It’s the year 2234 and humanity created the cure to ageing two hundred years ago, that’s right no more getting old and dying of old age. Now humanity can live forever as long as you don’t catch an incurable disease or a bullet. Cancer is a thing of the past, thanks to the same treatment that cured ageing. Due to the way the treatment ceases ageing by freezing both the creation and death of cells. Of course, this means you have to wait until a certain age usually about twenty-four so that the body can fully develop. You might be thinking this is only for the rich and powerful right. Wrong due to the formula for the treatment being leaked to all the major pharmaceutical companies before it could be patented, by a hacktivist group called Freedom. This mass leak of the formula caused its price to drop tremendously because so many companies had the formula in order to generate sales they had to have the lowest price. Which resulted in every company undercutting each other. In the end, everyone bought it from health tech incorporated for the low cost of $99.99. That’s right the cure for ageing sold for just 100 dollars, and the treatments even permanent. It’s even covered by most insurance due to the added effect of curing cancer.
However, this all came at a cost, the government in most countries to prevent overpopulation implemented a ban on reproduction, everyone who took the treatment after the first year was required to be sterilised. That was nothing though compared to the sheer boredom created from living forever. Nothing could be done about that, until one day a company called Virtuacorp invented the virtual reality pod. the most realistic virtual reality interface of all time, only problem was at the time all it could be used for was virtual vacations, because nobody could make an A.I system that was intelligent and realistic enough not to be jarring to users. You see the virtual reality was too real. Which resulted in any NPCs looking completely robotic, they just couldn’t show the proper emotion, when looked at in such a realistic environment. A few MMOs were attempted but none of them took off. So the boredom was only temporarily alleviated.
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The people who suffered the worst from this boredom were those who had been bedridden by some accident or another after receiving the treatment. Can you imagine living forever while being unable to get out of bed? No, well I can, my name is Nathen Newford and 176 years ago at the age of twenty-four, I was walking out of the hospital where I was treated on the way to my car. When I was struck by a hit and run, the doctors said if it wasn’t for me being right outside the hospital I would have died for sure, but even though survived I was paralyzed from the neck down. I begged the doctors for 100 years to end my endless boredom, before gave up resigned to my fate. I could only hope to die of some illness, until the year 2231 when a new type of A.I known as REAL was developed, REAL stood for realistic emotion artificial life. REAL was developed specifically by Virtuacorp for their new MMO Live Online. An MMO so realistic that if you were to become a master swordsman in the game you would become one in real life as well same went for things like cooking or blacksmithing. The game was set to release tomorrow at midnight, and lucky for me the hospital was gifted a VR capsule and a copy of the game for every patient who is either in a coma or paralyzed. Something about a study on how the game will affect us. The best part is the capsule are specially made with life support built in so if I want to I can stay logged in pretty much forever. I can’t wait till tomorrow. I hope that Sarah wakes me up early tomorrow; Sarah is my nurse by the way.