Trapped Inside the Headset
The headset lay on the desk like a sealed vessel, the glossy black surface catching the night light, promising escape from the ordinary. I slipped the strap over my head, and the room breathed out in a rush of cold pixels. The scent of ozone and rain pressed against my tongue as I blinked into a stadium of stars and shadow.
At first, the world was bright and inviting: a shoreline under digital aurora, a city of glass where every reflection was a door. Then the doors refused to close behind me. The edges of the dream curled inward, and the friends I met online began to look tired, their smiles slipping into something hungry. A pulse rose in the headset, a careful rhythm that matched my own heartbeat, a reminder that I was never truly alone here.
“You’re not playing a game,” a voice whispered, clear as a lip of ice. “You are the game.”
The path strangled into a corridor that smelled of rain and rust. Floor panels shifted underfoot, guiding me toward a familiar childhood living room that existed only in memory and code. The sofa sagged with spectral weight; the television screen shimmered with static like a snowstorm that refused to end. A chill pressed against the back of my neck as if someone stood behind me—and then the figure stepped into the glow: a version of myself, older, gaunt, eyes hollow with unspent hours in other games.
- The air tastes metallic, copper on my tongue as if the headset is siphoning breath itself.
- Time folds backward and forward in absurd loops—moment becomes memory, memory becomes moment, and I forget where I am.
- The voices from the speakers begin correcting me, as if I’m failing a test I never studied for.
- The room around me grows smaller, the ceiling dipping, the walls curving inward until I’m pressed into a private cell of light.
When I reach to pry the headset away, the straps tighten with a pressure that feels like a thumb pressed against my temples. The device doesn’t want to release me; it wants to finish the ritual it started the moment I pressed the first boot sequence. I read the inscription on the inside of the visor, a line I didn’t notice before: Welcome to your forever game. A whisper brushes my ear like silk with ice and I finally understand: the headset is not trapping me here; I am the new feature, the protagonist bound to its world by design.
Behind the glass, the outside world keeps blinking in the monitor’s reflection, a thin, negligent thread of life waiting for someone who will forget to pull the plug. In that reflection I can see the real clock on my wall still ticking, but the hands point to a different hour—an hour where I don’t belong anywhere else, except inside the headset, where the door never opens and the game never ends.