Tai Chi | A flash fiction story
40 of đź’Ż
Her friends were all in pods or plugged into haptic rigs. They were up there, in the cloud, in the Aether — strolling around some lake with a fountain shooting water twenty feet into the air in its middle, green hills of perfectly-trimmed grass, mallards flying by, their spotlessly-rendered velvet-green feathers against the bluest of skies. They were smelling the make-believe perfume of cherry blossoms pulverized over their faces in invisible droplets, or maybe fed directly into their nostrils by shiny tubes. They loved experiencing nature, connecting with some invented greenness — the memory of a world they had never lived in.
She preferred the real — the real real. The gritty, the grimy, the unattractive. The dark and stinky streets of Argon. The unfriendly wet pavement painted over with neon lights in a sad attempt of making it alluring.
Large headphones lined with electroluminescent cyan fed her ears a symphony of synthetic instruments. They pulsated and echoed along with a steady beat — a plucky bass holding up a canvas for a choir of brassy synths to paint a cosmic picture with soundwaves. She danced slowly to the beat under the lonely hologram of a tree — her neon-painted Tai Chi.
The tree was lit from underneath by vivid unnatural colors that blended to create the fakest of greens. In Argon, this passed as a park. That was all the green you’d get — all the green you’d need, anyway. With pods and rigs, why live in the real if the unreal provides the reality you’ve always dreamed of?
No, not her. She preferred to be in the real world, to connect with nature, with herself.
Synths blasted in her ears while the simulated tree shook its leaves to a nonexistent breeze, its voxels dancing with her. She danced, alone on the colorful pavement, connecting with nature, connecting with reality.
