The colour of her world

Last week's experimental evening with VR left me walking into the darkness and thinking, is this really a good idea?

She’s not old. She’s not young. Was she ever middle-aged? She’s just herself. Sixty-five. Obscured by the present and illuminated by her past.

Comfort zones ­– what are they? Right now, every ordinary event is obliterated by an ogre that screams obscenities at her as she creepy-crawls her way to a quiet space somewhere on the perimeter of her broken horizon.

Not now – not comfortable – no. She’s sixty-five.

Nightmare. Babbling baby, ignored by mother’s muffled ears – Air Pods screwed in place, where earrings used to hang. She’s sixty-five and she loathes these preoccupied parents. Pulling grotesque faces at the pudgy baby face to get a reaction, she wonders when technology will torment the human race out of existence. It works. In the silence, she watches the mother – a parent petrified for eternity, in a digital distraction world.

Nightmare. Hunched, hurt – old age creeping too quickly through the pensioner’s broken frame. Slumped in a self-made sphere of silence, he’s ignored by the Saturday night hipster in Mary Jane wedges. Look at her oriental socks chattering to each other and the Puppy War book waving a flag at the world. Why fight? Why war? This millennial trusts no-one. She’s given up looking for love in a dimly lit bar. She stuck on the overground with a pulpy puppy books and silly socks.

Reality has been obscured by clever-dick tech that teaches humans to forget feeling. It’s created a world that seeks comfort in fleshless forms made from illuminated pixels and dark web demons. The ordinary has been chewed up and spat out of reach.

*

She’s not old. She’s not young. Was she ever middle-aged? She’s just herself. Sixty-five.

There’s a quietness in the queue now. She’s here, ready to take a deep dive into Virtual Reality. Not the experiential landscapes, where warmongering warriors fool around with blasting the brains out of casual bystanders. No sadistic shoot-ups. No cruelty. She’s looking for escape.

Her headset helmet is as heavy as the weight of her world. Her vision is obscured by a black void – limitless, motionlessness, nothingness. Waiting for Virtual Reality to kick in, she wonders why Actual Reality has failed. Fake worlds are technological fast foods, they trigger a sky-high response that makes life’s failures disappear.

She can still retreat, she knows. Yet, she pushes the button and her 360-degree vision is transformed into technicolour. Emerald ceilings, bulbous and ever-growing, cast concave craters that she longs to climb into. Can she reach? Her hands claw the cage that confines her. She’s surrounded by rainforest richness. Birdsong blasts through the silence. Her hands, now Yves Klein blue, clutch the empty air around her.

White flash – the landscape morphs into mixed reality – dashes and grooves etched across the real world she longs to step away from. She’s being swallowed by Meta’s mouth. She’s swimming in Zuckerberg’s saliva.

Pinching the space, she finds the menu and clicks. Black desert – hillocks holding hands on the horizon. Darkness is too limiting. Stepping aside, she glimpses the face of a real-world child. Her child. His face flickers through the pixels and smiles. Then tiny, bursting bubbles blanket her gaze. Reality obscured – all illumination extinguished – VR now colours her world.