The sun was going down on the last official night of summer, and if I could have, I would have frozen that moment in time forever. I would have let the sun hang eternally over the horizon, painting the ocean and the earth in stunning gold and orange, warming my face and hers despite the breeze that said fall was coming. I would have let it sit there in that spot, unmoving, never giving way to night or coming back again to announce the arrival of the following day, if it meant this summer didn't have to end.

     Lina sat beside me, her gaze soft and her eyes just the slightest bit glassy, buzzed on the expensive bourbon we had saved for the occasion.  She didn't look at me. She was fully lost in the moment. It was one of those things that seemed like a skill in itself nowadays -- the ability to lose oneself completely to a single instant -- but she had it. It was one of the things I loved about her. One of the many things I hoped she could teach me to do better.

     When I looked back at the horizon, I was disappointed to see that all my wishful thinking had done nothing to hinder the inevitable. The sun was still descending, closer now to the point where it would wink out and put an end to this summer that would probably go down as the best three months of our lives. It was hard to think about what might come after this.

     Do things go back to normal?

     Do we go home, back to the States, and fall into the same old routine?

     Or do we go back changed? Better?

     Does life take on a different shape now that we've spent this time living everywhere and anywhere across the ocean, each of us learning along the way why we had fallen in love to begin with?

     I shook the thoughts away and tried to lose myself the way Lina was lost. Tried to milk every drop of joy out of these final moments as the sun sank deeper behind the horizon, the ocean swallowing the last light of the perfect season.

     It was when the sun had almost disappeared that I felt it. A twinge or a tingle that almost made me wince. Like my brain was a circuit board in a room with too much moisture in the air.

     Lina didn't seem to notice. She only sat and stared at the last of the sunset as it—

     Hm. Weird.

     Last I had looked, I was sure the sun had finished dipping below the horizon, but now there was a red sliver poking up, like the universe itself was trying to hang on to this moment as hard as I was.

     No. A trick of the light playing off the surface of the water. My mind had gotten the best of me for a second, and I had been afraid to let the moment go.

     I leaned into Lina, but she didn't move; only sat staring, still lost to the majesty of the moment.

     I watched her watching, and the light—

     Yes!

     The light on her face was getting brighter. The sand’s amber hue crawling ever-so-slowly toward a more radiant orange-yellow. When I turned to look again, the sliver had grown to a slice, and there was no chalking it up to optical illusions or wishful thinking this time.

     The sun was rising.

     I blinked hard a couple times, as if I could reset my vision and make the scene make sense, but it kept coming up.

     I don't think I was breathing as I nudged Lina. Once, twice, and finally on the third nudge, she turned. When her eyes met mine, my spine went cold.

     There was nothing wrong with her, exactly, nothing outwardly alarming except...

     ...except she wasn't there.

     Her face was right there in front of me but Lina, the woman I had finally proposed to, the one I had finally given my life to, was not behind it. I don't know what or who I was looking at, but my fiancé was gone. In her place was a husk. An uncanny facsimile of the person I loved.

     She smiled, the impossibly rising sun brightening her features further, throwing into great detail the nothingness, the no-oneness, the artificiality of this strange, yet so familiar face.

     I scrambled sideways away from her in the sand, feeling like a cat who had come around a blind corner to bump noses with a taxidermied dog.

     Her expression shifted. There was no transition, just a switch; from a smile, to a foreign look of concern, something that looked almost practiced.

     The sun cleared the horizon, and the world got brighter. Her face, fully illuminated, twitched, as if her expression was about to change again, but it didn't, like it had gotten stuck on the transition.

     I stood up and put a little more distance between us. It wasn’t a conscious movement, but something deep in my lizard brain wanted to be as far from this person as possible. I settled for just outside of arm’s reach.

     "What's wrong, baby?" The voice was hers, but it wasn't. It was like watching a doll speak in my fiancé's voice, and my spine froze all over again.

     The sun was a finger’s width over the horizon now, but, impossibly, it seemed to have stopped. The whole world seemed to have stopped.

     For a second, and for the second time, I though it must be my imagination, but then I saw the waves. The small, rolling waves that had been lapping the beach minutes before, lulling Lina and I into a blissful semi-hypnosis, were frozen in place, the closest just about to break on its way to the shore.

     A seagull hung in the air over the water, but it wasn't hovering on the wind the way it had been for the minutes before. There was no wind. The bird was just hanging there, motionless and soundless as Lina, who continued staring through me without blinking.

     I chanced a glance back up the beach behind us. I had to see if anyone else was seeing this, or if everything was frozen in the moment, but by the time I got my head around, the world had come back to life. A kid chased a bird that had come looking for scraps at a family’s picnic, a couple bought a pair of cocktails from the mini bar at the top of the beach, the birds not being chased by overzealous children hovered naturally on the wind, which had returned in the same moment the world had awakened.

     Lina looked confused, looking up at me from her spot in the sand.

     "You okay?" She said.

     It was her. It was Lina. She was back, and despite the strangeness of the last minute or so, despite how real it had all felt, my instinct was to go hug her. And I did.

     She laughed a little, but hugged me back. "Okay, I'll take this." She kissed me, the scent of her skin and her sunscreen mingling with the whiskey still on her breath.

     She was warm. She was here. The soul was back behind her eyes. As I looked back to the ocean, the sun was about to touch the horizon, on its way down for the last time this summer.

     Amazingly – I’ll have to look into this phenomenon one day – I was back in the moment, already ready to let those couple of strange minutes fade from memory. I had obviously had some kind of episode, but Lina seemed as ready to let it go as I was.

     When the sun was halfway hidden, a tingle in the back of my head, that short-circuit feeling that had preceded all the strangeness, began to return, this time as a gradual swell rather than a sudden spark.

     Before the sun was fully hidden, the scene glitched, and for a moment I saw blackness.

     No. Not total blackness. A red-black. The insides of my own eyelids.

     I tried to open them but didn't have the strength. I tried moving, but my limbs were held fast by something, and even if they hadn’t been, I felt so weak that just the weight of my arms themselves might have been enough to hold me down.

     The warmth and the breeze were gone. It was cool and dry, and I was lying down. One more time, knowing it was useless, I tried to get up.

     The struggle lasted all of a few seconds before I was back on the beach in Portugal, the sun on its way down toward the horizon.

     Lina, sitting beside me, interlaced her fingers with mine, and I watched in horror as the sun began to set on the greatest summer of my life.

***

They had been able to safely pull me out of the sim after sixteen sunsets, though I had, according to them, suffered a nervous breakdown by the seventh. It took a couple days before I was lucid enough to speak with someone from the company about what had happened.

     I had been in the hospital since they pulled me out, and LucidStream Experiences had sent a representative to “debrief” me after the ordeal. We sat at a small table in the day room down the hall from my room to talk.

     The first thing I asked was where Lina was. If she was okay.

     The man across from me, Mr. Lindhelm, project manager and nice-enough guy, looked uncomfortable. “Lina,” he paused. “Lina’s not a real person, Mr. Simmons.”

     Though I’m sure it wasn’t my first time hearing it, I didn’t understand the answer, and the Lindhelm could tell, so he continued without my asking.

     “You don’t remember creating her?” He asked. “You sat with the programmers and designed her yourself.”

     There was the hint of a memory there, like the recollection of a secondhand story, but nothing concrete; nothing I could grab onto and claim as my own. My gut wanted to believe the man was lying, but the rational part of me knew he wasn’t, and knew he had no reason to.

     I searched my memory – my actual memory – for a woman named Lina, and quickly found that no such woman had played a part in my real life. A woman like Lina wouldn’t have. A woman like Lina could have anyone she wanted. In the sim, that had been me. I was perfect in there. An exemplary alpha with everything going for him. Handsome and charming, vital and virile; everything I wasn’t out here, everything I could have been, given a few different turns on the road of life.

     Who knows? I could probably still get there, but it would take time, and I would suffer for it. In the meantime, even if I took responsibility now, even if I started working on a better version of me today, someone worth the likes of Lina, it would be months – maybe years – of “in-between,” of “work-in-progress,” all the while watching all the Linas of the world get swept up right under my nose.

     No. I’d had my chance. I’d chosen my path.

     “I want to go back,” I said.

     Mr. Lindhelm looked confused. “Excuse me?”

     “Back inside. Just put me back in.”

     Mr. Lindhelm shook his head, his expression apologetic. “Your subscription’s up and your account’s empty. If you want to switch payment methods we could consider it, but there’s still going to be some mandatory rest and recovery. You’ve experienced a massive glitch, and it’s important that we make sure you’re alright before we can think about letting you back inside.”

     “I’ll get the money. Just get me back in.” I tried to stand, but even using the table for extra help, I didn’t have the strength. I imagine I should have felt embarrassed, an uninjured man, victim of his own indulgence, struggling to get out of a wheelchair he shouldn’t need, but my desperation to get back inside overtook any logical emotion.

     “Mr. Simmons, we’ve already put you ‘back in’ multiple times, at your insistence and against our better judgement. You need exercise. You need real food. Your muscles are atrophied, your digestive tract is in shambles, and your dopamine receptors are so overloaded you’re not even feeding yourself.” Mr. Lindhelm paused for a moment, and the concern on his face actually looked sincere. “Live, Mr. Simmons. Really live for a while. Try it on. It might fit.”

     “I have another account.”

     Mr. Lindhelm sighed. “We’ve exhausted your backup account. The add-ons start get expensive quick if you’re not careful. Your accounts are empty. Please, there’s a real world out there waiting for you.”

     The phrase tasted sour, and he was talking down to me.

     I was about to let him know what he could do with his “real world” when the door to the small sitting room opened and a male nurse walked in. My vitals must have elevated past the arbitrary ceiling they had placed on me.

     Knowing it was purely for spite but not caring, I locked the wheels of my wheelchair. Let them work at getting me out of here.

     Some work it turned out to be. The nurse simply pinned both of my wrists in my lap with one hand – gently, which was the worst part – and unlocked the chair with the other, and with that I was wheeled out under the pitying gaze of Mr. Lindhelm.

***

As far as the hospital and LucidStream Experiences knows, I’m adjusting fine to the real world. Luckily, I don’t really need them. It took a little digging, but I found an indie company that offers a similar experience. I couldn’t quite get Lina exactly right, but she’s close. The locations and the NPCs for both programs are all imported assets from a third party, so other than Lina, everything is almost the same. Even the neural shunts that LSE installed are compatible with Mind Ivy’s jacks. I didn’t even need another surgery.

     Mind Ivy’s sim is not as seamless an experience as LSE’s – I have to come out at least once a day to eat, shower, and use the bathroom, usually during the time the in-sim sun is going down – but they’ve set me up with an indefinite line of credit as long as I give detailed reports on any glitches I find. 

     The worst part is that the sim will sometimes just randomly crash, and I wake up in my sim chair in what I’ve been told is “just a panic attack.” I’d always thought panic attacks were supposed to be pretty serious, but the crew here knows how to handle them. Luckily, the crashes are usually only momentary glitches that work themselves out before I can get too anxious. Also, sometimes, even when things are going well, I know I’m inside. Not always, and again, it’s usually momentary, but it really breaks the immersion when it happens.

     Oh, well. With my daily critical input and an indefinite free subscription to the beta, eventually the line between Earth and Mind Ivy will disappear completely.

     Then I can be happy.