Flight to the Virtual: A Vision
The Rubicon of Virtual Ontology
Last evening I fell into a trance.
I dreamed myself in a strange land, with box shaped houses, each drab and square in the cloudy morning mist. I am very like myself when awake, only very… fuzzy. I was just startling at the realization that one of my neighbors had gone for a journey and had not returned. He should have returned some days ago. A shudder ran through me as I suddenly remembered the neighbor who had moved away seven years ago. We had been friends, the kind who laugh and joke over the football game once a week. He never had been back, not once in seven years. This wouldn’t have been odd, except his parents lived in the next house and said he was always promising to come home for a visit.
With alarm I began to realize I knew of many such stories. They had seemed unimportant, rare and had not been close to me. Suddenly a pattern constellated. I realized with horror, I hadn’t seen anyone from out of town in two years, and now even vacationers weren’t returning.
The streets were notably quiet and there hadn’t been lines at the grocery store for several weeks. Where was everybody going?
But of course, there were so many places to go! 5 star beach resorts in Mexico, with flash deals too good to be true! That vacation house you always dreamed of? Exactly like you dreamed it, at a price you couldn’t miss! Come to think of it, things had really gotten better in the economy. Those UBI checks had made everyone just a bit more comfortable, not that they stopped working of course, there were always more new things to buy!
And then I felt it. This tugging in my chest. Vaguely I remembered feeling it for years, a subtle presence, always drawing at me, like the gravitational pull of some new star, drawing my soul towards it. With sickening horror, I realized from whence it came, and helplessly, I pulled a black box from my pocket. Neon light poured out, and the face of my neighbor assured me, he was coming home soon.
I woke up. I got up and made dinner.