As soon as we had both left the room Tempest asked which way I wanted to go, left or right, as we were in the middle of a corridor filled with similar looking rooms all bearing the same wooden doors and glass fronts. Having no knowledge to base my answer on I chose left because it was as good a choice as any.
“To the dorms it is!” He said jubilantly as we headed off to the right, which confused me a little, but when I tried to correct me he just poked his tongue out at me and laughed.
We turned a corner and now the walls of each room weren’t made of glass, like the meeting rooms and the doors were beech instead, each adorned with a number and a letter, the closest one to us being 10 G, descending only in number as we progressed.
“Here you go Mike, your new room will be 5 G and I’ve moved rooms to 3 G so I’ll be closer to hand if you need anything. Your stuff is still in the safe room though, it’ll be moved later. Next... onto one of my favourite areas, the canteen!” He said as we left the dormitory section and entered a large circular space filled with dinner tables, bar tables with bar stool type chairs, low tables surrounded by sofas, all manner of table and chair combinations.
Dispersed around the walls of the room were various entrances, like the one we had just come through, most of them seemed to lead to dormitories as they had letters posted on the walls of the entrance, but I noticed different signs on the others, one of which intrigued me most; Tech Labs.
“Hey Tempest, can we head over to the Tech Labs next?” I asked him.
“Yeah sure, I was planning on heading there next anyway, although... that food smells gooood.” He replied, as joyfully as ever.
Carefully making our way through the maze of tables we headed towards the exit we desired and as we passed through it I saw a security gate coming up. Tempest just walked right up to it, stared into the little box by the side and said Tempest clearly and sharply. The gate opened and as he passed through he said, “Just say your name for now and look into the scanner. You’ll get a proper agent name soon enough.”
Nervously I approached the machine and stared into the dim red light, “M... Michael Barrett” The red light flashed briefly and then I saw a green light appear and the gate opened for me, so I quickly passed through as I was nervous it’d change its mind and close again.
“Well here we are, the Tech Labs. As you can see we have all sorts of things going on in here. Almost all of which are happening on computers, not really much to see here unfortunately.” Tempest said, and he was right, it was pretty much just a group of guys sat at their computers typing away, much like I did before I was brought here.
“Ooh, I just thought of something I can actually show you, I just have to find the right guy...” Tempest said as he wandered off briefly, clearly in search of someone. Moments later he came back with a short guy in a lab coat. He had slightly shaggy brown hair and behind his glasses were a pair of tired looking green eyes.
“You’re Mike then I assume? Has he spoken to the Director yet? Did he agree? ” He asked, to which both Tempest and I nodded. “Good, well my name is Tom, nice to meet you. I’m one of the head technicians here, although I was only promoted recently.”
“That’s your real name isn’t it Tom? Up until now everyone has just been giving me their usernames.” I said, looking pointedly at Tempest.
“Oh, right, yeah, sorry about that, it just slipped my mind. I guess you are officially trust worthy enough now, sorry about that. You can call me Julian.” Tempest said with an apologetic smile across his face. (I was starting to wonder if he was ever sad.) “Hey Tom, why don’t you show him those headsets you have?”
“Okay, sure.” He said, suddenly pulling out some small looking headsets from nowhere. “This headset takes you into a virtual reality space. Time in there is accelerated compared to time in here. We’ve managed to improve this system so much so far that you can actually experience all five senses just through the electronic stimulation the headset provides. We can have lots of users on at one time, but the more are logged in the less accelerated time is inside there because the server gets worked harder.”
“Okay, but how realistic is it really? And not to dismiss your work or anything, but how useful can that be, because anything you do in there hasn’t actually happened.” I said, probably displaying my doubts a little too bluntly.
“Well, at the moment we use it most for training, because despite the fact that your body isn’t doing the exercise your brain still remembers which signals it sent while you were logged in, so it takes up to eight times less to do the real training because you already know the optimum way to do it, you just have to teach it to your muscles. And if you want to know how realistic it is, why don’t you try them on?”
Shrugging, I agreed so I put the headset on and suddenly everything went pitch black and then I couldn’t feel the ground beneath my feet anymore. I tried shouting out for help but there was no sound either, everything was just gone. Even more surprisingly some light blue text saying “Logging off...” appeared in front of me and then light started flooding back in as I opened my eyes again, now I was lying on the floor facing the ceiling.
As I sat up I noticed I wasn’t in the tech lab anymore, in fact I was back in my room, surrounded by all my things and Julian was sat next to me wearing a headset just like the one I had just put on, and was apparently still wearing.
“What just happened? I put on the headset and all of a sudden I’m in my room? And why am I so dizzy?” I questioned Julian excitedly, whilst I tried to fight off this dizzy spell I was having, which I assumed came from the shock.
“You’ve been in the system since a little while after I injected you with a mild sedative. I took off the bag and handcuffs whilst you were unconscious and I put the headset on you, which connected you to the system. The dizziness is because that was your first time, and because you were in there for quite a while and it confuses your senses. You get used to it, but the tech guys are seriously trying to fix that bug, it’s the only real side effect.” Julian explained calmly before he went on to explain that I woke up because the feeling of wearing the headset brought my senses back to the real world because they were already experiencing that feeling.
“Wow. That really was realistic.” I said, clearly still a little dazed by it all, but I was coping with it well, despite the dizziness.
“Anyway, that virtual trip to the canteen made me hungry, let’s go eat!” Julian exclaimed excitedly as he jumped up off the bean bag and headed to the door.
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Hey there, thanks for reading!
I'm off on holiday for the next week so I stayed up late just so I could finish this off before I left. You're welcome. And don't worry, I'm gonna do all I can to try and get at least one chapter knocked out whille I'm there.
I think I'll include one of my favourite ideas in the next chapter... can't wait. Haha, teasers.
Anyway, vote, comment and enjoy,
See you next chapter folks!
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Science FictionMichael Barrett thought of himself as quite an accomplished hacker and computer programmer, especially considering he was only 17 and could code circles around any other hackers he knew. He wanted a challenge. Something to really test his abilities...
