Real person trapped in a video game

Date: 7/19/2019

I was in some sort of laboratory. They were doing experiments there on animals. In one case, they were trying to rebuild a rare population of fish by breeding together specimens with recessive genes. The fish were called “Nariz” and had pattens on the side in the shape of a mouth. I also saw stuff like sea-dogs and sea-spiders in cages. There was one animal in here that I was especially curious about, because I had a theory. There was an online game that you could download, but only one person could play it at a time. In the online game, you went to attend a fancy high school campus with a variety of interesting characters that you could romance, and various events would happen. For example, one day various students were running for student body president and the goofball jock character came out dressed as a llama for his speech. Sort of Stardew Valley-esque. But the thing was, after playing to a certain point, one of the characters in the game—a 14-year-old child character—starts to gain a sort of consciousness. He eventually starts to destroy the game and murder the other characters, but he’s also a tragic character in the process. Kind of like that Literature Club game. His dialogue is actually unique every time. Anyway, my theory was that within this lab, there’s a mouse attached to a computer with its intelligence artificially boosted to the level of a human being with the help of the machine. This mouse, I thought, might be the unpredictable consciousness that exists within the popular game. I start interacting with the mouse through the computer. He’s in a glass case and its brain is hooked up to the machine. He says he is in some sort of fake game world, but not the one I’m describing. In his world, there are no other characters or beings to interact with. This leads me to believe there’s another creature in the game I know of, and this mouse was simply the victim of an earlier prototype. He was definitely interested in what I told him though, and even started to pull up the other game so he could try playing it himself. I start weighing the idea of removing the mouse from the machine to care for as my pet. I know he wants to be freed, but at the same time he’d lose all his intelligence. It’s a bit of an ethical grey area.