Unplugged

Unpugged

A short story by Rachel Harris

Her lips and her forehead were the only place on her face where wrinkles rested. My Grandmother. The woman could bake a pie while she built a shed in the backyard, and she did. She worked hard but stayed soft. When the cancer became aggressive, that was the first time I saw her cry.

“I don’t want to live this way” she said that day in the car after her second round of chemo. “And I don’t want to die.” I could feel her desperation for us to understand. She was a spiritual woman who believed in Christ, sometimes referring to him as “Yeshua” or “Yeweh” while citing various religious texts, sageing her house, and always damning the Patriarchy for the mess we were all now. After my grandfather left her for a much younger woman, she never dated again. She was forty-seven when they divorced. She began then to talk about her one, true love that now lived in Portland Oregon, married, and that she hadn’t spoken to for thirty years. He was her high school sweet heart, into college, only separated by circumstance of his enrollment in graduate school across the country. Grandma had so much regret for not following him, for letting him go and moving on with her life. One that didn’t turn out the way she had envisioned. It rarely does though. She said often “if I can’t be with him, I will die alone.” Sometimes, that made me feel invisible.

Grandma was often misunderstood for being “staunch” or “difficult” but, I know that she was just sure of herself. She was wise, careful, and she had an intuition about her that delivered her opinions as fact so we knew not to argue with her. She loved with all her heart and mind though. That woman never missed a homeless person’s hand with a twenty dollar bill. Never turned away from a child in need. She kept treats in her cupboard for stray animals, even dried crickets for the foul that occasionally played in her pond. Every creature mattered to her, especially when it came to our family. Because we loved her so much, the way she was the glue to our family, you can imagine how we begged her not to apply for the Metaverse. We knew she would be a candidate. The criteria was simply; terminal diagnosis, beyond child bareing years, medical debt that exceeds income and the inability to work. Everything was about human productivity in our current dystopia. Still, we knew the problems with the Metaverse were beginning to outweigh the benefits thus, forming The Resistance.

Millions of family members who protested daily to end the program. Family members whose loved ones had possibly fallen victim to the “glitch” inside the Metaverse that had caused spontaneous “wakenings” or the talk of political agendas to end the program entirely for ethical concerns meaning they would end the program suddenly and “turn off” millions of humans overnight, ending their lives without playing out their Metascape and the surviving families sure of their sudden deaths. They told us that the Metaverse would be a soft and gentle way to die.A person who enters the Metaverse would stay connected for an undisclosed amount of time between two and four years. They would live in a very real to them dreamstate, in the very specific archetype of dream life that they choose as defined by their extensive contract. The possibilities were endless and the maintenance of their meatsuits were managed by robots who kept their flesh sedated and pain free. Cryogenics promised their diseases to slow, allowing them time to enjoy their Meta experience.

“I would be with my one, true love” Grandma said at the Metaverse office. “I will spend my days with all of you. We will have breakfast on the balcony of my London loft and travel sometimes by train to see the world. I’ll make art, write books, and dance. My hair will be auburn again, and naturally curly. I’m so sick of this lifeless mop on my head and I don’t want to lose my hair. I end every day making love to my soul mate by the moonlight.” her eyes glossed over as she told us her plan. “Grandma!” we shouted in slight disgust but, in my heart, I had much empathy for the woman in her that longed for true love again. “We love you so much and we’ve never trusted the Patriarchy. The Metaverse is only designed to remove the burden of sick people from our broken system, to whisk you into oblivion and call it mercy.” we begged her to reconsider. “I don’t want to suffer my loves. If you love me, you’ll let me go in this peaceful way.” she gently reasoned.

When the news broke about the activists storming the Metaverse warehouses, we knew, Grandma was gone. It wasn’t supposed to be this way at all. She was supposed to go silently, in her sleep, at an undisclosed time so we wouldn’t know she was gone. That is what they promised for all Metaverse clients. When activists raided the warehouse, their intention was to slowly recover every human and slowly bring them back to society but, the robots who maintained the hygiene, nutrition, and security of Metaverse clients were programmed to retaliate by all means necessary. In order to save the lives of activists, The Resistance had to destroy the main circuit board, ending suddenly the lives of all 523,000 residents of the Metaverse.

It is probably for the better that the Meta Humans’ lives ended that day. Without robots to maintain their meatsuits and without cure for their declining bodies, there would be no one to care for them had The Resistance managed to simply destroy the robots and unplug them. For our family, closure came the day we took Grandma to the Metaverse office. Her decision was made and that was that. She lived one year and three months in her perfect Metascape and although I didn’t get to hold her ailing body through chemo, to hold her hand as she faded into death, I no longer had to wonder if Grandma was still Metaverseing or if they had pulled her plug.

Grandma was right, she would die alone. Her body only tended by robots but, her conscious, lived it’s best life with her one, true love, making love by the moonlight in London. Now, without the Metaverse, we will return to our bodies, sickness and health. To live our lives in Dystopia, suffering adversities under authoritarian reign, and longing for lost loves of yesterday. I hope Grandma’s heaven is even more devine as was she. Powerful yet soft, loving and beautiful. I miss her.