1 Paris: So how do we get out of this virtual reality cyberspace?
2 Spanners: We trek across the landscape, battling virtual foes, until we find a symbolic key that releases us, being careful not to die, because then we die in reality.
3 Paris: Can't we just decide to wake up? Isn't there some sort of safety protocol?
4 Spanners: Oh please. This cyberspace stuff was designed by geeky computer programmers.

2012-02-01 Rerun commentary: Because Your Mind Makes it Real. This is actually an important feature of cyberspace that will become a crucial plot eement later on.

And yeah. Think about how annoying your computer is, with crashes and freezes and blue screens, files that go missing, processors grinding to a halt because of annoying Flash or Java that's chewing up system resources, warning dialogues that pop up and give you no way to recover, ads that pop up all over the place, not to mention the constant threat of viruses and trojans, and of course the mysterious times when the computer will just lock up and not respond to anything short of pulling the plug for no apparent reason. Now imagine plugging your brain directly into one of these machines.

Yep. I'm certainly not about to try it any time soon.