The fibres of the rug prickle Enfield's fingertips as he runs them, again and again, over the synthetic coarseness.  He doesn't know how long he's been at it — sitting crosslegged on the floor of what used to be a child's bedroom and running, running his fingers in concentric circles — but he's far from stopping. 

He's melted into the rhythm, into the feeling of electric pulses skittering up his hands and into his arms as his fingers swipe back and forth, like the wipers of a cab sloshing rain from its nanoglass windshield.   

It's more real than real, this motion, this fibre, this rug, this room. 

Hyperreality. 

He doesn't ever want the motion, the impressions, to stop. 

He doesn't want the orange brown colour to stop assaulting his eyes with its stomach churning hideousness. He doesn't want the stink of his own poorly washed body that mixes into the invisible fog of scents rising from the rug he's been working with his fingers to be washed away, even if they make his nose feel as if it'll start bleeding at any second.

It's as if he's taken LSD or something. 

Except he's done just the opposite. He's sweated and bled the drugs out, but with the same effect. 

Oh good god, with the same effect. 

But the most important thing is that the voice is still there, and that reassures him.  The voice from the other side of the door. A man's voice. Calm, deep and soothing. 

A recording, it has to be, because they've been playing it on constant loop since his third day in this kiddie bedroom, in his detox isolation cell. 

The volume is hardly more than a whisper, the device somehow hooked up so that the sound seeps through the cracks in the pressed wellawood, cascades over the scratched and faded stickers of cartoon animals and crawls its way to Enfield's ears, where it roars like a storm in taifun season. 

In the first days, the cravings were too strong and scrambled the meaning of the words of the recording into gibberish. Then, when his senses had cleared somewhat, he'd wanted kick the door to splinters and smash the device just to make it shut up. 

Now, he barely notices it's there. Only when he concentrates, really concentrates, can he make out the individual words. But he doesn't need to because the words, the story, has become a part of him, like an arm or a toe. 

And that's made all the difference.

He has no idea how much longer he'll be locked in this room alone, meals he can eat with his hands pushed in through a metal flap in the bottom of the door three times a day, and he's not sure that it matters. 

He knows he'll never be able to revert back to how he was. To go back to his job on the twenty-seventh floor of a skyscraper, breathing recycled, lithium-impregnated air, performing tasks he's told are vital and rewarding — and because he's so blissed out, so zoned on happiness, he'll believe it. 

Because everybody believes it. It's just easier that way.

Fuck easy. And his job and his old life. He knows that everything he took to be so necessary, so important, for all his life was nothing more than dancing shadows cast by a flickering light. And because he knows that, they'll have to kill him to put him back inside. 

If that's overly dramatic or not, he can't tell. The sensations are too strong.  

Enfield's fingers graze back and forth, back and forth over the worn plastic pile of the rug, feeling every fibre. 

His vision goes fuzzy as he focuses all of his concentration on the voice, listening hard as the story of the man and the cave begins again. 

 * * *

The door behind Enfield is open. They've let him out. He's taken to shower in a small, but clean blue-tiled bathroom and given fresh clothing by a calm, unassuming dude who says his name is Culverton. 

He's been the one feeding and caring for Enfield. 

"And listening to your screams and nightmare talk, too," he says with an ironic, but not unfriendly, smirk. "What all you can get up to with a glow lasso, I never knew." 

"Five weeks, not bad," says a muscled dude with grey hair matted into dreads hanging over his shoulders, some kind of shells-looking things dangling from the ends. 

He's dressed in hoverbike gear. Rain drops sparkle on the black nanotex of his jacket like diamonds. He must have just come in from the outside. 

"You may not remember me, so I'll reintroduce myself. Name's Amstel, your section officer. How do you feel?" he asks. 

"Like I've donated all my blood to the plasma bank and replaced it with liquid hydrogen, thank you for asking, Amstel."  

Both men laugh at his joke, and Enfield grins, but he's still feeling woozy. 

He looks around for somewhere to sit.

The filters on the windows are almost transparent, only a inky blue tinge of night dimming still lingers in the panes. It must be shortly before dawn. 

The furniture is sparse. Bare plastic parquet flooring. Three bushy plants under a purplish neon tube in the corner. Something strikes him as odd, but it takes him a few minutes on the brown velveteen sofa to figure out what it is. 

There's no tech. 

No DataConnect console. No PayLace box.  

But more, he can't remember ever seeing this apartment before. 

The thought makes his forehead crease. 

Amstel notices. "No memory of coming here? That's not unusual. I bet you don't even remember a hell of a lot of the last month before you went into isolation."

Enfield thinks for a moment...and draws a total blank. 

He shakes his head as if that will help kickstart his memory, flicks a finger against his forehead.

Amstel smiles. Impossibly white teeth flash in his dark face. "Never mind. There's not a whole lot you'd want to remember, if you don't mind my saying. But that's about to change."

The smile drains from Amstel's face like dataflow flagging out. 

"Congratulations. You no longer have even a nanogram of government-approved Joy chemicals in your bloodstream. And that," Amstel points a gloved finger at him, "makes you a subversive."

Enfield nods. That bit he does remember. The Contagion agent explained the risks, and the rewards, in detail over the space of several evenings as they shivered on a bench next to an underground walkway, noise from the passing traffic shredding their words for any passing surveillance drones . 

If he joins Contagion, he'll never have a spouse, a family, his own apartment or a regular job in a skyscraper again. He'll be off-net and disconnected from society as he knows it. All his old friends and co-workers, he'll never see again. His diet will change completely, his habits, his mentality.

He'll be reduced to the unprotected state of primitive, primal man. He'll feel pain and difficult emotions at times, there was no going back on that, but he'll be more alive than he'd ever be able to imagine. 

He'll have the chance to be fully human, not a desensitised joy citizen. All the barriers that civilisation has built up to protect itself from suffering will fall away. 

Enfield nods again and a smile crawls onto his face. "I can't wait."

"Good," Amstel says, and hands him a black helmet with a turquoise streak down the side. "I take it you've been on a hoverbike before?"

* * *

The city stinks. 

Enfield can't recall ever having smelled something so awful before. Near the ground, it's oily and biological as if sewer water had geysered up out of the gullies and dried on the toughwear street coating. Higher up, on the level of traffic and personal apartments, the pollen of decaying concrete and burning sodium shoots the air through with a powdery, chemical tang. 

There is no rubbish in the streets, so it can't be that. Robot sweepers patrol at all hours their brushes rotating at high speed, the metal pinchers grabbing and swallowing fast food bags and abandoned games whole.

And yet, the stench is still there. 

Despite the cleaners, despite the breeze, despite the taifuns.  

It must come from the people, somehow. But Enfield can't figure out how that might be.

He left the detox apartment a few weeks ago. He figures that his senses are maybe still on high alert as he sits on the balcony of an abandoned apartment building swinging his legs over a three-metre drop, watching people and cars pass by. 

The other possibility is that everything he's seeing — hearing, tasting, feeling — was always there, he'd just never known what was like beyond the wall self-sedation and fear.

Below him, under the dusty floors of the empty building, under the split tiles in the lobby, under the dark cellar decorated with spiderwebs and damp patches, is a steel door that leads down into Farm 3, one of Contagion's secret growing sites. 

Enfield works in a dry room with clean white walls where he seeds tubular sacks of compost with mushroom spores. The mushrooms - and the microgreens grown on the other floors -  can, so he's learned, absorb joy chemicals from the bloodstream, allowing someone who eats enough of them to live in a constant partially-detoxed state.   

"Imagine, a partially-thinking, partially-feeling human hiding right out in plain sight," Amstel said as he showed Enfield around the operation on his first day. "There are a good amount out there already and the numbers are rising."

"I think I'd go nuts."

Amstel shot him a look. "You were one for a while, don't forget."

"What are you talking about? I never ate any of this stuff," Enfield said, gesturing to the rows upon rows of sacks with all sorts of mushrooms - from coral to bird's egg blue to packing paper brown - growing upwards out of the slits like some kind of underwater creatures. 

"The Dancing Duck on 27th street? Never ate there? Not even once?" 

Enfield shifts on the ledge of the balcony. The Dancing Duck was the restaurant near his work. He'd eaten there, what?, twice a week at least. 

And it was there he'd met a Contagion agent for the first time. 

No coincidence. He sees that now. 

The strings are starting to show.

His life had started to disgust him, not because he'd grown tired of it, but because of the mushrooms he was now helping to grow. They had already started to rattle him awake before the detox room. Break small holes in the armour of happiness drugs in his system, just big enough for the agent to slip a message through about there being a life, a reality, beyond the one he knew.

A bubble delivery car passes by on the street below noodling an instrumental version of the jingle from a popular ad for pizza chain from its loudspeaker.  

Enfield can make out the dark shapes of two employees through the tinted glass, but more clearly he can see the illumination from the screens of their data devices they're holding almost to their faces, unable to stop interacting with them as if their lives depended on them. Plastering the convex yellow sides of the bubble are ads for Choi Burger (with lithiumoid!) and Pizza Go Happy (free JoyInjection with every twentieth order!) 

The hot greasy aroma of Choi Burger, and the taste of the soft, artificial meat disintegrating on his tongue overwhelms Enfield's senses and for a moment he wants nothing more than jump from the balcony and race after the disappearing vehicle, slobbering and screeching for it to stop.

Enfield curses at himself.  Mentally rams his own head into a wall. 

He can't understand now how he used to love that crap. How, after all he's gone through, he's just wanted one so much he'd have chased a stupid delivery bubble for blocks and robbed it. 

What a fucking loser. 

That's also something new and as jagged as barbed wire: self-reproach. 

Hard to do when you're so tanked on Joy, you can't feel your own fingers. 

* * *

They told him it'd be rough. Enfield thought they meant physically. But the rough parts are turning out to be all on the inside. 

That morning Amstel had leaned against the door of the seeding room to check in on how he was doing, the shells on his dreads clicking faintly. 

"Tell me about it," he'd offered. 

An Enfield had answered, "Without all the chemicals, you start to feel your real emotions. Like real. And they're difficult. I never...well, I knew, but I didn't know what feeling felt like. " He dumped a spade full of coffee grounds into the open sack on the seeding table. 

Amstel had nodded, an all-understanding expression on his face. "Angering, depressing, intolerant, idiotic. Some amazingly bad shit in a bag, in other words."

"Exactly. It's overwhelming at times. You just want it all to go away."

"Reality, real reality, not what passes for it today, is very hard to take. For some people, too hard, you know?"

Enfield does know. He's starting to get it in a way that shocks him. 

He thought reality would just be a less blissed out version of what he'd always known, comfortable, pleasant and easy, once you got enough of it in you to feel the effects. 

But now it was here,  it hurt like hell. 

"But then there's the other side to feelings," said Amstel.

"There's another side?"

"Oh yeah. Love, man. And real, honest-to-fuck joy. Chem free and free to all."

"Really?" Enfield had snorted and shaken his head. "I mean, does happiness even exist, Amstel?  Really exist? Or is it something some advertising suits thought up and we all were just too eager to swallow whole to shake off this...?" Enfield pantomimed scraping sludge off his arms.  

"You bet your ass it exists. Be patient with yourself and hold out for at least six months. Then you'll see. And if the urge to bliss out gets too bad, ask somebody to kick the shit out of you and I mean properly. I don't mind telling you, I got two broken ribs and a mosaic of bruises during my first months. I'd be the last person to tell you it's easy."

Enfield considered for a moment. "Wait, you're talking about the story of the dude in the cave, aren't you? But, Amstel, I'm already out of the cave, man. I'm fully detoxed and standing in the sun, what else do I have to realise?"  

Amstel had just smiled, knocked on the doorpost and left. 

* * *

Behind Enfield, a door squeaks and he looks over his shoulder into a dim room of the abandoned apartment. 

It's Chang, one of the other seeders. 

"There you are," he says, and jerks with his head towards the way he came, making his purple fringe of hair whip to the side like a curtain being tugged. "They want us downstairs. Time to harvest some bluebells."  

Enfield's glad for the interruption. 

Harvesting the pretty, bliss-absorbing mushrooms and being a part of the global detox is something he thinks he'll enjoy. One day. 

He has to remember to be patient with himself, like Amstel says. 

Wait out the first six months.

Real joy is out there. He's got to believe that. 

But the phantom smell of Choi burger still ghosts around in his senses, making him sweat as he hops from the ledge. He follows Chang down the stairs and into the tunnels under the abandoned building, wondering the whole time if he should ask him for a quick, hard punch to the gut. 

As if it were that...easy. 

----

A/N The "dude in the cave story" is Plato's Allegory of the Cave.