by Avery Sawyer
It did drive some nuts. If you purposely killed your own avatar five times, you were done, poof, game over, unplugged from life support. No one talked about those people. (Except for James, of course.) They told us it only happened in very rare cases, to people who’d been mentally ill before they went in.
“They’re the sane ones,” James said, when the rare case of an avatar suicide appeared in the news. “Clearly. Who wants to live in a perfect world? There have been oceans of ink spilled about why it’s a bad idea to even try. Jesus, why am I the only one who sees this?”
But the thing was, I kind of did want to live in utopia. Or at least somewhere better than this. James was smart, but he was a bit of a conspiracy theorist and he liked to get a little carried away with nerd talk once in a while and I sometimes tuned him out, especially when he started ranting about the system.
When I was a little girl and my parents still had some money, we went to this exhibition, this City of the Future thing. Its presentation of hope and harmony and green was ludicrous, because by that time the water wars had already started and people hadn’t really tasted easy living in decades. Anyway, this one exhibit was called The House of the Future, and I loved it. Everything about the house was self-sufficient; it had its own solar panels and rain collection system. All the appliances were connected and could communicate with each other. The fridge could order food to be delivered and the soothing lights could be raised or dimmed at your quiet command. But the thing that really got me was the bathtub. It was enormous and full of clean, clear water. One side rose up higher than the others, and imbedded right in it was a screen showing dolphins splashing in the surf. I could see myself sitting in that bathtub for hours, watching those dolphins, enjoying all that water.
Mine.
I wanted it.
The only hope I had now of experiencing something as luxurious as that was to go into the Forever system. In the system, all I would have to do is describe what I wanted and it would be there.
Kids gearing up to sign the contract knew this, so they spent a ton of time looking at books and magazines and cached web pages from the early 2000’s, when luxury wasn’t common, but did exist. They wanted to fill up their minds with visions of beauty to take into the system. They wanted to be able to be as creative as possible with their demands, young architects who knew what infinity edge swimming pools looked like and could picture waterfalls that cascaded right into living rooms. They drank up photos of foods we’d never tried and read descriptions of flavors we’d never experience, so that when their avatars had the chance to order them, they’d get it right. Saffron, chevre, heirloom tomatoes, Kobe beef, lobster, water, water, water was on the lips of everyone about to go in.
Water. Please.
I’m so thirsty.
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