Writing Prompt: Visualizing Settings

At today's writing group, we were given a choice between two possible prompts:

1. You realize you have been dreaming.  Recreate your dream in detail on paper.
2. Pick a place of interest, visualize it...what makes this place vivid for you.

Point here being to exercise one's ability to use details, descriptions, atmosphere, and any number of other techniques to immerse the reader into a given setting.  For dreams and places of interest, or fantasy worlds, this can be especially difficult or challenging, so the more details given, the better and more real it seems.

For this exercise, I opted to dabble in one of my own novel ideas.  I've always toyed around with the notion of writing a cyberpunk story, maybe even in connection with a fantasy series.  So, here's what I came up with, using option #1...
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                I jerked awake with a start, and a single, jarring thought repeated itself in my head:  people don’t dream in the Stream.  It’s physically impossible:  the mind connects to the Stream, engages the neurons, making sleep impossible even though the body is still.  I had spent a good three hours in the Stream, actively finding the links and clues to the Mega Therion project.  I wasted a good hour in the Everwar game, just to make contact with the user Lightning_Shark.  I was active the whole time; sleep was impossible.

                There was no mistake:  I did indeed have a dream while connected to the Stream.  I had a definite subconscious experience.

                Reaching behind me, I yanked out the plug from the base of my neck, and I fumbled out of the stasis chair toward the monitors.  Touching the screens, I pulled up the session recordings; I saw my recorded interactions across the Stream and in the Everwar instance.  The last ten minutes were completely blank, as if I didn’t even exist.

                Cursing at the machines, I resorted to the old-fashioned way of recalling my vision.  I scrounged the den for paper and a pen, and I tried to recall everything, before they faded from my memory.  Even with hardwired cerebral implants, dreams never persisted long in memory.

                After leaving the Everwar game, I remember sliding across the Stream, my consciousness racing through the invisible networks and clouds that laced across the entire world.  All the data, the glowing visual grids, and high-resolution sites, whizzed past me in a blur of unreal light and color.

                Then, the dream initiated.  All that color and light coalesced, condensed, and rezzed into some tangible form.  It all solidified in front of me, transforming into a huge, colorful, luminescent dragon.

                What was it that Lightning_Shark told me? Mega Therion meant “the Great Beast.” Was this the Mega Therion project that I was seeking?

                No way was I prepared for this.  I waved my hands to bring up my GUI in my shell, but I couldn’t move fast enough.  The beast opened its mouth and a set of bright neon teeth bore down on me.

                With a loud electric crack, my shell was breached.  All the firewalls, codes, and programs fell away from me, their red letters appearing like blood.  With gut-wrenching alarm, I realized I was vulnerable.

                For what felt like an eternity, it was quiet; it was the deepest and most penetrating silence I ever experienced.  It was dark all around me; the deepest and emptiest darkness I ever knew.  The light and voices of the Stream were gone, and I was alone.  Disconnected from the World Wide Web, I never felt more alone than this.

                Then, something rezzed at my feet.  Millions of pixels appeared and spread out, until it made up a prairie.  It was a vast, lush, green field with hills in the distance that rose up before my eyes.  The sky was drawn in over my head; a beautiful and vast vista of blue atmosphere and glowing orange clouds.

                This was more than a mere sim.  This was not just another virtual reality.  The data here was light-years ahead of what current technology could accomplish.  Data for all other virtual realities were simple:  inputs for sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and superficial sensations merely piped in to the mind, making the users believe what they saw was real.  It was a world drawn for us on the fly.  This, however, was an entire world drawn before me in full, and I was able to tread through it.  Every byte of data became an atom in this sim, to build up the grass at my feet, the air against my skin, the clouds gracefully flowing above me, and the smell of the fresh cool wind in my nostrils.  This world was not merely rezzed; it was as close to real as it could be.

                I had to stop and touch the grass, brushing my hand against the myriads of blades.  Living so long in the city, I never realized that real grass could feel so stiff, and yet so smooth and cool.  Plucking a blade up from the ground, I saw that it split cleanly from its base, just like a real blade of grass would.  Holding it up, I watched as the gentle breeze carried the grass blade away.  Physics were always easy to emulate in a sim, but this felt even more complex than mere vectors and velocities.  There had to be programs in place to make the air currents flow so naturally, and to make the grass grow like it was real.  How much deeper could this sim go? Did it have its own weather systems? Was there a day and night cycle? Was there a life and death cycle for all the living grass, and all the other simulated organisms?

                Watching the grass blade drifting in the wind, I watched as something else rezzed before my eyes.  Pixilated tiles floated along the wind and built up a form in front of me, starting at the ground.  The tiles formed a pair of sleek, slender legs, walking coolly towards me.  The tiles continued to build up, forming hips, an abdomen, breasts, arms, and shoulders.  When the head materialized, I beheld a tall, beautiful woman with smooth, graceful movements.  Pixels cascaded from her scalp, flowing with the breeze to form a long length of silky black hair.

                Treading on the grass, the woman stared at me with her stark, black eyes; they had a thin blue ring that glowed brightly.  The more I regarded her, the more curious I became.  Was she a real user, like myself, or was she an artificial intelligence? She seemed to embody the manners of both.

                I stopped writing about the dream, when I realized that I had forgotten the rest of it.  It took a few moments to compose my thoughts again, and I remembered one final detail.  This woman, so graceful and seemingly-perfect, uttered just one word to me.  I remembered watching her soft lips moving, but I couldn’t hear her speaking.

                For the days that followed, a new obsession took me over, because the dream left so many questions unanswered.  I had to go back to the vivid green paradise.  I had to find this woman again.  Above all, I had to find out what it was she told me.  I had a feeling that the words she gave me were important.  Little did I know that the words she spoke would affect our future in terrifying ways.