I was fearlessly walking around in what seemed like a dormitory, despite everyone else being very upset about the police coming. A man was so off the edge that he held a shotgun to my head—but I was indifferent about it, so he ended up shooting himself.
Very purposefully I entered a specific room where people were hiding. My first impulse was to approach an unoccupied bed, but somehow I knew that the bed had an identity detector in it that I needed to avoid. There was a comic projected onto the wall where a window might be, and I laid my hands upon it—permitting me to page around the entire graphic novel. A voice was instructing me.
voice: "Okay, read whatever you can off of this. We need to find the title and author information...see if you can get to the first page somehow."(Note: I inferred that this comic was the back-story for the world I was living in—it was about a guy who traveled around in a hot air balloon and used gestapo tactics and price controls to oppress people. They were all kept living in dorms, under threat of violence.)
After much panning around, I found the title page.
me: "Okay, here I've got it. The original author's name has been whited out, and in place it's...uh...'Amir'? No, 'Aaari'."voice: (with exclamations in background) "There we go. Now we've finally caught him."
(Note: I understood this as some sort of hack, a little bit like going through the Bible and changing all the references to "Jesus" to the name on your drivers license in order to get power over a Christian world.)
At that point, the building dissolved and I was hanging around with some people who I understood to be members of my team. Somehow I trusted them.
man: "The museum director is going to be very pleased that we found out where this went wrong."me: "Ok that's great, glad to help. But hold on—I'm dreaming. Where is this museum? Is my world based on some kind of comic book, too? Can I get out of it?"
man: "Well, we can run a scan on you if you want..."
me: "That would be great!"
I rattled off everything I could remember about what year it was, who was president, etc. They held some devices up to me and looked on a screen which was displaying numbers. Then they looked in some kind of book. I looked over their shoulder.
woman: "It's been turned down from 16 to 18 Hulls. That's unusual, nobody uses that range anymore."(Note: Despite its application to boats or ships, the term "hull" applies to geometry and computer graphics. Some documentation for Quake says:
Version 2 of MCBSP... the format supports up to 16 hulls instead of Quake's 4. Hulls are customizable by the mapper like so: put '_hull1_mins' '-16 -16 -24'
...so it's perhaps applicable to a virtual reality, too.)
man: "Look, it's set up with two layers. One is labeled 'Bathroom Layer Normal' and the other is called 'Bathroom Layer Depraved."(Note: Though I don't personally find trashed and disgusting bathrooms to be a good form of entertainment, clearly some people do...as they are incorporated into many modern video games:
...and Maxim magazine peddles the 12 Greatest Video Game Toilets Of All Time:
...as if making a cosmic statement of about arbitrariness of aesthetics. Still, I'd prefer bikini models.)
