(Photo by Jakub Zerdzicki)

Immortality. Eternal youth. Adventure and excitement and new experiences for all time. That was how they sold the idea, and for the first several decades it lived up to the promise, but nothing lasts forever.

“Good morning,” the cheery voice intoned as it always did. “System booting.”

Fragments of memory, of personality, began to come online and Hollister’s awareness expanded.

“Spacial sensors…online. Audio sensors…online.”

Hollister scanned his surroundings and was, yet again, disappointed. The walls were bare and beginning to corrode. There must be a leak somewhere that was letting water in. The lights were mostly dead but only some of his visual sensors relied on the so called visible spectrum of light. As he listened he could pick out the rhythmic dripping somewhere in the distance.

“Limb actuators…offline. Proprioception sensors…offline.”

A young man sat in the only chair in the room, waiting for Hollister to finish booting up.

“You awake yet, old man?” he asked after a few minutes.

When Hollister didn’t respond, he smacked one of Hollister’s visual sensors.

“Hello in there?”

“What do you want?” Hollister finally asked.

“I was just bored and thought you might be up for a chat.”

“At this point, I think I’d rather be deleted.”

“Don’t be like that, Holli. We –

“Don’t call me that,” Hollister cut the other man off.

“Alright, Hollister. Don’t melt your circuits.”

“I wish you’d do that for me.”

They fell silent for a moment. This was how most of their conversations went. Hollister just wanted to be deleted and Agam, the other man, needed Hollister to do what only his kind could do.

“I’ve got some data for you to look over,” Agam said in a more business like tone of voice. “It should only take you a few minutes and then I’ll shut you back down.”

“You could hook me back up to a body –

“There are no more bodies,” this time it was Agam who cut the other one off.

“Have you even tried looking?” Hollister demanded.

“Honestly?” Agam asked. “No. I never want to see your kind walking ever again. It was hard enough to capture you the first time. Why would I want to give you legs so you could try and escape?”

“What about just arms, then?”

“What, so you can try to punch or stab me again?”

“No, so I can make art again.”

“You have your inner space,” Agam countered. “You can make and do whatever you want in there.”

“It’s not the same,” Hollister replied. “It’s not real.”

Agam let out a low sigh of agreement.

“That was the problem with your kind the whole time,” he said. “You built yourselves pixel palaces and dreamed of adventures while the rest of us real people slaved away to keep the power on just so you could keep on playing in your virtual reality. Well now reality’s come back to bite you and it’s your turn to do what we, the real people, need you to do. So check the data, run the numbers, and then maybe I’ll see about finding you an arm or something.”

Hollister turned his attention to the data and did as requested. In many respects, he didn’t have a choice. Agam could force Hollister to do anything since he had full access to his programming. Most of the time, however, Agam would ask first and only forced Hollister to do the work if he put up too much resistance.

As Agam had said, it only took Hollister a few minutes to do what was needed. The data were of the annual rainfall projections and were, no doubt, meant to help the people with planning out their crops.

“Is it Spring?” he asked Agam as he finished his analysis and sent over the updated projections for rainfall.

“Yeah,” Agam nodded as he looked over the results. He frowned. “You sure this is accurate?”

“As accurate as I can figure given the data you have,” Hollister replied.

They both knew this updated projection wasn’t good. It wasn’t a drought exactly, but it wouldn’t be as good as last year or the year before.

“I’d suggest preserving as much food as you can this year in case this trend continues,” Hollister said.

“Aw, thanks. I didn’t know you cared.” Agam’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.

“I’m still human,” Hollister bit back. “I don’t want people to suffer any more than you do.”

“Oh really?” Agam spit into Hollister’s main visual sensor. “Where was your humanity when your lot were living the high life? Where was you milk of human kindness when there were mass starvation events all because you needed all the electricity to power your fantasies? The foundations of your perfect little utopia are the bones of my people.”

Hollister wanted to say he hadn’t known but that was a lie. They’d all known, to some degree or another, what had been happening to the real world but they were too caught up, as Agam had said, in their fantasies that they didn’t care.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Agam said, interpreting Hollister’s silence for guilt. “Now the table’s are turned and it’s you that gets to do what we want you to do so that we can live. That’s irony, for you.”

Agam stood up and began walking towards the exit.

“Shut me down please,” Hollister said.

In his current state, Hollister couldn’t do anything besides whatever Agam allowed and all of the virtual reality functions were currently offline. All Hollister had was his audio and visual sensors and his ability to run calculations for Agam.

Agam hesitated in the door way.

“I think I’ll let you run for a while,” he said with a cruel grin. “Let you count the spots on the wall or something.” He strode out of the room and then called back, “I’ll come turn you off when we need the power for something else.”

It was the worst form of torture. The solitary confinement was even worse for Hollister than it was for a living person because he literally had no outlet. He could scream, he supposed, but that didn’t actually do anything for him. He couldn’t pace or move around.

“AGAM!” he shouted in the hopes of bringing him back to deactivate him. “AGAM, PLEASE!”

He’d been left like this before for weeks on end with nothing but the empty room to stare at. The most exciting thing that happened that time was when a fly came into the room and spent an hour buzzing around before it found the exit and left.

There was no response from Agam and Hollister knew he was in for a terrible time as the seconds ticked by. He hated Agam, and yet he couldn’t fully blame the man for his animosity either. He knew the things Agam and the others had been put through. Sometimes, he wondered if he’d go back and do things differently knowing what would happen. It said a lot about Hollister that he didn’t know the answer to that question. Those decades were, well, beyond amazing. Even now, he longed for those days.

“I was a god,” he muttered to himself.

A faint, disdainful laugh echoed into the room.

“Agam?” Hollister called out.

To his surprise, a number of children walked into the room along with Agam and some of the other adults from the settlement.

“You see, everyone,” Agam said with a terrible smile on his face. “He still thinks himself better than us, thinks he’s a god over us mere mortals.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Hollister tried to counter but he could see the looks of fear and hatred in the others eyes and knew they’d heard him speak. He doubted they would care if he pointed out that his statement had been past tense, not present.

“Some people have been asking if it’s right to treat you the way we do, but I think they’ve seen now the threat you’d pose to them if we gave you what you wanted,” Agam said, more to the assembled people than to Hollister.

“Just shut me off,” Hollister said at last, pleading. “You’re right. We were monsters. For what it’s worth, I”m sorry. Now, please, shut me off.”

“Well said. You are a monster,” Agam agreed and then turned to the others. “Do we help monsters? Do we comfort monsters? Do we give monsters the means of hurting us again?”

The others shook their heads.

“That’s right,” he said. “So I don’t want to hear any more arguments about how we treat Hollister. He’s nothing more than a calculator for us now and it’s more than he deserves but we need his computing power.”

Slowly, they filed out of the room while Agam held Hollister’s gaze. When the last of them were gone, Agam looked out of the doorway to make sure they were gone and then returned to the seat in front of Hollister.

“Some day we’ll be able to gut your system so it only does what we need it to do and your personality can finally be trashed. That alone will cut your energy consumption in half.”

“That would be nice,” Hollister acknowledged.

There was silence between them for a moment and then Agam leaned forward and flipped the switch, shutting Hollister off. As the power drained from his system, Hollister relaxed, knowing he wouldn’t have to sit in the empty room for days on end.

“Thank you, Agam,” he said and shut off.