I’ve always been fascinated by vision. Despite being by far the richest and most detailed sense we have available to us, it’s something many of us take for granted. The spectacular range of colors we can perceive paired with the extremely fine resolution of the human eye allow us to paint works of art onto the canvas of our environment at each moment of the day. When I came to university, I wanted to see even more deeply into the world of human vision. Looking back, I wish I’d never thought about it at all.
After a year of basic requirements, and another year of diving into the neurobiology of the eye, I managed to convince one of my professors to take me on as a student in his lab. He works on building a retinal prosthesis, an artificial retina used to help restore vision to people with retinal damage or disease. The technology is still in its infancy, but will lay the groundwork for full visual restoration one day. To be honest, both myself and my professor knew I was underqualified for the position. But he had enough faith in my technical capabilities and drive to give me a project of my own. I have some experience making VR games, silly little projects that went pretty much nowhere but taught me how to use the technology. My professor realized that I could leverage my game-making abilities and the VR technology to solve one of our lab’s problems. You see, implanting a microchip into the human retina is no easy task, and nobody really knows the best place to implant it. My first thought was to just put it right in the middle of the eye, in the fovea, where we have the most highly detailed vision. I used to believe that was the only part of human vision that mattered. The only part that could ever tell me anything useful. What a fool.
My professor knew better. It turns out that the fovea is the most detailed part of the eye because it has the densest cluster of sensory inputs, and with our current level of technology we just are not capable of creating a microchip with small enough electrodes to get any meaningful output in such a dense region. We knew we had to implant the chip off center, in the periphery, for it to do any good at all. It was my job to figure out exactly where in the periphery would be the most effective trade off between usable vision and usable microchip. To this end, the lab purchased a relatively cheap eye tracker designed for VR, which still ended up costing several thousand dollars. The lab has a VR room at the very back, a small, windowless box with not much more than a table, a chair, and an old HTC Vive Pro. There is one window embedded into the door itself, a tall, thin slit of reinforced glass that offers the only connection to the outside world. This was where I spent most of my summer days, alternating between writing code and sticking my head into a clunky headset. The experiment was pretty simple: use the eye tracker to find out where I’m looking in VR, and then block out my entire vision except for a small square in the periphery.
It’s a real pain in the ass to do anything using just your peripheral vision. Reading a simple sentence becomes a minutes-long ordeal where you have to scan letter by letter, hoping you get them all right and that you don’t miss any. What is very clearly a grayscale picture of a panda quickly becomes a blurry gorilla, or maybe a dog, or maybe even a motorcycle. My eyes would start to feel strained after just a few minutes of the experiment, and would be exhausted by the time a full hour had passed. To be honest, I was relieved when my stint in the lab ended at the end of last summer and I needed to focus on my classes again. I don’t have a lot of regrets in life, and I think perhaps that’s because I haven’t done a lot in life. I’ve spent most of my time desperately pursuing achievements to fill this… hole inside myself. I worked on project after project, things that I didn’t care much about but that I thought would make me an interesting person, worth the space I take up. I spent many of my days in the lab wishing I were anywhere else, participating in the world and having fun instead of wasting away in a tiny windowless cubicle. And yet, some part of me just couldn’t let go. I had spent so much time on this project, an entire summer! Giving up would make me a failure. I couldn’t just let that effort go to waste. God, if only I hadn’t been such a fucking idiot.
Anyway, that brings us to today. After another year of classes, summer is finally back, and I’m back in the stifling, beige VR prison that I now call home. With a surge of motivation that can only come from taking a break, I was ready to attack this experiment again and get some science done! After several hours of sifting through my old spaghetti code, and a half hour of testing the rig on myself, my eyes predictably became sore and exhausted, so I took off the headset for a rest. As I lay back in my chair, rubbing my temples, I saw something unexpected in my periphery. Someone was standing right outside the door, looking at me through the thin, vertical window. That was already quite odd, as the VR room pretty much lives in the backrooms of the lab. None of my labmates would make the trek down several corridors of storage rooms and empty offices to get to the VR room without a reason. Yet something in my intuition was screaming a warning, telling me that whoever was out there was certainly not one of my labmates. In an instant, my eyes flicked away from my computer screen and onto the window. It’s a motion called a saccade, where human eyes flick around from point to point. They usually take between 20 and 50 milliseconds to perform, and what’s especially interesting about them is that our brains actually do not process any visual input while they are happening. This was unfortunate for me, because by the time my eyes came to rest on the window, the grinning face was gone.
I figured my eyes must just be playing tricks on me. I’ve spent so much time in VR that they probably just want me to go outside and look at some grass. But after another set of trials, my tired eyes again told me there was someone staring at me through the window, a twisted grin on their face. My heart skipped another beat as my eyes instinctively flicked to the window yet again. Nothing. I got up and moved slowly to the window, moving my head to the left, then to the right to get a view of the entire corridor. Totally empty, as expected. And yet, something inside me was still screaming that this was wrong. My stomach writhed and flipped, my heart beating out of my chest. I had seen the face twice now, and I know from my many hours of VR trials that the periphery is blurry, but it doesn’t lie. My fear turned to anger as I thought of the possibility of one of my labmates pulling a prank on me, probably trying to give me shit for being out of the lab all year. I wrote a quick, snippy message to the lab slack, saying “Hey yall, if anyone is outside the VR room right now, please stop grinning at me, I’m trying to get work done.” Satisfied I had publicly shamed the prankster into submission, I pulled the headset back over my eyes to begin another round of trials.
I began another trial. One of the experiments I’ve designed uses randomly selected snippets of newspaper text, and places them in the little viewing box for the subject to try and read as best they can. It’s a difficult task, but after many hours I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I began the trial, speaking out each word as I sounded it out. “G… giv… give. M.. e? Me, yeah. Yo… you… your. E… eye… eyes… w- what the FUCK?” With a shriek, I ripped the headset off of my face and threw it onto the desk. My breaths came in bursts as an overwhelming fear gripped a cold hand around my chest. What newspaper would have THAT chilling demand? An article about a psychotic murderer? I quickly clicked onto the desktop view of the virtual environment, and took a peek behind the curtain to see the full text of the article. The same phrase, repeated dozens of times, took up the whole screen. “Give me your eyes give me your eyes give me your eyes give me your eyes GIVE ME YOUR EYES!”
My whole body was rigid. Even my heart had stopped. I slowly raised my eyes from the screen. Instead of looking directly at the window, I slowly inched my view to the left until I could see the window in my peripheral vision. Every microsaccade brought me a new stab of fear as the window slowly entered the very edge of my periphery. My heart sank as I registered a smear of red and white floating at the bottom of the glass. Every instinct screamed at me to look, to foveate on the face and get as much detail as possible about this threat, but I resisted the urge. After so many hours reading words and identifying animals in my peripheral vision, I knew I didn’t have to look at the face in order to see it. I moved my eyes slightly closer to the window, bringing the face a few degrees closer to my fovea until I could make out the details. What I saw made my blood run cold.
The face was completely skinless. Red and pulpy, dripping and oozing onto the floor, it bore a demented grin of sharp, skewed teeth. The eyes were pure white orbs, glistening sightlessly with desire. They were slightly offset from where eyes should be, not enough to be completely skewed but just enough to be noticeably uncomfortable. I couldn’t see anything below the neck, but at this point I didn’t have to. I banished the face from the window with a flick of my eyes, and with inhuman speed I hurled my body towards the door and pulled, flinging it open, ready to sprint the hell out of this building and never look back.
The door opened to nothing but more beige wall.
In shock, I collapsed to my knees, momentarily unable to register what I was seeing. Numbly, I closed the door again. The window still looked out into an empty corridor. A flicker of hope was quickly squelched as I pulled the door open to again see the same stretch of wall. I let go of the handle, allowing the door to swing shut. This time, the window showed nothing but pure darkness.
Just then, I heard a tinny ping from my phone. It was my labmate Jessica, sending a reply to my slack message. It read, “Umm, what are you talking about? It’s Sunday, nobody is in lab today. Except you I suppose. Why don’t you go take a break?”
I’m not ashamed to admit that I spent a while in a state of panic, hyperventilating on the thinly carpeted floor. This couldn’t be happening. It defied explanation. Everything has a rational, scientific explanation! Yet the darkness outside the window… and the skinless face… the chilling demand for me to give it my eyes… This was really happening. I wasn’t on any kind of drugs, prescription or otherwise. I have no history of hallucination under any circumstances. Yet the wall blocking my exit was solid as rock.
At least, it was solid as rock. Until I saw a bulge appear in my peripheral vision. It was the outline of the face, upside down and grinning, pushing out of the wall like someone pressing their face against a canvas tent. I let loose another shriek and pushed myself into the desk behind me. As I looked at the face pressing through the beige surface, it slowly pulled back into the wall, leaving a flat surface once more. But in my periphery, two more faces bulged, wriggling and grinning. My choked sobs almost made me miss the subtle scraping from behind me, but a moment later the desk I had been resting against pushed me over. I frantically turned, my eyes flicking between the faces pulling back into the wall and the desk, now blocking the door by several inches. I heard another scraping sound behind me. Still on my knees, I spun awkwardly to see the far wall. It took me a moment to notice, but the electrical outlet in the corner of the room was now half buried in the wall. I struggled to my feet, ready to try the door again in a vain hope of escape, only to bump my head against the ceiling. No matter where I turned, faces sprouted from the walls beside me and scraping could be heard from behind me. The desk where I’d spent so many hours focused on my code now cracked and crumpled as the wall behind it closed in.
I let out a wail, knowing my time had come. The faces all around me undulated in and out of the walls, pressing close to me, reaching for my quivering limbs, hungry for my frantic eyes. Their psychotic smirks seemed to widen with every sound of distress. One of them opened its mouth, tearing a hole through the wallpaper and letting a fleshy, red growth spurt noisily into the room. I tried to move away from it, but by now there wasn’t really anywhere to move to. My back pressed against another disgusting face, which opened its mouth and wrapped a fleshy, slimy tendril around my chest. I heard distorted laughter echoing through the now cramped space.
In a moment of clarity, I pulled out my phone and opened the camera app. Setting it on selfie mode allowed me to put the wall behind me into my field of vision. Now, all 6 surfaces around me are in view. The scraping stopped, but by now it’s too late. There’s barely any room to move in here. The door is almost completely covered by the walls and ceiling. I think the handle got buried in the walls somewhere, I can’t even try to open it. I can barely turn my body around. I can see the faces pressing in from the walls in my periphery. The fleshy tendrils growing from their mouths have wrapped around my legs and torso and won’t stop squeezing. They keep trying to work their way onto my face, into my eye sockets, but I keep brushing them back. The stink of urine and fear is overwhelming, but I know if I pass out I won’t have a chance to wake up again. A part of me wants to just let go. I’ve minimized my camera app and left it in the corner of my phone while I type this post. I’ve taken several photos of this situation. It’s not easy to see what’s happening because of how cramped it is, but hopefully you can get the gist. I called 911 a while ago but it didn’t go through. I’m not sure what I would tell the dispatcher even if it did. I messaged the lab building manager on slack for help, but he messaged me back a few minutes later saying that the VR room was empty and asked me what I meant when I said I was trapped. I tried to explain but he thinks I’m pulling a prank. Nobody in my lab can help me, perhaps only people who would be willing to believe my story can do anything for me now.
Please, someone come help me. I don’t want to die like this. I have so much to do, so much to see. I can’t bear the thought of missing out on so much fun in life, only to have my chance at freedom stolen away from me just before I graduate and finish this project that I never should have taken on. I’m begging you, if you happen to live close by, come to the neuro building, room 140, and save me from this nightmare.
And make sure you pay damn close attention to what’s happening in your peripheral vision. It just might save your life.