signals his brain would send to his fingers when he thought he was typing
at his computer. The act of typing must be necessary then. Why did they
need login pages and cellphone apps? Perhaps there were others in this
machine, each contributing to each other’s illusion. Or maybe the illusion
is so close to the reality the conspirators lived in that people outside of the
machine also need login pages. But he still didn’t understand. “Why should
I want anything?” He asked Miku Hatsune, “Wouldn’t they want me to be
happy? Or, at least, happier?” Why couldn’t he even have sex, if a woman
was just a few electro-chemical signals away? Maybe sex did something to
their hardware. That would explain why there’s a shame element to human
sexuality, even masturbation. But why was human touch so rare when it
would be as easy to create as a chair or a cat?
After a few moments, he felt more stable. David removed his
blankets of felt, wool, pleather, cotton, velvet and other fabrics, walked to
his computer underneath the Miku Hatsune poster, logged into his client’s
database, copied and pasted a piece of completed code, and clocked out
for the day. For what he was giving the conspirators, David thought there
should be more of an incentive than money. Living on only 20% of his
income, he had made enough and wanted so few material things that the
whole concept became moot. He viewed money like points in Sonic the
Hedgehog - the points don’t matter, but it’s better to have more than less
once you’ve defeated the bad guy. It’s just better.
The bus is where David was probably infected, though the grocery
store was a lesser possibility. The bus is also where David finally made sense
of the world. He was looking out the window like he is now, wondering if
the windows were actually showing him the outside or if they were some
kind of futuristic television set. “Is the bus going anywhere? Or is this just
a simulation ride? How can I tell the difference between a pothole and
hydraulics made to simulate going over a pothole? If theme parks can do it…”
Theme parks somehow triggered the thought of Quark’s business
on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which in turn triggered the idea of the
holodeck, a programmed holographic reality. A holodeck could make an
enclosed space seem infinite, the immaterial seem material. But there
was still the question of touch. In the Star Trek universe, the holographic
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