I sent in my application as a joke, knowing I wasn’t going to be picked. From what I remember her telling me, there were 30,000 applicants from my state alone. But by the grace of God I was picked.
I was perusing social media when I saw an advertisment for something called “EnviroReality.” It was advertised as a virtual reality system that temporarily erases your worldy conscience to fully immerse you in a certain experience. Put simply, when you are in the experience, you have no recollection of your life outside of the game. You could truly be a soldier in a medieval king’s army, or a tourist on a carribean beach, or a astronaut exploring the stars. But when your time is up, you will be taken out of the experience and you will have full memory of the experience.
I couldn’t wrap my head around how that would work. It just didn’t compute in my brain. But, I was intrigued and sort of wanted to try it out. I clicked the ad that took me to a professional website. There were some details about the address of the place, phone numbers, emails, and some legal jargon. There was a little box that said “Apply.” I filled the info and submitted.
Fast forward 2 weeks and I got an email from the company. “Congratulations! Your application to try EnviroReality has been accepted! We hope to see you soon! Please give us a call at 1 822-@@@-@@@@” I was flustered. I wasn’t expecting to actually do this put it was happening. I called the number and they picked up immediatly. We made arrangments for me to show up that afternoon.
When I rolled up to the address, I was confused. It was a derelict office building with 4 cars in the parking lot. The woman on the phone told me to go through the front doors. She said that someone would be there to greet me and walk me through the process.
I opened the front door into a hotel lobby-like area. There was a woman dressed in casual clothing sitting at a desk typing at a computer. Before I could say a word, she perked up. “Hey, you must be Rick!” She said. “You must be right!” I said. I screamed internally at what I just said. I was never good at talking to girls. “I just need you to sign some papers and we’ll be on our way.”
I signed the papers, skimming the text quickly. She got up and extended a hand towards a door to the right of the desk. I started walking and she walked behind me. I opened the door into a very nice office building. There were around 50 people working at computers, some people were tinkering with tech. There were murals and inspirational quotes painted on the wall, there was an IMAC at every desk, and a break room with foosball and ping-pong. This place had funding for sure, but It didn’t seem like that from the outside.
We continued walking until she took me into a room. I was expecting a regular VR headset and chair to be waiting for me, but when she opened the door, there was something different. A dentist’s chair without the dentistry equipment and an assortment of wires connected to pads that I guessed would go on my temples. Those wires were connected to a gaming pc. She gestured for me to take a seat. I climbed into the seat and leaned back. She started talking. “There are some things I’m obligated to tell you first. 1) This technology is not finished so there will possibly be small malfunctions within the experience. 2) EnvroReality is a device that needs to connect directly to 4 parts of your head, meaning that we will have to shave a bit of hair off.”
I stopped her there. “What? No, No! I am not doing that!”
“Sorry, its a bit too late now. You already signed.”
I must have misread that part of the contract. She took a razor and shaved the hair on my temple and scalp. “Yeah, we’re working on finding a way to connect the pads without shaving hair.” I was fuming internally.
“So, your time in the experiences is 30 minutes. You get to pick 3 experiences and spend 10 minutes in each one. While in your experience, you will feel every sensation your character would feel, including pain.
I winced, but I remembered the paper I signed.
When your time is up, you will transfer to your next experience. When your time in the finan experience is up, you will wake up.”
I picked the following experiences:
She did some typing on the computer, then swiveled her chair around. She picked up the pads and fastened each of them on the shaved parts of my head. It tickled a bit. “3… 2…. 1….” She tapped the space bar on her keyboard and I was out.
For the following stories: When I say “I” I mean my character.
I woke up. I knew my name. My name was Abu Usama Ibn Yasser. I had a sword in my hand. I looked around, there were around 300 soldiers, some on horses in the same uniform as me holding the same sword. I looked ahead. There were what looked to be 200 knights on horses. I knew where I was and what I was doing. I was in the Middle East and I was fighting in the crusades. And as advertised, I had no clue of my life out of this. I had memories of this soldier’s life. I knew my character’s mother, father and brother. I knew his troubles and his achievments. I knew where he came from. Damascus, in Syria.
The opposing forces were advancing towards us. We were in our battle formation. They came down on us like a storm, and we fought back. There were swords clashing, horses neighings, men yelling, and blood on the sandy ground. I found myself in a one on one situation with a knight. He was bigger than I was. He had a broad sword and armor draped in a cloth with a cross one it. He brought his sword down. I blocked his attack and swiftly tried to cut him, but my sword met his chain mail armor. When I looked back it him, his sword was already coming down. It made contact with my shoulder and it cut down to the bottom of my rib cage. I was in complete agony and I was bleeding.
One of my fellow soldiers saw me fall down and dragged me behind the line of battle and tried to stop the bleeding. I was falling out of consciousness. I got a good look at my helper’s face. It was my brother, or I guess my character’s brother. I remembered that my brother became a soldier with me.
I blacked out. I briefly came back to my worldly mind and I knew my experience was changing. I loaded in to my experience. I woke up one a one-person spaceship landed on a planet I didn’t recognize. My name was Matteo Giancarlo The foliage of the plants on this planet were green, blue, and purple. There were insect-like creatures buzzing around. There were creatures running and flying around and there was pond with large hippo-like creatures lounging. I went to walk out of the spaceship.
I blacked out.
My experience wasn’t supposed to be over, I was there only 3 minutes.
I woke back up. My foot met solid ground. When I looked around there was only a black void. I was confused, there was absolutley nothing. And I had no character either. Well I did, It just had no identity. I don’t really know how to explain this. I could think but I had no knowledge of people that existed, I had no knowledge of the world, I only knew the void.
I could comprehend what I was seeing, and I was thinking in english. A name even came to my mind. “Petrus. I yelled out. “Hello?” No response.
I felt sore from standing. I was likely there for around 30 seconds, but it felt like 20 minutes. So I sat down. When I went to sit down, I fell through the floor and started falling through the void. My ears were ringing loudly.
I heard a voice. “Why are you here?” It remarked with a bad attitude. It was ethereal and. The voice reverberated in my head. Before I could speak it talked again “How did you get here, who let you get here, Who let a Mawja get here?”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Just know that I am above you. It should be impossible for your kind to get here.”
“What do you mean?”
“We exist on a different plane than you. That is all I can say.”
The voice had no face nor body. It was only a voice.
“I don’t know how I got here. I don’t really know where I came from or anything. Do you know how I can get out of here?”
“This shouldn’t be possible.”
“What is this?” A different voice said. It had a deeper quality. I could place it as male, while the other voice I couldn’t put a gender to.
They started to converse.
“It doesn’t know where it came from.”
“Send It back.”
“It hasn’t come from anywhere.”
“Impossible. We created its place like we created the places of others. We created the system of existence from which it came. Send it back.”
I was busy contemplating this when I woke up in the office. I was sweating profusley and very startled.
I saw the familiar face of the woman who was helping.
“Sorry, the last experience failed to load and I couldn’t really figure out what happened. Sorry to cut your experience short.”
I looked at her. She looked back like I was crazy.
“If you want, you can grab a drink from the fridge on your way out.”
I started to walk out contemplating on what I had experienced. I got in my car and drove home.
Sometimes, I can hear 2 voices talking about things I don’t understand in languages I don’t understand. I’ve learned to ignore it. I’ve seen doctors about it. They’ve diagnosed me with schizophroenia but I know its not that. I imagine it is connected to my experiences of the EnviroReality device. I just think that a part of me is still in that plane of existence, listening to the beings that created us.