Le Reste

Lyrics

Subject is still.
Room temperature, twenty-one Celsius.
No external stimuli noted.
And yet.

The somatic cortex reports a disturbance.
Localized. The left thigh.
A brief, insistent shudder.
The familiar grammar of an incoming signal.
The hand follows its protocol, a reflex arc older than the device itself.
It finds only the rough weave of the pocket lining.
The screen is dark.
The log is empty.
No call. No message. No one.

A tactile hallucination.
A phantom vibration.
The brain, a credulous physician, misreads the chart.
It mistakes the rustle of thread for the urgent buzz.
A limb we never had, now aching.
The ghost of the machine we built.

Rothberg published in 2010.
Sixty-eight percent of the staff felt it.
The absent pager, the silent smartphone in starched scrubs.
A nervous system trained for the bell,
now ringing itself in the quiet.
Hypervigilance as a permanent state.
We taught the body to wait for the summons.
Now it summons itself.

Rosenberger called it a new illusion for a new technology.
An appendage of glass and silicon, grafted onto our attention.
When it's gone, the nerves still fire.
The map remains.
The territory was never truly there.
Just an expected pattern.
A learned twitch.

A tactile hallucination.
A phantom vibration.
The brain, a credulous physician, misreads the chart.
It mistakes the rustle of thread for the urgent buzz.
A limb we never had, now aching.
The ghost of the machine we built.

Another shudder.
The hand does not move this time.
The protocol is inhibited.
The log remains empty.
The symptom... persists.