In Translation | "Daydream Believer" by Kozy Watanabe
From 1999-nen no Game Kids.
I'm inside the light of a beautiful, shining rainbow. A warm and pleasant breeze is blowing. How wonderful this all is.
How long have I been here? Is this heaven?
Bang.
A sound foreign to the natural world. All at once, everything goes black.
It an instant, I've fallen from paradise into a world of darkness. But my eyes are used to the dark, and after a while I can tell that it's not nearly as black as it seems.
I'm in a room, a small one. Maybe capsule would be a better word for it. Either way, it's cold in here, and when I sit myself up with a groan, I feel something slip off of my face. Glasses? No. Goggles.
It takes a second to remember. These aren't just goggles but high-tech entertainment wear. You stab some diodes through the lids right into the eyeballs, let the vibrations of your skull act as speakers in place of the lowly eardrum, and enjoy manufactured stimulation fed direct to the brain.
I realize that I've got electrodes taped up all around my head. They're there to send sweet signals to the pleasure centers of my mind. That's right. I remember now, I'd jacked-in to the Dream Machine and was having the most wonderful nap.
A yellow light is blinking in the dark, an alert that the machine has come to an emergency stop. Must've been an accident, something to halt my automatic dreams.
As my head gets clearer, memories start coming back one by one.
Brain gyms have been making waves for a while now. Like how a regular gym exists to strengthen the body, brain gyms hit the scene promising to refresh the mind. At first, that took the form of places to go to lie down and watch calming nature videos while classical music played, but it didn't take long for specialized hardware to emerge and complicate things. In particular, a certain electronics manufacturer decided to hire a host of game designers and neurophysiologists for a grand project: create a machine that can provide the ultimate trips; a machine utilizing the controlled use of light, sound, and electromagnetic waves to take direct control of the brain's sensory perception. The second you jack-in, it blasts those beloved pleasure centers like nothing else.
It only took a single moment for every single test user to be sent into an eternal ecstasy. They all chose to stay in the machine. And until just a minute ago, I was living in the dream machine right along with them. I wonder how many hours – days, maybe - I was in there for?
There's an IV bag next to me. When I try to move my left arm, I can feel its needle wriggling beyond my skin. Once you're in the machine, you can enjoy a semi-permanence of dreams, no eating required.
Right, that's how it happened. I had gone to a new brain gym that opened near my place because I heard they'd installed dozens of this ultimate trip machine. I thought I'd just try it as a laugh.
Five minutes and a free test demo later and my life as I knew it was over. I never knew pleasure like that was possible. It was like my entire body - my entire being - had melted away. Without even meaning to, I became the dream machine's slave. But the fees were just too high.
"I'd love to, but I don't have that kind of money."
"Don't worry let money hold you back. There are still ways to get in the machine," the gym manager said, smiling.
"Like installment payments? Even that's too much--"
"No, that's not what I mean."
Like frozen time thawed out, my memories keep flowing back. How could I have forgotten the things that manager told me?
"Think about it. You enter that machine and with a flick of a switch you can experience true ecstasy whenever you want for as long as you want. Forever, even. We as people work and study and dress ourselves up nice and pretty and all of it, every ounce of our efforts are for one thing. Ecstasy, the end goal of humanity. And once you have that in your hands, once you're in the machine, everything else in this world turns meaningless."
He was right. I'd never known anything so wonderful. It didn't matter what; if there was a way to drown myself in that pleasure, I wanted to take it.
"What I'm saying is, once you sign this contract and enter the machine, you won't need anything else ever again. You won't need to walk, won't need to think, nothing."
"But the money...."
A lifetime contract cost the kind of dough someone like me could never dream of, no matter what I did or how hard I tried.
"You still don't get it? Your existence is going to become one with cyberspace. You're moving to heaven. You won't need your flesh anymore."
The manager pulled out a stack of papers from his desk.
"Don't worry about a thing. Just sign here."
As the papers flood my mind, so too does a burning smell. The temperature of the capsule has started to rise back up, and fast. Maybe the emergency stop is because a fire's started somewhere.
If that's what's happening, then I need to get out of here. But when I try to get up, I just fall right back down into bed.
They're gone.
My legs. My right arm's missing, too.
And on the one limb I've got left, this sad left arm, there's a sticker. A sticker with a single word written on it.
"Sold."
