Fall of the Faithful

By Tom Wells

Department of Human Preservation Agent Harold Gains had been called out to the crime scene of an apparent suicide jump from a high-rise hotel. Agent Gains had been dispatched to investigate the death of a male suspected to be a member of the secretive cult known as the Faithful. The subject's fall from ten stories looked like suicide, but looks can be deceiving as Agent Gains is soon to find out.

Suicide may have been common for the newly initiated Faithful, a secretive cult who implant themselves with network interfaces that have been constitutionally banned in the United States, but this messy means of committing the act was not. The newly initiated usually start with simple network to brain interfaces and work up to full bodily neural implants in the following years. Gains pulled a scanner out of his satchel and began to run it over the Faithful’s body. Only his brain contained implants.

This was consistent with all suicide attempts by the Faithful. Even if the jumper was very willing to join the Faith, few humans can take the information overload from the direct computer interface provided by the implants. It drives the newly implanted to the desperation of suicide.

What felt wrong to Agent Gains about this case was that initiates who try suicide use either drowning or suffocation as their mode to the next life. This was the first implant he had heard of killing himself in a way that would defile his body temple for the implants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Wells
• Release date: Oct 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465989956

Tom Wells

Tom Wells is a playwright. He lives in Hull and is an Associate Artist of Middle Child. Plays include Me, As A Penguin (West Yorkshire Playhouse/Arcola); The Kitchen Sink (Bush); Jumpers for Goalposts (Paines Plough/Watford Palace/Hull Truck); Cosmic (Root Theatre/Ros Terry); Folk (Birmingham Rep/Watford Palace/Hull Truck) and Broken Biscuits (Paines Plough/Live Theatre). Other work includes Jonesy and Great North Run (BBC Radio 4); Drip with music by Matthew Robins (Script Club/Boundless); Ben & Lump (Touchpaper/Channel 4) and pantos for the Lyric Hammersmith and Middle Child, Hull.

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