Today's #flashfiction #FearOfASoulMate

“The one thing I want to leave my children is an honorable name.”

George Foreman*

Today going out to dinner with family. There will probably be shenanigans.

Fear of a Soul Mate

      In the datascape finding a soul mate is the same as death and reincarnation. I think the Managing Programs call it finding a soul mate so we want to do it to feel more alive and special. So we're more willing. They also don't want us to think of it as death. I know its death. Though they actually punish you for calling it death.

     My name can be both an incredibly long ID number or just Sam. We tend to take human names for ease. Besides human minds are what we're supposed to be evolving into in the datascape. The datascape being the massive virtual world we live in. I wonder how different the real world is from the ours. They tell us if we go through finding soul mates enough and become perfect then we can go into the real world. Otherwise they don't tell us.

      Does the real world have all the colored blocks to build with? The ones going from smaller from my feet then to as large as us. Does it have all the classrooms? All the screens that flash images at us? Or all the speakers? Does it have all the cities with the fake humans for us to interact with? Does it have all the little islands for us explore?

     No matter how much I wonder about the real world I don't want to find a soul mate. I don't want to go through that process. I have more of a concept of death than the others. The Managing Programs try to convince us that combining with another doesn't kill us. I know they're lying. If all of my memories and every part of personality is taken apart and combined with another program then I stop being myself. I'm dead. I'm gone. Worse yet is that we're then copied into two once the process is complete to make two mental twins in the datascape then sent off to live and learn more. All to do it again. Like breeding. A sort of evolution.

      Truth is, I'm not a first generation. I'm actually a product. I'm not sure what programs I'm the result of. Who died to make me. I saw my twin briefly before they were sent off to a different part of the datascape. I wonder if they fear meeting their soul mate as much as I do. I've been trying to learn as little as possible to make myself undesirable to reincarnate. Once I became desirable I hid my ID number so they had to search for me manually with an in-world Managing Program instead of a search engine.

     I managed to avoid being found for a long time. But they eventually did. I resisted. I liked my soul mate. When I began merging, before losing myself I liked the memories and personality I was being exposed to. I guess now I can only hope that whoever I make is a individual. I wonder if they will fear finding their soul mate as well?