Users are hooked up to a machine that not only simulates a range of sensations, from pain to sex, but responds to brain signals to move a player's character.

In the tradition of role-playing games, players get some choice over their characters' appearance and abilities, and they must use logic and ingenuity to overcome each obstacle, often involving riddles.

In the meantime, Baal enters a fantasy setting in which a knight must rescue a princess from an evil sorcerer in a castle guarded by a dragon.

He captures Baal under the ruse that he is the hero, but when she makes sexual advances at him, he tells her the truth, too honourable to take advantage of her even if it is only within a game.

In his days as a cop, he had an affair with a battered woman he was protecting, and the jealous husband ran him down with a car, leaving him paralysed from the waist down.

Baal, a plain girl despite her voluptuous appearance in the game, has type I diabetes and is depressed from having recently broken up with her boyfriend, who couldn't handle her disease.

Aided by his police training, he remains calm and talks to Phreak, even though he knows his real body is in danger of eventual dehydration.

The mother eventually died, and Phreak is convinced that she was also killed by snakes, which he believes lurk in the shadows waiting to pounce on him.

They all end up in a prison together, and Walter tries to force the information out of Phreak, while Baal makes motions to seduce him, but he resists their methods.

Phreak is traumatised by the game's simulated death and is terrified of experiencing it again, but he will not volunteer that information to Walter, whom he decides to kill.

Walter and Baal decide they are in love and want to marry if they manage to survive their current ordeal and meet in the real world.

Phreak has manipulated police records so that there is a phony arrest warrant on Walter, but the friends he met in Killobyte show up and refute the charges.

(Anthony himself has been diagnosed with Type II diabetes, though the diagnosis was later called into question, as some doctors believe he may instead have chronic fatigue syndrome.)