All tagged SciFi

It Was Fun While it Lasted

When I was a teenager in the early- to mid-nineties there was a place a few towns over called Incredible Universe—it was a big box store that sold CDs and electronics and featured, in the center of the store, a massive virtual reality station. I never tried the VR station, because it freaked me out (for the same reasons that first-person video games freak me out), but people were really, really into it, and teenagers would spend so much time queuing up to use it. Aria, the protagonist of Under the Never Sky, basically has a VR station like that implanted in one of her eyes, and has spent her entire life existing in that world (called The Realms). She’s completely sheltered (and is the product of bio-engineering) and hasn’t experienced any of the “normal” things we expect of teenagers, including basic physical contact.