In a world where people avoid all human contact for fear of contagion and death, virtual reality interaction rules. When a Virtual Police Officer is forced to swap identities with a criminal, however, he begins to question the justification for his entire world-view.

SYNOPSIS:

Semi-finalist, PAGE Awards. Currently being adapted as a comic book.

David Lowell thinks he knows who he is.

In his post-apocalyptic America, the rich live in towers in the sky and poor convert themselves to hideous scrap-metal cyborgs (commonly known as Igors) in order to survive on the plague-ridden surface. Fortunately for David, he’s rich.

Since meeting face to face means risking a horrible death by contagion, the rich meet, work, screw and even die on LIVE, a hyper-realistic Virtual Reality network directly linked to their brains. Fortunately for David, he is a Social Media Police Officer, a profitable and respectable job on LIVE.

Yep, David’s got it good – until an Igor manages to hack LIVE and do what was previously unthinkable -- steal another user’s unique identity. That user is David.

David cannot create another identity – in losing his Live ID, he loses his self, in a very real sense. So, understandably, he becomes pretty obsessed with getting it back. The only way for David to do that is to hack his own brain. With a little help, he is able to install another identity into his skull – unfortunately, the only available identities belong to Igors long since banned from Live. In other words, David must assume the guise of his worst enemy if he is to recover his original self.

David (now Hank) returns to Live and tries to track down the person pretending to be him. In so doing, he finds himself beaten, hated, persecuted – all the things that he had lived his entire life immune to. He also uncovers the sinister truth behind the plague – that it was neither a natural disaster nor a terrorist plot, as he had been taught to believe, but rather a science experiment gone horribly wrong. He also realizes that he himself has had his memory tampered with and experimented upon – in other words, he has no idea who he really is.

In the face of these revelations, David reluctantly but firmly changes his mind about the Igors and decides to help them destroy LIVE, becoming the very kind of ‘terrorist’ he once reviled. He is able to reveal the truth and ‘save’ those around him, but at a heavy cost in blood and treasure.