It was a wonderful morning view, really.

The sunlight glistening across the tall glass buildings, only half the town was awaken with a dozen people going back and forth the streets. It was a new chance to start another day in your otherwise normal life. The first thought that crossed my mind, seeing the beautiful sunrise?

I wanted to end it all.

I know it’s not good to embrace your depression, but my life wasn’t nice. Mom passed away when I was little. All of our money was spent on her medication and Dad refused to get back up. He started drinking, smoking, and having all these terrible friends over to gamble with. There was never a time when he was sober. Not long after, I had to quit school because we couldn’t afford it. He got fired from his job. So, he told me that he was opening some prostitution business with his disgusting friends.

“But, Dad, we don’t have any more money to fund it!”

I was the price he paid to get his share in the business. The more I served men, the more they demanded for my body, and the more he gained profits. It was never a consented decision. Alas he never cared.

There I was, tightening my grip by the thought and sauntering by the ledge of a high building. Maybe I should just let myself fall into the afterlife. After all, I’d only climbed up forty floors to see the sunrise. Now that I’d seen it? No beautiful sunrises or new chances could ever fix my broken life.

The only thing that could set me free was this leap of faith.

So I decided to jump, the very last action I took in my miserable existence. I’d always thought there'd be ‘your life flashing before your eye’ moment, yet the only thing I felt was the wind blowing, and my heart pumping faster as I was getting closer to hit the ground. As soon as my body hit the ground, my vision went into static mode, as if my life had always been a monitor screen.

Despite how dead I believed I was, an alarm blared inside my head. My brain heated up and I started to experience the worst headache of my life. My head kept spinning and it kept getting faster and faster.

That was when I woke up with a start.

Gasping heavily in an unfamiliar hospital room, I see a man sitting beside me. The alarm was still blaring, but I realized that I wasn’t the only one hearing it. He was scribbling down notes on some paper, just like how a doctor would. I was uncomfortable enough with the alarm and headache, but what made me uncomfortable the most? The weird expression written all over the guy’s face that I simply couldn't understand.

“What—” I didn’t finish it as my body flinched instinctively at his sudden movement. His hands hovered over me and took something off my head. It was some sort of an iron headband, which I had failed to notice earlier. He tinkered with it, before muttering a sarcastic “Oh, great.”

“Wonderful. Just perfect,” he continued. His eyes moved sharply, like he was throwing glares at me, which made me sit a bit straighter, “Your name?”

My eyes darted to his lab coat and noticed the nametag on his chest. The poorly sewn nametag said in a cursive letter: Dr. Kim. I cleared my throat, “My name is Rachel. But I’m supposed to be—”

“Fiona,” he said briefly. Seriously, how could a guy be so stoic?

“No, I meant dead.”

He shook his head and sighed, followed by that cold glance again. “Your name is Fiona. Rachel is your Virtual Reality’s name and she is the one dead.”

There was annoyance in his voice. Was I supposed to be apologizing for killing myself?

“One year in VR world is one minute in real life,” he started talking in this precise, assertive tone. In this case, I had no other choice but to listen to him. “You were in a sixty minutes experiment of VR life on a difficult level. The goal was for you to feel thankful that your reality is not as difficult as it sounds. We also thought it could cure you out of depression. However—”

“I ended up killing myself,” I cut him short.

“You didn’t kill yourself,” he corrected me, “You killed your character, which brought you back forty four minutes earlier and the VR system now refuses to function properly as it was forced to stop functioning.”

He pressed a button from the back of the headband. A graph popped up in a holographic TV screen, with a lot of charts and a human body anatomy. I barely understood a thing it said, but Dr. Kim mumbled, “Let’s see…”

His eyes skimmed through the monitors. Of course, I just sat there in silence since I had no idea what was going on. Not to mention, a terrible headache was still assaulting me. As if there was a series of mini earthquakes inside my head.

After a moment of sweet torture, he started to spout some nonsense: “You appear to have a mild cognitive dissonance that affects your limbic system. Not only the VR forced stop, but your hippocampus is temporarily damaged due to—”

Before I got any further headache, I cut him off, “I’m sorry, could you please speak English?”

In response, he rolled his eyes at me. “You’re having a minor amnesia. Take one Litamine pill for today and rest.”

His hands moved swiftly, roaming through the second drawer by my bed as he took a bunch of pink pills, presumably Litamine. Despite how questionable it looked, I managed to swallow one.

“If my calculations are correct, your headache would have disappeared after you sleep. Then we may proceed with the experiment.”

My eyes went wide at his words. “I’m sorry, we’re continuing the experiment? Back to abuse, and hatred, and—”

“No,” he said firmly. His eyes flashed an emotion that I couldn't ignore. It was as if he was having mixed feelings of anger, confusion, worry, and stress.

Emphasis on stress.

I could tell by the bags under his eyes. Oh God, how could I have just noticed this? If his eyes were capable of talking, they would've been begging him to sleep just for one minute. Were it possible he had been losing sleep over this experiment?

My thoughts, however, was interrupted, “I am… I am so sorry. It’s just—”

Just like that. His iceberg persona with stiff yet precise body movements, along with his cold glares, melted away before my eyes. He took a deep breath, before continuing, “It’s just that… This experiment is crucial. I made a promise not to stop the experiment no matter what happens.”

A small crease formed near his mouth and I couldn’t believe it – was that a smile? I never thought someone so stiff could smile. “Someone would be upset if I broke the promise.”

Although curiosity flooded my mind, only a word managed to crawl out of my lips, “Who?”

In a blink of an eye, his smile disappeared and he was back to being cold. Standing up, he only ordered, “Get some sleep.”

After that, he walked out the door and left me even more confused than before. Weird, I had thought. Maybe that promise is important to him and he has to fulfill it. Maybe he was so stressed, because this experiment didn’t work? Oh God, could he be mad at me for stopping the experiment? It was sort of my fault that this experiment failed.

As guilt kept me awake, my headache got even worse. Suddenly, the whole room spun? God, I don’t even remember. The whole thing was a mess in my head. Up was down and down was up. It was as if I was falling off a building all over again, this time with my life flashing before my eye.

I did not see Mom dying. I did not see Dad turning into a monster. I saw myself graduating school. I saw myself becoming a science graduate. I saw my parents’ proud smile.

Then another flashed — I saw a man, who was it? He was a doctor. Wait, that's him! That tensed doctor who told me to take a pill. My business partner when we started developing a new technology.

The memories continued flooding through my head.

I remembered a problem. Nobody wanted to be the sponsor for our project. We could not afford any volunteers, so I came forward to volunteer myself. He was against it. God, what was his name? It starts with V.

I remembered a promise. His promise not to stop the project, no matter what would happen to me. I remembered seeing his full smile and him opening himself up. I remembered a ring, a church, and a white gown. How old was I?

But it all came around eventually. The sunlight woke me up, slowly creeping in through my windowsill. With that, Rachel died and I was reborn as Fiona. The only thing that is going on through my head right now is Vincent.

Speaking of the devil, Dr. Vincent Kim enters my room with his stiff posture, before speaking up, “Ready to continue, Mrs. Kim?”

I only respond with a smile.