Sam had moved to LA to be an actress. But the only job she could get was at this weird startup nobody had heard of. The work wasn’t exactly acting. But it wasn’t… not acting either? She was a body. She would show up to the offices and get her assignments for the day. Then she would get into her suit, a black spandex bodysuit covered in little white dots, and walk out onto the motion capture stage—a repurposed warehouse painted all green, with hundreds of cameras surrounding an inner circle.

Sam walks down the nearby hallway to the women’s dressing room, where she happily peels off the spandex bodysuit. Gently turning it right side out, she gives it a once over. A few of the little white balls are starting to come loose, especially on her butt where her heels kept resting and bumping during today’s shoot. She’ll have to take it over to the company seamstress tomorrow to get some replacements.

The green panel pops out once more, and the man in the hoodie pokes his head out. “Nope, I think we got it.”

Sam stands on the other side of the door and reaches her arms up above her head, then folds at the waist, stretching out her legs. Crouching and scuttling all day was really starting to kill her hips and knees. She gives her spindly limbs one last shake, and then opens the door and walks back through the set towards the desk.

Sam takes it from the top. She crouches, motionless beneath the desk. Counts to seven. Breathes shallowly, quietly, closes her eyes a bit. At seven, she pokes her head around the side of the desk. Pauses. Counts for four. Looks around. Takes a deep breath. Then scuttles, hands behind her head, protecting her neck, low as she can, to the door. Spins, puts her back to the door. Turns her head, ear aligned perfectly with the crack. Listens. Counts to ten again. Reaches over, pushes the door open as slowly as she possibly can. Just open enough so that her compact body can slide through. Slides through. Cut to black, end scene.

Sam shifts her weight over and scoots a bit to the left, then looks over at the man in the hoodie as if to say “like this?” and he nods. “Great, yeah, that’s better. Let’s take it from the top.” He steps back behind the screen and slides it into place so it seals seamlessly, disappearing.

“Sam, can you actually shift your body a little left, and put your weight on your left foot instead of your right? So you’re closer to the side of the desk.”

Woman closes eyes, takes deep breath. Reaches with right hand, slowly pulls the door open just enough to slip out of it and slide through.

Fire alarm is going off in the distance but otherwise no sound but her breathing. Ten long seconds.

WOMAN shifts her weight, and leans to the left to try and look out the crack in the door. She waits for four counts, then decides to move. Puts her hands behind her head and shuffles, low to the ground, from the desk to the door. Sits on the ground, back to the door, ear turned to the crack to listen.

**360 camera (CENTRAL POV) sits in the center of a generic office meeting room. Long table, phone in the middle, off the hook, dial tone audible, chairs scattered around. Fire alarm is going off somewhere.**

Virtual reality stands to let us convincingly experience things we would otherwise never experience—and perhaps, might never want to. As is often the case, the less revealed here about Rose Eveleth's story about VR, the erosion of digital content-free reality, and consent, the better. Read on. -the editor

VRtual supplies VR experiences to everyone: companies, governments, NGO’s, media outlets, even private wealthy clients. SThey do sexual harassment training, active shooter response training, lock down training, first responder training. There are experiences for parents who want to adopt kids, putting them through abuse and neglect before letting them walk away with a child; sensitivity experiences for those who want to overcome fears; empathy trainings to understand the lives of the homeless, or sex workers, or addicts, or refugees; mental health therapy training for those who want to get over past abuse, rape, assault.

Today, VRtual is nearly unrecognizable from the handful of dudes she had originally signed up to work for. Sam is now one of hundreds of bodies who work there, and instead of one grungy warehouse stage they now have a whole complex in an old airplane hangar. VRtual has become the biggest proprietor of on demand VR experiences in the world.

RONALD Great, I’m sure you’ll do great. Wear that red dress you have. (Gives her shoulders a final squeeze) And try to relax! (Walks away.)

MARISSA Looks around to other workers for help. A few people have noticed the interaction, but they avoid her eyes.

RONALD Thank you. Of course, she holds no candle to you. (Starts to massage her shoulders.) You seem stressed?

WOMAN (MARISSA) (doesn’t look up from her computer) Good morning Ronald, can I help you with something?

MAN comes up from behind, puts hand on her shoulder. Woman moves her body away from him, awkwardly. Man leaves hand on her shoulder. Woman removes headphones. All other employees continue working as if nothing is happening.

LEFT POV: aisle between the desks, at the end is another aisle that leads to another row of cubicles. On the wall at this T-intersection is an inspirational poster.

REVERSE POV: several other working employees, typing on their computers. One is on the phone. Another is eating yogurt out of a cup.

She didn’t get scripts as much as she got stage directions. Her job was to perform the motions and movements in whatever scenario she’d been assigned. Eventually, someone else’s face would be mapped onto hers. Usually a computer-generated one, an amalgamation of hundreds of people to create a face that felt vaguely familiar, but was also totally unrecognizable. On the rare occasion that she had actual lines, those were usually replaced by a voice simulation later anyway. In other words, nobody would know it was her.

As an body, Sam plays everything and everybody: secretaries and teenagers and moms and orphans and prisoners. The casting guys liked her because she was small. Small enough to be the body of an adult or a teenager. Small enough to be unthreatening, to fit in small spaces and to elicit pity from viewers. Six months ago VRtual got a huge contract with the city of Chicago to create VR experiences for jurors to relive the cases they’re deciding on. Those are especially awful to act in, because you know they are real things that happened. For the generic training videos you can tell yourself it’s all pretend. Court shots pay more though, because you have to be really precise. Lawyers send over incredibly detailed notes on the exact posture and facial expression and order of movements. Sometimes they even send over reference videos to watch in advance. Jury shoots take several days, even weeks, and animators sometimes come back for reshoots because your body was an inch out of alignment, and nobody wants to be sued.

But bodies are never allowed to know anything about the case beyond their movements. In theory, this is about privacy, the idea being that there would be no way the bodies could connect their motions to any news coverage the case might get. But of course, some of the shots are so specific that it wouldn’t be that hard to track the cases down. Sam can never decide if this information blackout is better or worse. Either way, she never Googles the cases she plays in. She doesn’t want to know what the juries decide, doesn’t want to feel in some way responsible for someone getting off because she didn’t tremble visibly enough for the jury to convict.

It isn’t all terrible though. Rich people also hire the company to recreate their favorite memories from the past, so they can relive them. Those casting calls usually require more experience and specialization. Knowing how to fence, row, sail, dance the waltz, where to put the dessert fork. These clients are also the pickiest, and there is a whole team of people at VRtual whose job it is to interview them about their memories and then research to recreate them. When someone can’t remember, for example, which precise street that first kiss happened on, the producers have to guesstimate some generic amalgamation of rooms and streets and hope that it is close enough to appease the client. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But often the complaints are just as vague as the original request. “That’s not what it looked like,” they say, but they can’t tell you specifically what it did look like, or what to change. But most memory recreations are obvious ones. Sam has been in countless weddings, on endless first dates, been “first kissed” over and over. She’s lost track of how many times she’s held her baby for the first time, met her real parents for the first time, seen fireworks, played on the beach, graduated college. At parties, when Sam would tell people what she did, it was always followed by a series of questions: have I seen you in anything? “You might have, but it would be hard to tell,” she would say. “I’m just the body. There’s another person’s face placed on top. I wouldn’t even recognize myself in one.” What she didn’t tell people was that now, certain motions made her nervous. Crouching, she was always crouching. Hiding from someone, chained to a cell, hiding under a bed, tucked behind an office desk during a shooting. It would sneak up at odd times. Playing with a nephew, crouching behind a desk to surprise him, and suddenly a wave of nausea would hit her. Her body remembered, reacted, like it was riding a bike. Or like when you pick a swimming dog up out of the water and they keep moving their legs. Sam wasn’t the only one who struggled though. Not long after VRtual went public, an expose came out in a big newspaper about a handful of workers who had panic attacks on set and were unceremoniously let go. The CEO responded to the article in a companywide email expressing smarmy, unconvincing condolences to anybody who felt stressed or unsupported at the company. “We take the health and safety of our workers very seriously here,” he said, while also cheekily acknowledging the irony that a company who makes so many workplace safety videos was now facing a workplace safety issue itself. In response to the article, VRtual hired consultants to evaluate the conditions and make recommendations. A few months later everybody got another email, a PDF of updates and changes the company would be making. The attachment was brightly colored and designed to make you forget that there had ever been a problem at all. There would now be a counselor on call during work hours, but the smiling faces in the PDF made you wonder why they’d be necessary. Employee health benefits would now include mental health coverage, but none of the people on the page seemed to need it. Bodies like Sam would now receive their scripts 48 hours in advance, and be allowed to opt-out of shoots up to 24 hours before the work day began (limit 2 opt-outs per month). Anybody who felt overwhelmed during a shoot could now say a safe word and the shoot would stop. If their mouths were covered for some reason, they could drop to the ground and straighten all their limbs, and the director would have to end the shoot. The motion seemed absurd to Sam. She tried to imagine, in the midst of pretending to run from a school shooter, dropping to the ground and stiffening like a board. She never learned if anybody used this “safety motion” or not.

FADE IN INT. Western themed bar. NIGHT. **The 360 camera (CENTRAL POV) sits in the center of a dimly lit bar.** FORWARD POV: first person perspective, woman, at a booth with her friends. REVERSE POV: the door to leave the bar. Over the door is a lasso molded to spell out the words “Giddy Up.” Stool near the door where a bouncer might sit, but it’s always empty. LEFT POV: bar, grouchy bartender, arms crossed, some men sitting at the bar. Several wearing plaid. A handful of cowboy hats. Drinking mostly hard liquor. Further back, two pool tables. Two other people playing darts. RIGHT POV: booths full of people drinking and laughing. Jukebox past the booths, two people stand looking at it.

There’s a bar near the office that everybody goes to after work. It’s not a good bar. But the VRtual soundstage is on a giant lot full of retired and empty military hangers, far from anything else. The bar is Western themed. Taxidermied animals on the wall, sheet-metal cowboy hats and lassoes that spell our words all over the place. There are pool tables in the back and a jukebox that only works part of the time. The floor is always sticky. They generally keep to the booths in the front, by the door. At the back it gets hot and smoky and full of guys she always wondered about. Nobody lives around here, and they don’t work at VRtual. Do they make the trip out here to come to this specific shitty bar? She avoids them as much as possible. But the bathroom is back there, where they all hang out. It’s a Wednesday. They’re there for someone’s going away drinks. Sam pops up, and scoots out of the booth less than gracefully, pointing to the bathroom, she’ll be right back. Walking towards the back of the bar, she realizes that she’s a little drunker than she thought. The weird ossified lassos strung up all over the rafters look wigglier than usual.