Unplugged

I’m on the front porch of Rubin’s place, staring across the lawn at the silent cars slashing past, feeling old and empty inside, when the new guy walks out. He’s got the cowboy twitch, the uncontrolled jerk of the head to the right or left, that all of us have when we first arrive here. I suddenly want to scratch the back of my head, down at the base, but I fight the impulse. The new guy sits next to me, sighs, then pulls his head up suddenly. It goes down and up again three times before I look away. Nobody likes watching someone else short circuit.

“Hey,” he says after a few awkward seconds. His hand is held out to me, close but not touching. “My name’s Jonathan. My two weeks just started.” He gives a quick laugh, and I shake his hand. His palms are dry and cracked, but his grip is strong.

“Mickey,” I say, watching him. The first two days are the worst here at Rubin’s non-tech health facility. Staying unplugged is not an option for a lot of cowboys, but the alternatives – stims coursing through the nervous system or triggering the built-in lightning viruses just about every system has nowadays, not to mention the unnatural act of plugging metal into the back of your head – the alternatives aren’t so tasty, either.

Jonathan relaxes slightly next to me. At least he’s stopped twitching. “I knew that flack would catch up to me,” he mutters. His voice is high, unsteady, and his scalp is bright white under buzzed black hair. “That’s what got me here. I had the cheap stuff put in me when I was sixteen, just starting out. How was I supposed to know it melted after prolonged use?”

“Yeah,” I say, the veteran cowboy trying to clean up his act. For the second time. The treatments after my first interment at Rubin’s held for about six months, then I started sneaking trips to Lia’s com line for a fix when she was asleep. Pretty soon I was popping her stims and jacking in every time she was gone. Lia found me in the bathtub, the stripped com wires attached to the miloprene plugs in the back of my skull jolting me with enough juice to cause paralysis. “Should’ve left you in there to dance yourself to death,” she’d said. To break the connection she’d had to prop my head up with an antique wooden chair.

“What’s your story, Jonathan?” I say. I keep my gaze away from him, following the traffic instead. Rubin’s is surrounded by transparent soundproof baffles at the edge of the front lawn, so the silence is complete. Rubin likes the rustic feel, even though there isn’t much peace and serenity left to spare these days. Behind the baffle, the ten lanes of satellite-guided traffic are only a few feet away.

After a few seconds, Jonathan flicks his gaze over to me. “My story?”

“Talk, man. We’ve got to talk to get through this, to pass the time.” A wave of nausea passes through me, and I fight off fresh, unfamiliar panic. “You know?”

Continued...

First published at:


Reprinted by:


Also reprinted at:

What the critics said about "Unplugged":

"This is one of my favorite stories. It's a short, taut piece, about Internet junkies, here called cowboys, who are trying to "dry out" before they fry their systems. We have another first person narrator, Mickey, who has been here before at Rubin's non-tech "health facility," on the edge of a huge freeway in a grim near-future. He talks to Jonathan, the new arrival; they both know their health is in trouble, but the urge to plug in, any way possible, is nearly overwhelming. What Mickey keeps trying to hold onto is the thought of his exasperated girlfriend Lia, who has obviously been disappointed one too many times. But temptation is very, very severe... The details are sharp and unsentimental: we see the ex-cowboys jerking and twitching, hear their mumbled, brain-fried conversations, but the view is compassionate, not scornful, and the inward battle is viscerally real."
—Sherwood Smith, SF Site

"'Unplugged'" is a decent story, dealing with the hackers addicted to technology. It is sort of Kesey meets Cronenberg, and makes for a quick and enjoyable read. While the subject matter is not particularly new, I found the setting of a drug rehab facility interesting and well done, and the view of technology as an addictive vice, refreshing."
— E. Sedia, Tangent Online

"'Unplugged' achieves an added measure of poignancy as it shows cyberpunk "cowboys" in their days of obsolescence."
— Faren Miller, Locus