Arthur had a choice. He could step back into the gray void and let the simulation fragment into a final, broken episode. Or he could do something Fred Flintstone would never do.
Arthur tried to exit. He shouted, “Log out! Log out!” But the neural link was a one-way door he had left open too long. His brain had mapped itself onto Fred’s neural patterns. To leave now would be a kind of amputation.
He looked down. His Fred Flintstone hands were trembling. The rough, stone-age skin was flickering, and beneath it, for just a moment, he saw the paper-thin, vein-mapped skin of Arthur Pendleton. He saw the IV needle taped to his wrist. Download The Flintstones
The system chimed.
The world froze. The laughing audience cut off mid-chuckle. Arthur had a choice
“Stop,” Arthur whispered with Fred’s thick tongue.
His son, Mark, had bought him the top-of-the-line neural-link desktop for his birthday. “It’s the future, Dad,” Mark had said, tapping the sleek, silver casing. “Full-immersion nostalgia. You don’t just watch old shows. You live them.” Arthur tried to exit
“Yabba-Dabba-Doo!” the voice boomed from his throat, a voice not his own, yet utterly joyful.
The world dissolved.
The last thing he saw before everything went black was not Bedrock. It was a single, out-of-place image from his own memory: his son, Mark, at age six, wearing a Flintstones Halloween costume, the cheap plastic mask already cracked. The boy was holding Arthur’s hand, looking up at him with absolute trust.
Desperate, he drove his foot-car to the edge of Bedrock. The simulation had never rendered beyond the town limits. There was just a flat, gray void where the quarry should be. He stood at the edge, his big, cartoon feet on the precipice of nothing.