KRELL Episode 1: AVR (Advanced Virtual Reality)

by Christopher Morley

“Around the world people are dying in the on-line video game known as KRELL – nobody knows why.” 

Working in an experimental computer lab in a small mid-western University, cognitive researchers Jade Lang and Professor Leo Nash have created AVR, an Advanced Virtual Reality system based upon theories she developed while serving in the military.  AVR captures electrical patterns of thought in the brain and converts them into vivid three-dimensional images which are projected back onto the subject’s own view screen creating a high resolution world of their own creation.  A virtual world of imagination, memory, desire and fear –  which they can enter and explore at will, but which can change at the speed of thought.

Unknown to Jade her former Commander Colonel Maru Draglan has discovered her theories and taken them in a dangerous new direction.  He has invented the virtual reality game known as KRELL.  All over the world players are dying in KRELL or being enslaved in Draglan’s own private army of thought-controlled operatives. Harboring a mysterious and personal motive Draglan reappears in Jade’s life upsetting her and Leo’s plans for AVR and for one another.

KRELL is about “inner space”, the very real emotional and psychological terrain inside our own imaginations where the mind and metaphysical mingle, where destiny and free will collide and where fear and desire dictate our reality.  KRELL holds up a mirror showing us how we see our world and poses the question: “What is real?”   Through the course of the series Jade learns the unimaginable answer to that question.