They let her sleep these days, it wasn't always like that though. In the beginning they didn't let her drift off for even a second, not like now. Now she sat in front of an open window in a low chair. The sun outside was low enough to turn the lightly smudged clouds on the horizon a bright pastel pink, but still high enough to bathe over half her body in its warm yellow light.
She had left a crack open in the window, just so she could smell the grass outside, carried to her on a gentle breeze, wrapped in the fragrance of the perfectly arranged flowers, in the too-pristine garden.
Megan let out a long lazy breath as she allowed herself to be dragged back to memories in direct opposition to this perfect day.
Dr Krane had told her that they could keep her awake indefinitely, yet still have her feel the effects of sleep deprivation. He informed her rather matter-of-factly that they could also stop her going insane in the traditional sense. Her madness would be an overarching acute awareness of the mental torture she was going through.
"That is all we will do to you, and we can do it for eternity. Or you could save yourself the agony and simply pay your debt and you will be free to return, where a nice new beautiful body will be waiting for you."
She hadn't complied straight away of course, she wasn't going to be a willing pawn in their bullshit corporate game. But at the end of the day, whether she liked it or not, she was in the game, she'd lost, and the rules were not favourable to people who'd lost the game in the way she had.
They stuck her outside in the garden, it was a vast maze that as far as she could tell stretched to the infinite. A spiralling never-ending fractal of thick sweet-smelling flower beds intersected by gravel paths. There was nowhere to sit or rest save for the uncomfortable stones of the path and they could make her experience time at any rate they pleased. Megan wasn't sure, but she thinks she lasted around four months before begging for them to stop her torture.
After that she was completely compliant, whatever task they asked of her she did, even accepting a name change. She wasn't Megan Sloane, her name back when she was alive was Kayla Martinez, she used to live in the part of the Mega City that back in her great Grandmother's time, was called Madrid .
Megan got up from her chair and looked out the tall window. They had put her in a town with other Deceased Indentures, DIs, people who had fucked up in the real, they had died owning money to one of the corporates or even the Order itself. The one thing you could not get away with in this life, or death, was owing money, and so Megan like the others, was shunted into virtual where she could pay off her debt by whatever means her captors felt fit.
The garden outside her window was of a normal size, almost disappointingly small after her time in the floral tesseract. The low fence twenty metres away separated her house from a small lane that ran through the featureless field that extended to the horizon.
Megan actually felt butterflies in her stomach this was about as excited as she had been since being here, they had given her a chance to return to the real early. It was an opportunity she couldn't turn down, her sentence was unlikely to play out in any less than ten years of real-objective time. Depending on what tasks they gave her, that could be anywhere between one and one hundred centuries to her.
Daniella, one of the other DIs she had met told her about this tactic. You make the inmates aware of just how maddening experiencing time without change was, they made you realise exactly the implications of spending centuries of your life in a virtual environment in which you couldn't die and your every waking moment, every motion, is controlled by a malevolent unseen force.
In truth Megan felt more than a touch of ambivalence about the situation. Whilst they were letting her go early, she was still technically in debt, so ultimately she would belong to them. They had iterated what they wanted her to do in the real.
In her case, the they were the Vatra Corporation, owner of the fourth ring of terrestrial orbiting habitats. Megan's debt hadn't originally been with Vatra, she had borrowed in order to upgrade her character for Treasure Hunt IV. Megan had chosen the game as it was one of the collection of virtuals you could play and earn enough credits to do what she felt she needed to do.
Like most of the virtual games, if you had good runs you could sell your FIM recording, but it wasn't a popular action game, it was mainly questing and Megan wasn't prepared to risk her life in the real-death games either in the real or virtual.
Megan had been unlucky, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She remembered that day with such clarity, she'd gone out with Felipe, Jan and the others, there was a new club in midtown every one was talking about it. It hung in the bowels of an old robot factory around half a kilometre above Lupin Square, an old magtrain had been reserviced and you could take it right to the entrance.
Felipe had wanted to get some modified Squirt, he said this guy had changed Squirt into something different, more powerful, "kind of hazy" he'd described it as.
Megan wasn't in the mood to buy non-corporate drugs in a bad part of town, but Felipe said it would be fine and the dealer lived just south of Lupin Square.
"We'll get the magtrain straight after, Jan and Silva will probably get there around the same time as us. It's cool baby."
She looked down into his round face, he was wearing his old eyepiece, two big dark round lenses in front of his eyes, attached by the old meld method. He smiled at her, his chin doubling as he raised his arms in protest.
"Come on, let's go." And so she did.
The dealer they were going to was raided as they approached the house. There was a lot of noise and shooting, Megan thought she heard Felipe scream.
The next thing she knew, she was being revived in virtual on the Vatra Shadow Server, technically she wasn't even on Earth anymore. The Orientation Administration Officer told her that her mortal assets were not enough to cover the debts she had accrued when she had been alive. Therefore she had been made a Deceased Indenture and her soul was now the property of the Vatra Corporation by order of the Holy Order of Banking.
After her eventual compliance, Megan got to talk to some of the other DIs in her sector, that's when she'd met Daniella.
Daniella told Megan she'd been there for around five subjective centuries, she had absolutely no idea how much objective time had passed, Daniella had ceased to care. She told Megan about some of the virtual wars she fought in.
"Cannon fodder pays well" she'd told her.
*"You can fight in any number of the corporate virtual wars. They don't offer you them immediately, but if you prove yourself they'll let you." Daniella told her.
The wars ranged in severity, sometimes the corporates had wars over minor ownership disputes. They set out the rules of engagement and went to war in the virtual, winner takes all. These wars were usually fought by Vatra employees looking to climb up the corporate ladder faster.
But these were sanitised wars, pain was set to a minimum, real death was not possible. Occasionally things got more heated, savage simulated wars were fought where the rules of engagement were harsher and real death was possible.
Daniella had told Megan that she longed for a real death war. The ones she'd fought in had been brutal and painful, the last she said had been a hand-to-hand affair, using swords, knives, axes and weapons Megan had never even heard of. Dying in these wars was horrifically painful, but not fatal. Daniella said that she had put her name down for a real death war, she reckoned she had a fair chance of getting one as they were worried about letting her back into society after so long in virtual. She said when you died in those wars, you were transferred to Earth's Main Shadow Server where your disembodied consciousness slowly dissolved to nothing.
Megan had thought that sounded nice, definitely better than the fate that lay before her. She was going to become a living character in one of the sado-erotic FIM-Real games. They had given her an avatar, PinkGus24, she hated the name, but when she asked if she could change it they simply said she had no choice, the character had some other game link that they felt no need to fill her in on the details. So PinkGus24 it was, or Pink she supposed.
It was almost time for her to go, she stood staring at a now dark landscape remembering her time in the labryinth. At first Megan had assumed she was dreaming, she sat and meditated for hours, days, just sitting there on the gravel path.
She told herself this was her dream, probably the instant before death, what the ancients used to call heaven or hell or perhaps limbo. She would close her eyes and concentrate on her breathing, expecting the dream to dissolve and she would either wake up or die, but she never did.
"Your time has come Megan, please go to the orientation area."
The voice had come from inside her head, she turned slowly from the window, pausing to shut it completely before walking out of the room and down the stairs to where they waited for her.
"The body we've given you has been sexually enhanced with the Lad-Suite. We'll want you to mainly interact with the city droppers, however from time to time we'll be asking other favours of you. You'll have a Controlling Executive you'll answer to and you can have as much subjective time as you need to get used to your new body in virtual."
Megan wondered vaguely if the prim and proper woman with angular features and neatly cropped hair was a real Vatra employee or some kind of virtual simulacrum. She returned the woman's bored gaze as she answered her.
"I'm ready now, send me back."
She woke in a spacious apartment lacking any natural light telling her that she still lived in the Underworld.
"Thought they might have given me a midtown place." She wondered out loud.
Megan got up from her bunk and crossed to the glowing terminal on the table by the door. Her first assignment was in around an hour from now, she read the name.
Kevin Wade, Banzo 707.
She took in a long deep breath as she looked around the apartment.
"Well, it might not be the purest air, but at least it's real." She said to nobody in particular.
Megan made her way to the shower and washed her new body as she mentally prepared for the next chapter of her servitude to Vatra Corporation.
Cryptogee
Mega City Tales are short stories taken from the universe of my upcoming novel Soulhunter.
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