Remembrance

  Preface: Something I have been meaning to write for a while but finally got around to doing. Might add more later. Primarily based on this album: https://fantasy-deluxe.bandcamp.com/album/arcadia-campus-virtual-tour

    It’s a perfect day today, but that’s easy to do when none of this is real. Burning bright in the cloudless skybox, the programmed sun touches everything below it; the near-neon green grass and bushes in the courtyard glows in the light that is shining through the grid of evenly-spaced trees. Lily-white walls, lacking in angles, reflect beams of sun in mathematical patterns, shadows progressing in the same pattern each day as the clock winds around its axis. A breeze brushes through the space, unreal hands moving over the plants and trees and walls, rippling through the clothes of the people down below–specks moving along at a leisurely pace around the plastic-looking grey concrete of the paths. The wind comes up and flows through my hair, rustling some papers I have in my room. It feels cool, refreshing in the late-spring heat.

None of this is real. Nothing except us.

My mind is elsewhere, my real body is elsewhere, but my consciousness is within the campus, sitting in this computer-sculpted environment, connected to a cloud of other students like me. Floating in stasis, our bodies are shells to be woken upon completion of our schooling and handed a degree. 

Some of us, anyway. 

A meter in my mind lets me know I need to eat; an element of the world beyond my subconscious creeping in. My vision blurs, my room disappears around me, morphing into sanitized marble tiles and polished-wood countertops, flowing neon shapes forming letters. Massive windows overlook a bay, sand keeping out the binary ocean that surrounds the campus as a whole, the perfectly blue water lapping against the shoreline exactly the same each time. A constant reminder of the nonspace of the school.

A cafe worker greets me while my eyes focus on its face. An almost human construct, an amalgam of code and modeling meant to resemble humanity, a semi-sentient slave. The fake person gives me a smile, their perfectly smooth skin a flat, pale color. It stands perfectly straight behind a pastel-grey cash register, wearing a black apron. A nametag is pinned to it, with a made-up name printed in cursive. The name changes each day, but the outfit never does. 

Still, sometimes I forget that they aren’t real. 

 I order, swipe my card, thank you, thank you. The worker doesn’t move, but food appears on a tray between blinks of my eyes, placed with mathematical precision on the wooden countertop. A round bagel with cartoonish bacon and eggs placed in between a straight cut, a paper cup in the corner with steaming tea, three napkins exactly. 

A person waves at me from across the shop, a real person. I know his face but I don’t really know him. I sit down at the table trying to remember his name. 

“Jacob, how are you? It’s been a while.” I say to him. He looks distinct from the workers around us.

“My name is Marvin.”

“Oh.”

We are silent as we eat. He gets up and leaves.

x

Classes make up the bulk of my morning, hypnotic trances where knowledge is poured into my brain, the content of which leaves as soon as I float to the next one. The halls in between are smooth, rounded at the edge and bathed in fluorescent lights that coat the area in a sterile blue. Waxed floors that are always clean and always look like they have just been rained on. Blank expressions of passing students, never speaking to one another, weaving between the streams of people with expert precision, constantly on the move.

Outside each building is much the same. Leaves fall from trees and never land. People sit around on the rounded benches but they seldom talk to one another, they cannot waste their time with things like that. Landscapers mow the grass which never grows, tending to bushes which never change, pulling weeds that reappear in the same spots every single day. Repeated activities, day in, day out. But it’s okay. They aren’t connected in the same way we are. They’ll reboot once the semester ends, with a fresh set of memories and new tasks to do. 

Day in, day out.

The full-glass double doors slide into the wall and allow me to enter the union. The open ceiling lets in sunlight from overhead, shining into the massive walled courtyard: two stories of tile and marble and glass connected via white stairwells. Perfectly green vines hang from pots over planted palm trees that stretch over the plaza and walkways which take hundreds of students each day to shops. Shifting holographic advertisements spread themselves across walls, emblazoned with the logo for the school, stock videos of happy students and messages of new sales. Nobody pays attention to these except the ones who are programmed to do so.

Another set of doors parts from my presence. A labyrinth of white spreads out in front of me, accented in hues of blue and green, massive glass windows letting in sunlight that highlights the bubbling liquid, which are the placeholders for pillars in this environment; like you’re inside a lava lamp, the organic blobs moving up and down in their invisible confines. Rooms flow into one another via curving walls, sections only designated by the items on display. An infinite stock of each product held on every single shelf and on every single hook. It may look like there are a stack of ten shirts or a few packs of colored pencils, but they never run out, never changing. 

For a moment I forget why I am there. And then I am at the register with a pack of pencils in my hand, all plastered with the university logo and done up in the colors of the school.

I place them on the countertop. The worker looks back at me with life in her eyes. Or maybe it was nothing. 

“That will be $10,000.”

It’s late and the lights in my dorm only turn on when they are walked beneath, hidden in corners of the cornerless wall. They do this to conserve energy, though in a virtual environment, I really don’t know the purpose. I phase my way through the sterile white door of my room, dissolving into nothing and appearing on the other side. 

A purple tint smears itself across my walls. The window is open and the blinds are swaying in the wind as the full moon hangs bright in the sky, like it does every night. Stars twinkle on a cycle, imitating the glowing orange fluorescence in the buildings still open around the courtyard. Sometimes I can see someone else standing at their dorm window, gazing at the computer-generated scenery made especially for us and maybe appreciating it, if they can.

There’s a party happening down the hall, I can hear it faintly when I stand by the door. I never want to go to them but I always find myself there, standing and saying meaningless words. The people draw me, I suppose. It’s the only time I feel like I’m part of something greater, surrounded by people who don’t just walk past.

I lose track of myself sometimes. Maybe it’s good to relax. Besides, the semester is over in a few days anyways. 

I wander down the hall.

“You want one?” Someone asks me. I think they’re a friend of mine, or someone from class; somehow I know them and they’re standing with an arm outstretched, a small, crystal-clear baggie with a single pill in it clutched tightly in their hand. Their face is a digital fiber displaying a plastic expression. 

“Take it,” they say, “and you’ll see the outside for a while.”

“Okay.”

They hand me the bag. The pill inside is checkered, about the size of my fingertip. I move it over in my hand. 

I had heard about this. People had found a way to visit their families outside the chambers. Even though in the real world it had only been a few minutes since they’d been put under, in the minds of the students, it could have been years since they had seen their loved ones. I try to remember what my family looked like. 

“Thanks,” I say, but they’re gone, and I don’t remember what they looked like.

Music booms non-diegetically. People dance, stand around, drink, laugh, talk, pass out, et cetera, packed in so tightly that some look like they’re phasing through the walls. Strips of light shine dimly in the ceiling, masking the clinical white in vibrant shades of blue and red and purple. The pill in my hand changes hue each second, its checkerboard pattern spinning around the color wheel with every cycle of the LEDs. 

Someone is standing by the window, getting a breath of the recycled, digital air. The wind barely gets to me on this side of the room, a wall that is twelve people deep breaks up the airwaves. 

I wade through the sea between me and the person at the window.

“Hey,” she says to me. She is as expressionless as everyone else, as she brings some amalgam of code to and from her face. It looks like a rotating jumble of letters and symbols and is nearly invisible against the deep purple of the night sky. A transparent cloud leaves her mouth, floating into the abyss of stars, smelling like an electrical fire. In the light of the moon, I can see the ones and zeros in the vapor.

“What is that?” 

“s̴̸̶̵̺͎͎̽̏́̇̕͝e̵̷̸̸͓͇͎͉͂͌̉͌̉̚c̵̷̢̒̚ͅe̵̷̸̸͓͇͂͌̉̚e̵͎̼̅̇,” she says. Another puff escapes her lips. 

“What?”

“s̴̸̶̵̺͎͎̽̏́̇̕͝e̵̷̸̸͓͇͎͉͂͌̉͌̉̚c̵̷̢̒̚ͅe̵̷̸̸͓͇͂͌̉̚e̵͎̼̅̇.”

“Oh.”

“You ever had it?” 

“No,” I say. Someone bumps into me. I look and see a person, fallen onto the ground, their body clipping between people’s shoes. “I’ve never really felt much on drugs.”

“Hm.” She says. She looks at me finally. “Why do you have that, then?”

She points to the baggie in my hand. I raise it to the moonlight, revealing the pill’s true colors: alternating squares of purple and black, accented by whatever strays of colored lights hit it from the main part of the room.

“I dunno. Someone gave it to me”

She takes another hit of s̴̸̶̵̺͎͎̽̏́̇̕͝e̵̷̸̸͓͇͎͉͂͌̉͌̉̚c̵̷̢̒̚ͅe̵̷̸̸͓͇͂͌̉̚e̵͎̼̅̇ before throwing it out the open window, never breaking eye contact.

“I’d be careful with it,” she says. “You might not like what it tells you.”

She walks away. I lose her in the waves of bodies.

I end up back in my room at a certain point in the night. Most of the party is a blur in hindsight, though at least it gave me something to do for a while. 

I sit slouched on my bed as the baggie sits crumpled on my desk, the plastic coated in a layer of digital moisture from holding it in my hands the whole night. The pill is the only object with color in the entire room, the stark white shining painful light into my eyes–I became used to the darkness of the party. 

Still I can’t picture anyone from my life outside of the virtual environment. I guess I’ve gotten too caught up with life in here to remember.

I wash the pill down with a tasteless imitation of water, waiting. I don’t know how long it takes to kick in.

Nothing. An hour passes. Nothing.

I look around to see if anything has changed, and my eyes wander to the body of a woman slumped on the ground in front of my bed. It takes me a second to realize that the woman is me, and that I hadn’t seen myself in a very long time. I look a lot like other people I’ve seen around campus, the same smooth face with the same straight, perfectly even hair.

Everything is still too bright. I try to rub my eyes but my hands are not there, neither is the body I’m inhabiting. I am air, I am a ghost. My eyes shut and the world disappears around me, yet a glow still shines through the darkness: large blue numbers and letters–like those of a digital alarm clock–stand tall in the nonspace.

May 10, 8 PM.

And I realize that the girl was right.

It is different when you have a deadline. I’ve been counting the days but I can’t count the hours. It overwhelms me.

In the union, I watch the flowing orbs moving, spilling over one another in their invisible case. It’s most of what I’ve been doing with the time I have left: appreciating what I have before I have to learn to again. 

The midday sun pours in over the ocean, shining on faces in the crowds of people, moving so quickly to get where they need to go, floating to their classes unphased by their surroundings. Blank stares mark their faces, and some look familiar, though I can’t place any.

Until one walks by. It’s the girl from the party. I get up and match her pace.

“Do you remember me?” I say to her.

“Yes.”

“You were right.”

“I know.”

We walk outside, passing under thin hanging vines and between evenly-placed palm trees in the perfectly green courtyard of the student union. Our shadows march alongside us.

“When is the reset?” She asks me. 

“Sunset tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright.”

I turn to her. A breeze bounces off the waves and into her hair. We stop, streams of bustling students curving around us. 

“Will you remember me?” I ask her. 

She thinks for a second, staring through me. Her eyes shine in the sunlight in a way I know mine never could. 

“Probably not. But I’ll see you around.” 

And she walks away, students closing the gap around her.

From a neon green hill near the beach I watch my final sunset. The waves from the perfectly blue water crash against the shoreline in the same way they have forever and how they always will. The birds in the skybox float along in a perfectly arranged flight pattern, swooping along their pre-programmed track. Laughter sings on the wind, the sounds of students having an end of semester celebration.  

My face and my body will return, but my mind will not. I’m not sad, I really don’t know what I feel. In a way, I’m comforted knowing I’m not the only one, knowing that this will all be here whenever we come back, even if we don’t remember it.

The sun sinks below the water. 

I feel myself disintegrate, 

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