Virtual Reality

• Joel Chan, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2009

Bullets flying everywhere, the sound of explosions and bullets whizzing past your ear, you shoot some of the enemies… then your mum calls and you pause the game to go and help your mum.

You go and help her then you quickly race back, un-pause the game and continue playing, the graphics are amazing, the game feels so real… too real, but you continue, then a flash of light fills the screen, you think it’s a flash grenade but somewhere in your gut you know it isn’t, you don’t notice until its too late, your getting sucked into the screen, first your legs, then your waist then you disappear into the screen.

You open your eyes and you find yourself in the past, holding a gun and in army uniform, then the explosion start and you wonder what is going on, its like your in the game you were playing just a few minutes ago and you realise you are in the game you were playing. You concentrate on the situation, you think back but all you remember is the mission is the mission briefing the day before you were sent into the field, you then realise that your running toward the battlefield and keep running.

You soon find yourself on the battle field shooting at the enemy, so you keep shooting and the enemy fall one by one until there is only one left, you take aim and shoot and he falls in slow motion.

Suddenly the game freezes and two boxes come up, one with ‘Continue written on it and ‘Quit’ on the other, you choose quit so you open the ‘Quit’ box and it fills with light and you get sucked in. You find yourself on the couch sitting there stunned, and then your mom calls so you turn of the machine and go help her.

Its soon dinner time, your having a roast, your favourite, the smell drifts into the room and you realise how hungry you are when you have only been playing and lazing around, then dinner is served and you wolf it down as if its just a snack, you ask for seconds and you eat that too, you then wash your plate and go too the lounge to watch TV.

You turn on the TV and the screen flickers to life and your just about to change the channel when you see an interesting headline “Children sucked into the game”, the newsreader says that all around the world thousands of children have been sucked into the game that you were playing and some even fainted from dehydration and starvation but you ignore the report and risks because you don’t care if you faint you just want to continue playing because it was so fun.

You wake up at 6 in the morning and start playing, but this time you don’t have breakfast, the same thing happens as before, the screen fills with light and you get sucked in, your so absorbed that you play for two hours without noticing and you finish the game in that time, you open the ‘Quit’ box and you get sucked out, but you never wake up. That whole time you were playing your brain had been sucking up your nutrients like a leech, trying to process all the information from the game and because of that you stay in a coma for 4 months. The moral of the story is that if you play for too long you might just run out of lives.