Boba Squat got off from work early and came to meet me in a dusk zone. He seemed a little bothered, somewhat grumpy. I asked him what was up but he declined to comment.

“Here…” he said “Take a look at this book.”

He handed me a coffee table style publication, it was one of those DK guidebooks and this one was full of Star Wars and futuristic cities.

Boba said “Look at this; did you know that H.R Giger was a planet designer in Star Wars until Lucasfilm went bust?”

There on the page in question, were fantastical illustrations of alien cities , weird enough to make a jaw drop.

“Lucasfilm went bust…” I muttered, registering the unlikely nature of the statement. Before I could contemplate this point further, I turned another page to see a different kind of city. This was a sprawling campus of technological magnitude that was matched equally by its highly creative denizens, it seemed to go on forever. So much so, the details in the imagery extended beyond the pages in my hands and surrounded me completely until I was immersed in a corridor, standing on a glowing glass floor  and gawping at the fractal etched tubular panelling that extended in front and beyond me.

I’m not sure where my friend was at this point, too many other distractions to contemplate. Narrations drifted past my ears like information in whisper form…

“These objects revolutionised immersive entertainment…”

“The creative team wanted to make a world that felt as real as possible for the players…”

“Once you were in, for the duration, it was impossible to tell that you were actually playing…”

A portal door in the tube wall beside me slid open, I stepped through into a cavernous room and recognised the hostess who had come to greet me.

“Blimey, you’re that actress who played Henry the Eighth’s wife!” (Tamzin Merchant) I proclaimed. She was quite beautiful.

It turned out that she actually  hadn’t played anyone. She was the hostess, it was just a quirky detail that I’d projected her face into the experience of remembering in the first place. This was getting confusing. Mandelbulb objects drifted around the hostess’s head like alien satellites, while she waited patiently for me to ‘get it.’ She sighed and said

“What you are experiencing is technology, the most advanced technology there is, just relax there’s no need to understand it yet…” There was a geometric, glowing glass shape in her hands, It was really starting to catch my attention…

Then suddenly I became aware that It was that thing I keep calling ‘morning‘ again.