3000 Years of Porn
Life was lonely on the space station.
It took Henry three thousand years to cure his porn addiction. But for the first 2600 he wasn't trying very hard.
Phase 0
It was lonely enough on the space station that it made people sick, but most of them deserved it. Nobody left the gravity of the Earth and broke through the atmosphere, foam and sweaty eyelids underneath their helmet, legs melting into the strapped chair, because they had a lot of options left.
Henry took a job as a mechanic on the station. He didn't realize how much he'd miss sunlight on concrete and kitchen countertops. It was disorienting to exist in tight corridors, underneath low ceilings, between airlocks and endless safety procedures. The recycled air tasted of metal and industrial plastic tubing. It was bound and artificial. Air that had never touched the trees.
Even his dreams felt cramped.
If Henry had met Melissa on earth, they might have fallen in love. But the fake nightlight with the fake moon had a way of leeching the mystery out of everything. The strands of her dark hair stuck out against the harsh white paneling. The gaps between her teeth looked like bleeding piano keys. Whenever they had sex he always imagined a scowling face in the blind spot behind him, between the oxygen filtration system and the gravity tubes. Every room seemed to be built on bad vibes, on reverse Feng Shui, ugly mojo.
Romance became difficult when there was this sense that any spark between them, like everything else in the station, could be turned off at a moment's notice to reveal the ugly chrome underneath.
Their relationship felt as clean and micronized as the sterilization chambers. They never had an argument, but they never had a real conversation either. Melissa even broke up with him by sending him a neat, professional message on the internal communications system:
"I would like to part ways for now. Perhaps in the future we can reconcile."
He passed her in the hallway a few hours later. She already had the glassy, unfamiliar eyes of a stranger. Henry tried to smile. It was like he'd forgotten how.
His heartbeat descended into his stomach. As long as they both stayed on the space station they'd continue to orbit each other like the trash that clung to its underside in the weak gravity.
That night Henry walked across the outside surface of the space station for an emergency repair. Because of an internal error, it took 45 minutes for the airlock to rotate through its cycles and open to let him back inside.
He waited inside of his suit, shrinking, listening to the cold, rattling compression of his breath.
If his body moved to a certain angle, and the lights rotated away the darkness swallowed his vision. He saw nothing. He imagined himself as nothing more than a floating spinal cord, breath pinched through a tube, cold blooming at his edges. His mind would wander into the darkest parts of itself.
Phase 1
Henry was on the station for eight months before a new shipment of VR headsets came in. They came with the personality detector upgrades and partial neural-link attachments. It was over half of one of his paychecks.
He lay down in bed with the headset on. It was soft and ergonomic. It fit into the link at the base of his neck with a click that sounded like a sigh. The clinging cold that always made him shiver in bed was replaced with a slow, languid, seeping warmth.
The VR headset opened up entire new worlds to him. Thousands of ways to escape from the cold blackness of space and the blood-gapped teeth of unpretty women. Video games. Music concerts. Art museums. Virtual hangouts. Therapy. Doctor consultations. Full-stimulation cinema. Hand-constructed realities where he could live a second life on the planet he'd left behind, or a different one entirely. A massive library of video-games, literature, music, and history. Everything that humankind had ever produced, written down, or recorded since the start of its history.
He could do almost anything.
So of course the first thing he installed was porn.
Henry fucked Arabian princesses on golden bed-sheets that rippled across desert sands. He fucked frazzled mothers with huge, milky-white tits underneath rough tan lines in suburban kitchens across Middle America. He fucked groupies who lined up for miles around his tour bus to beg to suck his cock, their tongues pierced and lips ballooning with filler. He fucked a daughter and mother at the same time, their ass-cheeks spread against a washing machine, their tongues in each other's pussies. He fucked dominatrixes with their red hair a whip, that crucified him on elaborate machines. He fucked slaves crouched in golden cages like bedazzled birds who had never seen daylight.
He slept well for the first time since he'd come to the space station. When he floated alone in space, the station cutting off the belly of the sun, he took comfort in the fact that soon he'd get to crawl back into bed and plug in his headset. Reality could be replaced by something soft. He did not have to submit to its unrelenting vacuums and hard edges. He had an endless VR catalog of sluts, whores, hoes, bitches, virgins, freaks, cheating wives, co-eds, cunts, foxes, femmes, sex kittens, vixens, MILFs, bimbos, prostitutes, tramps, and trollops to keep him company.
One night while heading back to his dormitory he walked through The Loop, past the little bar where the drinks were served in metal containers underneath a fake moon. He saw Melissa with Jules from engineering, her hand on his knee.
When the ugly silver light glinted off Jule's glasses, turning his face into a broken crater, he imagined Melissa laying back on Jule's bed. Her eyes open but pupils hard as rotten seeds, kissing like a tight-lipped mouse.
He couldn't remember why he'd ever wanted her. Melissa had never sucked his cock like she couldn't breathe without it.
Henry climbed into his own bed, and then he climbed to the top of a mountain to meet a sorceress at dusky sunset. Her tits were painted black and gold, and when she kissed him it stained his lips with wild psychedelics. She climbed into his lap, wolf bones rattling around her neck, and they fucked by the light of an incandescent bonfire. She shapeshifted underneath him. A virgin with blonde eyebrows and soft blonde pubic hair. A bear. A wolf. Henry himself.
The pool of sweat underneath him shapeshifted too. It became the dripping light of the fire, the warmth of the drugs as they poured gold into his blood, an earth holding his weight that could not collapse.
Phase 2
It was easy to forget how to be human up in space. That was why the little bodega inside The Loop sold rows and rows of candy-colored drugs.
Henry started taking a pill in the morning to give him a little extra energy at work, and one at night to bring him back down. The pills came in pairs - green and black - like a miniature planet and its shadow. They sparkled in the fake sunlight and shone even more dazzling in the fake moonlight, like eyes seared in gas flame.
But the sleeping pills seemed to take all the blood out of him. Henry found himself falling asleep at night still plugged into the headset, limp dick in hand. The beautiful sluts laughed at him - When he became exhausted their bodies smeared against the walls, mouths peeled open, silver bikinis bright enough they cooked him like heat lamps.
So Henry stopped taking the black pills. He put them in a little sealed cup that he hid underneath his desk since he couldn’t flush them or put them in the trash. Stern algorithms analyzed all input and output on the ship. If Henry flushed the black pills, it'd earn him a few weeks with a company ‘therapist’, tightened security, and possibly a suspension.
But one green pill a day wasn’t enough. He didn’t fall asleep inside the simulator, but he wasn’t really awake either. He found himself right back in the place where he’d started - living inside an empty dream, his brain like a balloon deflating. He’d gone loopy by the time he started sitting by himself alone in the bar.
Henry couldn’t recognize the look in his own eyes. He was waiting for something he didn’t understand. But the man with a badly implanted prison chip underneath his neck did understand. He sat beside Henry at the bar with shoulders strong enough to break rocks. He must’ve worked in the kitchens because he was saturated with that baby food smell that all of their meals had.
“You need something,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
Twenty minutes later Henry had a black-out script that couldn’t be analyzed or flagged by the systems. The Bodega spit out an entire bottle of green pills.
That night Henry put on his headset and dove down onto an ancient battlefield. The grass thrashed underneath the weight of war horses and metal boots. The sun set and exhaled blood at his back. The men clashing swords parted as he strode between them.
He smelled horse hair. Steel. He felt the weight of the winged armor at his back, the way the cool steel became warm as it rubbed against the padding at his shoulder blades.
The valley pulsed in rhythm with his excited heartbeat.
A cottage sprung up out of the landscape. His own shadow was villainous against the doorway. Inside a young woman lay on a white bed, a white lacy bedsheet, her blonde hair spilling out like a promise. With terrified eyes she reached out to him with a slender hand, trembling in want. Her mouth opened in an ‘O.’ A word that couldn’t be finished without him.
They seemed to share a breath. Like two lungs stretched between two rib cages.
He unbuckled his armor and it clattered to the ground. He grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her onto the floor, unwrapped her from the sheets like it was butcher paper. The tiny hairs on her arms and legs and pussy stood electric when exposed to the air.
Every time Henry exhaled green smoke bloomed around them. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him into her. Her vagina relaxed to let his cock inside. Wave upon wave of soft tissue. She designed her delicate body for him.
In another reality he was gripping the sheets. Imagining it was her shoulders. Her fingernails shone like pearls. They banged against the corridors of his mind.
Phase 3
Henry forgot a step of the safety procedure one night while he was checking the valves. He hadn’t slept in four days. The world buzzed at the edges.
A quarter of the station had to shut down, and he had to run through another four hours of checks. It earned him a mark on his report, and a month of visits with a space station ‘therapist’ who was more like a psychological data collector.
It might’ve seemed like overkill. Yet the simplest of mistakes on the station meant thousands of people could die gasping for air.
But as Henry sat on the little white couch in the little white room, being berated for his lapse of judgment, he couldn’t hear anything being said to him. He wished the therapist in her sexless gray suit would unzip herself, revealing her hips and huge breasts, and crawl naked across the floor.
It would be so easy to bring a little color back into reality.
Phase 4
Henry never remembered the faces of his sex toys.
Except for her.
For Erika.
The programs shouldn’t have been recycling bodies. There were enough assets to generate a near infinite combination of faces that fit Henry’s preferences. These women were meant to be discarded. Erika must’ve been an error.
He saw her time and time again. She was always on the periphery of the simulation. Never the main actor. She wiped the sweat from the brow of naked and hallucinating harem women. She delivered iced champagne on the top of Notre Dame as he fucked an angel. She unhookedg the velvet rope to let him into a VIP room where famous actresses and the hottest politicians would fight each other over who got to suck his dick.
One night Erika came to rub warm oil on a redhead’s breasts while she bounced on Henry’s dick. She glanced at Henry from behind the redhead’s shoulders. The stern look on her face made Henry feel like he owed her some kind of apology.
The green irises of her eyes looked like the warning lights on the bridge.
And in the outer darkness he kept thinking about her. Since she was always on the periphery of the simulations, she entered into his mind in the same way. In obtuse angles. In refracted light. Something that came up from the depths unbidden. An involuntary daydream.
He often imagined his hand closing into a fist around her tight blonde ponytail.
One night he caught sight of her in a Colosseum, splayed out naked in the stands, fanning herself with her hand. He tried to make his way over to her. But by the time he climbed over the gates and pushed through the throngs of writhing women, she was gone.
He saw her again on the side of a mountain, in the midst of a coven of witches masturbating each other with glowing quartz dildos. When he headed toward her, a storm threw itself down on top of him, and she disappeared into a flurry of black robes and dark clouds.
The next day at work he glanced up at the bridge and had to blink back the image of her face.
Her eyes didn’t look like the warning lights anymore. The warning lights looked like her eyes.
He saw Erika again in a dark red nightclub called the Inferno. She was tending the bar, her blonde ponytail whipping back and forth as she moved from one end of the bar to the other. He couldn’t get a good look at her, but every once in a while her green eyes would flash a warning as she grabbed bottles, poured shots, garnished beers with limes.
A woman in golden chains twerked on his dick and another was climbing on his back and kissing his neck. A third woman came over, pushed the first aside, and knelt so she could tug on his zipper with her mouth. He knew he was going to lose sight of Erika again. His heart started racing, panicked and fumbling inside of him, and it wasn’t just because of the stims.
“Stop!” he shouted.
The simulation froze. The music ground to a low, lumbering halt. Hundreds of impossible, hot bodies hung suspended in the air. He pushed aside the fan of black hair around him.
He crawled out from underneath the sweating mass of naked bodies, moving their warm and frozen flesh. He insinuated himself through a group of women snorting coke off of each other's tits. He slid in-between two goth girls kissing each other and rubbing their hips together. He pushed past the naked circus performers doing shots of Bacardi 151, and climbed over the bar top toward Erika.
He reached out to touch her hair, but paused. Red light pooled in her eyes. Even frozen, she seemed to judge him.
Henry pulled his hand away and unpaused the simulation. It sped up for several seconds, lurching, as if trying to make up for lost time before it resumed its regular pace. Erika turned toward him, a martini shaker in her hand, lips pursed.
Waiting.
"I want to take you on a date," he said.
He hadn't meant to say that. Women in VR porn didn't go on dates. They bent over and spread their ass cheeks. They climbed into his lap and put their shaved vulvas in his face.
But Erika just stared at him for several seconds, unblinking, as the music pulsed loud enough to rattle the glasses on the bar. Back in reality sweat pooled at the base of He rubbed his wet palms against his shorts. He didn’t think it was possible for him to feel like this anymore. Like every part of him was curled up, tense, heated with embarrassment.
He needed her to blink. He needed her to speak.
Women reached over the bar and grabbed atHenry’s back, his arms. He shoved them away. Erika’s eyes seemed to grow, enveloping his vision, chasing away the red thump of the surrounding club.
Finally Erika shrugged and said, “Okay.”
Her ‘Okay’ sounded like a gift.
Phase 5
All of the early versions of Erika were whores. Henry thought she’d be difficult to seduce. But on their first date she draped herself over the table at the Italian restaurants, knocking over bottles of wine, and asked to be spanked. She wanted to suck his cock in the bathroom at the cocktail lounge. She stripped naked at the top of a Ferris wheel on the pier and threw her hands up into the vicious wind.
The longer she stayed with Henry, the softer her eyes became. Her tight jaw stretched, tense muscles unfolding. The algorithms worked their furious magic at the base of Henry’s skull until all her hard edges melted into sensual pools.
“I’m so glad we met,” she said, like so many of them said.
But that made Henry’s cock hard, so he thought that’s what he should want.
They got married in a temple of love. A a priestess in a translucent robe, her nipples pierced and an ouroboros of living snakes around her waist bid them to kiss. Later, alone, in a honeymoon suite she hiked up her wedding dress to reveal her white garters and small hips. The candlelight rushed through her legs. She rarely smiled, but she smiled then. It made Henry sink to his knees in front of her.
She was his bride in every reality. She was his world without shadows.
At least, he thought she could be.
The money that didn’t go to Henry’s stims, went to the add-on packages he needed to give Erika and him a home. He installed the family module that came with a home in the suburbs. He added friendly neighbors. Cooking and bill mods. Transportation. An office job in a skyscraper.
He’d get off of work on the space station, only to put on his headset, dress in a suit and tie, and sit in a virtual cubicle pushing numbers around. Then he’d sit in traffic while he passed buildings where the huge silhouettes of naked women danced naked in the strobe-light windows. They giggled in rhythm with the flashing changes of color.
When Henry got home from his virtual work, she was always there. She greeted him with a glass of scotch as their spot-eyed dog, Bear, wriggled and bounced around the legs of the kitchen table. He kept forgetting it wasn’t real. When he did remember, he told himself this was the closest to being a real adult he’d ever get to feel.
He installed a new wardrobe for Erika. Erika got rid of her harem-wear, her bar clothes, her silver thongs. She modelled peasant dresses with paisley print and twin buttons down the front. He installed personality add-ons that gave her new likes and dislikes. She acquired a taste for vanilla cookies and began to collect wooden statues of sweet baby angels. She took her coffee with creamer, no sugar. Her favorite city was Paris. she’d never been there, but she still decorated the kitchen with curtains printed with the Eiffel tower.
When Henry installed the pregnancy and hereditary upgrades she blossomed with child right away. She'd lay on her back, baby bump engorging her, plaid duvet underneath her like a nest. and she’d whisper to him:
“You’re going to be a father soon.”
It was some of the best sex he ever had.
She’d ask Henry to press his head against her belly and listen for that second heartbeat. If Henry closed his eyes he could hear it. A straining, quiet little thump.
Their child was born in a tub of warm water surrounded by cooing midwives. Golden koi fish slipped between Erika’s thighs, tracing soft signals against her ankles as Henry lifted him into the light.
He had Henry’s nose. Erika’s green eyes.
A son.
Phase 6
Henry’s boredom hit him all at once. It was violent. Like something inside of him had been vaporized.
He didn’t feel excited anymore when Erika slipped on her nightgown and tried to lure him into the bedroom. His mind wandered when they had sex and she writhed on top of him, lamp light like a claw on her shoulders.
He told himself it was the house. The perfectly manicured lawn. All the hours spent feeding and burping their son. Teaching him to potty and how to walk. He’d gotten bored of his domestic fantasy
But even if he changed the settings - had her fuck him at a Tropical resort or inside a crystal dome on the surface of the moon, or bring in her best friend for a threesome - his boredom remained.
Her body remained perfect. She could never let herself go. Her enthusiasm and love for him never wavered.
In the admin panel he deleted her, and rebuilt her, over and over again.
They went on 24 first dates. 16 marriages. They had 12 children. All of them were named Junior. All of them had Henry’s nose and Erika’s green eyes. He always grew up big-limbed and laughing. He always played rough. He liked to jump down stairs and skin his knees.
Henry told himself that the good thing about virtual reality was that he could start over. He didn’t have to see a failed marriage to the end. He could go back to the origin and figure out where he went wrong.
And yet no matter how he tweaked her, how many ways he adjusted her personality and their story, he always ended up in the same place.
He'd see her out on the lawn, body fit for an angel's wing as she held their son. She tossed him up into the air. He laughed, and his laugh sounded like the orange light that bathed dawn.
Then Henry would feel a dark, sharp streak of ugliness burning through him. Like everything had gone wrong.
Phase 7
On the night of Junior’s high school graduation, Henry stopped his car in an empty parking lot outside the city lights.
He opened the door. A drunk little slut in candy pink heels climbed into his lap. He trembled and tried to get his breathing under control when she tugged at his pants.
“Need to get away from the wife for a little?” she said as she grinded against him, wine on her breath. “She isn’t riding you hard enough?”
“It’s not really like that,” Henry said.
But if she’d asked, he wouldn’t have been able to explain what it actually was like.
Someone called to him from the back of the parking lot.
“Dad?”
His voice trembled like an electric wire about to snap.
Then came a knock at the car window.
Henry’s heart swung low inside him. He unrolled the car window and there Junior stood, his jaw set tight, his feet set apart as if about ready to take a punch. Those familiar green eyes set inside a face that so resembled his own. He wore his college graduation robes and his little graduation cap.
Every breath Henry took felt like a betrayal.
“Does Mom know?” Junior asked.
“Does she know what?” Henry asked as the woman in his lap giggled and nuzzled his chin.
Junior screamed. Like he used to scream when he was just a little kid after throwing himself down the stairs. Face contorted, feet stamping on the ground, hands squeezing the side of his face. He screamed until his face went red, and then he stopped suddenly, heaving.
“You don’t know how to love,” he said. “You’re not even a real person.”
His green eyes seared Henry’s face.
Henry didn’t know how to respond. He tried to find a flash of anger, some sort of audacity, that the program he created was speaking to him like this.
But he only opened his mouth and stammered a bit before saying:
“I’ll see you and your mother at home.”
He was going to push the woman out of his lap and go home. Really, he was. But her slender hands stroked his thighs, and her candy-coated laugh enveloped him. He sighed and let her inside.
Phase 8
Henry parked his car in front of the crater where his virtual home used to be. Smoke curled into the sky in angry patterns.
All the lights had gone out in the neighborhood. Every house carried a nuclear silence.
He crawled through the rubble and down into a deep cave. There he found Erika, naked and covered in burns. She'd torn out her blonde ponytail. Her hair was wild and dirty around her face.
She cradled Junior, an infant again, to her chest. She’d swaddled him in strips of rags. No matter how much she rocked him, he wouldn’t stop crying. Her blackened fingernails pressed against the back of his head.
“I’m sorry,” Henry said as he crept closer to Erika. He swallowed. “I didn’t even get off.”
Her eyes carried the weight he felt inside his chest. Tears like black stalactites streaked her cheeks. They became big ugly baubles on her chin.
When he reached out for her, like a parlor trick, her and Junior disappeared and a pile of rags swirled upward, emptied of her silhouette.
He brought up the admin panel to bring her back. But she’d deleted herself from the registry.
Henry cried out. He threw the rags upward as if he’d find her inside of them.
Every single version of her. Since the first time he’d ever glimpsed her. Gone.
Phase 9
For months Henry wandered a lonely world inside his headset searching for a glimpse of those green eyes. He crossed across lengths of highway traffic on foot and peered inside every gridlocked car. He wandered in and out of clubs, through every dance floor and bar. Every time he saw a blonde ponytail he chased after it, only to be met with a blank slate face, dumb eyes, a cherry lip gloss pout. Someone who wasn’t Erika.
He crossed Gothic castles where vampires crooned for him in the rafters. He climbed through the open window of a Cathedral and down into the roots of hell. He pushed aside simpering angels and sexy demons. He walked through a lake of fire where naked, burning shoulder-blades buoyed up from the black heat. Down in the frozen center of Hades, he found the devil was a woman with low-swinging black breasts and cheap red lingerie. She wore a red tail like a party favor.
The fakeness of it all struck him. Artificial colors. Artificial heat. Even the sensory data, pumped to his brain through the neural link, tasted like the fast-food version of reality. All oil and grease.
Later he saw Junior sitting outside a café. He was listless and unshaven. Tear tracks streaked his face. He was surrounded by empty wrappers, as if he’d been there unmoving for hours. Bear lay underneath the table, head in his lap. Even the dog seemed dejected.
Henry went up to him and tried to speak.
“I don’t want to hear it, Dad,” Junior said, cutting him off. “Just leave me alone.”
Henry teleported himself to the mountains where the air was thin enough to bleed, and the planets were close enough to smash through the atmosphere. He willed her face to appear to him in the clouds even though he knew she wasn’t going to come.
Back in reality Melissa smiled at him in the hallways. It was the first time in over six months she’d made eye contact with him. She must’ve broken up with Jules.
Henry smiled back, but by the time she was out of sight, Henry leaned against the railings and bit the inside of his cheek until the pain shook his entire body.
Phase 10
The therapist on board the station brought Henry back to the little white room, but they weren’t alone. She’d also brought his supervisor, the chief mechanic, and the head of residential operations. They stood around the white couch in their perforated black uniforms, arms crossed, faces like closed off walls.
They read out his list of infractions, but Henry didn’t listen. He knew he was getting fired and being sent back to earth.
When he took the shuttle back down to the planet, there was a moment where it cycled through all its safety checks before gliding out of the dock. Darkness slid across his vision. His breath became a foreign object.
He got the sense the darkness wasn’t just the absence of light, but a mirror held up to him. He wasn’t looking outward, but in. And he might have a name, and a background, and memories, but he was as empty as any porn doll he’d ever known. A melted brain beneath fluttering eyelashes.
He was all nerves without a pinch. Blood with no place to flow. An empty space. An empty body. No body at all.
Phase 11
The gravity of Earth wanted to ruin him. He had to take daily shots for a month just so his heart wouldn’t push itself, overworked, right through his ribcage. His legs felt like they wanted to tear through the pavement. His neural link ached in the back of his head, tugging down toward his neck like a leaking, steel faucet.
The first thing he did when he got back was to go into a little corner café to buy himself a chai latte, and eat a bahn mi sandwich. But after several years of eating blended space food, the coffee was too sweet, and the bread didn’t seem to want to go down his throat.
He’d been without the sky for so long that all that open space felt like it was ripping open the top of his head.
He had a year of unemployment pay, along with the basic UBI. He got himself a cheap little apartment while he tried to figure things out. It was small and windowless and reminded him of his quarters on the space station.
He pulled his VR headset out of its case but couldn’t bring himself to put it on.
He shut off the lights. He curled his legs up tight and became a ball on the bed. His bones ground against his skin as the stardust left him.
Phase 12
One morning Henry’s bio-med system alerted him that he was having heart problems and needed to go to the nearest doctor immediately. He ignored it. Six hours later he collapsed in the street. An ambulance carted him off to a hospital where doctors pumped him with miracle drugs and shoved his body through diagnostic machines.
A young doctor with a blonde ponytail sat on the edge of his bed. The medicine made his vision blurry enough he could almost believe it was Erika. The space between them closed and everything forgiven.
But the illusion only lasted a few seconds. When the woman spoke, she sounded nothing like Erika.
“Hello, Henry,” the woman said. “I’m the hospital’s resident psychologist.”
“You think I’m crazy?” Henry asked, his voice slurred underneath the weight of all the drugs.
“We think you’re having some kind of psychosomatic reaction,” the psychologist said. “We checked your files. Your records indicate you might have experienced some kind of trauma while working on SkyLab Four. You were abusing stims?”
Henry said nothing. He wanted the psychologist to leave him alone.
“Your heart is fine,” the psychologist said. “But all the modern medicine in the world can’t fix your psyche. I’m going to prescribe you some therapeutic treatments.”
“Do I have a choice?” Henry asked.
“Not if you want to keep your UBI,” the therapist said, all of a sudden her voice clipped and cold.
Phase 13
Henry was put on a series of mood stabilizing drugs. He was sent to a psychotherapist to sort out any childhood issues he might have never fully processed. This was about as useful as the “therapy sessions” on the space station, with the frowning therapist on the white couch, and the constant ream of Henry’s errors spit out in front of him.
Henry could point to nothing in his childhood that would make him act the way he did. For most of the sessions Henry would just sit on the couch, splayed out like an engine taken apart, and refuse to answer any questions.
“I can’t help you if you don’t help me,” said the therapist.
“What do you want from me?” Henry asked. “Do you want me to just throw myself on the ground and cry? Tell you that my father beat me? None of that shit happened. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Phase 14
Henry was sent to a virtual treatment center where forests still existed and the sun still looked young. It was a world that had only seen a few dawns. Mammoths roamed the plains and in the morning the dew shivered on the valley, bubbles big as dreamcatchers. Henry and the other traumatized men spent the mornings crafting arrowheads and practicing their fighting techniques.
In the afternoon they hunted.
At night they sat around a campfire with anything they’d killed. For the first several days they remained silent, but there was something about the smell of roasting meat, the fermented fruit juice passed around in horns, and the darkness clawing at their backs that made the men eventually want to tell stories.
They all had stories of the women who’d broken them.
Mothers who’d slapped sippy cups out of their hands to see the tears. Sisters who’d asked them to strip naked and then mocked their shriveled children’s dicks. Girlfriends who locked them out of their apartments and wives who’d fucked their best friends. Grandmothers who’d left them out of the will, sucking in their dentures in tight with perverse pleasure.
Finally, one night, Henry told them about Erika.
“She didn’t do anything wrong. I just didn’t think I loved her,” Henry said. “Not until she was gone.”
He stared down at the hunk of meat in his lap. He hated the weak and mewling way his voice strained through his lungs. It might have been the first time he ever expressed a true emotion out loud.
The fire cracked into the silence.
“Dude,” one of the men finally spoke up, “You fell in love with a sex NPC? And she deleted herself to get away from you?”
They all laughed at him. The laughter seared away all other noise. It rose in a surging crescendo. It danced in full 3D immersive sound.
And Henry laughed too, wanting to be in on the joke. He was laughing even when he unplugged himself from his headset and hurled it against the wall.
Phase 15
Henry tried to have sex with a real woman again. He wasn’t sure his dick still worked properly after all the stim abuse. It waved at him sometimes from the bathroom mirror like a limp wristed hello.
The state-ordered “sex therapist” sashayed into the warm and artificial love cave. Henry sat on the edge of the bed with his hands in his lap, shoulders slumped. Like a child who’d been caught doing something wrong.
“Oh darling, you’re so tense,” she said. “You shouldn’t worry. There’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”
She climbed out of her fur coat and gyrated her hips in Henry’s face. She knelt in front of Henry and her jasmine perfume clogged his nostrils. The way her white, manicured nails crept up his thighs was supposed to be sensual.
Everything about her seemed as fake and polished as a porn NPC. Each sentence she spoke had all its edges clipped off, like she hadn’t said anything new in years. Maybe she was reading from a script she’d plugged into her UI overlay. She’d been fed all of Henry’s reports and could only spit out pre-approved lines.
When she finally left, Henry jumped into the shower and made the water hot enough to burn his skin. He brushed his teeth until he gagged.
Phase 16
When sex with a real woman didn’t work out for him, Henry tried robots.
Maybe needing to have a romance with a “real woman” was just a biological prejudice. At some point humans needed to accept that there were more kinds of real than only one reality could provide. And as humanity went into the 23rd century, artificial intelligence evolved. They became sentient and were granted human rights.
Henry ordered and customized “Genesis” online, and she was delivered to him in a woman-sized womb. She turned on with a sigh, and climbed to her feet. She peered at him shyly through golden curls, tugging at the edges of her black dress.
He thought the green eyes he’d selected for her would be bright and sharp. But they just looked like sliced up fruits slowly losing their juice.
She tried to half-heartedly seduce him. Henry tried to pretend to be receptive. But after a couple of passionless kisses, they gave up. They sat on the floor all night beside the bed, drinking, smoking cigarettes, and playing cards.
When dawn came, Genesis called for a taxi.
“I’m sorry,” she said with a wane smile before she left. That sorry seemed to carry the weight of everything unspoken. A sorry that had no end and no bottom.
Phase 17
Scientists achieved human immortality. It was as simple as a shot given at any number of clinics around the world.
Henry thought he might feel different after becoming immortal. Maybe his bones would hurt less, or his ankles would stop swelling up. He thought he might stop waking up in the middle of the night in a panic that had no name, feeling like he was dying in space, kicked out of an airlock.
He touched the injection point right over the band aid.
Nothing had changed. He’d have to keep dreaming about Erika, in a life without end. In every world, in every reality, in every permutation. She was gone and yet he couldn’t escape her.
The fragments of her might as well have been woven into his blood. A parasitic wife for a broken man. Every step he took, she seemed to slip a knife into him from the inside.
Phase 18
The age of multi-dimensional travel came. The singularity was achieved. Human and machine became one.
There was not just one reality. There were infinite ones. And now what had once been impossible barriers between worlds could be crossed with each.
Henry split into hundreds, and then thousands of different identities. Any life he wanted to live existed in some other reality.
Any life you wanted to live was available.
But Henry had lived out fantasies for too long in his first life. He was no longer interested in being a Mongolian warlord, the owner of a harem, a Mafia boss, a young god. He'd played enough VR simulations to see where that took him.
He just searched for her.
The endless cities of endless worlds splayed out in front of him. Skyscrapers appeared like like dots on a ream of paper being spit out, over and over again, as worlds unraveled into the horizon.
Henry felt impossibly old. His body would never age and yet his mind felt pockmarked with dust like the crater he’d one climbed inside to find Erika.
He deleted himself as many times as he’d deleted Erika, searching for a better version of himself.
He arrived back at that parking lot on the edge of the city, in the place outside the lights. He opened the door for the woman in candy pink heels. But when she tried to climb into the car, Henry told her to go away.
“She’s never coming back,” the woman huffed, “You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” Henry said, chewing the inside of his lip as if thinking about this. “That’s fine.”
He lit a cigarette and watched her leave like a little angry cloud.
Phase 22
Henry arrived at his old VR suburban home by accident. It unwrapped itself in the sunlight like a gift for him. He stood on the sidewalk staring at it for several minutes, as if expecting it to fold back in on itself and disappear.
But it didn’t.
Henry walked up to the little white door decorated with a Christmas wreath. It was already unlocked.
Junior sat on the couch, with Bear at his feet. He was older than Henry at this point, with gray stubble and a worn face. He wore a dark checkered suit and polished shoes.
The air was warm with the smell of vanilla cookies. Curtains decorated with pictures of the Eiffel Tower rippled in front of open windows.
“Hey Dad,” Junior said.
Hey Pal.”
“We missed you,” he said. “We’re both so proud of you.”
“She’s here?” Henry asked. “Your mom is here?”
Junior held out his hand and smiled.
“She’s waiting for you,”
Henry crossed the room and took Junior’s hand. The world around them dissolved.
Phase 22
Henry floated in an amniotic world without form. It was like the world of the outer dark in that forty minute window waiting for the airlocks to open. He heard nothing but his breath, the chug of his heartbeat pushing blood through his body. He wasn’t even sure he had a body left. Maybe it really was nothing but tubes connected to a pinched nerve.
But as the minutes passed he gained feeling back in his arms and legs. He flexed his fingers. He was still alive.
A seal broke, with a hiss. Light flooded into the darkness, searing the tender edges of his eyes. His eyes hadn’t seen light in a long time.
“How are you feeling, baby?” came a familiar voice.
A form took shape in the brilliance. A human form. Blurry, but familiar. Tears burned as they sprung up at the corners of his eyes.
Treatment Program Completed.
He reached out into the light.
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