An introduction

We were called Sleepers, that's what I recall from a past that no one wants to remember. We were a different type of human beings, ones that didn't want to keep on that same dreadful existence everyone was having. Then came The Company. The same that used to make mattresses (what an irony, right?). It's name was Orthopediae ad it began to experiment on virtual reality. It got so good at creating new realities for everyone that the nex step was to live in them. That's what we did. We put on some goggles, and started having a life way better than anyone else's. But we got lost in it. We forgot we were really alive and people started dying. Mostly from malnutrition, but others were so caught up in that new life that didn't remember what it was like outside, so they got lost, run over, killed.

I remember a little kid, a baby girl. She was mine and I was hers. When I woke up, if that's what I really did, I felt the mattress under my body, I felt the hunger and the thirst, but mostly I remember that baby. I took off the goggles and the room was too bright for me. At first I couldn't see anything, of course I hadn't really used my eyes in a very long time, but then the room became clear to me. I saw myself in the mirror hanging in front of me, a skelleton, once a healthy woman, once a mother. I remembered the dream I had, if that was a dream, about that baby, my baby. I saw her stuffed animal, a bunny, in my hands and I remembered why I chose to live in that fantasy world, that reality that wasn't my own. She wasn't there anymore. We weren't allowed to had anything that couldn't take care of itself and they took her. So I could be "happy" in a reality where she still existed for me. We were the guinea pigs of The Company, and they needed us submissive.

I went to the kitchen, if I could still call it a kitchen. A room that had a refrigerator filled with nothing but water. I took a bottle and drank. Went outside and saw all the other raws of apartments, where we live. In every one of those apartments was a couple of people, maybe more, with those goggles, living, escaping, dreaming. Then I noticed my apartment door, it had a notice in it, an eviction notice. It said that we had to get out of the compound because The Company went broke and they didn't have any use for us anymore. Well, that's unfortunate.

I went inside to wake up my partner, I tried very hard to wake him but he wasn't there anymore. His corpse was stiff, no odor, no nothing, just the semblance of death behind those stupid goggles. And I thought of her. If The Company wasn't there anymore, maybe I could get her back. I could try to locate her and... and... I really wouldn't know what to do. But that idea was brighter than anything in the reality I was living.