My protagonist, "Quota Soon," is a tongue in cheek joke about my life as a graphic artist... everyone always needs it now. Also my name in Second Life. He always wears a virtual reality suit and goggles that plug him into the virtual world as well as the real world.
In Infinite Swing, most of humanity has left earth for Vegas styled space stations. The remaining people on Earth are in underground cities going to school via virtual reality. Ancient cities are being leveled to return them to their original natural state. Some people are left behind. Amish, southern pacific islanders, and luddites resisting virtual reality take on a primitive role scavenging and becoming hunter gatherers like humans were 10's of thousands of years ago. Future Primitives.
Quota is a freelance videographer with an expensive anti-gravity video camera that he makes his money off of. In his underground virtual control center, he flies his video camera around Earth's surface for differing jobs until, one day, his job is to record primitive people still living on the surface. He finds one and moves in close. Seen as a threat, the future primitive spears Quotas' camera floating above his head like it was a dumb bird. Quota, losing his only livelihood, leaves the underground city and walks along the surface of the planet looking for his damaged camera.
Long story short, he befriends the primitives, learns that they are kept like game animals by the "others," and helps completely free them from the established technology society.
The Sequel: Ultima Thule
Too bad you come up with a sequel when the original isn't completely written.
So, Quota goes on. A wilderness exploration freak, he gets to a distant shore and finds a boat. He gets in the boat and starts paddling North. A storm happens and he loses all connection to GPS, internet and virtual reality. He finds an island. Exploring the island, he finds many mythical creatures and strange scenarios that seem to teach him. Witches, Cthulhu, half-man half-animal creatures, and glowing pixie-like entities. After a while, he starts to doubt if these mythical creatures are real or being projected into his virtual reality gear. Testing gives mixed results. Then he finds evidence of tiny, highly advanced projectors hidden in the forests, fields and waters of the island suggesting some kind of hoax.
Triangulating the projector signals, Quota finds a downed spacecraft from another world. His VR equipment helps him unravel a higher intelligence behind the projectors via the readouts in the craft. An alien approaches him and telepathically communicates their aims. The alien explains that throughout history they have approached lone humans, aboriginals on walkabout, shamans on vision quests and lone hermits. They barrage them with a projected world of their own mythological making to create a base belief. Once this mythology is considered "real" by the subject, they can transmit the more advanced levels of teaching that involve multidimensional thought, quantum reality and time travel. Apparently the mysteries of the universe are unlocked through imagination and belief.
It is the aliens' aim to educate only those that are ready to receive the knowledge. Only those available to accept an alternative reality are ready to evolve.
-In my own life, Quota's coming of age story of the Future Primitives is done. I'm now into how the mind works, mythologies, quantum physics, and higher intelligences. After achievement, there is a period of questioning reality. That's where I've been for the last few years. Adulthood doesn't make things easier, it just makes things different and should make you wonder even more...
