The world moved on without him.
Other people, off making love, getting into fights, finding relief at the bottom of a bottle or hurtling down the open road.
Or, the other places, that nobody could see. The dark fields where rubbish fluttered in the wind, metal clinking on metal while weeds grew up between the rocks and dirt. Empty suburbs of half-built houses.
The howling of the wind around steep cliffs, the gas station attendant alone for hundreds of miles. Empty huts in the mountains with small creatures ticking on sheet metal roofs. Tribes singing the songs of their ancestors, the busy intersections of Tokyo, London, New York.
Planets, galaxies in motion, stars burning up to spit out flares and radiation. All of that, very far away from him now.
The small room creaked and the paintings he had pinned up rattled, threatening to come off.
One was of a diner, of a man with his back to the window, sitting opposite a woman in red. He’d always liked that painting, and had always wondered who they were and what they were drinking. Probably coffee; he could taste it, bitter and burning hot. But why were they there, in the noir-drenched city streets? His mind drifted again: to the analogue grain of black and white photography. The way a conversation lingers on the tongue, all the words left unsaid. An empty bed in the morning, sheets crumpled and cold.
“What are you after?”
“I don’t know, something… Human,” she had said. “Not whatever you are.”
“You did this to me.”
“I had no choice, you know that. It was the only way to save you.”
He hadn’t left the room since. Not for weeks, months. Trains rumbled by, giant machines that carved through the night and shook his whole world. As soon as he managed to relax, another would come, and bring with it cold sweats and shaking fingers.
At 1:04 am, the white square of the monitor lit the empty room. A string of messages floated on the screen:
“So, Janet, you’ll never believe what happened with that guy last night, you know, the one you met a while back at the theatre.”
“Adam, yeah, I knew you two would get along.”
“Yeah, well it was a full moon and all, I figured it’d be real romantic if we met up at his house. Apparently he lives in the old place down by the tracks, whatever, people don’t get abducted these days. But yeah, old-school right? I actually wanted to see him. He was hesitant at first but I thought he was just shy. So, I get there, the door was already open so I go in and wait, and wait some more. It was creepy, and I felt pretty stupid for even going. Then he messages me that he’s there, in the room with me.”
“Sounds like he’s into some weird stuff.”
“Wait. So I was pretty scared now, for sure there was nobody else around ‘cept me. Anyway, I get up from the couch and, then, see something, where he said he’d be. I walk over and find this old phone, dead and all. Whatever, so it charges, and I turn it on. And it’s a picture of me and him, Adam, sitting on the couch. The flash made me look like shit.”
“I thought you two had never met before.”
“I never did, remember? Stop setting me up with creeps. I’m really not that desperate.”
“Jesus, sorry. So what’d you do with his phone?”
“Left it for the next girl to find.”
He still remembered the attack. He’d already received several implants by then: brain, spinal cord, fingertips. Sure, they say synthetics are taboo, people get offended easily these days. But damn, to get beaten up by a bunch of fucking luddites was not what he expected. The attack was in a back-alley. He’d just dropped of Suzanna, his surgeon-cum-girlfriend, at the theatre. Yeah, she worked the black market; she had to after synthetics were outlawed. But being driven underground had its perks. He was her test subject, pushing the envelope of cognitive science. Just in time, too. Picture this: as soon as his old boots were thudding along the wet concrete, some big skinhead in a leather jacket steps in front of him, baseball bat and all. He almost laughed at the poor guy, fucking stereotypical. But the thug threw the first swing. He ducked. He’d seen it coming, but there were two more behind him. One went for a kick to the back of his knees, the other went for his head and all that precious tech. Fuck’s sake. She found him bleeding out with his skull kicked in and teeth ground into the pavement. Whatever she’d stuck behind his eyes was tough shit; he remembered it all. She found him, didn’t even blink, and dragged the stump of his body back into the operating theatre.
Biting lips, she murmured something about total body loss: “It would be a world first. But don’t worry ‘bout it babe.” She scooped out the electronics, the biotech, the wetware and dumped it into a bucket in front of him. His legs were broken, blood dripped scarlet up to her elbows. “You’re still on the network, right? I hope so.” He must have blacked out then. Next he knew it, he was in a room, and not the physical kind. She must have done it on purpose: it looked identical to their run-down house. Down to the trash in the corners. But now patches of static clung to the walls like art, the whole building shooting for a particular horror-show aesthetic. She met him on the inside, wearing a flowing red dress that glowed brighter than any natural light would allow.
“You did it.”
She smiled. “You gave me an excuse.”
“It wasn’t my choice.”
She frowned. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”
“It’s ok.”
Her eyes were full of promise but the relationship didn’t last long. Nothing felt real between them anymore. “I just can’t do this anymore,” she said one day. “Its like you’re my pet boyfriend, locked up in here.”
He raged, and threw an old vase though the already broken window. “There is no outside for me! This is all I have. You are all I have… And you’re going to leave me alone in here?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“What does that even mean?” But by the time he finished speaking, she had disappeared.
What she did, he found out later, was map the real house over the digital, same as what she’d done with him. If it worked, he would be able to go outside, see real people when they were in the house or on the property, and vice versa. They would see able to see him, too. One reality superimposed over another. But the thugs that bet him up had gotten the taste for blood and weren’t going to stop. Who better to take a hit out on next than the chick who did all the surgeries, and made half the cybernetics herself? She was halfway through converting the house when they found her, or so he heard. He would’ve protected her if he could. The house and him in it got stuck in limbo. Technically, his family still owned the place, but to the outside world it was a total mystery. Not that he knew that, then: on his end the conversion was complete, he could see the homeless men who slept in the downstairs rooms, the rats that shat in the old pantry, and couldn’t do anything about it. He could only communicate online now, too, but it wasn’t so bad. Most people meet up in VR anyway. At least he knew the trains outside were the same as the ones rolling by his old house, out there in the real world.
2019