The Chain

by Adrian McKinty

George Orwell was wrong, she thinks. In the future, it won’t be the state that keeps tabs on everyone by extensive use of surveillance; it will be the people. They’ll do the state’s work for it by constantly uploading their locations, interests, food preferences, restaurant choices, political ideas, and hobbies to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. We are our own secret police.

“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

Life is a cascade of nows falling on top of one another without meaning or purpose.

That thing they said about the living being only a species of the dead. It was the kind of thing she’d said to her friends when she was a freshman. A young person’s idea of depth.

Chemo is a little death that you invite in in order to keep the big death waiting outside on the porch.