by David Gunter
“One of the projects your wife was working on and one which may be of use to you during this period in your life is, to put it simply, a virtual reality world which, we believe, has no equal and may never find its better. You see, Hellen created a VR world that defies all the current concepts of computer gaming and alternative reality experiences. Users of this system do not simply turn on a computer and interact with a VR headset or some clumsy haptic gear but rather have their entire brain synced up with our system, and they become inserted into the VR experience where they see, feel, smell, and taste a world which is full of adventure and possibility. Experimentation into this area has been going on in secret for over a decade with varying degrees of success for a handful of corporations, but our success stands out for one simple fact. The reason is that a person in our VR system may continue living their lives in the real world without impacting their lives in the virtual reality world and vice versa. Imagine having the experience of a lifetime with all sense of having done so, without impacting your current reality or having to give up living this life in order to do so?”
Carl the 3rd paused for effect but completely ignored David’s now clenched jaw and white-knuckled fists and so continued.
“This possibility is becoming more and more of a reality every day in the project your late wife started. Our test subjects are able to go on their normal lives, eating, working, and even playing other games, VR or otherwise, while the whole time being in our VR world. In this VR world, people can visit relatives and friends that they have little or no time to see in the real world. They can travel to amazing places their imaginations are not even capable of dreaming of. They can taste foods, drinks, and other recreational experiences, without impacting their day-to-day lives or real-world livelihoods. We haven’t released this VR experience to the public as of yet as we are waiting for a wide range of trials to be completed, but we feel that someone in your situation would both provide us with some very valuable data, and we, in turn, would also provide you with a kind of vacation while undergoing your treatment. We also, in full disclosure, spoke with your doctor about your case, and he informed us that there was a strong likelihood that you would probably remain in a coma for a few months after the operation, as is the case with a lot of operations such as these. Another possibility is that you will come out of the coma on the same day of the operation but be hospitalized for a time and then go into a rehabilitation period where you may need to relearn a few basics in order to be a fully functional adult again. What if, David, what if we could get you through all of this while you are experiencing a fun alternate reality existence?” Carl the 3rd stopped on this question sparing a quick glance at the lawyers on the other side of the room. If David had been paying attention at this point, he would’ve seen a slight wink and odd smile cross Carl the 3rd’s face directed at the same lawyers.
“Wow, that sounds really great!” David said as he forgot all his reservations and earlier discomfort. “But what about my family during this time?”… “Wait a second! You talked to my doctor?” David’s mind was racing through all the things that had been said and their implications but failing to grasp everything.
Carl smiled even wider and completely ignored David’s second question. “Well, that’s one of the best parts, I think. Your kids can actually go with you into the virtual reality world when they come to visit you at the treatment center. After the operation, you can go traveling on adventures with your kids in the VR world, while in the real world, you undergo the long path to full recovery. They may never even have to see you sick or out of your element. It could be a sort of vacation which could be a real family builder.”
“But there’s more…” Carl continued. “What if something goes wrong during the operation? And we hope that doesn’t happen, but what if it does? Here’s another part of this whole thing. When we transfer your cognitive abilities into the game, we are also able to copy your entire memory and sense of self into the game. Your family could actually visit your digital copy long after your physical body has passed. You would basically live forever in a perfect alternative reality.”
David’s expression went blank. He simply didn’t know how to react or what to say. He was still busy processing all the possibilities when one particular possibility jumped to the forefront of all the others. He raised his hand, indicating that he needed things to slow down so he could think.
David turned and starred out of the large windows and looked across the panoramic view of the city below, something that this conference room provided. In the meantime, no one in the room made a sound as if realizing a big decision was being made, and David really needed some time to think.
“Wait! This can’t be a coincidence”, David suddenly started. “A few years ago, Hellen asked the kids and me a question, which thinking back now, I may have misunderstood at the time.”
David continued.
“We were driving back home from a family outing, and she asked everybody in the car if they would choose to spend time with a dead loved one in another dimension at the cost of the living ones in this dimension. Peter and I really didn’t know what to make of the question and spent the entire drive home looking for holes in the idea. I think Hellen ended up giving up on getting an answer from us.”
Carl chuckled when he heard the question. “Well, she always had a way of asking a question without giving away her intentions.”
David interjected. “But! Could that mean that she found a way to transfer herself into her project, digitally or something?”
The question took Carl and the three lawyers in the room clearly by surprise. David looked around the room, at these people, with a sincerely questioning and borderline demanding look.
“Well?” David said.
The lawyers looked at Carl, clearly deferring the answer to him.
Carl the 3rd paused and raised his eyebrows as if considering how to correctly word his next few statements and then gave a sigh, cleared his throat, and spoke. “Well, that is actually one of my deepest hopes, and, honestly, it’s one that I and others have been afraid to hope for.”
Carl the 3rd continued.
“We didn’t want to get your hopes up, so we decided not to mention it. You see, when your wife passed away, we went through a pretty detailed look at her project and her notes. We found that many of the secrets of the project were things she kept to herself while giving us only the most obviously lucrative details. She was good at selling you on something while at the same time only telling you what you needed to know. Many of the most involved project members were able to fill in many of the gaps in her notes with notes of their own, but there were some pretty sizable pieces missing. Some of her notes could indicate that she repeatedly copied herself into the VR world in order to test it, mind you. In spite of this, however, we haven’t been able to conclusively determine if there is indeed a copy of her running around inside this VR world.”
He continued.
“Most interestingly were some of the expenses she told no one about. Also, some pieces of custom hardware that she created which seems to defy reality with their potential and implications to the project.”
“Like what?” said David. “Can you say?”
“Well,” Carl said, glancing at the lawyers, “it looked like she could encode a person’s memories in their own DNA, basically turning some of the cells in the body into super-fast memory readers and writers and other cells as storage machines. It looked like she could also turn skin cells into a kind of receptor to send and receive external data. It doesn’t seem to be possible that we’ll ever be able to understand a ton of other things she was delving into, but it looks like all the things she left behind would make some pretty incredible things possible. Nevertheless, we really need her to explain it all to us, honestly.”
“Please keep these things a secret and don’t get your hopes too high.”, Carl the 3rd added. “If you enter this VR world and find that it is
everything we imagine it could be, the possibilities of all sorts of things will be realized, but if it proves to be a dead-end, we don’t want it to slow down your recovery. I hope that your main goal is to recover and get back to the people in this world and leave these other possibilities to us, the company, to sort out.”
David’s head was swimming with all the possibilities, and he could feel hope starting to take over his rational and skeptical self. Before he really had time to correct his mind, he anxiously looked at this Carl character and asked to be given a good pen and whatever forms were needed for signing. An illogical part of him had taken root, and now there was no room for caution.
‘What if, what if, what if….’ was all he could hear in his mind, and, before he realized it, he was walking towards the elevators, walking out of the building, and then getting in his car and driving ninety miles an hour down the highway. The only thought that remained was, ‘Hellen; here I come, baby, here I come.’
CHAPTER II
The Long Talk
Three kids sat on the couch staring at a visibly uncomfortable father who seemed to want to start talking but couldn’t seem to find the right way to start. David had started several times to say something but then had closed his mouth in clear frustration.
“Oh, what the heck,” David said at last. “Kids, there’s no easy way to say this, so please just wait for the end before you ask me a million questions, and please don’t jump to any conclusions until I’ve said everything.”
He paused for a moment to get a good breath. London raised her hand way up in the air and said, “Daddy, what’s a concus… concussion?”
He ignored the question and continued.
“I am sick, kids. I’ve been told that I have a brain tumor. I don’t know if it is because of stress or because of missing your mom or all this drinking; maybe all three things rolled up together. I apparently have enough time to fix the problem, but I have to act quickly, so I’m going to get an operation to have all of it removed, the brain tumor, I mean, not the stress, anxiety, or drinking, although that would be a nice trick. Anyway, I’m rambling.”
Catching his breath again, he continued.
Raising his palm as if to say wait, though everyone was stunned into silence, he said, “Wait, I’m not finished. I went to see some of your mom’s lawyers, well company lawyers, to be clear, and they had something interesting to offer us that you guys might actually enjoy.”
He cleared his throat for effect more than for necessity and then went on.
“What if we all had a chance to go on a vacation together while I was getting the surgery? … So hear me out… the man from your mom’s company. He’s like the boss or something, Carl junior the CEO or something, said that we could go into this virtual reality world together, while I got the surgery thing out of the way, and then while I was in recovery you guys could come into this virtual reality world, and we could do something like travel the VR world or something together.”
The kids just looked in amazement and complete bewilderment at what their father had just said. It looked like they were caught somewhere between agony and excitement. The oldest broke the silence first.
“So let me get this straight,” said Peter. “You’re saying that you could be dying, but we are going on vacation… the HECK!!!”
“No, no, I’m NOT dying,” said David, a little frustrated. “What I have is easily curable and should be no big deal, OK?” David could tell that the two younger children were trying to decide if it was OK to cry or at least figure out what they were feeling, so he quickly added.
“The place where we are going is a magical land, they’ve told me, and where we can do or be anything we want to do or be. Imagine a place where you can be heroes and fight dragons and stuff like that. The list of things that this place has to do was longer than I care to remember, but I remember that much.” He tried to look as cheery as possible and held his breath for the next series of questions or outbursts.
London, the youngest, broke in this time. “Daddy, you’re dying?” Then she started putting on the all too familiar crying face, which soon was followed by curling up in the corner of the couch and crying her little heart out. Jimmy followed London’s example, at least partially, but in contrast, got up and ran to his Dad, who gave in and hugged the boy closely. London looked up and saw her brother was getting too much attention and then got up and ran to Daddy in order to reassert her need for attention.
David tried the best he could to calm the two younger ones down, but he could barely get a couple of words out between all the sobbing.
Then David sternly looked up at the oldest and said, “Peter, really? Did you have to make this into such a big deal? Now they won’t sleep for weeks. Son, you really gotta watch what you say.”
Peter’s mouth dropped open, not quite believing his Dad’s calm through all this, and started to feel his eyes tear up like the other two but decided that anger was the better option. Not wanting to make things worse, he got up and stomped out of the living room towards the front door.
David just watched his oldest son’s resolved exit and chose not to say anything allowing the teen to storm out of the house and cringing just a little as the boy slammed the door on the way out. David, still holding the younger two in his arms as he sat on the couch, leaned back and looked over his shoulders and outside at the front yard and watched as Peter picked up a rock and hurled it at a squirrel that was near a tree. “It’s easier when they can just cry it out,” David whispered quietly. ‘Hellen, how can I do this without you?’ He thought as he tried to comfort the younger ones.
Time slipped away, and before he knew it, the two little ones had fallen asleep in his arms. When they were smaller, he would have picked them up wherever they’d fallen asleep and simply carried them to bed, but he figured the living room couches were as good as any place for sleep, and he didn’t feel like going upstairs just yet. As he covered them with the living room throws, he marveled at how children handled heartache and how different it was the older they got.
The phone rang suddenly, and Peter walked in at almost the same time. Peter looked to be in a lot better shape than before, having expelled all the emotional stuff on the trashed lawn outside. David knew he’d have to help Peter work on that a bit as storming out of the house wasn’t something that was always possible when dealing with big life issues. Clearly waiting for his son to head upstairs, David more or less ignored the phone. Once he was sure his son was out of earshot, he got up and walked to the phone, which seemed was ringing endlessly.
He picked up the phone and, before waiting for words from the other end, said, “Hello, Jammie,” and waited for the person on the other side to begin the inquisition.
Jammie started asking questions hardly before David had finished saying her name. “Well, how did it go with the lawyers and that nice man from your wife’s company? What did they want? Is everything OK? With my sister’s affairs, I mean. Is everything OK with the kids? Why aren’t you saying anything, David? Hello? Can you hear me?”
Well, that kind of questioning always made David want to hang up the phone, and he was half tempted to play the poor connection game, but it was a land line, and Jammie knew that game far better than he did anyway. So he did the next best thing. He yawned nice and long and then chuckled, ignoring the gasp from the other end.
“Well, I nev…” she started to say.
David, ignoring the start of her outburst and just calmly and in a ‘nothing much going on here’ kind-a-way, started talking over his sister-in-law.
“Sorry I didn’t call you sooner. It’s been a long day, and I needed to have a talk with the kids before I talked to you. You’ll understand when I tell you what’s been going on with me the last few weeks.”
“OK?” Said the voice on the other side.
David continued, “Ya, so I’ve got a brain tumor and …
“
A what!!!” Jammie cut in. “Oh my god!”
David continued, “Ya and Hellen’s company wanted to offer the kids and me the opportunity of entering a special computer program they are starting for folks recovering from surgery and stuff.”
“A computer program!?!…” She said.
David kept ongoing.
“Ya, it’s like a virtual reality thing where people can visit with family while in a coma and during recovery if they’ve gone through some kind of brain trauma or something.”
“Wait, wait, wait, how the heck did you tell the kids all this without talking to us about it first! Please tell me you didn’t just tell them all this like you’re telling us! Those kids are going to be messed up for life and you…”
David cut her off again before she could go on with the finger waving. “It’s not as bad as it sounds over the phone. The operation isn’t even that serious from what I hear, anyway.”
Jammie cut in, “Not that serious? A brain tumor isn’t that serious? Now THAT’S news to me!”
David responded, “Now come on, Jammie, I’m trying here. Yes! I know there’s a seriousness to all of this, but I’d like to see the opportunities.”
Jammie cut him off again, “Opportunities!!!, you mean besides the chance to traumatize those poor children! Did you know that London told Ms. Hichins, her 1st-grade teacher, the other day that she can hear her Mommy’s voice when she puts on the headphones in the computer lab? All the kids in her class were completely scared out of their minds, David! These kids are not all adjusting in the same way to missing their mom, and they can’t run away from their problems with a pint of liquor or checkout at will like you can. And now this?”
David almost missed the statement about London but seeing a pause in Jammie’s tirade honed in on that.
“Wait! London said what? Now hold on, that’s pretty strange. I haven’t told you what I meant by opportunity, and this can’t be a coincidence.”
