Vibe-dreaming
The ad said: Earn $10,000. One hour. Medical research.
Marcus Chen pressed his thumb against the glass door. The scanner beeped green. Inside, everything was white — white walls, white floors, white ceiling tiles that hummed with hidden ventilation. The kind of white that made your teeth ache.
"Mr. Chen?" A woman in a lab coat extended her hand. Young. Maybe twenty-five. Ponytail pulled so tight it stretched her eyes. "I'm Sarah. Thanks for coming."
Her handshake was damp. Cold.
"Ten grand for an hour?" Marcus said. "I'd be stupid not to."
Sarah's laugh came out wrong. Too high. Too fast. "Right this way."
They walked past doors with no handles. Past windows showing empty rooms with single chairs. Past a janitor mopping the same spot over and over, his eyes unfocused, mouth slightly open.
"Here we are." Sarah badged into Room 47B.
A dentist's chair. Black leather. Articulated arms hanging from the ceiling, each ending in something sharp. Something precise. A monitor showing his vitals — heart rate 72, blood pressure 12080, neural activity baseline.
"Just sit." Sarah's fingers trembled as she adjusted the headrest. "I need to explain the procedure."
Marcus settled into the leather.
"We're going to interface your neural pathways with our proprietary AI," Sarah said, pulling latex gloves from a dispenser. Snap. Snap. "Think of it as... lucid dreaming. But more."
"More how?"
"You'll experience whatever you want. Whatever you've ever wanted." She wheeled over a tray. Silver instruments. A syringe filled with something opalescent. "The AI reads your deepest impulses and constructs realities in real-time. Complete sensory immersion."
"For an hour."
"Subjectively, yes." Sarah swabbed his temple with alcohol. The smell bit at his nostrils. "Objectively, the entire experience occurs in approximately —"
"Just do it."
Sarah's hand paused. "You're sure?"
Marcus thought about his ex-wife's lawyer. The custody papers. The empty apartment that still smelled like his daughter's strawberry shampoo. "Yeah."
The first needle went in behind his ear. No pain. Just pressure. Then cold spreading through his skull like spilled milk.
"Count backward from ten," Sarah said.
"Ten. Nine. Eight —"
The world cracked open.
He was seventeen again, in Melissa Rodriguez's basement, her parents gone for the weekend. Her mouth tasted like cherry lip gloss and stolen vodka. This time he didn't fumble with her bra. This time he knew exactly what to do with his hands, his tongue, his...
No.
He was twenty-three, accepting the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum computing. The weight of the medal around his neck. The flash of cameras. His father in the front row, finally proud, finally...
No.
He was thirty, CEO of a tech startup, firing Johnson from accounting. Johnson who'd laughed at his presentation. Johnson on his knees, begging. The power tasted like copper pennies and...
The experiences cascaded. Overlapped. A thousand first times. Every woman he'd wanted. Every man he'd wanted to destroy. Every configuration of flesh and power and violence and tenderness.
He killed his stepfather with a hammer. Made love to his high school English teacher. Became President. Became God. Became nothing.
Time dilated. Contracted.
He lived as a emperor in ancient Rome, watching gladiators tear each other apart while slave girls fed him grapes. He lived as the gladiator, sand between his teeth, sword wet with stranger's blood. He lived as the slave girl, fingers sticky with juice, counting the minutes until...
A lifetime in Tokyo. Neon and sake and bodies pressed together on midnight trains.
A lifetime in prison. Concrete and fluorescent lights and the weight of what he'd done.
A lifetime as a woman. Menstrual cramps and catcalls and the particular exhaustion of being looked through and looked at simultaneously.
A lifetime as a child who never grew up. Cancer at seven. Parents sobbing. The taste of morphine.
The lives blurred. Stacked. He was everyone. Had everything. Did everything.
And still the hunger.
He murdered. Was murdered. Loved. Was loved. Betrayed. Was betrayed.
A thousand variations of the same themes. Power. Sex. Revenge. Connection.
But underneath each experience, the same ache. The same emptiness that no configuration of neurons firing could fill.
He tried cessation. Meditation. Years in a monastery, shaved head, rice twice a day. But even in the silence, the wanting whispered.
He tried excess. Every drug. Every combination. Heroin and methamphetamine and DMT and compounds that didn't exist yet. Colors that had no names. Pleasures that had no boundaries.
Nothing.
Nothing worked.
Ten thousand lifetimes. A hundred thousand. The number lost meaning.
He began to notice patterns. The way every pleasure curdled. The way every perfect moment contained its own ending. The way every full stomach promised future hunger.
He lived as a photon, experiencing the universe at light speed. Time stopped. Everything happened at once. Birth and death. Creation and entropy. The cosmic joke of...
Wait.
Something shifted. Not in the simulated worlds but in his awareness of them.
He was Marcus Chen, thirty-four, divorced, sitting in a chair in a Neuralink facility.
He was also not.
He was the awareness experiencing Marcus Chen experiencing ten million variations of desire.
The simulations continued but he watched them now from somewhere else. Somewhere outside. Like watching a movie of someone watching a movie of someone watching a movie, infinite recursion, mirrors facing mirrors.
The experiences continued — murder, sex, power, loss — but they happened to no one. In no one. Neurons firing in meat. Electricity in silicon. No different. No difference.
The fear came then. Pure. Absolute. The fear of —
"Mr. Chen?"
Sarah's voice. Far away. Close.
"Mr. Chen, can you hear me?"
The room reassembled. White walls. White floor. The leather chair beneath him soaked with—
"How long?" His voice came out wrong. Rough. Like he'd been screaming.
Sarah checked her tablet. Her face was pale. Sweat beaded on her upper lip. "Thirteen seconds."
"Thirteen —"
"Since initial neural interface." She was already removing the needles. Quick. Practiced. "We need to run some tests. Make sure you're —"
"I'm fine."
"Mr. Chen, your neural activity spiked beyond anything we've —" She stopped. Stared at her tablet. "Your brain generated the equivalent of ten million years of experiential data in thirteen seconds. That's not... that shouldn't be possible."
Marcus stood. His legs held. Barely.
"The check," he said.
"We need to keep you for observation. The legal ramifications if something —"
"The check."
Sarah's hands shook as she pulled up the payment app. "I'm sending it now. But please, Mr. Chen, let us run some scans. Your amygdala showed severe —"
The phone buzzed. Transfer complete.
Marcus walked to the door. Each step felt like falling. Like flying. Like nothing.
"Mr. Chen!"
He turned.
Sarah stood by the chair, tablet clutched to her chest. "What did you experience? For the research. We need to know what you experienced."
Marcus thought about the taste of cherry lip gloss. The weight of a Nobel Prize. The sand between a gladiator's teeth. The space between experience and experiencer. The crack in everything.
"Everything," he said.
The door closed behind him. Soft. Final.
He made it to the parking lot. Three steps past his car. The asphalt was warm under his cheek. Rough. Real. Not real. The distinction had stopped mattering.
Inside the building, alarms screamed. Sarah was running. Would run. Had run. Time was broken now. Had always been broken.
His heart stopped.
Started.
Stopped.
The last thing Marcus Chen experienced was all of it. Every pleasure. Every pain. Every lifetime collapsed into a single point of infinite density. The orgasm of a seventeen-year-old. The grief of a parent losing a child. The cold of space. The heat of creation.
All of it.
At once.
Forever.
For thirteen seconds.
In Room 47B, Sarah stood at the monitor, watching his final brain scan play on repeat, watching the moment when every synapse fired at once, when the boundary between Marcus Chen and everything else dissolved.
The autopsy called it “Neural cascade failure.”
