Treatment: HELIX INFINITY

At the helm of Vasquez Virtual stands Rodrigo Vasquez, a brilliant yet ruthless 31-year-old entrepreneur. Rodrigo’s path to success was shaped by hardship. He hacked university computers at the age of 12, desperate to escape his humble beginnings as the son of a night janitor in Silicon Valley office buildings. Now, Rodrigo is poised to launch Helix Infinity, his most ambitious project yet—a 6th generation virtual reality system that uses the latest tech that makes you feel you are in another reality.

The Helix Infinity combines full-immersion technology with haptic suits, brain-computer interfaces, video in contact lenses (such technology currently exists). This hardware, designed by Vasquez Virtual’s hardware engineer, Akarsh Rao, pushes the boundaries of what virtual reality can achieve, making it possible for players to feel as though they’re stepping into entirely new dimensions. Rodrigo sees Helix Infinity as his ticket to toppling his rival, Dragon VR, the company that stole his first game out from under him years ago. The pressure is mounting, and Rodrigo knows that the launch must go perfectly. Leaving nothing to chance, he makes the reckless decision to link the system to a military quantum computer—unknown to players and his staff.

The debut is staged as a massive live spectacle at the Oakland Arena, and streamed worldwide. Thousands watch in person, millions online. The centerpiece is Jean-Paul Mbengue, the world’s most famous VR gamer—and former parkour world champion—who enters the flagship game Monster Planet Inferno on stage, his body fully visible as the audience watches him play the game on a giant screen.

Tarina, a 14-year-old girl with vitiligo—and the niece of Vasquez Virtual’s main game designer—enters a nonviolent puzzle game using the second prototype Helix Infinity haptics suit. As her mother enters Tarina’s room and smacks her on the shoulder to scold her, the haptic suit crumples to the floor as her body disappears into the game universe. Her mother screams—and ends up in the psyche ward babbling nonsense about her daughter disappearing into thin air.

The hardware plus the quantum system is so powerful that after exactly 27 seconds in the game it completely convinced Tarina’s consciousness that she was in actually IN the game universe—and with her mind so thoroughly convinced, her body followed! Just her mother’s very bad luck it happened right when she struck Tarina.

Journalist Mo Greenberg thinks she’s been stuck doing a fluff piece, but she soon senses that something is wrong. She finds Tarina’s live stream on the web, showing that Tarina disappeared into the game. She presents the evidence to Tarina’s Aunt Beatrice, who designed the T-ROX game especially with Tarina in mind.

Beatrice and Akarsh try to warn Rodrigo that something is very wrong. They don’t quite believe that Tarina is in another reality—but the collapsed haptic suits leaves a disturbing question in their minds.

Rodrigo set the quantum system to engage at level 3, and after 27 seconds in the game it hijacks Jean-Paul’s consciousness the game universe as well. At first, it looks to the arena audience like an astonishingly realistic performance. Then Jean-Paul is struck by a monster—and bleeds. That’s not like any other VR game.

The audience screams in appreciation, assuming it’s part of the show—but to the kids Jean-Paul teaches parkour to on weekends, it’s quite disturbing to see. But at the Vasquez Virtual office, staff panic. Bleeding—that is not a feature of the game. What looks like immersive entertainment is real physical injury. Jean-Paul can’t stop playing, because this is his world now. If he kills all the monsters, he will go to another level—an even more lethal one. His only option is to use his parkour skills as much as possible for evasion, but he can’t last forever, and there is no off switch.

Now Vasquez Virtual has two people inside different game universes—one fighting to survive in a violent world, the other excitedly exploring a peaceful one. Jean-Paul faces imminent death, and Tarina may be lost forever—though she herself has no desire to come back to the real world.

Hardware engineer Akarsh Rao dons the company’s third and last haptic suit to go in and retrieve the lost players. He enters Monster Planet Inferno in full view of the audience to try to bring back Jean-Paul. He knows he has 27 seconds to save Jean-Paul, or he too will be sucked into the monster world. He manages to contact Jean-Paul and remind him of the existence of the real world, but Akarsh is killed by a lava monster before the 27-second mark—leaving his charred body still in the haptic suit in the Vasquez Virtual lab. The crowd cheers, thinking it’s scripted—except for those who saw him walking around at the arena earlier, who are confused, but not yet concerned.

Physical rescue is abandoned. The company accepts what it has avoided: Helix Infinity is not malfunctioning. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do—convince the mind it is somewhere. But they did not expect the body would follow. That was the work of the quantum computer.

Software engineer Judy Wu has a deep-brain stimulation device (DBS) implanted in her skull to prevent epileptic seizures, and Rodrigo proposes they can use it to enable Wu to connect with the lost players without putting herself in danger. It should function like a Neuralink brain-link device, but connecting to portions of the brain controlling consciousness. She won’t go into the game like Tarina and Jean-Paul did, but hopefully she can communicate with them. Creepily, she’ll have to be cabled up through the haptic suit containing Akarsh’s fried body.

Now Rodrigo and his staff face a decision—who to save first? The pro gamer, who is in danger but has some skills, or the 14-year-old girl? When they see Tarina suddenly create a doorway that is not in the original game design, they make the emotional choice: save the young girl first, before she wanders too far away to retrieve.

Using her implant, Judy attempts a controlled mental synchronization with Tarina. It seems she has made a connection. But Tarina shrugs her off and creates an escape hatch in the floor, sliding away and breaking the connection.

Meanwhile, Jean-Paul continues to deteriorate in Monster Planet Inferno, as a very real monster damages his hand to the point where he can’t use it anymore. The audience watches, still believing it’s a show, cheering the amazing effects. Vasquez Virtual staff realize their emotional choice to save Tarina first may have cost Jean-Paul his life.

Wu quickly switches to try to save Jean-Paul. She is not sucked into his world, but she shares his consciousness, and so does her body. She begins to suffer physical bruises and bleeding as Jean-Paul continues to be pummeled by monsters. In panic, she screams “I could use some help in here!”—knowing as she says it that there is no one that can help. But then Rodrigo gets the idea to open the game up to the arena gamers. Since they don’t have suits, they’ll just be virtual in that world, and not subject to harm—but a huge influx of new players will force the monsters to attack them, taking the heat off of Jean-Paul long enough for Judy to have an undistracted moment of peace to extract Jean-Paul.

The gamers, still thinking this is all part of the promotion, jump at the chance to play this pre-beta version of the latest Monster Planet Inferno, and save their idol Jean-Paul—whether it is real or virtual. They fight past security guards to grab the 100 VR headsets on display, meant to be raffled at the end of the evening. They join with players watching from home to launch a massive and awesome attack, on a scale like the rescues in early Bond films such as You Only Live Twice. Everyone thinks it’s huge fun to help “Save Jean-Paul before he dies!” Only a couple of Jean-Paul’s parkour kids think Jean-Paul’s plight is real, but even they don’t understand exactly what’s wrong.

With gamers forming a protective circle around Jean-Paul, he is able to be relatively calm for a moment, and Judy is able to extract him. He reappears in his haptic suit in the Vasquez Virtual lab, stunned, bleeding and with a mangled hand—but alive. Judy is battered and spent, but rallies to make contact once more with Tarina, who has left the indoor world of T-ROX and is now moving through an outdoor world of her own creation. Tarina spins violently, spinning Judy around in her chair, but in the moment of calm after that, she recognizes Judy’s presence, and feels her Aunt Beatrice in the room. She thanks her aunt for giving her this world—which she herself has now extended—and says she has to move on. Her UserID disappears from the monitor, and she is gone from the screen.

In the aftermath, there are unanswered questions about Jean-Paul’s hand, and about the whereabouts of Akarsh and Tarina, but those questions are ultimately unanswerable. Vasquez Virtual releases their haptic suits and software—without the quantum module. Pre-sales are through the roof, and Rodrigo gets the IPO deal he sought. He becomes the first video game billionaire.