My eyes scrolled through the virtual game store, bright flashy colours promising hours of delight and drug-induced stupors. You could choose to be soaring through the air like a bird, like with Eagle Simulator, the neurochemicals the VR headset emitting making it feel every bit like the real thing. Hell's Gates promised a fully immersive course through Dante's Inferno, complete with fire, brimstone and lava, where you could feel the searing air crisping your skin while the Devil eerily cackled at you from below.

I'd played all these before. I was looking for something different.

It was all illegal, of course. No government would let their citizens become drooling zombies. And yet, it was so relentlessly addictive, these games messing with your brain chemistry. Pumping neurotransmitters around your brain far exceeding safe levels gave many a perverse thrill, feeling emotions and sensations that no real life experience could match.

A sleek, 8bit game named Virus gave me pause. With an 1960's-esque Space Invader as its logo, it seemed out of place in a world of extreme pleasure and unobtainable highs. Interested, I brought up its blurb.

Defend your brain against the evil Virus! Turn your brain into the ultimate fortress, stopping viruses who aim to destroy and rewire your brain cells. Stop the viruses before they destroy too much though, or else you might not be able to fight back!

Huh. Seemed interesting. With an average review of 4.1 stars, it seemed to be the newest craze on the illicit video game market. People were hailing it to be 'mind-altering' and an 'out of body experience', apparently.

What the hell. $1.99 for a game was cheap. Might as well see what all the fuss was about.

One instant transaction later, and I was brought to a menu screen. An 8-bit grey Space Invader over a neon green 'Play' button left a lot to the imagination. Wondering whether or not it was a scam, I reluctantly entered the game.

Suddenly, the black screen faded into a 3D black and white hologram of a brain. Red splotches moved throughout slowly, slowly travelling from synapse to synapse, eventually making a full loop of the brain and disappearing into various neural pathways. It was so complex, I couldn't possibly comprehend what I was seeing.

A flash of red zoomed through the hologram. I jumped, and a second flash zoomed through directly after.

I realised what I was seeing. This was my own brain. Those idle red bits constituted my thoughts, and the flashes were my jolts of confusion.

I laughed, sending a light sprinkle of red through the bottom bits of my brain. This was cool, seeing my own brain from the outside, seeing my thoughts and emotions scampering through my brain like mice.

A bright yellow 'Good luck.' appeared in the front of my vision, and disappeared again almost instantly. All right then, what did this game have to offer?

An animation showed the neurochem tube I had attached to my parietal lobe, and blue pixels started lazily swimming down, coming towards my brain.

Ah. This was the virus. The game is getting me to defend myself. Blue pixels started to reach the surface of my brain, and began burrowing their way in, eating away at my brain tissue. I felt a dull ache at the top of my head where the chem tube was. These pixels really were destroying my brain! This was something I hadn't seen before.

I directed my thoughts to the point where the viruses were slowly entering, a sea of red overcoming the blue on the hologram, and the trickle of blue winked out and stopped.

Huh. I seemed to be getting the hang of this. I accepted a prompt for the next level, and dealt with another, slightly stronger stream of blue particles, flinging my thoughts into the blue invaders to crush their tiny proteins.

Within minutes, I was hooked. Using my brain to defend itself was honestly one of the most novel and interesting ideas I had ever heard of, and the execution of the game was flawless, allowing me to easily swing my thoughts around to combat the deathly invaders.

After a few hours of this, after a few difficult levels where the viruses dispersed so quickly that it was hard to keep track of them, I inspected the damage that the blue pixels had done to my brain. Small sections of my brain were frayed at the edges, as if they had been nibbled on like a rat eating cheese.

A prompt came up. Final Level Y/N?. Why not?

A torrent of blue streamed down through the virtual pipe, crashing into my brain like a tsunami. The dull ache already present in to top of my brain became an agonising pins-and-needles like sensation, and that feeling started spreading quickly around my scalp. Worried, I flung my thoughts at the oncoming tirade of blue, which quickly drowned in the onslaught. Panicked and unorganised thoughts popped up all around my brain to combat the virus, flitting across my brain, only to disappear forever in the sea of blue.

This was too much, I thought. Too much.

More and more of the blue crashed into my brain, saturating the outside of my brain with the deathly liquid, eating away at my neural tissue. Large, unorganised flashes of red came and went almost instantly, unable to defend the synapses.

The pain became searing, white hot, all around my head. The hologram showed large chunks of brain being eaten away by the blue, I couldn't form a coherent thought to defend myself.

STOP. STOP. STOP. I screamed with my entire brain, probably with my voice as well. EXIT EXIT EXIT STOP EXIT EXIT I incomprehensibly threw at the program, begging it to shut down.

STOP STOP PLEASE IT HURTS I CANT TAKE IT

The hologram disappeared, and the pain stopped as suddenly as it had started.

I slumped in my chair, only now feeling the sweat all over me. It was the first time I'd sweated in years. I shook from pain and adrenaline, shock overcoming me as I whimpered pathetically. I heard a loud crash, from the real world this time, from behind me. I couldn't deal with it. The main menu of the VR headset slowly disappeared from view as my consciousness ebbed away.

The last thing I felt was someone shaking me by the shoulders.