There were gunshots denting the trees behind me, thuds getting closer and closer to my location in the forest. I could feel the twigs snapping beneath my feet, the smell of pine trees intoxicating, the burn in my muscles so real I actually needed to catch my breath. It was exhilarating, perfect even. As I passed a particularly large tree with low hanging branches, I ducked behind it. I could hear my pursuer’s steps a decent distance behind me, so I took this time to jump for one of the branches close to my head. I felt the bark cutting and scrapping my skin when I grabbed it, but still pulled myself up quickly enough, and started climbing for a few seconds before I heard the footsteps pass beneath me. I took my handgun out of its holster at my hip, walked out on a branch until I could see through the pine needles enough to take aim, and fired. The sound of the gunshot made my ears ring, but the startled yell of pain let me know I’d hit my mark. I dropped down from my position in the tree, and walked towards where the mirror image of myself was laying in the brush. I was feeling accomplished, cocky even, and so wasn’t paying close enough attention to him turning over and firing a bullet of his own, directly into my dominant shoulder. It felt like fire was being poured into the wound after impact, and the sensation of something piercing my muscle tissue and bone was crippling. A complete success.

“Terminate Simulation!” I yelled, prompting the scene around me to go dark and the sensations I felt in my body to dull until they were barely noticeable anymore. After about the thirty seconds it took to shut down the test, I couldn’t feel the pain anymore, nor the sharper muscle aches, but I still felt tired. My arms and legs were a bit slower, my breathing was heavy, my heart was racing, and I couldn’t be happier about it. The bug testing was finished, and now I was ready to move into the alpha and beta tests before proper production. I hit the eject switch next to where I was laying inside of the large metal tube I built to monitor my brain and body activity, and stood up. Not surprisingly I needed to stretch, given I’d lost track of how much time I’d spent inside the simulation, but after stepping away from the machine and computer set up, I couldn’t help but crying. After the years I spent developing this interface, and experiencing the test completed product that blurred the lines between reality and technology almost flawlessly, I was so happy that the amount of emotions overflowing was too much. VARUS, the Virtual and Augmented Reality User Synchronizer, based on my own design, whose AI was modeled after myself, was complete, and my work finally came to fruition.

Of course, what’s the first thing any self-respecting adult does when they get a new toy? They invite people to come play, and so I did! I went to my desk, picked up my phone, and immediately called my two best friends Leonard and Brady. They’d helped me with a lot of the design aspects, as well as brainstorming ways to tailor the experience to each user, and I couldn’t imagine anyone else joining me on my first for pleasure run of the VARUS system.