by Lee S. Hawke
Recess was walking out the classroom door and straight into a giant playground. Sara lingered behind everyone else, hating the way the door whispered shut behind her and cut her off from the teacher’s eyes and safety. Everyone else spilled out onto fake sand, and fake grass, and fake metal. She watched them go and wiped her sweating hands on her school dress. Then she wiped them again. The playground felt too small, crammed with preteen bodies and childish egos. And memories.
“Unplug! Unplug! Unplug!”
The ghosts of hands pushed her to the fake sand. The ghosts of cruel laughter dragged like fake grass against her hair. Sara hunched her shoulders and wrenched her neck to the side. The ghosts followed.
“Unplug! Unplug! Unplug!”
She opened her eyes. The world was blurry, but she could still see that she was alone. Everyone was on the playground, in the sandpit, wrestling with the energy of wasted bodies. Nobody was laughing into her ears or taunting her into submission. Not today, at least. The taste of salt, bitterness and relief flooded her throat. It was just her own voice chanting in her head now, inescapable and inexorable.
“Unplug! Unplug! Unplug!”
Sara gave into herself. She fumbled for her collar, reached behind to her neck. The world blinked, like a giant eye. One… two…
* * *
She woke in bed, and a ghost of pain from the DEON set in. She lay still with her eyes squeezed shut for a good two minutes, feeling her own brain throb with the beat of her heart in a painful staccato against her skull. The back of her neck ached slightly. She unplugged the jack and got up, tearing away the pads like an automaton, and left her bedroom.
It was a hot summer’s day, and she felt the sweat that had accumulated from the hour and a half stick to her thighs and scalp. There was no need to waste money on air-conditioning while you were plugged in. Her mother and father would both still be at work until at least 8. She passed their recumbent bodies as she made her way to the kitchen, ready to make a sandwich. Thinking.
The manual, which had been eagerly devoured multiple times when everything had first arrived, had said that it would only take an hour for DEON-associated headaches to go away. On average. Depending on what level you were at. That was back when the manufacturers had assumed people would ever properly unplug. She had never really had the chance to find out what that was like.
Sara kept thinking. She finished printing her sandwich, ate it, and was back at her bed in about twenty minutes. Her neck felt light, unnatural. She fingered it slowly, remembering a memory of a memory, or perhaps a simulation. She had been licking dry crumbs off her fingers as her parents had argued amicably about their day. Her hand had strayed to her neck absentmindedly. Her father had sighed. “Don’t be so eager to go out into the real world, honey.”
The real world.
She shook the memory away and reached up to her collar. Her fingers hovered there for a while, feeling light and insubstantial. She braced herself for pain, and the absolute certainty that nobody would be there waiting for her. Not Nurse Rawling. Not her parents. Not the children at school.
Sara set her shoulders and pulled out the plug. The world blinked, like a giant eye. One… two…
PLEASE CONNECT
Richard sits on a couch that’s too soft, waiting. He’s given up trying to get comfortable. Even shifting only reminds him of the cold sweat misting his skin and the empty space in front of him where his eyepiece should be projecting. He’s overhyped, a raw nerve. Maybe he shouldn’t have spent the last hour after work locked in a VIRTUOS, desperately trying to forget the upcoming ordeal. Or maybe it’s the drugs they gave him when he arrived, the ones that tasted like ash. To disable his internal electronics. To calm him. To make him receptive. The last two aren’t working.
For the seventh time, he tries to distract himself by looking around the room. It’s minimalistic, painted with a palette of pale blue that’s presumably meant to be comforting. The carpet is blue as well, the couch white. Another couch sits opposite his, empty. Soft music plays from hidden speakers. He can’t shake the feeling that the room is trying to lull him into a quiescent state before it pounces. He isn’t fooled. His gaze moves to the only other feature of the room, the grey sliding doors, and keeps waiting.
His sense of time is shot without his connections, so he doesn’t know exactly when the screen on the door blinks. But the effect is immediate. His breathing slows, his palms sweat and fist in his pants. And he sits up straight like a soldier, praying for the end, as the doors slide open and a woman walks in.
She looks different from the pictures he was given in the file, ones that he now suspects were heavily modified. There’s no sleepy, sultry supermodel here, just a mousy-haired woman with a surprisingly sweet smile. He wonders suddenly if they’d changed his own photos to make him look like a stud, and is inordinately chuffed at the thought. Then he blinks. What an odd thought. Perhaps the drugs are working.
Not enough, however, to make him forget the fact that they’ve now been staring at each other in silence for what feels like a minute. Blushing, he blinks automatically to bring up a chat window. Nothing happens. “Shit,” he says.
The woman grins. “Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?” she asks. She walks over and falls on the couch with a sigh. “Hi,” she says. Her voice is warm, rich, easy. “I’m Susan. It’s nice to meet you.”
Richard coughs. His throat feels lined with cobwebs, his face hot. And then he speaks the first words he’s spoken directly to another human being for the first time in eight years. “Uh, hi,” he says lamely. He feels every scratch, every tremor in his voice. “I’m Richard.”
Idiot, he thinks immediately. She knows his name just like he knows hers, it came to them with their job files. Just like their instructions: FOR THE FIRST MEETING, EASE IN SLOWLY. GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER. GET EXCITED. HALF THE FUN IS IN THE ANTICIPATION.
Right now, the only anticipation he’s feeling is the urge to run to a sanitary unit. Thankfully, she’s too polite to point out his greenish face. Instead, she focuses on a spot just above his eyebrow and picks at a loose thread on her tunic sleeve. “So,” she says. “How was your day?”
Richard tries to think. He doesn’t remember much, possibly because he spent most of it in a fog of dread about this scheduled connection. “It was good,” he lies hesitantly. “How was yours?”
Her turn to pause. Her eyes shift to the left, behind his head. Richard waits patiently, wrestling down the inner voice that’s meanly satisfied with the fact that he’s obviously not the only one uncomfortable with this whole unnatural situation. It distracts him enough that he’s able to quash the urge to bring up Sweet Hammer or Cat Trap in his lens, to let the bright colours and familiar puzzles distract him while the aching seconds pass. Well, at least it distracts him long enough for him to remember that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t.
“Awful,” she suddenly says. Richard almost jumps off the couch, startled. He’s forgotten what they were talking about, so he finds himself nodding along automatically, praying she doesn’t notice. She’s focusing on the blank wall behind his shoulder now. He lives in hope. She continues: “Well, not really awful. I was just nervous. Silly, right?”
Richard thinks of the data packet he screwed up that morning, the first mistake he’d made in a good five months. Something eases in his chest. It’s probably because of the drugs. “No,” he says, smiling for no apparent reason. “Uh, no. I mean, not at all. I was... I was nervous too.”
Susan laughs. Richard suddenly finds himself laughing too, painfully, consciously. Still, perhaps this speaking-in-person thing is doable. Maybe he can just pretend she’s a holding machine in the flesh. Whatever will help him survive this next month.
“Oh wow,” she says, covering her mouth with her hand. “I’m so glad I’m not the only one.”
“No,” he says, nodding along still. His head feels like a puppet, up down, up down. He stops. “You’re not the only one.”
They pause tog
ether, nervously. After the laughter, silence floods back into the room with a vengeance. Richard opens his mouth and tries to think of what to say next. This is so much harder than the AI they had him practice with. She saves the day again, and he’s both annoyed and grateful.
“So what do you do during the day?” she asks brightly. The smile is beginning to look a little fixed, but perhaps that’s his imagination. “I mean, aside from work? Not that I’m not interested in what you do for work, because I am.”
Richard’s brain works before he does. “I’m a data analyst at Geiger,” he says out loud, before remembering again that she already knows this because it was in their files. Shit. “Shit, sorry.” Shit. He tries to save himself. “I forgot, you must know that already.”
“It’s all right,” she says gently. “I’m a software coder at Isla. I know you know that too, but did you know that we still have to go into an office? The owner’s hanging on, well over a hundred and thirty, and she insists this ‘workplace culture’ thing is important to work, somehow.”
Richard is so surprised he forgets to be awkward. “I didn’t know that,” he says, struck. He can’t imagine having to leave his room every morning, let alone sitting down with other people and working together. That must be why she’s so good at talking. He feels a surge of relief that he’s not just incompetent: in a way, she’s cheated. Then he thinks about how she cheated, and the words come out before he can stop them. “What a waste of time.”
To his surprise, Susan comes alive. She leans forward onto her knees, and suddenly they are much closer than he’s comfortable with. “I know, right?” she speaks animatedly, gesturing with her hands. “It takes me half an hour to get there in the morning. Half an hour. Nobody else is on the train.” She pauses. “Well, there’s the man looking after the supply boxes in another carriage, but that doesn’t count.”
Richard swallows. For a moment, he tries to imagine facing that empty time and space and isolation everyday, and then his mind, screaming with horror, shuts it down. “How do you stand it?” he asks, genuinely wanting to know.
She shrugs. “You get used to it.” She smiles. “And you get very, very good at playing Sweet Hammer.”
Richard’s jaw drops. “What level are you?” he blurts out, before he can stop himself.
Her smile broadens. “BB234. You?”
He’s awed. “I’m still stuck on AZ11,” he says. “How’d you get past that?”
She opens her mouth to respond and suddenly the soft music playing in the room stops. A new sound hits them both, a gentle chime, almost like a school bell. Time’s up. 5 minutes. It felt like an hour. He doesn’t know how he did it. “Well, thanks,” she says, standing up from the couch and stretching. She’s still smiling, so he takes that as a good sign. “How about I tell you next time?”
Richard stands up too, awkwardly. “That sounds good,” he says. They each take a step, realise they’re far too close to each other for comfort, and pause. His brain, able to keep up with three data streams, stutters for a moment before he clumsily moves behind her.
“Thanks,” she says. She hesitates, walks forward quickly, and then connects. The door whispers open.
“Goodnight,” she says.
“Goodnight,” he echoes.
He lets the door close behind her. He stares at himself in the muted grey surface. He looks like he’s been spiked by a virus, eyes wide and sweating. He stares at himself until the drugs wear off and he feels the hum of electricity in his brain again, and then he throws himself into Sweet Hammer with a vengeance while he waits for the government car to take him home.
* * *
Three days after the first meeting, he opens the VIRTUOS that the government sent him like a good, loyal, assignment-abiding citizen. As the file unfolds around him in 3D, complete with sound, smell and colour, he mentally revises his opinion on the merits of the forced conversation. At least it’s not like this: excruciating and boring in equal measure. After all, he knows how babies used to be made. He knows more of how they are made now: cleanly, simply, safely. It makes him think that if he were in charge, he would never have reallocated the funding. The idea of the ocean rising to swallow them sounds less frightening than the VIRTUOS, which alternate between blisteringly clinical and downright horrifying. He doesn’t really know what the ocean is. But he gets chills when he sees their faces, the expressions and noises of what can only be pain, the horrifying animality of skin on skin and the sound of wet slaps. His member stays quiescent even though the instructions encourage him to participate, to practice. The assignment is only weeks away, after all, and Richard is a careful man who believes in preparation.
He can’t do it. He watches and feels nothing but a curious wonder that this is how the human race propagated itself for so many thousands of years.
No wonder they almost all died out.
* * *
“It’s all in the timing,” she says.
The schedules say that the first conversation was for introductions. The next one is meant to launch them immediately into preparation for the assignment. They’re meant to talk about what they’re looking forward to, what they want. Flirting, the audiobook told him in its reassuring voice, is a completely natural adult pastime that humans used to copiously engage in.
They talk about Sweet Hammer, and then riding the train.
“I know that,” he says insistently. “But it’s getting too fast, I can’t concentrate on both puzzles at the same time.”
She nods gravely. It’s a serious matter, after all. “Try relaxing a little. It’s ok to fail the first few times you try something different.”
Richard’s face must look like he just ate his dinner paste cold, because Susan laughs. “Really,” she says. “It’s ok.”
He changes the topic. “So. You play mainly on the train. What’s it like?”
She tries to tell him. Richard, who can count on one hand (with fingers to spare) the times he has left his apartment since the corporation bought it for him, is both fascinated and repelled by the concept. A private, branded car came to pick him up when he left his mother’s apartment all those years ago. And a government car ferries him to and from each of these forced, stilted conversations. There’s no other reason to go outside.
“So it’s really just an empty box with all these seats?” He asks aloud, trying to figure it out.
Susan laughs. She looks different, he notices that much. Her hair is tied up behind her head and he finds himself disoriented at the lack of movement when she nods. “I guess you could call it that,” she says.
Richard scrunches up his nose and leans forward, hands unconsciously moving through the air in the age-old dance of physical communication. “And then behind you, there’s another box? Only this one’s filled with… other boxes?”
Susan looks thoughtful. “I think it’s food and things. They must make the big deliveries on the train.”
Richard can’t shake his analyst’s mind. “But where does it all come from?”
“I… don’t know, actually.” She looks perplexed, almost annoyed. He is grateful that she puts up with his questions, it’s easier to think them up than it is to talk about anything else with her. Besides, he wants to know the answers. And he wants to know how she’s never thought about these things before. Unless she really has gotten used to it, but Richard can’t imagine how you could get used to something so alien. How you’d stop questioning things. He shifts a little on his couch and misses his eyepiece and his chat windows.
“So how does it work, exactly?” he asks, switching tack.
She’s humouring him now, but part of him thinks that perhaps she’d also rather talk about trains than what they’re meant to be talking about. “So,” she says, with the air of someone settling down to recite a fairytale, “You get to the station…”
He interrupts her in his eagerness. “What’s a station?”
She pauses. Blinks. “It’s where the train stops for a moment and the doors to the
box open. So you can get on.”
The bell chimes at 10 minutes this time. They get up at the same time and there’s a moment where her knees meet his shins and they brush against each other, hard. They both apologise, and then laugh. He lets her go ahead again. This time, while he’s waiting for the drugs to wear off, he thinks about the way her bones felt against his skin, and about hurtling through the city in an empty box.
* * *
The government sends him another VIRTUOS. He opens it and has to force himself not to close it immediately. So he sits through it instead. All ten minutes of it.
After about three minutes, his mind slowly adjusts to cope with its horror. He starts to notice more than the mechanics. The smell of the sweat and the rhythm of the movement drifts over him. It’s been a long day, and so he falls asleep.
* * *
Three days before their next meeting, he finds her username through Sweet Hammer. And suddenly everything changes.
She’s up to Level BB256. The competitive streak in him lights up like a data stream. He pings her a message and she pings back. It’s different from a chat window, although they could open one up if they liked. Neither of them do. They take refuge in the game’s user interface, short messages, jokes, teaming up for joint levels. She’s never played the multiplayer before. He has. Before he knows it, they’ve burned through three hours. When he finally logs off, he feels closer to her than ever, ten kilometres apart.
* * *
Close enough that as soon as she comes in the door, he starts.
“I tried relaxing,” Richard says. He keeps his face grave, almost solemn. She pauses in the entrance, eyes wide, hands reaching out and mouth already moving with platitudes.
He can’t hold it back anymore, the grin splits his face. He crows. “I’m at BA303. Catching up!”