The Halo

This story was inspired by recurring themes I've noticed in large entities. Companies going from individual people with big dreams doing a labor of love to cash hungry corporations who recycle the same crap. This genre is inspired by that, the electric state, liminality, surrealism, and other dystopian/cyberpunk themes. This story in particular draws upon religion to create a certain juxtaposition, inspired by other horror and "the salvation project". Written in November 2025 as a freshman in high school.

The Halo – A Neuroreality story

The Neuroreality engine.

I never meant it to be this.

I remember the day it finally launched. People lined up for hours to experience the latest technological marvel. It started as a simple college project. A way for dreams to be visualized and imagination to bleed onto screens. The first dreams were able to be captured, recorded, and replayed.

It wasn’t long before Eidolon noticed. The weeks following the launch party, the Neuroreality engine vanished. Any and all details vanished without a trace, replaced by 404 and error messages. The laptop was seized, the property bought, and the college paid.

Months later, the Halo appeared. Under another name, the Neuroreality engine had been absorbed, mutilated, and repurposed. It was no longer a fragile engine. It was more... polished. More corporate. Engineers had reverse engineered the dream painter into something for rendering things directly into the brain. It wasn’t a breakthrough anymore. It was a product.

The iterations began. Each Halo update became more surreal, more lifelike, more dreamlike. It was expensive at first, a crown of shiny plastic and signal for those who could afford it. Then the developers made a major improvement in the graphics rendering, “Iteration 4 of the Halo engine,” they called it. It cut computing power by 60%. It also cut costs by 60,000 dollars.

Everyone got the Halo. Everyone wanted to be the angels of their own digital worlds. No one wanted to face reality. The Halo. Filter reality through our crown. Why remain in this world when you can ascend into ours? They promised freedom. They promised a utopia. Who could resist that offer? The economy was crashing. Disease ran rampant. Government was corrupted.

The Halo was quickly fully integrated. Nobody left their homes. Streets were swallowed by leaves and weeds. Exercise, vacation, it all became the past. No one was ever offline. But the simulated reality was just a facade. Each memory, thought, name, all archived. Stored. Collected.

The corporation couldn’t keep up with the demand. The day Neuroreality became the only reality. Memories started costing money. Experiences became a paid premium. "Just two dreams for ascendance." They promised. Where those dreams went... no one knew.

Cathedrals of data centers shook the earth. Hundreds of them, humming, a constant, faint sound that chased you everywhere. Animals thrived. Buildings emerged from overgrown jungles of vines and plants. But everyone knows utopia is rhetoric.

The glitches were subtle at first. One or two people that stopped being online. Then it spread. Realities merging, coalescing... vanishing. The worlds became... Unstable. Parts of reality phased in and out of existence, "flickering," they called it. Some were trapped in time loops. Others couldn't log off at all. Clouds forgot render. Shadow's lagged. Developers claimed they were updating the systems. No one really knew.

I don’t remember what happened after that. Maybe I haven’t paid the monthly fee.

I never meant it to be this.

I wanted to give the world a way to see their dreams, not a way for Eidolon to see mine.

I guess this is just god’s cruel way of punishing us for mocking him with our Halos and false heavens, for replacing his world with our own twisted version.

I wonder if they remember how It all began. A dorm room. Coffee on late nights. A cracked laptop.

They probably locked that behind a paywall too.