She could see the tiny screens in the headset dancing with life, but the built-in lenses made it impossible to make out much detail. Holly assumed it was some game that David had left in stasis the night before he’d died. Though she hadn’t spared much attention for his gaming habits in life, she was more than a little intrigued by what new lands might be visible through the small displays. Part of her also felt like she would be betraying his trust if she were to put on his headset and log in to his character, a similar betrayal of his trust as skimming through his email. She knew she was being unfair to herself, but emotions rarely are.
In the end, her desire to be closer to her son, to be where he had been in lieu of him being where she was, pushed her to reach for the headset. She placed it atop her head, and after a brief period of adjustmenting the various straps, lowered it over her eyes.
The view inside the goggles plunged into an all encompassing black, but over the span of a few breaths, details emerged. Moonlit edges came into being, and Holly was able to recognize a reasonably modern bedroom at midnight. Almost as soon as she realized where she was, in an almost exact duplication of David’s bedroom, the sun began to rise outside the window, illuminating the interior of the space as though watching time lapse photography.
Once the sun outside completed its crescendo, Holly had to lift the goggles to peek back at the real world to make sure what she saw was computer generated, and not a live video feed from a camera built into the front of the headset.
Back in virtuality, two flashing objects atop David’s desk caught her attention. It surprised her how accurate the tracking was, as she was able to lift both controllers from the desk as though looking at them in reality. The controllers were oddly shaped, but after a few false starts, a helpful popup window showed her how to insert her hands through the openings in the center, inserting each of her fingertips into the soft plastic caps. WIth a gentle squeeze of her hands, actuators whined into action, cinching the built in lanyard to secure the controllers around the circumference of her palms.
Once the mechanism had finished its motion, the perfectly detailed recreations of the controllers dissolved into hands and accompanying arms. They were a bit more burly than her own, but tracked her movements perfectly as she extended her fingers and lifted them to her face. Holly made a peace sign with her right hand, and the hands in the game did the same. The movements were so perfectly matched to her own that after a few moments of testing, she was able to accept them as proxies and moved on to inspecting the additional doors installed into open wallspace in David’s room.
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One of the doors appeared to be made out of black glass, frame and all, and had no handle. When she approached it, it sprang to life like a computer screen and presented only a login prompt, with a touchscreen keyboard below. She tried a few combinations out of sheer curiosity, but none of her attempts made it past the primitive gatekeeper.
The other doorway had an arched stone frame, and banded wooden entryway, and what appeared to be a forged iron handle. The voices she had heard earlier filtered through the door, and not clearly enough for her to be able to make anything specific out of them. She stood in front of it, taking in the workmanship and the materials, which the computer mistook for a desire for more information. It popped up a helpful logo, which faded into existence at the center of the bronze band that crossed the door at eye level. The logo, fashioned from hammered bronze and inlaid leather, bore the legend Silenia.
“Silenia…” Holly tried the name out, and it brought up a few of the times that David had tried to tell her about some of the adventures that he and his friends had been on, the majority of which she had either been too distracted or disinterested to pay much attention to. The beginnings of tears pricked at her eyes upon remembering all of those times she took him for granted, all of those times that life got in the way and let her think that there was something more important than what he had to tell her that moment. She would listen to a thousand of his stories from Silenia now, if she could just have him back.
The tears never made it to the surface. The voices, which she assumed must belong to David’s friends, all hushed each other as they heard her from the other side of the door. That feeling of intruding on David’s privacy returned, only to be fought back once again by her grief, her all encompassing desire to retrieve any part of David she could, to be near the things he loved, to immerse herself in his world and hopefully drown his loss in good memories.
She raised her hand to the door handle, and she could feel the resistance of it in her hand, the coolness of the metal through the contact patches in the controller. She marvelled at the technology, finally beginning to understand why they were able to justify charging the price she had paid for it. The rough resistance of the handles mechanism made the journey from Silenia to her hands through force feedback built into the controllers, but with a lift and a pull the door swung open.