The consequence to a virtual reality - Plugg'd Part Two

 

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Your eyes shoot open. Your legs feel numb and you can barely feel your body. Slowly you sit up feeling yourself move for the first time in what feels like forever. Your body clicks itself into place and you feel something you haven't felt in a while. Touch.

You’re lying on your sofa, attached to a machine, wires are coming out of it and connecting to you. You lift your arm and pull yourself free from the machine. You wince in pain for a moment as the wires are ripped off you. You let your brain adjust, and for just a second you can’t remember anything, and then suddenly it all comes back to you.

The room is just how you left it but somehow a little duller. The lights are off and the curtains are shut, with only a small gap. Sunlight is fighting its way through the material. You lay for a little while until you feel strong enough to stand up. After a few failed attempts of stabilising your wobbly legs, you get up, using the arm of the sofa to support you. Your feet touch the ground and you feel the cold wooden floor on your skin. The cushions on the sofa, they’re indented with your body shape. You give your body a second to get used to the feeling of standing up and lift your arms in the air and get that satisfying feeling of stretching after you’ve been so still for so long.

You look down at your body. You are wearing grey, baggy tracksuit bottoms with a green hoodie. They feel and look baggier than how you remembered them to be. Slowly, you stumble through your living room, past the old, wooden coffee table where the books are piled high and dust is invading the pages.

When you step into the bathroom, you catch your reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink. You freeze at the sight of yourself. Your skin is an odd, yellow colour; you look sick. Your hair is knotty with masses of grease sitting on top of your head. You cringe at the sight of your face, the lack of colour in your cheeks and the black bags under your eyes. Your body seems alien to you, your bones are visible and fighting through your skin, you have never seen yourself like this before, and could have never imagined yourself looking like this before. Your weight has dropped and now you’re just a shadow of the person you used to be.

Slowly and carefully you pull the shower curtain over and turn the shower on. You continue to look at your reflection as you wait for the water to heat up. All of a sudden, your face scrunches up as you smell something revolting. You lean over and rip the curtain open and watch in disgust as the water from the shower falling into the bath is a dull green. The smell is pungent and is making you want to throw up, but you know there is nothing inside you to be sick. You quickly turn the shower off being careful the water doesn’t touch you. The water all collects by the plug hole, fighting to go down. It looks as though it’s too thick to go through the tiny holes, so it hopelessly floats at the end of your bath. You walk out the bathroom and shut the door behind you, hoping that the thick wood on the door is enough to keep the smell way from the rest of your house.

You wonder if you have any food in your fridge, or if it’s even safe to eat after eating nothing for months. You wonder how you survived and what the serum that was injected into your body every hour was actually doing? The machine had kept you alive for the past six months and allowed you to stay in the app.

You walk back into your living room; your eyes are immediately drawn to the red light flashing in the corner of your TV. You pick up the remote and turn it on. The TV turns on, but nothing appears. The channel is dead. You click the channel button repeatedly and flick through but nothing, each one pops up with a message, ‘We’ve moved, come and join us in Plugg’d’. You continue to flick through, hoping to find something. You’re curious to find out what’s going on in the outside world, outside the App. The TV finally flashes into life.

‘Don’t give up! Don’t leave! Stay with us, help us save our planet.’

The screen changes and a slideshow of pictures of what the world looks like appears. Shopping centres are completely deserted. Shops, restaurants and bars closed down, some are boarded up with wood, but some are abandoned without a thought, left open for anyone to walk into them. The windows are covered with posters and leaflets, all advertising where their new home is, in Plugg’d.

There is no one in sight. The world is empty.

Parks are empty, full of rubbish. With animals walking around aimlessly. Dogs, cats and even a horse, walking around looking for anything that they can eat. Cars are left abandoned on the side of the road, there is one that had crashed into a tree with the door still open; looks as though it had been taken on a joy ride and ended badly. There are hospitals, police and fire stations all closed down, boarded up. Everyone has gone.

‘We can’t run and hide in this app. Plugg’d is not an escape, it’s only a place to hide, a place to postpone your worries and hope that they don’t catch up to you. But they will, you can’t hide from life. You can’t give up on the world that has protected you and all your ancestors. Very soon, there will be a time when even technology can’t save us.’

‘Soon, Planet Earth will be going offline.’

You stand as the TV shows more pictures. A video of people attached to machines, their bodies looking like yours and some are worse. There are children lying there, being wired and connected to Plugg’d, kids who are too young to even comprehend what is happening to them. Even babies.

You walk towards the window and open the curtains. A cloud of dust appears, and you struggle to breath as it falls in front of your face. Your vision clears and you look out. The sky is red, but not like Shepard’s delight, more like the Shepard’s sorrow after a fox attacks his flock. The sun is fighting for a space in the sky, but it’s light is barely burning. You wonder if there is anyone out there, anyone else who has woken up, felt an ache for their old life and went back only to realise that it’s gone.

Is it too late? Should you just go back and live for the time you have left or try and help?

Why wouldn’t you? Go back to a place where the brightness of the sun can be controlled by a touch of a button. The temperature can be edited. Why shouldn’t you live in a place where you don’t have to worry about what’s around the corner, you don’t have to worry about being in the wrong place and the wrong time.

You look back at the sofa, at the indent of your body, the sofa that you had been living on for the past six months. On that sofa you had lived. You were lying on that sofa when you met them, when they made you laugh, when they made you cry and most importantly you were sat on that sofa when you fell in love. It felt so real, but it isn't, this is reality. You think about them; you think about where they are. They could be on the other side of the world, lying on their sofa, completely unaware of what is happening to the world. Is it even them? Were they telling the truth about themselves? Did they really have those beautiful brown eyes? Was the birthmark next to their belly button really there? Were the thousands of pixels they were made up of telling the truth? Your eyes focus back onto the sofa, back to the indent of your body. You never realised how small your body was until now. Your memories from the past six months seemed amazing, incredible and the best times of your life. But really, you were just lying there, dreaming on that old and battered, blue sofa.

If you stayed, what could you really do to help? The world has already given up, so why shouldn’t you? Did people even consider what they were leaving behind and what they were giving up to live in a pixelated world? Who were you kidding? I bet you didn’t think this was ever going to happen. Reality has struck.

You walk back to the sofa and sit down. The machine that has been preserving you for the past six months, it’s flashing because you disconnected and now it’s crying out for you to connect again. You are its lifeline; you are its only reason to be alive. It needs you.

Slowly, you type.

 www.plugg’d.com

You hesitate for just a second.

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