Inpuranto
“We’re closed”, Masao shouted. “Go tweak somewhere else.”
“Open up man, they’re in my house”, cried a male voice.
Annoyed, he switched to the closed-circuit channel and was surprised to see a familiar face.
“Takeshi?” he asked through the intercom. “What the hell do you want, don’t you know what time it is?”
“Fuck you man, you put this shit inside my skull, and now you’re getting it out”, Takeshi kept shouting, facing the workshop’s security camera from below.
“Wait, the optics module? I told you it was a bargain bin deal, you’re the one who decided to have it implanted anyway.”
“You don’t understand, there’s something wrong with it, it’s making me see shit that isn’t there.”
“What do you mean, ‘shit that isn’t there’? Are you high, right now?”
“I don’t know what else to call it, you need to do something man, you’re like basically a doctor.”
Takeshi being full of it wasn’t anything unheard of, but a moron like him wouldn’t be creative enough to lie convincingly about having hallucinations. Masao just sighed and buzzed the door open.
After pulling the eyeball out and resting it on a stand, Masao wired Takeshi’s visual memory bank through his empty eye socket. From the surgery chair, Takeshi kept gesturing at the holo-CRT interface while trying to pinpoint the exact moment he wanted to show.
“No, go forward, put on the recording from an hour ago.”
“Alright, settle down, let me j— Wait, what…?”
The screen was filled with what seemed like a fish-eye photo of vaguely human-shaped silhouettes, dissolved in ghastly shades of sepia over one another, standing side by side in a dark bedroom.
“I told you man, I told you, these freaks were at my house, oh fuck, I can’t even look at it…”
Masao screened through earlier recordings. Whoever those people were, they barely looked like people most of the time. When they did, their faces were a mix between video interference and blank spots of skin in place of missing features.
“Takeshi, look. I need you to explain to me when this started. Try to remember as many details as you can.”
Takeshi calmed down at least enough to get the point across. After the surgery, he barely noticed the missing faces in the large crowds at first, but that didn’t last long. He’d see those people standing on empty alleys and parking lots. Waiting for him in the hallways of his apartment complex. Facing him across his doorbell camera in the middle of the night.
“I woke up an hour ago and they were standing beside my bed”, Takeshi whimpered, his hands shaking. “I can’t go back to that place, man. I’ve never been so scared in my life. Please tell me this is just some weird glitch. That it’s not what it looks like.”
“Look, man”, Masao would go on. “I just buy and sell cheap implants. Shit like this is way above my pay grade, but… I’ll just be upfront. I didn’t tell you the whole story.”
It was a batch of second-hand hardware handed in by a woman claiming to be the widow of the man who had it on when he died. A background check would later reveal that his body was found inside a septic tank after he had been missing for several days. The coroner was blinded by a power surge during the autopsy, and a Shinto priest had been called in to perform a cleansing ritual before the cremation ceremony, but died in a house fire the night before. Police closed the case with no further explanations.
“Bro, this is fucked”, Takeshi said after a long silence. “How could you sell me this shit without mentioning any of this?”
“Okay, that was a bit sleazy of me, I’ll admit it”, Masao agreed. “Let me at least help you get rid of this thing.”
“Wait, for real? You’d do that for me?”
“Oh absolutely, I’ll be glad to take it off your hands, it needs to go away right now.”
“Holy shit dude, thanks a lot… You’re doing me a big one, you have no idea.”
“No worries man, I’m just glad you came to the right place”, Masao said as he leaned over his workbench.
“I hope I can at least buy a decent replacement with the money.”
“Money? Oh no, I think you misunderstood. I said I’d be glad to take it off your hands.”
Masao pressed the hidden button labeled “REFUND” under his tool table, and an electric current ran through the wire connected to Takeshi’s empty optical slot, carbonizing his frontal lobe.
“Yeah, he came back, just like you said”, Masao said on a speed-dialed call while he double-checked the smoking cavities of the skull. “I got the footage here, it’s even better than the rest.”
Yakumo and his bodyguards showed up at the workshop barely an hour after the call. While the company men disposed of the body, Masao delivered the hardware inside a safe compartment.
“Crazy how it happened to all three of them. I’ll be honest, I’m glad you’re taking this away.”
“You did good. Payment will be wired immediately, as promised.”
“Much appreciated”, Masao said, wiping his hands on a dirty rag as he turned around and saw the paused footage on the holo-CRT. He flinched as he second guessed himself if that was even the same position the strange figures had been in.
“Say…” he mumbled over his shoulder, his eyes fixed on the screen. “You don’t really think this thing is actually cursed, do you?”
“You tell me”, Yakumo said, producing a silenced pistol from his jacket and putting two bullets in the back of Masao’s head.
The next morning, another electrical fire was reported at the Night Market. No casualties, no security breaches, just one clandestine workshop engulfed in flames and two disappearances, possibly related. Meanwhile, in the cybernetic implant black market, an eye that sees the dead is still rumored to be in circulation.