= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
What happens when an avatar based on you is connected to your dreams.... and to your reality.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Alice awoke screaming, her naked body drenched in sweat. Since the nightmares began she had abandoned pajamas or nighties or even panties. The nightmares were bad. Waking up sweaty and clammy was worse. Bolting to the bathroom barely in time to throw up was even more so. But since the nightmares happened almost every night, Alice had grown almost used to her nightly run to the toilet and the spasms as her stomach emptied. What she could not grow used to, however, was having to struggle to remove clothing stuck to her body with her own sweat and urine and splashed vomit. That, as a nightly task, was just too much to endure.
It was by far easier to sleep naked and then just kneel on the floor of the bathroom naked puking into the toilet. At least when she was done heaving her guts out, she could stand up and immediately step into the shower and begin to wash away the sweat and stink before returning to her bed and hopefully getting at least a few hours of true sleep.
Tonight had been particularly bad. The nightmare had begun as it always did with strange, alien creatures dragging her down a hallway. But tonight the torture was different... and more severe. Tonight, Alice had dreamed that she was suspended upside down by her ankles in a large metal room. The ropes that held her tight stretched upward and downward into the corners of the room so that she hung diagonally across its center. In the dim light, she could see that her hands were tied to eyebolts welded to the floor at the corners of the room. What held her ankles in the upper corners was lost in the darkness.
Unseen hands reached forward with long arrow-shaped probes and touched her - or almost touched her. Each time a probe appeared a spark - a lighting bolt? - jumped from the probe to her body. She twisted and jerked and screamed and then screamed and screamed again as the electricity repeatedly tore through her.
Suddenly she was awake. It wasn't that she came slowly awake or even rapidly woke up. One moment she was twisting and screaming in agony, the next she was bolt upright in her bed screaming in terror.
As soon as she realized that she was back in her own bed, Alice started running for the bathroom. She was not yet retching, but she knew it would soon come. Her only thought as she ran was that if she could make it to the bathroom before she threw up, at least she wouldn't have to spend additional time on her hands and knees wiping up vomit from the floor
She made it to the bathroom and slid to a stop on her knees in front of the toilet. The spasms came immediately and she began to throw up in the bowl. She hated throwing up. She had always hated throwing up, even as a small child. For her, the spasms and forceful retching were almost as bad as the nightmares, and they were just as uncontrollable.
Tonight even the vomiting was especially bad with strong spasms seeming to come from deep within her. Each spasm brought a stab of pain that felt like razors were passing through her entire body. As she continued to retch into the toilet bowl, she felt her bladder empty from the force of the spasms in her abdomen. Warm urine splatted against her ankles. "So much for not having to clean the floor," she thought as the spasms gradually subsided and she was finally able to slowly lower herself backwards to rest her haunches on her ankles and her head on the cool porcelain.
Yes, she had seen doctors... and therapists... and psychiatrists. They all said that there was "nothing physically wrong with her," which is a polite doctor way of saying she was going nuts.
After the spasms had finally come to an end, Alice got up from the floor and stepped into the shower. She didn't bother waiting for the water to warm up. The blast of cold water brought her totally awake and was as cleansing to her mind as the later warm water and soap would be to her body. After the shower warmed, she lathered her body and rinsed away the residue of her copious sweating. Then she shampooed her hair. Her friends often complemented her on her new, short hairdo. She didn't bother trying to explain that not only was it easier to take care of, it was much easier to remove the sweat from each night.
She stood under the stream of water rinsing her body and letting the warm water relax her until the hot water ran out and the stream finally began to turn cold. She then emerged from the shower stall and stood for a few minutes drying herself with her last fresh towel before dropping it to the floor and wiping up the yellow liquid by rubbing it across the tiles with her foot.
"Oh crap," she said aloud. "If this is my last towel, then I'm probably out of fresh sheets also."
She was. So instead of changing the bed and going back to sleep, she gathered up the sheets from the bed and from the hamper in the bedroom and put them in the washing machine. The towels that she had gathered from the bathroom hamper were left in a pile on the floor in front of the utility closet that held the washer and dryer. They could wash while the sheets were drying, but it would still be at least an hour before Alice could go back to bed.
Remaining nude, she wandered over to her computer and brought up her web browser. Hoping that someone, somewhere in the world suffered from the same problems that she did and had put something on the internet - or perhaps that some doctor somewhere described what she was experiencing as symptomatic of some disease, she typed the words, "nightmare, torture, electricity, screams" into the search engine. She hit enter and then switched over to her mail program to log into her account - or at least she thought she did. What she actually did was hit the shift key instead of the enter key and then completely miss the special email key.
The email program hadn't opened and she had never started her search, so when Alice - without looking at the screen - began to sign in to her email account, what she actually did was add "Alice321" to the search engine string along with her other key words. When she hit the enter key, thinking that it would move her to the password field in the email program, she finally started the search.
She glanced up before she entered her password and saw that it wasn't the sign in screen she had expected. In fact, it wasn't a sign in screen at all. It was search results. She vehemently said "Shit!" hit enter, and once again attempted to open her email program.
Her hands must not have been seated properly on the keyboard because for a second time she missed the key for the email program and when she hit enter - again, without looking at the screen - what she actually did was to select the first item in the search list. A pop-up window from that site appeared on her computer asking for her screen name and password.
Alice finally looked up at what was on her screen. This screen looked different than her normal email sign in, but she had often complained that they kept changing that page just to force her to look at the ads before she signed in. Thinking she had, at last, gotten to email, she typed her sign in name, "Alice321" and her password, which was her cell phone number. Her almost boyfriend, Alex, had suggested she use that as her password. "After all," he said, "it is easy to remember and it isn't really listed anywhere that most people could find it."
A new tab opened in her browser that said in big bold letters, "Welcome to the Member's Section of Torturing Alice. Tonight Alice endures a special electrical torture in the steel room."
Alice was now wide awake and staring at her screen. Her mouth was wide open and she gasped as her name in bright pink letters burned into her mind. Even more shocking to her than her name was the image of herself just below it in the center of the screen hanging upside down and naked in a large steel cube. When she looked a little closer, she could see that it wasn't a picture, but a computer depiction of her - an avatar - accurate down to the little dolphin tattoo just to the left of her vagina that she had gotten to hide a small birthmark.
"God damn you Alex," she screamed at the screen. "God damn you to the deepest hell that exists and four more levels beyond that."
Alex was much more than just a friend, but still less than a true boyfriend. He had talked her into "posing" for an avatar to be used on a web-based game of some sort, but he had never told her the nature of the game. He promised her that it was just a one day process and it would pay her $5,000. He said it was the easiest money she would ever make.
Nothing is that easy, but it wasn't bad. For most of the day she walked around and danced wearing a skin-tight full-body leotard that had strange reflective dots all over it. Alex said that was to "capture her movement patterns." Then she had to go through a nude laser scan totally relaxed so they could make "an electronic mold of her body."
That she didn't like - not only because she had to shave off ALL body hair for the scan, but also because, after several attempts, Alex said that she was still moving too much and they would have to sedate her. He assured her that it was just a "harmless, low-level sedative" injected in her neck muscle near the back of her skull. It was relatively painless, but it put her out completely for quite a while. The only problem or side effect was that the injection site itched for a week afterwards. The avatar hanging in the steel box on the screen was obviously the result of that work.
