It's the year 2110.

You're Landon Fry, twenty-four years old. You're the kind of person who makes money by hiring other people to manage your affairs and taking care to read the small print on everything those corporate schemers send your way. Other than firing people and occasionally signing important documents with the word 'Fry' - which you take vicious pleasure in - you don't really have much to do.

You've got a place a few miles away from the city. There's a lot of countryside around your estate; fields of swaying grass, sheltered woods, bobbing daffodil heads. But you don't care about that. The only times you actually notice these things is when you skim over the fields in your flying car, the way the grass flattens with every burst of acceleration, the way the trees bend as you pass. You're probably the only person who owns a flying car in the general area. Who needs them anyway? They're all for rich people, a drain on fuel and an accident waiting to happen. But you are rich. You can afford to pay for the fuel and the licence and the daily speeding tickets. The accidents are just an added publicity bonus.

But there's only so much enjoyment to be had in destroying the countryside with rush and thrills of speed. Today, you're heading towards the city to find something else to fill your time with. Something to break the monotonous routine that your life had become. Your mother called yesterday and suggested voluntary work, helping out in the orphanages perhaps. But why would a man like you do voluntary work? A man like you would pay a whole bunch of people to do the 'voluntary' work if he really wanted to help out. This is exactly what you did, to show that you did not, in fact, want to do voluntary work. What you wanted was entertainment.

In the city, you park your flying car and instruct the officer who has been giving chase to leave the ticket wedged in the window or something. You walk around until something catches your eye. You pass a huge glass window with a bunch of manneqiuns wearing trendy suits, but your clothes are worth more than the whole store. You pass a casino, and as soon as you look in, you realize that no one in there can play as big as you. Then, you across a games store. You really don't know much about games and everything in the store looks unfamiliar. But you shrug and think, "Why not?" So you go in.

The salesperson looks bored. You suspect he's going through the same monotony of life you're going through, only yours is more expensive. You establish from the very beginning that you don't know anything about everything in the store, because you're the sort of person who gets straight to the point. The salesperson tells you that you need a console to play games on. The reigning champions of the industry are the Holoplaystation and the Konnect129600.

He tells you that the Holoplaystation involves wearing a certain headgear that will somehow feed images, sounds, smells, feelings and even taste directly to your mind, and that - with just intent - you do things in the game you buy. It takes a bit of time and practice to get used to it, but once you've become oriented to it, it will feel just like the real thing. Its processing unit is so powerful that it can randomly generate thousands of AI driven characters, each with their unique backgrounds, personalities and relationships, for your RPGs, he says.

The Konnect129600, on the other hand, involves standing in the middle of a hologram. The world is generated around you and reacts to what you do. A special suit will allow you to feel the things that happen in the game and restrict your movement when you encounter objects within the game. This allows you to manipulate them and even to sit down on thin air. The downside of this console, he says, is lack of flexibility with the controls. In the Hologamestation, you can do potentially anything - as long as the software supports it - but everything on the Konnect129600 is limited to movements you can carry out with your body. It has a processing power similar to that of the Hologamestation, and its advantage is that it will not seem so dream-like when compared to the Hologamestation experience.

The differences, to you, are minimal. You shrug and look at the hopeful expression on his face as he asks if you are interested in either console. But you're Landon Fry. You buy the store.