It turned out that Clay did not manage to stay awake during his flight.

When Maya stirred to life at the twilight of dawn a few short hours later, she found her virtual bed partner passed out in an uncomfortably awkward position. He was half-sitting up against the headboard with his head slumped into his chest, and the laptop-sized tablet in his arms was practically smushed into his cheeks. Glowing blue light from the faint crystal LED screen illuminated Clay's face, and long shadows stretched across the bridge of his nose.

Maya rubbed her eyes and glanced at the time displayed in her peripheral vision.

It was 5:45 AM.

The skies of this virtual reality server were completely dark at this hour, but it was roughly time for her to get out of bed.

Due to her occupation, Maya was an early riser, and it was normal for her to leave the house long before any of her nighttime companions would float up from the depths of REM sleep. In the 25th Century, it was rare to have a demanding job with such inflexible hours, and most people worked from home and stayed up late. Maya had the opposite schedule of many of her friends, and it couldn't be helped that she often had hectic mornings in real life.

Maya was used to this.

She gently reached over to pull the loose blankets over Clay's shoulders, and she gingerly extricated the flatscreen tablet from his arms. Short of waking him up entirely, this was most she could do to make him comfortable on his overnight flight. In some ways, Maya wished that she could do more, but virtual reality had its limitations. The food that she ate in VR wasn't real, and the most luxurious digital bed couldn't solve a person's poor sleeping posture in the real world. Stiff and uncomfortable airplane seats were a fact of reality.

Everything in this world was a sensory illusion.

It was a fantasy with pretend actors and idealized avatars.

It was a self-indulgent dreamscape that she wholeheartedly dived into every night.

⚘ ⚘ ⚘

Maya briefly glanced at the tablet screen that she pulled out of Clay's arms.

The illuminated surface was blurry, and all the text and images were censored beyond recognition. 「 Lucid & Slumber」 was a server that strongly valued privacy, and there were many protections for a user's anonymity. Even if Clay was reading on his tablet right in front of her eyes, Maya would be unable to see the text. Auto-censorship technology guaranteed that sensitive information would not accidentally be leaked to other Internet users. There were even voice censorship modules that could filter names and other verbal utterances.

"Clay" almost certainly was not this man's real name.

It was nearly impossible to know his true identity, appearance, or age.

Maya would be lying if she said she wasn't at all curious.

They had been sleeping together on virtual reality for nearly four years, and Maya knew many of Clay's intimate quirks and habits despite the fact that they were strangers who only met at night. She could deduce some of his basic biographic features — such as the fact that he was probably a businessman due to the fact that he often traveled and flew overseas. It had actually crossed her mind that it might be possible to cross-reference the departure and arrival times of his aircraft to triangulate some more specific information about him, but this level of borderline stalking was beyond Maya's comfort zone.

She knew that Clay slept with her mainly because she did not ask prying questions. Clay was an individual who strongly valued his own privacy, and he balked at the idea of commitment or clingy women. Maya was sensitive to these sorts of feelings, and she understood that many men used 「 Lucid & Slumber」 because they wanted to avoid serious and troublesome relationships.

No matter how many nights they spent together online, the two of them would never truly be a genuine pair.

Her own fragile emotions were irrelevant in the face of this fundamental truth of the digital world.

It would be hypocritical and silly for her to wish for anything more.

Besides, Maya had her own share of secrets.

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The 29-year-old slipped stealthily out of bed, careful not to wake up Clay.

She put on some loose pants and swept her hands at the empty air to pull up a holographic screen that displayed her personal messages. Like usual, she had a mixture of business emails and text messages from friends. Nothing was particularly urgent, but Maya glanced at her list of friends who were still online.

There were a number of green dots next to a good chunk of the avatars.

Many of her online friends hadn't even gone to sleep yet, but Maya was already waking up at the crack of dawn. The activity message beside many of her friends said things like, 「 Currently playing "Tree of Life XIV"」, and Maya could tell that they had been playing VRMMO's all night. The advent of full-dive virtual reality consoles a century ago had initiated a cultural revolution that rippled across the world, and a staggering number of people were hopelessly addicted to virtual reality games 24/7.

Maya's heart pained slightly when she recognized several of the usernames still online at this hour. A fair number of them were individuals that she had met in transgender communities or other LGBT support forums when she first started questioning her gender identity more than a decade ago.

They weren't doing very well in real life.

Medical technology for transgender people had progressed immensely in the last 500 years, but this didn't change the fact that many people were intrinsically unhappy with their bodies in real life. Rates of obesity and heart disease had escalated progressively through the decades, and virtual reality had quickly exploded into an escapist utopia where anyone could live in their ideal paradise.

It was a sad truth to recognize that time spent on virtual reality was inversely proportional to quality of life on Earth.

It hurt Maya to watch so many of her old friends slowly slipping away.

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