There are four possible skin tones for your orphan avatar, but all come with red hair. The red hair parts down the middle and exists, throughout the thirty minutes, in two long braids. Your experience takes place in a room, with sensors placed on your hands and feet, and a headset that dictates what you see and hear. Should you wander out of bounds, a metal railing will restrain you. Should you flip over this railing, a staff member will flip you back.
Enjoy the carriage ride down the Avonlea main road, which dips and winds as good rural roads should. Wave hello to the brook, the valley, the hollow, the pond landing, and another brook, over which the carriage goes because this brook has a bridge. It’s always autumn in Avonlea. And there’s always a breeze, mimicked by a fan that blows directly at your face. Meet Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, hardworking siblings whose skin tones (wrinkled white) can’t be changed, and who requested from the orphanage a boy, not a girl. Marilla says “Fiddlesticks!” a lot. Matthew doesn’t speak but can grimace, shrug, grunt, nod, or frown. They decide to keep you after all, but remind you a few times, seriously, and later teasingly, that you should’ve been a boy.
State your name, your real name, and the computer will intentionally omit one vowel from it, preferably an “e.” If your real name is Chen, for the ten minutes when you are in the classroom simulation you will see your name on the blackboard as Chn, and you can tell your teacher that you are actually Chen with an “e.” Without provocation, a roguishly handsome classmate yanks one of your fiery-red plaits and calls you a root vegetable at the top of his lungs. The room fills with the scent of stale carrot cake, and a staff member pulls your real hair with as much force as is necessary to cause you actual pain. You will then be presented with a virtual-weapons inventory, which includes a slate, a foam noodle, a retractable prop dagger, an inflatable hammer, and a dead fish. You can hit Gilbert Blythe with any of the above, as many times as you wish, and he will not be severely injured.
Diana Barry, your bosom friend, awaits you outside the classroom, and for six minutes she and you go on various life-affirming adventures. Will it be the haunted wood? The cordial cabinet? Jumping on old people asleep in their beds? Sinking a rowboat while reënacting a Tennyson poem? Discussing the latest fashions, like puffed sleeves or green hair dye, and, disastrously, trying to procure them? After bosom-friend shenanigans, your schooling must continue so that you don’t grow up totally daft. You’re at a desk, studying for hours, but in real time no more than forty-five seconds. The calendar pages in front of you keep falling off. Your pencil breaks, and is magically resharpened. What a montage, you think, and thirty seconds later you’re at Queen’s Academy, with Gilbert Blythe but not Diana Barry, whose mother doesn’t approve of higher education for girls. At Queen’s, you obtain your teaching license in one year instead of two and win the coveted Avery scholarship, making you the first island girl to attend a four-year college. Friends surround and exalt you, even Gilbert, whom you’ve forgiven but who is now obsessed with you. Triumphant music folds in: hip hip hooray! The V.R. experience can be stopped here, by selecting “Yes, I wish to end my experience” from the pop-up menu. You can then remove your headset and leave the room feeling galvanized, like you can do anything, like a woman in 1881 might’ve felt had she been allowed to attend college alongside braid-pulling men. Or you can stay for the final two minutes.
The bank that holds all the Cuthberts’ savings fails. Upon receiving this news, Matthew has a heart attack and dies. Green Gables is now in danger of being sold. You decline the Avery scholarship and teach at a local school and help Marilla. Eventually, you do attend college, and become a teacher who aspires to write. Gilbert goes to college, too, becomes a doctor, makes a proposal of marriage, which you reject, makes another proposal of marriage, which you accept, because who else are you going to marry in this beloved tale? The wedding is held at Green Gables. Gilbert takes over his uncle’s clinic and you stop teaching and writing and have seven beautiful kids, in the space of ten years. The V.R. experience ends here, and, though you do leave the room less galvanized, you are relieved that the immense pressure to amount to something has resolved itself and, in the natural course of adulting, priorities must change. A person can’t trailblaze forever; she has to slow down sometimes and take stock of societal norms. Also, motherhood is wonderful, as is running your own home. But why does your home have to be so idyllic, overlooking a harbor, a brook, and a valley somehow simultaneously? And where are three of your kids? The husband, of course, doesn’t know, because he’s not here. So, should the urge seize you, and with a quick tap of that red button near your temple, you can return to the past, the classroom, and, free of charge, for up to a minute, smack young Gil again with a dead fish. ♦
