'Deja vu!' thought Jim. His mind was getting bent by this VR equipment, and he was clearly starting to lose his sense of what was real and what was not. As the system shut down, the computer generated world slowly morphed into the real one. He lifted the helmet from his head and looked around, trying to take in his surroundings.
He found himself in the center of a large room, strapped into a chair on a raised platform. Along three walls were tables littered with computer equipment, power and data cables crisscrossing like rainbow spaghetti. On the fourth wall was what looked like high-voltage panels.
Sitting at one of the computer screens was a man of obvious Asian descent. Jim squinted at him, his mind still fuzzy. 'Who is that guy?' he wondered, the answer taunting him from just outside his reach. Then it clicked. "Dr. Wu!" he said, "Where am I?"
"Hold on, Jim," he replied, "I'm just making a few adjustments based on that last run."
"But..," Jim protested, "I feel like my brain has been washed"
"Hardly," the Ph.D. replied, "I was monitoring your virtual fantasy, and your mind seems far from clean to me!" His tone was quite matter-of-fact.
"Hunh?" Jim was at least one step behind. "Oh! That's just a phrase, 'brainwashed'. It doesn't mean what you think." Dr. Wu, Jim now recalled, still struggled with English colloquialisms from time to time. He also began to regain his other memories of the 'real world' as well.
He was inside a laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where Dr. Wu was a bio-physics professor, and he was a graduate student. He was working with the Doctor to test his ideas about stimulating the human nervous system through bio-induction. They had built the virtual reality system for just that purpose.
"Okay, Jim. I have fed the results of that run back into the system to update the parameters," explained Wu. "Hopefully, the next trial with go a bit smoother. Let me just...damn! The software crashed again! Just let me reboot."
*blong* came the sound of the lab machine starting up. He was putting his helmet back on when...
Fri Jul 3 02:39:36 1998
Linking Enabled