Jungle Hunt for K's Mind Virus.

K was blasted through a Buddha's stone eyeball into the jungle. He was now pure consciousness.

The clichés of existence were now just a children's game to his enlightened mind. He watched as thousands of red ants ate the flesh from a severed water buffalo's head lying in the grass. It was the matrix of the games design, beyond good and evil just hygiene, like human wars. The stink of people was perfume to him now. He ran a hand over his shaved head and inhaled the brackish air of the river delta. Maybe this moment of early morning reflection called for a cigarette but he didn't smoke. He felt no hunger but went into his bamboo house to the fridge running on a solar panel perched high above the jungle. He had paid a young native to shimmy up the tree and install it on arrival, his own bulk inhibited such activities. He was now up to about a hundred and twenty kilos he guessed, maybe more. He took a cooked parrot leg from the cold interior and bit into it. All taste was nectar to him now. He washed it down with river water Cola, which was just boiled water flavoured with red widow bark. A mild stimulant that acted like dialed up caffeine to his senses. He was no longer a human being. Death and rebirth had refashioned him as a digital ghost, a sentient software system that was fully autonomous.

In the Jungle with his "people" he ruled with a solid King like status. They were generated around him by the same hardware back in the world, although they were less evolved.

K had been an advanced practitioner of the Vulture God of the Himalayas. He had worked as an undertaker back in the world, cutting up the dead and feeding their flesh to the great white birds. He was the first westerner allowed to fulfil such duties. He had arrived with a backpack and PTSD from the human wars. Life had gifted him a second chance after saving a Lamas life from Bandits one night. He was then blessed with fortunate karma until the day he lost his life in a Mongolian drone attack. His consciousness implant was removed by tech lama android police systems and he was packed off here, to the jungle. It wasn't so bad. He sucked the fat from around the whittled down bone of the parrot leg. Where was his wife at? Then he heard her laughing nearby in the laundry shack. He left her to it. He went to check his fishing lines down by the river. Trees with huge branches attempted to touch leaves like hands over the divide of water. Monkeys jumped back and forth up in the canopy chattering away madly to each other. He waved at them as they were his friends. The program which gave him this existence had been living and breathing for how long now? He wondered?. He guessed at ten years or there abouts, enough to father five kids with three different women anyway. Two of his wives had digitally degraded in front of his eyes. One by a snake bite and the other by a virus from drinking unboiled.water. Easy come, easy go, he had thought at the time. Compassion and pity were human emotions that didn't exist here. In the jungle life and death were merely a lottery of arbitrary luck and loss. No one around him who was artificially generated would shed a tear if he died. The same rules applied to all.

K checked his fishing lines and tugged on one that seemed to be connected to a writhing object that he couldn't see. He unsheathed his knife and jumped into the river and chased the line to a massive mouth. The hook was embedded in the open lips. He repeatedly stabbed the fish around the gills until it's panic subsided and it became lifeless. It's fear and panic was part of a programmed reaction for realism. He watched as the brown river water turned red.

He hauled the eight foot dead weighted fish onto land and chopped off its head. This particular fish had a deep red flesh much like Tuna or Swordfish. He threw the head to his waiting cat, a female leopard/Tiger hybrid. She wrestled with the head and sank her fangs into the green scales.

There were no innards to take out so K filleted the fish in quick time. Digital dissolution would erase the animals remains from the game in twelve hours if he didn't eat the fish. He got it ready to take home. That's when he saw the boat lurking up river  it was a battered old military craft much like one used by the Americans in the human wars. Who was onboard? He crouched down low out of residual instinct and that is when he saw the unmistakable head of M, his old pupil from the Titan City of UK 6. He had taught him there before getting draughted into the human wars of the final times. That was when he had left the west through Particle Shift Drone to the Himalayas. He hadn't seen any of his old pupils since and now wondered if he would need to fight to remain plugged in to this particular simulation in the jungle. He moved on all fours then got up and ran to warn the others back at the camp.