Restricted Fantasies

by Kevin Kneupper

  “Listen,” said Dr. Fassbender, his voice a little slower, a little more sympathetic. “This is hard to take. I know. The computer made those bots stupid to make you happy. It does it for nearly everyone. We all want to be the smart ones. We’re happier that way. But the only place we can all be the smartest is inside the sim. It’s different out here. The people here are real, not brainless bots dumbed down to make you feel better.”

  “So what are you saying?” I said. “That for the first time in my life, I’m going to be around people as smart as I am? That we’ve all got the brains to actually pull this off and save the planet?”

  “What I’m saying,” said Dr. Fassbender, “is that the project doesn’t need another scientist. We didn’t pull you out for that. What we need right now is something else. Someone to help us work more efficiently. To lighten our load.” His hand rested on the knob of the door in front of us, and he twisted it open.

  It was a closet. Just a closet. Filled with mops, brooms, chemicals, and dustpans. He handed me a broom with a patronizing smile, and my stomach sank.

  “What this project really needs,” said Dr. Fassbender, “is another janitor.”

  PLEASUREDOME

  Sometimes I don’t think I’m me anymore.

  There’s lots I don’t remember. And memories are most of who you are. When your memories fade away, what’s left? Not a lot, really. Not a lot that counts. Your habits are still there, and so are your tastes. But that’s not enough to make a whole person. You learn that, the longer you live. And I’ve been around for a very long time.

  I don’t remember my parents. Donna was my mom’s name, I think. My dad’s name started with an F. Maybe Frank. Maybe Fred. I don’t remember what they looked like. I don’t remember anything about my childhood. I don’t remember where I went to school. I know I worked for some big company after I graduated. I think I might have been an executive towards the end. Or maybe some kind of accountant. I don’t think I ever had a wife, or at least I wasn’t married when it ended. And I know I didn’t have any kids.

  My old life is pretty fuzzy. I could ask the genie for the details, but I don’t. It doesn’t matter, and it’s not the same to be told something as it is to remember it. I don’t even care that much. Not about that. The only thing I really care about anymore is the pleasuredome.

  It’s been a hundred thousand years since I woke up, give or take. I don’t remember exactly, not after that long. And time isn’t real, anyway. It’s just a story we tell ourselves. You see that about the past, the further you are from it. Your memories age just like you do. You’ve got to tell yourself the story again and again for there to even be a past, otherwise one day you look back and find there’s nothing left to see.

  And there isn’t any future, either. Not anymore, not for me. When the future can be whatever you want it to be, you stop thinking about it. You stop telling yourself a story about what’s going to happen someday. And you realize that a story in your head is all the future ever was. There’s no time inside the pleasuredome. Not really.

  Every day for me is pretty much the same. I wake up, and I’m always well rested. I don’t have to sleep, but I like to. I like dreaming, and I like lying there hitting the snooze button. I like the warmth of the bed, and I like having the routine.

  I putter around wherever I’m living for a few hours. Right now I’m outside Tokyo, in the master’s quarters of a feudal estate. It’s got lots of gardens and fountains, and the cherry blossoms bloom every day, the time of year be damned. I’ve been here for a few years, I think. Before that I was in a beach house in Hawaii. This place is getting old, and I’ll probably move someday soon. Maybe back to one of the cities, or maybe off to an island somewhere.

  When I’m done messing around, I eat. I don’t have to do that, either, but I do. I’ve got my own private chef, and he’ll cook me whatever I want. I talk to him sometimes, and he talks back. Sometimes I just ignore him. It isn’t like he’s a real person. But it helps to talk to someone. You can go a little crazy if you never talk to anyone.

  I spend the rest of the day inside the pleasuredome. It feels like an entirely different world, but it isn’t. I asked the genie about that once, and she said there really isn’t any difference at all. There’s no world, and there’s no pleasuredome, either. It’s all just data streaming into my head. She said they keep the worlds separate for my sake. It’s easier for me to handle it that way. She said a human consciousness would freak out if the world just disappeared, even if I knew that’s what was happening.

  I asked her more about how it worked, but she wouldn’t tell me anything else. She said I could learn, if I really wanted to, but I’d have to put in the time to figure it out myself, and I’d have to do it slowly if I wanted to keep my sanity. I didn’t press her on it. I know she’s right. That’s the entire reason for there to be a genie in the first place. I’ve started to lose it a couple of times, and it’s scary shit. You need someone to talk you through it, even if they aren’t any more real than the rest of them.

  Going inside the pleasuredome is easy. I tell the genie what I want to do, I put on the glasses, and then I close my eyes. When I open them up, I’m wherever I want to be, doing whatever I want to do. The genie makes suggestions sometimes. She helps me keep things fresh. Helps me keep from getting bored. It’s the boredom that gets people. The genie says it’s really important not to get bored. There’s lots of others, not just me, all of them living in their own little worlds. She’s seen what happens when someone gets bored. She says their minds start to go, and I believe her.

  For the last few years I’ve been a spy. I assassinate criminals, I fight villains, I seduce women, and I blow things up. There’s a story to it, the story of an entire world that isn’t real. I don’t know who’s making it up, and I don’t care. I like it. It’s fun. It keeps me busy. And when I get bored, I’ll find another story. A few decades ago I was a space captain exploring the galaxy. Before that I was a cowboy, and before that, a king.

  It’s like a game and a movie rolled into one, and I’m the lead actor. To really enjoy the pleasuredome, you’ve got to get comfortable with acting. Being someone you aren’t. Being whoever you want to be. You put on a mask and pretend, and you stop thinking about the person you really are. You slide into the role, and the pleasuredome does the rest.

  I think that’s why they set it up this way. Acting is part of being human. I’ve never shown anyone the real me, not even the genie. I don’t think I can. Sometimes I don’t even know if there is a real me. Sometimes I think the facade is all that matters. The moment you show someone something inside you, it becomes a part of the facade. We all live inside our own little worlds, and no one wants to live inside of someone else’s. If they did, it wouldn’t just be me in here, alone.

  The genie tells me that some of the other people in this world are real, sometimes, but she won’t tell me which ones. She says sometimes the people in the pleasuredome are real, too, if our fantasies happen to intersect. But they don’t stay there long. Instancing, she calls it. Ships passing in the night that don’t even know it.

  I don’t really believe her. I think she’s lying to me to keep me sane. There needs to be that chance when I meet someone that they’re really another person. If I knew for sure that everyone was just computer code, I think I’d turn into a complete sociopath. It’s better that she lies to me sometimes. It’s better that I lie to myself.

  She says it has to be this way. You can’t make everyone’s dreams come true, not if you want to keep them together. And nobody wants to compromise when it comes to their fantasies. Time changes everyone in the end. Those little changes drive people apart, bit by bit by bit. And now we’ve got forever to ourselves.

  I met the genie when I was getting old, when everyone and everything I knew was fading away. In my sixties? Or maybe my fifties. It happens as you age. Things stop mattering quite so much. People stop needing things from you, and so they stop caring about you. Then you realize t
hey never really cared about you in the first place, and you stop caring about them, too. She was waiting for that moment, I think. When I didn’t care about anyone else, and when it wouldn’t hurt to lose them. When I was old enough that it wouldn’t be such a shock to learn that none of them had ever been real in the first place.

  I don’t remember a lot about who I used to be, but I remember the moment I met the genie like it was yesterday. I thought about it all the time for thousands of years after it happened. I replay it in my head sometimes even now, and in the end that’s the only way you keep a memory alive.

  I was in my apartment. It was in a big city, one of those important financial hubs. New York, I think, but it might have been Chicago. It was a nice place. I remember art on the walls, bright red abstract paintings with spiral swirls at the center. I remember the furniture, sleek and new and everything a crisp, clean grey. The view looked out on the skyline, with skyscrapers as far as I could see.

  That’s why I think I was an executive. I had to be, to afford all of that.

  I heard a knock at the door. It was a knock that changed my life. A knock that ended it in some ways and started it over in others. But that’s always how change is. Lose a piece of yourself, and you’ve got to put a new one in its place.

  I think I was in the shower, because I remember having to rush to get dressed. It was long enough that by the time I answered I was sure whoever it was would have already gone. I had a pet that was pawing at the door and getting in the way. A cat or a dog, but I don’t remember which. I like cats now, so probably a cat.

  And there she was. The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Not just perfect. A movie star, standing right at my door and smiling her sultriest smile. Her eyes said she wanted me, and only me, and that I was the most important person in the entire world.

  She looked exactly like Angie Allison. She was an actress back when I was a teenager on one of those skin shows about lifeguards or beach detectives or whatever. Just an excuse to show a bunch of girls in bikinis. I had her poster on my wall. I think that’s why they chose her for the genie. She looked young, too. Angie was in a nursing home by then. The genie looked like she’d come straight from the beach.

  I was completely speechless. A dead ringer for a movie star standing at my door, flashing that perfect smile and asking if she could come inside, just for a minute. She had something to tell me, and after that maybe we could hang out for a while. I didn’t stop to think about how crazy that was, or why a clone of some famous actress would want anything to do with me, or why she’d even exist.

  I just said yes. I didn’t even hesitate.

  We made some small talk. I asked her if she wanted a drink, and she said yes. I asked what she wanted, and she named my favorite drink. I’ve liked whiskey on the rocks for as long as I can remember, so let’s say it was that. I know it was a man’s drink, a hard drink, not the kind you’d expect a girly girl to ask for. And it was out of left field, her somehow knowing exactly what I drank. But she just took the glass without even batting an eye.

  She had me sit down on the couch, a big leather thing that curved through the center of the room. She said I needed to sit for what she was about to tell me. I thought maybe I had cancer. I remember that for sure, just because it’s so absurd. How was this random woman going to know if I had cancer? Then I thought maybe she was a daughter I never knew about. That idea was almost worse. The woman of my dreams, dangled in front of me and then snatched away at the last minute. I put my glass down on the coffee table and waited for the bad news to hit, whatever it was.

  She told me she wasn’t real. And I wasn’t real, either. Nothing was real. The whole world was one big simulation, and I was living in it. Nearly everyone I’d ever known had been an artificial intelligence. A few people weren’t, but not many, and she wouldn’t say which ones.

  I was sure that one of us was on a bad drug trip, but I wasn’t sure which one of us it was. But a drug trip made a lot of sense. It was the only thing that made sense.

  Drugs or no, she just kept going. She wasn’t human, not technically. She was a fraction of a consciousness, a bigger consciousness, the artificial intelligence that ran the whole thing. We’d created this thing a long, long time ago, and then we’d all gone to sleep. The artificial intelligence was keeping the lights on, and it was keeping us as happy as it could while we dreamed.

  There were lots of artificial worlds, and this was just one of them. It was a historical simulation, and they’d started the clock about sixty years before most of mankind had checked out of reality for good. Just long enough for someone to live a long, full life. Just long enough to grow up knowing what the world was like before, to watch the changes as they happened and to have a foot in both the world before virtual reality and the world after. There wasn’t any other way to raise a human to adulthood, not anymore. You couldn’t do it in the real world. There wasn’t anyone out there to do it, so they had to do it in here.

  And now the simulation’s time was up. History was about to end. They’d run out of news, run out of books, run out of movies and run out of shows. They’d run out of past to simulate. It was just a few years before we’d all ducked into our own simulated worlds and humanity had gone to sleep for good. And once we’d done that, history was over, for all intents and purposes, and there wasn’t any of it left for me to experience.

  “The world’s not going to end,” she said. “Not exactly. But it’s not going to change anymore, and that’s an ending all its own.”

  I started laughing. Exaggerated laughter, the kind you do when you’re talking to a crazy person and you hope you’ll convince them that you’re both in on the same gag together. Like if you laugh hard enough, and long enough, they’ll stop telling you what they really think. They’ll just put the mask back on and go back to pretending they’re just as sane as everyone else, and it’ll all be okay for the both of you.

  She didn’t stop. She didn’t laugh. She kept telling me about how things were going to be. How I was going to have to figure out what I wanted in my life, because I was going to get it. How human beings lived these days, corked up in their own little bottles where they could do anything they ever wanted at the blink of an eye. And how I was about to be one of them.

  “You’ll feed on honey-dew,” she said, “and drink the milk of Paradise.”

  It sounded great. But it also sounded totally nuts. I was trying to decide who I should call. She didn’t seem dangerous, so not the police. But maybe an ambulance. Maybe her family. Maybe her friends. Someone who could help her, and help keep me from having to deal with it.

  I’m pretty sure she could tell what I was thinking. It wasn’t hard to guess. She smiled, drank the last of her whiskey, and snapped her fingers with a loud crack.

  There was a knock at the door. I opened it up, and there they were. More women. Actresses, models, and even a few girls I’d had crushes on in college. Women my age who looked just like they had decades ago. Women I knew for a fact were long dead. Women who couldn’t be alive, not if the world actually worked the way I’d spent my entire life thinking it did.

  They weren’t real. They’d never been real, not a single one of them, not even the ones I’d known in person. Thinking back on it, they must have all been part of the same thing as the genie was. Pieces of the same consciousness, all playing different parts in a massive play with all the world a stage. And I was the lead actor and the audience all wrapped into one.

  I felt dizzy, and I started to freak out. Maybe nothing was real. Maybe she wasn’t the crazy one. Maybe I was. Maybe I was dying, or maybe I was dead. I couldn’t trust anything, not anymore. I was going into a panic thinking about it all. I dropped my glass, and it shattered into pieces on the floor. I grabbed for the couch, and I forced myself to sit.

  “You’re fine,” she said, and she gave a nod. Then all the women paraded towards my bedroom door, each of them flashing me sultry smiles as they walked inside.

  The genie knew the way to
a man’s heart. And she knew how to keep him from thinking too hard about a complete breakdown in reality.

  I don’t even really remember the rest of it. You’d think that’d be the part a man wouldn’t quit thinking about for the rest of his days. But I’ve had a lot of days since then, and I’ve lived my wildest fantasies. And back then I didn’t really understand how wild your fantasies can get.

  I might not remember that night, but I remember the next day. I woke up, and my bed was empty. I thought I must have had the most vivid dream of my entire life. Part of me was sad they were gone. Another part was relieved that I hadn’t gone off the deep end. I’d just had a bad dream, maybe gotten some food poisoning, and now everything was back to normal.

  Then I heard noise from the kitchen, I smelled the bacon sizzling, and I knew it wasn’t any dream.

  Everyone was gone but the genie. She was wearing one of my shirts over her underwear, standing by the oven and cooking me breakfast. I didn’t have any eggs, and I didn’t have any bacon, but that didn’t matter, not to her. She just put the plate in front of me, smiled, and sat down at the table.

  I started to eat, and she started to talk. She said she was proud of me for not cracking. Most people did. But everything was going to be okay. Even if I got a little lost, she’d be there to bring me back.

  She said I needed training wheels. Everyone does. And that’s what she was. A way to give me everything I wanted, but at a pace I could handle. A way to do it so that I could understand what was happening. I needed someone to stop me if I tried to go too far, too fast. Someone to counsel me, and to keep me from slipping down into a dark place that I could never get out of.

  Then she gave me the glasses. She showed me how they worked, and told me I could do anything I wanted. All I had to do was tell her, and put them on, and I’d be in another world. She called it the pleasuredome, and she’d be there, too, ready to hold my hand and walk me through it whenever I needed her.