Emoji Protocol

I: UPLOADING

Jules Francis woke one morning to find he could not feel his legs. On further inspection, his body seemed to have disappeared.

The absence of physical awareness overcame his functioning mind, leaving him disoriented and struggling to find a foothold in his reality. To calm himself, he focused on a single rational thought. Perhaps he was only awake within a nightmare and would soon come back into his body.

Jules' eyes remained forcibly fixed on the ceiling above. He should have been blinking. Absent was the feeling of eyelashes embracing his lower eyelids with the caky heaviness of morning. Instead, generic white plaster mounds stared down at him. They morphed into rough configurations, a consequence of his inability to look elsewhere.

Jules' mind, once calmed, remained active, but he felt a growing sense of helplessness as he realized his predicament. Facts repeated, echoing on a loop within his brain. He became childlike, silently repeating rote information about where he lived, who he was, and whom to call in case of emergency. No matter how hard he tried to push thoughts into sound, he found nothing tangible remained.

II: MEMORY DUMP

On a Tuesday, Jules' father arrived home from work with a large cellular telephone strapped to his belt. Standing taller, his father postured the new accessory for his distracted family. When this strut did not elicit the response he sought, his father removed the phone from his belt and slammed it down onto the kitchen table like an unappreciated Thanksgiving turkey. Jules startled long enough to gaze up from his cell phone screen, only to be pulled back almost instantly. While his mother played a word game, triumphantly working to defeat a fourteen-year-old girl living in Ohio, Jules scrolled through pictures of an up-and-coming actress recently in the news for leaked nudes, hoping to find uncensored images. His father, never one to be ignored, sat loudly at the dinner table and played with his new toy.

"Did you know this thing here has a mirror?" he questioned out loud.

"It's not a mirror," his mother's voice broke the third wall she had created behind her tablet's glow, "it's a camera." She punctuated her sentence with annoyance for having been interrupted for such a stupid reason.

"Why on earth would I want to see myself on this thing? If I wanted to see myself, I'd use the mirror in the goddamn bathroom."

Diffusing the situation, though annoyed himself, Jules responded: "People like to see what the picture will look like before they take it."

Jules' father shook his head in disbelief. "No surprises anymore. I can see everything in here."

It did not take Jules' father long to find his stride, suitably content to ignore his family now that he, too, had an object other than a fork in his hands. On an average evening, all three would pick at the meal in front of them to the sound of fingers on keys.

"There's shit on this phone!" his father exclaimed one night, breaking the silence. "Jules, are you listening to me? There is a pile of shit on this phone."

In response, Jules raised his gaze slightly, barely meeting his father's eyes. "That's an emoji, Dad," Jules said, batting away his father's enthusiasm with a limp hand. "You send them in messages and stuff."

"Can you two keep it down?" His mother's shouting filled the room. "I can't concentrate on my words if you keep talking so much."

All eyes returned to individual screens. Jules heard the knowing click of his father's fingers, reproducing the shit emoji furiously to his pleasure.

III: USER DISCONNECTED

Mrs. Francis had made her home her career. Even when Jules became an adult himself, she insisted that he continue to live at home. Selfishly, this gave her a continued sense of purpose. She made pancakes and omelets for years, going so far as to pack him a lunch to take with him to work each morning. Occasionally, she would slip a maternal note into his indistinct brown paper bag.

As a generally nervous person, Jules found the ability to socialize behind his technology to be a favorite modern convenience in his life. Over time, as he modeled these behaviors, he found his mother shadowing them. First, by purchasing a smartphone and, soon thereafter, a tablet with a screen large enough to accommodate her eyesight. Before Jules knew it, breakfast had turned back into cereal, and lunches lost their notes before soon becoming altogether extinct.

Jules noticed that he missed his mother's attention to mothering. As his mother tended to herself, choosing lipsticks from online department stores, it appeared to Jules that she had fully learned to navigate the invisible connections at her fingertips at the expense of connecting with her son. Jules recognized the hypocrisy of resenting his mother for behaviors he had, himself, brought into the house. Self-awareness, however, did nothing to quell his desire for homemade baked goods and the occasional peanut butter and jelly made to his specifications by his mother's hands.

IV: UNINSTALLING

The day before Jules woke up to find he could not feel his legs had started much the same as any other day: he woke to a massive boner.

Trained fingers reached his nightstand with ease, opening Facebook as he had every morning in the recent past. He expected to see one of the myriad attractive women he had friended posting something suggestive at the tip of his feed. Instead, it was a photograph of his mother. Jules felt his erection commit suicide.

Her status screamed in all caps: WE ARE GOING TO JAMAICA.

A string of emojis followed this. The overuse of the eggplant emoji particularly took Jules aback.

At breakfast, he considered mentioning that he had seen her announcement, which suggested this was not a family vacation. He became frustrated by his parents' secret giggles and synchronized alerts, saying nothing as he waited for an explanation, feeling increasingly neglected. That evening, before bed, he unfriended his mother. When he woke the next morning, he could not feel his legs.

V: USER LOGOUT

Jules found himself feeling claustrophobic, though he was in the same room he had occupied since childhood and in the same position, center of the bed, flat on his back, where he had been when he went to sleep that evening. Hours seemed to pass, though Jules could not be sure. He began to seriously consider that he might be dead, that perhaps he was in purgatory or, at the very worst, hell. Lying prostrate, contemplating the fate of his soul, Jules heard the door to his room open with a familiar creak. His mother shuffled into the room, followed closely by his father.

"Are you sure that everything is in order?" his father asked.

While it was undoubtedly his father's voice, Jules noticed that it did not sound as tired as it had for most of his life. Even as his father posed the question, he sounded filled with knowing excitement and joy.

Could they not see him, Jules wondered, as his parents continued to converse over him as if he were not there.

"Of course. I told Jan we would leave tomorrow, and she knows those two gals, the ones who will pick up the body. Helen and Eloise, I think." He heard his father grunt excitement at his mother's preparedness. "They said it'll look just like normal when we get back. You know, like Jules is always at work or something."

Again, his father made a contented noise.

"Should we say goodbye, maybe?"

His father meant this as a valid question. Excited as he was, he had no idea the protocol for something as new as this and deferred to his wife for further instruction.

"This is not goodbye."

His mother's tone carried the weight of the topic's conclusion.

In the following silence, Jules considered what could be happening that would require his body's removal.

His father's voice soon broke the silence.

"The phones are ready."

The very air within the room stirred, and he heard the wet noise of his parent's lips pressing together. His mother's voice ended the passionate moment.

"Think of all the adventures we are going to have, honey." Her voice dripped with romantic sincerity. "Everything is possible now."

His father, not wanting to break the moment but needing one last assurance, asked, "He'll be gone when we get back?"

"I took care of it."

Hearing the promise in his mother's voice terrified Jules. He wished he could move his eyes to the periphery and survey the physical scene unfolding next to him. His parents made their desire to be rid of his body unmistakably clear, yet that reality violently clashed with his belief that he alone held them together.

The next thing he heard was the click of a phone's camera. It continued to go off in bursts for what felt like an eternity. Jules' mother's voice halted the ordeal.

"How many different pictures did they say they need to get his face right?"

She sounded nonchalant, as if she were asking for directions and not directing a photo shoot of her son's prostrate body.

"Ten. Should I hold the mouth into a smile or something?"

"That might be nice," came his mother's reply. "I would prefer to have him smiling."

Jules could not feel his father's fingers moving his mouth in a calculated fashion. He only saw the same lapel he had seen for mornings on end as his father bent into his field of vision to position his unfeeling lips into a joker-like smile.

"We have him forever now."

Jules was so dizzy with confusion that he could not tell which parent's voice he was hearing. It picked up again.

"We just don't have to deal with him."

VI: DIGITAL GHOST

Two unfamiliar women's voices greeted him hours after his parents had left his room.

"He does have a lovely face," one of the women started. "I am so glad Janice called us to take care of Jules. I can imagine her laughing, seeing a face like this with those happy and hysterical tears. That's her favorite, you know. Those happy tears."

The conversation continued in a different direction.

"I just put in for the procedure on Harold. We just aren't connecting any longer."

The woman sounded suddenly vulnerable.

"I miss him," she went on. "I think I miss his expressions the most. He used to look at me with so much love. I've never seen a face quite so open to love."

Amidst a sigh of remembrance, the second woman asked, "When the emojis download onto your keyboard, do you think you'll send them out or keep them to yourself?"

"Oh, I don't know," Helen continued, breaking her reverie with a chuckle. "I normally send out these kinds of things when I'm messaging my Mahjong friends. It would be quite a gas seeing their faces after they find out I committed Harold to the program. I wonder if they will get jealous?"

Helen paused to reflect on her wishes and then continued as if she were intentionally explaining things to Jules rather than gossiping with an eager coworker.

"It's not like he would be dead," Helen announced. "Just relocated."

The two women enjoyed a shared laugh.

"Truthfully," Helen concluded, "I will see him more inside my phone than I ever did in person! Plus, the bodies look so relaxed just lying in the warehouse hooked up to all those screens. I swear Harold would love it, if he had any consciousness left."

The voices stopped, and a thick substance came down onto Jules' eyes. He had just begun to contemplate what he was seeing when his final remaining function, his ability to think to himself, was taken over.