Stepping outside a door I walked through a rather awkward landscaped driveway to a street. I could see street signs and highway signs, there was something about "New Route 1". Rather than start walking around in highways I looked for another entrance back into the building I had emerged from, and I found a garage. Staring at the mundane mess of objects around, I ran into a woman who was also there.
me: "Y'know, this place doesn't seem very high tech. Roads? General clutter? Driveways?"
her: "Well, there isn't a whole lot of technology here on the back side of Venice."
me: "Venice?"
her: "No, 'J'."
me: "Janice?"
As we were having trouble communicating, she went over to a table and picked up a box, and started pointing at the letters on it. I thought she was just using it to clarify the word she was trying to tell me, but what she pointed at was something akin to "M.A.G.I.C. - Multi Axon Gaming Interface Connector". She removed from the box a pair of glasses but with rather large balls instead of lenses.
I asked her what it was, and she put it on me which caused a rather radical shift in my vision, with an odd pressure on my eyes. I could suddenly see a lot of really strange stuff overlaid on the room. As I walked around and into some hallways I could see screens hovering around people as they worked.
me: "What is this I'm seeing? It's like a graphics overlay."
her: "It lets you see the sensory data that others are getting. So you see what's being transmitted to their minds."
me: "Wouldn't it be encrypted?"
her: "This is a shared channel."
I watched a man who was doing some kind of cooking and chopping on a cutting board. The screen where he was looking at the food was different from the interface he was using, which appeared to be morphing physically
me: "How does the part that's not in the overlay change like that?"
him: "It's hardware. There are mechanisms inside this controller can do certain transformations and retract parts. Not everything is done virtually, it's better like this."
Some of the things I saw were fairly disturbing, gross looking alien things that didn't look human but more like scary fish, who were also using the screens. I wandered a little more but don't remember much, until I ran into an older-looking black man who had a fairly official looking badge on. It had lots of numbers on it.
We chatted vaguely about what was going on and my arrival. He said that there was a huge problem of people being trapped...mostly black and white men put into opposition with each other. I said that it's hard because mechanisms of restraint are necessary to have exist, but they shouldn't be used improperly.
him: "How would you remedy this?"
me: "During restraint there's no point in punishing people further than the restraint itself. Let them have cocoa or listen to the music they like so it's not intolerable. The system of restraint should automatically start releasing itself as people do the right thing."
him: "For someone so new you sure are in touch with big ideas. Here, come with me."
He opened a panel in the wall, and we started climbing up into some kind of strange structure. I got a little stuck in the structure, but called for attention and got pulled out. It was some sort of office for a school of arts and sciences, with a woman working at a desk. He handed me a scholarship application.
I tried to fill it out and did a miserable job of even my name. But it started getting filled in automatically. I asked if there was anything they needed, like my social security number. They sighed and rattled it off and said they already knew it, but it was pointless now beyond helping with the occasional records search. When the woman at the scholarship desk asked about an address, the black man handed her a business card and said to just use his for now.