Chapter One

Jay’s mother died during the night, while he was asleep. He didn’t mean to drop off, but he couldn’t help it. He was exhausted. He was still connected by video-phone to the private room in the hospice when it happened. The doctors had told him it might be that night, and they weren’t wrong. She had been in the hospice for the last three weeks, plugged into a variety of machines that monitored her, fed her, kept her alive. She hadn’t been able to speak to her son since she had been there, but Jay kept phoning and talking to her at night after work. Sometimes he would just sit and watch her. He had run up a large bill, and the doctors had told him that she probably wouldn’t understand his words, but he had done it anyway. There had seemed to be so many things they hadn’t been able to talk about. There just hadn’t been time in his schedule for much contact during these last five years. And now, time had finally run out for them.

It wasn’t until thirteen minutes after three in the morning that he was woken up. A nurse’s voice over the intercom finally roused him. Jay was sitting on a black metal chair facing the screen. He had specifically chosen that chair because it was, like most expensive designer chairs, uncomfortable, but he had still fallen asleep. It must have taken the nurse a while to get his attention, as his headset had come off and was lying on the arm of the chair. He didn’t know how long the nurse had been shouting “Mister Gee! Mister Gee!”. Maybe that was why he had been dreaming of his father, another Mister Gee, who he had hardly known in his lifetime. In his dream, he had seen his father through the video phone, standing at his mother’s bedside, smiling and reassuring him.
“Everythings gonna’ be alright little Mister Gee,” he had been saying, “Soon you’ll see. Soon you’ll see.”

The nurse told him the news and asked him who would be handling the arrangements. Soon after, he had hung up and collapsed on his bed. He woke up at noon the next day. It was Sunday, and the fake sunlight streamed in through his fake video wall, punctuated by the fake birdsong. Jay wondered if this even worked for anybody now. Did anyone actually believe that what they were experiencing was the old real-life nature anymore? And how did they feel about it, knowing that this was the nearest they were ever going to come to hearing real birds, and feeling real sunshine? His guess was that it depressed everybody else as much as it did Jay, but Jay kept programming it as his wake up call on Sundays because he didn’t want to ever forget that it was the way he should have been waking up. Even if it was artificial, it seemed to stand for something that he should try to hold onto. At least until it started making him sick. With that in mind, he turned to the control box by the wall and shouted the instruction to turn the effect off. The strip lights on the ceiling flickered on and he heard the sounds of the coffee maker and toaster starting up in the kitchenette next door.

He sat up and remembered that his mother was dead. Now there really was no one in his life. He had spent the last five years isolating himself from people, shunning new friendships and old relations, avoiding forming bonds with the people he worked with, and not returning calls from those old friends who bothered to look him up. The only person in his life he had bothered with had been his mother. And now that she was gone, he was truly alone. How did he feel about that? What exactly had changed?

Standing up, he paced out the dimensions of his small apartment. He stopped, suddenly aware of the absence of sound in the apartment, apart from the breakfast machines at work in the other room. He hadn’t switched on Channel News, that’s why. It was usually automatic, but he didn’t want to hear anybody else’s news today. Today he had enough without being told what was going on in the rest of the city; in the rest of the world. Today he would try to live without his information props, he thought. It would be a day for self-reflection, for deciding what came next.

This idea didn’t last long, however. It disappeared when the videophone buzzed for his attention.

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