Teal | A flash fiction story
53 of 💯
Dawn sat uncomfortably in a virtual armchair, her new haptic rig groping her ass. The rig was talking in detail to her butt — through the language of touch — about the chair's velvety fabric and the springs underneath it.
She was staring blankly at a sparsely but beautifully decorated room, with walls painted some dark color between green and blue. The color was meant to be soothing, but it was upsetting — no naturally occurring thing in the universe had that exact color.
It was all fake: the chair, the color, the sympathy. Her new haptic rig had been a breakup gift — also something that didn't naturally occur in the universe. The gift also included a perpetual subscription to Argon and access to all worlds in the Aether. Among the multitude of virtual worlds she could explore, she chose a virtual therapist's room.
The therapist was fake too. There wasn't even an avatar, just an ethereal voice controlled by an AI trained in so much data it was impossibly better than any human therapist could be — it even had a few human biases and quirks to make the experience more realistic. The only thing it couldn't do was actually be human. As it turned out, that was the only thing Dawn truly wanted.
She wanted to talk to any person in the world about her breakup. But, having broken up with the most powerful woman on the planet, she couldn't, of course. No, Miss Atlanta was her company, she couldn't afford to have any gossip about her personal life: she didn't have one. That had been the very reason for the breakup.
So instead of being the happiest version of herself she had ever known, Dawn was a depressed human talking to a machine, trying to forget that Argon — the entire city where she lived — was brought to you by Atlanta Inc. And that Atlanta was everything.
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