You wouldn't think something as uncommon as a coma could happen to someone you knew, let alone happen to you. Yet there I was, alone on that hospital bed for all those years. Time flies when you literally cannot do anything meaningful. What you often don't hear in stories like mine is that the person in the coma can hear everything, so that made the boredom all the more unbearable. Of course I had a lot of visitors to begin with - classmates, friends, and family. But as time wore on, I guess people forgot about me. It was about three years of total silence before my final visitor arrived, a man simply named John. He explained about a small and privately-funded program to help people like me, one which may very well be my last chance. It was called project KALI, where select participants would be granted free access to virtual reality. The chance to experience life again was like a dream. The catch? I would have to beta test a game for them, one so apparently cutting edge that it could seamlessly replicate every human sensation possible. Only downside was the tendency for the game to cause severe psychosis and addiction over the long term, but John brushed that bit aside. The final stumbling block was that I had to rank within the top 100 players within a year or lose my free virtual reality connection, leaving me bedridden for the rest of my life. I couldn't, no wouldn't, let that happen. I could hardly wait, and the days that the installation took place were some of the slowest of my life. In retrospect, I had no idea what I was in for. Hi there! I'm blackram. This is the first piece of fiction I'm actually putting to "paper" and it's also a bit of an experiment. I wanted to see how far I could get with no formal training in writing or analyzing fiction and what quality of a story I could make as a general outsider. I know I may be jumping into the deep end but I have high ambitions for the plot of Awake and I look forward to trying to make that a reality. I appreciate you taking the time to read this and I hope you find it somewhat entertaining. Fair warning: the protagonist has a very strange outlook on life, drawing from my own experiences with schizotypal personality disorder. I apologize if it's disconcerting. That's the reason why this fiction has the "Strong Lead" tag, due to his unique mental resilience and acuity, not any actual physical advantage. Though there are disadvantages as well to his situation.