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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, paraphrasing 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 providing audio and visual quality at the maximum of human perception. 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 so busy having hot virtual sex that there's no-one left 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.
To make things easier on the audience (not to mention, where relevant, special effects budgets) the computer environment is generally depicted as being very similar to the physical world; i.e. people still look like people, they still have a "body" and a "location" and they obey most of the laws of "physics", etc. These rules are almost always tampered with (i.e. defying gravity in The Matrix), but the fundamentals are mostly the same (i.e. Matrix-people have only 4 limbs).
The real Deep Immersion Gaming. If the user thinks it's real, it becomes a Lotus Eater Machine.
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Examples
Anime & 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.
- The second season of Superbook had the pet dog one of the first season's regulars getting trapped in a computer after a freak accident caused it to merge with the Superbook (the Bible, only with a magic ability to transport people into the stories). The new hero of the season then had to travel into the computer to get her back.
- Chisame of Mahou Sensei Negima, being a Playful Hacker, gains an Artifact that lets her do this.
Films
- Johnny Mnemonic, starring the indomitable Keanu Reeves, had scenes in cyberspace, but the movie mostly took place in meatspace.
- 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 revolved around a city in a computer system owned by the protagonist's company - which in turn was in a city within a computer system.
- And possibly inside at least one more computer system - if you notice, every one of the three worlds you see has different subtle colorizations to them like that pointed out for the 1920s sim, and the movie ends on a CRT-shutdown animation...
- Strange Days features video recordings that provide direct sensory stimulus when played back, like virtual reality home videos.
Literature
- Cyberspace in the Sprawl Trilogy of William Gibson pioneered this trope.
- 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).
- Except in that case they lived on, not in, the computer.
- The Otherland series by Tad Williams is about a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits who break into a virtual reality network (in a time where VR is commonplace) and become trapped there, unable to go offline. Furthermore, they can apparently be killed there too. One of the mysteries they must solve is why this is the case.
- 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.
- 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.
- The majority of the storyline of Realtime Interrupt by James Hogan is Inside A Computer System. The apparent strangeness of reality the character experiences is explained to him as mental illness.
- Permutation City is a remarkably hard scifi look at this trope, with some strange philosophical added in.
- Greg Egan is quite good at this. Diaspora features a relatively in-depth look at the Polises, underground supercomputers simulating posthuman intelligences several times faster than real time.
- The subject of any number of philosophical papers from the classic "Brain in a Jar" introduction to epistemology, to Robert Nozick's Experience Machine, which raises the question of whether or not it would be ethical to plug into one.
- Three of Jack Chalker 's better novels (the Wonderland Gambit trilogy) feature people who have been inside the machine so long they've created thousands of alternate universes — all of which keep running after they're gone.
- Altered Carbon and the Takeshi Kovacs series features this trope put toward particularly gruesome ends. Torture victims could be implanted into a computer world, where they would be tortured for hours of subjective time every minute, for as long as the computer stays running. In theory, a person's consciousness could experience millennia of agony without the mercy of death.
- Timothy Zahn's Conqueror's Trilogy: The Copperhead fighter pilots have implants that allow them to jack into their fightercrafts: the pilots become the craft. They have expanded fields of vision, data from the ship's status comes in as taste, smell and touch. It is an extremely addictive feeling, leading to some pilots remaining jacked in between missions. Recently the Commonwealth military had set up better screening processes to avoid this. Reception to these new tests is varied.
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.
- 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.
- Stargate Atlantis also did this a few times. In one episode, McKay has to get Sheppard out of a VR where he's imprisoned. Later they use a VR system to dive into each others' minds., and there's also a VR pod that a friendly replicator girl gets plugged into to keep her on ice, while giving her the impression of living a normal life.
- 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.
- Red Dwarf had a slew of games and realities of this type, generally known as Total Immersion Gaming. The sims ranged from Better Than Life, a free-form fantasy enabler; to Streets of Laredo, a wild-west game that allowed players to play as one of three cowboys with their own unique skills; to Jane Austen World, which is exactly what it sounds like.
- Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad.
Theatre
- Possible Worlds by John Mighton has two detectives investigating the theft of a human brain. At one point they go to a scientist who studies brains, and one takes a machine hooked up to a rat brain with him. He muses what it would be like to be like the rat brain and believe things are real although they are really just electrical pulses. His partner tells him not to be ridiculous. Also, In the end, the detectives find that the scientist with the rat brain had stolen the human one and all the scenes that had "happened" to the dead man were just dreams he was having after the scientist hooked up some machine to his brain. Fascinating play, but bloody confusing.
Video Games
- The video game A Mind Forever Voyaging has you as a computer AI, with the real world around you simulated, and now you've been let in on the gag.
- The people of Tranquility Lane in Fallout 3 are all in pods hooked up into the main computer a la The Matrix.
Web Comics
- The webcomic The Noob is set in the VR of the "Clichequest" MMORPG. (Mostly, at least.)
- Used for a shameless Matrix parody during the Sluggy Freelance mini-arc "The Quatrix"
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- Near the end of Narbonic, Helen goes into the AI computer that Dave has taken over, in order to try to rescue him.
Web Original
- 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.
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. Going further than just "connected", though, the heroes are physically transported into the virtual world.
- Scooby-Doo and his buds did the Tron version of this trope, being disassembled in the real world and dropped into a video game in Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase.
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