It may become a series.
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Accept, Configure
accept!
A smile, wide with satisfaction, crept across Simone's face as she clicked a button and locked her phone. She would investigate her new 'app' purchase once she was off the city bus and in the comfort of her living room. There were prying eyes and nosy minds on transit and she didn't need any social commentary on The Mood Minder that she was eager to set up.
Ding! the next stop was hers and Simone all but flew the last half a block and two flights of stairs into her tired looking but comfortable apartment. Fwump onto the sad sofa, old springs protesting under her weight. Another slide and a tap and then the soothing blue screen of The Mood Minder.
Developed computer professionals with too-thick coke bottle glasses in conjunction with medical professionals with too-thin receding hair lines, The Mood Minder was programmed to interface with a tiny chip placed in the body, usually in the wrist, detecting the patient's heart rate and, somehow, one or two prevailing moods. The tracked data would be stored until a predetermined time (or when the patient was near a wi-fi connection) and then it would be transmitted to the primary physician (in Simone's case, a therapist or three). It sounded creepy and Simone's mother had told her as much, rambling on and on about 'the mark of the Beast' and other such Biblical nonsense. Simone respected her mother and the Bible but she was just too excited to try out The Mood Minder to take either seriously. Finally, something to help keep her honest in her sessions!
She absently scrolled through menus and options, setting up the application the way Dr. Selznik had instructed. Her heart sank and the too familiar anxiety beat its wings against her ribs. It was her mother's fault that Simone had a line up of therapists in the first place. Simone spared a glance at the fading news clipping pinned to the old wall paneling, her twelve year old self staring back at her, haunted, in black and white and only one of dozens of children pulled from the religious commune of the mad man her mother had fallen in love with.
The mad man that her mother tried to marry her off to as soon as Simone had had her 'first blood'.
The same mad man who had not waited for a wedding night to thrust himself into her life in the most painful and intimate of ways.
Simone wiped away the tears, watched The Mood Minder record her sadness and anxiety; could it see her tears somehow?
Her mother had railed against every therapist Simone had ever seen, every treatment plan she had ever tried, mocked her fear and scorned the night terrors. Though she had been forced back into regular society and learned to function within it (only to get her children out of foster care, she claimed), Simone's mother had never seen the deep wrong in the man she had followed; the mad man Simone had dubbed him but her mother called him the guru. So Simone often felt compelled to lie; to protect her mother and to protect herself even though lying did more harm than good. But with the chip and the 'app', she wouldn't be able to hide from the therapists anymore; they'd have proof that she was lying.
But what if it went haywire, started sending false data? What if 'they' came to take me away and what if it got her arrested?
It always came back to her. Always.
She tapped 'configure', scratched absently at the healing incision on her wrist.
Simone was willing to take those risks
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