The small scribbling underneath her ID Square in the middle of the south wall of her cabin left her quite perplexed. When she turned off the previous day to gather some much overdue REM, her body was so exhausted that she powered down in the wrong corner of her room. She had woken up with the wall in front of her with those strange letters on it. Letters in her hand. She tried hard to remember but to no avail. Maybe it was this conscious effort to access her old data or the amount of time spent apart from her neural links activated, but she started to feel some residual memories in the processor making their way into her consciousness. Some cache the overloads forgot to clear?

It was the day she first came to the Big Shuttle. The day she met Agent Orange, Miss Cherry, Dr Purple and Miss Topaz. They talked about Jung and Freud and the prospects of research as they ate delicately baked French macaroons from the lavish display of assorted treats. Ties, collars and A-line skirts crowded the lobby set for tea. Every member had an ID with a pixel of a certain colour and a code underneath. Hers was #77B7D0. She googled it, the colour was seagull grey. An unsure smile graced her thin lips.

She looked around. People! Everywhere! Her heart pounded. She headed to the restroom and splashed water on her face. The golden lights shining down on her in the otherwise dark room illuminated her likeness. Resting her hands in a triangle on the black granite pedestal basin, she saw her withered self staring back.

Unlike everyone else, she didn’t have a choice. Non-violent offenders were not forcibly recruited but there was no way she was spending another day in that grubby prison room. And the offer was too perfect to refuse. You would be living while you worked. That too any life you want! How many can truly say that they wouldn’t want a different life? You could be flying over the Atlantic, scuba diving in Thailand, smoking a joint in the Alps or making love to as many fair maidens as you’d like. Every Single Day! Even if you decided to take the day off you could lay on the couch scrolling through social media inside your head, while your body exerted itself in ways that best befitted your genetics. Your mind will be occupied fully by you and your body, by them. “This is a good thing”, she thought.

“Or you could always go back to starve and shiver in the dingy room waiting for some giant twat to make you her bitch!”, her inner voice taunted. “None of that. Not for me”, she said out loud meeting her own eyes in the reflection.

She was right. She had to be. She lingered for a moment, took a deep breath, and headed straight to the queue to meet the man in the black suit and golden brooch to get a set of forms. He explained the terms of the contract in meticulous detail though her head was off somewhere else debating the value of her trade.

The forms had a twenty-five-page long terms and conditions section which she glanced over and checked the box that said that she had read and understood all of them before putting down her signature. Its slants, curves and little knots resembled the scribbling that had started this avalanche of memories. One final voluntary scribble to sign off the rights to her body and life. From this day forth she was #77B7D0.

The artificial air of celebration bounced from the high walls of the shuttle and champagne glasses clinked. Ceilings dripped with love from the God in heaven as he reached out for the human hand in a highly detailed digital replica of 'The Creation of Adam'. Corporate had achieved 100% work-life balance. The mission was a massive success, a fully dedicated army of soldiers for science. Men and women up in arms for experiment and research. It was a genius solution to deal with the social exiles and prisoners. Although over time, hiring was open to all.

The neural life machine for the overworked and deranged corporate slaves was the magic juice they were seeking to escape their life of monotony. They swarmed the lobbies of the Big Shuttle with their resumes, medical certifications and genetic tests. Genetics would decide what a person is best befit to do(as nature had intended). All human motor activities would be controlled by the capital overloads who operated them to precision. Not so long ago, there were times when human workers on average made ten to thirty errors for every hundred decisions they took. What a corporate nightmare that was! The error rate today was closer to a negative number than it was to zero.

Miss Grey was shown to her new nest abode the Big Shuttle by an indifferent metallic human care buddy. Her scantily furnished white cabin had a big square in Seagull Grey shade with her hash code written on it. Agent Seagull Grey looked over at her test results and saw that it was punched in with the term ‘Research Assistant’. She felt proud that the overloads thought that her skills were best deployed in experiments that pushed human understanding over all bounds. It didn’t bother her that she understood almost none of it. Grey was brought back from her musings to her ‘butt rest in the space cabin’ by the cackling static that preceded the following call of command. “All regiments to the horizon dock, preparing for shuttle switch at o-25 hours.” She plugged in her neural life machine link. It was time for work.

A search bar appeared on her Mindscreen activated by the neural interface assistant. She focused her mind on an image that had started to form in her head from somewhere deep down in her memory cache. “Match found, initiating experience sequence code. Ready to initiate in 3..2…1…”

At zero, she stood in heaven. Blue mountains around, silky drapes of white skies and the untamed babbling waters of a crystal stream. White butterflies played with the small white flowers dotted in the grassy meadow. There was an old abandoned stone house slightly upstream from where she stood. For but a moment she saw a child playing near the fencing. In the blink of her eyes, she was gone. You could imagine inside this world too!

Who wouldn’t choose this life, if by surrendering the one life you have, you could live a thousand ones of your choice unburdened by the trials of the world? Wasn’t this true freedom?

She ran around the green banks, falling against the soft golden-emerald grass and watched the serene blue of the sky. How long she lay there watching the clouds move listening to the water slip over the rocks she didn’t know. She wasn’t bound by time. Not anymore. Grey stood up and shed her white satin dress. She was nature. Feeling the slight cold of the wind a line of goosebumps stood up on her skin. She traced them with her fingers up her right hand and followed the stream to the pool beneath the rocks.

Grey stood tall on the precipice of the waterfall. She felt a Goddess in this land that belonged to no one but her. With the grace of an Olympic swimmer, she raised her hands above her head, bent and dived into the deep pool below, her body cutting smoothly into the green of it. Down and down she swam, leaving little bubbles behind. She swirled around in the water and kicked herself back up to the surface. But…

“No!” There was a dark pull from the depth below. Its grip tightened on her right leg, dragging her down. A giant dark whirlpool of death had formed underneath sucking her into its belly. She tried to access her virtual assistant but it stood glitching. The pixels at the corners of her mindscreen flickered and before she could tell what it was, it went pitch black.

Inside the headquarters of the Big Shuttle, under the Inventory Management section sat the infamous agent #000000 (Mr Black), who saw the following dialogue box on his screen.

Experiment log: Employee ID: #77B7D0 (Seagull Grey):: Deceased: Collateral Damage.

Event Exception Handling: Erasing memory: Process commencing.

A second later the screen prompted: “Process completed. Press OK to proceed."

Mr Black pressed OK. The seagull grey on the dialogue box flickered once and turned white.

.    .    .