The Experience of a Lifetime
Camryn stumbled into the nightclub, steadying herself on a railing. She took a moment to catch her breath; though the atmosphere of the club was hot and sickly sweet with chemical vapours, it was much safer to breathe than the untreated air outside.
The clubbers were packed together on what would have once been called the dance floor, but rather than dancing to the club’s throbbing music, their bodies stood almost motionless. Their eyes stared directly ahead, unblinking, as images from a head-mounted projector burned directly into their irises. The only hint of life the stationary bodies exhibited were occasional, sharp intakes of breath taken from rubber mouthpieces: snorkel-like devices that drip-fed their lungs with a concoction of alcohol, nicotine and whatever other cheap chemicals the bartenders had on hand.
She pushed her way through the crowd, past the myriads of people too distracted by the perfectly tailored sensations of their ideal night out to notice her, until she reached the bar at the far end of the room.
“You want a mouthpiece?” the bartender asked over the music, picking up an empty canister from a shelf.
“No. I’m here to speak to Roze,” Camryn replied, just as she had practiced in front of her mirror countless times over the past week. The bartender interrogated her with his eyes, then replaced the empty canister with a small torch-shaped device from under the bar.
“You used one of these before?” he asked. Camryn nodded, lying. The bartender held the narrow end of the device to her mouth. Camryn took a deep breath.
“My name is Camryn Jones and I am not a police officer.” The end of the device blinked yellow and displayed a question mark. “Try it again,” the bartender asked, though his voice was more stern than before. Camryn took another breath.
“My name is Camryn Jones and I am not a police officer,” she repeated, more forcefully than before.
The end of the device blinked green and displayed a green tick. Camryn disguised a sigh of relief as the bartender replaced the device under the bar and dismissively indicated for her to follow him through the steel door behind the bar.
He led her into a dimly lit industrial corridor to a locked door, behind which hung thick red curtains. He gestured towards them with his head, arms crossed. “Thanks,” Camryn muttered, before clumsily feeling her way through.
Beyond the curtains, she found a circular booth decorated in ornate crimson and gold patterning, where a young woman sat in a red silk dress. Above them, a chandelier of orange LED strips bathed the women in a warm hue.
The woman remained still as Camryn carefully approached her. She was also wearing an ocular projector that was rapidly flashing red light across the surface of her eyes. It wasn’t clear whether she had even seen Camryn enter the room behind the barrage of information being displayed at frenetic speeds in front of her.
“Are you… Roze?” Camryn asked hesitantly, breaking the silence.
“No, I am not,” she responded with a friendly laugh. “But I am one of their proxies.”
Camryn noticed the regular flash of orange light from an implant in the woman’s left collarbone. She wondered whether it was a data uplink streaming information to the hacker’s actual location, or an explosive insurance policy in the event of a deal gone bad—or perhaps, more realistically, both.
“How can Roze be of service to you?” the proxy asked with a patient smile.
“I need their help,” Camryn replied. “There’s a program I need them to modify.”
The proxy laughed again. “Program modification is an extremely difficult procedure—but for the right price, anything is possible.” She extended a hand expectantly towards Camryn, who duly rummaged through the pockets of her coat and dug out two plastic cards.
“50,000 credits… and my identity data.” She placed the two cards in the proxy’s hand.
“Selling your identity to a hacker?” the proxy noted, still smiling as she traced her fingers over the cards, reading their digital contents. Her eyes darted as she validated their legitimacy. “You must be truly desperate,” she muttered.
“If this works, then I won’t need my identity anymore.”
#
“Do you have any questions before we initiate this sensory immersion experience, or SIX?” the bored medical attendant asked Camryn, staring down at his handheld tablet. She was lying in a dark, shallow basin in a white gown, partially submerged in a clear liquid. Intravenous plastic tubes connected her to the basin’s plastic shell.
The SIX basin lay between rows and rows of identical basins in a large, sterile warehouse. The machines hummed quietly in unison, displaying their occupants’ heart rate, oxygen levels and the remaining duration of their program whilst keeping them sound asleep. Some had only a few hours remaining, but others weren’t scheduled to exit their programs for several weeks or months.
“No, I’ve done a few before,” she replied.
“OK, great,” the attendant sighed, ticking boxes on the tablet. “Once the lid shuts, you’ll be fully immobilised for the duration of your selected SIX, which is…” he paused, checking the readout from the machine. “336 hours, or two weeks, right?” Camryn nodded.
“During that time the machine will keep you fed, hydrated and clean of any waste. Once the SIX ends, you’ll slowly regain control of your body and the lid will reopen after a few minutes,” he recited. “Any last questions?”
“No, thanks.”
“Great. See you in two weeks,” he said as the lid of the basin slowly lowered shut. Camryn was plunged into darkness.
#
Camryn walked into the arrivals hall of the airport with a small suitcase gliding silently behind her. The rising sun caught her face through the terminal’s high glass walls, radiating gentle warmth that she welcomed after the artificial coolness of the air-conditioned plane. She stretched out her arms, feeling herself relax for the first time in a very long while.
Someone covered her eyes with their hands from behind. “Guess who!” they shouted, their laughs echoing loudly across the arrivals hall.
“Uh… is it… Jenny from Crash Back?” Camryn replied with fake confusion, already smiling uncontrollably.
“Fuck yeah, it is!” Jenny spun Camryn around and scooped her up into an intense hug. “It’s so nice to see you again Cam!” she continued. Jenny’s bandmates joined in the hug, their leather jackets and ripped denim jeans pushing against her skin.
“I know, I know, I missed you guys so fucking much,” Camryn laughed as she felt tears run across her cheeks.
“OK, OK, seriously though,” Jenny interrupted, grabbing Camryn by the shoulders and looking her directly in the eyes. “Cam—are you ready for the best two-week road trip of your entire fucking life?”
“Fuck yeah!” Camryn screamed for the entire airport to hear.
“Then what are we waiting for, huh?” Jenny asked, grinning as she took Camryn’s hand and led her running towards the exit of the arrivals hall. Together, they piled into Crash Back’s famously unreliable old tour bus and careened out of the airport car park, laughing all the way.
#
“It’s a sensory immersion experience—a SIX, you know?” Camryn told the proxy.
“Roze is very familiar with the architecture of SIX machines,” the proxy nodded. “But what kind of modifications to their systems do you desire?”
“I have a specification,” Camryn retrieved another card from her pocket. “These are the subroutines that need to be modified and the code that needs to be injected into the main control loop. I also need some changes made to the LSU interface.”
“You’ve certainly done your homework,” the proxy smiled, taking the card from her hands and scanning it with her fingers. Camryn wasn’t sure whether the comment was made by Roze or the proxy herself. Her smile widened as the schematics and code snippets streamed into her eyes. She studied them intently, eyes searching through the documents, as she slowly pieced together the purpose of the modifications.
“This is… fascinating,” she observed, her smile subtly broadening.
#
“See you in two weeks.”
The medical attendant watched as the lid of the SIX machine was lowered over the young woman’s body. The magnetic clamps locked into place with a slight hiss as the airtight seal of the machine formed, completely separating it from the outside world. The display in the centre of the lid activated with a small chime, tracking her vital signs as the life support unit kicked in. The attendant noted down the details—all perfectly fine, though the occupant’s heart rate looked a little higher than normal.
As the attendant took down the figures onto his tablet, he noticed the display of the machine flicker to a different output: a video of the person he had sealed into the machine. Intrigued, he drew closer to the display.
“My name is Camryn Jones,” the woman on the video said in a clear yet somewhat unsteady tone, “and if you can see or hear me then I have just entered an SIX from which I will never leave.” The attendant stared on in bewilderment.
“The SIX that I’m currently in has been modified: its time limit has been removed and all emergency intervention mechanisms have been disabled. If you attempt to open the machine or disrupt the program, the system has been primed to immediately inject a fatal dose of chemicals directly into my bloodstream, killing me. In other words, terminating this program or trying to remove me from the machine would be murder.”
“I want my family and friends to know that I love them and that I’m sorry, I really am,” Camryn continued, more emotionally and tearfully than in the earlier, carefully scripted parts of her recording, “but there’s nothing left in the real world for me anymore. I just want to spend the rest of my life with the people I really care about, away from… everything else. Please… if you respect my autonomy, or my rights, or whatever—just leave me here and let me be happy. That’s all I want—to be happy with the people I love for the rest of my life. Thanks, and goodbye.”
The video paused for a moment, then restarted itself from the beginning. “My name is Camryn Jones,” it repeated as the medical attendant reached down to his waist and picked up his communicator.
“Boss? I think we’ve got a problem.”
#
“And you intend to spend the rest of your lifetime in this machine?” the proxy remarked inquisitively.
“Yeah. Why, is there a problem?”
“No, not at all,” the proxy continued, deep in thought. “I wonder, though, what could drive an intelligent young person like yourself to attempt such a thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“This is not a risk-free endeavour. These modifications are non-trivial and I assume you haven’t had the opportunity to test them out yourself. You’re playing with your life. Are you sure that you want to go ahead with this?”
“I mean… have you looked outside?” Camryn snapped. “The air is toxic, the sea is dead. You can barely even see the sun anymore. Everyone’s been at war with each other for decades, even if they don’t want to admit it. And you’re asking me why I’d rather live in a SIX instead of the real world? Wouldn’t you?”
The proxy didn’t reply, so Camryn continued. “Or maybe you and Roze are so stuck in your augmented reality interfaces that you can’t even see that the world is fucked. You’re like the chem junkies in the club.”
“I’ll tell you what I can see,” the proxy retorted with unexpected vitriol. “I see someone exchanging a perfectly privileged life in the real world to indulge in a deluded fantasy of living together with people that don’t know or care that she exists.”
“That’s not true!” Camryn shouted. “They do care! And it’s not a fantasy, it’s real to me!”
The proxy remained silent.
“Let us return to business,” the proxy cautioned calmly after an additional pause. “It seems clear that you’ve made up your mind.”
“Yeah, I know, I’m sorry,” Camryn murmured, avoiding eye contact. “It took me a long time to convince myself I wasn’t crazy for wanting this. Fuck knows if I’m right. All I know is that the only times I’ve felt alive are with Jenny and the band in the SIX machine. All I want to do is live that life. Is that wrong?”
#
The days passed in a blur of excitement and laughter. The band’s songs, the endlessly looping music that now formed the soundtrack of her new life, had never sounded as real as they did now. In a mirage of overlapping memories, Camryn sang along with the band in their tour van—then, she swam with them in a lake surrounded by lush green forests—then, she stood through the van’s sunroof as it drove at top speed, feeling the desert wind rushing across her hair.
“Hey Cam, you ok?” Jenny asked. Camryn jumped, suddenly woken from her thoughts, as she sat in the dust with her back leaning against the parked van. The stars lit up the clear night sky in ways she had never seen in the real world, only old photographs and paintings. The remains of a campfire smouldered in the dirt.
“Yeah, sorry, I was just thinking…” she smiled, staring into the distance. “Nah, it doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, come on, don’t give me that. I’ve got ways of making you talk! Let me get you a drink.” Jenny laughed, selecting and opening two beer bottles from a cooler. Camryn smiled and took a bottle, but said nothing.
“Come on. What’s on your mind?” Jenny asked more seriously, sitting down next to her at the roadside.
Camryn took a deep breath. “Do you… love your fans, Jenny?” she asked.
#
The proxy cocked her head to one side suddenly.
“Wait… something is not right,” her eyes darted between the documents and code snippets, her focus narrowing. Camryn gulped.
“There is an additional procedure hidden within these modifications,” the proxy concluded, her eyes piercing straight through the visuals in her eyes and staring directly at Camryn. “You will explain this to Roze. Immediately.”
“OK, OK,” Camryn stuttered, “I’m sorry, I just— there was another modification I wanted to make, but I didn’t want to have to explain it, that’s all.”
“This procedure,” the proxy remarked, suddenly more curious than angry, “it disables the sexual safeguards of the program, doesn’t it? Allows the constructs to operate within adult parameters?”
Camryn nodded, her face coloured with shame.
#
“Yeah, of course I do! We’re nothing without you guys,” Jenny laughed, taking a swig from her bottle.
“Really, though,” Camryn continued, “Do you really love us?”
Jenny paused. “I don’t really know. It’s complicated, yeah?”
They sat in silence for a few more moments, starting at the horizon.
“It’s just…” Camryn started, “When you came out—about being into women, I mean—it meant so much to me.”
“Yeah? That’s great!” Jenny laughed.
“The way you were so confident about it, how you didn’t give a fuck what people thought of you for who you were… listening to you say those things, it was the first time I felt comfortable with who I was.”
“And rightfully so,” Jenny joked, elbowing Camryn in the ribs. They laughed. A few more quiet moments passed before Camryn spoke up again.
“At that time in my life,” she continued, “things were… difficult for me. It felt like you were the only person that understood me, who I was and what I was feeling, even though we had never met before.”
Camryn paused. Jenny maintained a subtle smile, waiting for her to finish.
“And eventually I realised, the truth was, I didn’t just love you anymore. I was in love with you.”
There was another long pause. Eventually, Jenny asked, “What do you mean by that?”
Camryn thought of all the things she could say to Jenny, all the explanations she could possibly give for the way that she felt, all the words she could use to describe the emotions that she had harboured and treasured and suppressed and been consumed by for so many years of her life—but nothing materialised. So she gave up.
“Disable sexual safeguards,” she murmured, turning her face away.
A few moments later, she felt something brush against her chin. It was Jenny’s hand, turning her head back to hers. For a few seconds, they waited, analysing each other as though meeting again for the first time.
Then they kissed, passionately.
#
The rocking of the van woke Camryn as it snaked down a main road. The sunlight cut across her body, sprawled across the back seat. She groaned and pulled herself upright.
“Hey, you’re awake,” Jenny called out from the driver’s seat as she approached.
“Yeah, sorry, I must have overslept…” Camryn muttered, staring out of the van’s windows to try to work out where they were.
“It’s alright—we’ve almost arrived,” Jenny smiled somberly. Camryn stared back, puzzled.
“What do you mean? Arrived where?”
#
“And there are no other hidden procedures in your requested modifications?”
“No, I swear,” Camryn replied desperately.
The proxy sat patiently for a few moments more, then suddenly relaxed.
“Roze has completed your request,” she said, pocketing Camryn’s payment and identity cards.
“What? Already?” Camryn asked in disbelief.
“You will find full details of the procedure and proof of work on this memory card.” She pulled a new card from her arm and held it out for Camryn to take.
“Everything I set out? It’s all been done correctly?”
“Yes,” the proxy replied impatiently, “exactly to your specification.”
Camryn cautiously took the card.
“You seem doubtful,” the proxy observed.
“No, I guess I just didn’t expect it to be done so quickly.”
The proxy shrugged. “Roze is efficient, and your wish is their command.”
Camryn stared at the memory card in her palm, unsure what to say. Then, silently, she turned away from the proxy.
“Just be careful what you wish for, yes?” the proxy laughed softly as Camryn marched back through the curtain.
#
“But I don’t understand, why are we here?” Camryn asked as they walked into the airport terminal—the exact same airport terminal that she had arrived in two weeks earlier.
“You know how much we’d love to stick around and keep doing this,” Jenny smiled, taking Camryn’s hand. “But we need to get back to work—we’ve got a new album to write, music to record, gigs to play, you know?”
Camryn shook her head, standing still and pulling on Jenny’s arm. “No, you don’t, not in this program,” she cried defiantly, as though she could somehow convince this artificial representation of Jenny to change her mind. “We can keep going, forever.”
“What about you, though?” Jenny smiled patiently. Camryn stared at her with a look of complete betrayal. Jenny continued as though she hadn’t noticed.
“You’ve got your own life to live. You’ve got your friends, your parents, your family, they all need you. Yeah, work sucks, but it’s still your life to lead, to do whatever you want with—and we’ll be with you every step of the way, through our music and merchandise!”
“But I know what I want!” Camryn shouted, “I want to stay here, with you guys! Forever!” She pulled on Jenny’s arm again, to no effect.
“I love you, Cam,” she said with as much sincerity as her algorithms could muster, “like I love all my fans.”
“No…” Camryn stuttered in disbelief, shaking her head.
“And I’ll be here, waiting for you, whenever you’re ready to come back.”
The other band members nodded in agreement.
“We’ll do it all again. We’ll sing our songs in the back of the van, we’ll go swimming in lakes, we’ll drive through the deserts and have drinks over a campfire.”
Tears fell uncontrollably from Camryn’s eyes.
“We can’t wait to see you again,” Jenny smiled innocently.
The band gathered around Camryn for a group hug, who, terrified and in a state of shock, clutched onto Jenny’s body as though it were a ship’s mast in a storm.
“Please,” she begged, tearfully, “don’t make me go back. Don’t leave me, I can’t go back. There’s nothing… I’m nothing… I can’t—”
She lifted her head and saw that the ornate glass walls of the airport terminal were already fracturing and dissolving away into nothingness. She gasped in fear and gripped Jenny’s body even tighter, burying her face into Jenny’s shoulder.
Jenny remained motionless and silent. The other band members and the other passengers at the airport stood similarly frozen in their tracks. The ceiling of the airport eroded away as sections of the floor fell apart into complete darkness.
After a few seconds, Camryn, Jenny and the rest of the band were the only people left. One by one, Camryn felt the grip of the other band members on her body fade away until it was only her and Jenny’s lifeless mannequin. Camryn cried out in pain as Jenny’s body gradually began to erode away too, until eventually, she was left as the sole entity occupying the endless void.
But the program didn’t end.
Camryn realised that when she looked down she could no longer see the rest of her body. In a panic, she lifted her hands to touch her face—only to feel them pass into the space where her face should have been.
“Exit program,” Camryn blubbered in a panic, but nothing happened. “Exit program! Exit program!” she shouted louder, only to realise she could no longer hear her own words when she spoke. She couldn’t even feel her voice vibrating in her throat.
“Let me out!” she tried to shout, though no one could hear her—not even herself. “Please, oh my God, someone let me out!”
Her preconception vanished. She couldn’t tell if she was falling or flying through the void, or whether she was completely still. The space around her felt like it was freezing and boiling her at the same time. She felt the bodily urge to breathe, but there were no muscles left to engage in her diaphragm.
“Open the machine! Please! Open it and get me out of here!”
But her screams were left unanswered. Nobody came to retrieve her from the machine. And so, she screamed again, and again, and again. Her new life was just beginning.
Alistair Robinson (any/all) is a writer crafting stories at the confluence of science, technology, philosophy and humanity. You can find their work at alistairrobinson.substack.com