Renting Julia

"Where am I?"  She said.  And she said like there was no one in the world who could answer her.  But she said it out loud like she was expecting someone to answer.  She was alone.  She was always alone.  It had been that way for so long now. 

Her hands reached out and groped the darkness, clumsy and stumbling into the night.  There was nowhere for her soul to go.  Her body was a prison.  She tapped at the wall and half expected a secret door to open...it never did.  Or maybe she expected a door to open in her mind...that stayed closed too. 

Clouds danced in front of her mind's eye and she remembered what the grass felt like under her skin.  That was so long ago.  That was a very long time ago. She had given that up.  She was a surrogate now.

"Surrogates" as they came to be called were the newest generation of prostitutes.  Rather than renting out their bodies, they rented out their minds and let people come inside and play in their memories, live them like their own, feel them and taste them.  It was worse than being a whore in the traditional sense. 

Julia was a surrogate, particularly in demand.  She was wild in her youth and those memories were highly prized.  Most women don't have an orgasm the first time they have sex on the top of Ferris wheel on prom night...Julia did.  And now people were paying her a lot of money to see what it was like. 

She'd also done a lot of drugs at a lot of concerts with a lot of sex.  Now people were getting high all over again without ever touching drugs, just living inside of her for a few hours. 

As people violated her mind, she was awake...aware.  She imagined that it must have been what it felt like to have multiple personalities.  It felt like someone was tickling the top of her skull, she could feel them prying around inside the doors of her past.  And she could direct them, keep some things away, keep some things back if she wanted, it was a dynamic relationship.  It was more like a play than a picture; the performer and the audience could interact. 

"Where am I?"  Julia repeated.  This had never happened.  She was in a corner of her own mind she had never been to.  She'd followed the customer down a few corridors and twists and now she was lost...lost in a room she never knew existed...scared for the first time in her own thoughts.

"Hello?  Hello?   HELLO!"  Her voice started to rise.  She could feel an icicle stabbing into her.  "H-E-Y!"  The walls pushed out to her and she fought back, they surrounded her and suffocated her.

"What the hell is that?  Where am I?  Who is this?

Renters had to go through a vigorous screening process.  This wasn't supposed to happen.  There was one cardinal rule to using a surrogate: 

"You never enter a surrogate that you have known."

Someone was inside of her, someone who knew her, someone who knew what he or she was looking for.  And she was falling apart with terror.  Because they were picking her mind apart, throwing pieces of it here and there, like someone rifling through an underwear drawer, pairs of panties hitting the floor one at a time. 

"GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!"  Julia screamed.  It was almost like she could feel her mind being pulled open, layer-by-layer.  The skin of her brain felt like it was being stripped off. 

Julia woke up at the hospital.  She was uncertain how much time had passed.  She opened her eyes, breathing fast, but somewhat relieved that she was alone again in her thoughts.  She sat up in bed to see a young man in his twenties, staring at her in her bed.

"Hello Julia.  I'm glad to see you're O.K."  He smiled.  He seemed concerned.

"How long hav-" she started to ask.  He anticipated the question and gently encouraged her to lie down again.

"You've been down about two weeks now.  I'm sorry for what happened in there.  I know it must have been terrifying.  My name is Detective John Ritkins with Chicago Police Department - Homicide Division...Information Unit.  I have special training in interviewing surrogates.  That's why it felt different.  There was a chance you may have seen a murder suspect about twenty years ago.  Turned out there was nothing there...sorry."  He said the apology sincerely.  But it didn't seem to affect her.

"Something feels different in my mind."  Julia looked at him accusingly.

"Transient paranoia…an artifact of the search.  It should improve in the next few days."  He said matter of fact. 

"Why don't I believe you?"  She looked at him questioning him.  He bit his lip and was obviously upset with the question.

"I have to go Julia!  Get some rest! Nurse!  Nurse can we get some medication in here!"

"Wait!  Wait!"  Julia screamed.  "Come back!"  She tried to get out of bed but the hospital staff her down.  "NO!"  She screamed again.  "He killed her!  He killed her!  I remember now!" 

Ritkins stared at his cup of coffee.  It had been six weeks since he'd seen Julia.  He shook his head.

"God damn it!"  He said.

"C'mon John.  It isn't your fault. 

"Is it worth it captain?  I mean is it really worth it?"

"John, do you have any idea how many crimes we solved using your unit?  It's like having a thousand cameras running over the last 30 years.  The information we have is unbelievable.  Sometimes there are down sides. Residuals happen.  You know the numbers: one in ten-thousand."

"Residuals" was slang for "residual memories".  When an officer explored a surrogate for information about a crime, the probing felt familiar to the surrogate because of the skills of the officer.  Sometimes they would actually create a memory of the crime they were looking for, a memory that wasn't there.  It didn't happen often.  But it happened this time.

"Down sides?  Because you and I went into that woman's head she's gonna live the rest of her life thinking she saw a murder.”

Neither Julia nor Detective Ritkins slept well that night.