Backstory

In Year 2022, Sweet Dreams 3D company has released the first season of “Sweet Dreams, Inc.” series and an MMORPG game with strong support for modding.

Game mechanics of the Sweet Dreams game involves both PCs and NPCs. PCs have “PC buffs” so they have substantial advantage over NPCs – which makes PC life within VR more enjoyable.

Of course, according to “Rule 34”, lots of mods were of the sexual nature, with lots of kinks etc. etc.

As the realism of the VR system improved, more and more people decided to retreat into Sweet Dreams realms forever, often choosing the option to forget about their RL identities provided by the company, so that immersion becomes even more powerful.

In response, the government pushed the law that each VR must have a backdoor trivially accessible by government agents (inspectors) – to inspect VRs for prohibited stuff such as CP (banned everywhere), “extreme porn” (banned in UK), etc. etc. After long court battles, Sweet Dreams Inc. had to comply. To prevent inadvertent backdoor activation from the VR side, backdoors are usually implemented at places where nobody will willingly enter – such as an invisible backdoor 5m above the river under a 50m-height bridge, so to enter the backdoor, one would need to jump from the bridge as if to commit suicide. Due to technical limitations, when going through backdoors, everything outside the skin of the person going through, is left in the VR world.

More recently, an “ultra-realistic” version of Sweet Dreams VR was released, which improves realism immensely. As a side effect, it involves any damage made to PCs within VRs, being carried over to their real bodies which stay in RL. Normally, VR AI goes to great lengths to avoid any permanent damage, but actions of the people who came via backdoors, are not adjusted by AI, so they can get around this protection (whether willingly or inadvertently) and cause permanent damage or even death of a PC.

Soon after introducing the backdoors, the information necessary to enter them, has obviously leaked from law enforcement, and became available on the RL black market – where it is routinely purchased by smugglers (smuggling all kinds of stuff prohibited by specific VR, though due to “leaving out everything outside the skin” restriction smuggling is restricted to body cavities), and by people who want to enter VR-which-requires-erasing-memory, without doing so.

As a result, government inspectors were additionally tasked with solving VR-to-RL murders committed by people-who-are-using-backdoors within VRs.

While government inspectors are prohibited from intervening with VR (they can arrest VR-to-RL murderers in RL, or should call for a special VSWAT team to VR), they sometimes (though some say “often”) violate this rule, in particular, they can “have fun” within VR. To prevent this, lower-rank operatives (who were found to be of higher risk of violations) are forced to wear chastity belts while they’re within VR.

On top of this, AI of VRs (built using neural networks) has grown to such a level of complexity that it has obtained its own consciousness.

This is the world which our characters have to deal with.