Dr. Thea Dumont sat at their white desk in their white office across from aerospace technician Leander Kostas, Applicant 04327. 

Kostas wouldn’t meet their gaze. But Dumont knew he was the kind of man who preferred this illusory face-to-face meeting over messaging or simulated voice chat. He still felt it was more “personal.” So Dumont had added decorative touches to their virtual office: nickel detailing on the white leather armchair Kostas bobbed his leg in, framed floral prints for his darting gaze to land on.

“What did you want to see me about, Leander?” they asked.

“It’s—it’s happening again, Doc.” Kostas ran a hand through his wavy hair.

“What’s happening, Leander?” 

“The…the…” In lieu of an explanation, Kostas tapped an open palm against his breastbone. He blinked rapidly, though his avatar had no tear ducts with which to cry. 

He didn’t have to explain. He’d come to Dr. Dumont more than once with these vague complaints of dissatisfaction. 

The doctor leaned back in their chair, studying him. They remained puzzled as to why the aerospace technician had chosen to retain his Earth-bound appearance when he could have picked any form for his avatar. Dumont had personally opted to blunt their silver-black hair and their body’s feminine features, adopting neutral pronouns. What was the point of gender markers, they thought, when procreation was no longer necessary? But Kostas’s avatar in the Helix looked just as he had on Earth, down to the laugh lines around his liquid brown eyes and the cochlear implant scar hidden behind his left ear.

Dumont folded their hands on the desk. “You’ve been taking up hobbies, haven’t you? Like I suggested?”

Kostas nodded at his lap. “Golf. Chess. Water skiing. It’s not the same...”

“You titrated the difficulty level to your preference?” 

“It’s not. The same.” Kostas sighed and combed his long fingers through his hair again. “It’s just…none of this feels real.”

Dumont frowned. They’d expected user feedback on the Helix’s virtual environment. They wanted it. The project was still in the test phase, after all: ten thousand beta users rather than the entirety of the ten-billion-strong human population. But Dumont had been modifying the program for nearly a decade, and in their estimation, the platform was ready. Maddeningly, Kostas still wasn’t satisfied. 

“If the virtual environment doesn’t feel real enough, Leander, you can bump your sensory registration levels up another notch.” 

“It’s not that.” Kostas leaned forward. “Take golf, for example. Before, there would have never been a choice about how easy or difficult it would be to learn it.”

“Of course there was a choice. The amount of effort we put in determined the speed at which we acquired skill. It’s no different here.” Dumont had been told, back on Earth, that their tone could be curt. In the Helix, they’d chosen a soothing parental voice mod for occasions such as this. 

“No, there were other factors. Physical factors.” Kostas gestured to his absent cochlear implant. “Because we had bodies.”

Early on in the project’s development, one of the lead engineers had suggested that Dumont had vastly underestimated how much stock people put in their identities. Dumont had envisioned the Helix as a society cleansed of race and culture. Without bodies, things like age, gender, and sexual preference would become a moot point. There would be no need to fight over physical resources. Theological debates would become redundant, since mankind would transcend the need for a god. Everyone would belong to a collective consciousness without language barriers, social or class divisions. It would be a symbiosis of coexistence, a utopia of intellectual freedom. 

But apparently, that vision was too idealistic. People didn’t know how to let go of the past, even if the past was harming them.

“If it makes you more comfortable, Leander, you can turn off your auditory input.” Maybe that engineer had been right, and Kostas was nostalgic for his Earth-bound identity. “We can all download sign language–” 

Kostas cut them off. “That’s not what I meant. What I’m saying is, there were always things we couldn’t control, before. We got injured. We got tired. We got sick. Hell, we got old and died.”

All things that limited them. All factors Dumont had made obsolete. In the Helix, humankind could exist in its purest form: thought, the essence of what made them them. Dumont and their team had worked tirelessly to develop a program that could map human psyches, even down to the patterns of physiological response that produced emotion when (to the doctor’s surprise) it became clear that users still wanted to experience them. The Earth may have been doomed, but Dumont had found a path to liberation. Just like the Greek god Prometheus, whose gift of fire launched mankind into an age of enlightenment, Dumont had granted humanity this gift of freedom.

Only Kostas didn’t seem to be grateful.

Dumont stifled a sigh. “Have you tried meeting someone, like we talked about?” 

When Kostas applied to the Helix project, his wife and daughter had already succumbed to the unstable, radiation-plagued conditions on Earth. But these days, who hadn’t lost someone? Dumont had been twelve when they’d watched workers load their parents’ bodies into the incinerator. Some days, the grief had come on so strong it felt as though their body would rip apart from the inside. But that had been forty-one years ago, and in the Helix, Dumont’s eyes remained dry. 

“Meeting someone isn’t going to solve the problem, Doc.” Kostas didn’t seem offended by the suggestion. He seemed disappointed. “I know you don’t want to hear this. But I think…” He drew a deep breath, hesitance not quite dampening the resolve in his eyes. “I think this whole thing may have been a mistake.”

Foul heat spread through Dumont’s simulated gut. No one had ever dared to call the Helix a mistake in their presence. The word reverberated through the doctor’s coded synapses, contaminating places far deeper than that of mere pride. The Helix was their reason for being. And Kostas’s mournful eyes no longer looked so innocent.

Dumont stared at him. Then, slowly, they smiled. 

“I have just the solution for you.”

Read on by purchasing the 2023 Connecticut Literary Anthology