The morning passed faster than I expected.
The teachers hadn't fully hit their stride yet — it was still early in the term, so classes were loose and unhurried, more about sketching frameworks than going deep. I took down what needed to be noted, filled a few pages, and somewhere in the middle of writing my mind started drifting elsewhere.
Ashly sat beside me. She yawned several times throughout the morning, each one heroically stifled behind her hand. By the third attempt, the effort was entirely gone — the yawn stretched her whole face, and she dabbed at the corners of her eyes with the back of her hand before straightening up to face the board again, looking determined, though her eyelids were clearly running their own agenda.
When the bell rang, the classroom came alive instantly. Someone slapped a textbook shut. Someone else stretched loudly. Chairs scraped back, zippers rasped, and noise from the corridor started flooding in. Within ten seconds, the room had gone from silent to chaotic.
"Aren't we supposed to go to the hall?" Ashly tossed her pen into her pencil case and started packing up, her voice lazy. "That talk thing."
"I think so."
She looked up at me. "You're actually going? That doesn't sound like you."
I smiled and said nothing. She didn't push it — just tugged at her bag strap and followed the crowd into the corridor.
The auditorium was quieter than usual when we arrived. Quite a few students were already seated. The lights hadn't all come on yet — only the stage area at the front was lit, the screen behind it dark, waiting. The air inside had that slightly cold, open-space quality, nothing like the warm stuffiness of the classroom. We found seats somewhere in the middle.
"You think it'll be boring?" Ashly stuffed her bag under the chair and lowered her voice.
"Depends."
"I'll give it ten minutes," she said, holding up her fingers. "After that, I'm gone."
"You might lose."
"I don't believe you."
Before she could say anything else, the stage lights brightened slightly, and a man walked out.
Middle-aged. His suit was plain, nothing distinctive. But the way he stood on that stage made him impossible to ignore — not because he demanded it, but because his presence simply filled the space without trying. Like a stone dropped in water: no ripples at the surface, but you could feel the weight of it settling at the bottom. He picked up the microphone, and the auditorium gradually went quiet. Not because anyone asked for silence. Because everyone, without agreeing to, wanted to hear what he would say.
"Good morning, students and teachers. I'm Dr. William."
His voice was steady and grounded, without the usual warmth of a speaker's opening line. Just words, spoken directly.
"We've been trying to understand something," he said. "If the human brain could be precisely read and replicated — could we construct a world that is entirely subjective?"
A faint ripple of murmurs moved through the hall, then dissolved.
He didn't wait for it to settle. He kept going.
"My team has been working in this direction for some time. We've reached certain milestones." He let his gaze move across the audience — sweeping, yet somehow feeling specific. "Human perception does not depend entirely on reality."
The screen behind him shifted. Abstract images appeared: cross-sections of neural networks, wave signals, what looked like brain scans — uneven colour gradients, like maps photographed from the inside.
"Imagine a day," he said, slowing slightly, letting the pause settle in, "when you could feel real warmth, real sound, real touch — real emotion — inside a space constructed entirely by your own mind..."
The air in the auditorium changed. It was hard to describe — more like a collective held breath. As if everyone had inhaled at the same moment and forgotten to let go.
"Would you choose to stay in a world built from everything you've ever wanted? Or would you come back to this one — uncertain, imperfect, real?"
No one laughed.
Ashly shifted beside me and murmured, "That's a strange question."
"How so?" I asked.
"If it really worked to that degree," she said quietly, brow furrowed, "how would you even know if you'd woken up? How do you tell the difference between that kind of 'real' and the real outside?"
She paused, then gave a small laugh, as if catching herself being too serious. "Though it's probably still a long way off. That kind of technology."
I didn't answer. I just kept looking at the man on stage, something in my mind quietly sinking.
The talk didn't last long. Midway through, he presented more technical material — graphs, data — most of which I didn't fully follow, but the direction was clear: he was researching a technology that could alter human perception with precision, making the brain believe a constructed environment was real. Completely real. Down to the physiological response.
At the end, he said one thing, without any flourish: "The reason we keep moving forward is because we never stop questioning everything around us. Without doubt, there is no breakthrough."
Then the lights came up. The sound of the auditorium came flooding back — the moment of collective stillness shattered, swallowed by noise.
"Okay, it wasn't that boring," Ashly said, standing and stretching. "More interesting than that environmental one, at least."
"Mm."
"Still a bit much, though." She frowned, moving toward the corridor. "If it really got to that level... do you think people would just stop wanting to come out?"
I didn't answer her. I just walked with the crowd toward the exit.
At the door, I glanced back over my shoulder. The stage was already empty. The screen was dark. It was as if none of those words had ever been spoken — the space wiped clean, nothing left behind.
"What are you looking at?"
The voice came from beside me. Not Ashly. I turned.
Noah was standing there, not far, hands in his pockets, expression even. Like he'd been there the whole time — or like he'd simply appeared.
This was the first time he'd spoken to me directly.
"That talk," he said. "What did you think?"
I considered it for a moment.
"It didn't sound like he was making things up."
He looked at me — as if confirming something — and gave a small, brief smile. There and gone.
"If it were real," he said, "is there somewhere you'd want to go back to?"
The question arrived quickly. I didn't answer right away. People moved around us in a stream, voices overlapping in waves, as if we were standing in a completely different space.
"I don't know," I said finally.
He nodded. The way he nodded made me feel like he'd heard something else in my "I don't know" — not genuine uncertainty, but something known and unspoken.
"If you ever want to try," he said, "I might be able to help."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing." He said it simply, and walked away. His figure dissolved into the crowd and was gone, as if he'd never been there at all.
I stood where I was. I didn't follow.
The corridor emptied slowly. Ashly seemed to have walked ahead — I couldn't see her. When the noise faded enough, that melody surfaced in my mind again, without warning, without reason. Just a brief fragment, like something already dissolving coming back for one last moment before it was gone.
I looked down at my hand.
Then I slowly closed my fingers.
It was only a dream.