VirtualLand

It was a new job, in a new industry, that got Oliver into virtual reality a few years ago. He was hired on as a project manager by a tech company that specialized in making video games in VR. In order to do his job properly, he had to get familiar with VR and everything it had to offer. So he ordered his very first headset online and within a few days it arrived at his tiny one-bedroom apartment.

Oliver did enjoy playing video games, but never really considered himself to be a true gamer. Past a Nintendo entertainment system, he never owned a gaming console, which is probably a good thing. Video games these days are designed to be highly addictive, with no end goal in sight. It’s not just about saving the princess anymore; it’s about keeping you in the game as long as possible. Adult camps for video game addicts are now a thing. Oliver had read an article about a middle aged father who neglected his family because he was more interested in being a pirate in space, searching for that ever elusive chest of gold. Or maybe he just had really annoying kids? Some people just need an escape from their own reality. And it wasn’t until Oliver put on his VR headset and jumped into the social app VirtualLand that he met such a person and discovered their story. Her name was Jupiter.

When Oliver first arrived in VirtualLand, he was transported to his default home. A private space with colourful painted rooms and wacky decor. He was waiting for a creepy Pee-Wee Herman to suddenly appear behind him, whispering that he would be trapped here forever. Oliver got to choose the colour of his new robot avatar. he chose the colour black with big yellow glowing eyes. Seemed Black Mirror appropriate. He slowly learned to walk and pick up things with his newborn body. he tossed a paper airplane out the window and watched it fly away up into a cloudless blue sky. After staring in awe at his robot hands for over an hour, he was finally ready to mingle.

From a digital menu, he had the option to jump from map to map but also noticed he could create his own world from scratch. He thought about replicating his childhood friend’s basement, where he could relive his very first slow dance with Alison Harvey in grade six. Oh my god, he laughingly thought to himself. I’m going to trap myself in here. He also noticed he could attend live events. Tonight, there was a poetry reading, a computer programming class and to his amazement, a birthday party for a grandma turning 100 years old! He immediately searched around the house for his robot tuxedo.

The grandson who hosted the party was a thirty-something year old named Robert. He was a regular in VirtualLand and wanted to include his VR friends in the milestone celebration but also wanted to show his Grandma a part of his life that he valued so greatly. For the party, he had built an outdoor backyard setting. There were colourful balloons everywhere, a cake on a table and real life photos of himself and his Grandma, so you could put a face behind the robot avatar. Oliver was a total fly on the wall and eavesdropping on conversations. In total, there were about thirty people who showed up and from what he gathered majority of them knew Robert. He seemed like he was a popular guy and beloved in VirtualLand.

It was a very sweet moment when the birthday girl finally made her appearance for the first time in VR. Robert walked her around the backyard and showed her the real life photo memories that were hanging in mid-air. Eventually, everyone gathered around the cake and sang ‘Happy Birthday’. So there Oliver was on a random Tuesday night after work, sitting on his couch alone, singing Happy Birthday to someone he’d never met before. If his neighbours heard him singing they must have thought he was celebrating his own birthday by himself. “I hope he’s okay”, he pictured them saying. “Maybe we should bake him some cupcakes or something?” He should have fake cried afterwards to really throw them off and guarantee himself some free dessert, he thought.

As cheerful robots came up to Grandma and hugged her goodbye, Oliver remembered thinking what a different and surreal world this must be for her to experience. Her and him have nothing in common, except he knew how she felt.

It was at this party when Oliver first saw Jupiter, one of Robert’s friends. She had walked up to Grandma to personally wish her a happy birthday. Her robot avatar was a lovely pastel green but what attracted Oliver to her was the human sound of her voice: beautiful and angelic. He knew he had to eventually say hello but not tonight. Tonight, he had just been that robot — the weird loner in the back all by himself just intensely staring with big glowing yellow eyes. There’s one at every party.

The next day after work Oliver ended up on a real life date. As a single man in my late thirties, he was doing the online dating thing and connecting with real life singles. He found myself at a cocktail bar with a charming lady sitting across from him, full of wonderful potential. She was an engineer and found it fascinating when he told her about his recent birthday party experience. Later that evening, she asked Oliver if I wanted to continue the date and offered him a drink at her place. But he couldn’t help but think about Jupiter. He wanted to go back in. He needed to know who she was. Who was the woman behind that voice? So he politely refused and told her he was tired. He rushed back home, put the headset on and logged back into VirtualLand. He jumped around from map to map but couldn’t find her. He ended up going to bed disappointed and fell asleep dreaming of electric sheep.

A couple days later, he saw her at the campfire with her group of friends. The campfire was a popular map in VirtualLand, an open wooded area with a lake nearby and mountains in the distant background. It’s where all the cool robots hang out. So he decided to nervously make his move. It was a good thing his metal robot hands were dry because his human palms were sweaty. He walked up to the group and approached someone else first. His plan was to be as least threatening as possible to Jupiter, not some online sexual predator going straight for the kill. So he introduced myself to someone named Brian, a navy blue robot avatar who turned out to be a pleasant man. He told him he was new to the whole VR scene and they chatted about VirtualLand. Brian had been a regular for a couple years now. Eventually, he revealed to Oliver that he lived in Dallas, Texas and was an aspiring theatre actor. He hosted one of VirtualLand’s open mic nights that he also participated in. One of his regular songs he sang on stage was Music of the Night from Phantom of the Opera. Oliver told him he loved that song, which he did even though Masquerade was actually his favourite from the musical. He invited Oliver to their next open mic, which he gratefully accepted.

Later that night, Oliver found myself in a bar with a stage located in a side room. And while Music of the Night was being impressively performed on stage, he found myself at the back again, like the Phantom himself. But this time around Jupiter was with him and they were having a conversation, the first out of many more to come in this strange new world.

Over the course of the following week, Oliver cancelled his social plans so he could spend more time after work bonding with Jupiter and his new group of friends. Besides Jupiter and Brian, Oliver was introduced to Finch from Scotland, Don from Indiana and then there was Espen who lived in Norway. As Oliver quickly discovered, Espen and Jupiter had just finished having a romantic relationship in VirtualLand. They were now just friends, but still very much attached at the hip. Was Oliver’s life starting to turn into a potential Black Mirror episode? Probably, he thought with cupcake crumbs all over his beard.

A friend of Oliver stopped by his apartment. “A human!” Oliver shouted when he entered. At this point, Oliver’s neighbours must have thought he’d completely lost it. Oliver hadn’t seen his friend in awhile and they caught up on life before he finally stuck a headset on him and introduced him to VR. He briefly put him in VirtualLand and it wasn’t long before a random robot came up to him and said ‘Hello’. As Oliver watched him on his couch, he noticed his friend freeze and his body tensed up. He whispered to Oliver, “How do you pause this?”. It’s interesting when you walk around in these environments, yes, the graphics are still cartoony and it’s obvious the digital world around you is not real, but after a while your brain starts to adapt and you do feel like you are ‘somewhere else’, sharing actual space with real people. It was obvious Oliver’s friend wasn’t mentally prepared for an encounter. The feeling is equivalent to a stranger randomly walking up to you on the street and saying hi: slightly uncomfortable if you’re not expecting it.

Even though it was at the campfire where Oliver spent the majority of his time getting to know everyone, it was hanging out on an iceberg, in the middle of the Arctic, where Jupiter finally opened up to him. With whales casually swimming by, she told him her real name was Kelly and she was in her early forties. She lived in a rural area in Georgia and ten years ago got married to a guy who told her he wanted to have a big family. After she gave birth to her fourth child, he almost immediately left her for someone else. Not being able to afford childcare as a single mother, she was left to raise the children on her own with the support of government assistance. Her dad lived close by to help out when he could, especially when she was in a pinch. Oliver told her if she was still capable of dating to try online dating, that it was a convenient way to meet great people. She laughed and told him options were limited in her rural area and the ones that were available were extremely narrow minded. But Oliver had a gut feeling there was another reason why she wasn’t interested in online dating that she wasn’t telling him.

So how does having a relationship work in virtual reality? Oliver asked. Well, according to Jupiter, it can work quite well, especially when you have things in common, like computer programming. Both herself and Espen were self-taught VR developers and used their skills to go off and build their own worlds together. Some were private but others they shared with the community to enjoy. They even created their own digital dog and named it Pix.

One fascinating evening, Jupiter gave Oliver a tour of some of the public worlds the community had built, plus a few others she and Epsen had created. Oliver had now seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I mean, forget about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, he petted a wild brown bear in an abandoned medieval castle! Watching c-beams in the dark? Big Deal. he sat in a ferris wheel in the middle of the ocean. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the digital rain.

Eventually, Oliver found myself in a treehouse, high up in the sky, when he asked Jupiter why her relationship with Espen didn’t work out in VR. “He’s a good person”, she said. “But suffers from crippling social anxiety. He can’t even hold down a job. It’s tough for him to even communicate with me sometimes. I just couldn’t get enough out of him as a lover. I needed more, you know?” Her voice sounded sad. They sat in silence for a moment before she cleared her throat and asked him if he wanted to see something sweet. He said sure.

She took him to a world that an old friend of hers had built. A friend who had dated someone in here a long time ago but eventually left VirtualLand. Oliver followed her across an open wooded area and they eventually came across a small boulder nestled next to a tree. Follow me!, she said as she jumped into it and disappeared. So he jumped into the boulder and fell through the map, quickly landing in this magical underworld of a secret garden, filled with vibrant neon colourful ferns and foliage. It reminded him of the movie Avatar. I’m sure that was what this friend had in mind when he built it. In the centre of this garden was a massive 100-foot stone-like monument of one robot lovingly embracing another. It was a beautiful tribute to a relationship that once was. It became clear to Oliver that night, as he stood in that digital space, that feelings in VR can transform the landscape. Powerful enough to blossom entire worlds, ever expanding the boundaries of a new universe, filled to the brim with love and loss.

It was Halloween night after attending a friend’s party when Jupiter and Oliver had a video call, taking off their digital masks and revealing to each other their real life worlds. What he saw next matched the story of a single mother of four, severely constrained to her tiny home. There she sat with bags under her eyes and cross-legged on her messy bed, a place she spent the majority of her free time in VR. She was wearing jogging pants and a ragged t-shirt. There was no bedroom decor except for a simple lamp on a side table and a few pinned crayon drawings on the wall; a wall with cheap paint that was starting to peel. HIs heart broke for her but he knew her house was filled with much love, which kept it standing strong. Oliver had dressed as Charlie Chaplin that night and was still sporting a toothbrush moustache, so they joked around about that. She dared him not to shave and see how long he could go before it became an issue. He told her no way with a big smile, it would be shaved off first thing tomorrow morning.

It’s funny how people are randomly connecting through technology, Oliver thought. Here is someone who he would have never have met otherwise, and now, just a few weeks later, she had let him into her bedroom. And it would not be long after tonight, as his campfire days would soon start to flicker out, where he would learn about an even more private world of hers.

It made sense what Jupiter said about Espen. Of all the casual conversations Oliver had with the group, he could only get a few words out of Espen whenever he asked him how he was doing. Most of the time, he was just idling off to the side listening in. They respected him though. He was kind and a highly intelligent programmer who sometimes hacked VirtualLand, allowing the group to go off on fun adventures travelling across restricted lands, to places nobody had ever been before. It was like they knew how to unplug from the Matrix and had seen the unrendered side of the map. It was a group secret that made them all feel slightly superior to an ever growing community of new people. Oliver could see the emotional attraction that Jupiter still had for Espen, who sported a white coloured robot avatar. He was their Neo. The silent one with all the power, who gave them God-like access, yet unable to free himself.

Eventually, Oliver started dating someone in person, who took up more and more of his free time as his headset started to gather dust. But he became grateful for the time he spent in Virtualland and the real connections he made. If you ever find yourself there, listen for that angelic voice. And if you’re lucky enough to become friends with her, maybe she’ll invite you to her home. The invitation is sent as a paper airplane that you follow as it glides past the campfire and over the mountains. Continuing on, zipping past the abandoned medieval castles and across the snowy Arctic. Catching a high wind, it will soar up into outer space, floating past an infinite number of stars, deep into the dark abyss until eventually landing on a rooftop of a two storey house sitting all by itself on a vacant planet. Inside this dream home, the main floor is nicely decorated, filled with plants and a variety of different types of flowers. The kitchen has an enormous island made of marble with a giant skylight above it. A few crayon drawings are framed around a large wooden kitchen table that could easily seat twelve. Upstairs, the master bedroom has a king size bed with a large flat screen TV mounted to the wall. Entering the bathroom, lit candles and roses surround the large soaker bathtub. The song ‘My Heart Will Go On’ by Celine Dion gently plays on repeat. Also in here are a series of framed photos hanging on the wall of two robots and their dog, who shared a lot of time together.

In VirtualLand, you can build anything you want, with the option to make it last forever.