from “Virtual Realities”          

VR-1

The condemned prisoner, fed intravenously, sits locked in an electric chair. The wires from the chemotrodes implanted in his cranium lead to a toy trainset on a table beside him. The miniature locomotive whirs around the track on the weak current supplied by the electro-chemistry of his brain. His blank eyes have rolled back into their sockets from the rictus of epileptic delirium. The warden calls this art exhibit The Emancipation of the Universe.

VR-2

The business executive, waiting at the corner for a taxi, glances down at the curb by his feet and screams. He does not see the black asphalt of the road, with its glinting flecks of crystal grit, but sees instead a precipice that overlooks an abyss of stars, into which he is about to fall. The paramedic at the scene of the accident later tells reporters that the mutilated body in the middle of the street has died from depressurization, apparently caused by sudden exposure to a vacuum.

VR-3

The assistant technician, staying late after work, assembles a complex array of lasers and mirrors in order to generate the perfect hologram of a rose. He turns off the lights in the studio and fires up the emitter, the ruby rays interfering with each other at the centre of the tripods and cameras, where the spectre of a flower hovers in the dark. He passes his hand through the image with horror, unable to tell if he is solid, and the rose a ghost, or if the rose is solid, and he the ghost.

VR-4

The classical musician, trained in electronics, knows that soundwaves from ambient noise can leave their imprint on drying clay. He has insomnia. He packs a valise with his recording equipment and uses a borrowed key to break into a museum, where he puts on his acoustic headphones and runs a phonographic stylus across a single brushstroke in the canvas of an impressionist painting. He hears in the static both a brief shard of music from a violin and a soft voice saying the word blue.

VR-5

The private detective, smitten with a brilliant idea, removes the contact plate from the threaded neck of a lightbulb. He extracts the stem of the tungsten filament, then carefully hollows out the flask with a wire bottle-brush. He fills the resultant container with kerosene, replaces the contact plate, sealing it shut with solder, then screws the lightbulb back into his desklamp. He pulls the gold chain. The fireball of blasted glass explodes into the sudden rapture of his face.

VR-6

The psychiatric patient, acting as an experimental subject, sits manacled in a chair at a desk and types out his stream of consciousness without surcease. The typewriter administers an electric shock whenever he strikes a certain key, whose use his doctors wish to suppress, particularly the letters E and S. The negative feedback conditions the patient to think only in lipograms, and each week the doctors electrify an additional key until the patient can express his thoughts only in images made from punctuation marks.