Closing Time

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It had been three days in digi-paradise, and Ensign Scrudbucket had gone to bed the third night the happiest he'd ever been. On a comfortable (and therefore expensive) mattress stuffed with feathers and hay, in a twelve-bedroom jungle hut, just ten steps from the snow-sand beach. Only the twelve-bedroom jungle hut was made out of brick and it had an expensive HVAC system. Oh, and he'd met someone and they'd gone out twice already, with plans for a third outing the next day.

Paradise.

Scrudbucket woke up the next day in the cramped bunkbed he shared with eight people back on the Mothership. He'd never been more depressed.

"Ready for the Big Bang!?" someone asked him, enthusiastically pounding him on the back while he was scrubbing what was evidently last night's dinner (simulated macaroodles) from Toilet 2-E of Bathroom 66-O.

Scrudbucket didn't respond. He still had four hundred and seventy-two toilets to clean—and that was only if the ones he'd already cleaned, y'know, stayed clean. Which never happened. Not with the Mothership's menu options.

He wanted his cyber life back. He'd do anything to get it. If only there were a way...

A twisted grin came over his face.

What if he could start over...?

?

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