On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 156, of 240 so far.

Addicts

Her name was Harriet Duncan, and she was a psychologist and counsellor. Her first client of the day was slightly late, but that was to be expected, and she waited patiently in the comfortable, minimally-decorated room she had outfitted for consultations.

At four minutes after the hour, he arrived, and took his seat across from her while apologising for the delay. He had fallen asleep, he said, and been a little disoriented when he woke up.

This patient had been seeing her for several weeks, and was one of the handful of recurring types. In fact, he was amongst the primary demographic of those seeking psychological help: the contemporary, and virtually universal, type of obsessive-compulsive that had become colloquially known as a realphobic.

Most of them began their lives without a mental health condition, and then spent the next twenty-one years growing up and learning and living their strange existence, in a world where virtually no-one they met was ever older than them. They would see the silent, windowless skyscrapers, and at first they would wonder what they were. Then, when they reached the age of sixteen, they would learn the purpose of the hundreds of thousands of spires. Most expressed disbelief at first, but governmental information campaigns soon educated them.

The next five years, between sixteen and twenty-one, were known sarcastically — and also genuinely — as the Waiting Period. Until they acquired the final legal right that society could bestow upon them. Until they could apply for a place within one of the spires; a small cube-shaped chamber. Then, when they came of age at last, over ninety-nine percent of them would go in, and never again come out unless they later chose to have children of their own. Even that was becoming much less common.

Harriet looked across at the man who sat there, nervously running his hands over his own knees. Everything in the room was spotlessly clean — by its very nature — but he was still terrified about the possibility of what he called contaminants.

The compulsive disorder, and the anxiety, and the aversion to germs and grime, were exceptionally common. They were a natural by-product of the cubes. Harriet knew that the man would be like all the others, making a half-hearted attempt to pursue the course of therapy, before finally giving up after a few months or years. He would retreat into his cube, and never be heard of again. And she couldn’t blame him.

Why would you leave your own private universe?

The environment simulators had been perfected generations ago, and were now mass-produced, maintained, and overseen entirely by machines. They could be anything at all, without limit of apparent size, or even physical laws. Almost every adult in the world lived in one, technically alone, but perceptually in whatever scenarios they wanted to experience. There were even a perverse few who just lived in the cube without a simulation running, like being in prison, to make some kind of point about self-control or self-flagellation.

The problem with a perfect environment, or at least one that’s under your complete control, is that it very quickly creates a sense of horror at the idea of ever relinquishing that control. Of ever again being at the mercy of your fellow human beings, and how they might perceive you, or treat you, or judge you. With omnipotence in a virtual world, came the inseparable curse of an inability to live in the real one.

Harriet did her best to help some of them; she really did. As a woman of thirty-two herself, and unmarried, she saw it as her mission in life. Human society in pre-cube times still had all these same psychological conditions, but they had been rarer, and sometimes had purely organic causes. Now, in their near-ubiquity, they were largely the products of environment.

From time to time there were attempts to prevent or even delay the onset of cube occupation for the current generation of young people, but the outcome was predictable: the young themselves insisted, and rallied, and volunteered for their fate. They framed it as a deprivation and a cruelty, and the intractable problem was that they were hardly wrong about it.

She asked the man what had been on his mind lately, and after only a brief pause, it all came tumbling out. He had tried going out for a walk after their last session a week ago, and had made it only a little way down the street — the silent street, striped with the deep shadows cast by the rows upon rows of cube spires — before he had to turn around. By the time he reached his own building’s front lobby again, he was running, and by the time he made it back to the door of his cube, a hundred and eighty floors above the ground, he was sweating profusely and was sure he was going to have a heart attack.

Harriet nodded understandingly, and sighed inwardly.

The usual story once more. It wasn’t the fantasy or the wish-fulfilment aspect of the cubes that made them so irresistible to people; it was the malleability. The perpetual opportunity to offset or negate or erase negative outcomes. The option to redo, and re-try, until either the desired outcome was achieved or could simply be specified as a fait accompli. Together, it all offered an almost complete elimination of stress and anxiety, because it took away uncertainty and consequence. Unfortunately, the ultimate result was a corresponding massive increase in feelings of powerlessness, anxiety, and instability when out in the real world — an activity which was no longer necessary anyway.

The cubes took away all pain, and gave each person an entire world to shape. So, inevitably, they immediately turned everyone into addicts.

The session eventually drew to a close, with the man promising to consider trying his walk again, if he felt he could. Harriet told him she would see him next week, and that he could contact her before then if he needed to. She bid him farewell, and he vanished from the chair, ending the remote presence session.

Harriet glanced at the clock on the wall, seeing that she had a few minutes to spare, and she began to reconfigure her cube for the next appointment.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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