Free The Chaplain’s Legacy by Brad Torgersen Page B

rehabilitation.”
    “After how many decades?” she asked, stopping in her tracks and facing me. Her eyes had begun to sparkle keenly. I could tell from her posture that we’d hit a sore point.
    “There are whole generations of people addicted to VR. Why come out and face the real world when make-believe is so much nicer?”
    “Plenty of people recovered when the mantes attacked,” I said.
    “Sure, when we were forced to, we snapped out of it. Sort of. But if the mantes never existed and we’d been left to just toodle along the path of least resistance…I am not sure any force could have reversed the trend. We built ships in virtual bottles, then climbed in after the ships and pulled the corks tight behind us.”
    I couldn’t deny the ferocity or facts of her argument. Every family had a member, or members, who’d become addicted to VR. Minds lost to imaginary spaces existing purely inside the global information networks. Each man or woman a fairy king or cyber queen, a god or goddess of his or her own private electronic realm. Wealth, luxury, power, all limitless and beyond belief.
    Just sit down, plug in, turn on, and tune out.
    An infinity of sweetly alluring lies.
    I shuddered.
    “So how does the VR Plague tie back to the Queen Mother?”
    “Have you ever seen the bad cases? The ones who went into VR as kids only to come out as adults? Everything you and I take for granted, even eating and drinking and shitting, is an alien experience for them. They don’t remember the real world, and because there are no rules in VR there’s no need to bother with the mundane functions of ordinary existence. Most of those recoveries take years, and the patients hate it.
    “But a very few of them delight in escaping. Like being reborn. They can’t get enough of the  real  around them. Every morning they wake up is a chance to feel real hot and cold water from a real tap, running through their real fingers. To hear real music played on real instruments with their own real ears. To see a really blue sky with real clouds and a real sun with real warmth on your face when you….”
    She trailed off. I stared at her as she walked. Her eyes were looking straight ahead, but she was clearly lost in reverie.
    Instantly, I intuited the truth.
    “You were one of them, weren’t you,” I said.
    She looked over her shoulder at me.
    “Yes I was.”
    “How young were you when you went in?”
    “Six.”
    “Jesus, your parents let you get on VR at that age?”
    “It’s the world’s most amazing baby sitter.”
    I swallowed hard.
    “How old were you when you came out?”
    “Fifteen,” she said. “The war was hurting us. The govern-ment began cutting off and rationing resources. My parents unplugged me and sent me to a state rehab school for VR kids. When I was sixteen, they said I was well enough to go stay with my mother’s sister in North Africa, since my parents were denied custody. Auntie hated VR, considered it a tool of the devil, and took me in like the daughter she never had. When I was 18 I joined the Fleet through an ROTC scholarship. When I was 22 I went to space, and never looked back.”
    I didn’t say anything for a long time. The captain’s revelation had turned the mood stone-cold sober.
    “I think the Queen Mother is going through something similar to what I went through,” Adanaho finally said. “After living her entire life through the technological lens of her disc, she’s suddenly experiencing reality on its  terms. I think she’s finding the experience to be revelatory. Old instincts, long suppressed, are coming to the surface. Abilities. Perceptions. A whole new way of seeing and interpreting the world.”
    “That’s a hell of a speculation,” I said, shaking my head. “No disrespect ma’am, but can you be sure you’re not just projecting?”
    She was silent for a time. Then she reluctantly said, “No.”
    We took a few more steps.
    “But can you offer any other explanation as to why