I'd been working my way through the storage unit where human brains were kept viable, each of them able to interact with others in a virtually maintained world, when I ran across an odd one-- this brain wasn't networked with any of the others.
So I looked around at ancient records. This brain had been here since almost the beginning.
Considering that the "extended life" we could provide was not cheap and that few who could afford this would opt for such an approach to longevity, I was intrigued.
We have access to the virtual worlds these brains lived in, you see, and I could "step in" to it with the viewpoint of one of the people-- or, in this case, person-- residing there.
It was strange-- this virtual world looked like the real world from over a thousand years before, complete with all of the necessary trappings to convince a person who resided here that it was real... but it was empty.
No one was here, excepting the one "person" who was residing here, though I could swear I saw flashes of a ghostly figure in the corner of my eye.
I stepped out and decided to dig through the records. Even without networking, the necessary infrastructure to keep a brain alive this long was non-trivial, and, to top it off, I had no idea why anyone would want to be alone on a copy of twenty-first century earth.
The old adage of "follow the money" is a truism. I finally found all of the necessary records which included the world being simulated for the "man".
Y'know, people often choose to live in these worlds with others like them. This particular person didn't, it was chosen for him. He'd hurt someone that many other people had cared for and now...
Alone, he'd been, for over a thousand years already, his maintenance costs paid up by a self-sufficient fund for as long as his brain could be kept alive, forever haunted by ghostly glimpses from the corner of his eye showing the woman he'd had no remorse over torturing, unable to ever escape, even through suicide. Unable, in this virtual world all his own, to ever die.
And, given his history...
I flagged his brain box as containing a sociopath and that he was to be kept isolated... and well maintained. Forever.
Or, at least, as long as his neurons will last.
Sanitary measures matter, you know, as does a quarantine.
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Author: Jack C Lipton Title: Fiend or Faux Part: Universe: Departures Summary: Everything has a price... though not always in a recognizable currency Keywords: Revision: $Revision: 1.4 $ Archive: http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/CupaSoup/www/ Mailing List: FAQ: RCS: $Id: faux.x,v 1.4 2007/06/29 02:58:55 jcl Exp $