Better than my life. Chapter 4

4

A C-suit looks like a space suit. I saw it once in an old picture. Every centimeter of your body is under this grey thing. And you have a grey helmet on your head. I don’t remember why it is always grey, but it is. You are inside this C-suit, you can’t see or hear or smell anything that is outside. There is a panoramic screen in the helmet. It is right in front of your eyes, like huge glasses. What you see, hear, feel or smell comes to you from the computer. It comes from the game you play. Or is it the game plays you? I don’t know. Nobody knows. Some people ask shy questions in low voices. Sometimes. But computer games is big business. So big that it doesn’t answer such questions. It just makes E-money, every second and every minute.
Nobody knows why it is still called “games”. It’s not “games”, it’s a very big part of our lives. Sometimes I think we live in that world more than in the real world. A game is something that is not serious. This is serious, and has been like that for a very long time. Now we have no schools like in ancient world. We have educational games. It looks like a child enters a computer game in which some people teach him to read, count and so on. Those people are called teachers, but they are computer generated teachers. They are never angry like old time teachers sometimes were. They are never stupid. They just give pure knowledge.
About fifty years ago some people were very worried about computer teachers. They said C-teachers didn’t have emotions, and that was bad for children. Then more and more people started to think that way. And then big firms produced E-emotions. “If you love your kid buy some E-happiness for him” – that was the slogan. And people stopped worrying and started buying E-happiness. Or maybe the other way round – they first started buying E-happiness and then they stopped worrying. It was very clever, I think. A full pro version of E-happiness had E-sadness, E-anger, E-pain, E-loss and E-reunion. Actually, it had everything people could do or feel, or even imagine.
For example, you enter your E-happiness module, go to settings and choose yourself something exotic. First, your best friend steals your money and runs away with your wife. On the same day your doctor tells you are going to die very soon, and you begin to feel a very bad pain. So you know that you have only one day to live. You decide to go after your wife and your friend, to find them and do bad things to them, punish them. You find them and see that they have a very bad conflict over the money they stole from you. You see them kill each other. Then you go to hospital to die, and they tell you are OK. And then you meet a woman of your dream. What you feel at that moment is something you can’t feel in real life. Because all those bad things which happened to you can’t happen at the same time. Not in the real world.
Actually, E-happiness was a very big and clever computer game, and it was very expensive. There were cheaper versions, too. The cheapest E-happiness was only about 2000 E-money. It had E-hunger, E-pain and E-love, nothing more. And the Pro version had everything. There was a special Human Emotion Institute which studied emotions from biological, chemical and physical point of view. As a result, computer corporations knew how our emotions worked, and they could imitate them on computers. They could make them stronger than in real life. It was better than in real life. Better than my life.