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This is your living room. You're sure of it. It's been your living room for the past seven years. but it doesn’t feel like your room. It's all wrong, like someone’s pushed every piece of furniture a couple inches to the left. No one has, of course. You can compute this sort of stuff in your brain, no questions asked. You don’t even have to think about it. No one's touched your furniture.
But something is wrong. This is not your living room. It's the same living room you left this morning. You know your living room. Do you know your living room?
The couch feels the same way it always feels. The springs are going and you sink into it. It reminds you of home. home. You remember your home. But when you think of it the only thing that comes to mind is the living room you’re sitting in right now. But this room is not your home. You’re not from here, you’re from Brooklyn. Your mother’s still there. You can’t remember her voice. But you remember you’re from Brooklyn.
Maybe you can visit her. At home.
But how will you know who she is? If you don’t know her voice, you must be able to recognize her face. She must look like you, at least a little.
You’re looking in the mirror now. You must’ve gotten off the couch. The bridge of your nose is distinct. Maybe you get it from your mother. Maybe her nose is the same as yours. Maybe that’s how you’ll find her on your trip home. To Brooklyn? Right, yes. You’re from Brooklyn.
Maybe you’ll book time off. It won’t be approved. But you’ll do it anyway, to prove a point.
You should eat dinner.
You’re in the kitchen now. Your kitchen is sparse, missing crucial nutrients needed to keep yourself alive. But you don’t actually like a lot of those protein powders. But you need it to maintain the weak body you find yourself in, to make your neurons last another day, so you mix some into your water and drink it in one big gulp. You don’t taste it, at least. You’ve been having trouble tasting your food lately, but the powder has a taste you hate. You’re not even sure why you drank it so fast, because you hate it. But your body needs nutrients, worthless human organs don’t work without them.
But you are human. You like being human. You’d be more organic than not, if given the choice. But organs and tissue and bones make you weak, susceptible to illness and other malfunctions.
You don’t look in the mirror as you pass by the bathroom.
Did you eat something? You can’t remember. You remember the message popping up in your head, pinging you and telling you you’re hungry. But you don’t know if you ate.
It doesn’t matter. You’re not hungry.
You’re back in the living room now. Your living room, the one with your couch and your pillows. There’s windows too, that let you see outside into the compound in which you live. It’s dark outside, no one is moving, and you have to be up in three hours and thirty-seven minutes. It is not enough sleep. It is the perfect amount of sleep. It is all you need, when you have a million computational constructs living in your mind that–
No. Time to sleep. You’re laying down with your blanket over your shoulders, but you don’t remember doing it yourself. It’s time to sleep.
In your dreams, you hear the Net. You can’t see it, but it’s loud in your ears, the whispers, the grating static. It doesn’t go away. It’ll never go away. You have to get out. You will get out.
It’s just a matter of when.