The television chatters at him as he toasts a whole wheat multi-grain bagel. It is a window of chaos and color leaking into his zen-like gray palette and cleanliness—emptyness, even—of the apartment. He wonders, only briefly, if he always eats meals in front of the television to simulate company. He was never sure. It was the only time he watched television. There are what are called mirror neurons in the brain, specifically “designed” to deal with modeling human interaction, abstracting from it, deciphering it, and turning it into some sense of yourself in the situations that you observe. The mind’s model of other minds. In a very real sense, you are never alone. Every one you have ever known—their movements—are encoded in you. But he’s never sure. Could just be the noise. Maybe it was just something to stare at.

Then, of course, there was the suspicion. He kept the television tuned to CNN in some effort to keep a spyglass on a world that he did not trust, the macroscopic world—not that he thought the picture from CNN, or any of the 24 hour cable news channels, was even remotely complete. You’d have to be delusional to think that. Why watch it?—none of it had to do with him. He had nothing to do with it, the world, politicians, celebrities, workers, criminals, industries, wars, stock markets. None of it truly affected him… unless it all came crashing down, of course. So it had always seemed like a good idea to keep at least one eye on the experiment that was human civilization… just in case.

The television, “Damon Carver, a ten year-old boy from Portland, Oregon, was found by police thanks to a bit of new scifi technology—get this: the boy was found when police were able to identify him by a microchip implanted in the boy’s arm by his parents.”

Miles Obrien and Soledad O’brien banter like water-cooler colleagues for a while about “Science!” until the pundits are paraded out in their satellite connection squares, one to howl at the loss of privacy with a twist of what-is-the-world-coming-to; the other to blindly list the benefits of constant surveillance that would only be used by government agencies for good. Jacob thinks, yeah, because technology’s only ever been used for good. RFID chips implanted in kids. Barbaric. Still though, he didn’t know what it was like to have one of your own half-copies running around. It was pretty clear that brain chemistry changed dramatically as a result of parenting. Could it change an idea, even—a specific thought? Would an RFID chip planted in a child suddenly seem like a good idea if he had one?

And then in the middle of that thought, with a bite of bagel in his mouth, the television throwing out light into the room, Jacob drifts away. His eyes gloss over and the world is there and not there. Waves of billions of protons of varying frequencies of color fly out from the television 29.97 times per second, smashing into his eyes where the rods and cones of the specialized neurons behind the lenses of his ocular spheres detect and shuttle the signals on to be processed at near light speed, but nothing comes into view in his mind. Eyes, body, brain, present and accounted for. He is gone. Elsewhere in the room a clock ticks. Seven minutes and twenty-three seconds later Jacob comes out of it. He spits out the bite in his mouth. He is confused and looks to the television where they have moved on to another story. He looks to the clock and sees the missing seven to ten minutes.

Jumping up from his stool he wobbles to his refridgerator and looks across the days of a calendar. He makes a mark on today–a tiny black dot in one corner. Then he counts backwards from that dot and flips the calendar one month back, still counting, to the last dot: 22 days. He counts back to the dot prior to that: 34 days. And he counts back to the time before that, his eyes wide open with the Hunger: 37 days. He could continue on like this but he already knows the pattern. The intervals are shrinking. Some malformed rorschach of blackness on his own angiogram is coming to devour his consciousness.

Read the whole thread: The Memory Thief, Unthreaded