I regretted the decision as soon as we got off the train and saw what kind of neighborhood he was taking me into. We were in the worst part of town and every time we passed a dark alley or doorway I would make sure he was between me and the darkness.
We stopped in front of a metal door with graffiti on it. He didn’t knock. He stood to the side of the door and leaned against the wall.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“We have to wait?” he said.
“Why?”
“So he can come and get us.”
“How does he know we’re here?”
“Don’t worry. He knows.”
I looked down the deserted street looking for the quickest way out.
“You’ll be fine,” he said. “I got mine inserted a few months ago. There’s nothing like it. It lets you feel parts of the world no one else feels. It lets you feel things you can’t see.” He looked around to make sure no one noticed us and then continued. “The magnet is usually the first implant anyone gets. They call it a gateway implant,” he said with a smirk.
It was a rare earth magnet, thinner than a dime and inserted under the skin on the tip of your finger.
We met at a bar where he was erasing the bar code on people’s credit cards with his finger. This was how he hooked me.
“Are you sure he’ll do it for free?” I asked.
“I’m positive.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Of course it hurts. Anesthetic is illegal and they don’t use it. See, these guys are totally legit,” he said waiting for me to accept his naive logic.
I thought of the higher probability that neodymium magnets and other salvaged pieces of computer hardware were more accessible than illegal drugs. They probably considered the pain a rite of passage rather than something to be muted.
“So when is this guy going to get here?” I asked in frustration.
The metal door opened and a dim yellow light poured out into the street. A man stood in the doorway dressed like Abraham Lincoln without the top hat and a perfectly manicured jet black beard cut at right angles.
“You’re late,” he said to my new friend.
“Sorry. This guy kept me. He wants an implant,” he said waving his eyebrows up and down.
Abe Lincoln looked me over.
“Why?” he asked me.
Because it was awesome! I thought of a better answer that would get me through the door.
“I’m tired of my limited human experience,” I said.
He smiled. “Follow me.”
He led us up a flight of stairs to an apartment that was littered with dismantled electronic equipment. Tables were covered in motherboards, LED’s, and electrodes. The smell of solder was thick in the air. Two men were in the kitchen. One was in a dentist’s chair leaning back with a bright light shining down on him. His mouth was held open by a clamp and three tiny copper wires dangled out of his mouth. The other man was hovering over him with a scalpel in one hand and pliers in the other, pushing the tiny copper wires through the man’s tongue.
“What are they doing?” I asked, disgusted.
“He wants to taste his emotions,” Abe Lincoln said with a wicked smile. “The fusion of hardware and wetware started as just an idea. God didn’t make us perfect and we finally have the tools to improve the design. We could feel EM fields, see infrared light, and smell colors. Are you ready to be upgraded?”
No. “Yes,” I said swallowing my fear.
He pointed to a couch that was surrounded by broken pieces of technology. We sat.
He swabbed my index finger with rubbing alcohol, poured some into a shot glass and dropped a tiny metal disc into the glass.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Your sixth sense,” he said peeling the wrapper off of a new scalpel. “Try not to move.”
I was trembling, from the excitement I hoped.
He stuck the scalpel into the tip of my index finger. I broke my leg once. It was the worst pain I ever felt up to this point. This was worse.
“The fingertip is the best place to put it,” Abe Lincoln said trying to distract me from my pain. “It’s packed with sensitive nerve tissue.”
After the skin was cut he grabbed a device that looked like tweezers that worked in reverse and inserted it into the cut in my finger. It lifted the skin away from my finger to create enough space to insert the magnet.
It’s hard to explain what happened next. It was like time travel. One moment I was in excruciating pain and the next I was lying face up on the couch with an after taste of vomit in my mouth and string hanging from my finger tip from the stitches that closed my wound.
Abe Lincoln was gone. “What happened?” I asked my friend.
“You threw up, and then you passed out.” He looked over his shoulder towards the now empty kitchen. “We should get out of here.”
We left and walked back to the subway. Before we turned the corner I stopped. Beyond the throbbing in my finger I could feel something pulling, gently, at my finger. I was frozen, trying to figure out what it was. My friend stood staring at me with a curious smile.
“What is that?” I asked. He pointed up at a power pole that was next to us with a transformer at the top that was softly buzzing in the night.
I reached my hand out towards it and felt its electromagnetic pulse running over my hand like waves, gently pushing and pulling my finger. My friend stood next to me and put his hand up to the transformer and we stood in the dark street reaching out like we were warming our hands on a fire in the sky.