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They clapped when Scott stood, though not wildly. Not the kind of clapping that signaled celebration. Not exactly. For the old-timers, it was the sort that acknowledged survival, something between politeness and reverence.
For the newcomers, it was a quiet awe and a yearning to have what he had. Scott hadn’t spoken yet, so they had no idea what he had, but for him to be up there speaking on his fifth anniversary, they knew he at least had the secret of how not to plug in. That is what they wanted more than any material possessions. That was what they needed if they wanted to survive.
Scott felt a lump in his throat, and a shiver ran up his spine. No matter how many times he shared his story, he always froze when he realized they were not listening only to his story, but for the faint possibility of their own salvation.
He waited a moment longer, pressing his thumb lightly into the center of his palm. A grounding technique. He’d learned it from Liam, his sponsor, “One sensation to bring you back to the body,” he used to say. Scott hadn’t spoken to him in over a year. Liam moved North after a big promotion at work. They’d kept in touch for a while, but people drift, even the ones who save your life.
The Virtual Anonymous meeting was held in the basement of the Unitarian church on Alden Street. It felt less like a church basement and more like a bunker for broken souls. Smoke from countless cigarettes and vapes circled just outside the door. The floor inside was concrete, the walls were lined with ancient, yellowing caulk boards with Bible verses tacked to them. And the coffee, always too strong, had the bitter, reassuring Tang of something endured rather than enjoyed. There was no digital clock, only the ancient tick of an analog wall unit, just above the poster of the Twelve Steps. That was deliberate, Liam told him early on. Time should pass slowly in these rooms. Uncomfortably so, if need be.
“You go, Scott.” Joe’s voice rang out excitedly from the back of the room.
Too excitedly.
He knew Joe. By now, everyone knew Joe. He was always trying to be ‘part of’ just a little too hard. He was a newcomer who said he was coming up on 60-days without plugging in. He would always dogmatically cite passages from The Real Book like he had not plugged in for decades. That, or be completely absent. Distant. Oblivious to his surroundings. He’d twitch, then return with hyper focus, touting some VA mantra that loosely covered the situation. Then Joe would twitch again. The old-timers had seen it countless times before. All knew Joe was plugging in again despite what he said. Many in the group had been there during early recovery. They knew.
“Keep coming back,” they’d tell him with a hopeful smile.
“Five years,” Scott whispered to himself. How did I get here?
Five years without entering a virtual world. Five years without logging into the complex, intricate digital realms that had once consumed him whole. Five years without the fake sunsets, the bright, garish landscapes, the simulated cities where he could be anyone and do anything.
Still, the pull to return drifted through him like a half-remembered melody, faint, enchanting, but insistent, always waiting to be sung again.
Scott’s fingers twitched again as he looked around the room, assessing the people in the circle. They were his family now. People who understood, who had walked the same path. And yet, something gnawed at him. Something made him wonder if, just for a moment, he could slip back in. A few moments in a virtual world, just enough to scratch the itch a million recovery words just couldn’t reach. No one would know.
Would they?
He would know.
There is never just a few moments when it comes to VR. Never. He would always want more. He reminded himself what the old-timers always said. “One minute plugged-in is too many, and a million is never enough.”
Then, he remembered: his children. His ex, Lynn. The look on Eli’s face the last time they spoke, the anger, the betrayal. The vacant expression of his daughter, Marissa. She had given up on him before he even knew what had happened.
His throat tightened as the reality of their absence hit him. He had hoped they would come tonight. Prayed them come. He’d asked twice.
They hadn’t responded.
Someone in the back of the room coughed impatiently.
Scott stood before the group, their attention clinging to him like a second skin too tight to move in, and for a moment, it felt like he was back in one of those virtual worlds. The air seemed thin, distant, almost unreal. The sensation passed quickly as he steadied his breath, grounding himself. He shifted his stance, his hands finding the edge of the podium, something solid beneath his hands.
It was time to start.
“Hi, I’m Scott, and I’m a virtual reality addict.”
“Hi Scott,” the reply came back with forced enthusiasm, their voices stitched together by shared brokenness.
He glanced around the room, his eyes moving over the familiar faces. They had come to hear his story, but would they understand it? Would they know what it was really like to disappear into another world? Then came reality. If they were in these rooms, they understood. They knew.
“I started… well, I started a long time ago. I was one of the early adopters. Back when the virtual worlds were just beginning. I was twenty-nine when they first launched the immersive systems implants, the ones that let you really feel everything. The new virtual reality was like nothing else. You didn’t just control your avatar with a controller. You were in it. Everything was real: the heat of the sun, the wind in your face, the smell of the ocean, the way sand felt between your toes. You could feel it all.”
He paused for a moment, letting the memory of his first virtual beach wash over him. It felt strange now, the things he had once found so intoxicating, so all-consuming. Back then, he had been hooked immediately. At first, he said it was just an escape, a diversion from his crumbling marriage, from the monotony of daily life, from the constant pressure of responsibilities.
But even then, he knew it was more than that.
“I guess I was always looking for something more,” he continued, his voice quieter now, more reflective. “Something better than what I had. In the beginning, it wasn’t so bad. I’d log on after work, and I’d find this whole new world. One where I could be anything.” He let out a low bitter laugh. “It was a relief at first. To be free of myself, to not be Scott, the guy with debts, the guy whose wife was leaving him. To be someone else, somewhere else. I got good at it. Very good. Became someone important in those worlds. I was a player. A king. I got a taste for the power.”
He shifted his weight, trying to ease the discomfort creeping through his chest. “But eventually, it wasn’t enough. The games, the role-playing worlds, they weren’t enough anymore. I wanted more. So I started designing my own. I’d made a lot of credits with the virtual games, so I had the means to do it. So I created a private world for myself. A world where I could do whatever I wanted. A world where I could bend the rules of reality. Somewhere, I could make everyone love me. Be everything I always wanted to be.”
The silence in the room was thick now, they could all feel the weight of his words. He looked up, meeting the eyes of a few of the newer faces in the circle, the ones who were still hesitant, still unsure. He could almost hear their thoughts, the same ones he had once had. You don’t understand, Scott. You don’t know what it’s like to want something so badly, to need it so badly.
But, he did.
“In the beginning, I had money,” he continued, voice growing steadier, but the emotion still cut through. “I could build whatever I wanted. I tailored my world. I built the perfect life. I could do things I could never do in the real world. I was with women… women who would never have looked twice at me in real life. I had the perfect body, the perfect house, the perfect life. It was intoxicating.”
A wave of nausea gathered in the back of his throat. Needled his gut. He could feel his heart thudding hard, pulsing with memories long buried, but he continued, “the virtual drugs. The sex. The constant need for more. I always wanted more.
“I lived in that world for so long that I lost track of time. Days, weeks, and months passed without me even noticing. I didn’t need to sleep, I didn’t need food, there were ways around that. I didn’t need anything.”
“I was the king in my own kingdom. And then one day, I realized… I hadn’t seen my kids in months. They hadn’t seen me. I had stopped calling. Stopped caring.”
He paused, looking around the circle now. He could see their faces. Some of them had been in that place before. Others would be, if they ever plugged in again.
“Eventually, it caught up with me. The addiction… the escapism… it became a hunger. A need. The more you give in to it, the more it takes from you. And when you don’t have anything left to give…” He trailed off, swallowing, “it takes more anyway.”
“I don’t think I was even enjoying it at that point. If I ever logged out, I’d get sick, the headaches, the shakes, and anxiety were crippling. None of it stopped until I logged back in. I was no longer logging in because it was fun, it was to stop being sick.”
“A foggy year, maybe two, passed. I can’t even remember how long exactly or what I did in there. I lost 70 pounds. A skeleton. My body had wasted, muscles atrophied, my organs barely functioned. Still, I didn’t stop.”
“I wanted more…”
“Always more.”
Scott thought about Liam’s advice, four years earlier, the first time he was a speaker at a meeting. “Tell them what it was like, what happened, and what it is like now,” Liam told him, “it’s a 12-step formula that has worked since before you were born, so stick to it.” Scott always had.
“So, what happened?” The words hung in the air, and the circle seemed to bend toward him, every folding chair tilting forward, every face waiting. The answer might be the string they could follow out of the maze they were lost in.
“The inevitable crash happened.”
“I was ejected from my own world. I hit bottom the day the servers shut me out. I had nothing left to pay for the bandwidth, the storage fees, nothing left to bargain with. The world I’d built, the perfect world, the perfect version of me, was gone. I was so far in arrears the hosting company had the server’s hard drive formatted for the next waiting addict.
The illusion was gone, and when I returned to the real world, I faced the wreckage I’d made. My job was gone. My home was gone. My relationships were dust. The family had already moved on with their lives. All that remained was me, only me, terrified and powerless.”
“The real bottom wasn’t the loss of the job or the house… it was watching my family through the eyes of a stranger.
“And my family didn’t care anymore. My wife, Lynn, and my kids, Eli and Marissa, they were gone. They didn’t want anything to do with me. And I couldn’t blame them.”
He paused again, lowering his gaze. The pain felt fresh, the scars still tender.
Scott stood at the front of the room, his fingers spread against the podium, not gripping exactly, but reluctant to let go. He felt the tremors starting again, the familiar rise of panic he’d learned to suppress. These were the times when talking about it felt like opening an old wound, a wound that never really healed, no matter how much time had passed.
But the truth needed to be said.
“In the beginning, I thought my real-world deck was stacked, so I dealt myself another hand. Away from all the people, places, and things that had it in for me. That’s what I told myself. But it was an escape from life. An escape from me being me.”
“I lied to myself for years that it was just a pastime, a hobby. That it wasn’t hurting anyone. But it was. It was hurting everyone and everything I loved.”
Murmurs of understanding floated through the church.
“I told myself I could stop at any time if I wanted. Told that to my wife a thousand times. It was a lie then, just like it is a lie now.”
Scott exhaled slowly, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead. The room seemed as intimate as a confessional, dense with buried truth. The addicts within were his stand-in priest, silent, listening, unflinching.
His eyes glistened, and for a moment, he lowered his gaze to the floor, gathering himself before pressing on.
“I remember the first time I logged in for a month straight into the private world I built. I had just gotten divorced, and everything felt like it was crumbling. I was exhausted. I’d been spending hours at the office just to deal, then come home to an empty apartment. No wife. No kids. No reason to be in the here and now.”
“So I went there.”
“I remember the feeling of plugging into the interface after they were all gone.” He spoke in a hushed whisper. Scott absently touched the plastic cover on his temple, still feeling the divot of the interface behind it. “That’s when I crossed over from being a heavy user to an addict. The book tells us, ‘It’s a progressive disease, it always gets worse, never better.’ And the downward spiral is always spinning, faster and darker.”
The church basement had gone utterly still, even the air itself was leaning closer to listen.
“I remember that first full month, that strange sense of disconnection from my body, like I was waking up from a nightmare my life had become. And then, suddenly, I was there. In a world where I could be anyone. And I wasn’t just anyone. I was talented. I was handsome. I was desirable.”
Scott chuckled bitterly. “I was everything I wasn’t in real life. The world I created gave me everything I wanted. The freedom to do whatever I pleased, whenever I pleased. No rules. No consequences.”
He paused again, glancing at the group. He could feel the weight of their attention, their empathy. This was the part of the story where the ugly truth came out.
“And it wasn’t just the power,” he continued, his voice quieter now, more vulnerable. “It was the intimacy, as crazy as that sounds. The people, the characters in my world, they loved me. They adored me. And it wasn’t just in the way you’d expect from a game, like NPCs following scripts. These characters were real to me. I made them real. I gave them depth. Gave them consciousness. I created relationships. I made them want me.”
His voice caught in his throat for a moment, but he forced himself to keep going. The group needed to hear this, needed to understand how deep the addiction had gone.
“I was with them,” he whispered. “With these women, these characters. Women who were 10s. They wanted me. They needed me. In this world, I was desired. In this world, I didn’t need to try. It was effortless.”
“But then my perfect world was all gone.”
“Did I stop VR then?”
“Of course not”.
I did what addicts always do when the well runs dry: I pawned off the last scraps of my life, my wedding ring, my food relief card, anything that still had value. I funneled every credit into those back-alley VR parlors, the kind where the walls stink of sweat and ozone, and you plug in for as long as they can bleed you for. I lied to anyone who’d still take my calls. I stole from people foolish enough to trust me. Every cent, every favor, every ounce of goodwill – converted into pay-by-the-minute time inside a machine. Until… until there was nothing left to sell, no one left to con.
“My rock Bottom.”
“Then I knew.”
“I knew I was absolutely powerless over virtual reality, and my life was certainly fucking unmanageable.”
“Step one,” Scott heard several in the basement mutter under their breath.
A shaky breath escaped him as he forced himself to continue. “It was then, in what the book calls a moment of clarity, that I realized something. I wasn’t going to get better by just waiting for things to change. I had to make them change, and I couldn’t do it by myself.
He looked out at the group now, his eyes intense. “So, I did what they tell you to do in these meetings. I took the first step, I admitted to myself that I was powerless to stop. My addiction to virtual reality had taken everything from me. And I knew, in that moment, I had to stop escaping. I had to stop disappearing.”
“Like those posters on meeting room walls say,” Scott said, pointing to the wall. “I had to accept life on life’s terms and embrace reality for what it truly is.”
Scott took a deep breath, the weight of the words settling heavily in the air. “It wasn’t easy. The first few days were the hardest. I could feel the withdrawal, not from a sbstance, not from distraction, but from everything. From the world I had built, from the people who never really existed in that world. Withdrawal from the escape itself.”
He exhaled, his chest tightening at the thought. “But then something else happened. I realized that I couldn’t just stop plugging in. I couldn’t just stop escaping without facing the damage I’d caused. I had to face the real world, the mess I’d made.”
Scott’s voice trembled a little, but he pressed on. “So, I went to therapy. I started going to VA meetings like this one. I read The Real Book a dozen times in the first 3 months. I got a sponsor, and with his help I worked through the steps. Somehow, by the grace of God, I got my old job back and started rebuilding my life from the ground up, piece by piece.”
“I took every step they tell you to take and did everything they suggest you do. I made amends. I started giving back by becoming a sponsor myself. I took our message into rehab centers and correction facilities.”
“Finally, I contacted my family.”
His eyes flicked down to his hands, now resting on the podium. He could feel the dryness in his throat, the lump that had lodged there. “It wasn’t easy. At first, they didn’t want to hear it. Lynn, Eli, Marissa, they were angry. They had every right to be angry. I had abandoned them. I had let them down, betrayed them in ways I couldn’t even count.”
He paused, taking a slow breath. “But slowly, little by little, I started rebuilding. And one day, Lynn agreed to talk to me. She didn’t want anything to do with me, but she agreed to meet. And I’ll never forget it, the look on her face when I told her I was finally unplugged. That I wasn’t going back. That I was ready to live again.”
He swallowed, a tightness in his chest making it hard to breathe. “It wasn’t perfect, but it was a start. I still have a long, long way to go. And I know I’ve hurt them irreparably in many ways. I did a lot of damage. Five years later, they’re still angry, but with what I’ve learned in these meetings, they’ve been coming around—slowly.”
Scott’s eyes scanned the circle, seeing the faces, hearing the unspoken empathy in the room. There was something grounding in that. Something real.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’ve learned a lot over these five years. The virtual world, the escape, it was never the answer. It never could be. It only took everything. It took my family, my identity, my life… my dignity. But here I am. Still standing. Still fighting, one day at a time. I made it, and so can you.”
“One day at a time.”
The room erupted in applause. Woots and whistles rang through the hall. A dozen people came up to congratulate him on his five years and on being such an inspirational speaker.
#
The meeting was ending. The circles of chairs were beginning to break apart as the newcomers did their service work by putting them away and cleaning up. Everyone else was gathering their things, exchanging a few quiet words. Scott stood in the center of the room, his hands at his sides. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t feel the need to rush. He didn’t feel the pull of the past, didn’t feel the desperate desire to make everything perfect. More than anything, he didn’t crave plugging in.
He could hear the murmurs of conversation around him, the shuffle of feet, the sound of chairs scraping against the floor. But there was a stillness inside him, a quiet place that he hadn’t known existed until now.
And then he saw them.
At first, it was a blur, just figures moving in the doorway. But as they got closer, Scott’s heart caught in his chest. His ex-wife Lynn, looking as composed as ever, stood just a few steps away from him. His daughter, Marissa, and his son Eli were there too, lingering just behind her.
“Five years. Welcome back to the land of the living,” Lynn said with a smile. She was actually smiling at him.
His heart beat in his throat. He wasn’t ready for this. Not really. But they were here. They had come after all. And for a moment, just a moment, everything felt as if it might be okay.
Scott took a step forward, then another, his feet moving on their own accord. He was about to speak, to reach out…
Everything stopped.
A cold shiver ran down his spine. The sounds of the meeting, the people around him, the feel of the floor beneath his feet, all of it vanished.
He blinked, his surroundings flickering. The room was gone. The church was gone.
“Please transfer more credits to continue,” an artificial voice rang in his mind.
Scott didn’t move. His hand was still half-lifted, reaching toward a family that wasn’t real.
Yet again.
How many? What, A hundred simulated reconciliations, a thousand pre-programmed smiles? He closed his eyes. Breathed in. There was no musty church basement. No chairs scraping against tile.
Just code.
He touched his tingling temple and felt the warmth of the port. Maybe this time he’d wake up. Really wake up and work the steps. He reached for his holophone and pulled up Liam, his old sponsor. “It’s time for a change,” he said out loud, finger moving to the call button.
But his fingers hesitated.
“I’ve got enough for one more minute. Continue it,” he whispered to the artificial voice in his head.
It obliged.
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