Chapter 1

At long last, today is the day we turn it on!

After years of hard work and preparation, millions of man hours, years of planning and preparation, hundreds of millions of dollars dumped into research and development -- measuring everything from biometrics to mapping out entire countrysides from the tallest mountain to the smallest acorn -- it's finally here! We are turning this thing on!

People have been fantasizing about overcoming the human experience since the dawn of time. It's almost instinctual, built right there within the human genome, and I can say that with some authority because we measured it - no other animal on this planet can think about itself the way humans do. No other animal can self assess, create a sandbox environment in their mind and project itself into a future or alternative reality.

But we can.

But until now we've been restricted to the environments we create and share within our minds. Sure, we can shape our environment around us, but humans are incredibly inefficient at this - and our environment doesn't really facilitate the kinds of rapid changes that our brains our capable of.

Think about a large building. First off, it takes time for planning and design of the building. Then it takes time to dig out a deep hole in the ground. Then it takes months to even years and hundreds of people to build the thing. And that's not even including the man-hours it takes just to design and manufacture each individual piece of material, from the years of farming the lumber, mining the metals and forming them into their proper shapes. So many hours taken, and that doesn't even include the time it takes to travel throughout the process as well as the environmental impact felt around the world. You can't just copy a building, or even part of a building, without repeating the entire process over again.

Inefficient.

With such a finite amount of time given to our lives and so much sacrificed for the quality of lives, a few years ago I proposed that we could do better. It all started with an idea and a pitch sent out on the Internet, in a blog post of all places. An idea culminated upon the millions of years of thought and advancement taken up to that point. It was an idea that merged the CGI in movies with the interactivity of video games, with a twist of Star Wars, a dash of the Matrix and a pinch of Second Life, formed during my time on the road and eventually conceived under the backdrop of the mountains of Colorado...and finally projected into a sandbox future that looked much like the Jetsons.

But it's not just the future. God, it's so much more than the future.

It's the past and it's the present. It's a whole set of new dimensions and alternative realities based upon anything you can dream of. It's the Reddit of alternative reality and virtual reality. It's the existence of entire new realities based upon shared ideas.

Let me be clear though. This is not an alternative reality that you "experience" via an interface with you eyeballs and a few mouseclicks. No, that would be lame. We didn't spend countless hours on this just to create yet another reason to make you fat and sedentary, gluing you ever more to your personal computer or phone.

We wouldn't have had to evaluate every sensation the human body could ever experience for yet another iPhone app.  We didn't spend years developing a contraption that would keep you healthy, fed, fit and even manage your bodily excretions just for yet another computer experience.

We've designed it so well that you'll actually think you're in it. You could even lose your perception of reality. Oh, but you will know when you're in the real world, because it won't be as cool. No heads up displays, no anything you request appearing right within your fingertips, no telepathy, no teleportation.

Everything we've ever dreamed of that's limited by the human experience is just about to become unlimited. And today we turn this thing on!