Apathy

Apathy By Desmond Rhae Harris

Content Warnings: Animal/human harm

With the very first trophy he’d presented to his aunt, Micha had been taught that the impulses and actions that came most naturally to him were no good. The things that flooded him with the greatest sense of bliss and clarity were harmful. Off-limits. Evil . . . The actions that led up to pleasant feelings were apparently called evil.  

He carefully learned how to behave, as best he could, from what his aunt harped through gritted teeth: “Ever since poor, sweet Abba died so you could live, you’ve been my burden to bear.” Her liver-spotted hands trembled, clutching Micha’s dead bird so hard that its head looked ready to pop the rest of the way off. She took a deep breath, muttering viciously under her breath before ranting further.  

“I didn’t ask for this, all this death. Raising a normal child is hard enough, let alone one so malicious, so evil. And this–this is how it always begins! I can’t take this! Not now, not ever. So don’t you even start.” She leaned in close, her grey eyes boring into his like flesh-eating bacteria as her stale, deathlike breath made her final words all the more memorable:  

“If this is what it takes for you to feel something”–she raised the tiny corpse high and then smashed it against the floor– “then don’t feel!”  

Sometimes, those moments felt like they were only yesterday.  

Every once in a while, during especially eventless afternoons in the lab, that particular memory would reanimate its grip, squeezing Micha’s concentration to death until he nearly forgot where he even was.  

Sometimes, he wondered if things might have been different if his aunt had been kinder. But he figured that it didn’t really matter.  

Sometimes, he took a break from rehashing as much as he could remember hearing on the numbers stations that morning. He combed through the memory of the last time he truly felt, searching for some kind of feeling to bring back. But there was nothing there to reanimate anymore.  

Carefully, he studied the chip diagram poster on the adjacent wall, observing all the intricacies of the circuitry. He’d spend too much time buried in the chip’s technicalities to appreciate the beauty of how it could stimulate the human brain and make it sustain its body forever. The chips had become so common that nearly everyone connected to the First World had one now.  

Except for him. He had nothing but a silvery scar that resembled the usual implant mark, which he’d put there himself. Just to avoid all the irritating questions about why he wouldn’t want to live on forever. In truth, he simply didn’t care enough to–but that answer never satisfied anyone.  

“Micha?” A clear, high voice piped up from the entrance to his alcove. His cold, grey eyes were the only part of him that moved as he briefly noted the closing hour displayed on the screen. He swiveled his chair to turn and meet his lab partner’s gaze.   

“What are you working on now?” she asked.  

“Nothing,” Micha replied, stiffly rising to his feet and fidgeting with his heavy lab jacket, “I accomplished absolutely nothing today.”  

The brunette code analyst drummed her nail-bitten fingers on the steel door frame, chewing at her lip while she nodded empathetically.  

“Eh, that’s understandable. Bug hunting takes forever. I don’t really recognize that code, though . . .?”  

Micha said nothing, ignoring her curiosity and gazing back towards the same screen he’d been staring at for the past seven hours. The dotted cursor blinked back at him in a way that someone less apathetic might have found irritating. Pixel upon pixel, it appeared to mock his lack of progress with a soulless mimicry of spite.  

“Anyway, hey,” she continued, “Now that our time’s up, do you maybe want to go out and-”  

Already having tuned out the sound of her voice, Micha let his gaze drift to the CCTV wall while he removed his coat. Everyone on the screen carried on with such oblivion, each one bustling around, centered in their own little world of self-importance. Micha let his uniform drop in a crumpled heap on his keyboard, and the screen sprang to life with manic lines of code.  

After a few vacant moments, the figures in every scene on the surveillance wall began convulsing and seizing. Some dropped dead to the ground and others seemed to go feral, doing their best to rip everyone around them to shreds.  

For the first time in the past decade and a half, Micha almost smiled. As he watched the chaos tear through the city around him, a wailing alarm siren pierced the atmosphere of the crumbling world.  

His lab partner’s face went slack as she dropped to the floor in front of him, foam gushing from her mouth. Micha looked from her shaking body to the computer on his desk as it ran the strange script he’d finally decoded from the numbers stations. He’d never really known what exactly he’d been coding based on the numerical values and directions he’d heard on the radio. He’d never gotten around to looking into it.  

It would take only one brief shortcut and the simplest of commands to end the script. It would be so easy to stop the virus that devoured the sanity of anyone with a chip who was still left alive. It would be so easy to become a hero to everyone who survived.  

But he didn’t care enough to bother.  

As he stepped over the dying body on the floor before him to head back to his apartment for a coffee, the realization hit him: His aunt had been wrong.  

Evil wasn’t malice. It was apathy.