Jane and the chip

The subsequent inquiry blamed a slight power surge which confused our supercomputer. Jane saw the panel during that temporary monitoring failure.

         Anyway, our sensors show that on the fateful morning, Jane was sitting in prayer by her window. Looking down suddenly, she noticed a small area of her inner forearm that looked different from the rest. Most of the flesh had a translucent quality (as its designed to appear) with the veins looking blue and mottled purple. An area appeared matt and showed a lesser opacity. The surface will also have felt harder and gave no sensation when touched. Its size reminded her of the credit cards we’ve all seen in the history section in the old section of the worship-dome.

         The faith-cam footage shows Jane moving her fringe arise with a nudge, presumably to improve her vision, before taking long and a searching look. How could she have missed it before, she seems to say, her face a masterclass in confusion and wonder. A single sharp prod from her finger caused the casing to spring open, revealing a cavity within her forearm. She gently slid the cover to remove it, and discovered a shallow trough containing computer chips, much like a fuse box, with each chip mounted on a great many gold wires. They looked like nine small caterpillars, or a pattern of three-by-three dancing centipedes. She could just discern tiny white letters beneath each chip printed directly onto the metal of the cavity interior, but her eyes could not decipher such minute characters.

         Jane looked closer, peering through her fringe from every angle possible. The footage shows her moving her forearm this way then that, trying to optimise the lighting. She even appeared to smell the chips. Next, she picked at them, but their tiny size made them too small to allow a simple grip. She found a small pair of tweezers, the sort we allow for shaping an eyebrow, and suddenly yanked at the central chip, which readily came away from its socket. It looked like a dead fly, it’s immobile legs rising to God-home. 

         Straightaway she knew she had done wrong. Until that instant she never knew feelings of wrong but now thoughts flew unbidden through her mind. They scared her for she had never previously experienced thoughts like these. Indeed, she realised that she had never experienced a conscious thought before.

         Looking around, she saw her reflection in a window. She saw self and recognised the image. She looked at her body as if for the first time while pondering the capabilities of its various parts. She willed her foot to move and saw her knee move also. She spoke aloud, telling her hand to rise, and held it before her face. Was this ‘delight’ she felt while pondering its form and potentialities? She noted the timbre of her voice, which had at first confused her for it lacked familiarity.

         With a shock, she realised her words had not conveyed any God-praise. Worse, she realised she could no longer feel the God-ness that fed her times of prayer-mode. All sense of God-ness was gone  — all of it. She tried to re-enter the prayer-mode to convince herself of its possibility, but could feel no sense of God-ness. She also noted the lack of peace in her (what to call it?) faith-file. She needed to regain the feeling of intimacy and God-ness that entering the prayer-mode always gave her.

         She tried to restore the tiny chip to the socket in her forearm with the tweezers but dropped it. She searched, found it, and saw the damage on its tiny wires, and knew deep-down that she could no longer restore it. She stopped everything and sat still, which required an effort of will. Her breath sounded shallow. She almost tasted the way her heart fluttered.

         She felt strange as an alien curiosity entered her mind. Why had she never seen before the cavity and its polymer cover? Could she find other similar cavities or, indeed, different-looking ones? To whom should she share this secret, or perhaps others already knew? And if they did know, why had they kept the secret from her? What did the other chips in her arm control? She tried to analyse her feelings—the first time such a thought had consciously occurred to her. She removed her robes and wondered at her previously-unappreciated shape, and felt wonderment.

         She tugged at a second chip with the tweezers, and dimly felt it yield. Its wires fractures and the chip broke free leaving a second void. She slumped unconscious.

         And that’s how we found her. The faith-tranet had alerted us when she failed to respond, because the chip appeared to have malfunctioned. We later found the correct faith-cam footage and deleted all of it. Clearly, we cannot allow any evidence of a person failing to experience God-ness, which is a terrible, terrible sin.