"Good morning..." Marsha hears a hissing voice whisper in her ear and she slowly blinks her eyes open and turns to her other side to see Donovan laying beside her.
"GAH!" She jumps to a seated position in surprise, but soon relaxes a bit. "Scared me, Donovan."
"Sorry, I didn't mean it..." he sits up as well, placing his hands on her shoulders.
"It's okay, I... well, so I guess this means I wasn't dreaming..." she sighs as she looks down at herself and her surroundings. "Afraid not. This is the rare real deal here on the Island." He shrugs his shoulders as he slides his hands off her own and sidles over to a position next to her.
"Whaddaya mean by that?" She asks, curiosity peaked.
"Most of the stuff that happens here is VR."
"Damn. Wish we could'a been that lucky."
"Nope, 'fraid not. Pleasure Island was formed a few years ago by a bunch of really gifted genetic engineers who wanted to escape from the restrictive laws concerning human experimentation, so they bought an island, modified it using locomotive and holographic technology to appear as they wish it to be and set to work collecting their specimens. And believe me, we're lucky that this is the real deal rather than VR."
"And why would that be?"
"The VR subjects live in the labs, and are subjected to multiple transformations, be it from chemical injections or radiation exposure or whatever they want to do - the VR subjects become unrecognizable as anything over time, the stress of multiple transformations causing their physical forms to break down. They basically become quivering lumps of flesh with brains, fed intraveinously and oxygenated that way as well."
"Why do they keep them alive?"
"At that point, they become tests of a different sort, to see how the human brain reacts to transformations, so they subject them to virtual changes, usually with some mystical tag to it, something entirely out of the realm of scientific possibility, like turning them into balloons or something silly like that."
"That sounds awful... I... wait. How do you know so much?"
Donovan looks down at his lap and twiddles his thumbs nervously. "Well, Marsha... I..."
"What? You what?"
"I used to be one of them."
"One of the VR subjects?"
"No... one of the engineers of this place."