"Consider This Case"

Consider this case: A woman. 28 years old. Lives in a bed-rack apartment block in Alabama. She has engaged in heavy feed use since childhood, spending 70 to 80% of her free time connected. At age 16 she finds global success as mix guide, netting her a considerable sum of money. One day, when she is 19 years old, she connects to her feed. She does not disconnect again for 9 years. 9 years of continuous feed. 9 years without any direct human contact. 9 years alone in a hygiene bed. Dreaming. Meanwhile, her feed is a veritable flurry of digital contact: mixes, life stories, role swaps, rooms, hunts, avatar makers, empathy games, sex play, and on and on. For a while, her mix tours sell well, and she enjoys her celebrity. But over the years, tastes changes, and her income falls. Try as she might, she cannot revive her popularity. She tries sortieing, tutoring, crowd matching, whatever will make her money. But the competition in these markets is harsh, and she has significant debts to several promotion companies. Her money runs out. She manages to credit bounce for a while, but the writing is on the wall: she must disconnect. She knows this, yet she cannot bring herself to do it. Within the feeds she is well-liked by her spheres, known as a talented mixer and narrator, a reasonable wall mediator and a sensitive and capable participant in sex play. But she has a direct sense feed with complete safety overrides, and she has been on increasing pain dampening for the last 4 years. She knows she has bed sores and perhaps will need multiple amputations. She has assumed that she will live feed-to-grave, and cannot bring herself disconnect. She researches cortical suicide methods but decides against it. She contacts emergency services and arranges for them to remove her from her hygiene bed. One day shortly after her 28th birthday she is disconnected after a 9 year dream. She awakes to a world of horrifying pain. Pain dampening has blocked her opioid receptors, and the removal technicians can do nothing for her agony. Her entire body is atrophied and she has severe calcification around her ports, catheter and evacuator, as well as numerous sores and abscesses and general muscle atrophy. She is taken to the hospital for physical rehabilitation. After several operations, she is stabilized and her pain has subsided to manageable levels. Thankfully, her limbs are still intact. After eye treatments, she looks at herself in the mirror and finds something she does not recognize. She has aged 9 years, though a lack of sun exposure and facial expressions has left her face smooth and unlined, albeit inhumanly gaunt and pale. Within a few days, the hospital sends her home. She must use a scooter to return to her apartment, which is little more than weatherproof box to contain her hygiene bed. What will become of this woman? Sitting alone in her apartment with no job and no touch-friends, without even a bathroom other than the hygiene bed, she will find it very difficult to resist the lure of the feed. The lack of stimulation will mean that she is often bored. The lack of predictability will mean that she is anxious whenever she is not bored. She will find unmediated socializing torturous. According to our statistics, there will be a 90% chance of her making another long-term connection within a month. There will be a 30% chance of her dying within 1 year. This the price of long-term connection: it is inescapable. Less than 1% of users connected continuously for more than 3 years are able to go on to lead successful disconnected lives. In America, there are currently over 30 million users on long term connections. Unless something changes, they will stay connected until they die. This is why we have created COMPANION-12.