“Why did you come to us?”
“First off, my name is Alex. And it's pretty much straight forward. I've had enough and I want to disconnect. This network ruined me, it broke my spirit, and took away everything I had.”
“Come closer.”
Alexander walked toward her.
“Take a deep look at your life.”
The room blasted with the sounds of Requiem to Success, and the tall walls around him showed a succession of beautiful moments from his online life. Pleasant memories, exciting moments full of love. Angela nodded with her eyes closed, seeing the same scenes that he did. His popular law proposals, his meeting with Solly, the headlines that made him a hero. Lazy touching his face.
“But these are all good memories, before everything went bad.”
“In the end everything becomes moving pictures,” she softly steered him away, “memories, vapor moments, transient. There's no need to give up. Your whole life is ahead of you and you get to decide how it will all turn out.”
“My family won't talk to me, Nicola left me, and they removed me from the council,” he answered, and felt a growing reluctance to explain himself any further, or to even talk.
“Try to relax, Alex, let the experience take over,” she said, and he felt feminine hands move in the space around him and touching him from every direction. He closed his eyes and focused on Angela's voice, whispering in his ear: “After the great erasure you will find a new life, a new woman. Maybe even your family will forgive you. Allow yourself and them to surrender to the purifying amnesia.”
“I don't need more than a bed and some food. I don't want to be part of the wicked network that let my life fall to pieces. I can't be in Minds after Minds ruined me.”
“Minds is only a platform, it has no will of its own.”
“I'm miserable, I'm a standing joke all over the network and there's nowhere for me to get away from it. They turned me into a wacky racist pedophile. Police agents say they have solid evidence against me. At first I thought I'll show them all that I'm innocent, but now I figure it’s not going to happen anymore. Even my legal agent, Martin Schuller, gave up. And he's the best money can buy. He couldn't even convince Nicola. I can't beat the system. I'll never be able to clear my name on the network.”
“But your trial isn't over yet,” Angela remarked. “It might all still turn on its head, and then you gave away your digital life for nothing.”
“Slim chance of that happening,” he said with conviction and put his hands in his pockets.
“And what's waiting for you offline, in the old world?” she gently asked.
“Hope. The hope that I lost in this network.”
“And if you feel lost? There’s no way back.”
***
After proving his determination, an electronic eye emerged from a flat surface on the wall and scanned the short term memory stored on the component in Alexander's head, to verify that his decision was made with a clear mind and without external influence. The next step was a scan of the hardwired memories stored on the Ghost component. These included basic personality traits like his sense of humor, his preferences in food, sexual orientation, phobias, inhibitions, loves, and more. All of these were scanned again, digitally signed and stored in a personality vault in accordance with the digital hereditary law which was passed despite Alexander's opposition to it – the irony of fate.
The law determined that for every soul living on the planet and connected to the network, a digital profile would be created for historical record, and not for commercial purposes (an amendment Alexander wrote into the law). This compilation was usually prepared toward the end of a person's natural life, or in cases like his, on disconnection. As the well-worn joke went: you can take Minds out of your head, but forget about taking your head out of Minds.
The scanning process mapped Alexander's most memorable culinary experiences, his favorite foods and drinks, and sent them to be prepared by the Dream Maker. He poured himself a Gin Plus with nano-ice particles, and helped himself to a forkful of a vitamin rich, pure chocolate cake. Lazy rested her head on his knees. Songs that he liked were playing in the background, and the walls projected scenes from movies that once moved him, thought streams he shared with loved ones, and mementos from his various accomplishments. One memory he had no desire to see was being played over and over on the wall – together in bed with Nicola. Again he experienced that delightful feeling he had almost forgotten about, Nicola riding his prosthetic cock while he moaned in heavenly bliss. Another memory of her came to his mind and again she was up on the wall, her face changing place with other objects of his desire. The cherished sensation filled his body again. He leafed in his mind through a favorite magazine, and mostly went over the parting thoughts he was going to entrust with the Dignetly, thoughts that would go out to people he cared about after he was gone.
This was the point where many broke and gave up, in the comfort of the plush suite, before they could say “I hereby confirm” and thus seal their final disconnection. But not Alexander Cage. He pulled through that part with a steady voice.
“You're guaranteed basic living conditions for the rest of your life,” Angela said. “But it will be a modest and austere life. You should remember that you have prosthetics and implants and that you won't be getting the kind of medical assistance you were used to.”
“I'll manage,” he said with conviction. “I don't need any privilege. I just want a fresh start, without having to deal with the filth of everyone who betrayed, disappointed, abandoned and hurt me.”
Angela nodded, and pressed a button to open a door. Blinding light came through the doorway.
“This is where we say goodbye, and good luck, Mr. Cage. Just don't forget, the Neverminds will also not forget.”
“Thank you, Angela, I won't forget,” he said. He straightened his collar and walked Lazy by her hand toward the light.
They entered a big room with a white bed in its center. The arms of a white robot named Mortal sat him down and stroked his head.
“Mr. Cage, we have examined your thoughts and all the events that have transpired in the past year. They have, indeed, been difficult, but not irreversible. Nevertheless, you chose to move forward and entrust us with the valuable memories you have accumulated in your online life, and to permanently disconnect from Minds. Are you cognizant of this?”
“Yes,” he said with full confidence.
A tray rolled into the room and extended a flexible metal arm that took Lazy from him. He watched her, stifled with sadness. A cup of sleep water waited on the table. He could drink it whenever he wanted. Mortal wasn't rushing him.
Before taking the drink, Alexander looked again at Lazy, suddenly afraid of the unknown. “I'll always love you,” he said, choking. “Don't look sad. Someone will take care of you. Go on living like you always do. Promise me, okay?”
Lazy wanted to jump over, but the arm held her tight.
Without waiting any longer, he drained the glass in one gulp.
“Alexander Cage had chosen to end his online existence. Dignetly hereby approves the execution of a rollback. We shall now commence.”
Alexander started to feel weariness weigh him down, but before falling asleep he managed to say, “Don't worry about me, Mortal. I've been studying the Neverminds lately. I think we can connect.”
A robotic arm disengaged from the wall, ready to carry out the simple procedure of deactivating and removing the component from his head, and dressing it. A gentle ray melted away his digital lenses without damaging his retina.
With the procedure done, Alexander looked around with the curiosity of a child, but the experience of a lifetime. He looked at Lazy, fascinated by her existence, but not recognizing her as his own. Sometimes people who disconnected did not recognize their surroundings – a common effect that took several hours to pass.
A tray rolled Lazy out of the room, and another rolled in with a bag of warm clothes, food and some emergency Unis.
Alexander walked toward the exit gate, stood outside for a moment, looked around and climbed into a neotaxi that was programmed to take him to a Neverminds shelter. He felt a little tired, and looking at his arms and legs, he was scared for a moment. Then he remembered himself rolling like a ball of fire. After several seconds, his memories started returning in chronological order. He just hoped the Neverminds wouldn't make fun of him.
The sky cleared for a few minutes, and he looked at the sun, slightly blinded. He had occasional flashes of his meeting with Angela, the white light, Mortal. He delighted at the sight of engineered gardens, focused on a single flower and smiled.
His eyes shone when he saw the shelter. He carefully walked in, and saw in the distance two Neverminds around the same age as him, smiling and amicable, dressed in worn out clothes. Without demanding explanations, they came to hug their new friend. More and more came.
“Very nice to meet you. What’s your name?” one of them asked and shook his hand.
“Alexander,” he answered immediately. He was confused for a moment, not knowing if his name was Alexander or Alex.
“Welcome, Alexander, settle down in one of the beds. Rest a while and we'll come and take you to lunch – we're having bread and potato soup. Probably not what you expected.”
“It sounds wonderful.”
Deep in his heart he felt a huge relief, of someone who had reconnected to whom he was.
6
All in the Head
Cruising on Minds, Don Little locked his sights on the brain of a particularly hot blond. They thoughtmitted for hours, shooting witticisms and retorts at each other, and he could already imagine how it would feel to put it into her. They made a date for Dream Sex. She would play a sexy alien and he would be a curious human in search of a new planet.
Don leaned back. His gaze wandered down to his dead penis, but he had comfort in knowing that, thanks to Minds, there was Dream Sex in the world. Where would he be without the network that had given him back his prime?
Again on Re-Minds, he played his most often repeated memory – exiting the gates of prison toward freedom. Again and again he saw the gates of Moral Creek Maximum Security Prison open slowly as he approached. He had waited ten years for that moment, to be free. He stood drenched in the rain and listened to his pounding heartbeat competing with the grating iron monster that separated him from the world outside. The gates opened to a view of the tall trees and green grass that grew along one of the longest and prettiest streams in the country, and on whose banks the prison was built.
When he had first come in through the gates, he was a young man in the grip of divine ecstasy, as he later told it - an ecstasy that gripped him whenever he saw young girls with hard nipples and skirts playing in the wind. He had a weakness for underage girls and particularly thin blonds. A sick libido, to quote the expert who testified in his defense. The X-rated channel constantly running in his mind did not stop with fantasy, and ventured into harassment and a run of criminal activity. News networks covered him as ‘The Mentor,’ the title Little gave himself during the three-year long manhunt.
He lost a lot in the decade he spent in jail, mostly his joy of life and sexual capacity. The parole board had one clear condition: ten more years inside, or chemical castration. He survived that as well, to his surprise. He just ignored the limp appendage dangling between his legs. The appendage ignored him too.
The thing that broke him far more than his impotence was the stinging knowledge that he would never be able to put his penis inside the girls he loved and take pleasure in them. He kept afloat in that hell by reading, and looked with an almost intellectual apathy at pictures other prisoners had shown him of their women. It did give him a vague memory of arousal, but he could not really recreate the same old feeling.
His passion for life died together with his penis. He woke up, ate, pissed, listened, talked, fell asleep. Exercised now and then. But he felt aimless, and his fantasies were locked behind red laser bars.
On the surface, Don seemed a desperately normal person. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Unmemorable facial features. In a better world, he could have been the guy living across the street. Not too pretty, not too smart, not thin, not fat. Foul invasions into the bodies of his victims and jail time were the only things that set him apart.
During his trial, Don made no attempt to defend his actions. He played advocate to the flaming hot asses of his victims, glorified their beauty in minute detail, and turned to the electronic judges on the court walls for judgment with a smile plastered on his face. He hoped that these computer creations would be privy to his desires, wise to his wink, and be able to penetrate his drifting heart. But they, in turn, stared at him with impenetrable digital eyes.
“The man needs professional help, but is fit to stand trial for his actions,” they dryly concluded with unanimity.
Don was now remembering how he stood in front of the open gates on his release, exposed to a new world he did not know.
A gray depression washed over him, just like on that winter day when the gates closed behind him. Like then, the rain fell in brisk showers, the sun hid behind the clouds, and the stream flowed with thick green vegetation that had grown up around it in the past decade, with the polluting factories upstream having been closed.
No one passed through the area. Roads were a distant memory, and only several neocars could be seen in the distant skies. The wide field he could see through gaps in the prison walls was gone, taken over by a silvery tower that kissed the clouds and projected landing tongues for the flying vehicles.
He waited at the prison's front landing for his father, Kenny. Old Kenny was all he had left, after his mother, Aurora, chose to cut her ties with him out of shame. When the story broke, his mother divorced his father and severed all contact. When Don was sent to jail, his father went through a near breakdown. The son tended to stare at his feet during their on-screen conversations.
“I couldn't help myself,” he apologized, humiliated.
The father persisted in his questioning. “But why the violence, Don? Why like that?”
“I'm sorry, Dad,” Don answered, torn to pieces.
In moments like this, he felt himself burning with grief. He was crying for having cursed his father with a son like himself.
With endless patience, Don waited for his old man to come out of the flying vehicle. He rushed to meet him and hugged him with great emotion, insisting on carrying his own bag. The father was distant and responded with a light pat on the back, before the two got into the silver colored vehicle and took off on the flight route set by Kenny's voice.
The air in the car was heavy with silence.
Kenny handed Don an algae chewing gum. “It's good. Something new, it has arteriosclerosis inhibitors,” he said in the worrying voice of a father.
Don gave the gum a disgusted look, but put it in his mouth and chewed. A disgusting new world. His peripheral vision picked up two blond girls giggling together on a tower balcony. They looked so happy that he was infected by their smile. His penis slumbered in his pants, not rising to the occasion.
They crossed most of the city. What did the new world have to offer him? A life without any ass was a terrible waste as far as he was concerned.
“Fuck, Fuck!” he had shouted in jail when it got bad. He cried softly, and when his crying grew to a wail, he smothered it in a pillow. In one conversation with his father, he said, “They fucked me harder than anything I ever did.”
The father tried his hardest to believe his own comforting words when he said, “You can still fall in love, Don. You'll find yourself a good girl.”
Sweet innocence. The irony was that Don wasn't the aggressive type. “A gentle fellow,” other prisoners said of him. The human soul can certainly deceive.
They were now passing a huge screen that scanned the vehicle and targeted a commercial at its passengers. 'Where’s your mind, Don and Kenny?' It said, black on white, with a minimalist illustration of
two orcas leaping to meet each other, head to head, creating the letter ‘M’ between them.
He wondered what it was about, and how the hell they knew his name. The father mumbled something about synchronized data between the smart neocar network, which identified all passengers traveling through its aerial routes, and the digital billboards.
“This new teaser’s everywhere,” Kenny said. “People’ve been driving themselves nuts guessing for days now, thinking it might be some big event, but my money’s on some marketing nonsense, not a real life changer, like some think.”
Don couldn't even start guessing what the anonymous advertiser was going for.
“Where's my mind? Up my ass,” he told himself.
Don now remembered his life at his father's house, which began that day; a life that had been a continuous slumber in every sense. With a tether ring on his finger, he stayed in his room most of the time, in bed, a prisoner by his own choice.
The worried father tried to look after him, getting him to eat, buying him things that would make him happy, but Don withered between his sheets.
After tolerating this for quite a while, Kenny asked his son, “Isn't it time you met some new girl?”
“Who do you think’s waiting for me out there?” the son said, amused.
The days passed without anyone mentioning his castration or feelings, two topics that were as good as taboo, erecting a wall of alienating silence between them.
“I have everything I need here, between these four walls,” the son answered and took a bite from a health snack.
“I arranged a date for you,” the father said unexpectedly. “A nice girl.”
“Not interested. What do you want me to do with her?”
“Aren't you getting ahead of yourself? You're too quick to judge the girl. Go out, talk, get to know her... maybe you'll make a connection.” The father was suddenly enthusiastic about the prospect of his son turning into a normal guy.
“Let it go, Dad. It's a lousy idea.”
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