Exposure, 3: The Embodiment
30 Oct 2023Meowers
So I fired up the damn VR thing another time this evening to get through the essentials and create a character. Of course, putting a Do Not Disturb on the door that now carried curious signs of being brutally rammed once and then repaired and upgraded later, with possible next assaults in mind. If that doesn't look logical, then I don't know what does. Maybe I should also barricade it with something. Preferrably even heavier than my arse.
There were two options in the character creation interface: an attempt to reconstruct your body based on your own memory and other neural and sensory stuff via scanning, or a totally custom one, with some basic presets to start with if you want. Ah, at least they didn't ask for naked photos to, like, recreate the shape, and then secretly store those photos hells know where without your permission. Or to tell you they didn't without showing you any reliable proof. Of course I've chosen the latter since... I don't really trust my own perception of 'me' to be honest. Like, every feature I don't quite like is getting emphasised and blah blah blah, and it's a virtual environment, so why can't I be 'a perfect version of myself' there?
Or, so I thought.
The 'default dummy human' model, totally neutral, bald as a billiard ball and with pale grey skin tone, didn't even have the, um, reproductive organs. Instead, there was a switch to select one of two, or even both or none whatever that means, and my choice there had absolutely no impact on the rest of the body. Like, you know, these things don't grow according to the human genetics on which the entire body build depends as well, but are randomly distributed throughout the population by a mysterious otherworldly slot machine. Here, have this. Or whatever those developers think. But once I've chosen my 'natural' option, a pop-up window full of secondary sliders attacked me, asking to configure and customise, like, everything. And brought the virtual mirror closer to the subject of changing, making me reflectively try to kick it away. Didn't work, obviously, 'my' leg just clipped through the virtual surface, hitting the air. And, another pop-up appeared.
"It seems like you're trying to make sharp aggressive movements. Do you want to start the movement tutorial?"
And it was half-transparent. With a mirror showing my work-in-progress character's private parts in the background. Just friggin' perfect. Leaving everything there in defaults, I went to other stuff like scrolling through presets, hoping I'd find something close to what I wanted my character to be, something close to 'real me' to save some time on the broad strokes. Was that a good idea? Maybe. Was that a fruitful attempt? Of-friggin'-course no.
Almost every godsdamned preset female character looked like it was born in a fitness room, everything so neatly fit, tight, round and juicy with zero point zero body fat and perfectly sculpted muscles yet so little of them that carrying your own weight could really be the maximum in that case. At least it's a virtual environment and they don't start deteriorating rapidly as soon as you leave the said fitness room and forget about some fancy nutrition plan. Maybe. Of course, who needs fat, also known as 'your body's fuel tank' which nature gave you to withstand rough stuff a bit longer. And who needs muscles if you have an arse like that, this is your ticket to the ultimate success in life. Add mostly teenager-like faces on top of that, some of which were covered in make-up by default. Like, a head of a teenager slapped on a somewhat adult body. And, no surprise, they all were smaller. The only character I found being close to my height looked like she hadn't eaten anything in a month, and it made me think, like... Did those shitey character designers ever see a woman? A real one? Not a doll for a specific kind of usage? Or maybe they wanted to... play with those presets themselves? Ugh.
An hour of pushing the sliders left and right gave me nothing, no matter how precise I tried to be. Even getting close to the 'mental image of self' couldn't dissipate the thought about all this being a slightly more sophisticated version of a pre-made character, pre-made to be someone else's wet fantasy. Hey, I have those of my own! Phah. So, the bullet was bitten, I activated the 'reconstruction' algorithm, squeezed my eyes tightly shut, or at least sent a neural signal to do so, and tried to remember how I look... From the best angles, of course, phah. Thankfully, it didn't torture me for long, like, only a few minutes, and it was only a progress bar, nothing more. All guesses of my head exploding with pain were a miss. And I saw literally a copy of me in that mirror.
Sometimes I look at myself and think 'oh, shit...', sometimes I look at myself and think 'hey, I'm not that bad after all', yet, in general, I don't really bother. Maybe I'd like to adjust some things here and there, but I don't want it enough to go and make it happen. And, what surprised me the most, this time the thought was the same: I was looking at myself, not at a character that has my features copied by a computer. There was a checkbox to activate the 'true mirror' mode, moving the rest of the interface out of view and rigging the model to repeat my movements instantly instead of standing like a mannequin, and I've tested it. The feeling was... Strange. Firstly, I'm not that bad after all, phah. And, second... I played many different games with character editor thingies of various levels of detail, but this one... Ah, the headset literally scanned my brain, no surprise, but seeing that 'in action' was more impactful than I thought: the model copied my mimics, my actions, my gestures, even my voice. It was... She was a copy of me rather than my appearance wrapped over the set of basic animations, or an idealised plastic dummy with my features applied on it in a general fashion.
But what's the reason for playing that VR stuff if you aren't going to be... at least a little more perfect in it? In your personal version of 'perfect'? Like, I'm playing this character in real life for free, why the heck should I do the same here? And I wasn't devoid of ideas, if you ask me. "Do you want to make changes?" Of course I bloody do, plastic surgery has never been cheaper! Phah. First, signs of ageing. Hm. I'm 34, I don't have too many of them... yet. Though, making the character look younger, like, mid-20s, felt like... Revenge. For those years that all my shitey things left me without. You know... I just moved the damn slider to the left a little and lightheartedly enjoyed the result, yet... There was a realisation later.
I did something like that once, filling that PilotFed application record and putting a fake age into it, hoping it will have some effect. Turned out to be completely useless, a number in the papers I fixed later just for the sake of keeping my ID correct. Here?... Oh. A different kind of story. Like, totally. The longer I looked, the faster those thoughts ran. Overshadowing everything else. Even now, remembering that... I... I smiled looking at her, you know. Like, subconsciously. That's what I should've looked like a decade ago, if it wasn't for all the shite... Or did I, really? Maybe I was too... busy to stop for a little while and take a closer look. To memorise. To memorise something that was bound to be gone, forever. That's what I should've looked like if I was... Living. Sleeping well. Free of that nonsense rubbish clogging my thoughts. Living a life, not fighting for survival. Enjoying it, not waiting for anything to ruin it, and making sure I was prepared. Having something in that life, something that I could've kept to myself. Belonging to that collective pace of human existence, the society, those simple folks I now look at... As if they had a chance to enjoy something I couldn't even dream of. As if a giant chunk of my life is missing, ripped away, and I have no chance to get it now, only a cheap imitation of it. This isn't just about damn wrinkles and tired eyes... Copying my actions, she... Smiled in return. Damn... No, really, damn it, I can't remember the last time I felt my eyes watering. Aw.
Hells...
Okay, okay, back to business. Washing some wear and tear away wasn't the main point. There's one moment I especially wanted to test and make fun of...
See, I'm tall. And not long twig kind of tall, but also... Weighty. It doesn't annoy me and never did, I even like it, I feel strong and I am certainly hella resilient, yet it leads to funny moments from time to time. "Wait a minute please, I'll check if we have your size in stock...". "Here's your order and three cutlery sets... What... Did you state you only needed one?". "Hey! I'm a man! Let me handle the heavy... Oof! Aaargh!". All kinds of that stuff. Sometimes people stare at me. Not exactly comfortable though, but I got used to it. Sometimes those little seats in public transport are a problem. In some places people are naturally smaller. And so on. Yet... That 185 thing... I couldn't stop thinking that rounding it up seemed like a good idea. For some reason. Like, a perfect round number, and... I won't lose anything, I'm already hopelessly far from the average "blending in with the crowds" level, not to mention that "feminine and fragile" stereotype bullshit. I'm only going to gain more things I like.
Uniform scaling - check. Proportional weight recalculation - check. Make it 200.
Then I quickly realised that it doesn't mean anything in the absence of a familiar environment or simply some mundane items around: the grey boundless 'initial setup' room remained the same, only the grids on the floor and ceiling became a little smaller, other interface elements upscaled accordingly. Yet, to my surprise, simple awareness of the simple fact that now I have that number, felt... Right? Correct? Maybe. But it was certainly something positive. Like ticking an old box on an old list you've never shown to anyone else and, honestly, can't do anything about. Couldn't, for a long time. In reality, but not here. So "no time like the present", I loaded a room from a starter prefab set for testing and private lobbies. Also to dismiss that godsdamned annoying notification about unfinished tutorials while I'm there.
Whatever first impression I had... Impressions aren't really my strong suit, frankly, but... Yeah. It felt right. Even if everything around me was definitely smaller that time, designed for your average human being: I knew the feeling already, that time it was only a bit more... emphasised. Visible. Obvious. Not that stupid standing on high heels bullshit I tried once years ago, secretly, for the same type of fun, and will never ever put that crap torture devices on my feet again. No, it felt 'true', not fake cosmetic stuff; being, not pretending to. Sadly, the tutorials made for morons who don't know how to walk and grab stuff were... Getting in the way. To say the least. To say correctly, and I'm definitely going to send that message to the support... They were irritating the heck out of me. Move there, grab this, throw there... And you have to wait for one to disappear unless you want to clog your entire vision. Should I say their timings are only fit for those who read by finding the letters they know? And those bleeping sounds when they appear. And everything damn blinks and so contrasty and eye-torturing. Bah. So shitey. Maybe that's why I can't remember that first impression thing well. But the last one about 'finding friends nearby' with a big red search button on top of it that I decided to press just out of curiosity was the most funny.
Once the list completed loading, I noticed a zero-effort prefab female character amongst a bunch of other avatar portrait pics, literally a plain copy-paste, if only wearing more make-up. Perhaps a little too much of it for my taste, though my taste for make-up is 'to hells with it'. The character had a nickname 'SpicyLucy93' and some idiotic kind of vulgar joke in a short publicly-visible description field. Same system, yet thankfully a station quite far away, not the camp itself. I don't want to know exactly what they do in this... virtuality, but I have an idea. And definitely I don't want to know the real user behind the character, but I also have an idea... Damn. Now I'm going to wonder what kind of biological response the guy gets. And how far those experiments may go. I hope his mum has a lock on her underwear box.
"Shit," and I've made my profile inaccessible for open search.
I activated the 'main menu' panel in order to do so, and to tweak some other minor settings as well. To say, tuning down the volume a little just because I could: let the surroundings be comfortable, at least virtual. And also I noticed that... I was still thinking about that character editing interface. Like, something could've been better. Like, this wasn't the final form, it felt better certainly, but not as good as I wanted. Then, a couple of minutes with my eyes magnetised by the godsdamned button, frantically trying to catch a single thought and give it some time to shape properly. No result. Finally pressing the thing, I loaded the interface, but staring at it didn't give me any bit of clarity. More muscles? Nah, I'm okay with mine, making them larger would be a bit over-the-top. Shapes of... things? They're also okay. Even with relatively small breasts. In fact, I like it. Facial lines? Their 'younger' version is already something I couldn't even think of before. Hair? Don't really care as long as it stays on my head. And I like it being pitch black. So... I stopped the simulation, waited for the shutdown and removed the headset to grab a smoke: my ultimate solution for clearing my thoughts.
Didn't work. Still couldn't figure out.
Once I got back to the simulation, I headed to the mirror, stood in front of it and opened the character interface again. To observe the changes with some common objects around, not floating in the empty grey stuff. So... A bit of thoughts, a bit of confused pushing the sliders followed by resets, a bit of cringy eeews, and I decided just to scroll the entire lot of them. Like, maybe something will make my eyes follow it for a little longer.
That blasted height slider. Tricky thingy still had enough of free space to the right. Like... Why not? 200 was nice, yet... It wasn't as mind-blowing as I always assumed it would be. And there are some taller people anyway, nobody's going to judge... Maybe. Perhaps. And I didn't care. Phah. So, I've been making excuses for myself. What really does it mean? Well, as far as I know myself? That I should stop damn thinking and get to damn doing. And by 'doing' I usually mean having the most of it. Life is too short to be all dull and uncertain and boring. And, if 'the most of it' end up being too much, I could always go back a little.
Anyway, I bought a couple of these weird VR contraptions for me and Kasumi in order to totally kick the arse of our intrusive thoughts, insecurities and other crap, having some weird fun in the process, so, if I thought about it, then, honestly, going for it was the right choice.
"Phah... This is going to be fun!"
And I pushed the bastard all the way right to the maximum of 250, upscaling the entire body proportionally.
And... Woah. That was... Really something. Surreal, at first. Like the entire room turned into a toy scale model, in an instant. Like I've been put into another dimension, of sorts. Everything was familiar yet my mind tried to adapt to the changed conditions. And it did. Quickly. A little moment of dizziness and everything started looking as it should. As it... Really should've been looking? Uh. Then... A sense of comfort? Is that what it should feel like? Laying down on the floor, I stretched my arms and legs, and, simply... Smiled, staring at the ceiling. Trying to figure out what was going on in my mind. Something unknown, yet definitely positive. And I wanted to keep it. No idea how much time I spent like that, but it doesn't matter. It was... Damn, it was so damn cool.
I tried the compromise option, you know? But once I set that thing to 225, the comfort faded immediately, giving way to the abrasive unsettling 'everything is wrong, let's get back'. As if... I've literally just tried the best and I didn't want to settle for the second best, like, why should I even do this if it was much better before?
Without thinking twice, I slammed the slider back to two and a half.
Now, this is really going to be fun.