The Synergist

[Year 13 | 2265-66]

At the dawn of the new education year, Artur’s mum still had no idea about what her son was learning at the Extension Program for Talented Students, but doubted that he was learning maths and English.  As her investigations into the program were not bringing up any information (though when you buy off-the-grid technology from the slums and a dampener for the enhancements the City has installed in your body, your options are limited), but she hoped that he was learning something useful, like A.I or robotics.

In his off-time, Artur continued to do what he loved.  With his Gogh Tab Plus firmly in hand, he was mixing neon palettes with blood-red.  One afternoon, almost nine years to the day that he was given his Gough Tab Plus, he finally decided to test the neural link.  He looked at a holo-image of Mum and Dad, taken from their wedding day.  Oh, how happy they looked!  Then closing his eyes, Artur imagined the picture in his mind’s eye.  The Gogh Tab Plus recreated the image through a twelve-year-old’s lens, bringing a vivacity that twenty-third century cameras just cannot muster.

Artur didn’t understand why his mum was crying after seeing the image, but after that day, he vowed that he would never use the tablet to recreate images of his dad again.  Instead, Artur’s work would be reserved for characters from his favourite games, buildings in the City, and, one time, a guess about what his crush looks like naked.

The plan to avoid drawing images of his dad worked splendidly, even if if his nudie art resulted in an awkward conversation with his mum, a lecture from his headmaster about the appropriate use of neural links (“These are not designed to indulge your mastubatory pleasure, Artur Simril,” he said in a humiliating address to the entire Extension Program for Talented Students), and a major infraction from the City.  That is, until the eve of Artur’s thirteenth birthday, where he forgot to log out of his Gogh Tab Plus.  Besieged by nightmares about his dad’s torture: the kicks, the punches, the spatter of blood; Artur inadvertently recreated the grizzly scene again and again.  Artur created so many versions of the image that the Gogh Tab Plus created an animation, recreating in full the torture the once witnessed by the then-eight-year-old.