Cold Hard Truths 1: Vices Read Free

on my skin. The city always felt alive and dead at the same time, busy with people, but gritty and cold in an unfamiliar way. I’d seen what the sun looked like before, in movies or some old articles you could find online. I’d even seen pictures and images of grass and trees and flowers and ocean. I’d had a good education, which allowed me to know enough about our ancient society, the culture, and the agriculture that had been here before us. I’d learned about peoples and civilizations that were so different from ours, it could make a grown man’s head spin. Still, it was hard to imagine giant things like oak trees being buried deep within the soil that the pavement currently covered.
    No one gave me a second look as I walked down the street and headed toward my destination. Everyone was too absorbed in their own sad lives. I kept my hands in the pockets of my jacket, my eyes down but paying close attention to the people around me. My shoulders touched other people’s as we all wandered along the streets. No one had anywhere to be. Everything moved slowly.
    I headed to an old cyber café—a place for people to hook into virtual reality and forget their lives for a few hours. It was called CyberExtremeCafe, and the bright, glowing sign on the front of the building never let anyone forget it. It wasn’t only the rich who could tune in to virtual reality, but it definitely wasn’t in the budget for the poor. There was a microchip that had to be embedded into the user’s brain, relatively painlessly, or so I hear, and another, bigger chip placed into the right shoulder. The cables hooked in through the users’ shoulders, and they would sit slumped in chairs for hours, digital goggles over their eyes, living in another reality for a while. Another existence. When thinking of it as a different universe altogether, it really didn’t seem so bad. I’d considered trying it from time to time, but being completely out of commission for that amount of time caused me enough anxiety to disregard the thought. Still, I understood the allure of a different life. Maybe even a better one.
    The cyber café wasn’t where I needed to go. What was beneath the building however, would really raise a few eyebrows if anyone knew it was there.
    Walking in through the side door, everything was just like it had been the last time I’d seen it seven years ago. It was small, with digital signs hung horizontally along the walls, a main operations captain standing at the little kiosk in the center, and multiple chairs scattered about the room, each with its own box of wires and cables nestled right in next to the chair. It was cleaner than I remembered, with more neon signs and billboards lining the walls below the screens.
    The kid behind the kiosk desk gazed up at me and then immediately darted his eyes back down to his tablet. The staff here was paid well to keep their mouths shut and their eyes down. That and probably threatened with their lives. I walked to the back door and down the long, narrow hallway. Third door on the left. I opened it and went down a small flight of stairs. There was a giant metal door at the bottom of the staircase that reminded me of those bank vault doors I’d seen in old films from back when money was actually made of paper and coin.
    Next to the door was a small screen. I placed my palm on the screen and then used the eye scanner, speech scanner, and, last, a long needle operated by a machine for a blood test. I stood there and waited for the door to open, trying not to let my leg twitch. The singular Corx pill hadn’t really done enough to take me to my happy place or to see ghosts of lovers past, but it had taken the edges off all the sharp corners. I probably looked impatient to the cameramen watching me, but I kept telling myself not to be. This wasn’t unfamiliar to me, so there was no reason to rush. I didn’t have a single choice of my own to make past this point. Not that I had any before.
    The