A life of intravenous sedatives, sleep and recurring dreams, all while you recline in pods, and improvements are sought after all the time. There is competition for the best dreams, too. A few of those who live in their pods are going for the ultimate improvement…reality.
Finally, social hour.
Slim cracked his knuckles. They were unnaturally loud in his cramped pod. His 3-D readout dimmed, extinguishing the sole source of light. Disoriented, Slim blinked his dry, strained eyes. It was a relief when the sound of chimes announced a secure connection.
A hundred tiny faces, a score from each division, lit up the readout. Slim clicked out of the general chat and found the private, encrypted forum he was looking for. He entered Feely’s passcode.
Notion and Blunder’s pale faces filled the readout. Their useless bodies, like Slim’s, were socketed off screen. Their familiar faces comforted him, from their protruding cheekbones and sunken eyes to the silver filaments of cochlear implants coiled around their ears. Though their genes were identical to his, Slim could tell them apart at a glance. Notion had lively, sly eyes, and Blunder tended to bite his lip out of nervous habit. His friends recognized him just as easily. At least they had the decency not to comment on his spindly, scarecrow body. Slim’s higher metabolism made him constantly hungry.
“Where’s Feely?” he asked.
“Tell him, Blunder.”
Blunder scowled. “Why me?”
“Tell me what?”
“Look,” Notion said. “He’s twitching already.”
“Slim, man. Don’t pull a freak. It’s nothing to worry about. But Feely isn’t coming. He can’t play anymore.”
Slim’s heart dropped. “Did he get caught?”
“Jesus, no,” Blunder said. “Relax. He said everything’s fine and to keep playing without him.”
“I don’t get it. The simulation was Feely’s idea in the first place.”
“He didn’t say much else. Just something about ‘knowing too much.’”
Notion snorted. “Typical Feely.”
Despite the precious calories it required, Slim put his face in his hands. What a disaster. Even if Feely’s messages were true – and, knowing him, they surely were – the three of them could not possibly go on without him. What was a simulation without a Simulator?
“There’s more,” Notion said. “Feely has chosen to sever all contact with us for the time being. Frankly, I find that unnecessary and illogical. But before his exit, Feely left behind a fully-formed environment. A completely novel world beyond anything we have seen before. Blunder is downloading it now onto his dark memory bank.”
A feverish gleam in Blunder’s eyes indicated background activity.
“He will be our new Simulator,” Notion added. “You and I will explore the environment from the beginning. And Slim, you will not regret it.” He grinned.
Pure dopamine high, Slim thought. He has already had a taste. “Okay,” he said slowly. “I’m interested.”
“Damn right you are.” Blunder was still downloading, his pupils reading invisible lines of code. “We start tomorrow night. I’ll be ready then.”
#
After lights out, Slim had about two hundred seconds before the network sedatives set in. He fired off a string of encrypted messages to Feely.
You okay? What happened?
No response. He began to feel sluggish. Then, a blue alert indicated an incoming message. It was Feely.
Yes, I’m fine. Needed a break.
What’s this about, Feely?
It’s a long story. Get some rest.
His arms grew heavy. Through half-lidded eyes, he read a final message.
You’ll need it.
For years, the Overseers had tinkered with the intravenous dosage of sedatives, seeking the optimal titration for maximizing sleep minutes without causing drowsiness or confusion the following morning. The dosage they eventually selected also caused the interesting side effect of recurring dreams. Feely had once confessed to experiencing the sensation of flashing lights and a runaway pulse. Slim’s dreams were equally singular. Every night, he dreamt of solid food, like the protein wedges they had eaten as fledglings.
But the night after reading Feely’s messages, his dreams changed. The quivering, brown protein wedges evaporated in a pillar of steam. In their place loomed a massive, robed figure without a face. Slim turned – his legs worked in the dream – and ran for his life.
The next day felt like a quadruple shift. If only his readout had a clock instead of the standard timer for measuring his task completion rate. The Overseers who designed the network believed clocks would only distract Mechanical Turks like him. The time of day had no bearing on his ability to achieve his division’s sole objective of improving efficiency.
Slim had worked for months to drive his time down to twenty-four seconds for his current task. His readout flashed an image of a stranger’s face with furrowed brows and bared teeth. Anger or fear? Slim hit the ‘angry’ button and moved on to the next face. In between clicks, his imagination returned to the simulation.
Would Feely’s invention allow players to customize their appearances? Maybe Slim could play in a different color tunic. Like blue. Or even yellow. The possibility was thrilling. For the first time in weeks, a shiver ran up his back.
A growl in his cochlear implant brought him rudely back to reality. Above his readout, a red light gleamed. The timer read thirty-two seconds – an unacceptable increase over his baseline completion rate.
Slim swore and clicked rapidly. With an effort, he drove his time back under thirty seconds. The red light went dark, and he could breathe again.
Much longer, and the red light would have triggered a disciplinary response. The memory of the last one cast a shadow over him, and he did not break concentration again for the rest of the day.
#
At last, the sound of the chimes broke the monotony. He was released. Slim darkened his readout and allowed himself a minute of near-silence; the hum of power cables had long since receded to the background of his awareness. The darkness itself seemed expectant. Then he powered his screen back on and clicked through to the private forum, where Notion and Blunder were waiting. Blunder’s eyelids drooped, signaling that he was broadcasting. Slim imagined the illicit signal traveling at light speed through the bowels of the network before it flooded his body through the same ports that administered his nightly sedative. In moments, Slim found his surroundings transformed.
His pod faded and was replaced by an enormous, cubic chamber, populated by an assortment of bizarre curios. The room seemed to have sprung right out of the grainy images he had seen of ancient dwellings from the old world that predated the network. A chaotic world of constant movement and exposure to the elements.
Well done, Feely, he thought. You’ve dropped us into prehistoric times.
Slim’s screen was gone. The two feet planted on the ground had to belong to him. Incredible. He had never seen his feet before. Slim sat on a soft platform with four posts rooted to the floor. It reminded him of a crude version of the cocoon that housed his dreaming body in the real world, except without cables or a metallic sheath.
The absence of a readout made him uneasy, but his head swiveled easily on his neck without the slightest pain. Everything from the smooth walls to the uneven floors looked to be made of mineral or plant-based materials, long extinct, that had predominated in the Anthropocene epoch. A pair of wall-mounted hatches emitted a white light, far softer and friendlier than the electron glare of a readout.
The room struck him as cheeky and boastful. It appeared to have been designed for no purpose other than to showcase the furnishings of the ancients. Before him stood another four-legged relic with a glossy, reflective surface. On the wall hung a fragile-looking art object adorned with inscrutable signs. Behind him – how easily his body moved! – a series of zig-zagging planks climbed the wall at a forty-five degree angle and disappeared into a cavity in the ceiling. The air tasted cool and liquid.
“Slim?”
The voice came from the bright threshold of an adjoining room. Slim laughed. It was Notion. His friend waved and immediately held his slender hand up to the light. Notion sat on another, smaller furniture item, unburdened by cable or readout. His cochlear implants were gone. Gingerly, Slim touched his own ear and found that his implant was also missing.
His senses felt impossibly alive. Slim stroked the blue cushion underneath him. The threads seemed to sing, each fiber proclaiming its own idiosyncratic character. Nothing mattered but the tactile sensation of the fabric under his hand.
And then, as quickly as it materialized, the scene vanished. Slim was faced again with his old readout and the bone-deep fatigue of normal life.
“Sorry,” Blunder said. “Time’s up for tonight.”
In the bland darkness of his pod, the glow of his readout seemed suddenly anemic. Slim felt the impulse to struggle, to claw his way back into the simulation’s alternate universe of color and light, but it was no use. He remained socketed, as ever, in his titanium cocoon from the waist down.
Notion’s face on the screen seemed to have aged decades. Blunder looked completely spent, and no one spoke. Slim hung his head. He felt it too – grief for a world long dead, and for something deeper, more fundamental. For what could have been.
He was hooked.
#
They returned to the surreal world of the simulation every night thereafter. Slim’s days passed in distraction, his reveries punctuated by the automatic twitch of his clicking nerve. Evenings he spent in the realm of the ancients. Feely had designed a domicile typical of the 20th century. He had even given them legs, an ingenious detail that fit perfectly in the setting, though the appendages were distracting and unnecessary. In ancient times, people had apparently propelled themselves from room to room using nothing but free will and an abundance of calories.
Without the ability to move like their ancestors had, Slim and Notion explored the room hungrily with their eyes and ears, from the planes of light reflected in the glossy surface of an ornamental object to the antiquated creak of wooden planks that swelled and contracted within the walls.
Feely had achieved something sublime. The setting was beyond words. And by replicating the phenomenal detail of Feely’s vision so perfectly, Blunder had elevated himself in his friends’ eyes. Slim regarded Blunder with a newfound respect, verging on awe.
Blunder began to start them in the adjoining room. It was bright, almost painful for Slim’s eyes, which had spent a lifetime trained on a single screen. Light poured in through a trio of hatches in the exterior wall. Wooden storage containers were mounted on the interior walls. Quaint tools made of basic alloys, apparently designed for preparing solid food, littered the surfaces.
He and Notion sat across from each other at a kind of dais in the food preparation room. Notion was working on an old-fashioned puzzle, a cube decorated with a hodgepodge of colors. The cube was divided into a matrix of squares that could be rotated to change the configuration of each face. Notion gave one of the axes a tentative quarter turn, as though afraid to disturb it. Heaped in a bowl in front of Slim was a small mountain of food, real food, judging by the instant reaction of his salivary glands. The yellow fluff and spiced cubes were of a natural substance, all tossed in a scarlet paste that smelled deliciously sweet. Slim could almost taste it already in the cloud of steam rising from the bowl. He marveled again at the involuntary response of his physical body. The simulation had even given him a mouth that accommodated ingestion, as the ancients had.
He and Notion glanced at each other shyly across the table. The food appealed so nakedly to Slim’s body. It felt more transgressive than anything yet. He raised a pronged, metal implement over the bowl.
But something stopped him. He put the implement down and closed his eyes. The simulation’s sensory stimuli thrilled him while pointing to a deeper, still hidden dimension. A dimension of pure possibility.
“Blunder,” he said. “I want music.”
After a long pause, Blunder’s voice reverberated in his head. “Interesting.”
“Impossible,” Notion said. “The program will not support it.”
“Use the remote device there,” Blunder murmured.
Slim opened his eyes. Next to his bowl was a curved device that fit in the palm of his hand. He lifted the remote and pressed a green button.
Notion’s gasp was drowned out by a cascade of harmonious sounds.
Slim grinned. “What were you saying?”
#
They found a few minutes to speak after the session.
“Where did you get the idea to do that?” Notion asked. “To request music, I mean.”
Slim shrugged, wondering if his face looked as wan as his friend’s on the readout.
“And you, fearless leader?”
Blunder shook his head. “I didn’t know music was an option until he asked. The number of possibilities is… well, it’s not endless. But it feels that way.”
Notion scoffed. “Spare me your feelings. Every program has limitations.”
“Maybe not this one.”
“Don’t lose your head, Slim.”
“Notion, don’t act like you weren’t completely blown away tonight.”
“I concede that,” Notion said, hesitating. “We have advanced well beyond statistically significant boundaries in the simulation.”
“We’ve only scratched the surface,” Slim said. “How can you think about anything else, knowing what might be possible?”
Notion massaged his temples. “Your assumption is accurate. My performance has suffered lately, to a disturbing degree. My completion rate declined by four whole seconds this week. That is the sharpest drop of my adult life.”
“I know,” Blunder said. “Mine went down, too.”
“Yes, I’ve lost time as well. We’ve all lost time.” Slim let his frustration into his voice. “Don’t you see? We’ve lost years. Decades! Tell me I’m not alone in thinking this.”
Blunder was biting his nails.
Notion scowled. “Be reasonable.”
“I’m serious,” Slim said. “I was hungry tonight, sure. I’ve dreamt of nothing but solid food for years. But were those really my dreams, or the network’s? I’m not sure anymore. My appetite disappeared when I heard that music. I’ve never heard anything so beautiful in my life. It made me think. Maybe I’m more than just my genes.” Slim spread his hands pleadingly. “The simulation doesn’t care who we are out here. Just imagine, Notion. No more rules. We can be anything!”
Notion gazed darkly off screen. When he faced the readout again, his eyes brimmed with fear. “We all lose concentration from time to time. It will take them another generation to breed that out of us. But make no mistake. That is their intention.” Notion lowered his voice. “Simulation or no simulation, we have all had our close calls. Blunder, Slim. You both have. But do you not wonder about the others, the ones who fail to keep up? The ones who vanish, without any data to their names. The…”
“The decommissioned,” Blunder whispered.
As though in response to their words, a patch of shiny, raised skin on Slim’s back tingled. He remembered searing pain and the smell of his own burning flesh. Fighting the memory, he spoke as confidently as he could. “Stop it. You know that’s hearsay. Don’t be ridiculous.”
His friends said nothing. Notion’s face was blank. Blunder chewed his lip.
“Besides, you tested the code yourself, remember? It’s an autonomous, closed system. Nobody else has access. Not even… ” Slim paused. “Nobody. Just us. It belongs to us now.”
#
The light in the food preparation room seemed brighter than ever, but Slim no longer squinted. Notion sat erect in his seat across from Slim, cheeks glowing, his eyes alert and calculating.
Notion completed the final turn in the multi-colored puzzle. Each face of the cube displayed a single color now. He put the cube down and cleared his throat. “Blunder, I think… Yes. I am making a request. May I have coffee?”
“Wow,” came the low buzz of Blunder’s voice. “Yes, you can do that. But the coffee maker is over there.”
On the far side of the room, a cylindrical container with a black handle was seated coyly in a kind of docking station on the countertop. It was well beyond reach. The container produced a vigorous bubbling sound, and soon, a wonderful smell permeated the room. It was the smell of earth and organic life, bitter and nutty and rich. Slim’s mouth watered.
“My god,” Notion said. “No one has smelled that scent in over a thousand years.”
Slim stared at the coffee maker. It was not so far. Maybe a few yards away. His heart was racing. “I’ll get some for you,” he said.
“What?”
Slim shut his eyes and clenched his fists.
“What are you doing? Slim?”
But Slim did not hear him. He was concentrating, tensing every muscle in his body toward a single goal. He felt his legs lengthen and his weight disperse evenly across both feet. He rose. And then he was standing, his body fully upright and independent of its moorings. It could not be, but it was. He opened his eyes.
Notion was beaming at him with tears streaming down his face.
#
The transition back to reality was shocking and abrupt. Slim gasped, blinking like a newborn in the darkness of his pod. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. The day was nearly over. The timer showed one hundred and ninety seconds remaining until lights out, but a flashing blue icon on his readout indicated an unread message.
What a relief. Feely hadn’t blocked him after all. Slim’s encrypted messages had gone unanswered for days. He clicked the blue icon.
It’s your world now, Slim. I’m done.
Why did you leave? Slim waited. The seconds ticked by. It grew harder to keep his eyes open. Come on, man.
The less you know, the better.
Are you worried about me, or about yourself?
It’s not like that.
Slim’s chin hit his chest. He shook his head and pinched himself.
The simulation achieves more than I ever hoped. It goes all the way, Slim. It’s beautiful. The screen printed a long line of gibberish. Feely had to be close to passing out. And that makes it a time bomb. Take my advice and drop out. Don’t risk it. Please!
Slim was slipping away. His veins chugged with molasses. I stood, Feely. I stood up on my own two legs.
There was no reply.
You hear me? I stood up. And so can you.
But Feely was gone. Slim fell into a velvety blackness.
#
They did not enter the world of the simulation again for three whole days.
Slim clenched his jaw and dragged himself through his tasks. It was a miracle that he completed any. He had been reassigned from facial expressions to text strings. Today, he was matching adjectives in a resource bank to floating clauses that had been separated from their context. He felt like a frayed wire, contorted with violent, wasted energy. His average completion rate inched up to twenty-nine seconds. The red light above the readout flickered twice. At one point, it burned for a harrowing stretch of time, so long that his heart sank, but he clicked furiously and forced the light off, averting disaster.
At last, a coded message appeared on his readout from Blunder, asking to meet.
That night, Slim dialed out early and waited, muscles tensed, in front of a gray readout. Blunder’s face appeared, looking like a stranger’s. Dark rings had formed under his eyes along with a smattering of tiny, red pimples across his forehead.
“You look terrible. Blunder?”
Blunder seemed unable to look directly into the screen.
“Where’s Notion?”
“He’s done. He dropped out of the simulation.”
Slim swore. “Why?”
“He told me after our last session that he couldn’t tolerate the risk.”
“But that was days ago. Where have you been?”
Blunder dropped his eyes again. “I figured he had a point. You know, it might be smart to take a short break. Just in case. But… Oh, man. I messed up, Slim. I really messed up.”
Slim’s heart hammered in his ears. “What’s that mean?”
“I’m so ashamed.”
“Just tell me what happened.”
“The message I sent you today? I accidentally tagged it for the general inbox.”
“Oh no.” That meant anyone could read it, including the Overseers. “Did anyone reply?”
“No. Not yet.” Blunder’s lip trembled. “I’m sorry, Slim.”
Slim strained to calm his thoughts. If the Overseers saw the message, then it would be a matter of hours, if not minutes, before they came for them. And once the Overseers came, none of this would matter anymore – the simulation, their daily tasks, their bodies, their identities. Nothing. It was really happening. They had pushed their luck too hard.
He thought of their friends, Notion and Feely. The smart ones. He hoped they would survive this.
“All right,” Slim said and met his friend’s gaze. “We both know what this means. There isn’t much time. You up for one last broadcast? One last time, before…”
Blunder began to speak, but Slim interrupted.
“No. Never mind. I have no right to ask that of you. But if the simulation has meant to you what it’s meant to me, then, well. I can’t think of a better way to go.”
After a long pause, his friend nodded.
Slim gave him a fragile smile. “Good.”
Blunder’s dark eyes grew distant. He had begun to broadcast. “Slim?” He said, as the readout and everything else began to fade. “I’m scared.”
“I know. It’s going to be okay. See you on the other side, buddy.”
“You too.”
#
The food preparation room looked exactly as Slim had left it. The obsolete furniture and the blazing hatches in the wall gathered around him like kindly relatives. They appeared as tangible as the hands in front of his face.
He felt guilty, entering the simulation without Notion, though Slim had spent the majority of his life alone. It would be fitting to leave it in the same way. But then again, he was not alone, after all.
“I don’t know how much time is left,” Blunder muttered.
Slim slid his chair back. His legs flexed and extended, bringing him to his feet. There he was, fully upright, like a character in a cave painting. Wobbly, but comfortable. He took a deep breath. The hard part came next. With concentration, he lifted one foot and placed it in front of him. Then the other foot. And then again. Slowly, he moved toward the biggest opening in the wall, whose wooden borders intersected with the floor.
It’s a portal, he thought, to the world of light.
He moved toward it, buoyed by the sensation of motion. He was a demigod, a spirit out of a creation myth. Body and mind operating in complete harmony toward a common objective. It was like music.
“Almost there,” Blunder whispered. “You’re going to make it.”
Up close, Slim saw that the portal was made of translucent material, a kind of membrane separating the food preparation room from the new world outside. He grasped a protruding handle and pulled. An incandescent strip formed at the seam.
“It’s opening!” Blunder hissed.
Slim drew the portal aside. Light radiated over him, bathing his entire body with warmth. He choked with wonder and shielded his eyes.
And then, with an abruptness that stole the air from his lungs, darkness enveloped him. Panicking, he tried to orient himself. There was his readout, but the screen had gone blank. Gloved hands gripped him under his arms. There was a deafening screech, like rending metal. The hands wrenched him upward, and Slim screamed in pain as his cocoon split open and his wasted legs swung free of their plugs. Nutrient exchange tubes lolled, spurting saline and plasma into the air. The pain overcame everything. It was its own world. Before he lost consciousness, a final thought drifted toward him, lazily, like a cloud of vapor.
Strange, he thought. My body is so much lighter than I imagined.
END
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