Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)
Prompt:
In the not too distant future, neural/computer interfaces are powerful enough and advanced enough to interact with our nerves to make us feel, see, touch, taste and smell. You are a therapist that helps people that have lost the ability to tell the difference between reality and “wetware.”
Response:
From the Phorians to the Seraphs, all of them are on the verge of becoming permanently lost when they come to me, their grey matter grown wild in unnatural layers that resists any hope of non-surgical separation. I win them back, though. Usually. With the proper therapy, delivered regularly and at proper intensity, combined with complete removal of neural/computer interface hardware, a neurological wedge can be driven between the nervous system’s process centers and the higher-thinking components of the human brain from which arise our spatial awareness, desires, fears…our interpretation of reality itself.
I call the first group the “Phorians” after the most popular of the neuro-psy VR games, which 90%+ of them have been corrupted by: Phoria Vale. It’s an open world game with optional quests. Within its parameters and physical laws, however, there is little a player can not try or accomplish. They can be just about anyone. They feel the leaves of Phoria, its grass, its water. They can even breathe its air, smell it, sense it filling their lungs. They can caress and kill, eat and bed down in the wild–all in the game. For those who develop the illness of dis-separation from the game, the first key is to convince them that they are indeed on Earth, not in Phoria, and that Phoria had never existed anywhere outside of software and the wetware of their own psyches.
The “Seraphs” are harder cases. Some are unrecoverable, so corrupted and misshapen their synapse networks become, and even great swathes of their brain matter. For the unrecoverable, at some point all we can do, if the patient or their family has available funds, is to set them up on life support and let them live out the rest of their lives in their never-ending, open-eyed, full-sensory lucid dream.
The Dreamscape program they’ve become addicted to is in a sense a dream. The software simply triggers a continuous lucid dreaming state, and the neuro-psy implants make them feel everything, to a level beyond what the human mind can actually trick itself into believing during a regular lucid dream. Whereas the Phorians are limited by a comprehensive game world, the Seraphs are limited by nothing except their own imaginations and certain physical limitations of the human body outside of the which the brain has not evolved cognitive capacity to dream itself away from. They can imagine they are an octopus, for example, but never will they truly be able to experience the world in the exact manner of those eight-armed chromatophore-manipulating cephalopods.
The Seraphs scare me more than the Phorians could ever do. Some dream themselves as serial killers. Some, harboring a life of hatred against many antagonists, dream themselves to be dictators, commanding mass purges of their enemies, if not outright genocides. Still scarier are the metaphysical or occult Seraphs, that imagine themselves to be demons, underworld gods, extra-cosmic eldritch horrors, or even angels. Those with the angel complex, in fact, inspired the name Seraphs among me and my colleagues in the first place.
“Miguel” – Case B-453, is in my chair today. I have reclined him, and bound his hands to the arms of the chair with nylon constraints. His eyes are open, and he’s looking straight at me. Miguel is my greatest challenge yet, and I am determined to win his mind back to reality, at least enough to make him once again functional and cognizant of his true self. He terrifies me more, I admit, than any other patient I’ve had.
“I see you, demon,” he says coldly. He has somehow managed to access a lower set of vocal cords–not unprecedented, but a phenomenon still being studied. His voice is deep, like the low, bone-jarring hum of an earthquake miles below the surface.
“I am your doctor,” I inform him, as I always do. “I am here to help you, Miguel. You are dreaming, and I will wake you up.”
Miguel’s laughter booms. His eyes are terribly bloodshot, constantly streaming tears, because he has either forgotten to blink or the parasympathetic nerves that would normally do so have been crushed or incorporated into the neuron clusters that constitute his perceived ego as the Angel.
“I am tearing your hair out, demon,” he says.
“Doctor,” I correct him again. “And you are not physically interacting with me at all.”
Miguel smiles. His teeth are yellow, broken, apparently due to him having chewed on metal screws and nails before he was recovered from his home for care.
“But I am,” laughs Miguel. “I interact with all. It’s you who are dreaming. You have dreamed yourself into my world.”
For a moment–though it can only be my imagination–I feel my hair flicked atop my head, as though fingers have quickly run through it. At most, it must be the breeze from the air conditioner.
“I am playing with your heart,” says Miguel. “It’s not such a strong heart. I’m squeezing it.”
I see his hand, bound to the chair at the wrist, opening and closing.
“You are n–“
My heart has started to palpitate, my pulse suddenly increasing. There is a pain growing in my chest. Blood thunders in a torrent through the arteries in my chest and neck.
“Miguel,” I say, frightened now, sweating profusely, “I want you to stop this…th-this talk.”
“But not my hand?” says Miguel, smiling toothily. His bloodshot eyes leak, holding laughter in their depths. “If I spread my wings, I shall fly away with your heart on my palm, demon.”
“Miguel!”
The pain is increasing, spreading to my shoulder. Numbness floods my left arm.
“Miguel! Angel! Angel, stop!”
“So you know who I am,” says Miguel. He opens his hand wide, and the pain coursing through the entire left side of my body begins to subside. I fight to hold back tears. My heart still pounds–but slowly, to my immense relief, I can feel it fighting to recover its normal pace and strength. My head grows light as my blood pressure subsides.
“Angel…”
“You know who I am now,” says Miguel. “You have felt my strength and my mercy.”
“You believe you have evolved,” I choke out, barely able to speak, rising to flee the room. My head swoons again.
“Not belief,” he laughs wildly, ripping his arms from the constraints. “You are in my reality. All of you are. This demonic planet is now the domain of the Angel. All will feel me soon–feel my justice rain upon them.”
I run out of the room, screaming for my secretary, security, anyone. Miguel’s laughter echoes in my ears. Too far within. His laughter is beating at my mind.
I feel my hair flicked with playfully, as the Angel toys with his subject.
