Ramnath R Iyer's "The Forgotten Future" (short story, virtual reality, free)

This one is only for those with a taste for stories where all characters are entities inside a computer simulation.

I keep getting puzzled why some Indian authors are shy of using characters with Indian names. John & Sue in this story could as well have been Kumar & Sarita!

Story summery.

Couple of hundred years down the line, humanity has generally shut itself in a VR world by directly hooking the brains into the networked simulation & shutting down much of the body processes.

Usual dystopia results. Until someone figures it's the way to extinction - since everyone will eventually die out, & no one is having children in real world. So we have a hero & heroine now charged with getting the humanity back to real world.

Fact sheet.

First published: The Scientific Indian, sometime in 2006.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.