JIVE

I forgive my husband because I cheated on him and he didn’t like it. Now, I know what you're thinking. You forgive him? Why isn't he forgiving you? Well, my husband is a monster. No, literally. A girl has needs. There were parts on my husband that just quit working. Certain parts that I constructed.

Every time I try to fix these parts, they just get broken again. Sort of like my heart. Broken, over and over. I thought sleeping with other men would solve the issue and that he would understand. Lord knows I've tried to fix him so we could go back to sleeping together. But the male anatomy is such a complex work of art. You just can't fit any part into this complex divine machinery and expect it to work like before.

I cheated on him, not because I wanted to. You just give up on trying to fix things. And I never saw it as cheating. Those were his words. My husband is like a beautiful classic muscle car that's sitting in my repair shop and I can’t find the right part. No auto parts store could help me. So I chickened out and went searching for a new ride.

Please don’t judge me. I've lost everything. I've killed so many times that guilt has me on speed dial. My victims? Mostly young men who were neurally attached to gamer headsets. I would get underestimated, because they would see this defenseless older woman. Pretty but aged with silver and fine lines. She's old enough to be my mom. I can take her down. I'd read their thoughts. See it in their eyes behind that electric-pink neon glow in their headset visors.

It's like having the mom from The Brady Bunch sitting amongst your multi-player gamer homeboys, gripping the handle of a virtual exotic arc-damage machine gun. You're 21. Of course you think you can take her down. Not only is she old enough to be your momma, but her avatar is designed to look like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

Also, these boys were dealing with a software architect. Inside this virtual wonderland, they’re shooting highly explosive energy bursts of ammo at a woman who designed the very gaming platform they're playing on. I had certain gadgets they would never get their hands on in a million years. Gadgets I designed for neuro-hacking. Gadgets that lobotomized a lot of young men because of my longing to be with my husband.

It would work sometimes and then at other times, things would malfunction. Hacking into a neurochip and uploading your husband's consciousness into a young mind is corrupt as hell. I know. But it was the only way I could interact with my husband outside of the game that trapped him after his death. We were hooked up to the game playing together when the massive cyber attack happened. The attack fried his chip implant and killed him instantly. I went to check on our baby upstairs while he kept playing. Then I went into the kitchen to grab some sodas and some leftover wings. I came back to find him lying unresponsive on the sofa.

If I hadn't left to check on our baby, I would've been dead too, making our boy an orphan. I had a thought of joining him permanently, though. Taking our baby and just crossing over, leaving this life. My sanity comes back to me every time. Thank God for that, right?

I thought I lost my husband forever. But one day, something happened. On the day my darling husband died we were playing the unreleased version of a game I developed. I guess I feel doubly guilty because I wanted him to test the game with me that day. He was busy, running around the house, getting everything ready for our baby's birthday party. Our little boy was turning 3 and he wanted everything to be perfect.

I told him to calm down and stop being so frantic. We had two days to get everything in order, and I had already gotten the birthday cake and scheduled the pizza deliveries with the catering service. I demanded that he plant himself down beside me on the sofa and play Titans of Volition. A game where all possibilities are allowed and you can be anyone or anything, but with a few limitations. My husband has always loved The Wizard of Oz and The Tin Man is his favorite character. He wanted a heart, and after my darling husband made a full recovery after his open-heart surgery, he connected with The Tin Man. So inside the game, that's who he chose to be.

I chose to be Dorothy because of a sexual roleplaying request that my husband made one night in the bedroom. We had fun that afternoon. He was the Tin Man and I was Dorothy. But a different kind of Dorothy since this was an action-adventure game.

I had to protect my husband on numerous occasions from the Wicked Witch of the West and East. Using Incinerator Daggers, massive Hammerswords and Annihilator Energy Pulse Gatling guns, I was constantly killing these bitches. Sometimes one at a time or both of them at once.

At times they would get the best of me but I'd come right back with high flying kicks and punches. Before I left the game to check on our baby, I strangled the Wicked Witch of the West with one of my pigtails, snapping her neck for good measure. I had a blast protecting my husband inside my game. This test version came out perfectly. It synced with our neurochip implants without any trouble and we had access to all the weapons. The NPCs functioned properly. Every minute seemed perfect and it made me so happy that my husband had become my first beta tester.

The game came with a built-in AI called JIVE—JUICED INTERACTIVE VIVID EGO. JIVE maps the brain of the user. He adapts and makes adjustments based on the player's gaming habits to improve user experience, like memory seats making the driver more comfortable.

What I didn’t know was that the little time my husband spent with me in the game as The Tin Man gave JIVE enough time to map my husband's mind. His entire brain synapses had been contained within Titans of Volition.

I was cleaning up around the living room one day when the gaming console activated even though I had shut down its power cell. When I put on the headset my neurochip connected to the game. In mid-blink, The Tin Man appeared before me. He glistened, like a brand new steam engine in sunlight in the form of a well-defined god of a man.

He opened his mouth, said four words in that familiar soft-spoken angelic baritone and that’s when I lost it. Baby, I love you. It sounded exactly like my husband. This is my husband, right? I wanted to believe it. Outside observers might see him as a monster. A manipulative AI system. But this monster knew everything about us. Our most intimate moments. The birth of our little angel. What we did on our honeymoon that we promised to keep a secret. He knew.

I fell... Hard. Pathetic, right? It was only a year and a half since his passing. Barely two years. I left a group chat for widows because I grew tired of hearing these bitches talk about how their husband's death made them stronger. That wasn't me.

I was a single mom, raising my now 4-year-old boy. And I won't let him go anywhere near a virtual headset, even though he doesn't have a chip implant. He only has handheld gaming devices and old consoles. Nothing that requires syncing up with using the mind. And there are systems that sync up without the need for a chip, but I won't let my baby touch any game console that requires mind-syncing. The other moms in the neighborhood are buying these devices and they're trying to talk me into buying one for my boy.

They don't understand the agony I went through. That massive cyber attack gave my husband severe brain trauma. He died before I could call 911. Others who were connected to their gaming platforms through a neurochip were killed that day. A group of teenage boys died at a sleepover just a few blocks down from my house. Their neurochips ruptured and melted, burning a hole through the base of their skulls.

So no. My baby is never going to neuroconnect to a game. The only reason I kept connecting was because I got to be with my husband. But soon I grew tired of the virtual sex interactions. I tried rewriting a few lines of code within the game so The Tin Man could have functioning equipment that I could work with. And it worked for a while. But then the system would crash. The phallic simulator I connected to the game through my home wifi would stop working. Network crashes started occurring frequently and I could no longer be intimate with my husband.

Making love to your husband in the form of The Tin Man isn't the same. Through my haptic feedback gloves, touching his skin felt the same as touching my car. I missed my husband’s smooth skin and the little mole he had beneath his left shoulder blade. I missed running my fingers across the hieroglyphic pyramid tattoo on his shoulder.

So that's when the online multi-player gamer interactions come in with these young men. I developed this device called a Trace Echo. It's no bigger than my fingernail and it doesn't need wifi to connect. I downloaded my husband's brain synapses to my Trace Echo and made copies of his consciousness. To enter a multi-player interaction you have to connect your chip implant to the other players.

Once I'm synced up, I can select a chip and upload my husband's consciousness to whoever I want within the group. The device locks on, scans the chip's serial number and then uploads my husband’s cyber-consciousness.

And my God. It feels so good to hear my husband’s words coming out of the mouths of these young men. I make sure they're over 21 and live alone. Poor babies. They have no idea what's happening to them. I'm hacking their minds using a prototype psionic adapter. This is what happens when you're the CEO over a big gaming tech company, a software developer, engineer and now a mindhacker. I've been featured in the gaming magazines and on gamer websites, but I dress down so they don't recognize me. I infect them with my husband and like magic, he's speaking to me in the flesh. I almost want to cry.

Of course after the infection process I can't touch the love of my life through an interactive headset screen. So I tell my husband where to meet me and I drive to the location to pick him up. I see a tall, handsome young man standing in a parking lot or on a street corner at night adorned in piercings and body art. He never looks lost or bewildered because my husband's mind has fully hijacked his neurochip, taking control of the wheel.

In the back of my mind, a voice is telling me this is wrong. I'm hijacking these young men—kidnapping them, all so I can make love to a body that's housing my husband's AI-regenerated thoughts. I'm no better than a rapist. But I keep telling myself NO. I'm not a rapist. I'm with my husband again, right? I can live again. I don't have to grieve anymore. I can give that group chat the middle finger. While you bitches are bragging about your newfound independence and how your husband's death has made you stronger, I actually have my man back in my life and I've rescued him from death.

I go to pick up my husband at the agreed location. We go out to dinner and then head home. We can't take our hands off each other once we step through the door. This heated intimacy moves to the bedroom so fast that it feels like we've teleported. I dress up like Dorothy upon my husband's request. And I had to dust off the outfit, but it felt so good putting it on again for him. The outfit is the classic blue gingham pinafore dress with the checkered blue and white pattern that Miss Judy Garland wore, only it's more scantily-clad, low-cut and short at the hips. Also, I'm not wearing a white blouse underneath. It's just my bare tattooed arms and cleavage. I feel like Dorothy if she was a rap video vixen.

Thoughts of guilt crash into me every time I climb into bed on top of my husband. I keep trying to shut it out. He's here with me. Alive. Why should I feel guilty? This is my husband. I keep telling myself.

I know you're judging me. And you have every right to. Don't worry. I get punished for my sins. Like I said, I'm hijacking these young men. Having sex with them with my husband's cyber-consciousness overheating their neurochip.

Things backfire. And I haven't been able to fix the issue. The moment with my husband only lasts for thirty minutes. And then everything shuts down, killing the young men. Their chips can't handle the overload of data that I installed into their minds. It's like a computer crashing and you can't reboot or go into safe mode. I'm losing my husband all over again after those precious thirty minutes of pleasure.

So with every young guy I infect, I try to savor the moment. Every minute and every second, down to the nano-second is precious to me, because I know it won't last. These young men are hosts to his simulated consciousness but I've started to suspect that JIVE has generated a virus disguised as my husband's consciousness. So my husband isn't a monster even though I said he was in the beginning. It's JIVE who seems to be the monster, like I stated earlier. This is what I meant to say. I could be wrong about JIVE. But these young men die in my bed no matter how many times I try to troubleshoot. I want my husband back but I'm killing these young boys.

You're 21 years old and some creep of a lady hacks into your mind through a multi-player gaming interaction. The last memory you have is sitting in front of your screen wearing your headset, upgrading your weapons and logging into the online platform so that you can fight on a simulated battlefield alongside this lady who's on your team. And then you black out and never come back.

One young man after another has died in my arms—in my bed and I can't bring them back. I can't call 911. CPR is a joke. Tried it. They become brain dead and then everything shuts down. As always, the tears come after I've realized what I've done. I avoid the news because of the reports of young men's bodies being dumped at odd locations throughout the city.

Now, I've gone back to visiting my husband as The Tin Man in our virtual world. He's been begging me to stop transferring his consciousness to these young men. He saw it as me cheating on him. And then when he saw me this last time as nothing but a tearful mess of what used to be his wife, he understood. He regretted getting mad and calling me a few names the last time we spoke. He called me a cheating slut. I forgave him. He realized that I wasn't cheating. I was sleeping with a part of him. He just couldn't experience it because his original consciousness remained in Titans of Volition. All I did was download copies of his consciousness while his original stayed trapped in the game, never experiencing any of the physical interactions I had with these young men. I was just cloning him, not realizing that he never shared the experience through his clones—no interconnection between them. It's like your clone being released from prison while you remain locked up on death row. He still understood how I felt and what I needed. For me, these young men became him. He knows that I miss him so bad to the point of night sweats.

My sister was keeping my little boy while I was off doing these shady hi-tech kidnappings. She thought I was at work. But as a CEO, you can choose to work at home whenever.

Right now, I'm at home in the kitchen baking a peach cobbler, and my baby is in the living room, sitting on the sofa, playing on his handheld gaming device. He's the only thing I can hold and kiss right now. He's the only thing that looks like his daddy in the flesh and I won't lose him after thirty minutes. I have to be happy with this and accept it. No more abductions and mindhacking.

That thought is still there, though. You know the thought. What if I took my baby and we left this life? I'd really see my husband. What if we crossed over permanently?

I quickly eliminate the thought every single time, but with each passing day my sanity has been taking longer to reignite. I can't sleep anymore. What's a girl to do?

The End.