Maybe Tomorrow

Transition by Bill Kirton

Way back at the start of the century, the role-playing sites had been a revelation. People had thrown themselves into them, become slaves. masters, warlords – even poets, God help them. They’d fallen in love, married, indulged in sexual gymnastics totally incompatible with their physical condition and levels of attractiveness. And many of them had been broken when they found that the magic and freedoms they enjoyed in their virtual worlds just refused to transfer to their everyday routines.

But evolution got faster: the servers got bigger, the online experiences became even more realistic and the headsets, with their visual and olfactory sophistication, transported wearers into a virtuality which moved closer and closer to the real.

For Jez, it still wasn’t fast enough. It struck home one day in May. After breakfast he’d put on his headset and logged in to AD, which is what everyone now called Alternative Dimension. There, he was Gabriel, master of Glentyre. He harnessed his unicorn, rode it through the lava flow, left it tied up outside the Sistine Chapel while he ducked inside to fuck a wolf he’d met the previous evening in Chicago. It wasn’t special but the wolf was grateful. On the way back to his ranch on the plateau, he stopped briefly to release a tree elf from a rock in which she’d been locked by a guy with one silver wing sticking out of his forehead. She was grateful, too. The day had started well.

When he got home, his neighbour Gerry, a homosexual giraffe whose aspirations to be a DJ had so far been wrecked by the fact that he had no microphone or deck, was outside, doing his Tai Chi.

‘Hey Gerry,’ said Gabriel.

The giraffe ignored him as he moved his neck slowly from one side of his garden to the other. Gabriel stepped back as it hovered over him and, yet again, plummeted off his footpath to the floor of the ravine six thousand feet below. He always did that. It was so tedious. He got up, dusted his jacket down and flew back up. For maybe the hundredth time, he sighed at the predictability of AD and made a mental note to move the path away from the edge.

Inside the house, Derek, his stone gargoyle, was sweeping and dusting as usual. His welcome greeting sounded hollow.

‘Good morning, master. What is your pleasure?’

In the early days, before voice activation, Gabriel had smiled as he saw the words come up on the screen. Then the boredom had set in and he’d given him various answers.

‘World domination.’

‘Sex with a mushroom.’

‘Peanut butter with nipples.’

‘Tongueless cunnilingus.’

Derek had no sense of humour. His reply never varied.

‘The master has excellent taste.’

Bill Kirton.

Web: http://www.bill-kirton.co.uk/
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