2017 prologue

2117
Prologue
With immense force, the axe came down and split the log into two, uniform parts. Mark sighed as sweat dripped down his forehead. “Just enough work to soak these heavy clothes, but not enough to warm me up.” He though, folding his arms for warmth. He picked up the logs and loaded them into his worn wheelbarrow, mentally preparing himself for the long walk back home. Normally, he would have tasked one of the dozens of androids inhabiting his premises with getting firewood, but his home assistant had decided that it was time for him to do something more proactive. “Goddamnit dad, if only you gave me the root credentials.” In a bout of nostalgia, he retrieved a decades-old image from his jumpsuit pocket. It was an image of his grandfather (in his middle ages), and his young father (as a teenager). For a second, Mark had a profound thought about his own mortality, but it was quickly dismissed when a loud, blaring alarm erupted in his ears.
“Fuck.”
The world around him began to melt away, and was instead replaced by the interior of a dark, fluid abyss. For a second, a wave of calmness and content washed over him. This was interrupted when the darkness had begun to retract ever so downwards, immersing him in a bright, white light from above. Seconds later, after his eyes had adjusted, he noticed that he was inside a tube filled with a strange, almost jelly-like liquid. Large bubbles of air began slowly moving up to the top of the container, as the liquid began to drain. He screamed in pain as a fleshy, bio-mechanical mass was ripped from the backside of his head. His body promptly sank to the bottom of the tube, paralyzed. He could not even move his diaphragm, although this was not a problem as a small device on his navel beeped to life, electrically stimulating the muscle, forcing him to breathe. He could breathe through the liquid, through some unknown means to him, at the time.
After the liquid had been evacuated, he came to his senses. He remembered – something during the booting-down process makes him temporarily forget, perhaps the trauma, or the temporary retrograde amnesia induced by the cocktail of morphine and other chemicals that the SRS uses. The external glass wall of the Synthetic Reality Simulator tube smoothly slid down into the floor, only leaving a naked Mark lying on the chamber floor. He was covered in a thin film, which he promptly tore off, that had been created from the contact between his skin and the LCL (Lifeform Connection Liquid). He dragged himself over to a wooden stool, which he used to gradually lift himself up onto. He coughed up a puddle of LCL and took a tablet out from a small compartment on the underside of the stool’s seat, which he promptly powered on, immediately checking the date. It was 2117. For a second, he showed relief, but then began to become increasingly distressed.
For what he could tell, he had exited the SRS 5 times within the past few months. The problem was, he had only entered it once within that period. Something was definitely wrong.