Enter the LyfeBox™

Sierra P. Hatchett File #002

These days, it feels like the future is forever upon us, but I’m not a politician, which is why I try to make sense out of the world via fiction.

Below is an excerpt from a story I started discovering a few years ago called “The Wicked Circus” about a near-future society that closely resembles our own.

Sierra P. Hatchett is one of the story’s three heroes. She’s just been through a breakup, and she wants to begin again.

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What a difference a month inside a LyfeBox™ makes.

Today is Sierra P. Hatchett’s last day in conversation with something resembling oblivion.

Another day, another unspent dollar inside a hyper-realist augmented reality surrounded by 16K LED walls.

Yes, life has been breezy inside this veritable pleasure cube. The implant in Sierra’s brain analyzes her dopamine and serotonin levels to soothe problematic thoughts and unexamined behavioral patterns with calming weather events perfectly chosen for the seasonally appropriate air.

The pheromonal sprays coming from within the LED walls are hissing to render a cloudless blue Italian sky populated with the silver linings of golden-haired nimbus clouds.

Sierra looks up to the heavens to bask in the swirling symphony of Italian songbirds crooning across a 16K domed ceiling.

It is spring.

In at least one way, the LyfeBox™  is truly alive,

and while the wallpaper isn’t yellow inside this state-of-the-art leisure chamber, it wouldn’t matter if it were, because the white-canvas LED walls are at Sierra’s service, providing a comprehensive 4D-experience unlike any other.

Most of the world’s citizens haven’t heard of the LyfeBox™ just yet.

Still, those in the know—hundreds of thousands of Capital Region citizens with money to spend—have deposited tens of thousands of dollars into escrow accounts to earn a place on a waiting-list for a single day inside the LyfeBox™, and here is Sierra after thirty-days inside, a happy, sedated clam living so many other people’s dreams from within the confines of her own head.

Sierra is happy, or at least she thinks she is.

After a month of extra-strength Tranqualta®, it is chemically impossible for her to feel sadness, and after four weeks basking in the warmth of digitized seashores, the only thing that’s missing is a picture to prove just how happy she was to sign the NDA.

Sierra has seen the world from the comfort of her sofa.

She has hiked up an elliptical machine while traversing the more real-than-real Andes, has sat by a bonfire with digital avatars of ancient South American tribes and astral projected with them through the galactic plane, far, far away from here with the help of synthetic dimethyltryptamine.

Yes, maybe she has discovered renewed purpose in her own life from with the limitless, HD-rendered expanse, free to swim out of the cage that used to be her curious mind, replacing the Hard Questions with an endless cosmic adventure via a few more drips of ketamine and an endless stream of edifying and award-winning shows.

Sierra sits back and relaxes.

Her neural implant does the rest from the confines of her occipital lobe.