Articles Available Online

We were told to pay attention to things that were different, and it seemed to me that sex was no longer the same Now, we always wondered if someone was watching It wasn’t clear to us which sections were private, and how the technology worked It was also hard not to picture our real bodies somewhere in the frozen dark, motionless while we moved together here in the seeming warm   I brought it up in my sessions with the Reverend He told me he was surprised it had taken me so long to ask The others had worried about it in Cycle 1   ‘Which Cycle are we in?’ I asked It was difficult to keep track   ‘Cycle 3,’ said the Reverend ‘I understand your concern, but of course nobody watches you It was part of the privacy agreement we signed at the start Don’t you remember?’   I did That is, I hadn’t until the Reverend mentioned it The memory was there, but it felt very far away And maybe it was We hadn’t been told precisely how long the experiment would take We wouldn’t know until we were unfrozen at the end, our bodies still in their thirties and our minds at god-knows-what age   But the money was good Sam and I would be able to afford a nice wedding and a honeymoon to Hawaii, and only one of us would need to work while the other stayed home with the kids we hoped to have That is, if we were still fertile at the end It was one of the risks   Our life together before the VR world was still clear in my mind and I looked back on it often: Sam and me walking together to rehearsals, our first kiss in the snow, our apartment above Shipley Automotive, taking care of each other through winter fevers Our memories made in the VR world were less acute, but we were happy, we had each other, and we never got sick   Only couples were accepted for the experiment – ‘deeply committed couples’, in fact, and there was a test we had