Unbearably Real

The waiting room at Nexus Wellness smelled like eucalyptus and ambition. Victoria Hammond leafed through the intake forms, trying to decide whether to be honest about her meditation frequency. Around her, beautiful people scrolled through their phones between appointments in their athleisure that had never felt a drop of sweat.

"First time?" the woman next to her asked. She wore the serene smile of someone who'd already discovered enlightenment, or at least a better CBD brand.

"Third," Victoria lied. It was actually her eighth session this month, but admitting that felt like confessing to happiness addiction. Which was absurd. The Gratitude Chamber wasn't addictive; it was therapeutic. Dr. Reeves himself had said so on the podcast.

The Chamber had revolutionized wellness culture faster than hot yoga or ayahuasca ever had. The science was elegant: while you slept for six minutes in a sensory-deprivation pod, the neural interface mapped your subconscious ingratitude patterns—the complaints you didn't even know you were harboring—and generated a personalized simulation. You experienced months, sometimes years, living without whatever you'd been taking for granted.

Forgot to appreciate your working legs? Spend a simulated year in a wheelchair.

Complained about your mother's calls? Watch her funeral, feel the silence that follows.

Resented your body? Live in one ravaged by illness.

You woke up weeping with relief, euphoric with appreciation, chemically rewired toward contentment.

Victoria's previous sessions had been transformative. She'd lived through poverty so grinding she'd literally eaten from dumpsters. She'd experienced the 19th century as a feminist, the casual brutality of having to hide herself. She'd been a refugee, a cancer patient, a parent burying a child. Each time, she'd emerged grateful beyond measure for her actual life: the penthouse overlooking the Pacific, the healthy body, the freedom to love whoever she wanted, the absence of tragedy.

She'd never felt happier. Never felt more aware of her privilege, more determined to honor it with joy.

Always leaving a generous tip and donating to a charity of some sort.

"Victoria Hammond?" The technician smiled warmly. "We're ready for you."

The pod sealed with a pneumatic hiss. Victoria closed her eyes, feeling the neural crown settle against her temples. Dr. Reeves's voice came through the speakers, smooth as expensive whiskey: "Remember, whatever you experience is designed to help you grow. Surrender to it. We'll see you in six minutes."

The sedative misted over her face. Victoria's last conscious thought was wondering what she'd been ungrateful for this time. She thought she'd been doing so well.

---

She woke in a bedroom she recognized instantly: her bedroom, her actual bedroom, but wrong. The morning light was right, the view of the ocean was right, but something felt off. Muted. Like the world had been turned down to 80% brightness.

Her phone buzzed. A text from her boyfriend: Coffee on the terrace?

Victoria showered, dressed, and joined him on the terrace. They talked about the gallery opening that night, about whether to summer in Greece or Croatia, about nothing and everything. It was pleasant. It was nice.

It felt like prison.

Over the following days—weeks—Victoria waited for the simulation to reveal itself. Waited for the tragedy, the challenge, the loss that would teach her what she'd been taking for granted. But nothing came. She went to the gallery opening. She had coffee with friends. She worked on her novel. She watched sunsets.

She felt nothing.

Not nothing—that wasn't quite right. She felt what she used to feel before the Chamber: moderate happiness, occasional frustration, the normal oscillation of human emotion. But after eight sessions of engineered transcendence, of chemically enhanced appreciation, it felt like drowning in beige.

She tried to force gratitude. Every morning, she listed her privileges: health, wealth, love, freedom, beauty. The words felt hollow. It was like flipping a light switch when the power was out.

Months passed in the simulation. Then a year. Victoria began to understand what the Chamber had identified: she'd been ungrateful for ordinary contentment itself. She'd become addicted to the dopamine spike of post-Chamber euphoria, to the intensity of engineered appreciation. She'd turned gratitude into a drug, and now she was experiencing withdrawal.

The simulation was teaching her that baseline human happiness—the kind that doesn't require tragic contrast to appreciate—was something precious. That you could be grateful for simple okayness. That you didn't need to live through horror to earn the right to feel good.

But the lesson wouldn't take. The simulation stretched on, two years, three years, and Victoria felt herself hollowing out. Maybe engineering appreciation through trauma simulation was like forcing a flower to bloom.

She thought about her real body, asleep in the pod. Six minutes, Dr. Reeves had said. But the simulation didn't seem to have an end programmed. What if it malfunctioned? What if she was stuck here, in this gray paradise, forever?

The thought frightened her.

Five years into the simulation, Victoria stood on her terrace watching the sunset. Her boyfriend had left her (even simulated people had limits for tolerating someone's existential malaise). She'd stopped writing, stopped seeing friends, stopped performing the rituals of her privileged life.

She wasn't depressed, exactly. Depression would have been something, at least. She was just... done.

Victoria climbed onto the terrace railing. The Pacific stretched below, beautiful and meaningless. She thought about the irony.

Victoria stepped off the terrace.

---

The emergency alert screamed through Nexus Wellness at 3:47 AM. Technicians sprinted to Pod 7, where Victoria Hammond's vitals had flatlined—not her real body, but her simulated consciousness, which should have been impossible.

Dr. Reeves stared at the neural readouts, his hands shaking. In fifteen years of Chamber development, across hundreds of thousands of sessions, no one had ever died in a simulation. The whole point was contrast—you suffered to appreciate your real life, not to escape it.

"Pull her out," he ordered.

They opened the pod. Victoria Hammond sat up, gasping, her face wet with tears. She was alive. Physically perfect. The session timer read 6:14—barely overtime.

"What happened?" Dr. Reeves demanded. "What did you experience?"

Victoria looked at him, and he saw something in her eyes that made him step back. Not gratitude. Not appreciation. Something else entirely.

"I experienced my real life," she whispered. "The simulation showed me my real life, without the Chamber's afterglow. And I couldn't bear it."