52 Short Stories

 When I was 7 years old, my great-grandparents decided to renew their wedding vows for their 65th anniversary. And this quickly became a family affair given the rarity of such an occurrence. They decided they wanted the entire family together for the ceremony: grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, anyone remotely connected to the family by blood, marriage or adoption. And the only venue big enough was a cruise ship, which made the whole celebratory event that much more exciting.  I was really looking forward to the trip -- a giant family reunion vacation -- where I could hang out with all of my cousins, eat all the food I wanted (and whatever kinds of food I wanted -- dessert first every single night even!) and try out all the fun activities both on and off the boat. Obviously the percentage of rooms booked by my family and relatives was a small percentage compared to all the rooms available on a giant cruise ship, but by sheer force of numbers, we had quite a bit of...

To begin with, you must know that Virtual Reality didn't work out as planned. In fact, it went horribly wrong. Everyone started out very excited about their over-sized virtual reality goggles strapped to their heads. Eventually, someone was able to port the technology into more normal sized glasses. Then, came contact lens. And then came the day of the great fusing. No one is really sure quite what happened, but something went horribly wrong. By this point, basically everyone was using virtual reality contact lenses. So when they fused onto the corneas of the human population, on that day virtual reality became reality. It didn't take long for folks to forget what life was like not being an animated avatar running through a pixelated world that became increasingly more lifelike after every update. In fact, people began to worry that if they had children who didn't have "reality" lenses fused onto their corneas, the parents would not be able to relate ...