ErRoR

Alan stared at the words in front of him for a moment. Your password has expired. Please, reset your password. How had he missed the notifications counting down to this? How long had it been since he had to answer his security questions?

What is your favourite travel destination? “Shit,” he mumbled to himself. He calls up his documents and scrolls though until he found the file he was after, SQA.doc – the answers to his security questions. As he commands the file to open the screen goes white, and again a message appears letter by letter across the screen: Your password has expired. Please reset your password. “Fuck,” the anxiety creeping into his voice. Rome. Incorrect. What is your favourite travel destination? Japan. Incorrect. What is your favourite travel destination? Morocco. Incorrect. You have answered this question incorrectly too many times. Please, reset your password.

The screen begins to pixelate. Darkness creeping into the edges of Alan’s periphery. What was your favourite teacher’s name? Ms. Johnson. Incorrect. Mrs. Johnson. Incorrect. MsJohnson. Inocrrect. You have answered this question incorrectly too many times. PlEaSe, ReSeT yOuR pAsSwOrD.

Alan begins to tremble, sweat forming on his brow. His eyes dart wildly, searching for a document, icon, anything that isn’t locked. He fumbles through the menu, tries to select something, anything, but the message appears again, more aggressive: PLEASE RESET YOUR PASSWORD. What is your favourite book? “Why would I pick this? What kind of bullshit answer did I give?!” Harry Potter. Incorrect. His Dark Materials. Incorrect. Warning, one attempt remaining. Failure to respond correctly will result in total system lockout. “What the hell was it?!” The Hobbit. The screen goes blank.

“Christ, finally,” Alan breathes a sigh of relief. He stares intently waiting for the welcome screen. A second passes, a minute, an eternity to Alan. The screen goes green, then blue, red, orange, white, black. Letter by letter the words appear, SYSTEM LOCKOUT. “No, no, no, no, no!” Everything goes black.

Alan pulls off his visor, the ache in his bones growing with every passing moment. The lines that kept him nourished, painless, and drained his excrement, now useless. He first shakes himself free from the clamps that kept him vertical. Piece by piece he painfully detaches himself from his rig, blood oozing from where the tubes and needles were embedded only moments before. As he begins to recall where he is Alan struggles to raise his arms, and fumbles for the release, tumbling out as he manages to open the pod he’s called home.

As his eyes adjust Alan looks down at his limbs, frail and sickly thin. He had lost count of how long he had been plugged in, but the disarray around him speaks volumes. The air and surfaces thick with dust, rodents scurrying back and forth wet with blood?

A body, frail like his being feasted upon. Alan manages to twist himself around he sees another, and another still alive, being gnawed on, screaming in agony. Thousands of pods, dozens of corpses, no, more. Some of the lucky ones never managed to find the release switch. This wasn’t supposed to happen. What could it have been? A malfunction? Virus? Alan sits, too frail to move. This was supposed to save them all, the Earth overpopulated and growing ever more inhospitable. They were to remain plugged in until things were better, until the system deemed it better.

He barely notices at first, but one by one rats crawl out of their hiding place and begin feeding on his atrophied limbs. Alan yells out in pain, but his wails merely join the chorus of others already filling the air. As the life begins to leave him he notices lights blinking to his left, then right, from every direction, as the prompt appears across every pod: Please, reset your password.