Revenge

 

I sit.

That’s what I do now.

Sit and stare.

Sit in the metal chair and stare at the wall.

At least the wallpaper in my room is patterned. I get lost in it for hours—all of the different images jump out at me. It is only for a second, though. Then it fades away, never to be seen again as another takes it’s place.

I never thought that I would end up locked in one of these rooms. An experiment, of sorts, gone awry. I remember the day the idea came to us. It was just a lonely, innocent idea at first. However,  I suppose the human condition eventually had to worm it’s way into it. Why didn’t we stop before it got so out of hand?

The plan was to create a world. A world where two people could meet while on two sides of the globe. A virtual reality room, basically. For time’s sake, let’s just call it “The Room.” We truly got creative once the original model was completed. After three years of hard work, we began to test the limits of The Room. We discovered that pain could be inflicted upon the “Clients” in The Room. Not physical pain as we know it, but similar. This pain is a psychological pain, but it feels very much physical to the one who feels the pain. This is because in The Room, your mind is not aware that it is not actually attached to the virtual being present. Therefore, when the pain is inflicted, the brain tells yourself that you are hurt. I should have put a stop to the whole thing before it even started. Now it is much too late.

Our first test subject, we will call him Bill, was our last. We had developed programs within The Room, called Visitors, to cause Bill pain. We then studied the effects the experiment had on Bill’s actual body. The Visitors perform their task wonderfully, I must say. Despite a skyrocketing heart rate, which we expected, Bill’s body was not harmed. After a few controlled tests, we tweaked the Visitors’ coding and the heart rate monitor was connected to the Visitors’ programs. This allowed for the Visitors to know when Bill was about to have a heart attack and back off with the pain. The point, to inflict the maximum amount of pain without killing the victim. We rationalized that we could sell The Room and it’s Visitors to the government to use on terrorists and the like. We thought we were doing society a favor.

There was one factor that we overlooked in the experiment—the strength of a broken and angry man. When Bill came out of testing, he overpowered us and trapped us in our own creation. The Room, our brainchild, had been turned against us.

As I sit, I realize how wrong we were.

How wrong we were, to believe that what we were doing was good.

As I sit, I hear a sound.

I hear a sound behind me.

The sound behind me is the twisting of a doorknob.

I cringe in my seat.

I cringe in my seat because the Visitors are back.

The Visitors are back,

and I know what they do.

I know what they do because I made them to do it.