“I love you daddy.” they whisper, a little hand curled against my collar.
We all sit round a table and say our prayers. We bless the God of this world for the food we are about to eat, tracing its supply chain across eight different countries until being delivered onto our plateware. I hit the vape then we begin to eat.
Later. I sit by a globe with a dull light inside. It is a map of the Earth. I am reading stories to my two sleeping children and catch my own reflection in a mirror. I stare back.
Night time, lying on the bed, light from the ensuite slicing across the bed, across my feet.
“What time are you getting up tomorrow?”
“Seven.”
“Make it half seven and now we’re talking.” she said. My intelligent, beautiful, angelic wife had said something to me, had graced my presence through not only acknowledgement, but an order. I nod, again and again, I nod.
“You’re right, you’re right.” I keep repeating until I lie in bed and pretend to go to sleep. The lights go out.
And then, there is no-one.
Somewhere there is a click.
A man steps forward.
“Welcome to the family experience.” he says, holding out a QR code on a pamphlet.
“You mean, none of that was real?”
“It’s a digital illusion experience, cutting edge tech. You fuck with it?”
“Hell no brother. I’m all about authenticity. That virtual family stuff is like being in The Sims, nobody would ever do that.” I say, ripping the electrodes from my muscular body.
“We already sold a billion units. They are saying this is the ultimate game, you get a digital family and have to raise them into adults that can pay for your retirement.”
“Stop trying to sell it to me. Because I ain’t buying.” I says, hitting the vape.
“Like you got a choice.” He says. And we run towards each other and begin to fight.
I leave the stairway, catching my breath against the frame of a door. It had been a rough evening, I was ready to go home to my family and eat mushroom burritos. As I climbed into my Cybertruck and started the ignition I realised. I had no family. I was just a freelance reporter for multiple media conglomerates, writing for everyone from BBC News to Vice Magazine. I was a hot shot journalist, I turned down every award I was offered, but I was at the centre of every major news story you’ve ever heard of. I guess you could say I’m kind of a big fricking deal, so when these pencil pushers try and overtake my mind with experimental drugs and virtual reality, let’s just say they’ll never work in this town again.
Don’t they know who I am?
Sometimes I walk into a shop and they don’t give me a glass of water. Sometimes I walk down the street and the story goes;
“Hey, I recognise you.”
“Ah, have you seen Saturday Night Live?”
“Haha, what? Sure thing!”
“Then get the hell out of my bloody way.” I would scream through gritted teeth.
Sometimes, the pressure of being one of the worlds best ever journalists can get to me. People say to me, I have imposter syndrome, and so I say back to them, what does that even mean? Unfortunately I don’t know. I feel like I deserve the glory that is owed to me because some weeks I work more than forty hours. Sometimes even at weekends. I give up a lot of my own time to report on the hardest hitting stories of our lifetimes. Yet there I was, smoking ketamine and playing a family videogame, thinking; is this good actually? Why not. It is difficult to say if some of us are better off existing in a videogame, but its not too bad of a deal when you think about it.
Thanks for reading, remember to subscribe to the news. Go to a guy on the corner handing out newspapers and throw him a nickel, straighten the paper out with a flick of the hands and see a photo of a person opening a newspaper and on that page there is a person opening a newspaper and on that page there is a person opening a newspaper and so on.
