flash fiction
September 27, 2017

The Reality Game

I hear a knock on the door. They come to my house every day. They say they want to check on me, to make sure everything is alright. I know what they want though. They want to poke into my brain and ask me questions I don’t want to answer.

You should know that I have grown my prefrontal cortex through brain-stimulation way beyond what a regular citizen ever has. I found the instructions on the net, in one of the forums of this game I like to play. Some gamers talked about a hidden level, a new dimension that a user could only experience by being under the influence of synthetic stimulation. One user even said that the game could be used as gateway to another state of consciousness.

So when I read about the brain-stim kit, I was all in. I was able to buy the kit from a Nigerian gamer for less than a hundred credits. I tried it as soon as it arrived. I put on my headphones and VR goggles and I took some acid just for fun.

At first I only felt some vertigo that I attributed to the acid. Five minutes into the game, the environment around me changed completely. Somehow the sound and visuals seemed to be in perfect sync with my brain. There was a strange feedback loop happening and I soon discovered that my thoughts had a direct effect on the game.

The brain-stim kit can read my mind and create a 3D model inside the world of the game. I can watch my own thoughts in a way that seems impossible to define. I can look at my own ideas from outside and move around and manipulate them like any other object in the game. And the best part is that as my thoughts come and go and change, so does the 3D visualization.

After playing for weeks now, I’m having thoughts and ideas I never had before.

I took the scan-kit to my therapist. She insisted. She says it is nothing more than a useless gadget from a Nigerian scammer. She accused me of being too high on acid to notice.

So when I hear the knocking on the door, I know what they want. They’ve been coming all week, but I won’t answer again. All they want is to convince me that the game is not real. But how would they know? They haven’t spent months playing it like I have.

Listen, I’ve experienced both worlds. Only I can compare them. And I can tell you that what they call reality is just another game. Just a way, way less stimulating one.

September 27, 2017 · #101ToF · #Fiction · #Flash Fiction




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