Smart Teeth
I had a lot of problems with my teeth on into my thirties. My mother neglected to get us to the dentist regularly, get checked up, worked on. She was missing teeth. So was my grandmother. So was I, by the fifth grade. I really liked Skittles, a lot.
Clairmont School of Experimental Dentistry in Birmingham needed guinea pigs, and I needed cheap oral surgery. They pulled whatever remaining rotten pieces of teeth I had left in my face, molars that had disintegrated, splintered wisdom teeth. They cleaned me up and put a couple of fillings in the pretty decent teeth I had left.
Let’s back up for a second, I have a great smile, okay? My oral problems were a dark secret I hid behind a razor sharp grin of perfect pearly chompers. Moving on back a little, shit gets dicey.
After I had been cleared of what were only pieces of teeth, gotten some stuff filled in, gotten my teeth cleaned, I was a member of the family there at Clairmont. By the time they were doing the root canals -digging through my jaws to deaden the damaged nerve endings that used to own teeth- I was falling asleep during the operation. This was all free work. Good, old school, functional dentistry. The rub was yet to come.
It was after about six months of bi-monthly oral surgery that I ate food without pain, for the first time since grade school. No gaping holes in molars that caught morsels where they could sit and rot in dank little caves in your mouth. The self-loathing and disgust at my own gaping wound of a mouth had subsided alongside my inability to enjoy ice cream. My life was generally improved by the miracle of medicine. By the time the experimental stuff got under way, I was ready to let them put their dicks in my mouth.
***
I rue the day I got the fucking smart teeth. It was seen as a rousing success thanks to how well my teeth had regenerated. That was a miracle you’d read about on /r/technology but thought you’d never see applied in real life, let alone in your own scarred, sad mouth. That wasn’t even before factoring in all of the new features of smart teeth.
Smart teeth were meristematic tooth implants that coded to your DNA and recalcified as real teeth, regenerating your mouth back to its full adult potential. Of course, I mentioned features, and I know you’d like to hear more. The main feature was a self-cleaning function that worked in substitute for brushing aside from scheduled rinses once a month. The reminder for this rinse was a gentle vibration in the molars, a pretty inoffensive throb that would remind you to rinse and gargle for the month.
But why stop there? People started adding all sorts of custom doodads to their very own programmable smart teeth. Raver kids, tired of poisoning yourself with glow-stick gel? How about phosphorescent teeth? Any body fascists who are tired of using their own masochistic discipline can simply program their teeth to give them a good jolt if they exceed their calorie limit. Less eating, more crunching! Any sort of audio plugins were pretty standard after a while, from phones to Spotify, vibrating through your gums, into your jawbone, onto the tiny ossicles and into your brain as if your ear had caught it. Bluetooth compatible, pun unavoidable.
Some people got really crafty and figured out ways to use the vibrations of smart teeth to augment the sounds of their voices. They could hack their voice into different voices, increase vocal range, smooth out any bumps. Karaoke enthusiasts, we’ll say. Or kidnappers.
Kidnappers got me. They knew I had money because of those stupid commercials. Clairmont had a spokesperson in me, and knew I’d work for not much, given my dire state to begin with, my debt to them for restoring my mouth. I was on billboards, commercials, banner ads. Memes. I’d raised awareness of this incredible new technology and helped myself to its bounty in exchange for dignity. My before and after pictures were everywhere there were eyes.
Yes, my mouth was perfect, self cleaning, pearly, and that grin was still killin’ it, but everyone knew. They all knew how festering and horrible and painful it used to be. I hadn’t talked about the pain, because I had habituated to it long ago.
After my first root canal, in fourth grade, my mother never took me back to get crowns. After an infection, root canal, and then the slow whittling away of this dead spike of a tooth, scratching my tongue, catching loose shreds of chicken like surrender flags... After a lifetime of throbbing, pussing, bleeding gums, I’d given myself over to science and they’d made me conventionally handsome like everyone else who had all of their teeth.
These people knew. So what if I could eat crispy green beans without them cutting into my fleshy, naked sockets, I couldn’t get my head around the fact that I had let my mouth become so disgusting in the first place. Why would anyone else be able to cope with what I used to be? Especially after seeing my forsaken gums, like a haunted ivory ship graveyard in a pulpy swamp, plastered in magazines and in graphics on television, as I stand by and gloat and grin and shill.
“My smart teeth gave me a new lease on life! Thanks to Clairmont’s incredible stem cell technology, you, too, can have your original teeth back, but better! Self-cleaning, updating, GPS, it’s all an app away with XP Smart Tooth Technology!” I always hated commercials and loved cartoons. Infomercials were a lot of fun when I was stoned as a young man, somewhere in between, which is exactly where I could see myself after sign off at three in the morning.
So did the kidnappers. They lived in the neighborhood. Saw me at the coffee shop I frequented, hoping to catch the eyes of baristas a decade younger than me, hoping for some smart tooth groupie pussy, or something, I don’t know. These guys watched me buy electronic cigarette solution from the bodega on the corner. They followed me home from the movies. They did that the night they kidnapped me.
“Call Clairmont and Smile Smart!” one yelled behind me, the other cackling. I’d stumbled upon some fans, how flattering. I looked back and gave the friendly smile and wave, with a knowing but brief chuckle. I tried not to be awkward. They jumped me.
I woke up tied to a chair with my mouth pried open. I panicked, but couldn’t move. They told me what they’d done, as I recoiled in horror. “Play with stem cells, and see what happens. Icarus and that shit.” And a jolt of throbbing pain shot through my back right molar. I winced. I’m sure it’d make a normal person curl up into a ball of agony, but I can refer to this as sixth grade. Definitely bad, but not as bad as it can be, take it from me. The instance of it was jarring, instead of the frog-in-boiling-water gradual intensity of serious oral pain. In an instant I went from having a perfect set of smart teeth to the feelings I’d have as a high schooler, waking up at four in the morning crying as an abscess popped in my sleep.
I must have shed a tear, because they both started dying laughing. “It makes Jesus cry when you use little unborn babies to make your smart teeth.” Ignorant, fundamentalist, and insane. I wanted to ask if they belonged to Westboro, but I couldn’t talk while they had me strapped down and pried open, my mouth drooling yet dry, completely vulnerable.
“Let me hit him with the reminder.” A few keyboard strokes away and my mouth started throbbing like a cell phone. “Let’s just leave him for a while to think about what he’s done.”
And with that, they left me in the dark, thirsty, mouth open and vibrating. I couldn’t tell you how long I waited there in the dark, because after any amount of time with a rhythmic throb tickling your gums and rattling into your jaws, considerations of time and thought become a distant memory. Everything becomes distant in relation to the constant “om” of your smart teeth suddenly becoming the worst decision you’ve ever made.
It was like waterboarding, except I would have ripped these molars out with bare hands for a glass of anything to drink. It wasn’t long before I was given a similar option.
I had to make a new commercial for them. This one was going on youtube and all of my personal social media dispatches. To undo the damage I’d caused to the unborn I’d help murder in the name of smart teeth.
First, removal. I remember seeing torture porn horror flicks where people had their teeth ripped out, with little entrails of nerves trailing off, being plucked from the skull. I felt it happen as they pried the smart teeth from my mouth. The first two were painful and bloody enough, teeth and entrails thrown on the floor as I yelped and moaned in agony, feet bucking against restraints, my back arching in turgid response.
The third shattered in my mouth, the little cpu unit sending a spark and shards of teeth flying like shrapnel. My eyes rolled back into my head as I fought the deep down desire to go into shock or give up the ghost. I had a splinter of tooth in my tongue that dug deeper as I attempted to scrape it off with the roof of my mouth, which was bone dry and cracking. My left second premolar was left in there, a parting gift for the lifetime of agony, miracle of science, and subsequent torture. One last smart tooth. I technically ended up in better shape that when I started this mad science journey.
They took me into the next room where there was a rig set up, lights, camera, and a green screen. There is another person there ready to shoot our new soon-to-be-viral smash-mouth success.
“Hi, you remember me from the Clairmont Smart Tooth commercials. I told you that our personal futures rely on healthy mouths. I told you that XP Smart Tooth Technology was a scientific miracle that would change your life. Smart tooth technology is an abomination. All of us who attempt to set our humanity off axis or disturb our unborn will pay for their hubris with suffering. God hates smart teeth. This was a video produced by Westboro Baptist Church. Please, listen to them.” That was the script. They told me to improv a bit at the end, if I wanted, they could fix it all in post anyway.
I fumbled through it the best I could, in agony, obviously looking beaten and shaken, my mouth oozing blood, like a knife wound that talks. The marble-mouthed, half-sobbed read was exactly the motivation my character needed, so after I collapsed on the floor into a sobbing bleeding ball, they gave me some time to cry it out, picked me up, and put me under one more time.
I woke up in my backyard, on the porch swing. I was so happy to be alive. I went inside and rinsed with salt water and hydrogen peroxide to try and dry out the tender sockets where my smart teeth used to be. Eventually I healed up and just coped. Other people were abducted. Eventually the teeth were networked, and mass throbbings commenced. So I had that to look forward to.
Every few months I’ll get a hack that ranges from a pesky throb to an “I’m sorry, Jesus” level of intensity that has had the more fortunate getting their teeth pulled voluntarily. I have that one tooth that rings my bell every once in awhile. I learned my lesson, and I brush it just like all the rest.
