The idea for this story comes from JR Parz and the Master PC stories. I write this inspired by his original work.
Chapter 9: Reality
"Hello? Am I dead?"
Stephen didn't feel dead. He actually felt more real. The closest feeling he had to this was like waking up from a dream and realising how things should feel when you are awake. He was in clinically white room and it took his eyes to adjust to the brightness. He looked out the transparent walls and jumped back in shock when he saw what was in the room to his right. A 7 foot green thing was standing just on the other side of the glass. It had six limbs and looked like a humanoid lizard, dressed in some sort of leathery armour. He started to panic and looked at the room on the other side. A pasty gangly creature that stood on tripod legs was peering at him with antennae-mounted eyes when the opacity of all the walls started to increase. A very familiar voice came over his shoulder, instantly soothing him.
"Hi Steve. Welcome to the real world."
He turned round to see a curvy woman in her mid-thirties. She was wearing a tight grey pencil skirt and an even tighter white shirt and was open to the middle of her very ample, possibly fake cleavage; it was an outfit fit for an office secretary porn scenario. He noticed the nipple rings through the shirt, and what looked like a tattoo of binary code around her upper thigh. He also noticed the initials 'MP' on the inside of her right wrist. Her face was a sort of blend between Sophie, Imogen and his mother.
"You can call me 'M'"
"As in... MP... as in Master Program?"
"You were always so clever," she said, giving him a kiss on the lips, "shame you have no common sense."
She turned away from him and he caught sight of a tattoo on her lower back but her shirt obscured the whole design. Without looking back, she shook her head and made a jokey sigh before lifting the shirt to show a tribal tattoo design, like Alex's only like it was digitised on a low resolution screen. In front of M was a black ball filled with glowing lights. She put her hands either side of the hologram and pulled them apart rapidly, which caused it to expand across the whole room and zoom into the floating 3D image. It was immediately evident that these were galaxies. She zoomed in on one in particular and he could see it was the Milky Way. She spun it until the Orion spiral arm was on top and then zoomed in further. Names started to appear in white next to star systems as they made their way, presumably to Earth. As they got closer he noticed that the labels changed. Kepler-22 was in blue, but Gliese 581 was in green. Alpha Centauri was a dark red, whilst Sol was green. As they entered Sol, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Venus and Mercury all appeared as dark red labels whilst Mars and Jupiter were in blue. Earth was in big bold green letters.
Earth's characteristics floated next to the blue and white marble, including its human population. The number started close to 7.1 billion, but it was rapidly changing. At first he was in awe of the hologram and still a little excited to see that the Master Program was a sexy woman, but then he noticed the population was dipping, not increasing and within 30 seconds it had dropped to around 6.9 billion. He realised that was his doing and a sharp pang of guilt caused a pain in his chest.
