When they placed the headset on my eyes, I first saw white, and I felt like the only person alive. 

“Welcome, Eve.”

My name was spelled out in black across my eyes in the familiar company font before fading to black with the white-lettered user agreement. The contract unfurled in endless jargon in seemingly another language, my skimming becoming more like scrolling before I clicked accept, tapping a button on the side of my headset. 

Someone came around and tightened the strap around my skull.

They said something, but I couldn’t hear them. They’d placed headphones on me for the “full sensory experience” of a virtual reality unlike anything yet seen. 

I clenched my fists. I shifted my feet. I grounded myself in New York City, in the company headquarters, on the third floor in testing lab 325, in the year 2055. I was Eve, 25, olive-skinned, brown-haired, brown-eyed, 5’4”.

Human.

The white faded to light green, which sharpened into plants, then waterfalls, then darkened to the rocks circling a pool of water. This was a picture I submitted when I went in for the test, a photo from vacation in Maui about three years ago. They had brought it to life, almost unrecognizably, from a mediocre iPhone 24 photo. 

I could smell the water and hear it rushing. Birds sang somewhere above my head. Sunlight warmed my forearms. I kicked my feet again and winced when my right toe hit a hard rock. 

The VR headset was meant to anticipate user error; bend and cater to my every whim and want at barely the press of a button. 

But there was a single rule, one that the technology company representative hammered into me so thoughtfully he made me repeat it back to him verbatim. Twice.

You cannot, under any circumstances, speak. 

You cannot cry out in pain. You cannot shout with joy or sadness. You cannot exclaim how much your mother, sister, or aunt would enjoy something. You cannot make a single, solitary sound.
There was no voice to be had in this reality. 

I nodded when the representative said these things, especially when he made me repeat them. What need would I have for a voice when the point was to test a technology of sight?

I pressed the button on the control stick I held in my left hand. The scene of the waterfall faded to a bustling city, London, Piccadilly Circus, another vacation photo brought to life. 

I watched the red double-decker bus pass by a few times, the picture in a never-ending loop of time, a passing moment memorialized and repeated endlessly.

I blinked and I was back at the waterfall.

My brows furrowed. I swore I hadn’t pressed the button to move between moments. I pressed it now—and nothing happened.

The waterfall continued to rush in front of me, roaring in my ears as if I were underneath its spray directly, if tons upon tons of water were hitting me like battering rams. 

I wondered what would happen if I moved any closer. If I submerged myself in the virtual water and stayed there. I knew, logically, that I wouldn’t die. But my senses, my body, even my mind, could be tricked into thinking I was.

I swallowed, going to press the button to switch to a different image that would unsettle me less when my finger stopped moving. 

I bit down on my lip hard enough to draw blood. The headset tightened and tightened, and sunk into my face to a point where my eyes felt pulled apart. 

Tears blurred my vision and I forced myself to blink them away. I was at the waterfall still but I was in the water, up to my knees, though I had not pushed the button to move at all. I kicked my legs out and though they encountered nothing but air, the water below me moved and sloshed as if I had kicked high in the pool of water just before the waterfall.

I got closer to it. Again, I don’t remember moving.

The pain around my eyes grew as the headset sunk further into my skull. I kicked out again, my arms flailing, but no one came to remove the headset or headphones. I tried to stand and in my eyes, water sloshed and stirred up again, but I remembered that I was strapped into the test seat. There was no movement.

The waterfall was above me now, and then I couldn’t move out of it, and in my ears was the roar of water that I could not escape. 

My inhibitions left me and I screamed. I wanted out of this. No one was helping me out and I needed out and why, oh, why could no one hear me—

I’d made a noise.

But the system continued just as well as it always had. Nothing malfunctioned in the slightest. 

I screamed louder. Nothing. No one came to my rescue, no one came to save me from the illusion that I was dying, and that was tricking my body into thinking I had minutes left though someplace in my brain I knew I would be alright. 

I cast my arms out to try and pull myself up on one of the rocks but I found no such refuge. They might have moved me away from it. That’s what was happening, wasn’t it?

They were moving me, puppeteering me, trying to test the limits of my compliance, the limits of their machine to manipulate and scare.

I understood, then, why they had decided to drown me. 

Through water, no sound could be heard. No matter how loudly I screamed, I would never be loud enough to hear me. Not that anyone could, or would help at all. Cruel, sardonic irony.

The space behind my eyelids turned blue, then black.

I cast my arms out again and finally, my fingers found purchase on a nearby rock. Though I knew I gripped nothing but molecules of air in the testing room my skin felt shredded, bleeding, and strained as I forced myself out from underneath the waterfall and onto a ledge of dark brown rock.

I heaved as though I had run a marathon, my heart pumping, though my brain registered that I hadn’t moved from the chair the representative placed me in. My body could not tell the difference.

The images in front of me wavered. It slid to the side, fracking, misaligning. I could see my hands, feet, and body below and in front of me, but not my face, as I had no mirror. Not my selfhood. When I looked down into the water, there was no reflection.

What proof do we have that we are real, even in the so-called “true” reality of Earth? How are we to be sure our surroundings are not entirely fabricated, that our lives were not mere simulations programmed by someone above that we could not see?

Some people on Earth thought that way already and called it religion. 

I heaved and coughed, not bothering to hide my noises anymore. I looked up at the fake sky and thought about screaming, but I found it fruitless. It was mere screaming at a screen. 

I dropped the controllers hours ago. I had no comprehension of how to remove the headset latching itself onto my skin and sinking slowly into my genetic makeup. 

I wondered, after some time, about the rule the representative made me repeat. 

Do not speak.

Speak.

The noises I was warned not to make were footnotes and technicalities—yes, you might as well, just to be on the safe side. They were not what the company was truly afraid of.

I could not have a voice here. It was not virtual if I had a human voice in this realm. 

I stood, my blood staining my skin, staring out at a heaven that had already begun to burn. 

And I let my voice out.

“My name is Eve and I am not your perfect test subject! I am everything real!”

The world they painted so perfectly around me burst apart. 

I was left in blocks of red and blue and yellow, pixels scratching against the framework as they struggled to return to a place that no longer existed. 

I hovered in space between the space, in reality without reality. 

My words splintered into pieces and burst like fireworks in technicolor, lighting up the screen sky with a rainbow of color. 

I felt the headset begin to draw out of my skin, and I grasped the edges with my hands. I took the harsh, cold metal into my palms and yanked—hard.

I wailed. 

It was coming off, but not without a fight. 

I could see the room I’d entered to test when I cast my eyes down, but if I looked straight I was back in the burning technological Eden, a supposed paradise I was more than glad to be barred from entrance for all eternity. 

As the color burned and broke all the more brilliantly before my eyes, I pulled on the headset again. This time it popped right off, not without pain, but I didn’t hold in my cry of joy when I threw it across the room. I tore off the headphones and bolted from the room, sprinting down the stairs and through the facility to reach the bright night of New York City.

I stared up at a dark sky caused by science and nature and thought about crying. But gladly, I didn’t, as I was able to notice a screen in Times Square flickering out.

In and out and in and out and in and out. 

Then the square, the city, went dark all at once. 

And all I could bring myself to do, after all that screaming, was smile and laugh wildly, as loud and raucous as I could.