Stories (Play to Live World) by D. Rus
Author:D. Rus
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Sword & Sorcery, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Epic, One Hour (33-43 Pages), Literature & Fiction
Published: 2015-11-04T05:00:00+00:00
* * *
Doc hurriedly walked through the reverberating, half-empty corridors of the hospice. Despite the gravity of the situation, an occasional smile shined through his wrinkled, preoccupied face.
The nurses jumped out of his wayâhe looked like a murderous maniac in their eyes. At the facility, their numbers had dropped by two-thirds in a matter of weeks. The morgue refrigerator compartments had turned into frightening, tightly-packed communal cells.
A childâs consciousness easily went perma, eagerly grasping at the chance. Their bodies, marred by disease and having only clung to life by a childish belief in their own immortality, took their last breath with relief and let go forever.
An evil eye flashed from the cracked door of the deputyâs office. There he was, the snake in the grass. The medical community was like thatâyou made your bed and then you had to lie in it. There were plenty of others eager to take your place, though Doc wasnât holding onto his current position. If it was up to him, he would have left a long time ago, having hanged himself or taken to drink. The only thing that stopped him were the hundreds of hopeful children. The dream wasnât when you were carrying another body in your arms to the morgue every third day, walking like Death through the promptly deserted corridors, but when you stood by the hospice gates waving at the happy parents as they drove their miraculously-recovered child home.
The dream was beautiful, but reality was a bitch and justified the nightly cognac and a stream of desomorphine through his vein. In Docâs personal cemetery, the wind flowed between twelve thousand gravestones, each of which he remembered by name. How the hell do you live with that?
He didnât know. Weighed down by an unbearable burden, Doc entered a sharp dive out of which only a miracle could helpâone that had, at first, been obscured by misfortune.
The only joy in life was his beloved daughter Lena, who with all her girlish zeal surrendered to this new trendâvirtual worlds. Her parents even exhausted their budget giving their child a top-of-the-line capsule, the âiVirt 4â complete with all the bells and whistles. It weighed forty pounds lighter than the previous model; full immersion speed was a record four seconds; and the promised depth and breadth of the sense spectrum was advertised as â114% of realityâ. Plus, there was a flexible array of accessories and plug-in modules.
It was in one of the expansion slots that Lena had shoved a hacked controller chip that she had bought from a street peddler. The chip blocked the limit on the amount of time one could spend in full immersion, which had been introduced by the Ministry of Health. Taking advantage of her parentsâ trip to the dacha, the girl had spent thirty-two hours in her favorite game during her very first weekend. Where and with whom she had slept in this magical world of sword and sorcery had remained unknown, given that the compromised chip had cut off not only the manufacturerâs built-in restrictions but also the parental control functions.
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