My fingers move across gritty grains of sand, palm tree shadows waving back and forth in the warm wind. I hear the sounds of the sea and gulls' ringing cries and under the soft sun and blue sky I smile suddenly, possessed by a burning joy: I want to sing and cry! Overwhelmed, my eyelids spastically flutter and shudder close and the sweet, natural sounds around me surge deafeningly: waves, birds, wind and leaves. I drink in the noise and my eyes fly open again, awash in color and light and I pant in relief, the smile fading from my face and sweat trickling down.

It is time for this dream to end. I feel invisible hands pulling me away from the shore. Surveying once more the sparkling sand and slumbering sea, the palm trees and Alana's sleeping form, I rise to leave.

"Farewell my eyes! Goodbye, sweet dream!" I shake my head and walk off, the addictive first-person perspective of the world already lifting as he heads for the portal to meatspace. The tanned boy's muscular shoulders slump, back droops and then the light fades from his handsome eyes as he approaches that floating doorway. It's as if the boy has transformed into another in twenty steps. Green grass rustles in a lancing breeze and his tears stain it.

The present tense begins fading too, the stim threatening to leave him if he does not leave it fast enough. He wipes his eyes dry, promptly twists the knob, opened the door and stepped through. The stim world slowly transitioned out into black like the closing shot of an old movie, a transition period designed to allow users to adjust. Next his senses came back to him like waking from a dream, his neural wetwork reconfigured and then he was awake.

–––––––––––––––

The stim lady smiled very nicely and tousled his hair and said, "Colton, I dare say you're sick of these horrid stims by now. Well, I have good news. You'll have no more stims from now on. You've been rehabilitated to the point that you can start living in the real world and we're going to remove your wetwork today. We'll take it right out and it won't hurt a bit."

Colton nodded, swallowing. It was a lie of course, just like all the rest. Adults saying something wouldn't hurt was a reliable indicator that it would hurt. "No," the aquiline psychonostician had insisted when they had first found him, "reality-bounds will be healthy for you." "Living in meatspace won't be bad at all," the psychonostician hadd promised soon after in a trained voice Colton knew proven by studies to appear soothing and authoritative. "In fact, don't call it meatspace at all...instead, call it the real world." The doctor had finally sighed in calculated exasperation: "how about analog world then?"

"So if you'll just come over here, Colton." The stim lady offered her hand to the boy and he took it, hesitantly rising, his legs twitching. "Just sit right up here on this chair and the doctor will see you in a moment." She guided him over.

The rehabilitation process had been so gradual that Colton had no trouble imagining what being stuck in meatspace for the rest of his life would be like, but the prospect terrified him nevertheless. Immediately, breathing techniques, psychological stances to deal with rising panic began proffering themselves from his memory. He turned them away. That was another aspect of meatspace that repulsed him, the poor control over one's memories. Colton suspected the clinic had used hard mind control techniques to alter his neurological structure when he'd been in the real world. Inside his mind, the imaginary psychonostician shook his head, chiding the boy once more. "The world you were born into was made of illusions called stims, it is not the real world." Then the doctor delivered the clincher once again, just as soothingly: "we only do things that are for your benefit."

Yes, this vulnerability and inaccessibility that came with meatspace...Colton breathed in and out deeply, closing his eyes and letting his consciousness travel across each part of his unmalleable meatbody.

"This won't take long, Colton," said the psychonostician.

Colton nodded.

"Your brain is ready to be independent. But there'll be some tickling as we remove it, and some people say that there's a feeling of something missing in their thoughts. You'll keep trying to remember what it is, but you can't find it and you won't remember what it was. So I'll tell you what it is. It's the neural wetwork you're looking for and it isn't there. In a few days that feeling will pass."

The psychonostician was tapping some buttons and a foam enveloped the back of his head. More taps. Suddenly pain blossomed, a lightning needle pulling a searing string from head to toe. Colton felt his body spasm and back arch violently. leg thrashing and his neck straining, entombed in the foam. Somewhere in the back of his mind the imaginary psychonostician told him to close his eyes, start from the toes and make his way up. He couldn't make his eyes close. The everyday shivering in his hands exploded into shuddering and he felt his hands clawing at himself, the chair, anything.

"Berenice!" Shouted the psychonostician. "I need you here!" The stim lady ran in, gasped. "Neurogenic shock, suppress the peripheral nervous system. Get it to me! Now! Why are you waiting?"

The psychonostician ripped something out of her hands; Colton couldn't see. His body was spasming wicked, body trying to fly. "Secure him!" The psychonostician cried.

The foam pressed down on his head as if it were a vice grip on a watermelon. The stim lady grappled for his arms and the psychonostician ran up close, pressing a pad of metal points against his neck. "Just secure him, not too hard. Don't want trauma."

The foam loosened somewhat, eliciting renewed spasms. "Doctor, you hold him, he's too strong for me–"

"Not the whole thing! You'll fry his nervous system–"

Colton felt a fire enter the side of his neck as the metal punctured, his brain tingling as the flame spread throughout his body. Wherever it went, his muscles loosened and body settled down. Now he pulsated with pain and he was free to cry because it hurt and he knew part of himself was missing.

"Are you alright, Colton?" The stim lady asked.

Colton could not remember how to speak. They heaved him out of the chair and back onto his bed, put pieces of metal against his chest and head; did those and other things he could not understand at all.

The psychonostician trembled. "They put these kids into stims their entire lives, ruin their bodies and brains. The cortexes are such a goddamn mess. We could've flatlined him, you do realize that? We could've snuffed out his candle before he had a single goddamn chance."

"How long does the drug last?" Asked the woman who was both stim lady and nurse.

"Keep him at least two hours, watch him. Log his recovery as it happens and feed the report to the advisor channel I'm linking you with: he might need additional therapy." There was a brief pause. "If he doesn't show motor functioning in twenty, call me. This war has taken enough lives, poor boy."