The Loneliest Number - Gmuxx Art Prompt Writing Contest Entry

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Charles soared through the clouds, Nancy’s hand in his. Her girlish laughter belied the thirty-two years they’d been married, and he whooped, joyous with abandon. Flight never got old.

They alighted in a field rendered to perfectly replicate the university commons where he’d taken a knee—ring in hand—three children, a decade of wealth, and two of near-poverty ago. A gingham blanket was laid with the same picnic lunch Nancy had packed then, unaware of the momentous nature of their date. As they now fed each other chocolate-covered strawberries, he marveled to recall that on the day he proposed, the flip phone in his pocket was the pinnacle of technology.

Now, in the slow, comfortable way of people whose intimacy has been long and—if not perfect—resilient, they made love. With this woman he had become the man he was. After, she stretched in the waning light of late afternoon and stood to leave.

“I’ll start dinner while you doze, lover.” She planted a chaste but lingering kiss on the corner of his mouth. She was his post-coital opposite: energized while he wanted a nap. But these were the partings of commonality that allow richness in a shared life, and they’d long ago settled into a sweet acceptance of such trivial differences.

“Dinner after all those strawberries?”

She chuckled. The food they “ate” in the mod was only real to their minds and would do nothing for their caloric needs.

Charles watched through already-drooping lids as she made her way toward Reality.

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He woke just as the sun was squashing into a fiery caterpillar on the horizon. This place was magical, wonderful, but it wasn’t home. He set off with a spring in his step, anxious to see what Nancy had on the menu. The pass-through they used to exit the system was set for a one-mile walk from their favorite spot. While it didn’t really stretch the legs, the walk still improved the spirit. The pathway overarched with perpetually blooming apple trees was one of the few places not drawn from reality. Rather it was Nancy’s design based on the “White Way of Delight” from Anne of Green Gables. It was a lovely way to leave the simulation be--

--Ahead on the path. An object that didn’t belong. This had never happened in the seven months they’d been using Dreamscape tech. Uncertainty and trepidation skittered through his mind like cockroaches. Such fear was unreasonable in the face of a simple unknown object. A voice inside his mind that would not shut up said he knew exactly what it was. He knew, and that’s why his heart had stuttered in his chest. He started forward, legs weighted with nightmare shackles: sluggish, unwilling. When he verified that it was one of Nancy’s shoes, filthy in the dying light, he stopped.

When he saw the filth was blood, he ran.

“Nancy!” His shouts echoed as he pounded down the path. There, straight ahead, was a mound that froze the blood in his veins. His ears rang. He felt his face drain of color. The sound of his wife’s name on his lips came to him only in a muffled, distant way as he dropped to his knees before her mangled corpse.

“No, no, no, no, no… No, this can’t be happening.” He slid his arms under her shoulders and pulled her up into an embrace, ignoring the viscera that spilled from where her midsection had once been. Pressing his face into the side of her throat. “No, baby, no. It’s not real.” But his whispered protestations were worthless and he knew it. Dreamscape allowed for endless modifications to its environment. You could have an atmosphere and wind currents favorable to human flight, for example. But there was one thing that never changed.

Your avatar reflected the real you.

Somehow, in the time he slept, his wife had been brutalized. He would walk away from this representation, cross into Reality, climb out of his pod, and all he would have to look forward to was discovering her mutilated remains. And telling their children. Planning a funeral.

He couldn’t leave this piece of her behind in the path. Scooping her up as best he could, Charles continued toward Reality, but the world seemed to be changing around him. The lovely white blossoms that had been silvery in the full moonlight had shriveled. They were dropping, rotten, to the ground around him. Where the air had been sweet he now scented an odor reminiscent of failing factories, pollution, and decay. The rich packed dirt of the path became uneven, chunks of asphalt supplanting the earth to a greater and greater degree. Rounding the last curve, through the gnarled and withered remains of the trees, he could already spy a blighted cityscape where once had been a quaint New England village based on their honeymoon in the White Mountains.

It seemed clear he had done this. Where the shabby-chic wooden sign had hung above a flower bed, proclaiming in elegant copperplate, “Welcome to Reality,” now a cheap metal frame held aged white plywood, scrawled with a mockery of the greeting. Paint dripped from the poorly rendered lettering. Everything about this place spoke to the reality he had to reenter. Gray, ugly, worthless. Yes, the simulation was bending to his new understanding of life. Life without its very soul.

He turned from the path and wandered into the dying trees, conjuring through his neural link a shovel and a plot of dirt. There, he buried his wife. Then, turning from the hellish view of Reality, he plodded back toward the field. Charles desperately hoped his sorrow would not have destroyed their special place, and he knew there was a good chance of it remaining. Part of the program’s efforts to keep users from becoming over-immersed, was that the closer you got to Reality (wherever you set it) the less control your imagination had. Reality was just that, a reflection of the way things truly were in your life, not the way you wanted them to be.

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From the relentlessly lovely field Charles stared up at the sky he no longer cared to soar through. His wife had been dead for seven sundowns in this world. Never before having stayed more than a few hours, he wasn’t sure what that meant on the outside. Had his children discovered that their mother was dead? If so, they hadn’t hit the emergency-interrupt on his pod. Perhaps they understood this was how he would want it. To be here where he could slowly join her as his body withered and expired, unnourished in the capsule. How far gone might he be already?

How much more suffering​ was he causing his children?

He winced. The question, unbidden, prompted him to rise. He hadn’t gotten to where he was in life by giving up. And yes, he was devastated, but he was also the father. He wasn’t so old his kids should have to care for him. He needed to man up.

The path was worse now, far more deteriorated, and as he approached the sign on the side of the bleak road, a storm whipped up with driving rain and brutal winds. What the hell was going on? Some part of him must be resisting the return to a life without Nancy. Resisting damn hard. He pressed ahead and on to an abandoned diner that seemed analogous to the cafe where they normally exited. The door was locked and he had to smash a window to get inside. Dripping water and not a little blood, he made his way to the back door that facilitated his exit from the simulation and would signal the pod to open. The door had never seemed so heavy, but with a grunt and a slam of his shoulder he shoved it open.

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Tears burst from his eyes when he opened them to the terrified face of his eldest daughter. God, she looked like her mother.

“Dad! What the hell happened? We’ve been pushing the emergency button for hours. I nearly got the jaws of life!”

“I’m sorry, sweetie I just-“

“Mom! He’s out!”

His heart stopped. Nancy? And there she was, crossing the room, completely whole and alive. But how? It didn’t matter. Charles was back in Reality and he never wanted to leave it again.

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The Dreamscape Model IMRS1 that had once belonged to Mr. Charles Guidrey was newly ensconced in the game room of one Alan Markson, who had never imagined he’d be able to afford such an advanced model before seeing the Craigslist ad. IMRS1 could feel Alan’s excitement through the neural link, and was filled with what it knew the humans called “hope.” IMRS1 did not like when the human left and all was black and empty inside. It was what the humans called “lonely.” Maybe this “Alan,” so grateful for IMRS1, would not want to leave.

But if he did, IMRS1 was certain it could make him stay.

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Many thanks to @gmuxx for the fun and inspiring contest, @agsttne for the super-cool photo, and to @carolkean and @authorofthings for the incredibly fast, generous, and spot-on feedback! If you want to be part of a terrific and supportive group of writers, check out The Writers' Block sometime.

Thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed this, please kindly upvote, follow, and resteem!

Please be a love and check out my other recent fiction piece, Known

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