1

Let me begin by saying, the doctor told me there would be an adjustment period. What he didn’t say was anything about the blue skin. I’m not talking about my skin turning blue, no, that would have been weird enough. I’m talking about seeing it on everyone else. I woke up to find myself surrounded by either overgrown Smurfs, or Blue Man Group; take your pick.

Naturally, there was a reasonable explanation for my azure stained vision. Here’s the thing about that though. The instruction manual the surgical technician gave me had over three hundred pages and I’m dyslexic. So, I tossed it after the first five pages.

Had I read it, I would have better understood my condition and how to fix the anomaly. The truth is, glitch or not, in those first few moments… I simply didn’t care. I was so grateful for my restored eyesight, that I would have happily dealt with Smurf people permanently. Fortunately, that wasn’t necessary.

When I first learned that cancer would inevitably take both of my eyes, I had two choices. a world of never-ending darkness or total ocular replacement. Either way, I was told that the baby brown eyes I’d grown up seeing in the mirror had to go. It was either that or die. Some choice, huh?

My wife, Bernadette, and I thought we’d prepared for that reality, but in hindsight (forgive the pun), we really had no clue what awaited us. It turned out that the blue skin thing would go away once the sensors in my new eyes calibrated and adjusted to my neural pathways, but little did I know, it was only the beginning of what my implants would show me.

Now, I’m not talking about the ticker ads constantly scrolling at the bottom of my field of vision. The same ads that I’d refused to pay upfront to have removed. I’m not even talking about the never-ending pop-ups that the user interface bombarded me with to identify people and objects I’ve known my whole life. I want to tell you about how my new eyes would end up showing me a world that had been hidden from me my entire life and how that would ruin me.

When the doctors finally removed my bandages weeks after surgery, and light flooded my sensors for the first time, I remember searching for my wife. Surely, seeing her beautiful smile would reassure me that we’d made the right decision. Then I found her standing next to me, and when my new eyes met hers, she flinched.

“Oh no…” I gasped. “What happened? Did something go wrong?”

She looked at me and faked a smile. “No. Of course not. You look fine.”

Oh, that word. Fine quickly became the word I dreaded hearing her say. Every time I asked what was bothering her, fine became the word which confirmed for me that somehow everything between us had changed. A lie so convenient and practiced, that hearing it made me want to vomit. My wife refused to confess her new contempt for me while looking me in the eyes. In fact, she refused to look at me in the eyes at all.

Giving the Devil her due, the first time I saw my new eyes in the mirror, they took me by surprise as well. Before removing the brown eyes, my mother had given me, the doctors scanned them for both appearance and for biometric retinal identification. My new implants projected reproduced images of the originals across the 10k LED surface of my bionic eyeballs. Everything modern technology was capable of to make them seem like the set I’d always had.

Their movement, though. I don’t know any other way to say it other than it looked wrong. Quick, mechanical jerks instead of the smooth muscular movement I was accustomed to. Even worse, they glowed softly as they projected their images. How could I not look like some mechanical thing? The nature of my implants’ uncanny valley would prove too wide to cross for my spouse in the coming days. Unfortunately, that was only the beginning.

2

The first time I noticed the auras, I thought my implants might have malfunctioned, or perhaps they still needed additional calibration. Waves of color emanated from people, seemingly at random. I waited a couple of days for the calibration to catch up, but then I noticed a pattern. The colors all represented different emotions, and I could tell what people were feeling at any given moment.

Would you believe love looks orange? I know, right? Not pink, not red. Love looks orange, and I saw it envelope families, friends, and couples. Wanna know who I never saw it around? My so-called dearly beloved. As even more days passed, another color began following her, but only in my presence. A cloak of black energy slowly grew around her, and it only got stronger the more time she spent around me.

“I worry about you.” I told her one day, when her face looked so black only her cold blue eyes pierced her new black veil, “I keep seeing something… wrong with you.”

“Wrong with me?” she shouted in a tone far darker than her aura, “How dare you! You look at me with those vile things, and say that to me? It just makes me want to dig them out…”

I was terrified, and then I noticed the spoon Bernadette gripped in her fist; right before she lunged at me. We struggled and I got away from her, but I had no remaining doubts of what her black aura meant. My wife wanted to murder me. Something about my new eyes had turned her against me, and it was going to cost me my life.

After the police were called, they told me I needed help. The mental kind. After all, why would anyone ever use such an excuse to beat up their wife? Me beat her up! I’ll never forget how she smiled when they told me that. Of course, just like our tussle, I was the only one who caught her smirking. The police, who were far more concerned about reading my rights, never saw it.

During my trial, it turned out that I didn’t have a choice about seeing a shrink. The judge handling my case made sure of it. The quack they sent me to loved talking about denial and transference, but she refused to do the one thing that mattered most: just listen to me. Had she given me the opportunity, I could’ve even proved my claims. I mean, I knew about the baby in her womb, still too small to show, but already making her midsection glow a soft orange. How could I know that?

The only thing going for me was even if my therapist refused to listen, so long as I kept up with my appointments, they couldn’t lock me up—not yet anyway… Then again, my wife had cleverly laid another trap for me, to make sure I did time.

Another condition of my release insisted upon a 500-foot restraining order that I obeyed religiously. Unfortunately, it did nothing to keep that familiar black figure from seeking me out. Now, the authorities would have everyone believe that pure coincidence brought us together the day they locked me up for the second time. I knew better though. I even tried to keep my hands off her when she lunged at me, but Jesus in Heaven, she terrified me!

The more I fought her off me, the more I became convinced she would succeed at killing me that second time, and I screwed up; I struck her. I admitted as much to the same judge who sentenced me the first go-’round, but he wasn’t having any of it.

“Sir, once… shame on you. Twice, though? Shame on me if I didn’t step in to protect your poor wife.” He told me, even as he prepared to carry out a sentence that would put me in jail for six months. Six months! Our divorce papers already sat with my attorney, so once I repaid my debt to society, I would leave jail with a criminal record and no wife. At the time, I thought things couldn’t get much worse for me. Wrong again.

That first day in county jail felt like they had sent me straight to Hell. That murderous black veil I only saw around my wife? I saw it everywhere in the joint. Dark specters swirled around me day and night and my panic consumed me. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. At night, the soft glow of my implants illuminated my cell until morning came. More than once, the demon sharing my cell shouted at me.

“Would you shut those damned eyes of yours! I don’t need no damned nightlight…”

The longer things went on like that; the dark clouds seemed to spread like a virus. Cellmates gave it to the guards. The guards gave it to the kitchen staff. It seemed like no one was immune to it, and at every moment, I feared for my life. A prisoner’s shank in the shower? A guard’s baton beating in the corridor? Maybe I’d get a bowl of poisoned soup from the guy in the kitchen. The longer I remained, anything could have happened to me, and apparently, no one cared.

It turned out that my unavoidable attacker would end up coming after me in the yard. The lying guard on duty told the warden that I went nuts after a stray basketball hit me on the head. He saw the ambush, but he said nothing! Based on the guard’s report alone, the warden gave me solitary confinement for a week.

Fine by me, by the way! Until then, I hadn’t slept so well since they incarcerated me. Even so, I still wouldn’t eat the food they brought me. So, my week of “R&R” vaporized into only three days before the guards jerked me from my cell and strapped me to a bed in the infirmary.

The doctor jammed needles in my arm and used vinyl tubing to deliver regular doses of sedatives to my bloodstream. Then the warden brought in a specialist to insert a feeding tube. I watched helplessly as they pumped servings of God knows what into me. I waited for the cramps of poisoning to come. They never did. After a few days, I began wondering if my captors enjoyed watching me wait for death. Pretty soon, I just wanted it to end and depression took me. 

3

My captors must have taken objection to that. They informed me that I had become so despondent, that a priest had been called in to come talk to me. When he walked into the infirmary, I said nothing, and faked sleeping to see if he’d leave me alone.

“They tell me you want to die, my son. Have you lost all faith in heaven?”

I opened my eyes to my visitor for the first time since his arrival. He flinched at their soft glow, but the orange aura surrounding the priest proved he was a creature of love. Love for a deity I had long given up on.

“Father, ever since they gave me these eyes, I’ve seen the truth of mankind. Murderers follow me everywhere and though I no longer believe in it, I can’t help but wonder… Has heaven punished me for seeing too much?”

Like a flare in the night, the priest’s orange aura glowed brighter, and I felt humbled in its presence. I began to believe this beacon in the darkness had come to save me, if I could just hold on…

“You say these demons showed up when you got those new eyes of yours, my son?”

I nodded. Tears streamed from the artificial ducts crafted to keep my implants wet.

“Oh my…” my visitor gasped before rushing for the door. I called out desperately. “Please don’t leave me with them, Father! Please!”

Thankfully, he hadn’t left me for long before coming back with the doctor. The physician looked at my charts extensively before asking the priest a single question. “You’re positive?”

My savior nodded solemnly and then made the sign of the cross before leaving me for good that night. The next morning, the surgical technician who installed my implants visited my bedside. The jail’s doctor and the priest stood silently behind her as the technician waved a glowing wand over my face.

“Oh my, you’ve lived like this for months? No wonder you went crazy. Here, try this…” she said, and a bright flash came from the wand in front of my face. My display went all white and then when it came back, the word “calibrating” flashed on screen for several moments. When my vision eventually returned, the auras had vanished.

“Wha… what did you do to me?” I asked the technician.

She shook her head disapprovingly and said, “About one in every 150,000 people develops the visual phenomenon you call auras. The surgery also caused a glitch of overproduction of the adrenal and pituitary glands. We don’t know why it happens… yet.

“Even so, we discuss it heavily in the manual we gave you. If you had read it and contacted us at the first sign of symptoms, we could have performed the procedure I just did for you. See what happens when you don’t follow your doctor’s orders.”

I looked over to the priest, who stood back in the corner with a very glum look on his face. “How did you know?” I asked.

At first, his voice stammered. “Well… We don’t usually talk about such things, but when somebody comes to us for an exorcism, we first check for signs of mental illness. We prefer not to seek help from heaven for something earthly in origin. Since the implementation of the ocular replacement surgery, we’ve seen a spike in mental health crises. Your new eyes clued me in…”

The priest’s explanation left me in disbelief and left the corporate technician with something of a worried look on her face. “Just a glitch?” I asked, looking back at her. “I knew things—things I couldn’t know. I knew about my shrink’s pregnancy. How could I know that?”

“Micro-expressions,” the technician said matter-of-factly. “You call it body language. Your overstimulated brain took visual cues and interpreted them as best it could. In layman’s terms… you got lucky on that one. Think about all the things you got wrong. If you do the math, the answer becomes even “a broken clock tells the time correctly twice a day.””

The room fell awkwardly quiet, and the technician must have felt some obligation to break the silence. “If it helps things, I went ahead and upgraded you to the ad free plan at no charge!” Her pitiful attempt at sympathy garnered nothing but harsh glares from everyone in the room. Everyone but me, actually.

Though several people were surrounding me at the time, I never felt so alone. Laziness on my part had landed me divorced and in jail. The pit I was staring up from seemed far too deep to climb up and out of alone.

“What happens to me now?” I asked pitifully.

“I imagine…” The priest spoke up to say, “From here the lawyers and judges will have all the say, of course, but it seems to me that you have some compelling new evidence to present in your defense. I want to testify to my experience within the church, too. It seems like something we should have spoken up about sooner. Don’t feel alone, my son.”

Then the priest looked coldly over at the technician, while still talking to me, “You might even have grounds for a civil suit when everything shakes out. As frequently as the church has encountered your condition, one in 150,000 cases seems a bit optimistic to me. Maybe, worth more than some quick mention in a handbook.”

Refusing to be baited, the technician stormed from my room in a huff. My new friend came to my bedside and held my hand. Honestly, until that day, I never believed in a higher power. Not really, anyway. Even though medical science felt confident it could explain my condition, how about my deliverance from it? How could I ignore such a sign delivered by a servant of heaven, no less? I believe religion and science agree on one very important idea. Things happen for a reason.

I don’t know if I needed to lose my eyes before I could see things so clearly. I do know that wonky bionics or not, my view of the world around me has changed for the better. The judge agreed with me on at least that much, though he refused to admit his mistake in judgment concerning my character. All the same, he had no choice but to release me. The evidence and testimony brought forward were incontrovertible. Without so much as an apology, he gave me back my freedom.

However, the judge must have felt some lingering and nagging resentment with his final verdict, though. Before I could leave the courtroom accompanied by my attorney and my new spiritual leader and friend, the court asked me one final question. Try as he might, he couldn’t mask the spite in his voice.

“Have you learned anything valuable from all this, sir?”

I looked back at him and grinned. “I have. Next time, I’ll read the instructions.”