The Unincorporated Man (40 page)

Justin had started this crystal upset that he was not exploring Atlantis, or building a pyramid. But by the end of the day he was profoundly happy to be experiencing this man’s life. Maybe the VR machine was influencing his hormone levels, or maybe it was something as simple as his never really having had a chance to start a family—his wife’s tragedy had seen to that. It didn’t matter. Preston, Justin realized, was smart to have put his wife and children first. At that moment Justin would have traded his billions to have what Preston had. Because no one had ever looked at Justin, he thought sadly to himself, the way “his” children now did. The days flew by filled with friends, family, and meaningful work. He discovered that Cord Industries had broken up, and that the part Preston worked for was now owned by the European conglomerate Deutsche Telekom. He spent a while cursing Sebastian after that little piece of news. The old office was physically still like he remembered it, but it was more or less staid. The driving energy he’d spent years encouraging was now gone—replaced by competent complacency. But Preston didn’t seem to mind as it gave him more time to spend with his family, and so, in the end, neither did Justin.

It seemed like months flew by. The birth of Justin’s first child/Preston’s third was something that at least one of them would never forget. Then, two months after the birth, “it” began.

“Honey,” Preston called out in a voice that would never command men in battle, “are you feeling up to a trip to the mall?”

“Are you kidding me?” his wife responded. “The mall or a house full of screaming kids? Call the sitter. We’re mall-bound.”

The trip saw the two of them visiting the same shopping center Justin had walked through in his initial entrance to the VR museum. Glittering trestles and walkways connected to other malls and shopping centers nearby to form a sort of Oz-like city devoted to manic shopping. After two hours of walking this pantheon of shopping splendor, Justin started to get the same tired, played-out feeling all malls engender when the eyes grow weary from one too many BIG SALE! signs. The only thing of interest was the story unfolding with Justin/Preston and his wife. They went into the same VR store Justin had visited…
how long ago?
. . . and paid a week’s salary for his wife and him to have an adventure. Only after Preston’s wife heard there was a money-back guarantee did she agree to the trip. Justin, through Preston’s eyes, saw his wife put the same calibration unit on her head, sit in the same recliner he’d sat down in, and blank out pretty much the way he probably had. Except for her breathing, and that was very, very shallow, Justin could have sworn she was dead.

Is that what I look like?
he thought.

Justin as Preston went through the VR process… again.

So
, Justin wondered,
I’m in a VR simulation, going into another VR simulation. This could get confusing
. He leaned back down into the recliner, had the array once more placed upon his head, and once more, the world went dark.

This time Justin/Preston was a bigger, more commanding version of himself, now dressed in expensive Victorian day clothes. He was traveling with his wealthy wife and companion. They were in a train car together.

So two people can experience the same VR simultaneously. That makes it very interesting
, thought Justin. He had an image of himself and Neela experiencing some VR that was definitely not G-rated. He left that thought as he began to appreciate just how well the programmers of this crystal did in setting up the backstory. There was an April 11, 1912, copy of the London
Times
with a front-page, below-the-bend story on Preston and his wife. According to the paper they were a wealthy and well-traveled couple who had a romantic reputation as explorers. They’d even written a travelogue of their adventures that made them sound like Mr. and Mrs. Indiana Jones. But the real shocker was that they had passports, documents, and tickets to set sail on, of all ships, the RMS
Titanic
. Preston and his wife had a debate about whether to go on the doomed vessel. They soon decided the ship would not sink in a VR fantasy and spent the rest of the time being amazed by how real the simulation was. As far as they were concerned, this was reality. They used their precious and well-paid-for time trying out everything. Preston’s wife was amazed that her body was near perfect for adventuring, Olympic gymnastics, and general fooling around. Preston, though not a muscle-bound clod, was certainly as finely cut as a human body could get. By the time the train pulled into the station they both agreed that this fantasy was already worth a week’s salary.

It only got better.

The station, the port, the press taking their picture as they arrived, the other guests, and of course the first-class accommodations—all of it was spectacular. They were living the world of the
Titanic
. And when the infamous night of April 14 arrived they made sure to stay up… just in case.

They hit the iceberg.

And what should have been a disaster turned out to be the best part of the whole adventure. Within minutes of the episode they were found by a terrified purser, who informed them that the captain wished to see them at once. It seemed that their status as world-famous adventurers earned them the untimely audience. Only instead of the meeting ending in confusion and halfhearted attempts, ultimately leading to tragedy like the real story, this meeting took a different course. This time Preston took charge. He gave Captain Smith a semiprivate, heart-to-heart talk, in which he told him it was his responsibility to get as many passengers to New York as was humanly possible. Even if that meant ripping planks from the deck with his bare hands, tying them together with his intestines, and then kicking the rafts into the cold, dark, unmoving ocean himself. Preston/Justin had no idea if this “damn the torpedoes” approach would have worked in real life, but it seemed to work in this one, as it got the captain out of his fatal funk. Now the captain gave firm orders to the crew to see that all the passengers were escorted to the boat deck. All boats were to leave with the maximum number of passengers, with places at the oars to be given to husbands, and in all other cases women and children first. With the chain of command fully working, the boats were readied, filled, and set afloat. But the amazing part of the adventure was when Preston and his wife got the ship’s architect to stop feeling sorry for himself and start thinking of creative ways to build rafts in a hurry.

The highlight for Justin/Preston was the gathering of all the men on deck and a speech that was part marine sergeant and part
Henry V
. The oratory was filled with everything from “Yes, some of us might not make it tonight” to “We have a chance if we work together” to “The millionaire is putting up all the survivors in his hotel free of charge for a week.” It was magic. The men ripped up planks, tore fire hoses into cording, grabbed doors, tables, and floatable luggage, and made the most motley, harebrained rafts the world had ever seen. If the sea were not so smooth it would never have worked. But this time it did. Because as the bow of the ship started to slip under the water, the deck, now filled with makeshift rafts, simply acted as a platform that allowed the rafts to float away with hundreds of passengers safely on board. The rich and poor worked together, as a spirit of “screw the iceberg” set in. And when Captain Smith insisted on going down with the ship, Preston punched him in front of his officers and told them to put him in a boat. He quickly explained that a captain’s first duty was to his passengers, and second to his ship. Since there were now thousands of passengers in need of a captain’s experience at sea, his death would have been in vain. He told the still stunned officers that all the oared boats should gather all the rafts together. They agreed, and even more lives were saved. Still, wondered Justin, if it was not a VR simulation, would it have worked? Who cared? It was great.

The next day the rescue ships found the sea afloat with the singing survivors of the
Titanic
. Only thirty men had lost their lives—almost all in acts of heroism—and not a single woman, child, or husband was lost. When the survivors finally did arrive in New York it was to a ticker-tape parade the likes of which the world had never seen. The celebrations were astounding, and Preston and his wife were the heroes of the century. What had been a tragedy in real life was made into a triumph of the human will to survive, with all the rich men pledging the money to build a newer, bigger, better
Titanic
, and let nature damn well try to sink that.

When the adventure ended, the couple left the VR store in absolute awe. They both agreed that it had far and away been the most thrilling, exciting, life-affirming adventure imaginable. Before they even stepped out of the VR center they were already making plans for their next trip in.

Justin found himself slipping forward now, not experiencing every moment but being brought to specific points in the life of Preston Sinclair. Over the next two years the couple managed three more adventures. Each one was more grand and exciting than the next. And though Justin was having fun, it was always with a grain of salt. Because he was always on the lookout for the red flag that would mark the supposed end of civilization as he knew it. But nothing showed up. In fact, everything he’d seen and experienced was just a series of romps into pure, unadulterated fun.

He also watched in interest as good engineering and fundamental breakthroughs had quickly brought down the prices of the VR machines themselves. He saw that the first home-use VR units cost fifty thousand dollars. In a year they were down to twenty thousand, and two years after that, three thousand. Justin/Preston didn’t wait that long to buy his family one.

At first the machine delivered in spades. The family went on tours of the pyramids
as they were being built
and family vacations to Mercury
without suits
. But what was nice was having the children taught applied science by Einstein, gravity by Newton, and literature by Shakespeare, who, incidentally, took the children to see one of his plays in Elizabethan London. It didn’t take long for Preston to put his kids on the new short-day plan, in which they only went to
real
school two hours a day for PE and other group events, and had the VR handle all the academics. After all, the kids could share a classroom in VR with children from all over the world, experience multiculturalism,
and
get a superior education to boot.

The Sinclairs failed to notice that they were drifting out of their friends’ lives, and their friends out of theirs. Occasionally they’d meet at work or in the store and make plans, but it almost never worked out. The VR was always,
always
more fun. Within a year VR became the only source of entertainment of any import for Preston and his family, and when the price of a machine hit five hundred dollars, it became the only source of entertainment for practically every family in the first world. The real miracle, Justin realized, was not so much that Preston and his wife brought to term their fourth child, but that they managed to find time to conceive at all. He was a child they both loved, but unfortunately, being the fourth as well as being especially needy, put the newborn in direct competition with Einstein, Newton, Shakespeare, and the continuing adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Indiana Jones.

And that’s when the first red flag showed up.

The family stopped eating meals together. Not that one could place the blame for that malady squarely on the shoulders of enhanced VR.
The lack of shared meals
, sighed Justin,
was a sad fact long before people were adventuring into realms of home-based VR
. No, the real red flag was the fact that the family stopped eating meals—in the real sense of the word. Why bother to eat real food when all the food in the VR tasted better, never made you fat or sick, and was always what you wanted? So Justin watched as the Sinclairs began to snack on inexpensive, prepared nutrition bars and drink just enough water so that they could jump back into their recliners, sit back, fade out, and head for their next great quest.

What happened next should have been obvious. Or, at least, it should have been obvious to Justin. However, he was so invested in “his” family’s slow, downward spiral that he failed to notice.

The world’s economy collapsed.

There were a number of dynamics at play, chief of which was the fact that a vast amount of the world’s GDP was driven by entertainment and advertising—both of which had been wiped out by the advent of cheaper and better VR. Why go to a movie, take a cruise, visit a museum or an amusement park when VR could do it not only better, but for free? Within three years tourism, a main cash cow for third-world countries, was all but dead, and as a result much of that world was on the brink of starvation. More amazing was that no one in the first world bothered to notice or, if they did, seemed to care. Because what did it matter that one half of the world was starving or, perhaps, even closer to home, that the house was foreclosed on, or that someone had their car repossessed? So they couldn’t buy new clothes or eat in fancy restaurants. All their problems were simply a VR rig away from disappearing. And regarding advertising—advertise what and to whom? Brain-drained bodies lying comatose on recliners? Initially, the VR revolution was a boon to advertisers. After all, they had a captive audience and could deliver the goods however they imagined. But that only worked as long as the people doing the “experiencing” bothered to leave the VR rig. When the incentive to stay in the rig was greater than the incentive to leave it, advertising took a nosedive, and with it a significant portion of the economy.

Young couples were packing up their meager belongings and moving back in with Mom and Dad or, in many cases, joining cheap communal apartments. Thrift stores did a bang-up business, and pasta manufacturers were bringing home the bacon, as spaghetti became the meal du jour for all seven days of the week. In VR you ate steak and lobster and lived in a palace and had sex with the most beautiful men and women imaginable. It was all that mattered.