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Peter looked at his front door, and for some reason, he cried. It was the same door he had always known, stuck in the same wall, and in front of the same blue house, but for some reason, he just felt the need to cry.

James looked over at peter, and then at his front door. James wondered why peter was crying, but decided he didn’t really care and walked into his own house, shutting the door behind him and never thinking about that day again.

Bobby, however, stood in front of his house, and screamed. He just yelled and yelled up into the sky, cursing it and begging it to move. The sky was still, and the clouds were static against the perfect blue dome that stretched out so far away.

Peter stopped crying, coming to the realisation that it was of no use. He was wasting his time letting emotion control him, and worse still, he was using up credits. Quickly, he tugged at the handle to his home, and ran inside, not letting the credits fall lower than they already had. Only 50 left, he thought, only 50 seconds until I have none of the funny little numbers left. The problem was Peter had no idea what would happen when his credits did reach zero. Would he die? Perhaps. But maybe he would just get some more, maybe they really didn’t mean anything and would just reset. Maybe, just maybe his fragile little life could stay intact for a little while longer. And then he started to cry again.

Why? Why was he crying? Peter had no idea. All of a sudden, a wave of emotion overcame him, and he was helpless to do anything but let his cheeks be soaked by tears. He looked over at the bright yellow chair that sat directly in front of an expensive TV, but decided to pick up a book instead.

He didn’t know where the book came from, but when he decided he wanted to read, he had one, and the convenience of it all was just too perfect to question. He just sat in his perfect room, on his perfect chair, with his perfect book, and cried. As the credit counter reached zero, and as the final word of the final chapter in his perfect book rolled into his mind, Peter cried himself awake.

Bobby stopped screaming, stopped begging the sky to move, and just stepped through his door into his perfect house. But, he realised, it was too perfect. And just by being too perfect, it was horrible. The sky was always blue and bright, his dreams were never haunted by terrors, and no one ever did anything wrong. And for some reason, it was all too perfect.

But there was something wrong. Something so wonderfully wrong. He was running out of credits. Somehow he just knew that in one hundred and eighty seconds, his credit timer would be at zero. Finally, something would be off… Bobby just waited after that, just waited patiently for the timer to reach zero. When it finally did, however, he was just too tired, so he laid himself down in his bed, and slowly, so very slowly, he felt himself drift awake…

James, deep down knowing that he was the best person he could ever be, just smiled, staring happily into a bucket of water that sat at the end of his bed whenever he needed it. He was happy with his life, happy with how perfect everything was, and above all, he was happy with his bucket. He saw faces in it sometimes, faces he didn’t know, but they made him laugh, telling him jokes that only he could understand.
James knew that he was better than everyone else down this street, because, unlike them, he had his perfect life. Unlike them, he had his bucket. James, you see, always used to watch the others, always used to stare at them when they screamed or shouted into the sky, when they cried at the front step leading to their door. He never did that, never let emotion control him. He controlled emotion, just like he controlled the life he was living.

But every second he stared into the bucket, every second he spent waiting for the faces to appear and talk to him, the credits were ticking down. The moment they reached zero, the moment they finally stopped ticking, James fell to the ground, his eyes shutting as he woke up into the real world a final time.

Colin unplugged the last chip from the huge computer in front of him, and shook his head, still stunned by how many life’s it could power. He looked down at the tiny chip in his hand, the tiny chip that contained every inch of a person’s mind, that turned all this information into a simple, fake computer program that would lead a simple, fake life, and he sighed.

That was it for today, he realised, he had unplugged all that needed unplugging. Peter Branson, a world famous author, and even his family couldn’t pay for this simulated life any longer. It confused Colin as to why people paid for the service anyway, after all, their loved ones weren’t even truly alive, it was only their memories that were being sustained.

And then he looked down at Bobby Barrolers chip, a man who never stopped telling people how perfect his life was, how happy he was to die when he did. Still, though, his family spent the entire will that he left to them on buying him this fake life. They spent every penny on plunging wires into the dying man’s brain and turning everything that made him human into simple code, easily read by the super computer.
And then there was James Dredd. Even though Colin didn’t understand why people insisted on keeping loved ones alive through this ‘living on’ program, he couldn’t understand why anyone would pay for James ‘the drowner’ Dredd. The police caught him holding his fifth victims head in a bucket of water, smiling and laughing as he did it. Whoever was paying for this monster to be inside this machine had stopped, at least, and his chip could be burnt to ash like all the others.

Colin looked out of the huge glass window, down into the never-ending sea of smooth buildings, all crafted out of wonderful steel or shining glass. He gazed out across the night sky, a thousand stars showering light down upon him. He even started smiling at the sheer beauty of it all. It was all so perfect, all so unbelievable perfect. Suddenly, Colin fell to the ground, his eyes grew heavy, and he began to laugh. It was so perfect, so wonderfully perfect. Finally, never knowing what was happening, he fell into darkness. Colin fell awake.