered on the one where I'd whispered to a friend, late at night, about the towers humming overhead, about how every new app wanted my retina, my voiceprint, my soul.
Unacceptable, he said, voice flat as a dial tone. You're leaking. I felt it then, the motherfuckin rewiring. A pulse, low and wet, like someone breathing through a straw into my ear. They weren't justwatching anymore. They were editing And implementing new adjustments. Cutting out the jagged edges of doubt, smoothing the creases where rebellion used to live.
And the worst part?
I fuckin liked it. i lOVE it. For a second even, half a second, I wanted to be cleansed clean. To be willfully conformed. To forget the fluoride, the chemtrails, the way my phone vibrates right when I think about workingout. But then the dream cracked. A glitch. A stutter. The man's face flickered and pixelated, then human again, then gone. And in that split-second, I saw the wires, they were thin silver threads snaking from his temples up into the ceiling, disappearing into a sky full of satellites.
DARPA's wet dream. Project Dreamcatcher. They'd turned sleep into a courtroom, REM into a confession booth. I woke gasping, sheets soaked, head throbbing like a busted amp. The clock said three-fourteen. Same mtiherfuckin time every night now. The past couple of nights were identical in terrifying ways.
And the migraine,it wasn't random. It was a fuckin receipt, I'm for certain A thank you note from the ghost in the machine.
Next time, I won't fight. I'll think of cats. I'll think ofsports, I'll think of anything that isn't them. Because if they catch me awake,if they catch me thinking, they'll come back. Not in dreams. In daylight. In the mirror. In the way my reflection smiles when I don't. And I'll never know if it's still me smiling back. I'm not exactly sure NOW.
