What You Want™, Part 2

“Always get what you want™,” the blue words floating in the shimmering air, as around you the light sets into a featureless room of unbroken white.  You frown - somehow you’d expected something... more.

After all, this was the neurosim.  That floating slogan: “Always get what you want™,” was all you’d seen on every new channel the entire day now, though instead of blue the words had been mostly coloured a red so distastefully garish it almost bled off the holoscreens.  But such was “news.”

You’d heard it said that the three cornerstones of modern media were sex, money and death - and when a story came along that had all three, like this one, then the media went insane, just as they had for this story.  Nine cases - one fatality.  But one was all it took.  Everyone knew neurosims were safe - it didn’t matter if it was a gory warzone or the greatest energyblade duel in history - no matter how real it felt, it wasn’t real.  It was just electrical signals transmitted into your brain, like the most vivid dream you’d ever had, the only real part of which was your own mind, your own body.  You could touch, you could smell, you could taste and you could feel pain, but you could never die.  At least, not until now.

It was the families of the nine victims that were pressing charges - the eight still alive refused to do so themselves, were even desperate not to be deprived of their copies of the neurosim which had nearly killed them.  And that only fuelled the headlines - ‘Deadly SexSim Causes Insanity?’ ‘Brainwashing through Sex?’ ‘Always get what you (suicidally) want?’  The morbid “news” headlines went on and on, one moment flaming the Neurotech corporation for releasing such a dangerously flawed product, and the next moment praising the moral Neurotech family for stopping worldwide production despite the massive worldwide demand.  But in lieu of cashing in so well they could pay all their court costs forever, the company had instead recalled all existing copies of the now infamous neurosim, even your copy.  But then, you’d already returned your copy yesterday after it refused to start, faulty on arrival.  And your replacement copy had arrived this morning!

To Be Continued