VW Prologue Re-done

Grey had a little while to ponder, floating in the inky blackness that currently surrounded him. How did everything get to this point? Truthfully, he didn’t know. Every time he recalled it, or the series of events that led here they would slip through his hands. He recalled most things in his like fine. He was a mute, couldn’t speak, never developed vocal chords when he was swimming in the womb. Add to the fact that he had the unfortunate timing to be born before the industrialization of growing genetically compatible replacement organs and etcetera that occurred in his high school years or the unfortunate reality of his parents being too poor to afford the then expensive, thus out of reach, but now situationally dirt cheap ‘skull jack’ as everyone now refers to them as.

It is literally a metallic jack installed at the base of the skull spearing just above the brainstem, apparently in some beta trial when they hooked right into the brainstem some asshat decided he wanted to fiddle around with the coding in the jack and give himself god like reflexes and an increased mental acuity. Well the fool may have accidently stopped his heart, fatally ending his dreams of becoming a pro in Crucible of Ancients, a game that somehow managed to be popular for 80 solid years after it was first launched, at least it was still popular before whatever had happened, happened. The skull jack remained expensive for at least 20 years before the Jerian government discovered how useful it is as a tool of learning and made it mandatory for anyone to attend high school with one and that for anyone between the ages 12-18 the government would foot 80% of the procedure to have it installed. Besides that, was a recent thing, like last 10 years sort of deal.

It wasn’t like installing a skull jack wouldn’t have been immensely expensive anyways, what with a growing body anyways. Why has this been mentioned then? Well funny you should ask, because shortly after it was released to the public, that same company released a Virtual Reality helmet to accompany it. Lo and behold it was a huuuuuge hit… Why is this even mentioned as a solution to his specific problem, well if he used it and made an avatar in any of the plethora of games to follow. Well, Grey would have developed the neural pathways to use vocal chords when growing up. Now, sadly, it was a tad to late for him to learn without immense difficulty, not that he’d have much of a chance now he figured.

Well enough of the pity party he supposed. May as well review what he’d gone through in his life to see if he still remembered everything hoping that nothing in his head was tampered with. What? Tampered with you ask, me. Well, other me, when the good ole ‘jack came out some maliciously devious people thought it was a brilliant decision to tamper with people’s heads especially because you could literally download anything you wanted into your head including computer viruses. At first it was harmless, searching out all your security info and whenever you’d jack back into anything connected to the internet I’d send everything I’d gathered to the one who made the virus. But then people got fucked up and started tampering with personalities of people. Bitchy boss turned into submissive slave the next. As things had gotten waaaaayyyy to far out of hand the government got involved, the punishment for any sort of program that: indentured servitude in combating what they had done to others via programs like their own. Thankfully the government reacted fast enough that most of the creators of such code didn’t even entertain the thought that such a code would be used against them. Even if they did though it didn’t last long against government efforts. Thankfully most of those victimized by such programs weren’t permanently changed, the programs behaved separately from the actual person’s thought process. Most? Well a few of those offenders were too smart for their own good and found a way to permanently alter someone’s personality over time, much like how one would go about training a dog. Most attempts were stopped before any permanent changes were made but some victims had to go through rehabilitation to fully recover from the changes wrought upon them.

Distracting himself from the intricacies behind the history of the skull jack, Grey thought about what happened to him starting from what his parents told him. When Grey had been born he behaved very similar to a normal baby, looking around and being curious, that was up until the umbilical chord was cut. Then his face had morphed into a pained wail but lacking the most important part, the wail. This was a cause for serious concern to both his parents, the nurses in the room, and the doctor because this indicated a lack of a babies most important communication tool, it’s voice. The first few years of raising Grey were especially tough on his parents. Grey’s father worked himself to the bone to look for a cure for Grey’s inability to speak, only to be told to see one specialist after another. Losing most of his hard-earned savings only to find out it was all in vain. His son simply lacked vocal chords and there was no solution in reach with the meagre amount of money he had left after a few years of searching. While Grey’s mother exhausted herself in trying to keep Grey content, which is saying a lot because Grey couldn’t signal to his mother that he wanted something. While later he found his own unique way of communication which may have involved throwing foam blocks at his parents, at least before he learned sign language. After that relatively was smooth sailing the only problem that cropped up was when Grey first went to preschool. He had trouble fitting in and communicating especially with his classmates, for no one understood sign language. Which, sadly, led to his exclusion from games the other kids played. Not to mention what the other kids said about the gestures he made whilst trying to communicate. These small things added up and after the first week of attendance Grey no longer wanted to go, which a few weeks after that led to his withdrawal from the preschool and his introduction to homeschooling.

Grey’s mother had to quit her job, so she could homeschool Grey which in the long run ended up leading to a decline in the family’s standard of living and while they weren’t poor per say, they ended up not very far from it. He received a decent primary and middle school education because for whatever reason the only way to get into the door to get an interview for a job one had to have a doctorate degree in an applicable subject. Mainly because he had parents that had a skull jack that they got during the special period when the government decided to sponsor 80% of the costs for anyone who was in college and wanted to have one installed, when they luckily, happened to be in their sophomore year of college. This event happened seven years before I was born, when the government just announced its ‘sponsorship’ to those in between the ages 12-18. Luckily my parents could afford to pay the 20% required for me to have a jack installed when I was 12, leading me to be somewhat adept in using the jack and its associated software. Not to mention how the jack affected the time one spent in college aside from the mandatory four years of high school, the average time in college somewhere from 2-3 years add 1-2 for continuing to a masters and a further 2-3 for the doctorate.

Sidetracking a little to clarify a few things about the government’s importance on education. Teaching is a very respected position, especially for high school and college. The minimum requirements to be a high school teacher are three doctorates in relevant subjects (i.e. a biology teacher might have a doctorate in General Biology, Human anatomy, and botany or something along those lines) and in most cases the more the better, not to mention job experience. Doesn’t really help that teachers are also paid a generous wage of 200-300 thousand Credits (monetary comparison: 1 dollar = 1 Credit) a year. Highschool is a government institution, one school per city/town/village size generally depends on the local population.

Going back to Grey, when he was being taught by his mom he showed a general interest in code, working with both metal and wood, and reading. This became somewhat useful when he went into high school as it gave him a few ‘workshops’ (school clubs) to choose from. But the important thing to mention about his high school experience was that he was mostly ignored besides a few teachers because of mainly two things: 1, not many his age knew sign language and 2, no one was patient enough to wait for him to write a response. What? An overlay feature that most of the other students had on a visor? Well, sadly Grey’s parents couldn’t afford it and didn’t want to take out a loan or increase the mortgage on their house as it wasn’t truly necessary for school that and the fact that visors were half what a teacher earns a month truly didn’t help. Thus, leading to Grey having no friends. The only occasional interaction he would have were classmates he would have to do a group project on.

Grey pauses his recollection for a bit as some of the earlier things he remembered were getting fuzzy, this was worrying, especially as he was having trouble remembering the face of both his father and mother, there may have also been a sibling but that was all he could remember at this point. When suddenly a blue box popped up in front of him.

Hello and Welcome, G%$R&^E*&Y

You are now being %$*#&^W#^

Have fun!

huh, thought Grey, that's totaly not ominous at all... not at all...

Then with a loud pop Grey vanished.