Free Transcendence by Christopher McKitterick

realistic.
    “ Yeah. I’ve done it before.”
    “ I was watching newsfeed. There’s a Zone down there.” She stresses “Zone” as if saying “bacterial bomb.”
    “ I’ve been through them before.”
    A moment of silence. Intheflesh conversation is so awkward. No assists, no distractions, nothing interesting to concentrate on during lulls.
    “ I wanted to let you know I missed you,” she says.
    Jonathan laughs once, not out of humor, but stops himself before the sound turns ugly. “Why?” he asks.
    At that moment, unexpectedly, hearing the answer becomes a desperate need, the most important thing in the universe.
    “ I don’t know,” she begins, “I guess your going off to treatment made me, well, think about things.”
    Jonathan looks at her, struck by the vividness and concreteness of intheflesh reality for the second or third time in one day. She missed me? This is more intimacy than he intended. What had I intended? he wonders. Who am I to change anything?
    He distracts himself by focusing on things other than his sister. He studies the room. Josephine is framed by a new, pastel-pink couch that stretches along the entire wall—which, he notices, is stained in several places, even though he remembers that the white wallcoverings were guaranteed stainproof.
    Other objects leap out at him. To the left of the couch stands a wall-sized interactive-hologram projector, dull grey now. To the right, several shelves loaded with dusty treasures as well as half a dozen tiny interactives, each of them servers in their own right. Three giant 3VRD projectors hang blankly on the walls. Josephine’s left calf rests against the home entertainment center, a featureless black rhomboid which houses the apartment’s massive server, an all-bandwidth-capable unit which won’t be paid off for decades to come—or, more accurately, will serve only as trade-in on the next hot unit and keep them in debt indefinitely. Otherwise, the room seems surprisingly empty without the colors, scents and sounds projected by the servers and overlays, without the critically acclaimed art his parents subscribe to. Jonathan doesn’t miss the art.
    “ I thought a lot about you,” Josephine says. She’s eighteen, two years older than Jonathan, old enough to subscribe to college channels, but her attention is clearly on him instead of class. So she’s skipping just to speak to him intheflesh, when she could just as easily do so while 3VRDing. He could, anyway.
    Jonathan shifts his weight to his other foot, his boots, purposely shredded, creaking.
    “ Yeah?” he says, looking away when he realizes her eyes are on his. He remembers the big sis who had snubbed him at every opportunity, every time he made an effort to have real contact with her, until finally he overcompensated and fed back exactly the kind of treatment she had given him: distant, cold and hard, contact through computer feed only. He has learned relationships are safer that way, when digital walls shield people from one another.
    “ Yeah,” she answers, and for a moment seems to grope for words.
    So now she acts as if she wants a different relationship. Anger begings to bubble within a knot at his center; he feels violated by her stare, that brown-eyed, gentle, intense stare. He wanted to be the one to change things; now she has taken even that from him. What right does she have to alter their interaction? It’s obscene how real she seems, the scent of her skin, those eyes burning into his retinas. An unrequested blackcard program automatically recalls them and replays—
    “ How was it for you, in Corrections?” she finally asks.
    Jonathan consciously shuts down the program, his hands starting to shake. “All right, I guess,” he says. He rubs damp palms on the thighs of his pantlegs. “I made it out. Got out of a lot of school.”
    “ No, I mean how was it? How did you . . . feel?”
    “ I don’t know,” he answers, honestly, still rubbing his palms.
    “ What did