"What flavor is this? It's divine," Rake said, slurping up his tablespoon of Ben and Jerry's.  

"Five Car Pile Up. They don't tell you the five flavors. I think you're supposed to guess." 

"I ruled out strawberry, vanilla, chocolate, cherry, raspberry, blueberry... What else is there?" 

"They're not going to make it that easy on you. You can bet these are hybrid flavors and fruits that do not exist in nature, probably nowhere outside of the Ben and Jerry's farms." 

He sighed, setting down the bucket on the coffee table on which they also had their feet perched. 

"What?" 

"I refuse to contribute to the complexification of ice cream. Life is just not supposed to be this damn difficult." 

"What are you complaining about? I got the Ten Car Pile Up." 

He laughed as she shoved a spoonful into his mouth. "God, that's twice as divine as the 5 Car Pile Up." 

The commercial ended on the flat screen TV and the newscaster returned, announcing, in her beguiling female voice, interrupting the sanctity of Doc Holiday's living room, "Digital Nirvana went on sale today. You or your loved ones may now choose to upload yourself to a digital only existence at any time at zero cost to you." 

"At zero cost, no less!" Rake said. "See, what did I tell you?" 

"Huh?" 

"Huh what?" 

"I had the TV computer searching satellite news worldwide for any mention of Digital Nirvana. It's just funny it landed on a Chinese TV station." 

"I thought their lips were moving a little funny." 

"Ha-ha. Doesn't that strike you as peculiar? You'd think we'd be beta-testing over here in the U.S., where last I checked, we were a little more open-minded about the kinds of future we were willing to step into." 

"Makes perfect sense. Billions of Chinese weighing down the environment. Skim the top thirty percent off the top for the smartest, most motivated, that's still more than our entire population in the U.S. The rest of them are just dead weight. Fire up the ovens. It's Auschwitz all over again, only you walk in the room to get scanned, before you walk into the ovens." 

She was keying away at her cordless keyboard before he could finish getting the last line out.  

"What are you doing?" 

"Since we're supposed to be taking a vacation from your mind I thought I'd help you out by digging into the rest of the deal. The small print they didn't allow out with the press release." 

"I thought we were agreed you were more hack than hacker." 

"I just didn't argue with you for fear of feeding your inferiority complex." 

"But now that I'm drunk on a quart of ice cream, I'm too high to care?" 

"Something like that. Yep, here it is. Volunteers get to have a hundred thousand donated to their favorite charity or to a relative left behind if they agree to have their bodies composted. No legal ramifications incurred for disposing of the body, even if the person is still living, since it is viewed by the state as no more than a backup copy. Now I can see why they're beta-testing this in China. Disposing of live bodies is a tougher sell this side of the Atlantic." 

"You caught the conspiracy bug, or not yet?" 

She threw down the keyboard, and reached for her ice cream. He grabbed it and the spoon out of her hand. "This is my vacation from reality, remember?" he said. "And I'm not nearly drunk enough for this." 

Holiday got off the couch, grabbed her pet koala and stroked it as she hugged it to her chest.  

"That thing is real, right?" he said, eying the koala bear. He honestly hadn't noticed the animal until now. Some detective he was. 

"No, of course not. The poor creatures are endangered. I don't believe in keeping real exotic pets. The wildlife is under enough pressure without us trying to turn them into pets." She quickly lost herself in her back and forth pacing and he returned to devouring her ice cream. 

"TV, display newscasts, books, magazine articles, anything with a mention of scanning and uploading humans to server farms," she said. The TV turned into multiscreen mode, continuing to splinter until the screens were too small to read, and still the picture-in-picture squares continued to propagate. "Timeline for the bulk of these publications," she said. 

The TV displayed "2030-2050."  

"So they've been planning this for twenty years," Rake said. "How could I have missed this, with a paranoid chip upgrade, no less?" 

"There are enough real world news events to keep the likes of us busy. Easy for trends to escape the best future forecasters with all that's going on out there. Besides, most of that data-mining software is devoted to turning a profit. The only people who stand to gain by this are a handful at the very top, the top one percent of the top one percent." 

"So you agree with me that someone has been priming the public psyche for quite some time now?" 

"Could be the mass psyche programming the mass psyche. Who's to say this isn't leadership from the bottom up? People calling more and more with each passing year for better living options. You said it yourself, the kids live more in virtual reality these days than in the real world." 

"God, I hate rationalists. They have a plausible, down-to-earth answer for everything." 

She laughed, realizing how much tension she was walking around with for the first time. He probably was picking up on it and decided to cut her a break.  

"I suppose it's all just idle speculation without some kind of proof," Rake said, tapping the spoon against his forehead. "And I think I know just where to find it," he said, jumping off the couch. 

"What now? First comes sex, then sleep, then more sex, then tomorrow off, and a possible return to the real world only if can't find another solid excuse for extending Doc Holiday's holiday." 

"You really do have me confused for a younger man." 

She held up a bottle of chips. "Brought him along. All we have to do is stick him into you." 

"That just sounds so wrong." 

"Yeah, I have to admit that sounded better in my head." 

He squeezed her at the shoulders, kissed her on the forehead, and departed. She sighed as she heard the front door close behind him. "I beginning to think that man isn't just playing hard to get."