1 Iki Piki: {walking through cyberspace} So in the hour we've been spent here, a month or more has passed in realspace?
2 Spanners: Yep. The neural interfaces keep our bodies in suspended animation.
3 Iki Piki: Who came up with this technology?!
4 Spanners: Game developers. By the time a kid finishes Halo 17, his parents are dead of old age and can't nag him to do his homework instead.

2014-05-07 Rerun commentary: The Halo game series is currently (as of May, 2014) up to Halo 4, with a number of other spin-off games with subtitles rather than series numbers. I've never played any of them, and know virtually nothing about them. (As I've stated before, video gaming is one nerd activity that I really don't do.)

From the timing of the releases, I guess I picked Halo to mention in this strip because Halo 2 had recently been released, and was probably dominating a lot of the discussion on the net at the time.

From the release schedule of roughly 3 to 5 years between titles in the series, we can surmise that Halo 17 will be released some time around 2070. Which is actually a lot sooner than the Space theme is supposed to be set. Presumably somewhere along the line one of the games suffered a multiple-century-long development hell.