You ever have that dream where you’re falling, only you don’t wake up you just keep falling? And you swear the sensation of falling is real and it’s exhilarating and scary and unreal all at the same time. I like that dream. I like it a lot.

Last year, when we could fly and go places, I went to Japan. Tokyo mostly. It’s like the future, there. Not the actual future but like the future from the original Blade Runner movie, only less rainy. They have the kinds of conveniences that are inconvenient until you know how to utilize them properly. I guess that’s just new technology.

Anyway, I was in Tokyo, being a tourist, marvelling at the future they live in and I got propositioned to be a contestant in a game show in the entertainment district. A guy in a bright orange shirt with a lanyard and clipboard saw me and said, ‘Hey, American, you want be on game show? Win a-big prizes?’ I assented and he brought me half a block to another orange-shirted individual with a different clipboard and another ID badge clipped to her shirt. She helped me fill out some paperwork and had me sign it. Then I was ushered into a studio inside the building we had been outside of.

I know, and like, Japanese game shows: Takashi’s Castle (the source show for MXC), Hole in the Wall, the one where people had to live in an apartment and survive by winning newspaper contests (which I only know about because my friend’s brother was a musician on its theme song). And I expected something sadistic and highly luck-based. I was dead-on.

Blind like Bat had contestants wear flippers (like underwater flippers, for your feet) and traverse a gently padded floor in which large holes created limited pathways, kind of like that old labyrinth game with the marble. Except there weren’t dead ends, just holes.

Contestants were given twenty seconds to survey the flood before being blindfolded and given a low-frequency pulse generator (it looks like a Nerf gun) to replicate a bat’s sonar system. The idea was the large wavelengths generated would bounce of the floor creating a kind of echo but not bounce of the holes, giving the user a sense of where the holes were and where the pathways were.

Contestants went one at a time and we weren’t allowed to see any one else’s attempt. When it was my turn I used my surveying time to plan out the first twenty feet, just less than halfway across the floor. Once blindfolded, but knowing my initial path, I utilized the pulse gun those first few steps to calibrate myself to its use: imagine dropping a stone down a filled-in well as opposed to a deep, open well. It was subtle, but there was definitely a sensible distinction.

The other issue I foresaw was getting turned around in the middle of the room. If you weren’t careful you could easily lose your sense of which side the exit was on and go the wrong way. So I planned to alternate left and right ninety degree turns and do my best to stay in the middle of the floor.

I was successful. I navigated the floor, found the exit and won the game. My prize - a session in the most advanced virtual reality system in the world (you know, the future) with the ability to go anywhere, fly through the air, all while suspended in a tank of oxidated water in a hyperbaric chamber to simulate weightlessness. I wouldn’t be actually flying, but my brain wouldn’t know that.

There was additional functionality as well. I could move things at will, create, destroy them. Other people’s (the bots generated by the game) thoughts would appear in text bubbles if I so desired. I could dilate - shrink or grow - and lower my opacity to appear ghost-like or set it to zero and be completely invisible. All of these features were nice, but I knew from my first moment in the synthetic world what I was going to do.

I flew to the eastern edge of the Sargasso Sea and then went up as high as the simulation would let me, about five miles above sea level. I created a hole with a ten foot diameter directly through the center of the planet all the way to the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia. A perfect tunnel from one side of the world to the other. The opportunity to experience freefall for hours.

I flattened myself against the outer edge of the simulated atmosphere and turned off my ability to fly. I fell. I fell to the surface of the virtual world, through the hole I’d created. As I recalled from my high school physics class, this contrived scenario would result in an object accelerating to the center of the planet (ignoring air resistance) and then decelerating until a velocity of zero was achieved at an altitude equal to the original height of the fall, at which point the entire thing would happen again and continue to happen ad infinitum. A perfect oscillation. Perpetual freefall. But unlike a satellite orbiting a planet, a freefall with a variable speed.

I was the object and I fell for hours. I fell until the simulation technicians turned off the simulator and the fluid I was suspended in was drained and I was released from my harness and headset. I left the simulation studio with a smile etched on my face.

The next day I took the train to Kyoto where the cherry blossoms were in bloom. They were nice.