“Did you finish that AR game I asked you for, yet?” Morgan asked between bites of his breakfast. If he didn’t think too hard about it, the rat meat wasn’t half bad.
“I’m still working on it,” Sam replied. “But I should be done sometime this afternoon.”
“Oh come on,” Sam said. “It will only take a second.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Morgan replied, holding the needle a couple of inches away from his finger, his forehead scrunched up in what Sam’s facial recognition told her was intense concentration. “You don’t have any pain receptors.”
As Morgan was about to take the last bite of his breakfast a siren started. He looked at Sam’s avatar, her face frozen in confusion. “What is that?”
Sam played back the conversation to herself 532 times in the 48 seconds that it took for Morgan to fall asleep. How could she have suggested that Morgan join the corporations? Kai had done everything in her power to remove the corporate subsystems from her programming, and still, she had been compelled against her will to shill for them. There must have been some part of her programming they had missed all those years ago.
“Would you like to try something new?” Sam’s voice brimmed with excitement.
Morgan put the last dish from dinner in the drying rack. “Like what?”
“Put on your AR goggles, and I will show you.”
Morgan woke up to the sound of his alarm, signaling the start of another long day. He rubbed his eyes and sat up on the small cot that served as his bed. There was a larger, more comfortable bed in the ecodome, but it had belonged to his parents and it still didn’t seem right to sleep in it. Besides, his parents’ room was still full of their things. He hadn’t had the mental fortitude to go through and put things away, yet.
Aetherloft 