And so it went. I hacked website after website, and kept losing track of the strangeness of it all. It was like I was being reset like a computer program. And yet—I didn’t lose everything. Over the course of slamming through a dozen websites, I gradually built up a tolerance. I began to be able to take my attention away from hacking for a few moments at a time. But if I slacked, or tried to get up, WHAM , reset, I was back at the computer again trying to remember what I’d just been doing.

But then I wrote a little script that kept the computer busy doing stuff, so it looked like I was still hacking away. And then, with it running, I tried pushing my chair back. That was it! I’d done it! Smug in my victory, I stood up and looked around.

At first glance, it looked exactly like the room back in my old house. But there was something weird about the landscape outside the window. When I took a closer look, I realized there wasn’t a landscape. It was a painting.

Or…not a painting. A virtual reality texture.