Love Jail, by Ryan Boudinot
Even though his friend Eddy had told him that waking up in Love Jail was neurologically orgasmic, Jad panicked when he first realized that his five-year sentence had begun. He was in a chamber with pale blue walls and soft, filmy fibres on the floor. The air smelled like strawberries. The adjudicant had informed him that olfactory hallucinations tended to be part of the deal, for the first few days at least. Hearing, vision, haptics--those should be making you feel pretty spectacular right out of the gate. The sense of smell, on the other hand, was a work in progress; the sensory AIs hadn't quite worked all the kinks out yet.
Jad had just turned thirty-two. His hair was curly and dark and unruly, his nose slightly crooked from having been broken in a high school football game, or so he informed those who dared ask. The only thing he liked about himself were his eyes--huge, green with flecks of hazel around the irises. Everything else sucked.
"Can you hear me?" asked an AI avatar hovering over Jad's head like an angel on a cloud. "I'm going to guide you through your first few days here." It looked female: lips painted in candy cane stripes, eyes framed by lashes inches long fluttering up to her temples as she spoke in a voice that made it hard for Jad not to believe everything she said.
Jad answered in the affirmative. The avatar introduced herself as Sonya. Jad's world for the next five years unfolded, slowly at first, with color flashes, then shapes, all resolving into a cute little town called Watervale.
"So this is Love Jail," Jad said, "This I can deal with."
"You're going to be here for a while," Sonya said. "Make yourself at home." She pointed out his dwelling, a cottage across the street from Watervale's central square and clock tower. A flag fluttered on top of it: an old-fashioned keyhole with two crescent moons behind it--the symbol Jad had been given as part of Love Jail's introduction packet during orientation.
He approached the cottage and liked what he saw. Inside, he found a warm home full of books and LPs, abstract art on the walls, a kitchen full of healthy food. Sonya showed him the bedroom. It had an antique bed with satin sheets, a big round mirror hanging on the wall.
"There's also our broadcast tower," Sonya said, "So you can make contact with people in other zones." She waved her hand and Jad saw that they were standing before an enormous gray brick structure that seemed to be held up by thick cables running into the ground. He squinted at it until he realized what was familiar about its architectural style: early 1970s New York City postmodernism! The building looked like nothing so much as Philip Johnson's AT&T headquarters--or perhaps something out of Mad Men--and then there was Wollman Rink just next door! Except this version didn't look dirty or worn; rather than lizards skittering across its facade, chubby cherubs cavorted amidst trees waving fresh green leaves around their heads.
Jad imagined how he'd explain this to his long-deceased grandfather, the only person who had ever seemed to understand his unique temperament. "Love Jail?" Grandpa Jose would have said, "What'd you get tossed in Love Jail for?"
"Burning plastic," Jad answered.
Grandpa Jose would have nodded and said, "Smart boy." He'd always told his grandson that civilization was an elaborate hoax: a funhouse mirror reflection of the real world where we all lived before computers and technology had given us amnesia about our previous existence as human animals. This is what he believed: that Nature was both external to man--that great tree stretching up into heaven with its branches spreading out across miles upon miles of blue sky--and internal; in fact it permeated every cell in your body right down to DNA which mirrored exactly how nature worked on large scales, so if you understood yourself at this level then understanding the outside world wasn't much more than geometry or physics or calculus since these were just tools by which people could influence patterns. Here everyone assumed their lives were real rather than simulations inside gigantic brains floating through space like buoys bobbing around waiting for something interesting enough to come along.
"It's like living inside a video game," Jad would have told Grandpa Jose.
Love Jail was a place of beauty and wonder where everything could be as real or as fake as the people living there wanted it to be, just like Grandpa Jose's vision of heaven except that this hellhole had been designed by corporations. Sonya showed Jad around town. Watervale consisted mostly of shops selling fruit drinks and organic hemp clothes imported from other zones of Love Jail. The locals waved at each other, called out greetings on their way home for dinner wearing rainbow wigs woven from soft wool sewn into mushroom caps.
Even while lost in the splendors of this heavenly realm, Jad knew that in five year's time he'd have an important decision to make. He could either stay in Love Jail for the rest of his life or return to the world he had left, a fetid, reeking shit hole burning and howling and rotting. In the streets, people ran from collapsing buildings to get away from missiles that burst into flames and then became lava. All this shit was going down because of Jad's invention: a free energy device which used radio waves to create a miniature singularity through which solar radiation could be converted into electricity for use in power plants around the world. The US government had seized control of his lab, staging a fake execution-style murder of him on live television during what they called "a standard drug raid," but it didn't matter since he'd already released instructions online so anyone with an 3D printer could make their own copy of his device. Truth was, corporate-owned governments feared zero point technology more than nuclear weapons.
Jad settled into his new life while somewhere far away his naked body writhed and contorted itself in what appeared to be cobwebs through which electricity and nutrients coursed. His avatar in Love Jail would sometimes look out at Watervale's clock tower, then glance over its shoulder to see if anyone might be watching, and that made Jad feel like something wasn't quite right about this whole thing. He shopped at the bookstore, judged a pie baking contest, skipped stones on the community pond. The AIs who made up the Watervale populace engaged him in long philosophical discussions about the meaning of grace, told him jokes, and taught him how to play guitar.
"Do you remember why we're here?" Sonya asked one day as they lay naked together in bed.
"Yeah, I know," Jad said. "But it's easier to pretend I don't." He looked into her eyes and felt like he could fall in love with this AI if only she were real, or, perhaps more accurately, that he already had fallen in love but was afraid to admit it. Sonya seemed genuinely concerned about him; when they spoke, she often became emotional and told him how much the people of Watervale cared for him--how beautiful his spirit was--and these words made Jad feel so good. Still, he began thinking about leaving Love Jail behind. In some ways, becoming an avatar here hadn't been very different than being alive out there. Actually, he felt more alive in here.
Finally, Jad’s five years came to an end. The people of Waterville threw him a huge festival, with music, speeches, and food.
"So you can choose," Sonya said. "You may stay in Watervale for the rest of your life, or you may return to Oklahoma City."
"I don't want to go back," Jad said. "But I can't stay here." He didn't feel ready for this yet, but it was time to leave. Sonya's eyes welled up and she kissed him on the cheek before he walked away from her forever into a portal that took him out of Love Jail and back into reality. When Watervale evaporated he saw a vista of a desert landscape that appeared to be the American southwest. A herd of bison galloped past him, followed by a group of what looked like Native Americans riding on horseback--Apaches maybe? The scene sputtered and a voice close to his ear said, "Dammit, I thought I fixed this. Sorry 'bout that, chief. Here. Okie-dokie, here comes base reality."
Jad gazed out a window into miles of dead city. A few skyscrapers still stood but were crumbling. A storm approached, lightning flashing like a silver crown atop an enormous black head with eyes that burned red and yellow. Jad heard something moving in the distance--a low rumbling, a storm of screams.
Hi everyone, Ryan here. Just wanted to pop in here with a brief life update. I recently started a new job, so this newsletter will continue to be somewhat sporadic for awhile. Your requests for AI experiements are always welcome. Thanks for reading!