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A Taste Of Reality

“Drop it!”

Zed raised his plasma pistol up and aimed it at the Trigorthians second head, the one where its true consciousness resided.

The Trigorthian thinned it’s several eyes and slowly lowered its half raised rifle to the ground, leaving it there and kicking it toward Zed.

“Good thinking, filthy Trig. Now, tell me where the bomb is planted or drooling is gonna be about the only recreational activity your capable of for the next…”

The Trigorthian flickered, it’s whole green mass just flitted momentarily out of existence and then back, interrupting Zed’s overwrought line.

Zed looked around the small room in confusion. “What the fu…” But before he could finish the word, the whole room began to flicker and flash until it just disappeared.

Zed began to panic. Total soundless darkness consumed him. For the first time in 23 years he was logged out.

“Shit.” Zed wasn’t sure if he thought the word or actually spoke it. If the VR pod had been doing its job correctly then he should have spoken it out-loud. The nutrient bath and electrical stimulation was guaranteed to prevent 99% of muscular atrophy, and the pure oxygen liquid blood thinner solution should have prevented stroke and paralysis.

Zed tried his arms, his real arms now that the neural net hook up was switched and his motor cortex reconnected to the mainline leading to his real, as opposed to virtual, muscles. His hand lifted up, as designed, and he pulled the airtight seal of the earbuds out, then broke the wet seal of the eye buds.

Although his eyes had not seen any real objects or people in decades, with the graphics being fed right to his visual cortex, the cone and rod cells of his eyeballs were nonetheless maintained by automated luminal stimulation, and when his optical nerve was reconnected to them they had no problem seeing the blue lit interior of the probiotic lined chamber for the first time in ages.

Zed commanded the pod to open and prepared himself for the most uncomfortable ordeal of “waking”, the first halting, painful breaths. While logged in, the lungs are consistently stimulated of course, but the bulk of oxygenation is carried out intravenously and so it takes some time, as well as hacking, dry coughs, to get the oxygen flowing by conventional means again.

Eventually the coughing subsides and Zed sits upright, hairless and pale, inside the moist pod, looking for all the world like a freshly birthed bipedal alien. The room is, bizarrely, much as he left it, albeit covered in dust and bleached by years of sunlight passing through the single window. His furniture is gone, as is any other semblance of what was once a conventional human apartment, sold when he made the complete transition, along with everyone else who could afford it.

He stretched his legs and stepped out gingerly onto the dusty floor. Sitting there, feet on the ground, he stood up and found his muscles worked well, though he was a bit dizzy.

Standing, completely nude in his old, forgotten living room, Zed began scanning his equipment for the problem. He looked at the maintenance log and saw that an inspection had been carried out by drone just a week earlier with no problems. Running a diagnostic he confirmed the fault was in the local high bandwidth modem. It had burned out – a common enough occurrence, but one he had so far avoided. Disconnecting the primary hookup from the top of his cranium, Zed plugged himself directly into the hard-line and with a thought ordered an emergency drone repair.

“Four hours?” He said it aloud, although there was no one to hear. The drone would bring a replacement in four hours. Four hours, naked, IRL. Zed settled into the idea and stumbled over to the large single window.

The air in the apartment was stifling. Looking out the window, Zed took in the distant outside world. Below him stretched the dead expanse of Old New York, it’s husks of sea logged skyscrapers sticking up out of the ocean’s surface, like the steel finger bones of buried giants, empty but for corpses of old New Yorkers, and the deteriorating trappings of the old, “real” world.

Zed thanked his lucky stars he’d had the wherewithal to buy on the Palisades, high up, before the Panic.

The hot sun beat relentlessly through the heavy glass and Zed had already had enough of the real world, thank you very much. With a click he reconnected his main line and slimily crawled back into his artificial cocoon, preferring to wait for four hours in cool, comfortable darkness than spend another moment “awake” out there.

Putting the real world out of his mind, Zed settled into a nap and dreamed of Trigorthians, bank heists, and the multitude of other adventures he wished so eagerly to escape back into.

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