Mankind's (not necessarily humanity's) greatest achievement was the struggle to build the first lifelike Virtual Reality sex simulator over three decades.
The VRS Project was funded by a brilliant software nerd who was rejected by women like most of his kind. After much work, he found himself very wealthy. Although his problem no longer had to apply, it had ruined his whole outlook. No man should endure decades of abstinence, yet hundreds of millions of men were forced to do just that. It was known as sexual selection, by which only the more dynamic male genes were passed on through multiple mothers.
Accepting that the VRS Project would dominate his life, he was ready to sacrifice the fortunes of his investors so that someday everyone could get laid whenever he wanted.

In his Playboy interview, he admitted he didn't care about the social implications. The technical problems were enough for a thousand lifetimes.
He speculated VR-sex would improve the gender balance, reducing sexual assault rates. Despite these benefits, he only won sarcastic prizes from feminists and church groups.

The first roadblock was the most obvious.
It could be proven that Virtual Reality sex was, to put it mildly, impossible: in the same way that Earth's mightiest supercomputers couldn't crack common encryption, any machine that could fool human perception had to be exponentially more complicated than a human brain.
The only way to fully simulate making out with Miss Universe required Miss Universe's clone.

This inconvenient fact was no match for the power of frustrated lust.
The Project team began by squeezing several decades worth of research into the first year.
They realized a perfect Sex Simulator could also simulate anything else. A less than perfect one could simulate nothing else.
As long as it was better than reality.

Most of the grunt research was done by offshore contractors working in parallel. All results were made public to encourage the few competing researchers. The Project needed all the help it could get. It was a time of religious revival, and masturbation was condemned by Christian and Islamic demagogues.

Only four years behind schedule, the product of Phase Zero was a bargain at twenty billion dollars. It only required three tons of hardware (the next version would be bigger), but the control center sprawled across three floors and employed a hundred technicians.
The astoundingly versatile, omni-directional framework contained half a million parts, not including the retractable nano-needles.

The software billionaire tested the equipment himself. He admitted that any strumpet or floozy could do what his machine could do (and do it better), but his machinery could be easily mass-produced. He won more misogyny awards.

The user could squeeze and fondle a computer generated woman through a bodyhugging exosuit suspended in a support skeleton cradled inside a moving framework.
His body was only supported in a few places, depending on whether he was supposed to be standing, sitting, or lying down.
The exosuit was made of thousands of hydraulic bladders wrapped around inward-facing nano-needles.

In the first test run, only the user's hand could interact with the VR-woman. To avoid lawsuits there was also a male version serving 2% of the user base, mainly homosexual men who wished to remain closeted. Privacy was guaranteed.
The user's body was still immobilized, but he could turn his head in four directions along two planes.
Dynamic software created an ultra-resolution 3D model of the user's object of affection, which had to be felt to be believed. The next version, using a 'bilateral sheet interface', would allow full-body contact.

It was a triumph of science: a middle-aged man huffing and panting on top of a nonexistent younger female. The bottom of the exosuit pressing against his body like a mattress was woman-shaped but only millimeters deep.
The suspending skeleton precisely measured his location through colored reflectors dotting his suit.
Most data about the simulated woman, including her position, was embedded in the bodysuit to save valuable microseconds.

The user could feel his simulated sex partner's detailed skin texture and smoothness; temperature, density, and dampness; grab her body and bend and stretch or compress the joints; push and squeeze her with his legs; fondle the lushly fractalized hairs; roll off and roll over; and push and pull from several permitted directions. Sliding skin layers heated and cooled realistically, with all the underlying muscles, sinews, nerves, blood vessels and bones lovingly recreated.
One pioneer test subject liked to slap his VR lover. Biting or licking was not possible, though a Japanese inventor was working on this problem.

The first VR-sex simulator was of course rather sluggish. The mighty arrays of nitrogen-cooled parallel processors filling a converted parking garage needed time to catch up with the user's groping and poking.
A research team was forced to invent a new generation of analog chips to get the needed speed. Most users could tolerate the inevitable errors.
Only the areas the user was looking at or touching were rendered. In fact they were pre-rendered. Most Sex-Sim elements had to be calculated and recorded in advance, and were combined on the fly.
The surrounding environment was also pre-simulated from every angle; the rooms, furniture, and bedding embedded as detailed holographic patterns in dedicated CPUs.

The results could be frighteningly realistic. VR environments were far crisper, more detailed, and more lifelike than real life.
They could get boring after a while, so new environments had to be designed at stunning expense. The first simulated palace of love had twice the inflation-corrected budget of the first Toy Story movie.

Every scenario was planned in advance, all eventualities lined up in flowcharts and data buffers.
The Control Program created the simulation by combining thousands of predefined micro-tasks and sub-scenarios. Every detail of the side view of someone's ideal mate walking on the beach was perfected in thousands of preliminary simulations.

Pre-rendering employed thousands of independent artists and engineers, whose efforts had to be seamlessly combined.
The most important elements were subconscious. Factors like air temperature, wind, humidity, scents, feedback vibrations and infrasonic rumbles set the stage. Subtle motions in the user's body were set up in the supporting framework.

It was not enough. While visually accurate, the simulated images couldn't keep up with fast-moving users. Full-body interactions felt unreal after a while.
Even the first prototype had to use the mysterious technique of mind manipulation.

Halfway between illusions and black magic, the field had no consistent philosophy, only a set of loose conjectures like a fever dream.
The core insight was that the user had no free will but was acting out a program.

The first step was memory/perception integration, involving the brain's amygdala and fusiform areas. Before entering a simulation, the user endured a prolonged induction phase, concentrating on the setting without questioning it in any way. Drugs and an isolation tank session set up the proper suggestive state. He was flooded with detailed depictions of every aspect of the fictional environment.
Forced to absorb a torrent of perceptions and descriptions, the user's situational memory became overloaded. A new awareness emerged at that point, a process called holistic integration.
Ideally, he never caught up and realized his consciousness was seized, or started testing the limits of the simulation.

The first experimental sex simulator was installed in Hong Kong, after its don't-ask-questions constitution was renewed until 2097.
Because of China's vast fertile men surplus (worse than anywhere except India and Arabia), tens of millions of Chinese men couldn't find sex partners.
They flocked to the testing center in Guangzhou, where many bribes changed hands. A small minority continued in windowless vans to 'Heaven's Harem' in an unmarked office building far from the waterfront. Half were virgins. The Project team went out of its way to select a handful of disabled participants.

It took weeks of practice. Users transitioned into the simulator after spending time in virtual training rooms. The setting was crafted by each user.

Then the fun began.
The key to maintaining the proper hypnotic state was to overwhelm the user with sensations.
Full-vision display goggles covered his eyes, as tracking lasers projected images with higher apparent framerates than reality.
His brain was scanned and monitored. Trained to focus on the next action, his brainwaves controlled the force/feedback levels.

The crucial insight was to also simulate the user himself. The simulation needed to predict his actions and desires. He was the core of the simulation.
The way he scanned and explored his environment was planned by the control software. Anticipatory simulations sometimes transcended free will.

Assisted by the engineers in the control room, the AI running the simulation provided emotional feedback, the only way to create a meaningful sex partner.
The user wanted to be fondled, stroked, or slapped, or to tumble with his dream date to the ground. 'She' responded to movements and expressions he wasn't even aware of.

VR entities were generated from the user's viewpoint, a process called autological projection. More effort was dedicated to calculating the user's body's interactions with the simulated environment through internal pressure points than to the environment itself.

Each user designed his ideal partner, complete with a detailed backstory. She had an elaborate internal life of a type unknown in nature, including a hidden compulsion to please her creator.

Some preferred to indulge in hero fantasies, standard porn plots, or violent perversions, others frolicked through celebrity harems. No actual celebrities had allowed their bodies to be scanned, so their recreations were based on movie scenes and thousands of close-up paparazzi shots, a fact hidden from the test subjects. Requests to simulate underaged celebrities were of course vetoed by the legal department.

The magic happened when the user became convinced the simulation was realer than reality, like a drug trip or a lucid dream. In fact they were deceived into thinking the real world had been an excessively dull simulation all along.
The hardest part was returning to reality, which seemed very depressing.

At first the researchers didn't recognize the dangers. They even claimed VR experiences could make dysfunctional individuals saner, but the process could go wrong.
There were urban legends of strange killings, mind control conspiracies and mental breakdowns. A VR simulation that turned horrifying could scare a user to death.

For now, the danger was limited. Early sex simulators barely worked at all.
Despite three venture capital rounds, the hiring of thousands of programmers on five continents plus ten times as many subcontractors, the most expensive Korean electronics and Japanese robotics constructed to the highest standards - the simple fact remained that today's most advanced hardware was not nearly advanced enough.

The problems were legion.
The first billion dollar exosuit had to be customized and tailored for each user. The suit used electro-stimulation to help bend the user's joints as needed. Able to stimulate most surface nerves, its web of force/feedback fibers could also push and pull the user's body into any shape. The bodysuit was complex enough to walk by itself. It could even put itself on.
The ultimate goal was to fully control the body's proprioceptors, which would obviate the need to move at all.

But the control software running the bodysuit, exoskeleton, and outer framework couldn't adapt smoothly enough.
To the user, it could feel like being trapped in a dense fluid or being buried. Many dropped out after their first session.
There was talk of lawsuits for psychological trauma, including attachment issues and impotence. Investors started to grumble. The VRS Project was compared to earlier acronymed boondoggles like SST, SDI, SCSC, ISS.

Surprisingly, one of the first test runs had succeeded beyond all expectations.
The user had entered a hypnotic state of extreme concentration. The resolution and surface textures were immensely detailed. He could feel the geometry of space itself.
It was an entirely new type of perception.
His dalliance with a famous videogame vixen somehow became a false memory from a new timeline. The details faded, but the experience converted him from a chronic loser into a magnetic entrepreneur, though the transition took six months.
It seemed the simulation had rewritten his reality.

In the most successful sessions, the user felt several steps removed, as if he was remote-controlling his own body. Very slight motions were exaggerated in the simulation. He barely needed to think about moving for his VR-self to respond. It took more effort to stop an action than to start it.
His control movements might resemble fidgeting, but it felt like he was walking, running, grabbing and handling objects with extreme precision. Tilting his head caused a scene shift. Focusing his eyes allowed fine motion control.
The simulation became an extension of himself. The slight hardware delay only strengthened the out of body experience. His awareness became free to change any way it wished.

This development finally attracted the long-awaited attention of respectable researchers. Within months, two dozen universities and software firms had established their own VR institutes. They soon discovered new VR illusions.

Users stopped feeling their exosuits after a minute, which allowed the pressure cells to create deeper sensations.
At low resolutions, virtual women appeared hollow, like mannequins that might collapse unpleasantly. They could be solidified with updated pressure maps constantly overlaying earlier ones, a step ahead of the user's reality censor.

Forcing the user to pay closer attention made him less likely to notice errors. When his brain was tricked into helping to create the simulation, it was harder to notice the flaws.

Human awareness could deceive itself on even larger scales, changing memories and personality traits. The effects could spread across time. When someone experienced deja-vu, the recalled memory was only moments old. The past could be rewritten in deep ways.

The researchers identified a new addiction beyond the joys of VR sex. Even ordinary VR environments could give users omniscient power illusions, the ability to access any truth, a deep awareness across universes, at least for a while. Some felt distinctly godlike.

Like compulsive gamblers, many test subjects stayed in their simulations for days at a time, seeking some ineffable reward. VR students could study up to ten times longer. Simply making people pay attention hard enough could rebuild their brains.
The Project planners realized the spin-offs were more valuable than the sex simulator itself, at least financially. VR might dominate Earth's economy by 2050, yet it was a distraction from their true goal.

The Project went commercial, releasing the first simplified home-use Sex-Sim to fund their core research. Version 3.1, released in early 2028, was visually impressive but didn't allow much physical contact, though it came with a partial bodysuit. There was hardly any caressing, hugging, stroking, petting or fumbling involved, but since it was a pornographic product, this mattered less. The included scenarios had no relation to reality.
The software's focus tricks created the illusion of intimacy and user dominance.
The next version's online AI gave the virtual sex partner limited awareness.

There was no reported decline in sexual harassment incidents, but the increase was slowing.
Being what they were, teenage males spent inordinate efforts trying to access the earliest Sex-Sims. Hastily passed laws imposed harsh penalties on anyone allowing that to happen. It was later discovered that Sex-Sim users had trouble interacting with real females.
The technology was banned outright in the Muslim world, except as a medically approved marital aid, or to help artificial insemination and IVF treatments.

While very dramatic, VR-Sex couldn't compare to the magical passions of reality, which were all about mystery, great struggles and great prizes. Cyberspace was about solutions.

Society began to fray at the edges as humans started making odd choices. They gave up the rich chaos of real life to enter the simple yet inexhaustible purity of the New Net. Pharmaceuticals could neutralize and harness the human sex drive for other purposes.

The Project team had to face the truth.
Their latest and most advanced sex simulator, the SNGXXX, was a monstrous assembly of intricately arranged springs, gears, pipes, wires, pistons and cables that filled a cavernous hangar.
Imprisoned at the center, the user's fondest dreams could sometimes come true there, if he went with the flow.

Most of the world was now simulated in cyberspace at a resolution approaching human perception. Yet something was missing, a host of subtle and chaotic details.
The first fully successful Sex-Sim required one last breakthrough. It could either be a direct computer-brain interface, or a way to fully simulate a human brain inside a computer.
Both options were worth pursuing.

The VRS Project would achieve its goal on the same day that mankind became obsolete.

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