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"What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply, electrical signals interpreted by your brain." — Morpheus, The Matrix
The interior of a computer is a fine and private place, but none, I fear, do there embrace. — Roger Ebert, misquoting Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"
This is a relatively new branch of Science Fiction, it deals with the aspects of people being either partially or completely attached to, and part of a computer system. Virtual Reality taken to the next step, or perhaps, Virtual Reality as reality.
Being partially attached means that you "jack in" or otherwise connect, and you then experience whatever the computer system shows you, typically minimum is visual as good as what your eyes look at and audio is full omnidirectional stereo. It might go further and give you taste, touch, smell and more, or as Dennis Miller once put it, "If some unemployed punk in Trenton, New Jersey can buy a plug-in for $29.95 to let him make love to Cindy Crawford, Virtual Reality is going to make Crack Cocaine look like Sanka." (More than one sci-fi story has this happen: Humanity dies out because everyone is too busy having hot virtual sex that there's no one to make any actual babies)
If you're completely attached, either your consciousness has been transferred into the system and you don't have a "real body" outside of the system, or you are "stuck in a pod" and are connected to it. You may or may not know you're within a computer system.
While there is some overlap between the two concepts, this differs from Cyberspace in that when you're Inside A Computer System, it may be completely self-contained and have no connection to the outside world. You might also be alone in there. Cyberspace implies a connection between the computer system to the real world, and has multiple people connected to it. Although The Matrix fits both definitions.
The real Deep Immersion Gaming.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Serial Experiments Lain has this as the central theme of the story. Notably, it treats Inside A Computer System as a mystical experience, without any technological peripherals connecting people to the virtual reality; the only "scientific" explanation given to the out of body experiences is the Earth's electromagnetic Schumann Resonance, which in the story can link human brains and computer equipment together without anyone noticing.
- In Silent Mobius, this is Lebia Maverick's main shtick.
- Ghost In The Shell.
- Everyone in .hack// is inside a MMORPG.
- Except in .hack//Liminality, which is all about what's going on on the outside.
- Dennou Coil has the real and virtual world coexisting.
Film
- Johnny Mnemonic, starring the indomitable Keanu Reeves, had scenes in cyberspace, but the movie mostly took place in meatspace.
- The original Robocop movie didn't have much in the way of cyberspace. But, how can I not mention that Robo's method of hooking up to the computer was a seven-inch spike coming out of his hand like a, well, spike.
- The Matrix, of course, probably defines the whole genre.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall is trying to determine if what is happening to him is real, or if it is memories that have been implanted in his brain because he's on a console.
- Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky may be simply be having a series of really bad experiences, or he's stored in a computer system and is living a fantasy existence.
- Natalie Wood's last film, Brainstorm, worked with equipment that could do the whole virtual reality thing over a telephone line. Not DSL, either; a simple modem that hooked up to someone's phone, or could be acoustically coupled and transferred over a pay phone.
- The movie eXistenZ had a Virtual Reality gaming system that people entered, and in some cases you couldn't tell whether they were in a game or in reality. This movie came out about the same time as The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor.
- In FreeJack, the "soul" of the character played by Anthony Hopkins is stored in a computer because his body has died, and needs a replacement body to be transferred into within 24 hours or his soul will also die.
- Tron is a variation on this. The protagonist physically enters a computer network when his body is reduced to component information by a teleportation device.
- The Thirteenth Floor had a computer system within a computer system.
Literature
- One of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books (this troper thinks it was Mostly Harmless, but isn't sure) featured a description of an alien computer terminal which worked in this way. However, one could exit at any time, and reality and virtual reality were quite distinct.
- This trope is central to the original book's premise: The Earth itself is a very elaborate computer created to discover the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything (the answer has already been found: 42).
- The Otherland series by Tad Williams is about a random group of people trapped in a unique virtual world (in a time when virtual reality is common-place). It get's kinda twisted.
- Merry, in the Whateley Universe, is a cyberpath who can interface with computer networks simply by being within a few feet of a powerful CPU hooked to the network. When she does this, she's 'in' the computer network. She meets a Whateley Academy kid who can do almost as much as she can, but who prefers the Tron visuals for his version of cyberspace.
- G.A. Effinger's book When Gravity Fails has a system where people meet in a Virtual Reality system, and can even have sex while in the system, and it's indistinguishable from the real thing. In one case, eight people lie down on the Virtual Reality couches, and only seven get up; one of the visitors figured a way to kill one of the others by causing their "soul" not to go back into the body, but to stay and effectively be purged when the machine was shut down.
- Tad Williams's doorstopper series Otherland primarily takes place Inside A Computer System.
- In the Matter of: Instrument Of God is about the Afterlife, set up inside a massive computer system, where the occupants are aware both that they are dead and that they are within a computer system.
- Vivian Van Velde's novel Heir Apparent rests completely on this idea. Gianine gets trapped in a virtual reality fantasy game when it's damaged, and has to win the game to escape.
Live Action TV
- A notably early example was in the 1976 Doctor Who story "The Deadly Assassin", where the Doctor travels into a surreal virtual world inside a computer matrix.
- Also in "Forest of the Dead", Donna is put inside one when she is 'saved' by the library.
- The Stargate SG-1 episode "The Gamekeeper" featured a planet whose inhabitants deliberately plugged themselves into virtual reality pods after the planet was devastated. By the time SG-1 found it, it got better.
- The planet had definitely recovered into a near-paradise. Too bad that the "Gamekeeper" didn't bother to tell the inhabitants of the planet. Fortunately, SG-1 was there to save the day... again.
- In Vr5, Syd can draw the subconscious mind of anyone she calls on a telephone into virtual reality. As in Brainstorm, this involves an acoustic modem. Which was already about ten years out of date when the show aired.
- The half-dozen people who actually watched the whole series eventually discovered that the much-maligned "acoustic modem" was not off-the-shelf technology, but Applied Phlebotinum from a buried Secret Project.
- J-drama Sh15uya centres on a group of fifteen-year-olds trapped in a virtual replica of Shibuya.
Video Games
- The video game A Mind Forever Voyaging has you as a person whose entire life has been inside a computer, with the real world around you simulated, and now you've been let in on the gag.
Webcomics
- The webcomic The Noob is set in the VR of the "Clichequest" MMORPG. (Mostly, at least.)
Western Animation
- ReBoot.
- This was also the plot of a second-season episode of Hanna-Barbera's Pac Man: Pac-Baby got lost inside his daddy's new home computer, so Pac-Man and Pac-Junior went to rescue him.
- The entire premise of Code Lyoko.
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