second life

Here is the most recent copy of a story I've finished here on vacation.  It's still in an early draft form, but it's further along than most things I post here.  It's approaching 5000 words, so pace yourself, but it's a short story and it goes from start to finish here.  I'm mostly interested in general responses, but I have put a couple of more specific questions on the bottom of the post.  Bon appetit!

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Second Life

I hadn't seen Evan since graduation, and although we'd written on each other's Facebook walls a time or two, I was surprised when he wanted to come by for a visit. We caught up a little, remembering old professors and good times, but finally I asked him what brought him here.

“I'm on my way off the internet,” he explained. He pointed out the triviality his life had increasingly seemed to take on as he had become more and more connected online. His last girlfriend had even left him because she thought he was always paying more attention to his phone than to her. He couldn't write, he couldn't even read a long piece of text anymore without getting that twitch to google something new and interesting. “I finally decided enough was enough, and now I'm headed to my family's cabin where I can live like a human being again.”

When I pointed out that cutting yourself off from humanity didn't seem like the same thing as living like a human, he shrugged. “When you're an alcoholic, you have to stop drinking before you can rebuild your life. I'm thinking of it as internet rehab, my own private Walden Pond where I can reconnect with myself and with nature. And besides, maybe I'll finally finish my novel!” He said with some excitement.

“I don't know that anyone can really live without the internet,” I said with a smile, “but I hope you're successful.” The cabin was only a few hours from my place, so I promised to visit every couple of months or so, and we said goodbye.

Time passed, and to be honest, I didn't think much about Evan. One sleepy summer Sunday afternoon, I wrote him a letter in pen and ink (in solidarity with his analog pipe-dream) asking how things were going and if I should plan on heading up to see him. I didn't get a response for some time, so I wondered if I had got the address wrong on the envelope. But a few weeks later I got an email response, in which Evan described his more-or-less successful attempts at living off the grid:

At first, I was fired up and it was easy to keep myself on task, gardening, hiking, reading off a printed page, and writing my novel. But after I submitted the novel to my first publisher, I suddenly had all sorts of nervous energy. Without daily interaction with some sort of society, I lost the motivation to write to anyone. But since most of the people I wanted to talk with were scattered across the country, and since I had grown to like my little cabin lifestyle so much, I decided the only thing to do was to get back online. It was only when I went into town to get a satellite dish installed on the cabin that I got your letter.

A little social media was all it took to get the literary juices flowing again. I'm beginning a series of essays while I wait to hear back from the publisher, but I think I'm on to something for my next novel, anyway. And I started a blog, so we'll see where all that goes. I'd like to show you around my mountain when you get the chance, although I see your Facebook status just changed to 'in a relationship.' Don't you know that women are only trouble for the creative mind? You'll never write anything now until you dump her—you won't have the time, let alone the concentration.

Of course, Evan was talking more about his own problems with women than mine, but the rest of his letter was pretty peppy and I thought he must be doing pretty well.

Later that summer, I did take my girlfriend, Hana, up to visit. He showed us his garden, which was fairly formidably covered in tomatoes, squash, potatoes, and other useful vegetables, considering he'd never raised a living thing in his life. There were a good few weeds growing up as well, which he explained with a shrug. “I don't find as much time to keep it up as I used to, now that I blog most days, but I can still eat off of it, so that's success, right?” As for the other necessities of life, he had made a deal with his grocery clerk to haul them up the mountain in his pickup once every two weeks, so practically speaking, Evan was a more steady occupant of his little cabin than Thoreau was at Walden.

He mentioned that friends would drop by from time to time, and when he saw hikers coming, he invited them in for some water, so he wasn't completely alone, but he had all the time he needed to write his masterwork of a novel. “It's the novel of the age!” he said enthusiastically. “It's a declaration of independence from technology, a return to our real roots as the greatest animals on the face of the earth!” I laughed. He smiled and shrugged. “We are what we are. I am proud to claim the title of animal, a living, thinking, breathing animal that writes novels and grows his own food. I don't need anyone or anything but me!”

Evan's bombastic enthusiasm was more obnoxious than ever, but probably that's good for a writer. He couldn't stop talking about how frustrating it was to try to work with editors—he had been asked to write a guest column in a tech magazine due to the success of his blog, and had already pulled his novel from one publisher because the editor wanted him to change too much. Mostly, he just talked a lot. A life of written words seems to have created a deficit of spoken conversation for him, but otherwise he seemed happy and well.

We had a pretty good time, and to Hana's credit, she put up with Evan's outsized vocabulary and tendency to show off his literacy in a broad range of subjects. She even out-maneuvered him in a discussion about the futility of language and forced him to admit several deficiencies in his theory of a future “literary internet.” When we were saying our goodbyes, he winked at me and whispered, “Listen, I think it's only fair to warn you that if you don't hurry and marry that woman, I will.”

“You snooze, you loose, my friend,” I said, genuinely pleased at his back-handed praise. We promised to visit again towards the fall and drove away from that little refuge back to real life.

I did ask Hana to marry me that fall, and between wedding plans and work, we never made it back to Evan's cabin. I kept pretty good track of him, though, as it seemed he spent all his time online. His blog on the intersection of life online and the natural world got picked up by one of those big magazines in New York in an attempt to be more relevant to the modern reader. His novel was finally published and jumped to the top 30 e-books, and stayed there for months. I bought the hardback version, and it was pretty good for a first novel, but then I bought a tablet and I kind of wished I had it electronically. He would send me short emails with anecdotes from conversations he'd been having with internet literati, or more often copy-and-pasted emails and chats with amusing results. I told him about getting married, about how it wasn't as hard as I'd feared to keep my soul while working in corporate America, and the day-to-day living that he seemed to be missing with his fast-paced online life.

Our emails grew less frequent over time, though, and eventually they stopped. Hana quit her job to get ready for our new baby, and we moved to a little house outside the city. The focus of our lives changed. I found that family demands meant I spent more time off the computer than I had in the past, and I didn't notice his two Twitter accounts or that his blog had morphed into a meditation about virtual life on the internet in a higher-profile magazine. In fact, it wasn't until I was browsing the stacks in my local bookstore's going-out-of-business sale that I read all that on the jacket of his second book, collected of essays on digital life. Enjoying the irony, I bought the hardback version and didn't regret it a bit.

I went home and decided I'd write Evan an email letting him know that I'd bought his second book and thought it was great, and that if I changed my mind after reading it I wouldn't tell him. Before I could finish my online banking and head to bed, he had already responded. “Hey, it's been a long time, hasn't it?” he began. At this point, it had been more than two years since I had seen him in person. I expected an update on his life, but all I got was an excuse that he'd been really busy and asked all sorts of questions about how we were doing and what it was like to be a dad. We traded emails for a few weeks, him describing a lot about his life as a writer but avoiding any mention of a personal life, until finally he wrote that he wanted to catch up in person as soon as possible up at his place.

Our new baby girl was pretty adverse to car seats at that point—and by adverse I mean she would not stop screaming until she was let out, no matter how many hours it took—so I wrote back asking if he couldn't come down and see our new place. He was oddly adamant that he couldn't leave his work for that long. “I'm practically glued to my screen these days, and if I miss a deadline, that could be the end of it for me,” he said. “It's really hard for me to find time to get out anymore, but that doesn't mean I don't miss seeing people. I'd really appreciate it if you could make it up to see me,” he finished, sounding a little desperate.

I was a little worried about him, so I took a vacation day, kissed Hana and our baby goodbye, and set out for a weekend in the woods. One of my tires went flat halfway there, so by the time I got to the cabin, it was already late and it was hard to see the driveway from the road. I parked the car and as soon as the headlights turned off, infinite stars appeared above me, thicker and brighter than I could remember for a very long time. There was no moon, no city lights, and only a faint glow from inside the cabin, so my view was marvelously unobstructed. I stood leaning on the car door for a few moments before deciding that Evan had the right idea with his little mountain retreat and heading toward the front door through the deep darkness.

Because of that darkness, though, I tripped on the undergrowth that seemed to have taken over the front of the house. Vines were climbing up the side of the house and the grass and brush had grown up to my knees. As my eyes adjusted to the dim night, I could see that the garden seemed to be just as overgrown.

I picked my way carefully to the front door and knocked loudly, hoping Evan hadn't gone to bed. It was late summer, but the mountain night was colder than I had expected and I shivered as a breeze came up. I waited, then knocked again. I tried to laugh at myself as it occurred to me that the murmur of the stream and the wind in the branches began to sound more and more like disembodied voices in the forest. I checked the time on my phone and decided that it was better to sneak in as quietly as I could and crash on the couch than to leave.

When I cracked open the door, I saw that the only light in the little cabin was a pale blue glow coming from the kitchen where Evan had set up his laptop when we had been here last. I slipped in and quietly called, “Hello?” in case he had fallen asleep at the keyboard. Not hearing a response, I tiptoed toward the kitchen and the source of light.

From the door frame, I could see Evan slumped over the small square kitchen table, apparently asleep with his face toward turned his laptop screen. Illuminated with that flickering light, Evan looked eerily emaciated. His eyes were invisible in the dimness of deep eye-sockets and his arms were almost skeletally thin as they rested futilely on the keyboard in the dark. He looked dead. I flipped the light switch, but there was no reaction—the light was apparently burned out. I tried to speak, but my voice caught in my throat and all I could do was cough weakly. I paused, then I backed out of the kitchen to the front room and the bedroom, flipping the switches. They were all burned out.

I took a deep breath and went back to the kitchen. I cleared my throat and knocked on the door frame. “Hey, Evan!” I managed, fairly loudly. My voice only cracked a little. There was no response but the flickering of a changing computer screen. It was running something, so he couldn't really be dead, right? Or at least not for very long...

I took a deep breath and used my phone to feebly light up the space in front of me. What ever happened to those phones with flashlights on the end? I got right up next to Evan's body and finally saw that he was breathing. I immediately relaxed, but he still looked dead, and he wasn't responding. I gingerly tapped him on the shoulder, but he wasn't cold or anything, so I gathered my courage and shook his shoulder. I would have spoken, but I was afraid if I tried, I might choke. Evan kind of slumped over further and I had to hold him back in his chair—which is when I saw them.

There were long, thin strands of something coming out of his arms toward the desk, like a spider web made of wires. I jumped back and shuddered as I tried to catch my breath. Evan's blank face was now staring at the ceiling.

I'll admit it crossed my mind to just walk out right then. And by “crossed my mind” I mean my muscles screamed to run away as fast as I could. The only thing that kept me from bolting was that my brain seemed incapable of computing my muscles' request. But after a moment or two, I was able to relax and overcome my shock. I came back close enough to get a good look at his arms (although I kept my distance from that death-like face), and under my phone's glow, I saw that in fact, they were wires, and they looked like they had been inserted seamlessly into Evan's skin. They went directly into the laptop, somehow. That's when I noticed what was going on the screen.

It was a chat window. Messages from Evan's account kept coming up, and they had my name on them.

Hey, Todd, look here.

I can hear you, but I can't say anything. Just look over here.

No, dude, the lights are burned out.

Yes, in the whole house.

Relax, dude, you sound like you saw a ghost. I can't talk, but just look at the screen.

Right, again, you can tap me on the shoulder, but I'm not going to be able to respond...

Be careful! Don't let me fall on the floor!

OK, this is starting to hurt my neck. Although, it did already have a crick in it...

Wait! Wait wait! I know these wires look crazy, but it's OK! Just look at the screen!

My blood ran cold again. I swallowed hard and took a step away from the computer. That's when the next message appeared.

Please wait! Please! Don't leave me here like this!

“This isn't funny, Evan,” I said, finally finding my voice. “You're sick and you need help, but this isn't funny...”

My voice faded out as more text appeared on the screen. I know I'm sick, I know, but I really can't move.

I took a step closer to the screen. “What, do you have video chat running or something? Are you just somewhere else so you can pull a prank? Because you really did have me for a minute there, what with this warm body and all.”

Yes to the video chat, but that's really me, sad as I look.

“I don't believe you,” I said, but I was starting to shake. I took another step back from the table and the grotesque body seated in front of it.

Come on, man, why in the world would I bring you up here for something idiotic like that?

Evan had never really been the prank-pulling kind of guy, so that was a good point. I hesitated.

There's no way I could prove it to you, but this is why I couldn't come see you and your family. I am literally wired into the internet.

I grimaced. “What's that supposed to mean? How?”

*shrug* I don't know. Since you saw me last, I just spent more and more time on the online. One day I realized I'd been at my computer for 24 hours straight, so I went to bed, but I couldn't sleep, so I came back. I lost track of time, and the next time I looked at the computer, it had been maybe two more days. This time I really did go sleep, but I wasn't really tired, so I slept restlessly. After a night like that, I decided sleep was getting unnecessary, which is great for a blogger. I had more time to surf the web and write, and who would sleep if they didn't have to? I didn't ask questions, I just adjusted and enjoyed my new freedom.

Well, people started noticing my seemingly limitless energy on the web. I got invited to write more and more guest columns and do some ghost writing, which was great for my bank account and for my self-esteem. But it came clear pretty quickly that I had to abandon writing anything longer than about 1000 words, because my search-tic had gotten too bad to concentrate on anything longer than that, including my next novel. I was still pretty good at short essays back then, though.

That was when I discovered the stock market. I had become so quick at surfing and processing data on the internet that I could predict the market's ups and downs almost as soon as they happened. So I started spending part of every day doing that. And then I realized I could pick up news reports across the world in real time, so I did that in between trades and started a news aggregator. Between the two, I run a fairly successful page under a pseudonym. Life would be great, but now I have a problem.

I didn't realize what was happening with my body until it was too late. Somehow, these wires grew out of me into the computer while I was busy paying attention to all this other stuff. At first, I tried to pull them out, but each time I did, I noticed that my surfing speed dropped. So I stopped. My life was more online than off, so what does it matter that I can't get up away from the computer?

Well, I've been going on like this for some time, but as you can see, my body is in pretty bad shape. But I've also started noticing that I don't ever really pay attention to it.

“Well, you really should. You look like death.”

That's kind of my point. I don't think I live in my body anymore.

“Huh?” I shuddered.

I know it doesn't make much sense, but I think my body is dying, but I don't feel it dying, and my mind is as sharp as ever. I think somehow I've made the transition across the digital threshold.

“How can you tell?”

Well, my physical reactions are slow, and I can't really move more than automatically. And honestly, I haven't eaten in weeks, but I'm not hungry. I can do literally a few thousand things on the internet in the time it takes me to stick out my tongue. And soon, I might not be able to move anything at all. However it happened, I think I've transferred into a purely virtual existence.

“You've got to be pulling my leg,” I said without conviction. I glanced at the body staring at the ceiling. It certainly looked like Evan, but it was certainly on its way out of this life. I couldn't imagine he could come up with some hoax that looked so realistic... and breathed...

I don't know, but that's what I think. And that's what I really needed you to come for. I would never have been able to explain this without you standing right here. I think this body is keeping me back. I need you to release me from it.

I recoiled. “This is really sick. I'm not going to kill anyone.”

Hold on, just a second!

I paused my retreat.

Hold on, really, hear me out. That body there, it's not me. I'm the man who writes blogs, who comments on life on the internet, who runs a news website. And now I have an opportunity to become a real journalist, to investigate a life that no one has ever had before, to do real pioneering work! But I can feel this body is holding me back. I think too slow, because I have to send messages back into that brain. It's slow and it doesn't mean anything to me anymore.

“You don't need me. 'This body' of yours is dying pretty well on its own.”

No, you see, I don't actually know if I don't need this body, and I'm running out of time. I need you to cut a few of the wires and see what happens.

“And if you start dying, what am I supposed to do then?”

There will be time to handle it. I'll be paying close attention, I can promise you that. Please, Todd, I don't know how much time I have left, and if I'm wrong about needing my body, I need medical help right away.

“Seems like you could have thought of that earlier,” I mumbled, but he was right. Whatever happened before, he needed help now. “What do you need me to do?” I said with a tone of resignation.

There's a pair of scissors hanging above the sink you can use.

“I won't get electrocuted?”

They've got plastic handles, so you should be fine.

I took my phone and found the scissors and came back. I looked down at his hideous arms and the tangled web of wires that held them captive. “Now what?”

OK, just cut one or two wires and let's see what happens.

Slowly carefully, I took a single wire and placed it between the scissors. Then I cut it.

Evan's arm seemed to flinch, but there was little reaction. I turned back to the screen.

That felt all right. Let's try a a few more.

I cut three more. The body didn't flinch this time.

I think it's working. Let's see if you can fee one of the arms now.

I hesitated again. The enormity of what I was doing started to sink in. “Listen, Evan, even if you could do this, are you sure you want to? I mean...”

I know, I know. But I've thought about it a good deal. If this works, though, my body may die, but I'll live forever. However this happened, I don't know that it's reversible at this point, but there might be a way forward. We can't go back now. Go ahead, cut me loose.

What choice did I have? I cut one arm free, and then the other. Before I cut the last wire, I made sure Evan was ready. “How do you feel?”

Better than ever. I can think even more clearly than before—faster, sharper. I'm ready. Cut the wire.

I cut the wire. At first, nothing happened. “Evan?” I asked, looking from the computer screen to the sallow face of my friend and back.

The edges of panic had begun to sink in when a new message appeared on the screen.

I've done it! I've somehow become the future of humanity! Look at me, I can move from here to China and back practically at the speed of light! I will never die, for I am not tied down by your version of reality! I am immortal! I am the internet! I see all, I am all! The glory is mine!

And then, nothing. No more messages. I tried to get a response out of Evan, talking and typing up a storm, but nothing came of it. I was talking into the void, into the darkness.

Then I remembered the body, sitting there in the dark. I was alone with a living corpse.

I ran out of the house. I shouldn't have run, I know, but I did. I drove straight home and I didn't tell anyone about what I had seen, not Hana, not the police, not anyone. I couldn't sleep at night anymore with the lights off, and I couldn't touch a computer without getting goosebumps.

I would have liked to have forgotten the whole ordeal, but that's not the way things worked out. When Evan stopped writing for two weeks on end, his publishers contacted the police, who checked out the cabin. Of course they found my fingerprints on every light switch and on the scissors. Evan's body had begun decomposing and it was no longer clear how he died, so my defense lawyer didn't have much to go on. I told her exactly what happened, and she suggested the insanity defense, which I of course refused. Well, the prosecution's case was circumstantial but convincing, and the jury convicted. The judge lightened my sentence based on what he considered my unstable mental state, which I am grateful for, but I'm still appealing.

Evan could help, but he doesn't. In the weeks after our little incident, a new web magazine appeared, accurately predicting market swings and attracting a big following among finance-types. Oh, it's under an assumed name, but it's him, all right. And it spends half its web space blabbing on and on about life on the web and “living virtually.” That sneaky jerk, he knows what's happening with me and he refuses to get involved. I sent him a dozen emails, and he didn't respond to a one of them.

The worst part of it is that Hana doesn't believe me, either. She filed for divorce this week, and I hear from the other inmates that the judge assigned to our case hates convicts. I just don't know if I'll ever get to see my daughter again.

Well, fine. Evan can ruin my life if he likes. I'll get out of this hole someday, and when I do, I'll find him. See, I've been working on a theory of how he did it, and it's not that hard: you just have to be dedicated enough to the internet that it claims you as its own. So the moment I'm free, I'll do the same as him, but when I get out there in the internet, I'll take him apart. He never really was the competitive type, and I know how to play the endgame. I'll figure out what makes his little media empire tick, and then I'll leak it to all his competitors. I'll drive down the prices of the stocks he owns, I'll empty out his bank account, and I'll DDS the heck out of his stupid web site. And he won't know it's me until it's too late. Sure, with neither of us embodied, it might be a long struggle, but I've got two things going for me that Evan doesn't: I'm in the right, and I've already killed him once.

I can do it again.

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My questions are these:
1. What about the general premise?  Sure, it's been done, but I was mostly looking to finish something for a change.  Is it too boring?  Can it be improved?
2. Where is the structure weak?
3. What can I do to strengthen the emotional impact of the climactic scene?
4. What other craft observations can you make?

No matter whatever else, I am so glad to have actually finished something... ahhhhhh...  :)