Didn't win...minor upside is that now it's just mine.
stocked and colorful as ever, but, with what exactly, it wasn’t as clear. Reports from Greenland foretold the future, as usual, but, whereas, before I had ignored them, today, I was unmoored. A friend, a former D-1 scholarship athlete, confided he had stopped exercising, while my mother, who is sixty-three, enrolled in not one but three Pilates classes. The elevator opened and I stepped from this liminal haze into face-to-face confrontation with the chairman of the board.
He nodded when he saw me, and gazed at some point below my forehead to avoid considering my breasts, which seemed more prominent to my own eyes since I wasn’t sitting in a wheelchair anymore. Now, it seemed there were other reasons not to face me eye to eye.“Implant working well, I see,” It was less a question than a statement, but I wanted the chance to prove myself without being Special Needs Virtual Reality Designer. I reminded myself that I was lucky to literally find my footing at this stage of my life. “You bet, sir.” I said, feeling like a toady.
“Glad to hear it,” he said, his nod making him look more like a macaw than the owl he resembled at rest. I wasn’t sure he’d want to hear if things weren’t going great. I would have to make a success of the conference and justify his faith in my “living experiment.”There was a lot more riding on it than my own enhanced mobility, including the possible physical freedom of millions of people like me, but I tried to take everything a day at a time. Still, the pressure of my long-term vision made me tense sometimes.
I didn’t tell him I thought I felt weirdly because of it, and that I wasn’t sure whether I should call my doctor or put in a tech-support ticket. Experimenting on myself, even while it benefited my professional growth, was undoubtedly taking a lot out of me and I felt glad that I brought my wheelchair with me. I told myself that conferences generally made me nervous, so that didn’t mean that the virtual cerebrum that our team developed to provide the coordination that Nature hadn’t was failing. “Mind over matter,” I told myself. All I had to do was get through the next day and a half. I reached into my swag bag and ripped open the cereal bar in it. As I ate it, I tried to imagine its carbs providing energy in a way that would get me into a modified Senior Olympics in forty years. I believed myself too. For about fifteen minutes, as I straightened my back, stuck out my chin and determined to face towards the future. I had to wait as my foot shook. It finally stopped, but I knew I couldn’t avoid thinking about it forever.
“Get back to me, Sanjit.” (It had been my partner’s idea to forgo the old-school removable helmet for a chip that connected to my brain more securely. It made sense at the time, but now that I was practically limping and sweating from my temples, my goal of looking cosmetically like everyone else at Futurefest 2023 seemed like sad irony. I crept slowly through the lobby, marveling that through pandemics and drone wars, hotel lobby
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