10 Signs You’re Addicted to ReVisit
By
Joelle Killian
Are you hooked on the past? ReVisit allows you to relive your most precious memories via immersive VR. But this innovative technology comes with risks, if not used responsibility. Check out these ten warning signs that your habit is becoming problematic:
1. You’re neglecting your professional obligations.
Your manager probably agrees. But you’ve already hit this week’s targets, and it’s only Tuesday.
Same old story: women have to work twice as hard, be five times as talented as the flock of bros fresh out of coding bootcamp. Don’t you deserve an escape from the casual misogyny, the interminable meetings that could have been an email? Deal with those urgent missives about your annual performance review later.
2. You use ReVisit to escape problems in the real world.
The walls of your cramped downtown apartment rattle and shake, the condo construction next door kicking up a musty smell that your landlord refuses to admit is black mold. But even tech income can’t insulate you from another San Francisco housing boom, so without this rent-controlled shoebox, you’d have to decamp to the suburbs of San Mateo.
Instead: lower the ReVisit headset over your face and max the volume, drowning out the jackhammers. Plug its cable into your cranial port. Boot up your favorite sequence and press START.
3. You’re romanticizing the past.
The ReVisit logo emerges from the darkness, rotating on the splash screen.
An insistent bassline vibrates your sternum, red lights pulsing in time with the music. The simulation commandeers your nervous system as Club Vortex manifests around you.
You tower above the black-clad crowd on platform boots, head heavy with plastic hair extension and fashion goggles. There’s a gin and tonic in your hand. God, it feels so right there, doesn’t it?
DJ h4ck3r crossfades into the next track, all rapid-fire drum machines and crunching feedback. Rivetheads swarm the dance floor as kinderbats and eldergoths flee. Shoving your way through the sea of windmill arms and stomping steel-toe boots, you peer up at the nearest elevated platform.
Violette. Up on the go-go box, in a pentagram halter and hot pants. Posing and writhing inside the cage like a spooky doll.
Your chest contracts. Empty your drink, the tang of quinine a familiar life-raft.
Mowhawked deathrockers nod in recognition as you pass. Promoters hand you flyers; frenemies embrace you, shouting repetitive nonsense over the deafening power noise.
When you glance back up at the box, Violette’s gone. Some pretty white boy has cornered her at the bar. His long dreads are matted with bits of metal and bone, his Revolting Cocks shirt tucked into pleather pants.
Her eyes flicker over to you, waiting to see what you’ll do.
You should slide between them. Take her arm, coax her away, fuck her in the ladies’ room, whispering all the pretty promises she longs to hear.
Because three days from now, she’ll break up with you at a drag brunch, both of you quietly crying while surrounded by trashed bachelorettes.
Because unlike you, this douchebag can commit. He’ll promise to fill her up with stupid babies, take her away from this place. Picket fence and all.
Unless you get in there now. Do something to change this shitty timeline.
But instead you do the usual. Get another cocktail, smoke in the alley out back. Meet whoever’s holding tonight in the bathroom. Then DJ h4ck3r spins your favorite Nitzer Ebb banger, and you thrash like a possessed brat on the dance floor.
4. You lose track of time while in ReVisit.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Till you close the club down and the bartender lets you stay after-hours and the top shelf comes out and more bumps and you’re staggering home at sunup, too spun to remember where you live.
Lift the visor off your face and remove your headphones.
Your windows are dark. Something’s buzzing.
5. You’ve withdrawn from social connections.
Sure, but even before ReVisit, you isolated like a pro. The third pandemic blessed you with a permanent remote position, a welcome respite from micromanagement and inane cubicle chatter.
Now your devices are silenced, notifications off. You used to check your messages daily. Then every other day. Once a week. Calls from friends petered out, but everyone’s busy with toddlers and kitchen renovations these days, anyhow. You blocked your family years ago.
So why is your phone buzzing?
You swipe up to reject the call, scowling at this technological betrayal.
But you just love to poke a fresh bruise, don’t you? So you can’t help but listen to your many, many voicemails. Most of them are from your manager. Delete those.
Then a familiar voice invades your bubble.
Hey, you there? It’s your sponsor, Clyde. C’mon, I know you’re there. His cough sounds crackly, like crumping cellophane. Haven’t see you round meetings lately.
He sure hasn’t. You noped out after your home group exploded into pointed debates about whether partying in ReVisit counted as a relapse. Back to square one, claimed the old-timers, you gotta start counting your days again.
Clearly, you disagree.
6. You’ve neglected your physical health.
So sitting around in the sim all day isn’t good for you. So what? It’s still better than real mountains of blow and vats of whiskey. During your last downward spiral, your doctor dropped the bomb: Quit immediately, please. Unless you’d like your heart to explode.
Those were some rough years, post-partying but pre-VR. Learning to exist inside your own skin, to withstand the excruciating crawl of the hours, the intolerable droning of deep silences.
You also had to quit clubbing: too triggering. Which was probably for the best, since the old crew had moved on, the dance floors now packed with fresh-faced children, all side-eyeing you: who invited the wasted grandma? But that left you still living downtown with too much time on your hands.
Meetings helped. You sponsor helped. Clyde, the former linebacker, a grin plastered across his broad face and snapping strawberry gum as he urged you to do the steps. Make amends, the usual.
Not that you ever got that far, tripped up by all the technophobic bullshit. You beefed with Clyde, with the group: without any health consequences, what was the problem? You weren’t out there getting mugged, weren’t snorting unidentified powders in sketchy bathroom stalls. No more stupid shenanigans. Sade and sound in your virtual cocoon.
But Clyde is still crawling up your ass, it seems.
Next message: Seriously, log off. Another crackling cough. Gimme a call, we can get coffee. Go see the bison.
The two of you used to walk around the bison paddock in Golden Gate Park, steaming to-go-cups in hand. The mangy herd depressingly domesticated but preserved by tall fences. But the eucalyptus wafting on the ocean breeze always calmed your nerves as you vented to Clyde about your life. About everything changing.
I know you’re tough, friend, but even you need support. He snuffled, nose running as the fog drifted over the park. You gotta let people in.
You pictured your mother slithering into your room, her venomous words poisoning any momentary delights found in your solitude. Dad’s life nothing but a murky lake, your family the stone around his neck dragging him to the bottom.
Delete Clyde’s messages, too.
7. You experience cravings or withdrawal symptoms when you try to cut back.
Monday. Log onto the team platform. You can wait until the weekly status update is done. Totally doable.
But you’re antsy. Scratching your elbow rash, skin flakes littering your keyboard. Fidgeting in your ergonomic chair, nostalgia tugs at you. You long for your safe place, the controlled chaos of the club. You turn your camera off when the meeting devolves into mind-numbing analytics.
Wouldn’t today be better if you said hi to your old friends? Not the current versions you now scroll past on social media—Botox smiles and dead behind the eyes—but their party monster selves. Your manager will be monologuing about KPIs for a minute so you may as well. Just a quick spin.
Boot up Club Vortex again, KMFDM thumping in your ears.
Those recovery groups fixated on rock bottom, the shitty parts at the end of the line. But ReVisit opens a portal to the golden era, back when you were unstoppable, the debauchery epic. Bouncers let you cut the line, bartenders comped your drinks. Babes couldn’t keep their hands off you and the drugs weren’t cut with poison. Your biggest concern was the skirmish between the aggros and melancholics on the dance floor: ridiculous.
Re-embody your true self, your most vital form. Repeat the steps: gawk at Violette, freeze with indecision when she’s cornered by Pretty Boy, then turn away to party.
Circling again around the moment just before your impending doom. The thrill of pressing on that bruise. How you love to scrape yourself over the edge of this moment’s knife.
Now it’s industrial cardio time. Stomp that rage out on the floor. See? You won’t be shattered so easily. You’re an unbreakable machine.
One blink later, you’re crouched behind a gas station at sunup, tearing fried chicken apart with grease-stained hands, ravenous and feral.
Fade to black, the ReVisit logo.
You remove your headset and wander over to the window. They’re demolishing a crumbling Edwardian across the street to erect some generic edifice of concrete and glass.
Clyde’s voice echoes in your head: Hang around the barbershop long enough, sooner or later you gonna get a haircut.
He always worried about VR clubbing triggering a real-life relapse. But you knew the true danger: the longer you stayed in there, the harder it was to come back to the meaningless architecture of the present.
8. You’re struggling with regret.
Which compels you to return, over and over, to the moment you chose your fate. Because it was always your choice, right? You’re better off. Unburdened. Free.
But what would life be like, if you’d chosen that alternate timeline? Violette was catching the feels, obviously, every time you slept together; you backed off every time those got contagious. Still, you often flash on the way she growled while biting your neck, her silky skin against your hands, a slippery free-fall into a bottomless velvet abyss. One that you could have fallen into forever.
Part of you scoffs. Reality can’t possibly live up to such happy-ever-after fantasies. That’s not how it works. You’d just ruin each other’s lives. Monogamy was a prison of bullshit. And she’d already been side-eyeing your drinking, primed to transform into your mother, all up in your business; then you’d become your father, resentful and sour-faced.
You gotta let go of the past, Clyde said. Focus on the present. That’s all anyone can do.
But the present was absurd. Catastrophic climate change, unending political strife, and your hollowed-out existence. What was left to focus on?
Whatever. You’re an autonomous machine, remember? Absent any needs and their toxic by-products. Other humans were vectors of disease and suffering, inconvenience and obligation. Better off.
But you keep wiggling back into this mental crawl space, getting stuck with the spiders and rats of doubt skittering around in the dark.
There’s a 1:1 on your calendar today. You contemplate staring at your sagging face on the screen, hearing your increasing irrelevance in your manager’s voice, and reach half-consciously for your headset.
You can’t keep looping like this. Either choose differently, or stop torturing yourself.
9. You’re obsessed with closure. Why can’t you just move on?
So here you are again. DJ h4ck3r spinning, the whiff of spilled beer. Your favorite song, the singer growling like Cookie Monster. Home.
Corseted twins wave you over, but you’re on a mission. Put down that drink, avoid your dealer. Push through the throng of camo and fishnet, locked onto your target.
They’re at the bar, as usual. But this time, you do what Violette's eyes always beg for: slide between her and that dreaded douchebag, fixing her in your sights.
Standing this close, you’re hit by her fizzy soda-pop scent. You’ve rehearsed several opening gambits, but her effervescence bubbling in your bloodstream leaves you mute. Instead, you pointedly flick your eyes in the direction of the ladies’ room, falling back your default move.
Her face swirls with indecision, eyebrows furrowed at your outstretched hand.
Shit. This was a mistake. She’s so over it. And now you’ve set yourself up like some prepubescent chump. It’s not too late to flee for the bar, the bathroom, the alley.
A lifetime of moments passes, both of you suspended in stalemate.
The club freezes. Static, then black screen. Logo.
10. Lost in your own world, you’re missing the obvious. Get your head out of your ass.
The walls shake again, mushroom clouds of dust outside.
What just happened? The Vortex sequence has never booted you out like that before. Did you break it? It would be just like you to break it.
Jackhammers pound next door, because apparently this wrong-turn timeline hasn’t just vanished. But you stopped looping—didn’t that count for anything? Maybe there’d been smaller changes; you need more clues. Leaning over your desk, you click open a tab, intending to peek at Violette’s socials, see if you’re connected now. If she’s still hitched to Pretty Boy.
But before you can check, a chat pops up. Your manager. All caps. Attached is your termination notice.
Something stutters wildly in your chest. Those skittering rats and spiders. You worry about your heart for the first time in ages. Panic surges through your limbs; you spring up and pace. Did you really imagine your life would be magically transformed? Because of something you did in VR? You’re an idiot. A child. An idiot child.
And now you’re an unemployed aging woman in tech. In this market. One who can’t fall back on her folks, like normal people.
You glare at your headset: another technological betrayal. That epic crash pierced your delusions, collapsing the pathway back to your golden era. You can’t return. It’s not the same, now that you know. But without a virtual escape hatch, you can’t stay locked up in this noisy, moldy hermit cave, either. And the outside world is still a shitshow. You imagine riding the bus, vulnerable to humanity’s viruses and overbearing energies. Maybe you should just lie down on the floor, give up.
Construction stops. The silence is ten times worse than that infernal racket.
From the quiet, another sound emerges. Underneath everything, like a hum, an endless droning. The inexorable gears of existence turning, grinding. Dragging you into a future you do not want.
That sound has always been there. You’d searched WebMD, wondered if you needed you hearing checked. Drinking and drugs used to drown it out, or at least make it tolerable. After quitting, you escaped via your headset, music or podcasts—often both—playing in the background.
It’s getting louder. Louder. Now it’s coming from the liquor store down the street.
You check the time. The store’s still open. The folks hanging outside could probably hook you up. Not thirty steps away from your front door. You go to the window and stare at today’s meaningless architecture, then down at your phone.
Voices thunder inside, like bison stampeding over your head: back to square one, start counting your days again. A new message arrives, drowning out the noise: I know you’re there, friend. Gimme a call.
First appeared in Fusion Fragment, June 2024
Joelle Killian is a queer Canadian living in San Francisco whose fiction has appeared in Fusion Fragment, Mythaxis, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. One of her doppelgängers is a psychologist writing about psychedelic therapy. Another was once in an undead dance troupe.
By
Joelle Killian
Are you hooked on the past? ReVisit allows you to relive your most precious memories via immersive VR. But this innovative technology comes with risks, if not used responsibility. Check out these ten warning signs that your habit is becoming problematic:
1. You’re neglecting your professional obligations.
Your manager probably agrees. But you’ve already hit this week’s targets, and it’s only Tuesday.
Same old story: women have to work twice as hard, be five times as talented as the flock of bros fresh out of coding bootcamp. Don’t you deserve an escape from the casual misogyny, the interminable meetings that could have been an email? Deal with those urgent missives about your annual performance review later.
2. You use ReVisit to escape problems in the real world.
The walls of your cramped downtown apartment rattle and shake, the condo construction next door kicking up a musty smell that your landlord refuses to admit is black mold. But even tech income can’t insulate you from another San Francisco housing boom, so without this rent-controlled shoebox, you’d have to decamp to the suburbs of San Mateo.
Instead: lower the ReVisit headset over your face and max the volume, drowning out the jackhammers. Plug its cable into your cranial port. Boot up your favorite sequence and press START.
3. You’re romanticizing the past.
The ReVisit logo emerges from the darkness, rotating on the splash screen.
An insistent bassline vibrates your sternum, red lights pulsing in time with the music. The simulation commandeers your nervous system as Club Vortex manifests around you.
You tower above the black-clad crowd on platform boots, head heavy with plastic hair extension and fashion goggles. There’s a gin and tonic in your hand. God, it feels so right there, doesn’t it?
DJ h4ck3r crossfades into the next track, all rapid-fire drum machines and crunching feedback. Rivetheads swarm the dance floor as kinderbats and eldergoths flee. Shoving your way through the sea of windmill arms and stomping steel-toe boots, you peer up at the nearest elevated platform.
Violette. Up on the go-go box, in a pentagram halter and hot pants. Posing and writhing inside the cage like a spooky doll.
Your chest contracts. Empty your drink, the tang of quinine a familiar life-raft.
Mowhawked deathrockers nod in recognition as you pass. Promoters hand you flyers; frenemies embrace you, shouting repetitive nonsense over the deafening power noise.
When you glance back up at the box, Violette’s gone. Some pretty white boy has cornered her at the bar. His long dreads are matted with bits of metal and bone, his Revolting Cocks shirt tucked into pleather pants.
Her eyes flicker over to you, waiting to see what you’ll do.
You should slide between them. Take her arm, coax her away, fuck her in the ladies’ room, whispering all the pretty promises she longs to hear.
Because three days from now, she’ll break up with you at a drag brunch, both of you quietly crying while surrounded by trashed bachelorettes.
Because unlike you, this douchebag can commit. He’ll promise to fill her up with stupid babies, take her away from this place. Picket fence and all.
Unless you get in there now. Do something to change this shitty timeline.
But instead you do the usual. Get another cocktail, smoke in the alley out back. Meet whoever’s holding tonight in the bathroom. Then DJ h4ck3r spins your favorite Nitzer Ebb banger, and you thrash like a possessed brat on the dance floor.
4. You lose track of time while in ReVisit.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Till you close the club down and the bartender lets you stay after-hours and the top shelf comes out and more bumps and you’re staggering home at sunup, too spun to remember where you live.
Lift the visor off your face and remove your headphones.
Your windows are dark. Something’s buzzing.
5. You’ve withdrawn from social connections.
Sure, but even before ReVisit, you isolated like a pro. The third pandemic blessed you with a permanent remote position, a welcome respite from micromanagement and inane cubicle chatter.
Now your devices are silenced, notifications off. You used to check your messages daily. Then every other day. Once a week. Calls from friends petered out, but everyone’s busy with toddlers and kitchen renovations these days, anyhow. You blocked your family years ago.
So why is your phone buzzing?
You swipe up to reject the call, scowling at this technological betrayal.
But you just love to poke a fresh bruise, don’t you? So you can’t help but listen to your many, many voicemails. Most of them are from your manager. Delete those.
Then a familiar voice invades your bubble.
Hey, you there? It’s your sponsor, Clyde. C’mon, I know you’re there. His cough sounds crackly, like crumping cellophane. Haven’t see you round meetings lately.
He sure hasn’t. You noped out after your home group exploded into pointed debates about whether partying in ReVisit counted as a relapse. Back to square one, claimed the old-timers, you gotta start counting your days again.
Clearly, you disagree.
6. You’ve neglected your physical health.
So sitting around in the sim all day isn’t good for you. So what? It’s still better than real mountains of blow and vats of whiskey. During your last downward spiral, your doctor dropped the bomb: Quit immediately, please. Unless you’d like your heart to explode.
Those were some rough years, post-partying but pre-VR. Learning to exist inside your own skin, to withstand the excruciating crawl of the hours, the intolerable droning of deep silences.
You also had to quit clubbing: too triggering. Which was probably for the best, since the old crew had moved on, the dance floors now packed with fresh-faced children, all side-eyeing you: who invited the wasted grandma? But that left you still living downtown with too much time on your hands.
Meetings helped. You sponsor helped. Clyde, the former linebacker, a grin plastered across his broad face and snapping strawberry gum as he urged you to do the steps. Make amends, the usual.
Not that you ever got that far, tripped up by all the technophobic bullshit. You beefed with Clyde, with the group: without any health consequences, what was the problem? You weren’t out there getting mugged, weren’t snorting unidentified powders in sketchy bathroom stalls. No more stupid shenanigans. Sade and sound in your virtual cocoon.
But Clyde is still crawling up your ass, it seems.
Next message: Seriously, log off. Another crackling cough. Gimme a call, we can get coffee. Go see the bison.
The two of you used to walk around the bison paddock in Golden Gate Park, steaming to-go-cups in hand. The mangy herd depressingly domesticated but preserved by tall fences. But the eucalyptus wafting on the ocean breeze always calmed your nerves as you vented to Clyde about your life. About everything changing.
I know you’re tough, friend, but even you need support. He snuffled, nose running as the fog drifted over the park. You gotta let people in.
You pictured your mother slithering into your room, her venomous words poisoning any momentary delights found in your solitude. Dad’s life nothing but a murky lake, your family the stone around his neck dragging him to the bottom.
Delete Clyde’s messages, too.
7. You experience cravings or withdrawal symptoms when you try to cut back.
Monday. Log onto the team platform. You can wait until the weekly status update is done. Totally doable.
But you’re antsy. Scratching your elbow rash, skin flakes littering your keyboard. Fidgeting in your ergonomic chair, nostalgia tugs at you. You long for your safe place, the controlled chaos of the club. You turn your camera off when the meeting devolves into mind-numbing analytics.
Wouldn’t today be better if you said hi to your old friends? Not the current versions you now scroll past on social media—Botox smiles and dead behind the eyes—but their party monster selves. Your manager will be monologuing about KPIs for a minute so you may as well. Just a quick spin.
Boot up Club Vortex again, KMFDM thumping in your ears.
Those recovery groups fixated on rock bottom, the shitty parts at the end of the line. But ReVisit opens a portal to the golden era, back when you were unstoppable, the debauchery epic. Bouncers let you cut the line, bartenders comped your drinks. Babes couldn’t keep their hands off you and the drugs weren’t cut with poison. Your biggest concern was the skirmish between the aggros and melancholics on the dance floor: ridiculous.
Re-embody your true self, your most vital form. Repeat the steps: gawk at Violette, freeze with indecision when she’s cornered by Pretty Boy, then turn away to party.
Circling again around the moment just before your impending doom. The thrill of pressing on that bruise. How you love to scrape yourself over the edge of this moment’s knife.
Now it’s industrial cardio time. Stomp that rage out on the floor. See? You won’t be shattered so easily. You’re an unbreakable machine.
One blink later, you’re crouched behind a gas station at sunup, tearing fried chicken apart with grease-stained hands, ravenous and feral.
Fade to black, the ReVisit logo.
You remove your headset and wander over to the window. They’re demolishing a crumbling Edwardian across the street to erect some generic edifice of concrete and glass.
Clyde’s voice echoes in your head: Hang around the barbershop long enough, sooner or later you gonna get a haircut.
He always worried about VR clubbing triggering a real-life relapse. But you knew the true danger: the longer you stayed in there, the harder it was to come back to the meaningless architecture of the present.
8. You’re struggling with regret.
Which compels you to return, over and over, to the moment you chose your fate. Because it was always your choice, right? You’re better off. Unburdened. Free.
But what would life be like, if you’d chosen that alternate timeline? Violette was catching the feels, obviously, every time you slept together; you backed off every time those got contagious. Still, you often flash on the way she growled while biting your neck, her silky skin against your hands, a slippery free-fall into a bottomless velvet abyss. One that you could have fallen into forever.
Part of you scoffs. Reality can’t possibly live up to such happy-ever-after fantasies. That’s not how it works. You’d just ruin each other’s lives. Monogamy was a prison of bullshit. And she’d already been side-eyeing your drinking, primed to transform into your mother, all up in your business; then you’d become your father, resentful and sour-faced.
You gotta let go of the past, Clyde said. Focus on the present. That’s all anyone can do.
But the present was absurd. Catastrophic climate change, unending political strife, and your hollowed-out existence. What was left to focus on?
Whatever. You’re an autonomous machine, remember? Absent any needs and their toxic by-products. Other humans were vectors of disease and suffering, inconvenience and obligation. Better off.
But you keep wiggling back into this mental crawl space, getting stuck with the spiders and rats of doubt skittering around in the dark.
There’s a 1:1 on your calendar today. You contemplate staring at your sagging face on the screen, hearing your increasing irrelevance in your manager’s voice, and reach half-consciously for your headset.
You can’t keep looping like this. Either choose differently, or stop torturing yourself.
9. You’re obsessed with closure. Why can’t you just move on?
So here you are again. DJ h4ck3r spinning, the whiff of spilled beer. Your favorite song, the singer growling like Cookie Monster. Home.
Corseted twins wave you over, but you’re on a mission. Put down that drink, avoid your dealer. Push through the throng of camo and fishnet, locked onto your target.
They’re at the bar, as usual. But this time, you do what Violette's eyes always beg for: slide between her and that dreaded douchebag, fixing her in your sights.
Standing this close, you’re hit by her fizzy soda-pop scent. You’ve rehearsed several opening gambits, but her effervescence bubbling in your bloodstream leaves you mute. Instead, you pointedly flick your eyes in the direction of the ladies’ room, falling back your default move.
Her face swirls with indecision, eyebrows furrowed at your outstretched hand.
Shit. This was a mistake. She’s so over it. And now you’ve set yourself up like some prepubescent chump. It’s not too late to flee for the bar, the bathroom, the alley.
A lifetime of moments passes, both of you suspended in stalemate.
The club freezes. Static, then black screen. Logo.
10. Lost in your own world, you’re missing the obvious. Get your head out of your ass.
The walls shake again, mushroom clouds of dust outside.
What just happened? The Vortex sequence has never booted you out like that before. Did you break it? It would be just like you to break it.
Jackhammers pound next door, because apparently this wrong-turn timeline hasn’t just vanished. But you stopped looping—didn’t that count for anything? Maybe there’d been smaller changes; you need more clues. Leaning over your desk, you click open a tab, intending to peek at Violette’s socials, see if you’re connected now. If she’s still hitched to Pretty Boy.
But before you can check, a chat pops up. Your manager. All caps. Attached is your termination notice.
Something stutters wildly in your chest. Those skittering rats and spiders. You worry about your heart for the first time in ages. Panic surges through your limbs; you spring up and pace. Did you really imagine your life would be magically transformed? Because of something you did in VR? You’re an idiot. A child. An idiot child.
And now you’re an unemployed aging woman in tech. In this market. One who can’t fall back on her folks, like normal people.
You glare at your headset: another technological betrayal. That epic crash pierced your delusions, collapsing the pathway back to your golden era. You can’t return. It’s not the same, now that you know. But without a virtual escape hatch, you can’t stay locked up in this noisy, moldy hermit cave, either. And the outside world is still a shitshow. You imagine riding the bus, vulnerable to humanity’s viruses and overbearing energies. Maybe you should just lie down on the floor, give up.
Construction stops. The silence is ten times worse than that infernal racket.
From the quiet, another sound emerges. Underneath everything, like a hum, an endless droning. The inexorable gears of existence turning, grinding. Dragging you into a future you do not want.
That sound has always been there. You’d searched WebMD, wondered if you needed you hearing checked. Drinking and drugs used to drown it out, or at least make it tolerable. After quitting, you escaped via your headset, music or podcasts—often both—playing in the background.
It’s getting louder. Louder. Now it’s coming from the liquor store down the street.
You check the time. The store’s still open. The folks hanging outside could probably hook you up. Not thirty steps away from your front door. You go to the window and stare at today’s meaningless architecture, then down at your phone.
Voices thunder inside, like bison stampeding over your head: back to square one, start counting your days again. A new message arrives, drowning out the noise: I know you’re there, friend. Gimme a call.
First appeared in Fusion Fragment, June 2024
Joelle Killian is a queer Canadian living in San Francisco whose fiction has appeared in Fusion Fragment, Mythaxis, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. One of her doppelgängers is a psychologist writing about psychedelic therapy. Another was once in an undead dance troupe.
