New World Notes: A LEVER TO MOVE THE MIND

Kill yourself!
Do it! Do it now!
Dead! Dead!
You're nothing-- you don't even exist.

"The fear of wrong things begins as a spidery prickle on the back of your neck. You feel a sweet chill, as it begins to skitter up your skull, then becomes a soft, sickly expanding pressure in your chest. This isn’t the kind of fear you feel from most computer games; it’s not like the jack-in-the-box shock you get, for example, when an animated ghoul pops its head out from behind a dark corner. This is a cloying, helpless, desperate panic, and it’s no fun at all.

The Virtual Hallucinations building arrived on Sedig's southern shoreline a few days ago (coordinates: 45, 25), but I had a chance to visit the place in August, when the building resided on a private island owned by the medical research arm of a California university. The brainchild of Nash Baldwin—“Nash”, named after John Nash of A Beautiful Mind, for reasons that’ll soon become obvious—the building contains a closely researched recreation of visual and aural hallucinations, based on interviews of real schizophrenics. Baldwin transplanted the simulation to Second Life's public continent, to give residents a chance to try it out, and to collect their feedback afterward (there’s a survey-taking device at the end of the tour), and as I first watched residents enter the doors, yesterday, I wondered if they’d feel the same kind of terror I did, last month."
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