Retrowave 2067: A Virtual Reality Adventure

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The Red, Cybernetic Sun

So, I have no idea if anyone is alive to read this, but if anyone is outside the S.M.V., then I have quite a story for you. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Ekalb Dar. I was born on June 4th, 1965, and I was your average Atari-playing, cassette-breaking, trouble-causing, 15-year-old. I used to live on 607th street SW, in Miami, Florida. Before I came here, to the S.M.V., I watched an ad on TV about this technological breakthrough and how it would affect our everyday lives.

Humans and technology could finally be integrated into one another, vacations would now cost almost nothing, waiting would be a thing of the past, and entertainment would find a whole new outlet. This was called the S.M.V., which stands for Simulated Mind Vacation. It sounds like a robotic savior, I know, but it was different. It was created by a Japanese tech company named Nami that, despite the political unease and undeclared war between the U.S. and its allies against the Soviet Union, had the abilities and the funds to produce anything, no matter the cost. Nami proved their impressive capability when they created the self-recharging battery, which allowed batteries to have almost limitless power, thus solving the world’s small power crisis. Now Nami had built the S.M.V., and everyone wanted to try it.

I was chosen out of a hundred candidates to be a test subject during the early stages. The tests we had to go through in order to even qualify for the S.M.V. were crazy. We had to stay up late working on equations, science questions and so on. I was described as the perfect candidate by one Nami scientist. I don’t know if this was because I was different from everyone else, or if I had something special that Nami wanted. They never told me, but I was too excited to even care. I was in every magazine, newspaper, and on every TV screen in the world. I even got my own TIME magazine cover! How about that?

The lead engineer working on this project explained it all to me. Here's how it works: the S.M.V. is a virtual reality world that runs off hundreds of thousands of high-power computers that process and create a virtual landscape rapidly, even faster than light. One Nami scientist told me that if they had engineered it correctly, I shouldn't feel anything until I was