Beyond Your Years

Day 19 of Flash Fiction February! The Prompt today was about being trapped in a digital paradise where time moves differently.

You want to know about my time in… that place? I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself to say the name again, it was an experience I wish I could forget. I guess I’ll start at the beginning. It was a digital resort; an escape from reality. I don’t really remember arriving, it was so very long ago now. I knew where I was. I am sure I enjoyed all the offerings that were available to me, but one day I realized I had been inside for too long. I know that one of the features of the digital resort was time feeling different inside. While my body was sustained in a pod my mind was living a month every second. I had only purchased three seconds, which felt like a luxurious amount of time.

But as I approached six months, I had a feeling something had gone wrong. The thing about that place is it doesn’t really change. There’s a lot of things to do, but after enough time it runs together. You run out of new things to do, especially if you are the only human in a sea of bots. They only have so many lines of dialogue programmed into them. I kept track of the time for a while, but time blurred together. I don’t even know when I started keeping track of the years instead of days.

I tried to ground myself, to slow down and think about the things that were real to me. Doing so was more than uncomfortable though. It hurt, like trying to fight against a relentless stream by wedging myself on sharp rocks. My sense of identity began to slip. I repeated my name to myself, the names of my partner and kids, my parents, even just people I had known. Do you understand what existing for hundreds of years in an unchanging purgatory does to someone?

No, I suppose that’s why you came to talk to me. I didn’t sleep so much as just let my mind go blank. The flow of time was easier when I just let it move. Sometimes I dream I’m still there, did you know that? I hate those dreams. It almost makes me feel like in there was the reality, and out here the dream. I mean if you think about it, I’ve spent less than the tiniest fraction of my life really living. In the real world.

Because of all of this I was shocked when my rescuers finally showed up. At first, I was totally thrown off by the sudden appearance of something new. It scared me. But they explained to me they were humans too and had been desperately trying to find me since some error had happened with my pod. I had been under for months before someone had noticed I was still inside. I had no idea how to interact with them, and I’m sure I said many nonsensical things. But they pulled me out and returned me to my body. Everything felt more sharp, real. It was scary too and I was unable to really express how I felt.

Here we are now though, real years later. I am not whole exactly, but better than I was. I live for now, the ever-changing now.

One thing that I would want people to take away from my story? I don’t know, maybe just enjoy your lives? I’m sure most of them won’t go through what I did, hopefully.

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Flash Fiction February: Week 3 Directory