More Perfect (Temi Oh) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Temi Oh wrote her first novel, Do You Dream of Terra-Two? while studying for a BSci in Neuroscience. It won the American Library Association’s Alex Award in 2020 and was an NPR Books We Love pick in 2019. She has written stories for Marvel’s Black Panther, Dr Who and Overwatch. Her second novel, More Perfect was published by Simon and Schuster in May 2023.Her first short film Murmur was funded by Sky Arts and the BFI. Since then, she has written on the Netflix TV series Castlevania: Nocturne and the CBBC series Silverpoint. 

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Chapter 1: Moremi

1 MOREMI

‘Will it hurt?’ Moremi asks the girl from the sixth-form who sits opposite. The girl is lit in zebra-print by the slats in the blinds, holding a hot-water bottle to her stomach, and her hazel eyes keep flitting up to the muted television screen at the far end of the waiting room.

‘Only at first,’ she says.

‘That’s what everyone says.’ Moremi is nervous. She’s only been waiting in the school nurse’s office for a quarter of an hour, but already she’s chewed her thumbnail down to the quick.

‘Where does it hurt?’

This morning she’d been excited about the procedure – she is the last in her class to go through with it and has been begging her mother to sign the medical waiver for almost a year now. There is an asterisk next to her name on the school register, which indicates she is still ‘Pulseless’. Even the word, she hates.

The sixth-form girl casts Moremi a sideways glance as if considering how much of the truth to tell her. ‘Everywhere,’ she admits finally. ‘Your whole body, but only for a minute. Less than, maybe.’ Moremi swallows. ‘And not just your body, also… your mind.’

‘You mean, my head?’

‘No, it’s deeper than that.’ The girl frowns in recollection. ‘It’s a weird sensation. As if something is there that shouldn’t be. That feeling you get when someone is looking over your shoulder, only this is deeper, the machine eavesdropping on your thoughts, your memories.’ She touches her forehead with the palm of her hand. ‘It’s as if you’re not alone in here anymore.’

‘But that fades away after a while, right? That feeling?’

‘Not really,’ the girl says, fiddling with a loose thread on the edge of her school skirt.

Moremi rubs the miniature ballet slippers that dangle from a keychain on her school bag. For luck, like a rabbit’s foot. She’s done it so often, before an audition or a dentist appointment, that the satin at the toe-box has frayed now. She’d only been thinking of the moments after, how good it would feel once it was done; she’d forgotten about this, the scalpel, the pain.

The bulk of the device is the size of a five-pence coin, placed under the temporal bone. The sixth-former must have had hers implanted a while ago because the skin around it has completely healed over. Moremi can’t help but stare, even though she knows it’s rude. Around its central processing unit is a cluster of accessories – the pin-headed RAM, HPU, sensors and transmitters as well as optional drives – that make a ‘constellation’ of LEDs and metallic notches in the skin behind her ear. The girl wears her hair, as a lot of people do, to one side in order to make the lights of her constellation visible. Pinks right now, indicating that she is in mild discomfort, steady beat of her heart, the brightest light, throbbing like a distant drum. Moremi’s friend, Zen, had been the first to get one a few years ago and Moremi remembers leaning close to her head to marvel at it, an unnatural fusion of organic and mechanic that she used to find almost viscerally repellent.

‘How old are you?’

‘Thirteen,’ Moremi says.

‘Isn’t that a bit old?’ the girl asks, regarding Moremi with a familiar suspicion; some people consider parents who refuse to give their children a Pulse the same as parents who turn down vaccinations. ‘Have you watched the video?’

On the screen above them, it’s running on mute with subtitles. An informative broadcast about the implantation procedure. Moremi catches words like ‘direct neural interface’ as they flick across the monitor. ‘I’ve seen it a few times,’ she says. In doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms, on television. Something about it, today, makes her a little queasy. Maybe it’s the spongy pink schematic of the human brain. The nanoscopic fingers of the Pulse are called arrays. They measure less than one thousandth of the width of a human hair. Once the Pulse is implanted under the bone, millions of arrays extend, penetrating the thick membrane of connective tissue that surrounds the brain. The arrays spider through grey matter, routing around for cranial nerves: the optic and auditory neurons, the hippocampus – where memories are stored – and the amygdala to interface with.

‘So… it’s like brain surgery?’ Moremi says.

The girl snorts derisively. ‘Don’t be dramatic. My dentist does, like, ten of these a day. It’s like getting your ears pierced.’

They’ve learned a lot about the brain this year in biology. Moremi has discovered that it contains around 86 billion neurons. That the external world can be fractured into lines of analogue or binary code for it to interpret. The colour of the sky right now is a specific wavelength of light that sends a pattern of impulses into the back of her brain. A kiss on the cheek sets off fireworks of its own in her facial nerve. Strange to consider how rich her inner life appears to her – including at this moment, the smell of the waiting room, the glitter of dust in the air, the sound and sight of schoolchildren playing on the Astroturf out the window – even though it is simply the result of some chemical code disseminated through grey and white matter. Just as hard to believe that the whole of the internet, every picture and video, email and game, is written in the binary language of machines: ‘on’ and ‘off’ switches, 1s and 0s. It’s these similarities which make it possible for the machine to interface with her brain.

The Pulse is programmed to transform neural signals into lines of computer code and vice versa. The whole process has been called ‘neural digitisation’ and it allows the Pulse to turn the brain into another node on the internet. This means that once the procedure is over, Moremi’s head will be part of the internet in the same way a phone or a tablet computer is. The thought of it is astonishing and terrifying.

Her console makes a noise in her bag. Moremi scrabbles for it, and when she sees that it’s her mother, she races into the bathroom to answer.

‘How did it go?’ her mother asks.

‘It hasn’t happened yet,’ Moremi whispers. Through the window, she can see a group of girls from her class ambling to their final lesson.

‘I thought it was this morning.’

‘Oh! The audition.’ Moremi makes herself look away, focus. ‘Well, I think… I mean, I fumbled the last part of the adagio but—’ Even before she finishes she can hear her mother sigh. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not me you have to apologise to.’

Moremi wants to say, ‘Isn’t it?’ Her mother almost never calls her out of the blue. These past few months, preparing for the auditions for the Regency Ballet School, have been some of the happiest of her life. She’s cherished the time they’ve spent together. Those late nights and early mornings in the kitchen, listening to her mother clap out the beat and say, ‘again’, ‘again’, ‘again’, with feeling. That elusive glimmer of pride in her eyes, the blessed light of her...