On the third of March 2012 , a Tuesday, a newly developed virtual reality game called Flight was delivered to East Coast video parlours. Almost immediately rumours began to circulate that some players were actually levitating during the game. On April second two spectators noticed a thirteen-year old boy called Sherman Oakover behaving oddly in his VR harness, and called the attention of the attendant. The attendant checked the status readout on the unit and confirmed what the boys thought they were seeing - Sherman Oakover was levitating in his harness.

It was soon discovered that Sherman Oakover suffered from petit mal seizures, although never of more than a few seconds duration. Sherman had apparently suffered an episode while in the VR module and experiencing the Flight simulation.

Six weeks later, under the supervision of a team of top specialists, Sherman negotiated his way up the entire height of a decommissioned missile silo in Wyoming , totally conscious. That same day a yogi, having witnessed Sherman 's flight, levitated half a metre off the ground for thirty seconds. The team continued experiments, keeping an air tight security lid on progress, but it was to no avail. Due, perhaps, to what has been described as the `hundredth monkey' principle, or elsewhere as `morphic fields', people were beginning to fly all around the area. And like a replicating virus, it spread.

So did the deaths. While the sure knowledge of the innate ability to fly enabled flight, even momentary doubt negated that ability. The first death occurred only days after Sherman 's first accredited flight when a thirty five-year-old man fell to his death from a height of five metres. For a while the pattern of death and injury almost matched that of the initial spread of flight as large numbers toppled from the skies. In relation to this, it was quickly noticed that the sight of a falling body would set off a chain reaction of falls. Finally, after several weeks, the situation stabilised. Many still fell from the skies, but growing numbers flew and stayed aloft. But many refused to try at all.

Altitude records continued to be set and it soon became apparent that those flying failed to be inconvenienced by adverse natural conditions, such as cold, or lack of oxygen. In early June a Russian teenager entered space over the Urals, and that same day an Australian grandmother dived the Great Barrier Reef for two hours without breathing equipment. A week later, after six others had tried and disappeared, a geologist stood at the centre of the earth, and two days after that a woman who had been catatonic for the previous seven years observed the Milky way galaxy in its entirety.

Theories abounded, some bearing resemblances to some of the ideas considered by quantum physicists, others being even more exotic. The intellectual stocks of Rupert Sheldrake, for example, were up. But not many were disconcerted by science's failure to explain flight - after all, as some one early commented, science could not explain consciousness itself either.

Society changed completely. Flight was available to all who would try and could sustain it. The old and young, rich and poor, strong and weak flew the universe. Typically, however, fliers settled into a pattern where they flew for a time, then returned home to eat, sleep and do other things. Bangladeshi children flew around the towers of New York , and returned to their homes to discuss the experience. Russian babushkas flew to Mars and later conferred around a samovar. British skinheads flew into the sun and drank to the sight and sound of it in their local pub. Maps were useful for coordinating meetings, but vision was the thing.

Scientists and just interested amateurs explored the natural world, flying along the San Andreas Fault looking for signs of stress, cruising through the undergrowth of the Amazon rainforest cataloguing disappearing species, and going further and further out into space.

Los Angeles street kids flew to central India to work in the fields for a day, nestling in groups around campfires to laugh at the moon in the Andes at night. Brazilian bureaucrats surveyed their work in the jungle, and partied in Paris that evening. Generals and privates checked out the competition, and then found better things to do with their lives. With such a choice, the fliers increasingly chose only to do things that seemed to matter: food things, shelter things, ecology things, necessary things.

And steadily a new kind of consciousness emerged concerning the natural world, and human society. Pointless environmental damage and stupid social inequality, now so obvious to everyone, became unacceptable.

And steadily the world split into two camps: the fliers and those who were afraid to fly. Trouble brewed.

Then, in early 2013, a twenty eight year old woman, suddenly reminded of a childhood incident while cruising the Altai mountain range, lost her nerve and fell from a height of nearly five thousand metres. Falling under gravity's order, something happened to her and she regained herself. She stabilised, and flew on. Later, she said she was falling to her death when she heard a voice telling her it was all right to fail, and she stopped falling.

Soon the hundredth monkey effect or whatever it was took hold, and there were no longer two camps. Everyone could fly, and fall, and fly again, as they chose. And they wanted to know everything. They would still die, but until then they would explore, and talk, and sing. Everyone flew, everyone saw and heard and felt and tasted and smelled, and everyone told others what they experienced.

With so much common experience, boundaries blurred. Soon there was only a universe becoming increasingly conscious of itself.

End