Virtual Reality - Part 6

I thought I saw him on the swings, and then on top of a set of bars. I was panicking at this point, turning my head left and right, noting again the dual sensation of feeling my chin rub across my chest and being both alarmed by its strangeness and comforted by its familiarity. None of this was right.

“Hey.”

The voice came from behind me. I whipped around fast enough that my bulk took a second to catch up, and when it did it struck Leo on the side hard enough to knock him to the ground. I didn’t offer a hand to lift him back up.

“What the fuck did you do?”

Leo rubbed his scraped elbows and looked up with a grin. “Nothing. Well, nothing you’ll remember, at least.”

Oh no. Fuck. This guy was breaking all kinds of laws fiddling with software that could rewire a mind. Diverting the chemical pathways and atomic chains that held anyone’s brain together was a task reserved for the most expensive neurosurgeons using the most advanced technologies. Hobbyist writing braincodes had caused so much damage in the early days of humanity discovering the full map of a mind that it had been outlawed.

But this guy was doing. And doing it to me.

I tried to enter the code that would let me escape this simulation, but it didn’t work. I tried reaching up to my head where the brainjack should have been, but of course I only slapped the wrinkle of flab that pushed out my earlobe.

“Sorry, you can’t leave yet. The code needs a bit of time to get to work, you see.”

I wasn’t listening. I looked down, saw his smiling face, once alluring and now…

I fell on top of him, chubby hands around his neck threatening to choke the life from him. “Stop it! Stop it now! Let me out!”

And then I was holding onto nothing. I fell on my hands and knees, belly scraping the freshly mowed grass, unsure where Leo had gone.

“Over here,” I heard him call, his legs swinging back and forth from his perch on the jungle gym. I laboriously got back to my feet and hauled myself over to continue assaulting him.

It turned out that he’d picked the one place in the situation I couldn’t follow. I was so heavy that my grip wasn’t strong enough to grasp the bars hand over hand or even lift myself to the next ring of bars. I kept falling, bruising parts of my anatomy on the way down. Leo just sat there, giggling.

“Come down here so I can crush you!”

“Oh, I’d like that, but it’ll have to wait a bit longer,” he replied. “I can promise you it’ll only feel weird for a little while, then you’ll feel back to normal. Well, not the normal you’re used to, but a new normal.”

“Why?” I called up, finally having given up on trying to reach him after yet another failed attempt. “Why are you doing this? Can’t you just find your own fatass boyfriend in the real?”

This time Leo’s laugh was one of sadness rather than mirth. “Are you kidding me? In today’s age of designer babies and genetic engineering? If someone could even approach the sort of size I’m after, they’d just edit their code so that they stop digesting after reaching a certain caloric load. Nobody wants to actually be the size you are, not anymore. Maybe not even ever.”

“So what, your plan was to just make someone the way you wanted them?”

Leo nodded. “Pretty much. Easier than the alternative.”

“I don’t believe that,” I shouted back. “You said you based this,” I waved expansively at my own expanse, “was based on an old boyfriend. So you found one at least. Just do it again!”

“Do you know how long I searched?!” Leo’s shout was the first time I’d heard him sound angry. “How lonely I was? How horrible it was to hate everyone around you, to finally find that one person, that one thing that made you happy, and to have it taken from you?!”

“Taken?” This was new. “You never mentioned he was taken.”

“Yeah, well,” Leo said, then trailed off and looked away. I stood in silence for a few moments waiting for him to respond, but when he did all he said was, “it’s done.”

And then everything went dark.

There’s a big difference between sleeping and having your brain turned off by a computer. Sleeping doesn’t really turn your brain off--it’s still always doing stuff, important stuff you don’t have any control over and makes you feel rested when you finally wake up. Getting your mind flipped on and off by a computer was horribly disorienting, like how I imagine it’d feel like if you woke up from a car crash.

I was in my room. It was dark, the only illumination came from the neon lights of the city filtering in through the window. My head hurt, but not like a hangover or a tension headache. It was diffuse and all-consuming, like my brain was in a fog made of needles.

I lifted myself up. I was on my bed, over the covers. It was too dark to see well, but I could make my way to the bathroom by feel. I needed water. I needed a painkiller. I needed to piss like a racehorse.

It was hard stumbling my way to the bathroom, but I managed to hit the light on the fourth try or so. I nearly fell over the toilet, but I managed to get my stream into the bowl--again on the fourth try or so.

By then the fog had lifted just enough to realize that I could actually reach my genitals without leaning over and how odd that sensation felt. I peeked into the mirror and was shocked at my own reflection. I was thin. Emaciated almost. I could see cheekbones, elbows, the contours of my own musculature. It was sickening.

And then I felt hunger. Hunger like I’d never felt before. A ravenous hunger, as though I’d woken up from a months-long coma. Maybe I had. I couldn’t really remember what had happened recently…

All I knew was that I was hungry. I ignored how light I felt, how I rattled down my own hallways like an ancient pinball machine, and focused on what I could easily stuff in my face as quickly as possible.