Happiness is a choice. That phrase is etched in my mind. Not because it’s true, but because it was the calibration clinics’ slogan.

I’m talking about forty years ago. After the practice was legalized, but before the first home care kits. There were these government-run facilities where you could go and ask men in white coats to fix those aspects of yourself you didn’t like. Back then, fewer options were available, but it was at least possible to erase concepts from your mind, modify your character, and even take the first step toward personalizing your memories.

If you wanted to be more intelligent, more daring, or willing to tackle any project, you footed the bill and that was it. But those options, just like now, cost dearly and required special permits from the government.

Fortunately, other calibrations were inexpensive.

If you were poor, they could free you from material desires. In the days of primitive capitalism, that would have meant fewer consumers; a total disaster. However, by the time calibration appeared, any sensible entrepreneur was investing in both branches of industry: earthly and spiritual pleasures. Entertainment and self-fulfillment. Fast food and poetry. Reality shows and self-help seminars.

If you were unattractive, there was no problem either. In the clinic they could disable your mechanisms to identify potential partners. After that, the perfectly symmetrical faces or well-proportioned bodies you saw in magazines and on TV meant nothing to you. Suddenly you were thumbing through the pages or flipping channels, looking for something else. Of course, the same companies that printed magazines and made movies knew how to cover their backs by investing in the promise of that something else: an age-old concept that went beyond the ideal of beauty. A seemingly simple concept (it can be expressed in a four-letter word), but profitable.

Forgive me if I’m not more specific. I don’t intend this story to sound intellectual or sophisticated. You’ll understand better when I tell what happened to me forty years ago, when I visited a calibration clinic and asked to have that word removed from my mind. Not just the word, but the whole concept.

And all because of a domestic quarrel.

One afternoon, I came home from work and found my boyfriend whipping my dog with a belt.

As soon as I opened the apartment door, Hamlet ran up to me with his tail between his legs and his ears down. He threw himself at my feet, groaning.

I didn’t expect such barbarous behavior from my partner. I thought Carlos was the one, for reasons I can’t remember now. We had ourselves calibrated (not once, but several times) to match tastes and aspirations. And he had his cynophobia cured, perhaps too well.

However, before judging, I wanted to know.

“What’s the matter, [. . .]? Did Hamlet growl at you again?”

“Worse, Lucy. Much worse. He called me a jerk.”

“Is that true, Hamlet?”

Behind his left ear, the receiver lit up, but it took a while for my dog’s deteriorating brain to process my question.

“It’s true, he’s a jerk,” Hamlet answered in his electronic voice.

He had a high-pitched, puppy-like voice. Since I got him the translator implant, I’d never bothered to update it. Even at that moment I was amused and couldn’t resist the urge to scratch his head, just above his shaggy gray eyebrows. Carlos shot me a reproachful glare.

“You’re a stupid bitch for staying with him,” Hamlet added.

I immediately straightened up, confused.

“See that?” Carlos said. “He’s insupportable. You have to take him to the vet for a calibration.”

“Forget it. He’s too old for that. Also, it works differently with dogs, even if they’re genetically modified.”

There was another reason. Now that I lived away from my parents, Hamlet was a living memory of my childhood. A true friend. People changed at will overnight, even me, but Hamlet was always the same.

“Forget this?”

“Come on, Carlos. He’s just a curmudgeonly old dog. If he bothers you so much, go to the clinic and tell them—”

“No way. I’m not going to conform to a dog’s habits.”

“I’d do the same for you if you had, for example, a cat. I’d do it because I [. . .] you.”

I can’t stand cats, and my conditioning doesn’t allow me to remember the word I used then, but it must have been a very strong reason according to my old emotional configuration.

Carlos brought up an alternative that horrified me: “If we can’t calibrate him, we’d better put him to sleep.”

“No!”

“You must choose between the dog and me.”

“Come on, you’re being dramatic.”

“No, Lucy. I’m tired of his barking, his hair on furniture, cleaning his shit.”

Noticing my silence, Carlos went to the room and began to pack his things.

I stayed in the living room, and sat in an armchair, stunned by his reaction.

Carlos left, slamming the door. I still couldn’t understand.

Perhaps the calibrations hadn’t worked so well with him. Or they conflicted with his new attitude toward dogs. If we’d gone to the clinic for another session as a couple, everything would have been solved. Maybe. But neither of us brought up the possibility.

Something had gone wrong from the beginning. Some incompatibility that we’d ignored and then had been hidden by successive calibrations.

I was sure of one thing: it wasn’t Hamlet’s fault. When he came over to rest his head on my knees, I ran my hand over his spine.

“Looks like we’re alone again, old friend,” I said as I wiped my tears away.

“I told you he was a jerk.”

I come from a long line of poor workers. People who couldn’t afford a calibration or who were calibrated against their will by corporations during the old regime. That’s why my parents never tired of telling me how lucky our generation was.

I was the first in my family to receive conditioning at a legal clinic. My parents wanted me to be a happy girl. And I was. I received no other gifts, but it was enough.

Thanks to my conditioning, poverty never bothered me. I was also unaffected by my classmates’ teasing about my old clothes, my lanky looks, or my teeth. I knew they were unhappy and that’s why they needed to mortify me.

When I was twelve, with my own money I’d saved since I was seven, I bought myself a genetically modified puppy, christened him Hamlet, and finally had a friend to talk to.

When I talk about my childhood, people tend to imagine it in shades of gray and think that I was living alienated. They’re wrong. I grew up among ordinary, tired, and vulgar people, but that didn’t prevent me from feeling good in their company. I was genuinely happy.

Then puberty hit and things turned upside down.

That insidious four-letter word I’d read in fairy tales and heard so often in songs was taking on a physical dimension. The ending of Romeo and Juliet, which seemed illogical to me when I read the book in my childhood and seems illogical to me now, made sense then.

The idea that I needed something more to be happy crept into my brain. It led me to a series of complicated relationships of which I now only have fragments. Broken phrases. Blurred text messages. Illegible notes on sheets of paper, always next to a heart pierced by an arrow. That symbol, which now seems morbid to me, remains in an old journal with a pink cover.

I don’t even like that color now.

I wore a pink dress when Carlos left me. More like a uniform, it was from the boutique where he worked. Still in the same dress, I left the apartment two hours later and walked to the nearest calibration clinic. It was night, but the service was open around the clock.

Although the waiting room was empty, I had to wait a while because the staff had gone to dinner.

I was hungry, but I decided I’d eat later. I also would have liked a drink, a pain reliever, or both. But they’d refuse to calibrate me if I showed up in an altered state. So I took advantage of the wait to calm down.

For a moment, I thought about calling my parents.

But tell them what? That I was miserable? It wasn’t their fault. I alone decided to move to another city because my then-boyfriend was going to school there. No one forced me to calibrate myself with each new partner.

I didn’t call any of my friends either. They would surely try to talk me out of what I was about to do.

My first idea was to erase Carlos from my memory, like in that Jim Carrey movie, but that entailed the risk of getting mixed up with the same kind of jerk over and over again. So I decided to cut my losses.

When the receptionist finally told me to go in, I stepped into the office and expressed my wish to the doctor.

“Are you sure?” the doctor asked as he adjusted an elastic band with sensors to my forehead.

He wasn’t surprised. His patients made stranger requests every day. It was pure formality.

I nodded.

The doctor explained: “Removing a concept is like uprooting a plant. The plant has roots. That means not only your perception of the world will be affected. There will be retroactive changes. A whole semantic network of words and associated linguistic constructions in your language or other languages you master. In the same way, some memories will disappear. If you agree, please confirm it verbally.”

“I agree and wish to proceed.” My consent was recorded.

Half an hour later, I left the clinic.

I felt the same as before. Of course, I wasn’t in the mood to immerse myself in my memories either, or I would have noticed the gaps. On the way home I listened to a song I liked and the audio seemed to skip at times. I tried to remember the lyrics, but only bits and pieces came to me.

I soon discovered that, except for that inconvenience, my new conditioning offered only advantages. Unlike other breakups, now I didn’t feel the urge to call Carlos or spy on his social media. I dedicated myself to living my life. Even my work became less tedious. In the evenings, I went out with friends. I talked to my parents on the phone more often.

I spent most of my free time at home. I took care of Hamlet and we talked about the old days.

Suddenly he became nostalgic and a bit incoherent. He talked about toys he never had, toys he had surely seen on TV. Above all, he swore a lot and had outbursts of bad temper.

He sometimes complained of headaches.

I suspected it could be the implant, so I asked for a day off to take him to the vet.

When I saw Hamlet lying on the operating table, I couldn’t hold back tears.

“I like that song,” Hamlet muttered, lifting his ears. The anesthesia started to kick in and his ribs rose and fell at a slow pace.

Music came from a speaker on a wall. The volume was very low, barely audible, but I recognized the notes.

“This type of music helps patients relax,” the vet said.

I was amused both by the fact that they operated on dogs with old gushy muzak ballads and the professionalism with which the vet readied himself to remove the implant.

“Your suspicions were correct. The neural splicing is damaged and that was causing the pain. We could use other areas of the brain to reconnect, but I don’t recommend it for a dog his age. Don’t worry, your dog will be fine. He just won’t be able to use the implant again and he’s a bit senile.”

Something in the vet’s words reassured me. He told me to make myself comfortable, and I fetched a chair.

It took the vet less than ten minutes to remove the implant, seal the hole in the skull, and suture the skin.

“Now we just have to wait for him to wake up.”

He sat next to me and we chatted away for a long while.

His name was Daniel, and he was a connoisseur of the old culture. He even knew where I got my dog’s name from. Few people had guessed it before.

But the real surprise came when Daniel put his finger to one ear. I shut up and we listened together to the song that had just come on.

“I can’t understand the lyrics, but it’s nice,” he commented.

“What do you mean?”

Daniel explained to me he too had had himself calibrated. An entire concept was erased from his mind and now the songs were muted at some points, as if censored.

The song we were listening to at the time talked about not having something. Something without which, you’re lost. I suggested it could be a wallet or a phone. We laughed. Daniel went further: since the group was called Air Supply, the song could be about someone who was suffocating. We laughed louder.

Then I noticed Hamlet opened his eyes.

I walked up to him and put a hand on one of his forelegs. I called him by his name and he lazily raised his head to me.

“I’ll miss talking to him,” I lamented.

“You’re already doing it,” Daniel said.

Hamlet brought his muzzle to my hand and licked it three times before lying down again. I understood what Daniel was referring to. The dog was communicating something very primitive to me, prior to words, songs, translator implants, or calibration. And I discovered in my reaction the true scope of brain conditioning: some emotions survive on a deep level, below language.

So it came as no surprise to me that Daniel asked for my phone number.

“To visit you and check on the patient’s progress,” he said.

What happened between us then didn’t surprise me either.

Even so, after so many years, I sometimes wonder why we’re still together without having to calibrate.

I think we lucked out.

Because it’s always good to find someone to talk to, but nothing compares to finding someone you can remain silent with, knowing that, in each moment of silence, there’s always something more.