Naked Minds

Revelations

            “It’s not possible. There hasn’t been a serious breakthrough in VR. All the available games are still very rudimentary.”

            “What year do you think this is?”

            “It’s 2013.”

            “No, that’s the year this story is set in. It’s a parallel reality where cyborgs exist on Earth and where you play the hero that liberates cyborg slaves from human dominance.”

            “If that’s the story then why didn’t it play out like that?”

            “TNDM virus overwrites the characters and the story including the main player which is you. The story is showing you the hallucinations, not your brain. You’re not actually high of anything. The New Dawn has hijacked your VR experience. The real reason why these hackers are dangerous criminals is because these hacks cause people to forget that they’re having a VR experience. They get confused just like you are now. They can’t tell when the story began and they forget about reality.

            People pay a lot of money for these simulations and the leading VR corporations pay me to safely eject the users once the simulation has been corrupted by hackers. They used to suddenly disconnected people from the VR experience but that made some users have seizures while others went completely insane. So what the industry does now is they insert a Controller, which is someone like me, to help you, to make sure that nothing happens to you. The company doesn’t want another lawsuit on its hands.”

            Johnny pressed the tips of his fingers into the armrests of the red leather chair he was sitting in. He buried his fingernails into the wood. It all felt savagely real. Natas poured himself a drink and offered one to his guest.

            “What’s the point,” Johnny snapped.

            “It has the exact same effect as the real thing,” Natas explained.

            “So what parts of me are real in here? My name, where I’m from…”

            “These VR experiences are very customizable. I am not told any personal details about the user that’s stuck in a hacked simulation. I am briefed about the plot of the game and they usually insert me to take over some important role in the ongoing plot. My only job is to give you instructions on how to finish the story and thereby release yourself from it. Just like old video games, they end once they are completed and the user ejects the disc. In the VR experience, you will be the one ejected. You will be less shocked now that I’m here and telling you this. I’m slowly preparing you.”

            “So where are we then exactly, in the outside world, the real world?”

            “You are seated in a comfortable VR experience chair while your brain and all your senses are plugged in order to perceive the signals that this simulacrum is sending out. The company that hired me and that created this game is called Real Dimensions Entertainment or RD for short. We are inside one of their VR cafes.”

            “Where are we geographically? What city?”

            “We’re in Amsterdam.”

            “I spent a night there before continuing to Toronto. So when did the game actually start, at what point.”

            “What you are describing might just be a part of the game.”

            “No! It was real. I wasn’t high when I arrived in Amsterdam. I was very sober. Everything started becoming surreal once I smoked…no, it was after I met this girl Albina!”