Ariadne saw two kinds of people leave the brain tattoo parlor: she could tell them apart by the type of hope in their eyes. Some looked eagerly at everything in the hope that it would trigger the Proustian payload they had paid the parlor to build random associations for. Some, it was clear from the frozen curve of their necks, had spent a long time trying not to look at anything. They were glancing skittishly at random things now, afraid they would trigger the payload they had come to regret, hopeful they would not.
Even the latter had hope. Those without hope — the programmed associations too strong to remove and too painful to live with — always chose darkness in the end of one kind or another.
What hope Ariadne had, she wasn't sure herself. She carried more tattoos than most, a minefield of grief, and she grafted on herself new associations in the rare nights when she closed the studio. She couldn't say for sure that this lessened the unpredictable tides of her continuous pain. But it kept her eyes open, and of the ten thousand things that triggered unnaturally sharp memories on sight, darkness was the first and most terrible one.
(Originally posted on my blog.)