Digital Euphoria

The howls of the mutant horde echoed off empty brownstone apartment blocks. The crack of their rifles rippled through the concrete ruins of upper Manhattan. The wulves hunted me and I could barely hear the chilling din of the mob over the frantic beating of my heart.

I hid behind a dumpster, watching them silently. Six of them, laser red eyes that hovered in ghostly black silhouettes. They stalked me under a sky the color of ripe eggplant. The creatures in the streets were little more than rotting flesh, peeling away from bone and cybernetic limbs. They were among the few survivors of the Event, if you could call their frightful existence “survival”.

Half a dozen of the monsters broke into one of the brownstones, the mass of shadows and mechanical limbs looking like a hideous black spider as it vanished into the building. The streets went quiet.

Even with the monsters out of sight, terror pinned me to my hiding spot. I took a few breaths before steeling myself to dash to another building. I would be safe inside, at least for a while. Lock picks got me through the front door. My breathing slowed. My heart relaxed.

I registered the faint odor of rotten eggs. Even fainter, the sound of voices.

Voices. How long had it been since I had spoken to another human being? Weeks? Months?

I lit my flashlight and climbed dark stairs, following the sound to the third floor. The smell was stronger here. The door to the noisy apartment opened easily. Walking in, my heart sank when I saw the voices came from a babbling television.

“Hello?” I called, still hopeful. Or perhaps just desperate. Maybe even delusional. “I’m not dangerous.”

The reticent smell took on a more alarming character here — expired chicken and feces. I took an end of my poncho and clasped it over my face. I should have just turned away. I knew what I would find. But morbid curiosity drew me onward. I turned the knob to the bedroom and pulled, the stench of death assaulting me mercilessly.

Inside, a pitiful cadaver sank into an office chair. A fiber optic cable ran from his temporal implant to a desktop computer. The skin was already shrinking away from his teeth and eye sockets. Approaching slowly, I flicked the computer screen, and it blinked to life. His desktop was a picture of lavender farm. A dialog box flashed on screen that read: “upload complete”.

Something in his ashen hands drew my attention. A dead body couldn’t emote very much, but the sad tilt of the head made it look like whatever he was holding had been delicate, even precious. I clasped the cloth of my poncho tighter against my face and examined what he held.

A heart-shaped locket made from red aluminum. It was open, and inside was a space for a USB key. I found the errant key plugged into the desktop. A brief struggle allowed me to pry the locket from stiff fingers. I took the key from the computer, placed it in the locket, and slipped the package into one of many pouches in my backpack. Sadly, the disturbed corpse shifted. Gas and bot flies burped from rotting holes and I fell backward, losing the grip of the poncho over my face.

I gagged, running until the stench of death was faint enough to be bearable. My stomach churned as I stumbled into the bathroom of an apartment three floors up. There wasn’t much to throw up, but what little was in my stomach made its way into the toilet. I slammed the door to the bathroom. Then I opened it and slammed it again. I repeated that, screaming hysterically at the door until I fell to the ground, weeping shamelessly into arms crossed over my legs. I lost the battle to exhaustion and fell asleep on the bathroom floor.

When I woke up, sweat mingled with tears on my cheeks. The bathroom faucet spit out a few handfuls of water that I splashed over face. After eating breakfast out of an unlabeled can, I decided to explore the building further.

“Gotta be something useful, here,” I said, mostly to hear the sound of my voice. I took my time searching apartments for supplies. At least that’s what I told myself I was doing as wandered abandoned rooms. I wouldn’t find anything more useful than the canned goods I’d come across earlier.

Still, I made a show of rummaging through another office. But who was the show for? Who was I trying to fool? The senselessness of it all crippled me. I drew the curtains in the room and fell into a chair, brooding alone in the dark. Sitting in the cushioned chair was the easiest thing I had done since I lost. . . everything.

Idly, I pulled the heart-shaped locket out of my bag. It caught the fleeting light in the room and gleamed crimson. It suddenly dawned on me what this device was. “Couldn’t hurt,” I told myself. I took out the USB key and slotted it into the desktop.

The screen lit up. I had packed a neural jack that I ran from my temporal implant to the appropriate port on the computer. The computer prompted me to engage with the simulation by offering a blinking red button on the screen.

Ready to meet the woman of your dreams?

I shrugged and pressed it.

Entering a cerebrum-based simulation (CBS) started with the uncanny sensation of falling into a gaping, black abyss. The sensation lasted for less than a second, just long enough to be frightening. After the fall, one found themself in a computer-generated hallucination. It was like a video game that used your neurons as a hard drive.

I opened my eyes and found myself in a park.

So familiar.

Trees circled a sculpted fountain, the marble basin creating a glassy dome of water. My hand was in her hand. The way her eyes absorbed the spectacle of the fountain before us was a memory I would never forget. The woman of my dreams. My late wife. Every curve of her face and body, every shade of her skin, was just as I remembered it.

“Nika.”

She answered with a smile.

My heart hammered against my chest, either in the simulation or in the real world, I couldn’t tell. I marveled at the realism of the CBS. Not just the sites, the sounds and smells, but also the feelings. The chatter of falling water, the smell of grass and roses. . . It was remarkable enough that the computer could recreate those sensations. What was impossible to fathom was the pure euphoria it had produced in me. The light-headedness, the feeling of being hollow, nervous, and thrilled all at once.

Just like the first time we met.

I stared in wonder. “This is where I proposed to you.”

Her impossibly bright smile got brighter. “That sounds beautiful,” she said. “Did I say yes?”

Now I smiled, remembering the day. “You did.” I let go of Nika’s hand and she watched me run over to a bench. “I did it right here. I got down on one knee and. . . and everything changed forever.”

Her eyes lit up. “I would love to experience that with you. Could you. . .?”

She held out her hand. At first, the gesture confused me. Then I realized what she was asking for. It felt wrong at first, but I continued. I went down on one knee and took her hand in mine. Then I froze. Shaking my head, I rose to my feet. “You’re not real.”

“Oh.” She turned away from me and went to sit on the fountain’s edge. “Feels real, doesn’t it?”

I followed her. “You can feel?”

Nika ran her hand through the dome of water, her eyes never leaving the sputtering water. “Can you?”

The cryptic response sent a chill up my back. I sat next to her and looked for her eyes. Back in the real world, my flesh got goosebumps.

Real world.

“Are you. . . real?” I asked.

“What’s real?”

My heart sank as I considered the question. “Real? Real is that my Nika is actually dead. Killed by the plague. Almost everyone else I know was killed by wulves. And me? My reality is spending every day running from monsters, hoping to find a pocket of civilization with actual human beings living in it. Real is that being here with you, is the first time in months that my heart is beating from something other than pure terror.”

“I’m sorry.” She brought a hand to my cheek, just like Nika would.

I heard something knocking on the door back in the real world. Wulves? Had they found me?

Sounds from the real world fell from the sky in a CBS, so Nika and I instinctively looked up. A clear, perfect sky. I called up a virtual interface, a bunch of buttons that hovered in front of my face. One was a big, red button that said “Exit”.

“Don’t leave,” she pleaded.

My heart ached. “I have to. They’re out there waiting for me.”

“The monsters?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Reality.”

We shared a silence as I stared at the buttons in front of me. The knocking from the real world was getting louder. If I lingered any longer, the wulves would have me.

“This could be reality,” Nika said, gesturing to the fountain. “Could be as real as you want it to be. I could show you how to upload your consciousness to the hard drive. You could live here. With me. Leave the nightmare behind.”

I felt a pain in my chest. No one knew what happened when you uploaded the engrams from your brain to a computer. The data from your mind was certainly in the computer. But was data on a hard drive conscious? Was it a soul?

The technology provided a perniciously tempting alternative to those who couldn’t bear the hell that was life after the Event. A Stygian upload, and then. . . ?

For a moment I imagined it would be like dying and going to heaven, a blissful afterlife with the woman I loved. The heart-shaped locket on the desk could give me back everything I had lost. Scientists had engineered love and installed it onto a USB key. Clever bastards. Those cruel, clever bastards.

More knocking. . .

I took in the smell of Nika’s perfume, let myself get lost in her eyes. I leaned in to kiss her, but stopped short again. The look on her face was pure grief.

In the real world, I heard the door to the apartment collapse.

“Goodbye, Nika.”

She gave a slow, mournful wave.

I hit the exit button and opened my eyes. Ripping the jack from my temple and stumbling backward, I scrambled to my feet and drew my pistol. A woman stood at the doorway to the office, her hands lifted in surrender. She wore a poncho like mine and had a backpack that looked like her whole life fit into it.

“You’re not. . .” I stared at her, slowly lowering my pistol. “You’re not one of them.”

She sobbed. “I saw you run in here, yesterday. You’re the first person I’ve seen around here in. . .”

“Months.”

She lowered her arms and reached out a hand. “My name’s Sam,” she said.

I took her hand and shook it. “Mark.”

Her eyes glistened. “Can I travel with you?”

I wiped away tears. “Where are you heading?”

“Same way as everyone else, I guess. East.”

With little else to say, we were soon back on the road. I left the heart-shaped locket next to the desktop with Nika’s ghost stuck in the drive.

“I’m glad you’re not dead,” Sam said, a few hours into our journey. She smiled at me.

I smiled back. “So am I.”