A Shallow Root SystemAutumn 2021

Dry heat. Sand. Broken rock smoothed by a millennium. One endless dirt road. A thoughtless scattering of broken car, truck, and trailer husks creaked in the low wind and interminable sun. A ten thousand yard plateau and ten thousand more after that. She could be anywhere on the planet right now and this desert is where she wanted to be.

Breathing long and deep, the subtle movement of Del's body was a cover for chaos erupting in bursts of nanobot-stoked, neuronal lightning in her brain. Her eyes fluttered as they raised, she had slept on her left arm, the right one had bent behind her. Half of a face in the pillow. Filthy, matted hair disastrous over mixed-Mediterranean skin and gold-speckled almond shaped eyes.

The message projected in her eye was stuck in mid-scroll. The content had loaded but the widget wasn't tracking her eye movement or her mind's focus, causing the scroll to be stuck in place. It twitched just enough to hint something wasn't right.

The transcript she avoided in her eye came from a conversation she could have recited word for word. Her mother's assault was as endless as it was jittering.

"...so what? At least someone from a great family has any interest in you at all."

"A great family—as though inheriting money makes you better people . I'm not interested, mother. Back off, it's my life."

"Society? This is survival, Del. You'll be Barb Steffs all over again. Within a day—a day! No more home. No more inheritance. No more family. Gone."

"I know." Del had replied knowing that the the transcript wouldn't quite capture her groan. It also didn't capture her fatigue knowing her mother was using persuasion prompts designed by the most advanced psychologists. Delivered by AI to the display in mother's eye to the words that came out of her sanctimonious mouth to the text in front of Del's eye and all the way to the grief in her belly.

Twenty years previous, in Toronto's Jennifer Keesmat International Airport, a little Del sat with tears rolling down her face. Her parents and siblings loitered in a VIP lounge waiting to be blessed by security, exhausted and indifferent. Arriving home didn't make her feel better. It made her feel worse. She had seen unbelievable poverty. Slums that stretched for miles. Blank stares. Shoeless, toothless, and forgotten people.

Their eyes didn't know the obnoxious luxury that hid behind the big gates of beach-front, private resorts for families with access—families like hers. They didn't know the waste. They only suspected the truth: that their listless death was meaningless to the wealthy who passed them by every single day.

Del had been yelled at for piling food from the buffet into huge bowls and walking them out the front door for people on the street. She felt the stares of hotel staff. She avoided the glares of the hotel guests. The entire trip was fraught with clenched teeth, tears, and scowls from her family.

By the time she was home she was grounded, punished, admonished, and emotionally spent from trying to explain herself in a language that apparently only she could understand. In the years that followed, she would go to class, to practice, to the other practice, and to her mom's friends' kids' parties. She would join the groups, go to the right vacation hotspots, and subject herself to every expectation her parents would have.

She kept up the facade daily. Bursts of fruitless frustration would happen from time to time. They always ended with her feeling overwhelmed by guilt and returning to her place in line.

As she matured, the intrusions into her conscience continued. Nonetheless, Del had long since stopped caring about her mother knowing everything about her private life from Fyreweb. It was advertised as a truly private network. For most of its membership it was. For the extremely wealthy like dear old Mom, nothing is out of reach.

Gold, crypto, DNA validation, and lifetime access permissions: once a true child of wealth submitted these things, then and only then could they get access. Access to the most despicably-run, toxic social network for wealthy, young human garbage. Bobbing up and down, a great shiny mass of floating human detritus on a river of narcisistic existence. Del's unvocalized disgust was enveloping, making her acquiescence to silence all the more biting. The pressure to just get along was too great.

This new pressure was different: she was out of school, in the world. An adult by definition of the laws of her state. Losing her family would be rough even with the distance between them. A few friends to miss. A love that never really happened. It was all she had to hold on to. The truest thing she could find in an ocean of false friends and fake people was the lie she told herself. She swam among the ladder-climbing dilettantes because she could accept the world as it was. Eventually, she would hate that truth enough to do something about it..

It had been just under five years since Del anchored her used, mid-20th century inspired, mid-22nd century built, autonomous home-on-wheels. Though it may as well have been a decade. She was never far from the time displayed in her eye, never caring to see. The latest tech augmentations meant for the life she was no longer interested in living.

The home's glass tint dispersed in a honeycomb spread across every window. Each hexagon's outline lighting in a wave before disappearing to let in morning sun. Doing what it can to match Del's awareness as she slowly awoke. Brain activity measured and recognized. Easy for this technology. The sunlight molested the home's disarray by removing its dark cover, revealing an ugly fucking mess.

The hallway-shaped home's self cleaning materials are sophisticated enough to activate in UV light. The designers had considered everything. Aided by predictive software for environmental planning, each surface had been grown, shaped, skinned, implanted, and assembled. A robot's precision guided by a practiced human mind. Yet, as sophisticated as the technology was and as well intentioned as it's authors could possibly be, neither were capable of fully predicting every possible use and scenario.

Including a scenario where the doors didn't open and a single person shed and exhaled onto everything for extended periods of time. The home's AI system had few routines for extended periods of abnormal behaviour. In the decisions it made it's authors' biases came through. It didn't need to consider abnormal behaviour since most people's desire to fit in would usually win.

Delila twist-lifted her body in a one-armed push up from the mattress, forcing her lean frame to separate from the bed's comfort. The view out the back window faced magnificent endless desert. The expansive beauty told quiet lies about its true murderous intention. Life here is painful struggle with an undignified end.

About 20 yards away from Del's eye was one lone, human-sized cactus. She noticed that it leaned slightly from the top mimicking a sign of respect or an introduction. How could it have gone unnoticed all this time? She sat up without taking her eyes off of it.

Those same eyes found a bright red crown atop the plant's apex that looked like smooth and shiny skin under the protection of countless spines. It failed identification. It wasn't a melocactus—those are smaller. This had red arms stretching out from an abnormally long stem. There was no other life around it. Dust and rocks radiated out from its stabby centre. The Internet-In-Her-Eye® gave only the surface details. According to all references there was nothing special about it. It was as much a part of its environment as anything else. It belonged there.

She felt off, which took her mind away from her fascination outside. In Del's brain, subtle bursts of synthetic chemicals were released from the organic implants purposely grown in her body. Organic matter planted by dark-web to front-door syringes. "Punk As Fuck", she thought to herself when she waved her finger over the purchase button. "It's my body. I'll drive it how I want to."

Mostly she drove it with a mind to alleviate endless anxiety and depression using a grown mixture of CBD, THC, and melatonin directly from implants. She even pushed the syringe into her stomach herself.

In her hypertechnical sanctuary, parked dead center of nowhere, she breathed a little easier; slept a little deeper. Relief from all the sloppy, endless tears and blurred vision that painted so much of her waking life; the relentless anxiety and constant heartache. She wouldn't have that peace for long.

There was no crack of thunder to signal the change. No cannons. No yelling. No flags waved. Quiet as a lie in a compliment. Del didn't know it but a war had started.

The system that interfaces with her biotech ( her personal AI-based controls ) was in the process of being hijacked. Code fighting code: overriding, deleting, replacing. Her home's care system was becoming a digital fusarium-rot spreading within all the millions of nano-devices in her body. She wasn't in control.

Through the window she stared at everything and nothing: what is and what would be. There was no wrinkle of her brow, no curve of her mouth. All slack in her face.

Hours had passed. She didn't notice. Didn't notice that the home had downloaded its own code from some dark corner online. From some basement filled with genius criminals who could spend all their days dreaming up ways to destroy. The home duplicated the hacked implants in her body and adjusted new ones. It even wrote a few hundred thousand lines of its own code. Grown into her stomach was a biochemical printer pushing out whatever stew the home commanded. And from the gut direct to the brain.

The colours outside flipped from bright blues with yellow sun to dark blues and pin-prickedblack and then back again to bright blues. The numbers representing a clock in her vision moved backward every other second it moved forward. She noticed nothing.

She didn't notice how the temperature changed outside or the birds that hopped past the cactus. Not the rain, not the wind. Not when snow started to fall. Not even the popping crowns of winter fruit berries on the few other cacti around the home that had once made her so happy.

Messages from her father started coming in. "Del. Enough of this. Come home. Take the money, have some kids. Will anyone else know the difference between you running away and a temper tantrum? This is the way it's done. The way it has been done for our people for as long as anyone can remember."

A father's one-way assault continued on a sedated, cloudy-brained daughter who missed every word of it. She couldn't respond even if she wanted to.

"Come home now or don't come back at all." Words he expected would be searing had he been able to witness them land. He signed off. Without waiting he blocked her contact.

The upright incorruptible man. All business. No heart.

A lack of compassion, she often reflected, made everything worse. It was at the source of all their many familial frictions. The arguments that went felt smooth like simmering conversations and the ones that ended badly with raised voices and doors slammed. His resistance to her ideas, her values, only made her connection to them stronger as she grew up. Deep fibers woven into the heart and nerve and sinew of her body.

On the floor of the home, over the course of hours, her awareness returned to a state that approached something near functional. She wept when she read and eventually absorbed the transcript from her father's message. She felt weak. She curled into a ball, hugging her knees tight. Every tear evaporated before rolling off her cheek, caught by little robots on her face. Just like the ones in her eyes. On her skin. In her guts. In her brain.

Little robots keeping time with her frenetic thoughts. The only thing she ever really wanted was to not feel all this pain; to find those few moments of peace and to force them wider and wider. Until her life made any kind of sense. A harmony of the outside and the inside. A life strong enough to endure anything.

The idea seemed like a conversation overheard through a wall. Someone else's declaration for someone else's life. In and out of lucidity. The home, her hacked implants, and everyone around her pushed and poked and prodded until she didnt know which way was up. She felt high. Melt-into-the-couch-for-a-week-straight high. One with the universe high.

In the space between trackable neuronal activity and the unknowable processes of quantum mechanics participating in consciousness, a message formed for Del. It phased into her awareness; an apparition moving through a wall.

"Come closer."

She raised herself and stepped to the door with a cautious, awkward movement. Sensors in the floor, ceiling, and the door itself recognized her intent to leave the home. A crack of light made an outline around the door as it was pushed out and to the right in a single, fluid gesture.

The tiny space burst with light and dust. Every surface began cleaning itself. Some undulated dust to pockets where it was collected and transported to outside deposits. Some surfaces were so tightly blended that the tiniest particles of dust slid off them. Everything clean and nothing broken.

One step and Del's bare feet touched the cracked dirt, her heel on soft stone. The light she squinted at was now early morning. She took more steps in what felt like invisible molasses toward the object of her fascination. The sight of the giant cactus pulled her in. An arm outstretched long before it was close enough to touch. Del wasn't even sure if it was hers or if a new arm had suddenly grown from the center of her chest. Chemical delirium was washing over all the deepest parts of her brain.

When her fingers finally met the plant she could feel upward curves forming at the corners of her mouth. At first her finger made slow paths, tracing around each spine. Anguish, grief, and the taste of relief enveloped her. She had been without touch, without companionship for so long.

Compelled to be closer, Del leaned in to wrap herself around the cactus. She was met by white fire all over her skin, and was just aware enough to know it was a feeling to get away from. Stepping back, blood leaked out of thousands of tiny wounds. Red tears streamed down her limbs to be absorbed by the earth and then forgotten forever.

She retreated into the home, to lie in her own bed. From the back window, the gorgeous thing looked so peaceful. A lone spotlight for her focus. The flies swirling over the drying blood couldn't be seen. Not from the distance her mind looked out from.

Her wounds healed the old fashioned way: slow. Red blood cells creating collagen, creating new tissue. For days and days, in and out of awareness, her mind spun on the events with the cactus. Everytime she leaned on a pillow she felt the same stabbing heat. Over and over. She couldn't wait to be near it again. She wouldn't wait to be near it again. She stared at the pillows on her bed. A smile and an idea formed.

In the darkness, the cactus caught diffused light from the home's exterior bulbs. She blocked that weak light where she stood halfway to the plant. Severed arm sleeves from varsity sweaters and satin robe belts and three different kinds of tape held pillows—bed pillows and pillows from the pull out sofa—around her torso and arms. Drawing in a deep breath of determination, she walked closer and leaned in. The spines bent at wild angles. Del could feel their sharp points push into her skin where her armour failed. Bursts and bursts and bursts of pleasure in her brain – until she finally laid her head right into the plant, thrusting spines through her cheeks and into her tongue.

The pain stole all that sweet high and foggy brain away from her. Leaving only confusion. Now, she stood in the light of her home staring into it's semi-tinted windows. She swayed as she wondered if the shadow moving within was real or not. Blood polluted her taste, rolling down her chin into her shirt, combining with sweat between her breasts, pooling in her belly button.

Each one of the dozens of security cameras turned to focus on Del. The home received instructions to grab stills from the captured video. Flashes pulsed and travelled through the back of Del's retinas and into the recesses of her brain. Just as suddenly, everything around her was covered with darkness.

Chirping crickets made the only sound she could discern as she awoke. In the east, from the edge of the Earth, a horizon of light pushed against the dark. It crossed an enormous distance, creeping closer until its light touched her toes. Her feet were still in the same spot they had been when the cameras focused on Del hours ago.

A scene of blood and mess and mental illness. As exposed as her desperate need to connect. Unforgivable weakness. The image was minted onto blockchains. It was encoded into DNA and shipped to off-planet server farms. Tens of thousands of messages. Tens of millions of engagements. Rich kids, poor kids and the bulk in the middle. Every social network had a copy of an image from the scene outside her home.

Her battered heart dove off a steep cliff into a deep quarry of humiliation. It swam in circles of misery as her mind spun and spun and spun.

Inside, she peeled off everything that wasn't her skin. Standing in front of her bedroom mirror she selected dense cleaning materials to be made. The bioluminescent gel looked like a spreadable universe. Applied to her dirtiest parts, the bots dispersed seeking out filth to remove and destroy. They moved around each other on unknowable paths. All of them, walking through a holiday crowd at the mall, avoiding collisions and obstacles.

Del spent the day in bed, trying to rest, able only to stare out the back window of her home. Her entire body—leg hair, arm hair, pits, scalp, all of it—had the remnants of last night's cleanser bots trapped in them. When she moved enough to shake them loose, they'd all be gone. Collected no doubt by other bots and manufactured bacteria and other absurdly elegant technological spells.

Her reality was a blurry smear of light and emotion. Desire and shame in an ebb and flow, an endless push and pull. She could make out new messages forced into her view but not much beyond that.

She had blocked his name, his friends' names and his family's names before escaping to the desert. Like every other barrier ever created, the wealthy and those unburdened by ethics could find ways around it. This family had real wealth, enormous power. Teams of engineers could be hired from every country around the world and set to break into her mind at any time.

"There are millions of people who would kill to have this opportunity. It's really not that bad, is it? When the weather is good we have the yacht, when it's bad we have an underground shelter nicer than any castle. Kids running around, family dinners, big events with more food than most countries get in a year."

"We can make the images disappear. We can do that. We can give you back your pride."

She knew at that moment how the image got out. Maybe it was the punishment her brain had been through or maybe it was just how she was now. She wasn't the least bit shocked by this intrusion. He had chopped off one of her legs to force her onto his crutch. Off balance to him meant easier to control.

"Any surgery you want. Our doctors are the best on the planet. Teeth, tits, lips, remove a rib. Whatever you need. Anything. You'll be the wealthiest, most beautiful girl and all your friends will hate you. All you have to do is go to church and be a wife. Your parents want this for you. Your cousins want this for you. The human race wants this for you."

If someone held a knife to her eyeball and demanded she describe her worst nightmare this would be it. Subservience. Superficiality. Artifice. It may have been his manipulation that set this blurry desert dream in motion or he may just be taking advantage of existing fissures in her life. The message left her feeling the deepest grief through a lifetime's traumatic haze. A familiar thing that had always been with her. That precipice before a burst of tears she carried with her every day, in every conversation, in every place she went. The hurt that was always waiting for a push from calm water into a torrent.

She moved to leave the home, ambling toward the radiating heat from the cactus outside. In and out of the spell. The intoxicated, blurry spell with less and less control over her body. She kicked out her foot with too much force hitting the corner of the wall connecting to the door. Her toe broke.

For the briefest moment the AI within the home was interrupted. Taking in this percussive information and creating new plans. Which chemicals to release and where and in what quantity. No hijacked signal from outside agendas. No voices from false gods.

All the bad code, mis-patched plugins, and injected malware: the processes in the machine spun without catching. A brief respite for Del. For the first time in months her body was operating as it normally would. Without manipulation. Without molestation or suppression. No inescapable messages. No expectations to be anyone other than herself in the here and now. She could taste the freshness of the air. She held her arm up to see the little hairs on her arms rise. She was herself.

"Delila"

From her eyes, water began to flow. Heart beating harder, chest heaving.

"Delila, come."

The words came as much to her ears as they were spoken through her chest, vibrations from the utterance of another plane. A thing of magnitude, of enormity.

Outside, once again she stood in front of it. No pillows to protect her flesh. No clothes, no restraint. Her naked eyes all over its thick skin. In awe of it's resilience, the beauty of it's imperfect flower.

Torrential bleeding from each wound as spine after spine pierced her. Her face, her lips, her most sensitive parts. Bliss in the flood as she came and came and came. Underneath the tempest, the shuddering, the shaking, she was real. Her truest self taking action, finding a door to escape through.

She lay now on her back, face up to the indifferent blue-washed sky. The warmth of the sun on her punctured skin. Smiling-eyes wide, mind clear, bleeding to death, and ready to go.