I Volunteered for This

My wife Sharon died doing what she loved. It was a freak accident, nobody's fault, nobody to blame or be angry at. We had been deployed together on a disaster medical assistance mission to a far off community devastated by a hurricane. We were there to pick up and fly to safety a national guardsman who had been critically injured helping the victims of that disaster. The helicopter we were riding in had just touched down onto a rain soaked field. We both knew the pilot well. He was one of the best, very skilled and extremely safety conscious. Like I said, it was a freak accident. The aircraft was shut down before anybody unbuckled, as per protocol. As we were exiting the door a strong gust of wind lifted the helicopter slightly at the exact the moment Sharon stepped out and her foot touched the ground. The copter rotated in the wind and the skid came down hard on her leg, crushing her when it pounded back against the muddy earth. That wasn't the biggest problem. When she got yanked down by the two ton aircraft, her head hit a rock that was poking up through the sodden ground. Sharon died quickly, never regaining consciousness. My only solace was that that she didn't suffer. I sat in the mud and held her hand while they extricated her broken body from under the machine. A circle of friends and colleagues stood around us crying. I couldn't move for the longest time.

We had talked about what to do if something like this ever happened. Sharon had everything pre-arranged down to the smallest detail. She was that kind of person. In a daze, I brought her back home and did everything just the way she'd outlined. Now, months later, I was still numb. I had plenty of friends who came by to cheer me up, who tried to keep me busy and involved. It was nice of them and I appreciated it. But it all felt hollow. I was okay with being alive, but not happy about it, not without her. I missed Sharon so much, her laugh, the twinkle in her eyes, her jokes and teasing, her smart-mouthed comments. I missed everything. Most of all I missed Sharon's touch. From the very start of our love affair her touch had been something special. There was a kind of electricity that ran from her hand to my very soul. It imparted a spark that made me more alive; not just feel more alive, but be more alive. Whether we were doing mundane chores around the house or making mad passionate love, her every touch made my heart beat a bit faster, me breathe a bit deeper, see more clearly, and feel everything more fully. It made life more worth living. I craved Sharon's touch every minute of every day and it was gone. It hurt and I physically felt it's absence every waking moment.

****

When the researchers at the university called me and asked me to volunteer for their experiment I immediately said yes. I needed something different, something that might take my mind away from missing the love of my life. An outlandish experiment was just the thing. Over the phone, they told me that it had something to do with a new kind of sensory input technique designed to augment virtual reality systems. I had helped the university develop some VR simulation training scenarios so it made sense that they would call me. I didn't know anything else about it, what it involved, or whether or not it might be dangerous. I didn't care. I'd already lost everything that was important to me, I had nothing else to lose.

"We know that emotions and sensation are closely connected," one of the researchers was explaining to me when I got to the lab . "This new system allows us to feed sensory input to the subject with such intensity that it should also evoke an emotional response. That should bring the perception of 'realness' of the virtual system to a whole new level making it much, much better than anything that we do now. The resolution of the sensations that we can trigger with this systems are at least ten orders of magnitude higher than anything anybody's ever been able to do. We're using a next generation, high gigaflop processer and low temp, nitrogen cooled microprobes linked with an high speed optical array storage device..."

I was only half listening to what he was saying and barely understood half the things he was talking about. Doctor Phillips, my friend in the lab and the one I had worked with in the past, laid his hand on the speaker's shoulder stopping the flood of words. "What Jim is saying is that it should feel very, very real." Phillips had known Sharon too. We'd all gone out to dinner together many times after I had finished day-long sessions helping him in the lab. We had a running joke between us that he needed to come up with a way to enjoy the alcohol induced glow from pitchers of margaritas without the tequila hangover. He cried along with everyone else at her memorial service.

"We've never done this with a person before and we have no idea how it will affect you. You need to know that," Dr Phillips gently explained to me.

I nodded. "I get it. I'm happy to help out in any way that I can. What do you want me to do?"

"The probes need to have really good contact in order to work. There are about a hundred of them that attach to your scalp with small needles. There are other probes that go into your nostrils, on your tongue and multiple places on your skin. It will take at least an hour to wire you up. We're planning on this session lasting most of the day and we've learned from animal experiments that keeping you well hydrated with an intravenous electrolyte solution is very important. Since you won't be able to get up and urinate, we'll need you to wear a condom-style catheter. You also need to empty your bowels before we start. Are you okay with all that?" Jim, the first researcher, asked.

"I ate a good breakfast and took care of 'business' before I got here. I'm good to go." I tried to sound as upbeat as I could, but the emptiness of Sharon's absence filled me. The lab didn't distract my thoughts from her the way I had hoped. It only reminded me of how much I had lost.

"Two more things you need to know before we get started," Dr Phillips said looking at me with paternal concern. "First, this is just the first generation version of the system. We don't really know what you will perceive or feel. There's no way yet for us to control specifically what the sensations will be. For example, through the computer we will send you temperature, touch, pain, pressure skin sensations, but they won't be a specific sensation of say silk or sand. Same thing with taste and smell. We'll tell the computer to stimulate specific receptors on your tongue, or one of the olfactory receptors in your nose, but we have no idea what you will feel like you're smelling or tasting."

I nodded again, not really caring.

"The other thing is that we already know how to send out sounds and images. That's pretty easy. What we want to learn about today is how the other senses are stimulated with this new system and how that will affect you. We're going to set this up so that you won't be able to actually see or hear anything. Human brains don't do well without sight and sound because we are so visually centered. So it's likely that you will have some visual and auditory hallucinations. You brain will create sights and sounds that will probably loosely match the other sensory input. It will be kind of like a dream. Do you get that?" He asked.

I nodded again not saying anything.

"I'm not sure what it will feel like. It may be great, or it may be really disturbing. Just like some dreams are wonderful and others are nightmares. We simply don't know what to expect, " he concluded looking carefully at me trying to gage my reaction.

I just sat still not speaking, not caring. I answered his unspoken question of whether or not I could handle the experiment. "Let's get this show on the road," I said.

Dr Phillips nodded a silent okay.

I stripped naked and changed into a hospital Johnny gown, the kind that's open in the back. They explained that it would make it easier to put in the intravenous line and apply all the leads necessary for the experiment. My hair was already cut short so applying the scalp probes was easy. I laid still in the recliner as the technicians applied what seemed like thousands of wires to my body. It felt like every square inch, front, sides, and back, hands, feet, face, was covered with the sensors. There were even ones on my butt and groin.

"Leaving no stone unturned," I said to one of the techs.

"Just trying to be complete," the tech answered back. I noticed that she had blonde, shoulder length hair, sort of like Sharon's. I could see her muscles ripple as she moved about almost cat-like. It reminded me strongly of my love and her gorgeous athletic body. I had loved feeling her against me. I instantly ached for her.

They let me put on the condom-style catheter myself. It was no different than rolling on a regular condom. I didn't tell them that it had been a very long time since I'd used one of those. My wife and I had never had to worry about birth control. "I've been fixed," she joked before we'd made love the first time. So we had always enjoyed the extra intimacy of pure skin-on-skin contact with every sexual encounter.

"I love to feel your bare cock in me exploding," she had said many times. "It makes my orgasm so much more intense."

I had loved that sensation too.

***

After the techs were finished I must have looked like some kind of weird medusa. Wires trailed off my body from everywhere as I lay in the recliner. I knew they were going to tape my eyes shut and put foam ear plugs in as Dr Phillips had explained. Before losing those senses he said, "We will be monitoring your brainwaves the whole time. If we see something alarming, we'll stop the experiment. But since we have no way of knowing how you are feeling, you will need to tell us if you need to stop. We're going to give you a very mild sedative and muscle relaxant to make it easier on you to sit still for as long as it's going to take. If you have any type of problem just press this panic button." He placed a small remote control in my hand.

The blonde tech who looked like Sharon, inserted the foam ear plugs. Her face, a faint smile of concern on her lips, was the last thing I saw before she taped my eyes shut.

I was alone in the quiet darkness unsure what was going to happen. My heart sped up slightly in anticipation of what was going to come next. It wasn't really fear, because I simply didn't care what the consequences might be. It was more like uncertainty. I had no idea what was going to come down those wires, out of the silent darkness and into my brain. In happier times I would have called all of this excitement. Now the only appropriate word was stimulation. I smiled and thought of the conversation that Sharon and I had once had over drinks.

We had been talking about why we liked reading or seeing pornography.

"Erotica! Not pornography," I insisted.

"What's the difference?" she answered defiantly.

"Erotica has a story to tell and that's what makes it arousing, exciting and worth reading or seeing," I said. "Porn is just about the physical act. There's no story."

"It's just stimulation, not real arousal. The story makes the sex scenes more believable, more realistic, not necessarily better," she countered.

"I don't agree at all," I said firmly. We had never had any problems disagreeing with each other. That was one of the beautiful things about our relationship. There were plenty of places where she and I didn't see eye-to-eye, but we absolutely respected each other and our disagreements didn't diminish our deep love one bit.

"Sure I like the sex. That 'stimulation' is part of what I like about erotica. But what really turns me on is the feeling that it evokes, the emotion, that's the arousal. I think about you every time I read a 'dirty' story. Not only because it makes me think about doing whatever is in the story with you," I said stroking her butt, "but also because it reminds me of how I feel when we make love. That's what I really love, the feeling," I said.

"Yeah sure," Sharon teased me. "All you guys want is a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, quick fuck before you cum," she continued with a smirk, not really meaning it. "Us girls might just as well be your right hand jerking you off."

I knew that she was just kidding me. We'd often talked about how deep our connection was. We were soul mates, put together by some mysterious force of nature later in life after we'd each had nasty marriages and divorces. We were blessed, and every time that we made love we could feel the depth of our connection. Our trust in each other was complete and that carried into our wildest and most intimate physical acts. There was absolutely nothing, no physical or sexual act that I wouldn't do with her and I knew that Sharon felt exactly the same way.

***

All of this ran through my mind as I felt my heart speed up laying in the lab, waiting to find out what would happen next. The sedative and muscle relaxant hit me simultaneously. I felt a gentle, floating sensation, not at all unpleasant, but it left me feeling even more disconnected from my surroundings. If it was possible, I cared even less about what might happen to me than I had before.

The first sensory input from the system felt like ants crawling on my skin. It wasn't a bad feeling, but it wasn't pleasant either. The prickly sensation increased in intensity and I began to feel something on my tongue and in my nose. Not the same tingling sensation that I was feeling on my body, but a completely different sensation inside my tongue and on my nasal passages. It was if my tongue was smelling and my nose was tasting something.

"That's weird." I thought "This must be what synesthesia is like."

Synesthesia is a neurological disorder where one's brain mixes up sensory input so that stimulation of one sensory system crosses over to another. People with the disorder might describe the taste of red, or the sound of wetness. For me, it wasn't as clear as that. I just knew that something was triggering my taste buds and my sense of smell. It wasn't quite right, but I could definitely taste and smell something.

The sensations got more intense and quickly became very unpleasant. There was a stabbing pain coming from everywhere at once. It HURT! At the same time, there was a sour, nasty taste in my mouth, like vomit and a reeking odor in my nose. I was going to puke. I flashed back to a memory.

*****

"Are you okay?" I could hear the sound of concern in Sharon's voice as she knocked on the door to the toilet stall.

It was before we were married and we had been eating at one of our favorite comedy club restaurants. It was margarita and fajita night. For one price we got a pitcher of margaritas and two dinners along with tickets to the comedy show. We'd eaten there before and we loved going to the comedy club. We'd never eaten the fajitas there, and that night I learned that I never would again.

I'm sensitive to MSG, the artificial flavor enhancer. Within a few minutes of eating food cooked with MSG, I become violently ill. That's exactly what happened that night.

"Uh oh," I said after polishing off my first fajita. I was pretty sure what had triggered the discomfort growing in my stomach and what was about to happen.

"What?" Sharon said

"I need to go to restroom right now." I stood up from the table and ran into the seedy men's room tucked next to the entrance to the kitchen. Within moments sweat was dripping off me, soaking my clothes. Then the nausea and vomiting hit, followed by intense stomach cramps and profuse diarrhea. I was completely incapacitated.

It felt like it lasted for hours, but it was only about ten or fifteen minutes; long enough for Sharon to get worried and come looking for me in the men's room.

"Are you okay?" I heard her ask a second time, now sounding really worried.

"Yeah. Just give me a minute. I'll be out, but we need to go home. I'm sorry," I said panting and trying my best not to throw up any more.

"Open the door honey," she said.

"No. No. I'll be okay. Just give me a minute." I heaved again uncontrollably.

"Open it right now!" she demanded and I knew that there was no arguing.

Kneeling on the floor, my head still over the toilet, I reached behind myself and flipped open the lock on the stall door. The next thing I felt was a soothing, cool, damp paper towel on the back of my neck and Sharon's hand gently wiping my forehead.

"It'll be okay. I'll take care of you," she said comforting me. I immediately felt better.

****

Back in the lab, past the stabbing pain and my rising nausea I heard her voice inside my head, "It'll be okay. I'll take care of you."

And just like that night in the comedy club restaurant, I immediately felt better. My heart rate slowed and the pain eased off. The sour taste disappeared from my mouth and the stench faded. I saw flashes of color in front of my eyes. The sensations coming from my body lessened and began to coalesce. I felt pressure, and movement; smoothness and roughness, as well as warmth and cold. It was beginning to make sense. I relaxed. It was going to be okay.

It seemed like I was in the middle of dense grey fog intermittently pierced with flashes of brilliant primary colors. The sound of the blood rushing in my ears reminded me of waves hitting the shore. As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I felt sand beneath my feet. It was warm, almost hot, and gritty. I felt the heat of the sun on my head and face, and the sound of waves became more clearly defined. Each illusory sensation reinforced the next as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fitting together to form a complete picture. I thought about the times Sharon and I had spent together vacationing in various beach locales. The sensations gelled and became even more defined. I realized that the harder I concentrated, the clearer the virtual world around me seemed. I thought more about us at the beach.

***

It was the very first time we ever traveled together. We'd been dating just a short time. I longed for any time with her and was so happy to be getting away, alone with Sharon, away from work, away from our kids, that I was even looking forward to the long drive to her timeshare on the South Carolina shore. We held hands and chatted during the whole trip down the highway. Time went by in a flash and before I knew it we were checking in to the ocean front condo.

My heart was racing as we rode the elevator up to the one bedroom rental unit. We had loaded the cramped elevator with our suitcases, beach chairs and a cooler of food, not wanting to make multiple trips to the car to unload our stuff. We almost had to stand on top of each other to fit into the tiny elevator around our things. Sharon was pressed so tightly against me that I could feel her breathing. The heat radiating off her matched my own. I was on fire. I wanted her so badly and I could tell she felt the same way.

We tumbled out of the elevator practically panting.

"Let's get all this stuff into the room," we said in the same breath.

"Then we'll get undressed and into our suits and head to the beach," her voice practically trailed off after the word "undressed". We both knew that we weren't going to get to the beach right away.

We spent the next few hours ravishing each other like two horny teenagers. I explored every part of her body. She in turn held nothing back, moaning loudly in delight with each swipe of my tongue over her nipples and clit. My fingers probed deep into her pussy, finding and rubbing her G spot until she erupted in a violent orgasm the way that I loved. We finished off our afternoon of pleasure with my cock exploding deep inside of her as she rode me to my own intense release. It was wonderful just like it had been before and I knew would be forever. After recovering, we finally made it down to the beach and held hands sitting contentedly in the sand watching the sun set over the water.