io9 is delighted to showcase an extraordinary work of fiction from *Lightspeed Magazine*, a publication celebrated for its dedication to imaginative literature that deftly explores the boundaries of science, technology, and human emotion. Each month, io9 curates and presents one story from *Lightspeed’s* latest issue, offering readers a glimpse into worlds that both reflect and challenge our own. For this month’s featured selection, the story chosen is “Reality Check,” a penetrating and unsettling narrative written by the acclaimed author Nancy Kress. We invite you to immerse yourself in this masterfully constructed tale and experience its poignant exploration of family, isolation, and the implications of technological interference with the human mind.
**“Reality Check” by Nancy Kress**
In this story’s opening scene, the reader enters a house steeped in tension and quiet despair. The door to a teenage boy’s bedroom stands firmly closed—locked from within, as it always is—serving both as a physical barrier and a symbol of emotional disconnection. In the hallway, Harry and Sarah, the boy’s exhausted parents, exchange looks of frustration and resignation before forcing their expressions into artificial smiles of parental affection. Though they both know their son Oliver cannot see those smiles, habit and hope compel them to try once again. These efforts have been ongoing for fourteen long months, a stretch of time filled with futile coaxing and growing hopelessness.
When Sarah knocks gently on the door and entreats her son to come downstairs for breakfast, Oliver responds politely but distantly, his voice filtered through the wooden wall that separates them. He asks that their housekeeper, Mattie, bring breakfast to his room instead. Harry, suppressing irritation, reminds him that he is imposing unnecessary work upon the servant. Oliver’s calm reply—pointing out that Mattie is spared the trouble of cleaning his room—stings with its logic. Anonymous yet filled with restrained defiance, his words underscore the autonomy he has carved out in his self-imposed exile. Within that room, Oliver attends to all of his needs—washing his own sheets in the bathtub, drying them out the window, and managing a fragile world of order entirely separate from his parents’.
This daily stalemate shatters when Harry abruptly loses control, his patience evaporating. Furious, he demands that Oliver come out, his voice brimming with paternal authority and desperation. The boy’s calm refusal—“I can’t”—is like a final door closing. Sarah intervenes instantly, dragging her husband into the guest room before his anger transforms into action. There, they argue bitterly, their words unveiling both parental helplessness and deeper marital fractures. Harry rails against their therapist’s advice, declaring that what Oliver truly requires is not empathy or professional intervention but the stern discipline of old-fashioned parenting. Sarah, tall and elegant with the lingering poise of her past modeling career, rebukes him. She insists on their vow to raise Oliver without physical coercion or emotional manipulation, reminding Harry of the counselor’s assurance that boys afflicted with HIRSIA—Hiding in Room Syndrome with Internet Addiction—eventually emerge on their own, strengthened by self-determination.
Their quarrel, swift and venomous, exposes the full rot within their marriage. Each accusation—of ignorance, vanity, and betrayal—descends like shards of broken glass. The subject of Harry’s research, amphibiosis, becomes both a scientific metaphor and an allegory for their relationship: a union that balances precariously between symbiosis and parasitism. Their argument culminates in another forbidden subject—the experimental neurological procedure Harry wishes performed on Oliver. Sarah’s panic crescendos as she vows never to consent to such an intrusion, branding it an abomination. Their conflict quiets only when she withdraws, shaken and resolute, into the dim hallway.
Through her concealed vantage point in the linen closet, Sarah secretly watches Oliver collect his breakfast tray. His long hair falls past his shoulders; his movements are calm and deliberate. For a fleeting moment, she sees not a patient but a boy who still smiles at pancakes—the symbol of normalcy. Yet as his door shuts again, leaving silence behind, Sarah remains in the dark, her tears betraying how fragile that scene of domestic routine truly is.
Over the months—and eventually years—Harry and Sarah exhaust every possible remedy for their son’s reclusion, from gentle persuasion to professional interventions. HIRSIA has become an international phenomenon, especially prevalent among adolescent boys, sparking debates across psychiatry and culture. They try coaxers, digital monitoring, and educational programs, all to no avail. Their son continues to thrive academically but remains isolated. A desperate experiment—Harry cutting off Oliver’s power—ends only in escalation and violence, forcing the couple to confront not just their child’s illness but the hollow core of their marriage itself.
Nancy Kress’s narrative traces their descent into an emotional labyrinth, guided by love that curdles into obsession and fear that masquerades as moral duty. As the world around them edges toward technological solutions, Dr. William Cantwell’s revolutionary neural implant promises redemption for families like theirs—through quiet rewiring of the mind itself. What follows is a deeply unsettling chain of choices propelled by desperation and rationalized as love. Harry invokes his scientific credentials to justify the experiment; Sarah, drawn between skepticism and yearning for hope, falters under the influence of another man—a charismatic physician whose empathy conceals ethical blindness.
Without overt violence, the story transforms the family’s domestic drama into a meditation on control: the compulsion to repair, to correct, to override human vulnerability through science. The aftermath is chilling. Oliver emerges from surgery “cured”—obedient, composed, and detached. Yet something integral has been erased. His brilliance remains, but imagination, emotion, and the subtle capacities that connect human beings in empathy have faded. To Harry, this looks like success. To Sarah, increasingly aware that her child’s soul has been quietly rewritten, it feels like spiritual death.
Kress develops this transformation with slow precision. Oliver’s world, once filled with vibrant games and poetic perception, becomes mechanical. Where he once saw beauty in art and found meaning in the abstract complexity of Jackson Pollock’s *Convergence*, he now sees only meaningless chaos. He loses his capacity for wonder and symbolic thought—the very essence of humanity’s creative impulse. The closing image, with Oliver calmly removing the painting from his wall and placing it in a closet, is not simply an act of aesthetic judgment, but a grave symbol of what he has lost: his mother’s tears, his father’s ambition, and above all, his own imagination.
“Reality Check” is not merely the story of a boy cured of internet addiction; it is a sophisticated exploration of what it means to live meaningfully, to feel deeply, and to err humanly. It challenges the illusion that scientific mastery can erase suffering without cost. The story’s haunting precision forces readers to confront the uncomfortable truth that in trying to make our children perfect—or real—we risk stripping them of their most vital imperfections, the ones that make them human. Nancy Kress, a writer renowned for her penetrating examinations of biotechnology and morality, constructs here a timeless parable on the perilous intersection of progress and love.
Originally published by *Lightspeed Magazine*, “Reality Check” exemplifies Kress’s distinctive voice—clear-eyed yet compassionate, scientifically rigorous yet lyrical. Her mastery lies not merely in speculative invention but in her unwavering attention to emotional authenticity. Through the lens of one fractured family, she presents a bleak but deeply plausible vision of how the quest to “fix” the human condition may end by dismantling it. As in her broader body of work spanning over thirty novels and countless short stories, Kress reminds readers that every technological promise carries within it a moral reckoning, waiting for those brave enough to see it.
To explore this story and more extraordinary tales at the intersection of science fiction and moral inquiry, visit *Lightspeed Magazine*. Within its pages, you will find other voices that challenge conventional boundaries and enrich the ever-evolving conversation about humanity, imagination, and the unknown potential of science itself.
Sourse: https://gizmodo.com/a-radical-cure-for-internet-addiction-brings-chilling-consequences-in-this-dystopian-story-2000695945
