New years eve, a joyful holiday to most, a painful one to others. The holiday itself is sad in a way. We are celebrating a new year, another year without a cure for cancer, another year for a poor person to come a little bit closer to their end. Oh joy! Time to start counting the death total of the new year. Yah! Welcome new diseases, make it feel like home. What are we really celebrating? Don’t get me wrong, we totally made many great achievements, we managed to not leave Earth, still have religious extremists, and launch nuclear missiles at each other because we disagree on something. Imagine two three year-old brothers with atom bombs at their disposal.
Maybe it’s just the state of the world that makes me think like this. Ever since Mirage came out, the world has been consumed, trapped in a fantasy world, leaving the rest of the world to rot. The worlds largest energy crisis occurred since the 1970’s as more and more people gradually left the physical world for the ever expanding virtual one. Software firms and internet providers dominated the worlds market, gaining both power and money in incomprehensible quantities. Crime rates peaked as drug sales reached new heights. The economy reached an all time low as bank accounts ran dry. Transportation services withered away, airports shut down, bus stops rusted out. Since war between countries was unheard of, militaries faded out of existence. Only primitive countries still had physical schools.
Now don’t get me wrong mirage is not the bad guy, all they did was release a gaming console that was bound to be released eventually anyway. Nor are the people to blame, what would you do if your childhood dreams became reality. All of your favorite TV shows, characters, video games, and movies came to life. If there is anyone to blame it is Data Delivery International, DDI for short. They are the largest internet provider in the world, controlling not just the flow of data, but governments and other world powers as well. They are after money and power like all other big companies except Mirage who seemed to be all about the customers.
Mirage is a virtual reality gaming console that expanded into a console for anything that can be done in real life. All of the data being stored on servers, owned by Mirage. With an internet connection you could do anything in Mirage, work, go to school, shop, play video games, watch movies, all seemingly real, lasered onto your retinas, the perfect escape.

Immobile like a boulder I lay in bed, awake, and to my surprise there is no sound of an alarm clock, just tranquility. I looked to the side and see a hunk of  plastic (too cheap to have metal) and wires, my alarm clock. Smashed to smithereens in rage when it went off accidentally on a Sunday (was totally my fault). A casualty of war I like to think, the war between getting up and not getting up. I would like to think I got out of bed quickly but reality speaks otherwise. Every morning I usually have three choices:
Quickly get out of bed, never happens. Getting out of bed so slowly I often question if I’m even moving. Last but certainly not least (my favorite), not getting out of bed at all. But that is the beauty of Mirage, I don’t have to get up (assuming I didn’t leave it downstairs), I could just slip on my visors and escape...