Chapter 3
Life Hack Republic, Virtual Reality
John saw a familiar sight; a small seaside stone chapel. The weather was sunny and perfect with a refreshing breeze. There was no trash on the beach or no fishy odors coming off of the perfect water as he walked across the sand toward the chapel, thinking about the desperate situation and how it got started.
As an older man, he thought back so many years, when he was younger. There were a lot of distractions with so many forms of entertainment. But the worst of all the distractions to people everywhere was social media. Everyone stared at their phones. And since everyone was staring at their phones, there was no one left to talk to if you wanted to talk to someone, so you didn’t. You went back to staring at your phone. That was how the extreme techno-isolation began. The real world and all of its distasteful situations and disappointing people was a lot easier to avoid than to learn how to navigate about.
While many who were addicted to their phones were isolated socially, they also became isolated intellectually. They only looked at content that they agreed with. They did not look at opinions, or even facts that made them feel the least bit uncomfortable. Their narrow minds fit snugly in their narrow worldviews. As their minds became increasingly closed, they would not endure any criticism. Those who they disagreed with were banished as if they never existed with a simple tap of their device. Meanwhile, they let other people, mostly demagogues who they blindly trusted, do their thinking for them. So they trusted anything that was easy on their ears.
Over the years, people poured a lot of their money into virtual reality (VR) devices and software as it became increasingly more realistic. All this available profit made the servers of VR to constantly strive to up their game; the experience and the interface equipment. The experiences became more real all the time as biometric sensors were added to not only to make them look real, but literally to feel real.
Virtual reality became the most insidious distraction from all of the responsibilities of life. Most people preferred those pleasant or exciting VR experiences to the lonely, boring and disagreeable real world. Every imagination that they could want was within reach of their minds. It was so addictive that it even put some drug dealers out of business. VR sessions were sometimes so intoxicating that the participant’s minds would block out real-world bodily needs, leading to dehydration and malnutrition. In some cases, VR participants had spent so long in their VR fantasies that they would forget whether they were in the real physical world, or in a VR world. Some super-hero obsessed individuals realized they were not flying in VR while they were on the way down to the pavement from the top of a high-rise building while they were in physical reality.
People could no longer be depended upon to regularly show up for work and the developed countries started to go into economic decline. People did not take care of their own properties. Anything that could be put off, was. All businesses and organizations went into decline because of staffing needs and could not receive goods and services from their suppliers. People were too distracted by VR to care about resisting an increasingly tyrannical government; too distracted to care about the real enemies in the real world who hate them.
Most of the virtual worlds involved realistic violence. A participant’s VR absorbed mind would become so desensitized to killing that many would continue their killing sprees for entertainment purposes while in physical reality. The murder rate by “thrill killers” in Homeland was off the charts. Police departments hid some of their homicide statistics for fear of being reprimanded for failure to control the populace.
By the time the serious alarms began to sound by those few caring individuals who could see the trajectory towards apathetic dystopia, it was too late. People were no longer willing to listen to any ideas about implementing countermeasures to their addictive comfort zones, such as VR auto-shutoff timers or alarms.
The last thing anyone wanted to hear about in such a culture was God, so they would use any kind of privacy complaints against those who cared for their souls that they could think of.
John entered the perfect seaside chapel. It was beautiful with the bright sun gleaming through the beautifully colored stained glass windows along both sides. The pews had a perfect glossy finish on them. There was no one else there, ever. It was surprising to John that this place was allowed to stand where it was. He walked up and kneeled at the altar. The sun’s reflection gleamed off of a simply designed foot-tall golden cross on the altar.
John began to pray about what seemed like a hopeless situation. People had lost touch with reality. It seemed there was no bringing them back. As far as he could tell, he was one of the last ones who favored the real world, although he was not totally immune from the pull of VR either. Only a great God could impact such a huge problem.
But as John saw it, losing touch with reality was only one layer of complexity to the problem. The most important aspect of ignored reality was the spiritual condition of each soul was being ignored by his preoccupied fellow countrymen. That was man’s responsibility for his own spiritual condition. How was a person to care about the spiritual world, which they cannot see, when they can’t even care about the temporal, earthly world. In John’s thinking, the spiritual world must be more real than the temporal world, because man’s standing in the spiritual world was eternal. With that in mind, John determined that with VR in the equation, Man was being distanced two steps away from reality instead of one.
A Bible verse had often crossed his mind over so many years; Isaiah 55:6: Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near. It appeared that there were very few left who would seek the Lord while they were totally immersed in VR experiences. It appeared that most people would quietly go into the next life without hearing about the best thing they could ever hear: That Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came to the world to save all people from their sins so they could spend eternity with God in his sinless Heaven, and be spared from the lake of fire. John fell to his belly and started to weep for the souls of the virtual reality slaves. He begged God, Who had the limitless resources of all of Heaven to intercede with the situation of so many souls going into an unthinkable eternity of torments without God.
“Excuse me,” an unexpected man’s voice with a foreign accent came from behind.
John quickly turned, surprised that someone else was there. It was a black man of slender build in his thirties.
“Don’t leave,” the man said. “I would like to speak with you.”
John remembered the irony that he was in a virtual reality chapel praying about VR addiction. Because of their extreme insistence on realism, it was easy to forget that the Life Hack Republic was not in physical reality.
Most people in Homeland could be considered to be clinically addicted to some form of virtual reality, if anyone cared. There were many virtual reality worlds available. Of those, Life Hack had the requirement that each participant, or player, was hooked up to an interface that scanned their actual physical body as their actual profile and movements interacted with the world, instead of just choosing some fantasy other-worldly avatar. One of the main attractions of Life Hack Republic for many was the realism and beautiful scenery. Others found LHR to be too restrictive and lacked the excitement and stimulation of other online fantasy worlds. Each VR world had their own set of physical laws, limitations, size, and design. But all the really good VR worlds, like LHR, required the users to wear special sensory apparel that would give the wearer a more realistic touch and feel to the world they were in. Of course the world operators were always finding more must-have extras that raked in even bigger profits.
“Please don’t leave,” the man said to John.
John wiped heartfelt tears from his eyes after the prayer and asked the newcomer to the chapel, “No, I wasn’t going to logout. Who are you?”
“I am Mawuli. I am a Christian missionary from Ghana.”
“Is that in Africa?”
“Yes, West Africa. I did not realize that things were this bad over here, in the West, I mean. I found you because we are going into the virtual reality worlds to find people, to try and reach them for God. It is not going well at all. People feel free to be very hostile to us missionaries. I came in here, not realizing that I could find any Christians. I can see that you are a Christian, right?”
“Yes. My name is John.”
Mawuli said, “Things in the West have become very grim for souls, John; very grim indeed.”