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New Haven and the Virtual Reality Contract

Date: 22-Mar-2021/10:20+0:00

Tags: , ,

Characters: woman, me, paper

I was watching some sort of documentary, which was explaining how there had been some rumors about a sickness on explorer's boats when they crossed the sea (e.g. to America) and it had been historically attributed to "mayflies". But the argument being made that it wouldn't have been possible because the mayflies wouldn't have been in that area or reached the boats. Researchers believed instead that unfamiliar microorganisms on the various islands had infected the travelers, and as they docked from one island to another they were adding up several different microorganisms that altogether was too much for their immune systems to handle.
My perspective of this changed to where I was on a beach. There was a boat with no one on it kind of heading at me, and I noticed other large plastic boats just kind of on the beach as if they were for public use. I avoided the boats and went toward the shore, where I believed I had parked my car for some reason (in a lot that would be free all day).
It was hot and sunny outside... enough that I, not having any cover from the sun, felt I should do something to protect myself. I walked past some groups of people in front of houses who seemed to be having some kind of barbecue, with food in their hands. Walking past what I had thought was a house I looked in to see it was a kind of rec center, and there was a room with a large area of older people seated watching some large screen and sitting at tables.
I lingered in the doorway for a moment to look at it, but then continued walking on. I passed a young-ish woman who was cleaning something on the deck of a restaurant or bar, in the shade.
woman: "Y'know, not that this work is so great. But I'd rather be doing this here, than be out there in the sun!"
me: "You've got a point. Got any recommendations for indoor things to do here in... uh... here in..."
I came to realize I genuinely didn't know where I was.
me: "Uh, I'm not saying I don't know where I am to look cool or indifferent, I genuinely can't remember."
I started working through what I thought my memory was.
me: "Okay, it's a town that's historical. Like where settlers would have landed...not Plymouth. It's two words. New Haven, I think? Am I close?"
woman: "It's good to talk out your process."
me: "Yes, talking through a process is better than just saying you don't know and freezing. It's important in interviews, because you're not necessarily as interested in whether someone gets a correct answer as you are in seeing the process by which they think."
woman: "Well, I have to get back to this. But I'll be serving tables later."
me: "Okay, well hey I might come back by in a bit."
I went into the bar, and walked all the way through to the front, which dumped me into the street. The town seemed to have dark wooden 2-level walkways, so there were businesses on both levels. It looked interesting so I thought I might spend the day checking it out.
But trying to pull up a map on my phone of the distance from Florida to New Haven, I clued into the fact that I had no memory of traveling there--and it was a dream. Given that I had a phone in my hand I tried to use it to call from "out of the dream". But the UI kept intersecting buttons in crazy ways and blocked me from making a call.
Eventually I got it to call a contact for my mom, but she could only seem to say "Hello" and then "oh" to everything I said.
Note
You would think after so many years of a 0% success rate at calling (or emailing) from the dream world to the waking world, I would have learned to stop wasting my time. But, apparently nope! I still seem to fall for this... a lot.
As I paced down the "New Haven" street talking on the phone, I suddenly turned into a door that led to the living room of the house I was asleep in.
me: (yelling at ceiling) "HEY! HEY! Virtual Reality Help Menu! DISPLAY HELP MENU!"
After a few seconds, a little rectangular screen materialized in front of me. Then it turned into a piece of paper, which I grabbed.
paper: "Against protocol, we are giving you this information..."
I tried to keep calm and stay in the dream, and read through what was on the paper. I couldn't quite get a fix on it. But whatever it was describing involved using the eraser end of pencils against "mirror types" to cause some sort of effect.
Searching around for a pencil, the only one I could find was short and stubby, with hardly any eraser on it. I went to the bathroom and ran it against the mirror. What happened was exactly what you'd expect if you took a pencil eraser and wrote on a mirror: almost nothing.
Frustrated, I scratched the word DREAM on the mirror, but seemed to do a pretty bad job of it. I left the bathroom and went back to where the paper had appeared.
me: (yelling at ceiling again) "I demand to see a copy of the contract you believe I've signed to get me into this virtual reality! It is my legal right!"
There was a delay. I looked up at where the original paper had come from, and there was a screen showing something about New York and Ithaca on it.
Suddenly documents started pouring out of the ceiling in floods. Not a legal contract, but just a pile of things on information purportedly about me.
It was about how I worked for a tech company in Ithaca and it had become involved in something called "Wi9" or similar...and it had been open-sourced due to me pushing for it to be so. The articles had pictures of me and rooms of tons of people with computers. It said something about my involvement with Visa (the credit card company). There was nebulous use of gender sometimes seeming to suggest I was female, but the pictures were ordinary ones of me circa my 20s.
I tried looking through what I could, but there wasn't much more I could see before waking up. One thing was a partially-filled journal of colored drawings.
Note
I went to college in Ithaca. I also interviewed for a tech job in Ithaca some years ago, but did not end up working there.
copy write %C:/0304-1020 {Met^(00C6)ducation}

The accounts written here are as true as I can manage. While the words are my own, they are not independent creative works of fiction —in any intentional way. Thus I do not consider the material to be protected by anything, other than that you'd have to be crazy to want to try and use it for genuine purposes (much less disingenuous ones!) But who's to say?