* * * *
Uriah woke up with a numb right leg, surrounded by androids of an azure hue at his bedside. The room looked like the inside of a saloon. Was the inside of a saloon. Bit chilly, but the blanket made it bearable. New age music with a superabundance of piano and harp streamed into his ears. It was dawn, based on the light streaming in through the window to his left, which reflected as a near-blinding beam off the central robot’s shoulder.
“You’re a long way from home, eh, friend?” said that bot, only its voice was like a Transhuman’s. A specific Transhuman’s.
“That depends. Is this Goodsprings?”
“The very same. Crank the V down a bit, if you’d please, buddy.” After the robot turned and nodded to a somewhat smaller one, the music grew fainter.
“I could be farther, then.” He propped himself up on his elbows, which wasn’t as difficult as he thought it would be, and looked toward the end of the bed. Eyebrows narrowed, he said, “You – didn’t –”
“Replace your broken leg with a prosthetic one? You bet!” Uriah took a closer look at the prosthesis, pulling the bed sheets off it. “Good as new, right?” he added, almost shrilly.
“It’s, uh, amazing.” He wasn’t entirely sure he didn’t mean that. “And my back?”
“Same. Took a lot of sedatives. Sorry about that – we didn’t want to disturb you. Ya looked like you’d had a rough day. Can I call you Dennis?”
He faced the android, seething. “Yeah, well, I would’ve preferred it if you’d asked my permission before removing a decent chunk of my body.”
“Don’t you like the improved one, though?”
“To an extent, but I’ve never quite been fond of becoming an Unnatural. Especially when forced to do so by a rapist from the social class that decapitated my dreams.”
The same robot mumbled something, or channeled the sound of Livingston’s mumbling, then said, “Ah, right, that’s your term for Transhumans. Not like I’d tend to agree with you on that score, but you already knew that, huh?”
“There are a lot of questions I could ask right now,” Uriah said in a suddenly raised voice, “but let’s start with why you won’t talk to me in person, Livingston.”
“Well, pardon my rudeness, Mr. Uriah – I prefer to go by Zach, by the way – but much as I value this conversation, I’ve got concurrent business to attend to. I’m only speaking through this fella ‘cause he’s my favorite. The other ones can get work done, but Big Blue here has attitude, y’know?”
“Fair enough. Why haven’t ya made Big Blue kill me already?”
“Kill you!” The bot made a chuckling motion to match Livingston’s audio input. “What would give you that idea?”
“Don’t insult my intelligence, Livingston.” He tried to get out, but one of the other robots grasped his arm and threw him back with surprising ease.
“Zach, and –”
“I heard the cover story you fed Jane, that sex-bot you met earlier. ‘Metrauto doesn’t support Project Autopia?’ I would say I’ve heard lazier alibis, but I’m not a liar like you.”
Silence. Then, “You really don’t know, do ya? But I guess I can’t blame you. You’re only just entering this uncertain world.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, Livingston. Literally. My older brother played this game all the time when I was a kid.”
“Please let me explain, Mr. Uriah. I didn’t mean you were entering the universe recently, I meant this world. You can’t tell me nothing drastic has changed about Earth in the past few years.”
“Don’tcha mean days?”
“I mean what I say.”
“So you think that whatever killed everyone except us was something that ‘grew’ over years?”
“Who said anything about something killing everyone else?” he said with another innocent laugh. “You’re more far gone than I thought. Far into the depths of virtual reality, that is.”
“Bullshit. For another hundred years at least, reality is reality. And that’s only assuming the moon colonists survived.”
“No argument there. What’s reality but the sum of all our physical experiences, perceived through an unfortunately subjective consciousness?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you really did see all those dead people, including me. Your physical experiences were as convincing as experiences can get, so as far as that definition of reality goes, your world in which everyone but us has died is real. Think of time travel. If you go back to the past through a wormhole, the time you go to is as real to you, as the present is to the people ya left behind.”
Okay, I’ll play along. He looked around, taking in the complete integrity of the place, just as he remembered it from over twelve hours ago, before saying, “So you’re saying I’m not crazy.”
“As crazy as a zealot. The potential to be one is in all of us – it’s evolutionarily good for us, even – but when a few resist their genes, they become the delusional ones. So you could be saner than I am, but considering you have to believe that I resurrected myself for your story to make sense, I like my chances.” He laughed heartily. “You’d also have to believe that a bomb intended to kill you managed to put not a single dent in this rickety ol’ saloon.”
Uriah remained silent.
“Speaking of which,” Livingston continued as his robotic oracle grabbed a disc-shaped device from a nearby table, “whatcha say to a drink? Can’t give ya the ‘real’ thing, if you insist on that distinction, but I could hook y’up to one of these.” A robot nodded towards a Mindscape.
“Just what is that monstrosity?”
“If they can get ya to believe you survived the apocalypse, one of these babies can make ya feel as if you’re wetting your whistle like it’s New Year’s Eve.” He didn’t stop talking when his guest sat there agape with confusion. “The best part is, you can get stone-cold hammered without doing anything you’d regret if it had consequences in this world. No hangovers, either!”
“Keep heaping more bullshit onto that pile, man. Also, I’m an Organic. I can drink real liquor.”
“Not anymore. Why stop at the leg, when the rest of your body is killing you from the inside?”
“You sonofa–!” He sat up and removed the sheets completely, partly to put himself in a position to strangle the androids and partly to see himself. He was only wearing boxers, and the body apart from the right leg looked normal. Not that he could tell the difference between his fake leg and a real one. “I don’t believe you.”
“If I didn’t, could I do this?”
Uriah seized up before falling backwards into a sleeping position. “You cunning protoplasm,” he said through clenched teeth. “Couldn’t stop at my bones, could you? Had to put your little machines in my spinal nerves, too?” This didn’t prove he had anything else artificial, but why wouldn’t Livingston have made the whole switch?
“Good guess.”
“Is this how you managed to stick your filthy Unnatural whatever-you-have-down-there inside Pat? ‘Cause I know her, and I’d bet my own whatever-I-have-down-there-now that she could kick your ass otherwise before you even opened your fly.”
“That must be something else from your virtual world,” he said with concern that sounded more sincere than Uriah knew it could be. “Trust me when I say she’s as much a virgin as you are.”
“What, was I wearing a chastity belt on that train?”
“You sure do sound like a Christian, the way you hate Libertas so much.”
“I hate Libertas because people like you used them to put me and Pat out on the streets, now if you’ll kindly grant me some autonomy, I’d like to leave.” Uriah rose, but the machines sent him right back down.
“I can’t have that if you still aren’t convinced, now can I? You’d report me to the police for a crime I didn’t commit, and that wouldn’t exactly do wonders for my reputation.”
“Oh, well, isn’t that convenient?
The one sight that would convince me I was wrong, like dozens of other humans walking around as if the Housekeeping never happened, you won’t let me see.”
Big Blue thrust the disc closer to Uriah. “I’ve got all the proof ya need right here. Have a good time, that’s all I ask.”
Proof that’s gonna kill me, sure. But what choice do I have? He’s already done the worst thing to me possible by robbing my freedom. “All right, get it over with. If this does kill me and Pat’s also still alive, make sure she at least consents next time.” The head robot attached the disc, and it slew his consciousness like anesthesia.
He was sitting at one of the Pioneer Saloon’s tables, and his best friends from before the Housekeeping were cheering him on. They were all only mildly drunk, apparently waiting for Uriah to be the first one to become plastered from the monstrous mugful of alcohol before him.
Before granting their wishes, he lit an incredibly flavorful cigarette and blew smoke into the mug – the reason for which he knew about as much as why, in one of his dreams, he had declared that the sea was colored ferret. Their egging him on grew more enthusiastic when he did this, and Dean, a bald guy with an elaborate-patterned tattoo on his scalp shouted, “Come on, ya got five grand ridin’ on this baby! Chug like yer about to sing Madonna songs in drag and ya don’t wanna remember a lick of it, ‘cause that’s what yer doing if ya wuss out!”
Chug he did, amidst chants of approval that made him feel as big as Elvis Presley in their eyes. It tasted heavenly, probably due to the smoke. His windpipe did not exist, nor his bladder, nor any finite stomach space. Just he and his beer, and the admiration of everyone he respected, even normally straight-edge Pat, who looked about ready to explode from pent-up desire.
Uriah let the mug hit the table, staring back at her. He stood, approaching the person he finally had back. And yet, she laughed so drunkenly, it felt ugly. Not wrong, just ugly.
She was telling him that she loved him.
He seized the mug and permitted himself to throw it at her head. The gore made him want to vomit – along with some other causes, doubtless – but he had to snatch the projectile back up and, closing his eyes as he shook head to toe, whack it through the air like a sword.
They were too caught off guard to defend themselves. Yells and the cracks of glass-skin contact encompassed Uriah for about a minute until they could protest no more. He opened his eyes, telling himself it wasn’t real as he saw blood everywhere.
All the same, it was murder. Murder to rid himself of everything in this place that could possibly keep him in it.
Like clockwork, the anesthesia wore off.
Jane was loosing electromagnetic shots into the room viciously. The robots shut down, casting Isaac Livingston into silence. Uriah was relieved to find she had fired at the Mindscape itself rather than the device affixed to him – he’d be dead otherwise, or at least disassociated from his nerves.
Then, as he unwillingly reached for a robotic cadaver with which to shield himself, Jane attacked him over the shoulder.