The smell of pine drifted as I walked back to the cabin, and I enjoyed the dappled light and the way my shoes settled in to the pine needles. The sunlight was beginning to feel warm after what had been a hard winter, but the flies and mosquitoes of summer were not yet awake. I listened to the gentle rumble of the trees and the rhythm of a nearby woodpecker, with birdsong always around me. There was work to do of course, and in the spring that meant repairing the damage done during the winter. Shingles would need replaced, traps and lures would need maintained, and a thousand other small tasks would emerge from the first inspection of my own little domain. These thoughts occupied my mind as I neared home, and though there were one or two difficulties I was without a care in the world. I reached the clearing around my cabin and saw the administrator walking towards me from the right hand side. She was dressed in harsh white, standing out against the mottled background of the forest. A panic settled deep in my chest, and I resisted the urge to run. “Good morning sir.” she said. The way her hair was neatly plastered to her head reminded me of where I was going. She looked so false standing there, unmoved by the forest and the blue sky and the cabin I had built with my own hands. “Have you enjoyed your Experience?” “I’m going to stay here for a spell.” I said. I had almost forgotten that this would happen. “I’m sorry sir, but you’ve reached the safe limit for time spent in an Experience.” “Like hell I have, I feel fine. I’ll sign what I need to.” I knew what was coming, they think they can do whatever they want once you’ve signed and paid. My work, my home, gone – they tell you that you can come back here but it’s never the same. “That isn’t an option for us right now,” she said “you have reached the safe upper limit of three years. I’m going to place my hand on your shoulder; you’ll wake up and will be helped by one of our customer care administrators.”
I woke up to the smell of disinfectant. I could hear an electric buzz but nothing else, the air felt stale and lifeless. “Welcome back sir.” I tried to reply but a headache kept my mouth shut, and when I lifted my hands I found they were strapped to the sides of the bed. “You’re still restrained sir. The headaches will go away in the next minute or so, and once you’re safely back with us I’ll undo the straps.” I opened my eyes and I was back in one of the sterile rooms they keep you in while you’re gone. The synthetic administrator sitting beside me looked close enough to a real person to give you the creeps. It had a vacant smile and was pointing its face at me. “I’m fine, how long was I under for?” “Your Experience lasted for seven minutes sir. It is now 1203 on Tuesday the fourth of April. I have your return information pack ready for you to review.” Seven minutes, but I could barely remember coming to this place. The review pack was there to remind me of what I was doing before I went under, and I definitely needed it. My mind was in the forest and the thought of going back to lattes and social media sickened me. As the administrator began to undo the restraining straps I could have cried with the grief of losing that simple life. I looked down to see a body I didn’t recognise. I was wearing stiff clean clothes and had soft, pale skin untouched by the sun. Gone were the hard, efficient muscles of my natural life. There were no cuts or scars on my hands here and my arms and gut were soft and useless. “You have access to this room for a further five minutes sir, you may use this to read over your return information pack.” The synth left me alone to remember a life I’d spent three years doing my best to forget. The first line of the review pack brought another wave of depression. Jackie thinks you’re going to the gym, and will expect you back by one o’clock. You need to pick up something for dinner on your way home; on Tuesdays you usually eat Indian food. It was so mundane it felt like a punch to the chest. The rest of the pack set out a detailed description of the small things we filled our life with. Dinner with friends I barely knew, trips to cities we’d already been to, exercise classes to keep our useless bodies alive longer. Nothing was productive. Try to do anything for yourself and a synth will do it better and without asking you; we had engineered ourselves in to a complete and efficient obsolescence. I stepped out of the building on to a street that hadn’t changed since I left 14 minutes before. Shining cars passed with a smooth whirring sound, people walked by in garish clothes and competed to look happier than one another. There were no smells, and I felt overwhelmed as much by their absence as by the onslaught of sharp angles and hard noises coming from the real world. The odd tree was planted to bring a taste of nature in to the city, but even they were so heavily managed as to look unnatural and fake. The limbs were heavy with flowers that lacked perfume, and no insects or birds flitted around to bring life to them. People walked beneath them on a bed of fallen petals without looking up. I walked in to the nearest store to pick up a bottle of milk. To get a litre of milk in the forest I would have first needed a tame an animal. There were wild pigs and herds of deer, and I imagined there might be goats somewhere. Here I didn’t even have to pay; it had been a long time since anybody paid for food, and even longer since anybody had to work on a farm. Synths had replaced workers, and leisure had replaced currency, and nobody seemed to notice that it took the meaning out. It was getting close to the time I’d need to go back to Jackie, and the stress of it brought a wave of heartburn. She would look at me and see the man who had left her that morning to go to the gym and work off a little of the flab I’d dutifully packed on over the years. Well, I had lost something. The front door came up on me before I wanted it to, and I returned to the place where I lived. “Hey hon, how was the gym? Did you pick up some milk?” Jackie asked me like nothing had happened. I put it away and looked through a few cupboards to find a glass. Everything was so clean and organised and unvalued, if a glass was taken away neither of us would notice. It made it seem like they weren’t there at all until you opened the door, and might well disappear when you closed it again. “John are you alright?” The walls were skirted with wide panels that had an even grain, I’d never noticed that before. It had grown fast, the summers shown by the boards were long, and the winters barely registered. I hoped they were old enough that the wood was from a forest, but the straight grain had no knots to tell me about the branches it used to carry. “John what the hell?” Jackie asked, her eyebrows were drawn down low. It made me wonder what she was so mad at. “Have you ever noticed all of the wood in this house is synthetic?” I asked. She looked at me without replying. “You can tell because there are no knots, did you know the knots are where a branch used to be? Can you still call it a tree if it has no branches?” “What are you talking about?” She asks. “Nothing. I got the milk, how has your morning been?” I asked as I tried to find the cupboard we kept the beers in.