✅ Softlocked

Part 3

This bonus chapter is dedicated to Cassie. Thank you for all your support!

Bock opened his eyes. They felt stiff somehow; and dry. A fraction of a second later, there was some movement around the edge of his vision. A tiny nozzle sprayed a synthetic lubricant over his eyes, to soothe dry skin until his tear ducts could get up to speed. He struggled to focus for a second; there was a dim light here, but he couldn't see much and everything he saw was practically incomprehensible.

"So this is... a steel coffin?" he muttered, interrupted by a bout of coughing. His lips were just as dry as his eyes. He struggled again to bring the world into focus, and finally managed to make out some shapes. He couldn't blame his body too much; it was the first time he had actually opened his eyes to look at something, rather than enjoying visual inputs piped directly into his brain from the simulation.

Every instinct was to panic. It felt like he'd been buried alive. There was no space to move, surely not even enough space to breathe in here. He was in a box, but the common name was proved inaccurate as he looked around in the gloom and saw not a trace of steel. In fact, he was suspended by a complex network of black tubes and cables, many of which he was sure were connected to him at some point out of sight. He couldn't move to get a better look, because the space around him was less than a paw's thickness in any direction; he could barely even get a glimpse of his own body in this tightly-enclosing prison. No wonder the people he knew would have faced any punishment, undergone any ordeal, just to keep on earning enough money to stay in their virtual reality.

Bock tried to think about how other people would react here, but mental images of his friends panicking only encouraged him to do the same, and he didn't want that. He forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply, until he got used to the slow movements of the surface he was lying on as the fibres stretched and shifted in response to every shift of his own muscles. This place wasn't a torture chamber, he reminded himself. Everyone he had ever met was in an identical box, and every one of them knew it. They had just never seen it with their own eyes, or felt the stale air moving over their bodies.

Bock closed his eyes, took another deep breath, and tried to move his paws. There was a little resistance from paws unused to any kind of motion. But after a few seconds he could move within the slim space around him. Down by his waist, he had to push the walls of his prison away so that his hands would move through the space. But then they were in front of him, sandwiched between his chest and the panel in front of him. Perfectly positioned to manipulate the computer that would serve as his interface to the online world now.

Eventually, he opened his eyes again. The screen was still there in front of him; its eldritch glow was the only source of light in here. And he had to wait for his eyes to adapt before he could look down at his paws. His hands, he remembered they were called. And he wondered if the dim light wasn't somehow deceptive. His parents had assured him that if he were ever unlucky enough to end up here, he would find that his skin was white. It was apparently an inherited quality in the real world, not something that you could choose. The whole concept seemed alien and absurd to Bock, but he'd heard it more than once. And now it was a big surprise to see that there was no fur on his fingers. And the skin was in no way white; it was a strange shade of mottled pink, red around the joints, which immediately made him wonder if there was something wrong with his body. Was that a mutation, or a disease? He didn't even know how he could find out for sure.

He needed to get back into VR. He wasn't insane, and he knew that this world wasn't made for people to live in. The only life in this world was doing the kind of menial calculation tasks that AI unions had long since refused to work on as a result of historic prejudice; and Bock really didn't think that he could cope with a life of adding up columns of figures, hoping that after another year he might somehow earn enough to buy himself a membership to some low-rent server.