In the Palm of Metal

Short Story

“What do you want to do when you plug-in?” Bennett asked as he watched the buildings go by in the car. 

That was the only thing that anyone ever talked about. People exchanged their fantasies instead of anything else. And why not? The VirtNet was when life truly began. The first sixty years of a person’s existence were meaningless dredge, a grey dullness that consisted of work, sleep, and the occasional stop for food. But when that time was finally up, it was absolute bliss. 

Bennett had talked about what sort of life he would have on the VirtNet for hours. His plan was to start off as a starship captain before moving on as a pirate. Not one of the realistic scenarios certainly, he wanted nothing too stressful. But sailing the Caribbean during the golden age of piracy? Now that was something unique.  

Hudson kept his eyes on the road. Taking a deep breath, the older man shook his head tiredly. “I would just like some sleep.”

Bennett couldn’t help but be disappointed in the response. He had never gotten Hudson to share what the man would do for plug-in day. Five long years they worked together, and it was always the same noncommittal answer. Perhaps that was a lingering trait of Hudson’s generation; they tended to be more private with their fantasies. 

The older man did look the part of the so-called Last Generation, the final people who grew up before the VirtNet. Hudson’s balding hair was always messy, and a bulge had begun to form at the waist. A drab brown coat and black tie did nothing to improve matters. Bennett, on the other hand, wore a bright blue coat which contrasted nicely with his blond hair. He still retained a boyish appearance even in his thirties. 

An orange notification appeared in the car's windshield, alerting them that they were nearing their destination. 

“I think today is going to be the one.” The old man grunted. 

Bennett leaned up in the chair. “Really? You want to do it today?”

Hudson looked at Bennett with a defeated gaze. “Yes.”

The car pulled to a stop before an imposing apartment complex. It was just one of many rectangular blocks that dotted the city, but it looked to be on the rougher side. The greasy metal held up dirty floor after dirty floor. The windows near the street were broken and cracked while those higher up were shuttered closed. 

The street had relatively few people this early in the morning. A single doorkeeper broke away from the entrance and began approaching their car. From what Bennett could see, the gentlemen was of an older sort, probably in his late seventies and understandably looked irritated. If he had done the right planning, he could’ve been in the VirtNet by now. But now, he was a doorkeeper at a run-of-the-mill apartment complex. The man only wore a badly patched suit and tie and had a scraggy beard that he clearly didn’t bother shaving. 

Bennett stepped out of the car and straightened his coat. “We got your call. Where is she?”

“Twenty-third floor, plugged directly into the nutrient pipes.” The doorkeeper jammed his thumb up. “Damn parasite.”

“Thank you, we’ll take care of the problem.” Hudson pulled himself out of the car and walked over to them. 

It occurred to Bennett that just fifty years ago most police officers wore uniforms and badges instead of suits and ties. Many used to spend their days patrolling, either catching cars or arresting criminals. Nowadays, cars were self-driving, and the criminals were too busy getting high. 

Besides, there was only one sin that the gods of the U.S. Government cared about; the one that had just been committed on the twenty-third floor of this apartment building. 

The two stood there silently for a moment, a brief repose before the task at hand. It was often a necessary tradition for those in their line of work. The mind needed a second to brace itself. 

“All right, let’s get this over with.” Hudson sighed as the car automatically closed the door behind them and drove to a nearby parking spot. 

Bennett breathed deeply. This was the worst part of the job. He would have fifteen more years of grunt work before he would have enough money to get the platinum package. It included a decent maintenance deal with some of the better nutrition formulas and a hospital just five minutes away. That was a lot better than some other people’s plans. The man working the door would almost certainly be there until his nineties, starting into the twilight of middle age. 

But his policy plan came at a cost, Bennett had to do the work that no one else wanted to do. 

He nodded to Hudson, and the two entered the complex. Inside was a dimly lit, rusty interior. The simple room had a chain covering pulled over a reception desk built into the wall. There were a few chairs scattered about, but Bennett got the impression that they were just used to take up space. In front of them were three elevators, all in just as much disrepair as the rest of the building. 

They took the one to the left, and Hudson jammed his finger into the third button. The elevator shut its doors and rumbly climbed up. It screeched and groaned as it shambled toward the twenty-third floor. A scary thought flashed through Bennett’s mind of the elevator breaking and killing them. It was a pitiful thing to get killed before you retired into the VirtNet. Bennett read it online all the time. 

Thankfully, the boxy contraption rumbled to a stop and opened into a dingy hallway that stank of mold and moisture. Bennett stepped out first and spotted it immediately. The construction crew had cut out a section of the wall, revealing a small room that plaster had once hidden away. Several  workers lounged by, waiting for the officers to do their job before patching the wall back up again. 

Bennett gave them a swift acknowledgment as he entered the space. 

He stopped in his tracks and groaned as he saw what it was inside. Hudson came in, and out of the corner of his eye, Bennett saw the older man lower his shoulders in visible grief. 

At the back end of the room, there was a metal pipe which carried nutrition formula to every person plugged into the VirtNet in the building. However, a tube had been connected to the pipe, which led directly down to a dust-covered metal box with a glass lid. The pod hummed with a slight whir, and inside was a single woman. 

But she had been discovered far too late. 

Atrophy had set in as it always does with people plugged into the VirtNet for an extended period. The sealed container could only do so much for the human body after prolonged motionless. The muscles just withered away, and the body was left as a husk of what it once was. That was the bitter truth of VirtNet. Once you plug-in, you’re signing a contract to leave the physical world behind. The longer you stay, the worse it got. 

But the woman was in advanced stages now. She looked like she had been in there for decades. The woman’s flesh draped around her skull like a thin layer of cloth. Her hair had all fallen out, lying in the pod around her head as a disgusting halo. The torso was covered with a loose fitting dress, but even that gave away her disfigured form. Her sunken stomach wheezed up and down. The arms and legs were sticks of brittle bone; Bennett doubted they would ever function again. 

It was a pity that they had to take her out. However, the law was the law. She had committed the gravest crime in the twenty-second century: tapping into the VirtNet without paying. This woman had stolen decades worth of electricity, nutrition formula, and the other necessities. It was all about efficiency these days, all about keeping the forty percent alive in the VirtNet. Leeches like her stole legitimate resources from paying customers. In many courts, you had better outcomes if you committed murder. 

Bennett came up to the control pad and typed in the command to shut down the capsule. Immediately, wires began retracting from inside the woman’s back, wires that had been feeding her nutrition, extracting waste, and connecting her nervous system to the VirtNet. It was all turning itself off and leaving. The flesh made horrible little suction sounds as the strands departed, leaving bloody little holes dotting her back. 

And it was done. The woman was disconnected. The lid slid open, and the scented smell of chemicals creeped out. The woman, still in her red dress, began to breathe irregularly, no doubt suffering from being pulled out. She didn’t open her eyes. Consciousness would come in a few minutes. That was where it would get ugly.

Meanwhile, Hudson punched the code into his cellphone, calling for a special extraction team. In the advanced cases, the body was just too delicate to handled without life support. Right now, even getting her up could be dangerous. 

Bennett pulled up the woman’s vitals on the control pad. Everything was normal for one coming out of such a long plug-in, but that still wasn’t a good prognosis. The woman wouldn’t be able to pass waste anymore; her body had grown too dependent on the machine. The lungs were about to go too. In the next five years, she would need to be attached to a breathing machine of some sort.

The limbs were worse than Bennett had expected. The machine had to keep up with several complications in the woman’s body. Her nerve connections to the legs were all effectively shot. She would be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life. Her arms were better off, but the muscle was so decayed that he was genuinely sickened. 

The teeth had all fallen away from the gums. They were forcibly swallowed by the machine and digested in the stomach, turning them into a slush and running them up through the extraction wires. Finally, the eyes were the last on the list. Cataracts had developed severely on both of them, but that was hardly a concern to the capsule. It just focused on keeping her alive and plugged in. She didn’t need functional eyes in the VirtNet. 

The sound of a deep breath drew Bennett’s attention away from the control panel. The woman’s eyes were open, and Bennett could see a mixture of confusion, fear, and dread on the woman’s face. She clacked her gums slowly, and Bennett could see a look of strain upon the woman. She tried to lift her arm, but the muscle just wasn’t there. 

Bennett couldn’t imagine what she was feeling. She had been living in the VirtNet for so long, only to be ripped away and put right back in her decaying body. She wasn’t able to see and wasn’t able to move. All she could do was receive what was left of her sensory input organs. 

“She’s awake,” Bennett called over to Hudson. 

Hudson looked back and saw the woman struggling like a newborn infant. “I’ll set up the communicator.”

The device was a simple black box with two neuro-connectors attached to it. Hudson quickly unrolled a soft mattress while he jabbed the small wire into the woman’s neck. Bennett saw her register the pain, but there wasn’t enough muscle there to resist. Meanwhile, Bennett sat down on the mattress and lifted his head. Hudson was quick with the needle, jabbing it directly into Bennett’s neck. 

He felt the cold sensation of microscopic machines connecting his nervous system—then blackness. 

It was instant. The entire brain was hijacked and disrupted. All of Bennett’s sensory inputs were disconnected and reconnected to the box. The computer inside sent signals up to his brain, simulating everything that the mind needed. He was now in a small, simple room with two chairs. It was just like his normal body. He could feel everything, and the world was in absolute clarity. He could see, touch, smell, and hear everything without the slightest indication that it wasn’t real. 

He crossed his legs and waited.  

It only took a second. The woman appeared in the chair opposing him. She looked completely different from the woman in the capsule. Her hair was a nice auburn which fell to her shoulder. The face, once gaunt and decayed, now were full of life. Her body suffered no atrophy or any sign of sickness. Her vibrant green eyes glanced around, terrified. From what Bennett could tell, she looked no older than twenty. 

“Where am I!?” she demanded. 

Bennett noticed a French accent on the edge of her speech. It was always amazing to him that the communicator was advanced enough to carry even the tiniest of details. Bennett raised a hand, and a clipboard appeared in his hand. It would take a digital recording of everything that happened from now on. 

“Ma’am, my name is Bennett McCarthy. You’re under arrest for crimes against the state.”

Bennett saw her connect the dots almost instantly, and a look of absolute horror appeared on her face. She was fast, intelligent. Most took several minutes before they realized what had happened. 

“Ma’am, I need your identity number.”

“My—” Her face was still reeling with shock. “Two-eight-three-two-nine-six,” she said almost automatically. 

That was one relief given by the machine. It forced the patient to give answers by stimulating regions of the brain. It made Bennetts’ job of dealing with the traumatized a lot easier. A part of him felt pity for her. She had just been ripped out of paradise and thrown back into reality, but she did choose to illegally tap into the network. There were consequences. 

“Thank you.” Bennett typed in the identity number into the clipboard. 

The communicator reached out to the network and pulled the woman’s information onto the board. The number registered to one Samatha White, died forty-four years ago. Bennett’s eyes flicked to the woman. She had been twenty-seven when she placed herself in the capsule. There were many reasons why someone would do this. Policies took decades, and often it was tempting to take a shortcut. Samantha had another thirty years left on her plan when she faked her death, and thirty years might as well have been a century in VirtNet time. She probably figured she could get away with it. 

Samantha White just started sobbing in her chair, crying and bawling. Bennett didn’t blame her. The VirtNet was the ultimate drug. All your dreams and fantasies could come true with a simple thought. The role-play programs alone gave countless lives for one to live. Not just the mundane drudgery but it would give you a life that was real. 

In the VirtNet, a person could have meaning and purpose. You weren’t just a cog in a world that didn’t care. And even if that wasn’t enough for you, there was the pleasure circuit which just activated the dopamine receptors in your brain. You could have endless bliss for the rest of your days. Many had called it man’s final victory over God. Finally, heaven had been brought to the earth and sold to the masses at a decent bargain. 

And that was true in so many ways. Churches lost more than ninety-five percent of their attendance. Why spend your days praying when enough cash could give you everything you ever wanted? Society reorganized around the new meaning being marketed. Everything revolved around getting in the VirtNet. The saintly rich were icons to the penitent poor, looking to buy their way into salvation. And the damned? Those were the ones who died without reaching that most fulfilling of pleasures. 

Bennett knew this more than most people. He could see the effects of the VirtNet right in front of him with his own eyes. The brain was completely changed from the sheer bliss it had been subjected to. The woman kept shifting in her chair, feeling a perpetual discomfort just existing outside of the system. Right now, the communicator was stabilizing the woman’s mind for communication. However, she was going to experience severe withdrawal that would begin in a few short moments. 

“Ma’am, I will now inform you of what will happen.” Bennett began reading from the digital clipboard. “If you have access to any monetary assets, they will be seized and used to pay off your debt to the state. Should you not have enough funds to pay off your debt, you will be boxed with no chance of trial. You will now provide all of your financial information.”

He looked up and waited for her answer. None came from her quivering mouth. Her eyes were filled with tears and she kept mouthing. “I’m sorry.” 

“If you have no financial information to offer, you will be boxed. Please inform me of anything you own of monetary value.”

“Nothing.” She cupped her hand to her mouth. “Nothing.”

 “Thank you.” Bennett snapped his fingers, and the program ended. 

He woke up on the mattress and pulled the needle from his neck. “No financial assets.”

In the time that he had been under, the emergency team had come and had already loaded the woman’s body into a life support capsule on rollers. Hudson yanked the needle out of her neck and waved his hand. The medics took the body away, and it was done. Bennett laid back down on the mattress and closed his eyes. It was almost like clockwork now. 

He waited and resting, feeling the gently warm sensation of blood trickling down his neck. The world was silent for a few minutes except for the distant hum of machinery. In the beginning, such an encounter would’ve tugged at his heartstrings. Now, it was a scarcer emotion. Bennett tried not to care anymore. He just desperately waited for the day to come when it was his time to plug-in. 

“I’m certain now.” Hudson dusted off a part of the capsule still remaining in the room. “It’s time.”

Bennett lifted himself up to a sitting position. “You sure?”

“Yeah.”

They had been planning this for a long time now. Everything had been set up and calculated. The simple fact was Hudson still had sixty years to complete for his plan. A few wasted investments had left him far behind. He proposed an agreement to Bennett to help him get into a capsule. In return, Hudson would transfer the rest of his savings to Bennett’s account. 

They had covered their tracks well. It was all ready to go. The only matter was of when and where. 

Hudson removed most of his outer clothing and dropped it behind the capsule. Once that was done, he carefully laid down in the pod as Bennett watched from the outside. The glass screen lowered and slid into place, locking Hudson inside. 

“Get ready for heaven,” Bennett said to his partner as the machine began running initial diagnostics. 

The older man snorted. “You haven’t got the faintest clue, do you?”

“What do you mean?” Bennett asked as the system scanned the old man and prepared the initial injections. 

“You could never see it.” Hudson stiffened as the wires entered his back for the first time, digging towards his spine. The man whispered something Bennett couldn’t hear as other cords began worming their way in. One lone tube filled with anesthesia inserted itself into Hudson’s wrist. The man was quickly fading away. 

“I don’t understand.” Bennett shook his head, trying to get an answer out of Hudson before he was gone. 

The old man looked up with sad eyes. However, he wasn’t looking at Bennett, but past him. 

“I’m tired. I’m so tired. Don’t blame me.”

Hudson’s eyes suddenly bulged as a wire injected itself into his neck… and then he was gone. The man’s head slowly rested on the fabric within the pod. However, there wasn’t a smile on his face. There was just the sad expression of defeat. It was the same look that Bennett had always known. 

“I’ll be right after you, old man.” Bennett comforted himself as Hudson entered perfect bliss. He turned around and left the small enclosed room. 

“Seal it up,” he told the workers. They hadn’t been paying too much attention. No one noticed that only one detective left the room. 

“What about the capsule?” One briefly ducked his head to peer inside the hole.

“It’s too much of a hassle to move. We’ve destroyed the connecting circuits so no one can use it again.” Bennett stepped in the worker’s way, preventing the man from getting a closer look. 

The men got to work attaching equipment to the wall. In just a few minutes, a foam material had been applied to the hole and was beginning to solidify into just another section of the wall. Bennett made sure there was no trace of the compartment before leaving.

Later that day, Hudson would be in a car crash. Bennett had a replica body waiting to be sent to the morgue. For the apartment complex that Hudson now slept in, Bennett already had someone on hold to modify the computers. The discrepancy in numbers which revealed the woman would be altered to conceal Hudson. All of it had been expertly planned. It had only been a matter of when and where. 

Bennett opened up a holographic interface just outside the complex. Opening into his bank account, he smiled as the first installment was made to his name. An advertisement played above him, the image of a woman gesturing towards a sleek pod. He glanced up at it, watching the rapturous display. 

Perhaps what happened next was a trick of his imagination. The holographic woman leaned forward and her skin took on plastic texture in the dim morning light. As she inhaled to blow a kiss, her mouth extended into a black gaping maw which seemed too wide to be natural. Bennett took a step back as empty eyes smiled at him. 

Below the imitation of a woman, the caption read: Are you ready for heaven?

For some reason, Bennett didn’t turn away from the advertisement as he usually would. This woman looked more like a plastic toy than a flesh and blood human being. He couldn’t help but think that this woman—this angel of the new heaven—appeared like it had been made rather cheaply. 

A strange sense of disappointment came over him. Maybe it was seeing Hudson locked away in that capsule. Maybe it was just the years slowly weighing down upon him. But for the first time, that dream of the VirtNet, the bliss to come after his dull life, didn’t look as majestic as it once did. The promise of his afterlife seemed so fake, a poorly made imitation, just like the advertisement. 

He stopped himself before he could think on the matter any further. Bennett turned around and headed towards the car. 

“Just a few more years,” he muttered to himself.