Postby Jay Candice » Sun Dec 02, 2012 6:06 pm
Sorry, no bondage this time. But this part is essential, it needs to be there.
I woke up, unbound. But there was something distinctly different about her surroundings.
Firstly, I was not bound, which was crazy. That didn’t happen pretty much at all anymore.
Secondly, there was nothing. It was a blank white scene everywhere I looked, white floor, white….. Sky? White walls. It was as if I was in a great white room with no end, and the ceiling was the sky, all the same color. Even my clothes were white, a white T-shirt and shorts, which I preferred over the diapers earlier. I didn’t have any shoes though, and my bare feet felt that the floor or whatever it was felt artificial, man-made.
“Hello.” I turned, there was a young man, with a friendly smile. He was dressed in jeans, and a long black coat that touched his ankles. He was handsome enough, but it was the look of relaxation on his face that startled me a little bit. It was a look that proved he had answers, proved he knew what was going on. I knew it.
“Who are you?” I asked hesitantly.
“Me?” He raised an eyebrow. “I’m Liam, and you’re Jami.”
“Looks like I’ve made myself known,” I commented. “Where am I?” The surroundings were blank and bleak, just like they were before. It was creepy, unrealistic. It definitely sent me on edge.
“A good question,” He stated. He stared at the landscape as if was no big deal.
“Are you even real? Is this a dream?” I asked anxiously. I had never been in a dream this realistic before, or ever aware that I was dreaming. It was called lucid dreaming, I think.
“I am real, and this is not a dream, but it’s similar,” He replied. “My name is Liam. This is my creation.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Good job, did you just get started?”
He laughed. “Just like I’ve heard, you have the sensitivity of a blunt axe.”
“Thank you. So where am I, for the second time?”
“This is a simulated reality, all inside you and I’s heads. Have you ever watched The Matrix?”
“That movie with Keanu Reeves in it?” I asked. I think I had heard of it somewhere.
“Precisely,” He said, nodding.
“Then no, not really,” I admitted.
“Then think of it as this,” He said. “We are both sharing a dream, but outside of it, there are other people completely controlling what happens in our two dreams, connected how they are.”
“Your saying that I am dreaming now?” I said skeptically.
“No,” He said flatly. “At the present time, your body is in a coma-like state. Right now, the your consciousness, the thing that I am talking to right now, is in an avatar that is similar to your appearance in what we would call the ‘real world’. Do you understand?”
“So what you’re saying is,” I said slowly. “That I’m asleep somewhere, and this is my mind?”
“Close enough,” He replied. “We, as in the creators of our little Island that I’m sure you know so well, have created a reality similar to the one that you experience in the real world.”
He threw an orange at me that I was sure he didn’t have before. “Eat it.”
I peeled it, and looked at it for seeds. If this was a dream world, then eating a poisoned fruit shouldn’t be able to kill me, right? I bit into it, tasting the acidic juice and orange-y flavor, just like it was supposed to taste like.
“It tasted like an orange, didn’t it?” He asked.
“Duh.”
Liam rocked a little bit on his feet. “What you taste as the taste of an orange are merely electrical signals from your nerves into your brain. The taste, touch, sight, feeling, everything are merely signals that your brain interrupts. With our reality, we can replicate those signals.”
I blinked. “What you’re saying is, you’re sending artificial signals to my brain, to make this place!”
He beamed. “You caught on quite fast. Precisely. Our research spent countless years recording the effect and signal different tastes, touches, smells, and so on had on the brain. We then created our own electrical signals identical to those sent by nerves to the brain. It was only a matter of creating a machine that could send artificial signals that we created, and we have our virtual reality.”
“So,” I said slowly. “How is this different than the Matrix in that movie?”
“It is quite similar,” He answered. “You see, the Matrix in the movie also creates a simulated reality, thus the name The Matrix. However, once you know the rules of the Matrix, you can bend and break rules of reality, as they are just a computer program. However, the rules of our reality are different. Instead of being programs, they are instead only what you interpret. You feel gravity, but maybe that is just a signal that makes you think you are on the ground? Make sense?”
“No.”
Liam tossed me another orange. “See that? How do you know that you actually caught it?”
“I can feel it,” I said. “I saw it fly through the air.”
“Aah, but as I said before,” He said with a smile. “How do you know that the sight of the orange is not just another signal to your brain? That the touch of this ‘orange’ is not just another electrical pulse sent to your nerves? Is there a difference?”
He was starting to make sense now. Just a little.
“We call this reality, Sapienta. Or ‘Sap’ for short. Sap is based on real rules of our world. In the Matrix, you can dodge bullets, and fly, and do all sorts of crazy stuff. However, in Sap, we can manipulate reality. Just through outside interference.”
Liam snapped, and suddenly, the air became frigid. The floor turned to ice and we were suddenly standing on an iceberg, floating along. The sky was blue and the sun shining brightly, but it was as cold as Antarctica, and for all I knew that was where we were.
“It’s c-cold,” I chattered. “B-but that’s j-just electrical signals to my b-brain, right?”
He beamed, and snapped again. Suddenly the wind howled in my ears, and we were looking down at a busy city, with cars honking, the wind howling, and the chatter of unknown people below.
“This is the Empire State Building,” I realized. I had been there before, once, when my parents and I had visited New York.
“In here, in Sap,” He stated, his voice clear and easy to hear despite the howling wind, “we are practically gods. Inside, only myself has the power to manipulate what happens. But outside, those programming it, they can do anything as well. This is what we’ve spent years perfecting, as our ultimate challenge.”
In the end, it matters not how many breaths you took, but how many took your breath away.
-shing xiong
We are not retreating, we are advancing in another direction
-General Douglas MacArthur
Fall down seven times, stand up eight
-Japanese Proverb