Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: Martha and the Muffins – Echo Beach

Echo Beach is a retirement community unlike any other, for residents who have died in the physical world and been uploaded into an entirely digital realm. But it takes a lot of processing power to recreate an entire human life and cracks, in the form of strange glitches, are starting to show.

======

Michael was putting the finishing brushstrokes on his painting when the sky glitched. He’d been inspired by Monet, who painted the same subjects over and over again to capture subtle differences in light and shadow. Michael had painted the view from their rear porch so many times that he could see it with his eyes shut. He knew the exact pattern of the clouds. He knew the rhythm of the waves, exactly how they would fall one after another after another. The sunset, there were about two dozen different variations set to some kind of randomiser. Presumably that was so people who didn’t pay attention too closely could appreciate the beauty of the occasional sunset without realising they, too, repeated themselves again and again. But he’d never seen the sky glitch before.

Clouds moved north to south, always. Long strings of altostratus that caught the refracted light of the setting sun along with the occasional pillow of fluff. At one point, Michael had tried to translate them into morse code, thinking they might have contained some kind of hidden message, but there was nothing but gibberish. During the day, one saw clouds that seemed designed to evoke certain shapes, like a Rorschach test, over and over. The hammer, the dog, the reclining woman. He’d gotten to know them all in his painting. Creating pictures of the same view over and over, of the beach, looking out across the water, was his way of embracing the sameness. He worried that if he didn’t find a way to embrace it then he’d go insane.

The sky skittered. The clouds stopped, frozen, then jumped backward like a film reel skipping frames. A pregnant moment and then the view went flat and lost all sense of depth. It closed on him, too close, terrifyingly close, as if the sky and horizon were merely projections on a screen that was collapsing on top of him. Michael flinched backward. The beach, the water, the house, all remained solid and seemingly real, however. After a moment, the sky bounced back. Clouds stuttered one more time and then resumed their normal progression.

A little stunned, Michael set his paintbrush down on the table and picked up the painting. It depicted the beach, which stretched away in both directions. The homes of their nearest neighbours were identical to their own, humble beach shacks with flat roofs and white walls, wraparound porches. The beach was a golden ribbon of sand. Water unrolled, riven with gentle waves, to the horizon. Every home had an identical path from their lawn to the beachfront through a thin delineation of scrub. Every lawn, every path, every patch of scrub, all literally identical if one looked too closely.

Looking around, Michael didn’t think anyone else had witnessed the glitch. He’d seen one of their neighbours a couple of minutes ago while he was painting but they were gone now. He had the beach all to himself. Michael returned across the porch and through the back door of the house.

The beach shack’s interior didn’t match its exterior in either appearance or dimensions. It had been so long that Michael didn’t even notice anymore. The back door entered into a sprawling living area, wider than it appeared the house could hold from the outside, mostly furnished in white with a carpeted pit in the middle. Statues and artworks surrounded the room. Off to one side was a glass dining table surrounded by leather chairs. His husband, Raymond, crossed from the equally oversized kitchen with a dishtowel tossed over one broad shoulder.

“Another day in paradise?” Raymond said.

“Did you see that?” Michael asked.

“See what?”

“The sky outside. It glitched.”

“What do you mean glitched?”

“I mean it went all flat and it-, shut off, for a second. It looked like the sky was falling.”

“Oh, honey.” Raymond gave Michael a comforting hug. “I guess these things happen from time to time. Little stutters.”

“Not like this, I don’t know. It looked serious, maybe we should report it?”

“Sure, you should log it. Is that the new painting?”

“Yeah, uh, that’s right.” Michael held the finished painting aloft.

“Looks great, I mean, just like all the others?”

“I guess so. I’ll put it in the storeroom.”

Michael felt a bit dazed, going through the motions as he passed the kitchen and headed to the storeroom. All the rooms in their home were fully customisable. The lower floor consisted of the expansive living space, kitchen, dining room, front hall, and the storeroom. The bedrooms were upstairs even though there was no visible second floor on the outside of the house. If they wanted to, they could have added a third floor, or a fourth, or a basement with a bowling alley, a miniature golf course, a private theatre, anything that could be programmed could be theirs. The view through their windows showed the beachfront and, in the distance, their neighbours, but could just as readily show a forest or a city or the kind of arctic tundra that no longer existed anywhere in the real world.

Echo Beach marketed itself as a retirement community like no other. IntelliGEN, the company that ran it, had perfected the science of human uploading. Or so they claimed. Residents like Michael and Raymond chose to leave their physical bodies behind to live out the rest of their existence in the virtual realm. There was no going back, the process resulted in the death of the physical brain.

Michael had zeroed in on the name ‘Echo Beach’ when they went in for their first consultation. Were the residents, once uploaded, really continuations of the people they’d once been or were they just copies, digital ‘echoes’? The sales consultant was clearly prepared for the question.

“What makes you, you?” the man asked. “If you lost an arm and had to get it replaced with a prosthetic, are you now ten percent less you? What about your legs? What if you replace your heart, or you need a machine to help you breathe? Are you still you or are you only a percentage of you?”

Michael, already in the early stages of lung cancer at the time, had conceded that, no, he didn’t think it worked like that.

“No, because the body is just a vessel for the brain, right? I mean, we might take care of our bodies, or not, be proud of them, think of them as representing who we are. Or maybe we have to change them to make them feel like the real us? But ultimately, we know the real us is a piece of meat between our ears about this big.” The consultant made a fist, holding it up for them to see. “Riding around in a machine made of meat specifically to protect it and keep it alive.”

“But that’s my point,” Michael said. “Because it’s not like you’re taking the brain and keeping it alive in a jar somewhere, and tricking it into thinking it’s in this virtual world of yours like some of the other communities do. You claim to be uploading people into a totally digital format.”

“That’s because we only think we’re a brain. The truth is, we’re not even that. Our consciousness isn’t meat, it’s electrical impulses jumping around on the surface of that meat. Electrical impulses, pure information. What we do here at IntelliGEN is first we scan your physical brain so we can create a custom silicon host for your consciousness that retains the same memories and connections as your physical brain. Then we take those electrical impulses, the real you, your consciousness, and literally transfer them from the physical brain into the silicon. It’s why, unlike other companies that claim to use brain uploading technology, we cannot create digital copies. There’s only you, the one, true you, being picked up from one place and transferred to another. A place without frailty, without injury, disease, where you can truly live forever.”

Michael hadn’t been totally convinced but he was terrified of dying. Of nonexistence. Not a weeping, screaming, pleading terror, but a low and constant drone of fear, a pit of dread that he felt he was constantly tiptoeing around since he received his diagnosis. Medical science could treat him, push back his expiration date again and again, but he would never be entirely cured. Ultimately, he’d decided that even if the Echo Beach version of himself was only a copy then he’d rather die in ignorance than succumb to nothingness. Maybe it would be like giving birth. He and Raymond never had children, maybe creating a copy would be like seeking immortality through giving birth to another version of himself. It didn’t matter. When things became inevitable, Michael had given himself over to the uploading process. Raymond, who was healthier but also older and who had a great deal more faith in what Echo Beach was selling, followed soon after. Now, copy or echo or original, Michael could never be entirely sure and he tried not to think about it.

One of the ways Echo Beach fooled the mind into almost forgetting everything was digital was by making things feel as physical as possible. Instead of simply sending his new painting into storage with a word, Michael had to take it to the storeroom. Instead of simply teleporting between rooms, he had to walk there. When he opened the door, a long hallway of a room stretched away from him. If he looked too hard, the back end of the room looked a little flat but as long as he kept striding forward the room continued to expand. Inside were stacks of memories and objects they’d had scanned in the physical world to take with them. Artworks and random odds and ends. Michael reached the point at which he stacked his paintings. He had no idea why he kept them, really. Dozens of almost identical landscapes showing evidence of his journey as an artist more so than anything else. Setting the new one down, he wondered how much data the paintings actually represented. If each canvas remembered every brushstroke inflicted upon it, every bristle, so that the details could be studied up close and maintain total realism, or if the program that controlled the paintings had some way of paring those details down.

Michael picked up one picture, set it down, picked up another, and shuffled through the different variations of the same subject matter. They all looked and felt exactly like real paintings. He could see the brushstrokes that multiplied and stacked to form the sea and the shore and the sky. He could feel the weave of the canvas under his fingertips. That was Echo Beach’s greatest strength, that everything felt like reality except when inconvenient. Although he had to wonder why they put so much focus into this then had such repetitive waves and weather patterns. Presumably something to do with user experience. Ranking what would break the illusion. Or maybe they’d never fully considered the amount of data a simple thing like a painting on a single canvas would require. It probably compared very little to the amount of data needed to recreate an entire human life, after all.

As Michael put the paintings back into place, he felt a moment of lag. His hands dragged at the air as if it had suddenly thickened. For a moment, the sensation of where he felt his hands were located and what his eyes told him failed to match. He moved backward, thinking the paintings might be responsible. The lag followed and his feet became frictionless. For a moment, he feared he was slipping right through the floor, but then everything caught up and he stumbled across the room. The experience was so brief he wasn’t sure if it was a problem with the simulation or if he’d just imagined it. Afraid, distressed, he hurried out of the storeroom.

xXx

Michael failed to report the faults although he told Raymond he had. Part of the reason was that he couldn’t find the words to express why the first incident with the sky and the stuttering clouds had disturbed him so much. He didn’t want to dwell on it. The second moment, in the storeroom, he tried to convince himself it hadn’t happened. Maybe it was just a slip and a moment of panic and an overactive imagination. While the residents might no longer have adrenal glands, Echo Beach did a fine job of substituting every possible human feeling. Even panic and fear and anxiety.

The other thing that stopped Michael was the fact that he had no option for talking to a human representative of the corporation behind Echo Beach. Echo Beach residents operated at an entirely different timescale to the physical world. As electrical impulses mapped onto silicon, it would be inefficient to experience their world as slowly as they had when stuck in suits of meat. But it meant they could only register faults or requests as recorded messages and hear back from human representatives the same way. There were AI reps of course, who would discuss any issue at length and were authorised to offer solutions and escalate faults, but they had the same problem as any artificial intelligence no matter how advanced. They were programmed foremost to tell people what they wanted to hear rather than prioritising any version of the truth. Michael had decided he couldn’t stand the hassle of it all and tried to put the whole thing out of his mind. He hadn’t been successful, however, by the next night when they went to visit the Haversons for dinner.

Teddy and Amy Haverson were the closest friends Michael and Raymond had made since moving into Echo Beach. Every time they visited them though, Michael was struck by the sheer number of pineapples they used in their decor. Much like his and Raymond’s home, their bungalow was visibly bigger on the inside. Pineapples featured in virtually every painting on their walls. A neon pineapple dominated their wet bar. Ceramic pineapples lined shelves and a lifesized golden one sat on the glass coffee table between them. He knew perfectly well it was to do with the fact that the Haversons were swingers. Plenty of Echo Beach residents were. When uploaded, most people went from retirees to having young, fit, beautiful bodies again, the best possible versions of themselves. Both Michael and Raymond had been in their seventies when they were uploaded and now Michael looked like a trim, waspish twenty-something while Ramond had returned to the broad shouldered and bullish weightlifter he’d been when the two of them first met. Even so, some residents found the thought of being restricted to one partner for all eternity to be daunting, hence the swinging. Michael got it, but he still didn’t think that was worth basing the entirety of your house design around that one aspect of your identity. Given how aggressively forthright the Haversons were about it, it was likely they were all such good friends only because Michael and Raymond weren’t exactly compatible.

“Have you experienced any glitches in the last few days?” Michael asked.

“What kind of glitches?” Teddy asked.

“Michael had a moment where the sky had some lag,” Raymond said. “It was probably nothing but you said the clouds repeated, didn’t they? And went flat, and it looked like it was falling in on you? But then everything was okay.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Michael said. “That’s pretty much it.”

“The sky is falling, the sky is falling.” Amy smiled over the rim of her wine glass.

Michael did his best to return her smile. “Something like that.”

“These things do happen, I suppose,” Teddy said. “Things did feel a little bit glitchy when we had the basement installed, you know? Moving from up here to down there, I don’t know, there’d be this moment that felt a little bit like being stuck in a loading screen. But it smoothed itself out after a while.”

“I don’t like to think about it,” Amy said. “We’re young again, we can eat what we want, drink what we want without a hangover. We can sleep with who we want, we have our perfect forever home. If cutting ourselves out of the so-called ‘real world’ was the price for that, I’m more than willing to pay it. But I don’t need to think about it all the time.”

“Did you hear the other day that Echo Beach passed ten thousand residents, by the way?” Teddy said. “Hard to believe. That’s a lot of neighbours, new friends. Potential playmates.”

Teddy and Amy retreated to the kitchen to finish preparing dinner. Michael felt vaguely annoyed with Raymond for downplaying the glitch he’d experienced. But then, he’d been downplaying it himself, not wanting to report it to Echo Beach support.

“Their forever home, right,” Michael said. “They could have gotten a designer at least.”

Offhandedly, Michael reached for the golden pineapple sitting on the table in front of them. Imagining the heft of it, he wondered how far his estimation would be off and whether the mismatch would be on him or on the Echo Beach program that itself would be estimating the weight, the contours, the feel of the pineapple as he interacted with it. But he didn’t get the chance to find out. His fingers passed right through the body of the pineapple like it wasn’t even there. For a moment, he glimpsed a wireframe. A grid of faint lines that mapped every curve and nodule of the golden fruit. Where his hand and the object interacted, both he and it turned insubstantial. He snatched his hand away.

“Did you see that?” Michael said.

Raymond looked disturbed. “I did.”

Cautious, Raymond reached past Michael and wrapped a hand around the pineapple. He clearly expected to pass through it as well but he picked it up and juggled it for a moment. He passed it to Michael. Cupping his hands, he was relieved as the golden ornament dropped into them.

“Just a momentary thing,” Raymond said.

The two of them made an excuse to leave. It was difficult now since coming to Echo Beach, since they no longer suffered the ailments they once did. They couldn’t claim to be tired or sick or feel a migraine coming on. Teddy and Amy didn’t look insulted. The night was still young for them, they could always invite around some of their special friends.

Headlamps carved through the night. Overhead, the sky glowed with such luminosity that they could have easily driven without the use of the lights. It showed a glittery galactic arm of constellations along with a fat pie of a moon at least three times as big as the one in the physical world. To one side of the road they passed one identical holiday home after another, each with a private slice of beach. Intellectually, Michael knew they could drive aimlessly and pass hundreds, thousands, of identical homes. Enough for ten thousand residents according to Teddy Haverson. And yet if they connected with someone and drove over to visit them, they were never more than a couple of minutes away. Far enough to make the journey feel real without being an actual inconvenience. No matter what number your address was, you were never more or less than five minutes from town either.

“Should we have told Teddy and Amy about the pineapple?” Raymond asked. “What caused that anyway?

“Lag,” Michael said. “It’s a lot of data. You don’t really think about it but every object, every room you go into, it’s so much data.”

Michael felt suddenly very aware that they’d been driving for too long. Not a long time, they’d been distracted, talking, but they should have pulled into their driveway by now.

“Ray, where’s the house?”

On a typical journey, they would pass by a few dozen beachside shacks. All identical in their basic form, just enough detail in their yards or driveways or windows to differentiate them. But their own house, day or night, shone with a special light that made it impossible to miss. The driveway would be laid out like a glowing carpet and the car would roll onto it almost of its own accord. But now, Michael wasn’t sure how long they’d been driving but they passed nothing but blackness. No houses, not even those of neighbours. Nothing but impressions of a shoreline and the vast, wine-dark sea beyond it.

“What the fuck? Where is it?” Michael insisted.

“It’s just up ahead here, it’s got to be,” Raymond said.

Almost soundless, their car rolled through the void. No houses on either side of the road. No lights but their own and the ceiling of stars.

“Stop the car,” Michael said.

“Stop? Why?” Raymond said. “There’s nothing out there.”

“Stop the car, Ray!”

Raymond did as asked and their vehicle braked smoothly to a stop. Michael threw his door open and stepped out. As soon as he did so, he wondered what he was thinking. He was panicking, he supposed, desperate for some ‘fresh’ air. Intellectually he knew there was no air and he had no lungs. He gulped it all the same. Stepping away from the car, however, his feet came down in the void. The sky glowed, there should have been enough ambient light to see by but the ground was black enough to be invisible. For a moment, he worried he’d fall through it like a trapdoor. That he would fall into blackness and just keep falling. Impulses that replicated a racing heart, a shot of adrenaline, rippled through his consciousness. He felt solid ground underfoot though. The crunch of sand under his shoes. He just couldn’t see it.

“Fuck, oh fuck,” Michael said.

Light appeared, like a ship breaching through black fog. Slightly off to Michael’s right side, a house swam into view. Their house, of course. They would recognise it anywhere. Driveway and porch aglow, the whiteness of the building framed against the dark of the sea.

“There it is!” Raymond said.

Michael looked around. Enough light had returned to the world that he could see the yard and his feet underneath him. Or maybe the yard had needed a few moments to lay itself out visually beneath him.

“It wasn’t there.”

“Maybe an issue with the weather programming, too much cloud or something?” Raymond said.

“We could see the ocean and the sky, but the house wasn’t there! Things are falling out of step, Ray. Like the pineapple, the data to see it was there but the data to touch it didn’t catch up. The data to bring the house to us didn’t catch up with us moving or whatever!”

“Let’s go inside, we’ll figure it out with the admin in the morning.”

xXx

The next day, Michael and Raymond headed into town. The virtual township of Echo Beach. There was no real reason to do so, they could have reported the faults they’d been experiencing with a message or a phone call. If they wanted, a single request and they could have had a ‘representative’ turn up at their front door within minutes. But it felt right to be doing something, taking action, moving. There was an IntelliGEN office in town and they intended to pay it a visit.

The township of Echo Beach was a single main avenue facing a boardwalk and beach along a stretch of perfect coastline. Dozens of restaurants and cafes and bars and clubs and stores and other entertainments. Far more than any seaside tourist town in the real world could support. More businesses were tucked away on a second street behind the first but they tended toward the more intimate or less glamorous. All of the establishments were open 24/7 and staffed by AI constructs. The seaside bars and restaurants and such were somehow always populated but never crowded. The drive into town took just under five minutes from their home, same as it would no matter where they were coming from.

They drove to the IntelliGEN office behind the first row of stores. A huge glass block on the corner of its block. Parking was always ample and, if needed, they could step out and let the car park itself. When Michael and Raymond went inside, they were greeted by what looked like a perpetually smiling young man in his early twenties, skin and teeth perfect, hair coiffed. The rest of the vast showroom floor was empty.

“Good morning, gentlemen! Welcome to IntelliGEN, how can I help you today?”

From the beginning, Michael explained the glitches they had experienced. From the moment when he thought the sky was falling, to the storeroom, the pineapple at the Haversons, and the darkness that lingered on their way home. The AI assistant made all the right expressions of concern and noises of sympathy.

“I’m really sorry you experienced that,” the store assistant said eventually.

“Is there some explanation for what happened?” Michael asked. “Do we know if it’s being resolved?”

“Yes, absolutely. The Echo Beach community is constantly being updated to maximise user experience. What you’ve described coincides with the delivery of some of our most recent updates. We apologise for any distress they might have caused you.”

“So they’re done now? It’s fixed?” Raymond asked.

“If you experience any other minor issues, please let us know!”

Michael failed to find reassurance. As he and Raymond left, he glanced back over his shoulder. The AI assistant watched them go, unblinking, the grin frozen across his face.

Echo Beach, the main part of town at least, was, of course, designed to be as walkable as possible. One of Michael and Raymond’s favourite cafes was close by, on the main avenue, and they headed there instead of going home. Tables overlooked a stretch of beachfront lined with palm trees. Like virtually every other cafe, it was bustling but not overcrowded. The coffee and sandwiches tasted like perfection.

“Do you really believe it? About the updates?” Michael said.

“Well, the AI can’t really lie to us, can it? It’s here to serve us.”

“Of course it can lie! It’s programmed to say whatever it’s told to say. It wouldn’t even know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

“So you don’t really believe it’s over?”

“I don’t know.” Michael buried his face in his hands.

“What do you want to do then?”

“I guess we go home and see if any more news comes out about it.”

Before they left, they saw another couple that they knew, Margaret and Joanna. In spite of himself, Michael stopped and exchanged the usual pleasantries.

“How have you been?” Joanna asked.

Michael shrugged. “Another day in paradise.”

“Did we see the two of you coming out of the IntelliGEN building?” Margaret asked. “It wouldn’t be that the two of you are having some faults, is it?”

“Yes!” Michael seized on the opening. “Yes, we have, you too?”

“Just some small things,” Joanna said.

Michael again gave a rundown of the glitches he’d experienced. Joanna told a similar story about a sculpture that turned insubstantial and a meal they’d eaten where the taste and texture took a few moments to catch up on the first bite. Most worrying, however, was an incident when the two of them had dipped their feet in the water during their daily walk along their private beach. The water first hadn’t felt like anything and then froze and trapped the two of them for a few long moments before returning to normal.

“It felt like quicksand or something,” Margaret said. “I was worried it was going to pull us under.”

After leaving the cafe, Michael and Raymond lingered on the boardwalk. People swam and walked along the beach, even jogging in the sand as if exercise was still some kind of necessity. Michael felt like he was seeing it for the first time.

Raymond summoned the car. It drove up to them, empty, and they climbed inside then made for home. It wasn’t a long drive, of course. They’d only been travelling for a couple of minutes when they saw something wrong.

“What the hell is that?”

At regular intervals, trees grew alongside the gently curving road. They had no significance, they were simply part of the scenery. Ahead, however, a tree had seemingly sprouted in the middle of the road and a car had rammed right into it.

“I think that’s Margaret and Joanna’s car!” Raymond said.

Residents of Echo Beach could drive just about any model and colour of vehicle they could imagine. Neither Michael nor Raymond cared much about cars so their vehicle was just a variation on the standard sedan they’d been supplied when they first uploaded. Margaret and Joanna, however, drove a bright red sportscar. As they got closer, they could see the car look undamaged. Instead, it was almost like the car had melded with the tree.

Raymond parked behind Margaret and Joanna’s car and they got out to investigate. Michael circled wide, cautious about getting too close. He could see that his initial estimate that the tree and the vehicle had somehow combined was correct. The tree’s roots and the base of its trunk appeared seamlessly from the asphalt. The trunk then continued up through the car’s engine block and reappeared from the centre of its hood without any apparent damage to the vehicle or the tree. Both, however, vibrated with some kind of unnatural tension as if disrupted by sharing the same space. Worse was the fact that the tree’s lower branches were low enough to spear through the car’s windshield and roof. There was again no damage in those places but the branches sprouted through the vehicle’s interior and appeared to riddle the car’s inhabitants as well. Through the tinted glass, Michael could see them hanging there, motionless, but he couldn’t make out any detail.

“Margaret? Joanna?” Michael said.

When there was no answer, Michael chanced his way up to the nearest door of the sportscar. Raymond did the same on the other side of the vehicle. The two of them then recoiled.

“Oh, fuck.”

Leafy branches wove in and out of both Margaret and Joanna’s faces and chests, completely bloodless. To Michael, it didn’t look like they’d crashed into the tree. It looked like the tree had failed to load in the correct position as they came around the bend and then sprung into being in the wrong place at the wrong time, occupying the same space as the car and its occupants, paralysing them. While there was no blood and no visible injuries both Margaret and Joanna were frozen in place. There was no life in their eyes. Like the car, like the tree, they vibrated with eldritch energy.

“What do we do?” Raymond said, afraid to touch anything.

“Let’s go back home! We’ll report it from there.”

Michael and Raymond hurried back to their car. No others appeared in either direction as they pulled around the frozen sportscar and drove on in the direction of home. Michael was surprised and relieved when their house appeared beside the road just where it was supposed to be. They parked in the driveway and ran inside.

“Were they dead, do you think?” Raymond asked.

“I don’t know! No one’s supposed to die here unless they choose to move on, and you know that’s a whole process!” Michael said. “But they weren’t there, you know? No one was home in their bodies.”

Raymond hurried around the living room, checking windows and doors as if worried the glitches were something that could break in and get them. Through the windows, the world seemed to be in one piece. The sky and sea in concert with each other. Everything in the room looked solid. Something about his rush made Michael feel sick. He wanted to tell Raymond to stop moving but felt paralysed by indecision.

“House command, place a call to IntelliGEN support, we need to log a major fault!” Raymond said. “You know what? We need a representative out here, ASAP! And we need to log a message for a real person! We need to talk to a real, living person!”

“No, Ray, calm down,” Michael said. “Stop!”

Raymond didn’t hear him. “Is there anything you think we can do to protect ourselves? Anything we can order? If we shut down some rooms and seal off the storeroom? Maybe we should get rid of some of this art.”

“Connecting you with support now,” the house said. “A representative will arrive at your door shortly.”

“Ray, calm down!” Michael raised his voice. “I think this is all happening when the system has too much to think about at once! It’s overloading on data or something, we need to stay calm!”

Raymond listened but he was still circling the room in a panic. His elbow brushed against one of their ornate vases, resting atop a rickety pillar. A tall, sculpted vase covered in an ornate blue pattern, a reproduction of a Ming Dynasty piece. In the real world, even a replica would be worth a fortune. Both plinth and vase arced toward the floor. As it hit, the vase shattered. It just wouldn’t feel real if an object like that didn’t break and Echo Beach was all about making their experience feel real.

Michael briefly imagined the sheer amount of processing power that would go into making something like that look as real as it did. Calculating the impact, the fracture patterns. The hundreds of newly created disparate parts, the shards, all of them with their own unique pattern. Mapping and performing their thousands of separate arcs and interactions with one another as they fanned out in all directions and clattered and fell.

The house came apart. The world came apart around it. Not shattering, like the vase, but fragmenting into just as many pieces. Walls and ceiling and floor and yard and sky and beach and ocean and every object and piece of furniture, 2D models, 3D models, frames, all the distinct pieces of data that made up their virtual world. Even Michael and Raymond themselves, the impressions of skin and hair and nervous systems and everything that made a virtual body feel physical.

There was a vast, rushing sense of emptiness. A sense of being taken apart at every seam and broadcast across the universe. Then, Michael, mind and body, felt himself snap back together like a set of toy bricks. Raymond was beside him but the two of them found themselves falling in a pale blue void. Falling without any sense of actual motion. Michael had a vague sense of their house, and the rest of Echo Beach, far above them. From their perspective it was still broken into a series of huge, flat puzzle pieces. They’d been thrown loose, slipping through the cracks of their reality, and with each passing second it got further and further away.

“What happened? Where are we?” Raymond shouted.

“I don’t think we’re anywhere, not anymore.” Michael’s voice sounded flat and strangely calm.

Raymond twisted and turned. He could still do so, he could control his body, but it was frictionless, without purchase. He looked like an astronaut in orbit, stuck in the middle of an open room with nothing to grab onto. The void, all around them, was the same pale blue as a perfect sky but there were no clouds and no details of any kind.

“We can’t just keep falling!” Raymond said.

“Maybe we can,” Michael said.

“We have to land sometime!”

“Maybe we don’t.”

“We’ll-, we’ll starve or something!”

“We won’t.”

“We’ll die!”

“We can’t.”

Raymond twisted and turned some more, taking in the enormity of the void and their situation. For whatever reason, Echo Beach was showing cracks. Too many residents, too many houses, objects, whatever it was. Too much borrowed time. Maybe they could fix it. Maybe it would all snap back in a moment’s time, or an hour, or a day, or a month, or maybe never. Maybe it couldn’t be fixed. Maybe no living soul in the real world would ever have any idea that anything was even wrong. Maybe this was happening or would happen to all of its residents, or maybe Michael and Raymond were just some of the unlucky few. There was no way of knowing.

“Another day in paradise.”

Michael wondered just how many days that might be.

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Sean: Echo Beach was one of the tracks I wanted to ‘adapt’ into a story from the very beginning when I started writing ‘Mixtape’ stories. I had a few ideas that didn’t quite catch. A mysterious tourist town that a protagonist remembers from their childhood but can’t be found on any maps, a kind of lotus-eater place that lures in unsuspecting tourists with great deals, somewhere literally displaced in time, ghosts, I don’t know. There’s some crossover with other songs I might end up adapting (Kokomo and Ghost Town by The Specials spring to mind). 

Obviously one idea was a virtual afterlife story inspired by the likes of the Black Mirror episode ‘San Junipero’. I’m sure the parallels are pretty obvious if you’ve seen that one. I get a little bit weird about the mechanics of stuff like that in shows and movies, hence the sales pitch about how the technology works here. Stuff like uploading people and teleporters freak me out because how are you not just killing the people involved and creating a copy? I’ve mentioned that it’s usually one particular image that inspires me when creating a story and it was that thing about Monet painting the same scenes over and over again, which came up in a show I was watching or something, that gave me the final push into this one.

I’ve chucked a few more songs into this year’s Mixtape to let you know what’s coming up! Hadn’t updated that one since the beginning of the year. A bunch of throwback songs from female artists at the moment, I’ve noticed. Like Martha and the Muffins obviously, but also the few I’ve just added. Give them a listen, and thanks for reading!

Next Track: Cyndi Lauper – True Colours