My wife Sharon died doing what she loved. It was a freak accident, nobody's fault, nobody to blame or be angry at. We had been deployed together on a disaster medical assistance mission to a far off community devastated by a hurricane. We were there to pick up and fly to safety a national guardsman who had been critically injured helping the victims of that disaster. The helicopter we were riding in had just touched down onto a rain soaked field. We both knew the pilot well. He was one of the best, very skilled and extremely safety conscious. Like I said, it was a freak accident. The aircraft was shut down before anybody unbuckled, as per protocol. As we were exiting the door a strong gust of wind lifted the helicopter slightly at the exact the moment Sharon stepped out and her foot touched the ground. The copter rotated in the wind and the skid came down hard on her leg, crushing her when it pounded back against the muddy earth. That wasn't the biggest problem. When she got yanked down by the two ton aircraft, her head hit a rock that was poking up through the sodden ground. Sharon died quickly, never regaining consciousness. My only solace was that that she didn't suffer. I sat in the mud and held her hand while they extricated her broken body from under the machine. A circle of friends and colleagues stood around us crying. I couldn't move for the longest time.
We had talked about what to do if something like this ever happened. Sharon had everything pre-arranged down to the smallest detail. She was that kind of person. In a daze, I brought her back home and did everything just the way she'd outlined. Now, months later, I was still numb. I had plenty of friends who came by to cheer me up, who tried to keep me busy and involved. It was nice of them and I appreciated it. But it all felt hollow. I was okay with being alive, but not happy about it, not without her. I missed Sharon so much, her laugh, the twinkle in her eyes, her jokes and teasing, her smart-mouthed comments. I missed everything. Most of all I missed Sharon's touch. From the very start of our love affair her touch had been something special. There was a kind of electricity that ran from her hand to my very soul. It imparted a spark that made me more alive; not just feel more alive, but be more alive. Whether we were doing mundane chores around the house or making mad passionate love, her every touch made my heart beat a bit faster, me breathe a bit deeper, see more clearly, and feel everything more fully. It made life more worth living. I craved Sharon's touch every minute of every day and it was gone. It hurt and I physically felt it's absence every waking moment.
****
When the researchers at the university called me and asked me to volunteer for their experiment I immediately said yes. I needed something different, something that might take my mind away from missing the love of my life. An outlandish experiment was just the thing. Over the phone, they told me that it had something to do with a new kind of sensory input technique designed to augment virtual reality systems. I had helped the university develop some VR simulation training scenarios so it made sense that they would call me. I didn't know anything else about it, what it involved, or whether or not it might be dangerous. I didn't care. I'd already lost everything that was important to me, I had nothing else to lose.
"We know that emotions and sensation are closely connected," one of the researchers was explaining to me when I got to the lab . "This new system allows us to feed sensory input to the subject with such intensity that it should also evoke an emotional response. That should bring the perception of 'realness' of the virtual system to a whole new level making it much, much better than anything that we do now. The resolution of the sensations that we can trigger with this systems are at least ten orders of magnitude higher than anything anybody's ever been able to do. We're using a next generation, high gigaflop processer and low temp, nitrogen cooled microprobes linked with an high speed optical array storage device..."
I was only half listening to what he was saying and barely understood half the things he was talking about. Doctor Phillips, my friend in the lab and the one I had worked with in the past, laid his hand on the speaker's shoulder stopping the flood of words. "What Jim is saying is that it should feel very, very real." Phillips had known Sharon too. We'd all gone out to dinner together many times after I had finished day-long sessions helping him in the lab. We had a running joke between us that he needed to come up with a way to enjoy the alcohol induced glow from pitchers of margaritas without the tequila hangover. He cried along with everyone else at her memorial service.
"We've never done this with a person before and we have no idea how it will affect you. You need to know that," Dr Phillips gently explained to me.
I nodded. "I get it. I'm happy to help out in any way that I can. What do you want me to do?"
"The probes need to have really good contact in order to work. There are about a hundred of them that attach to your scalp with small needles. There are other probes that go into your nostrils, on your tongue and multiple places on your skin. It will take at least an hour to wire you up. We're planning on this session lasting most of the day and we've learned from animal experiments that keeping you well hydrated with an intravenous electrolyte solution is very important. Since you won't be able to get up and urinate, we'll need you to wear a condom-style catheter. You also need to empty your bowels before we start. Are you okay with all that?" Jim, the first researcher, asked.
"I ate a good breakfast and took care of 'business' before I got here. I'm good to go." I tried to sound as upbeat as I could, but the emptiness of Sharon's absence filled me. The lab didn't distract my thoughts from her the way I had hoped. It only reminded me of how much I had lost.
"Two more things you need to know before we get started," Dr Phillips said looking at me with paternal concern. "First, this is just the first generation version of the system. We don't really know what you will perceive or feel. There's no way yet for us to control specifically what the sensations will be. For example, through the computer we will send you temperature, touch, pain, pressure skin sensations, but they won't be a specific sensation of say silk or sand. Same thing with taste and smell. We'll tell the computer to stimulate specific receptors on your tongue, or one of the olfactory receptors in your nose, but we have no idea what you will feel like you're smelling or tasting."
I nodded again, not really caring.
"The other thing is that we already know how to send out sounds and images. That's pretty easy. What we want to learn about today is how the other senses are stimulated with this new system and how that will affect you. We're going to set this up so that you won't be able to actually see or hear anything. Human brains don't do well without sight and sound because we are so visually centered. So it's likely that you will have some visual and auditory hallucinations. You brain will create sights and sounds that will probably loosely match the other sensory input. It will be kind of like a dream. Do you get that?" He asked.
I nodded again not saying anything.
"I'm not sure what it will feel like. It may be great, or it may be really disturbing. Just like some dreams are wonderful and others are nightmares. We simply don't know what to expect, " he concluded looking carefully at me trying to gage my reaction.
I just sat still not speaking, not caring. I answered his unspoken question of whether or not I could handle the experiment. "Let's get this show on the road," I said.
Dr Phillips nodded a silent okay.
I stripped naked and changed into a hospital Johnny gown, the kind that's open in the back. They explained that it would make it easier to put in the intravenous line and apply all the leads necessary for the experiment. My hair was already cut short so applying the scalp probes was easy. I laid still in the recliner as the technicians applied what seemed like thousands of wires to my body. It felt like every square inch, front, sides, and back, hands, feet, face, was covered with the sensors. There were even ones on my butt and groin.
"Leaving no stone unturned," I said to one of the techs.
"Just trying to be complete," the tech answered back. I noticed that she had blonde, shoulder length hair, sort of like Sharon's. I could see her muscles ripple as she moved about almost cat-like. It reminded me strongly of my love and her gorgeous athletic body. I had loved feeling her against me. I instantly ached for her.
They let me put on the condom-style catheter myself. It was no different than rolling on a regular condom. I didn't tell them that it had been a very long time since I'd used one of those. My wife and I had never had to worry about birth control. "I've been fixed," she joked before we'd made love the first time. So we had always enjoyed the extra intimacy of pure skin-on-skin contact with every sexual encounter.
"I love to feel your bare cock in me exploding," she had said many times. "It makes my orgasm so much more intense."
I had loved that sensation too.
***
