• World Helmets!
    Just put on the helmet, goggles, and gloves!
    Press the little red button and be transported to a world of your own creation!
    The helmet reacts to your thoughts and brainwave patterns creating your own virtual world tangible to sight, taste, touch, scent and hearing!
    The helmet monitors the world around you and creates obstacles that match!
    Just $39.99 a set!

    Posters, adds, pop-ups, and billboards proclaimed this in glaring red letters with images of fields and lakes and piles and piles of gold or candy.
    I sat back at my café table sipping a cup of coffee whose genetically modified beans had been grown in an climate controlled bio-dome on the moon base and watched these adds grow more numerous until they plastered every surface. I watched the kids walk by with slim boxes under their arms, business people with the boxes tucked into bags and briefcases.
    “What do you think of these ‘world helmets’?” I asked the person sitting at the table next to mine.
    “My daughter bought one yesterday. She put it on after school and didn’t take it off until dinnertime. I had to lock it up so that she would do her homework. I might buy one for myself.” The woman took a sip of tea and resumed reading on her palm-book.
    I got up and paid for my coffee. Then I wandered through the streets watching the kids wearing plastimesh helmets that covered their ears, mirrored goggles, and plastimesh gloves. The gloves looked like loosely woven white plastic strips, the helmet was the same material but it had been stiffened into a helmet shape. They were wandering around, fighting virtual enemies, or picking invisible flowers. Then, slowly, adults joined the crowd of wandering children. A few at first but the crowd grew. I didn’t notice much until one day I went to the café and no one was there to make the coffee. I ‘let myself in’ and made myself a pot of coffee in the deserted kitchen. I was sitting at my favorite table when a bunch of small white parachutes carrying white boxes fell from a drop plane. One landed on the table in front of me. I opened it and inside lay a plastimesh helmet, gloves, and goggles.
    “They must be getting desperate. All their consumers are dream walking. I have nothing better to do.” I shrugged and put it on. At first everything was blank white. Then it started to fill in. Slowly a table, a street, a green striped awning, and a cup of steaming coffee formed in front of me. It was a warm summer day and people were strolling up and down the cobblestone road. A waiter swooped down with a refill and I waved him away. I don’t know how long I sat there, luxuriating in the warm sun of my childhood. Wait! The sun is warm here! This isn’t real. A gray blanket of smog in all but the highest places now covered the sun. Once I realized that the image broke into pixels and returned to blank whiteness. I wrenched the helmet and gloves off, panting. I stared at the innocent looking white thing. It seemed to stare back. I turned my back to it and continued on my now ice cold coffee. Truly ice cold; a thin skin of ice had formed on top. I tossed it out onto the slushy sidewalk and went back inside to make a new pot. I returned outside with my new cup and watched the dreamers stagger around when something caught my eye. A little girl, maybe six was lying on a snow bank in a summer dress. It was made of that gauzy material that girls that age seem to like. Patterned with flowers and cats. She wasn’t making snow angels, she was just lying on her stomach picking invisible flowers and weaving them into an invisible chain. Then she put an invisible daisy chain on her helmet covered head and curled up for a nap with a happy sigh.
    “Wake up!” I scrambled up and out of the little fenced off café area. “You’re going to freeze to death!” I grabbed her by the arms; they felt like clothing covered metal, hard and strong beyond their size. I tried to wrench the helmet off but the girl shrieked and punched me in the chin hard enough to make stars dance before my eyes. I sat down in the slush, hard. She ran off. I chased after her, once I could stand up that is. She was wearing shoes at least and that gave me clear tracks to follow. She was fast! She got enough of a lead on me that I was glad of the footprints; in summer I would have lost her. By the time I found her curled up in the snow, asleep. I had taken long enough that her lips were already blue. I scooped her up and ran back to the café. There I turned the heat up full blast and put her down next to the heating vent. After I had removed that cursed helmet of course. While she slept I went to the store across the street and took a child’s winter coat and snow-pants out of the window display and brought them back. A closer look at her dress showed a badge from the Kamari School. It was a school for the genius kids who had been created for the last stealth war. They would act as human calculators and computers. The brain behind the stealth, you might say. They were created, used, and discarded as the government willed. She woke just as I finished making hot chocolate for the both of us.
    “Good morning. Have a good sleep? I found you sleepwalking in the snow and brought you in here.” I handed her a mug.
    “Its winter? But it was summer just a moment ago!” she sipped her coca.
    “You were dreaming that.” She didn’t say anything more. I left to find blankets and to bring my cat to the café. She had recently had kittens and I wanted to keep an eye on her. When I returned the girl was gone, as was her helmet. I was glad to see the winter gear I had found for her was gone as well. A note in wobbly handwriting was left on the table,
    'Thanks Mr., I like the clothes but the helmet is calling. I like that world better then this one.'
    She had better handwriting than I did. I wonder what her dream was like? Was she normal there? Did she have a family? What did she mean by ‘the helmet was calling’? Calling? Then I felt it. The faint feel of sunlight on my skin, the taste of coffee, the sound of people chattering echoed in my ears. I wanted the sunlight, the never-ending coffee, and the old world. As if in a dream I put out all the food I could find for the cats and put my warmest clothes on. Then I put that cursed helmet on. Why resist? There was nothing left out here anyway. The coffee would run out eventually, and then I would find more people freezing to death. Why bother? I left this grey world for the sunny one that was waiting. I wanted to believe.

    In a gray city, in a grey building, in a grey office suite, in a dim grey room, sat the CEO. His grey hair was combed perfectly back, his grey suit impeccably pressed, his grey eyes watching another grey man who sat at the grey control panel in front of him. He lounged comfortably in a charcoal grey chair that was made from the skin of a now extinct animal.
    “The last one has linked in sir,” the second grey man said. He adjusted the grey earpiece that rested, mostly hidden by his grey hair, in his ear.
    “Very good. Get them into the transport planes and into the barracks. Then start controlling their reality.” The CEO said.
    “Yes sir.” The man pressed a couple buttons on the control panel and typed in a command.
    In each “city of dreamers”, the people turned as one and started walking toward the main square’s where transport planes waited.

    Three years later…
    An army of grey ecosuited, white helmeted, gloved and goggled people of all shapes and sizes waited in silent lines below the mirrored office building waiting for the command. Their minds locked into their personal dreams, their bodies controlled by the CEO.

    The only reminder of our nameless man was a family of well-fed cats and an untouched cup of coffee.