In the near future, the United States government passes legislation establishing the Anticipation Day program, which allows citizens to have an immersive virtual experience once a year. The simulation appears perfectly real to them, and they have a limited ability to skip ahead or bail out of their simulation early. This is pitched as a kind of nationwide mental health program.
Five friends—Patrick, MaryAnne, Mike, and struggling married couple Eric and Alexandra—embark on their simulations: Eric joins the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803; Patrick has a Twisters-style adventure as a tornado chaser; Mike seeks to have the professional hockey career that injuries denied him in real life (leading to depression and a substance abuse problem); MaryAnne wants to relive the last memories before her father’s decline into dementia (despite the presence of her unfaithful ex-husband); and Alexandra wants to have a sun-soaked mega vacation in Brazil. They all have transformative experiences, though not all of them are positive.
While the idea of a realistic simulation on this scale isn’t new, it’s a fresh angle to treat it as a national health initiative. Unfortunately, the focus on this aspect of the premise results in a disjointed narrative; the first part of the story follows the people who shaped Anticipation Day and details its movement through congressional committees to the President’s desk. Then, after meeting this cast of characters and learning a great deal about them, they vanish from the story altogether.
The writing also leans heavily on lengthy expository speeches, which can be a bit wearying. For example, in the first section the President reads a lengthy memo laying out some of the justification behind the initiative verbatim. It’s long and dense with data points and statistics, and it’s just one of many such speeches in the story. These lengthy lectures disrupt the flow of the narrative, and would have worked better dispersed more gracefully throughout the stories.
Overall, Jeffrey Michelson’s ANTICIPATION DAY is an interesting idea that gets too caught up in the weeds to reach its full potential while missing some opportunities when it comes to the simulations themselves. Mike’s is the most interesting, as it doesn’t go as expected (and in a character-driven way). The others are a bit less creative: people have simulated adventures or relive moments of their own lives to deal with problems that aren’t particularly unique (or presented in an interesting way): marital problems, concerns about drinking, the loss of a loved one, general midlife malaise. A more adventurous approach to both the problems and the simulations would have served the concept better.
Jeffrey Michelson’s ANTICIPATION DAY boasts an ambitious premise based on immersive virtual experiences, though it runs into some predictable choices and overwriting.
~Jeff Somers for IndieReader