.png)
He said it was for safety, but everyone knew the real reason was convenience. The car did all the steering, braking, and thinking while Jack comfortably sat back and enjoyed the ride. His only real task: adjusting the straps on his virtual reality headset.
The headset was an Oculus Rift 19.01 — sleek, lightweight, and cheap enough now that you could pick one up at Walmart between the breakfast cereal and the motor oil. The first models had come out around 2016 and were mostly for gamers with too much time on their hands. But technology improves quickly when there’s money involved, and before long the headsets had become standard equipment in self-driving cars.
Jack slid the visor down over his eyes.
Outside the window the city was waking up the way cities do — uneven sidewalks, tired buildings, an occasional siren somewhere down the street. But Jack didn’t see any of that.
His Oculus neighborhood was spectacular. The headset transformed the streets into wide boulevards lined with tidy lawns, fountains, and cheerful neighbors who always seemed to be watering flowers or walking friendly golden retrievers. Children flew kites. The sky was a permanent shade of blue that meteorologists in the real world could only dream about.
Jack quietly commanded, “Google Zoo.”
The neighborhood melted away. Suddenly he was strolling through an enormous park with no cages in sight. Lions lounged in the shade. A herd of elephants wandered lazily past. Overhead, birds circled in slow motion. The remarkable thing about Google Zoo was that many of its residents had already disappeared from the real world years ago. But here they were doing just fine.
Jack reached out and brushed the side of a tiger. The software generated a faint vibration in the glove sensors that made the stroke feel convincing enough.
“Google Sea,” he said.
Now he was underwater. Blue light filtered down through endless water while whales drifted silently past like ancient submarines. Somewhere in the distance one sang — that long, haunting call that used to travel across oceans before the oceans became and mix of shipping lanes and wind turbine farms.
A notification appeared:
BEACHED WHALE EVENT AVAILABLE.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO HELP?
Jack did, and within seconds he was part of a team of heroic volunteers rolling the enormous creature back toward the tide. When the whale finally slipped free and swam away, the headset rewarded him with a warm burst of orchestral music.
Jack smiled. Helping others always felt good, even if the "others" were algorithm-generated pixels.
As the car continued its route toward downtown Jack considered his options. Some mornings he preferred Google Adventure, where he could step into old Hollywood films and become one of the characters. He’d once chased a spy across rooftops in a Hitchcock thriller — black-and-white mode, naturally. Another time he’d ridden beside John Wayne across Monument Valley. Maybe his fave--the headset kept track of one's favorites like a playlist--was portraying Robert Redford in The Natural, hitting the final game-winning home run that set the sky ablaze with fireworks. He'd done that 73 times and wondered why he wasn't bored yet.
But today he had meetings. So he switched programs.
Simon Sinek appeared in front of him like a motivational prophet standing in a stadium of roaring fans. “Today,” the digital voice boomed, “we choose greatness!”
Jack nodded solemnly as his car rolled past a block of boarded-up storefronts he never saw. The headset glowed softly.
Outside, the city moved along as it always had — uneven, imperfect, and stubbornly real. Inside the goggles, however, Jack’s world was going wonderfully.
* * *
Related Link: The original blog post that set this story in motion.
