One morning, when Sregor Gamsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible robot. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he moved his eyes a little he could see his silver belly, slightly domed and divided into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to grip it and seemed ready to slide off the shiny metallic surface at any moment. His arms and legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, lay by his side helplessly.
“What’s happened to me?” he thought.
It wasn’t a dream. His room, a proper human room, although a little too small, nestled between its four familiar walls. A collection of website designs he had printed out lay spread out on the table—Gamsa was a digital designer—and above it there was a picture stuck on the wall with blu tack. It showed a group of smiling co-workers gathered on the decking of an office with drinks in their hands and was entitled, ‘Thirsty Thursday’. It was fake, or course. They had never met and greeted each warmly, never gathered on decking to drink each other’s health and laugh. He had digitally created the picture, using images of his co-workers from the online staff directory, and then found images of drinks on websites and cut and pasted them in.
Sregor swivelled his eyes to look out of the window at the dull weather. Drops of rain could be heard hitting the pane, which made him feel quite worried that there might have been a leak in the night and he had rusted.
“Oh, God”, he thought, “what a lazy career I’ve chosen! Staring at a screen all day, every day. WFH, Working From Home, like this takes much less effort than being part of a business in an office. I never leave the house. I don’t get the exercise of running for my train connections, racing to get the best desk, or grabbing a sandwich to eat over my keyboard. I have no physical contact with new people so that I can never get to know anyone or become friendly with them. It can all go to Hell!”
He felt a slight itch up on his belly, which normally he would have instinctively scratched, but his body was unresponsive, refusing to budge. What was wrong with him? What was wrong with his body? It was only twenty-five years old and wasn’t in terrible shape was it? Maybe it was. They said that sitting was worse for your health than smoking and he did a lot of sitting tapping at his computer, often propped up on pillows. He had once tried to look after his body, but he’d never enjoyed physical exercise. Gaming was always his preferred go-to and surely far more useful. Now he thought that perhaps he should have done more activity.
He swivelled his eyes again to see his pot belly, slightly domed, pushing up against the bed sheets. There was a time when a morning erection might have accompanied it, but that had not happened for some time. When he thought about it, he couldn’t remember the last time he had experienced a ‘morning glory’, which was odd and rather depressing. Why was his penis the one part of his body that wasn’t stiff? Even dead men got erections. Hanged men taken from the scaffold were often seen to develop erect penises. He had read that it was something to do with pressure on the cerebellum created by the noose. Such a priapism was sometimes called ‘angel lust’. Sregor knew there was nothing angelic about his lusts. Such phenomena were also called ‘death erections’, or ‘terminal erections,’ but he was too young for ‘rigor mortis’ to have set in surely?
Or maybe he had never been alive? Maybe he existed in a metaverse, a simulated world, a computer game like the ones he enjoyed playing. Maybe he had always lived in a computer game and now he was buffering. The idea that we all live in a computer generated world of some sort, or indeed several at the same time, had always seemed rather hopeful to Sregor. Perhaps another Sregor was out there somewhere moving freely, being successful, getting likes on Instagram... Perhaps this simulation had just reached obsolescence. Game Over. Well, if it was ‘Game Over’, Sregor wished it would just end and he wouldn’t be left hanging in some suspended reality, fixed for eternity, lying on this bed.
“That is stupid!” he reprimanded himself. “Constant video calls make you stupid. You’ve got to get enough exercise. Other people obviously manage it, posting pictures of their lithe, tanned bodies, disporting themselves on holidays. When was the last time I took a holiday? I should tell my boss I want a holiday too; I’d get kicked out on the spot. But who knows, maybe that would be the best thing for me. I could video call the boss and tell him just what I think, tell him everything, let him know just what I feel. He’d fall right off his desk chair! And it’s a funny sort of business to be sitting online all day, talking down at your subordinates from up there in the cloud, especially when he presses his nose up so close to the camera. Well, there’s still some hope; once I’ve got the money together to move out of my parents’ house and afford a deposit for my own place —another five or six years I suppose—that’s definitely what I’ll do. That’s when I’ll make the big change. First of all though, I’ve got to get up.”
He looked over at his smartphone, glowing on the chest of drawers. “God in Heaven!” he thought. It was nearly nine and the numbers were steadily, quietly moving forwards. He had meant to get up early, to go outside, to walk in the park, to smell the flowers, listen to the birds, feel the breeze. He had set the alarm for four am. How had he slept through that nerve jangling row? Now it was nearly nine when the team meeting began; and if he missed the start he would not avoid his boss’s anger as the assistant service software, ASS, would track his absence and report about Sregor’s lateness. The ASS was inhuman, and with no understanding. What if he reported sick? He knew that would be impossible as the ASS used facial recognition to verify any such claimed conditions.
Then suddenly he felt his limbs move by their own volition. His legs swung off the bed and he was transported to his desk with easy fluent strides. His laptop lit and booted up and he saw the pale, metallic faces of his co-workers staring out at him with red eyes. They had all chosen backgrounds of blue skies, fjords and tropical islands. “How are you?” asked a voice and everyone chorused: “Fine.”
Suddenly, Sregor’s eyes were dazzled by a ray of sunlight that streamed in through his window. He looked out and saw a rainbow.