The Kalos
By: Jay Vogel
Copyright 2013 Jay Vogel
It's been almost a year now since the incident. Since the day everything went quiet and I suddenly felt so alone and isolated from every single person around me. All at once. All in an instant. I had gone from being surrounded by voices and friends and love to having absolutely no one to listen to me except for my very empty and depressing apartment which can only reply in long exhalations from its many exposed, leaking pipes circulating the hot air.
I sit on my hardwood floor of my empty flat, and I shriek and flinch at every single goddamn creak this place makes. In the mixture of sounds, I once again hear her voice as if she is speaking right into my ears. At first, I thought the voices and the visions and the dreams just meant that I was connected to the Kalos again, but soon you start to consider the possibility that maybe the brain is just trying to compensate for something that is no longer there by completely fabricating it.
The voice is not threatening. It is not menacing or haunting. It is as though the woman it belongs to is sitting right here next to me and I can hear her snoring as she sleeps, or she is in my kitchen and yells some expletive when she burns her hands on the stove, or she's stretching her arms and legs after waking up and giving off a very long and audible yawn. Very natural sounds a human would make that just communicate signs of life, that she exists and wants for someone to know that.
If I close my eyes, I can even feel her hands in mine, her breaths against my face, her head resting against my shoulder and my insides get warm, but I open my eyes and the sounds change from the soothing voices to the high-pitched squeals. There are rats here again. I know it. I can sense them running around, eating crumbs of food I've dropped, their tails hitting the walls as they retreat into their holes somewhere. I cannot find them yet I can always hear them. Can always sense them. At night I can smell the little droppings they leave hidden around the house, almost like it is in my own nose. It is unbearable. In the summers I could sleep on the roof of my building most nights, peaceful as the city's many machines hold their breath and everyone silently communicates in the Kalos , but now as it gets colder I can't really do that.
I'm still getting used to being separated from the Kalos. The operator says I should be back online within a few months. They rarely have cases like this, which makes me wonder why they are so bad at dealing with it. What else is taking up all their time? I don't think my work has yet to figure out I am no longer connected, a relief since most everything requires access to the Kalos for retrieving the knowledge we need to build our products and troubleshoot problems. I can usually keep up with my tasks which dissolves any of my employer's suspicions. Even if I am not connected, as long as my computer and devices are, I can get my job done pretty well. Establishing a secure shell on my computer, or SSHing as we used to call it, in order to connect into the Kalos is pretty easy, but it is a major pain to navigate through. The brain interface that everyone has now is unbelievably convenient. Nothing is worse than CDing through a server manually on a desktop, a server that is constantly being updated and configured by every damn soul in the country connected to it. The scripting languages we learned to write in order to sift through folders and databases get really complicated when working with dynamic data that get to be this large as every human's thoughts are being stored, but I've become rather proficient with it, giving me a bit of an advantage and allowing me to slip under the radar.
At least the business meetings have stopped, once people realized there was no point physically showing up in a conference room when all we would do is just look at each other and say nothing. All of our thoughts and ideas and updates pooled into the Kalos, transmitted via the Human-Kalos interface in the brain, applying the “R1D” filter (R1D is our team name at my job). The filter allows us only to connect with and instantly message each other telepathically over the Kalos network. A whole hour and half of silence. When you are not linked into the Kalos like me, it is a completely new perspective, especially if you had spent fifteen years of your life becoming accustomed to and actually depending on those K-servers as a means of communication and making friends and being social and just about every other damn part of life.
The heat broke at one point in my abode and it took me a week to figure out how to call and speak to a HVAC mechanic over my device. I tried as hard as I could to find him on the Kalos network by going through it manually and figuring out how to query using the correct filters for a mechanic, but doing so that way, it is cluttered and messy and very tedious. With the HKI, my thoughts could go up into the clouds of swirling brainwaves and select a 'mechanics' filter because of the protocol attached to my query, then I simply transmit my issue and embedded in that message is my address, which is received by a mechanics group who shave off those address bits and link up to the nearest mechanic to come to my apartment. I don't even have to say a word. I gave up doing it manually on a computer and just dialed the Kalos operator. Luckily, the only speaking required on my part was to issue some simple commands to the recording which did the rest of the job for me as it was connected, and the mechanic showed up the next day to fix my heater.
At night I can hear the rats downstairs. I can even sense their little feet scurrying across the floor, their high-pitched squeals, then their teeth biting into something that didn't break apart like food. It was something plastic and it was on my coffee table.
I sprint out into the living room and scare the rats away, one of them dropping my ID card from its mouth and fleeing to the shadows of my home. I pick up the card which has my Kalos ID, or KID, on it. The picture is of me when I was fifteen, one year before Kalos was released.
My mother took this picture. I remember. We had relatives over: my aunt and uncle, grandma and grandpa. I was smelling their breaths. I could tell them exactly what they ate that morning and last night for dinner. And I was always right. They couldn't believe it. We'd also do this thing where I would go upstairs and they would whisper to each other, and even from upstairs I could hear every word that they were saying. Mother always said I had extremely heightened senses. Peak levels. The doctors agreed. They had never seen brain activity like mine before. My hearing, eyesight, smell, all were off the charts. They were even questioning if I was seeing the same damn world that they were seeing, or if I was seeing something else.
I remember. I looked over at my mother and she took this picture of me smiling after I yelled, “Spinach Pie!” And that was exactly what Grandpa Stanley had eaten the night before. My big ole smile, such pride in my superpowers as I called them. My heightened senses. My body more in tune with the energy flowing around me. But being so sensitive to the world's vibrations and agitations came with some negative side-effects. I felt I was always inadvertently eavesdropping on conversations people believed to be having in private. At night, I heard my mother and step-father whispering to each other down the hall and that got pretty awkward sometimes. I just covered my ears with my pillow but I could still hear them saying mushy things to each other.
This was not what bothered me the most, however. I lie in my bed now in my crappy apartment, unable to sleep because now I can hear the sound of her snoring and turning in her sleep, and it brings me back all those years before I was connected to the Kalos and could hear the same sounds in the night as a fifteen year-old. But one night, I did not hear the sound of a girl in peaceful slumber. I heard crying. Panting and sniffling and tears splashing against the ground. The mourning clenched my insides and prevented me from falling asleep. I remember venturing into my parents' room to see if they were upset, but the grieving sound was not coming from them as they were asleep. I searched all over the house to find the source, but even after nothing turned up, I was still haunted by this sou
nd, this ghost of a girl wailing right into my ear, and I desperately wanted to see her. To find her. To hold and comfort her so the awful sound would stop. So that she could be at peace, and I as well.
One year later from that night, a giant plug with a computer chip and antenna was inserted into my brain, along with every other brain of every other human in this country who opted to undergo the procedure of connecting to the Kalos: a massive server for the human mind. Scientists discovered that brains emit weak signals through the air like a radio launching an EM signal. They created these simpler technologies that could capture these air-brain waves and process them to understand the messages embedded as if our thoughts are nothing more than 0s and 1s. They did all this computing and storing of human thoughts in a program known as The Kalos. I remember learning to first use the Kalos before we were hooked up. I was that young. It was as simple as issuing commands on a terminal, sorting through directories which stored