The Problem With Expansion Packs
by Ronald Schulte
part 1
“9-1-1. What is your emergency?”
“Please help! My mother is unresponsive!”
“Is she breathing?”
“No!”
“Pulse?”
“No! Wait, that’s not what I mean! She’s a virtual! You know, post-biological, retired to the Cloud? She never takes more than a few milliseconds to respond to our messages, but it’s been almost four minutes now since her last response!”
“Okay, ma’am, I’m with you now. What’s her Cloud ID?”
“9F33AF08121FEC3D! Please hurry! I’m so worried!”
“I understand, ma’am. We’ll check in on her for you.”
“Okay. Thank you!”
Betty put the woman on hold, then opened a chat window on her laptop.
“Hey, Adam - we have an unresponsive Cloud resident,” she typed. She added in the Cloud ID, then clicked Send.
“On it,” the chat window responded.
Betty sighed.
She’d been doing this job a long time, since before Cloud retirement was a thing. This sort of call still felt more like tech support than emergency services. Anyway, there were four new lights blinking on her phone, so she couldn’t dwell on it any further. She took a quick sip of her coffee and answered the next call in the queue.
* * *
Adam reviewed his information as he fluttered to the ground in front of a small single-story home in a generic suburban neighborhood. The Cloud ID he’d been given belonged to a certain Gloria Rosenbaum. She’d been uploaded to the Cloud about three and a half years earlier, standard retirement package.
The home didn’t look like much to Adam, but his perspective didn’t matter. Digital life after death was a matter of personal style and taste. At least Gloria got to relax in retirement; the only way Adam had been able to afford the Cloud was by taking on full-time post-biological meta-virtual work, and he doubted he’d be relaxing any time soon.
Adam shook away his thoughts and focused on the task at hand. He stepped up to Gloria’s door and rang the doorbell, then stepped back and waited. No one answered the door immediately, so he pounded on the door a few times. It seemed dumb, having to do things this way. Adam could easily hack his way in if he wanted to, appear right in front of Gloria as if out of thin air. But that sort of thing was highly discouraged because it “ruined the illusion.” The Cloud residents didn’t like to be reminded that their new reality wasn’t, strictly speaking, real. Adam understood, but it was bloody inconvenient.
As he waited, he ruffled the feathers on his wings. He enjoyed this particular avatar. How he appeared to his clients depended on what sort of afterlife experience they’d chosen. In Gloria’s “Heaven” afterlife skin, meta-virtual residents like Adam appeared as angels.
In other skins, Adam might appear as a spirit, or a wizard, or a man in black, or an extraterrestrial. In one particularly disturbing skin, he’d appeared as a clown with a striking resemblance to Pennywise from Stephen King’s It. He sincerely hoped that skin didn’t increase too much in popularity.
This is taking too long, Adam realized. Retirees never took longer than a few seconds to answer the door. He reached out and tried the doorknob; locked. He was about to check for an open window when he heard a muffled voice from somewhere inside the house. He pressed his ear against the front door. It was faint, but he could just make out the words: “I’m stuck! Somebody help me!”
“I’m coming, Gloria! Hang on!”
Since Gloria sounded distressed, and he was fairly certain she couldn’t see him, Adam cheated a little. He muttered a few incantations, which in turn executed a few lines of code. He then bent down, lifted the corner of the doormat, and grabbed a shiny new key from underneath. The key fit the lock perfectly. Adam unlocked the deadbolt and opened the front door.
“Gloria? Where are you?”
“In the hallway! Near the bathroom!”
Adam followed the sound of her voice. He turned the corner into the hallway, then gasped.
“Is it bad?” asked Gloria.
Gloria’s head and upper torso were in the hallway, sticking out of the wall at an angle. Her lower half, from the hips down, was nowhere to be seen.
“How long have you been like this?” asked Adam when he’d finally recovered his ability to speak.
“Since this morning. I went to sleep last night in my bed, and woke up this way.”
Adam frowned. He’d seen a lot of crazy stuff here in the Cloud, but nothing quite like this. Still, it didn’t surprise him much. Just another glitch in a Cloud full of glitches.
“I sure hope you can help. My legs are going numb.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Adam said with more confidence than he felt. He walked over and knocked on the wall near Gloria’s ribs. “What’s behind this wall?”
“My bedroom. Or maybe the closet? I can’t tell how close I am to the door.”
“First door behind you?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
Adam nodded, walked around Gloria, and counted his steps to the bedroom door. He entered the bedroom, then took the same number of steps back in the direction he’d come from. His last two strides did indeed take him into Gloria’s closet. He turned on the light, revealing an enormous closet space. It had to be at least one hundred feet to a side, and appeared to be several stories tall. Adam studied the wall to his right, but Gloria’s bottom half was nowhere to be seen. He spun about in confusion.
Then it dawned on him.
He turned off the closet light and made his way back to Gloria in the hallway.
“That closet, is that an expansion pack by any chance?”
“Yes, it is.”
Adam cursed inwardly. “Did you save the paperwork when it was installed?”
“I’m afraid I didn’t. Is that going to be a problem?”
“Shouldn’t be.” Might be. The problem with expansion packs was that it wasn’t at all like putting an addition on a home in the physical world. In the Cloud, additional storage could be sourced from just about anywhere; Adam wasn’t sure if the data resided on the same server as the house itself or even the same network.
But the expansion itself didn’t really matter; Adam needed the house’s original closet, where he expected — hoped — he’d find Gloria’s lower half. The old closet’s data would have been swapped out and archived somewhere when the expansion was installed. However, finding it without any installation notes would be very tricky.
“When did you have that expansion installed, Gloria?”
“It was a gift from my daughter to celebrate my first year of digital immortality. So... about two and a half years ago?”
“Do you remember the names of any of the installers?”
“No, sorry to say. It was a team of angels, though, maybe five or six of them. Only took them a day to knock out the old closet and build the new space!” Gloria gushed.
Adam nodded appreciatively, although he knew it would only have taken one of them a split second to utter the appropriate commands. The hammers and saws were, of course, all for show.
“Okay. Hang tight, Gloria. I’m going to search for your paperwork.”
Adam moved out of Gloria’s line of vision and whispered a few commands to start a trace of Gloria’s garbage collection. It was a long shot, given the amount of time that had elapsed, but maybe he’d find something.
While the trace ran, he walked around Gloria’s house and rummaged through her various drawers and cabinets, hoping perhaps she’d squirreled away the document and simply didn’t remember. The manual search proved fruitless, however, so Adam sat down at the kitchen table and waited for the trace to finish.
“Any luck?” called Gloria from down the hall.
“No, nothing... Wait. Here it is! I found the paperwork in your trash. One second.” Adam flipped through the record and found what he was looking for: a pointer to the home’s original closet. A few more commands and he’d managed to swap the old closet back into its original place.
“Okay, found what I needed,” he said. True enough, and all she needed to know. He obviously wasn’t about to reveal that he’d just magically downsized Gloria’s enormous closet. “Let’s see about getting you out of there.”
Adam made his way through the hallway and bedroom and into the closet. When he turned on the lights this time, it was a much different experience. The closet was a decent size by physical-world standards — maybe eight feet by twelve feet — but, compared to the expansion, it was puny. With the clothing racks and shelving, there was barely room in here for Adam’s wings; he had to tuck them tight against his back.
Adam pushed away a few outfits on hangars to his right — apparently abandoned by Gloria when she’d installed the expansion — and verified that Gloria’s bottom half was indeed where he’d expected to find it. Adam probably would have been relieved to see this, but he was understandably distracted by the puddle of blood on the floor, and the creature gnawing on Gloria’s calf.
He recoiled as the creature hissed. The thing was black as night and looked like it had a thousand teeth. The creature stared at him for a moment, then glanced at the open door behind him. Adam instinctively pulled the door closed. The creature hissed again, then continued snacking on Gloria’s leg.
Adam whispered commands as quickly as he could. A cage appeared around the creature, which Adam kicked away from Gloria’s leg. The creature screamed and thrashed, tossing the cage around the small space. Adam leapt at the cage and, by the time he landed, he had a sledgehammer in his hand and the cage had bolted itself to the floor to ensure a stationary target. He brought the sledgehammer down upon the cage, crushing metal and creature alike. The lifeless pile of flesh within the mangled cage indicated that a second swing was not necessary.
Threat contained, Adam turned his attention to Gloria. He did his best to heal the damage the creature had done to her leg, then tapped out a few chunks of drywall around Gloria’s midsection with the sledgehammer.
“Gloria? I’m going to lift you out into the hall. Are you ready?” It would have been easier to have her duck into the closet, but he couldn’t let her see the old closet, let alone the grotesque carcass.
“Ready,” she confirmed.
Adam hoisted her, upwards and outwards. Her legs cleared the drywall, and she fell to the hallway floor with a loud thud and a curse. Adam used that moment to repair the hole in the wall. Extra bricks on his side, just to be safe. He had no idea what sort of malware he’d just killed, but where there was one, there would be more. He needed to contain them to this space, evacuate Gloria, and call for reinforcements.
When he was satisfied that the wall was secure, Adam exited the closet, closing the door behind him. He hesitated, then quickly installed a couple of deadbolts and engaged them from the outside, just to be safe.
“Gloria, we have a problem,” he panted as he jogged out of the bedroom. “We need to...”
“What’s wrong with my leg?”
Adam spun around to find Gloria in the bathroom, examining her calf. The bite wound was slowly changing color, from red to blue to violet. Streaks of black began to extend outwards, down toward her toes and up toward her hips.
“Gloria, listen to me,” said Adam slowly. “You’re infected. We have very little time. You need to trust me and do exactly as I say. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” said Gloria. Where Gloria’s blouse was slightly hiked, Adam could already see black tendrils working their way up Gloria’s torso. He had only a few seconds to pull this off.
“Close your eyes, Gloria. Whatever you do, don’t open them.”
Adam whispered the command when Gloria closed her eyes. By the time they were fully closed, he was ready. He didn’t dare hesitate, lest he lose his nerve. He planted his feet firmly, took a good deep breath...
And swung the machete that had appeared in his hands at Gloria’s neck.
Gloria’s head tumbled to the floor.
“Ouch!” she shouted.
“Keep them closed!” he reminded her as he grabbed her head by the hair and yanked her away just as the infected body flailed in their direction. Adam sprinted toward the kitchen, quickly walling off the hallway behind them as he ran.
“I can’t feel my legs again,” Gloria observed.
“That’s expected,” grunted Adam. He turned the corner and ran toward the front door. He opened the door, bolted out...
And slammed into a solid surface.
He bounced backward onto the foyer floor.
“Uh-oh,” he said, massaging the bruise on his forehead.
“What is it?” asked Gloria. Bless her heart; her eyes were still closed.
Adam stood up and whispered a few commands.
Nothing happened.
“What is it?” Gloria repeated.
“We’ve been quarantined.”
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Ronald Schulte
