Beneath a Bicameral Moon
By Jeremy Szal
The aliens recapture me on the edge of the desert, just as I start hearing someone else’s memory inside my head.
I don’t realize what they are at first. It’s something I feel rather than logically understand. Like I’ve unearthed a crumbling chamber secreted away inside my skull, cramped with events and memories I just know have aged with time. My implant—long disabled by my captors—fizzles and sparks as if performing a reboot. I frown, try to access it, but it’s as dead as the blasted and scorched landscape around me: rolling dunes, soaring cliffs, and soul-destroying heat searing into the haze of far horizons in all directions.
It’s all incredibly alien to me, as alien as the first day I saw it. But for a moment, I feel like I know it: every gor
