This is the final story I write for the fiction writing class I took in the fall. I mostly created this story for the sake of the ideas that I try to present throughout it. I think that's how science fiction works, anyway.
A Bloodborne Simulation
For a slowed down moment Admiral Jacobs watched his deck crew through the complete chaos. They were, in every sense, the best of the best, but now they were out of options. The instant crystallized into a memory that was situated to become the greatest feeling of defeat he would ever experience.
“Report!”
“We hit them, but the slug was deflected by their shields. Major hull damage is being reported across the upper part of the ship due to the cannon misfiring.”
A door at the rear of the bridge opened, and a small cadre of fully armed and armored special-operations marines calmly approached Jacobs’ command post. The leader of the group put a hand on Jacobs’ shoulder to announce his presence.
“Sir, I have orders to get you off this ship.”
Jacobs looked over his shoulder at the armored hand trespassing on his bridge. “Fuck off.”
The marine didn’t budge. “With all due respect, Sir, the Kusanagi is going down, but you aren’t going down with her. I suggest you order your men to abandon ship.”
Admiral Jacobs stood up and surveyed his bridge for the last time. He addressed his entire crew over the ship’s communications system in a loud, steady voice. “This is Admiral Jacobs. I am initiating a full evacuation of the Kusanagi. Here are your orders: all personnel are to evacuate to the planet. Once you’re planet side rendezvous with the rest of the surviving crew members and then contact a friendly local population.” Then, speaking only to his command crew, “Navigation, lock in a full throttle course away from the planet, try and buy us some time.”
“Course locked in, Sir.”
“Thank you. You are all dismissed! Get to your shuttles.”
As a formality, Jacobs waited for his crew to leave the bridge and then allowed the marines to escort him to his private shuttle.
Flying away from the Kusanagi, he had a great and terrifying view of its destruction; a physically accurate explosion, perfectly rendered in the neural pathways of his mind. Admiral Jacobs closed his eyes and clocked out.
#
As Michael Jacobs opened his eyes, his memories and personality flooded back into his consciousness. Admiral Jacobs commanded, until recently, a huge, technologically advanced “capital” spaceship as Michael’s avatar in a massive online game called “Stardust,” wherein Michael was one of the highest-paid sponsored players in the world. Today’s loss had been a terrible one. Days of chasing around false leads and fending off ambushes –only to have it end in the utter destruction of his ship. Obtaining a new one would be no simple feat. He dreaded the next few game sessions, which would undoubtedly see him trying to escape a foreign planet to safety and that was something he had not had to do for a long time. He imagined what kind of scripts the programmers might come up with to make his escape more entertaining to viewers; all for the sake of a dollar bill. He grew irritated at being reminded that he was their pay-per-view spectacle.
Admiral Jacobs still existed in Michael’s memories, only now he was partially buried by his non-virtual self. It was part of a plan for total game-immersion. Whoever you were outside the game didn’t get to come with you inside the game, but once you exited the game those memories stayed with you. At first there had been some strange psychological effects from this mechanism, but to most modern gamers it was just like learning a second language. Getting started young was all the better.
For a moment he was unable to move; the paralysis induced by the game was chemically identical to R.E.M. sleep paralysis, or so he’d been told. He surveyed his apartment in much the same way he’d surveyed the Kusanagi. Not for the first time he considered how his crew was simply replaced here by the furnishings and comforts of his life. This thought made him feel somewhat neurotic. Next thing you know I’ll be talking to my fucking coffee pot.
Finally, control over his limbs returned and he was able to take off his cathode helmet and stretch out. He wandered, idly, for a few minutes around his apartment. One of his favorite parts of end-game was how fresh everything seemed when he returned to his real life. He also knew too well that things would soon be back to their dull selves, but by then he would be ready to jack back into the ever-changing game realm.
It was a nice place, as apartments go. A corner suite of an expensive downtown high-rise, one side’s windows looked down into the city and the other’s looked over a park. His living room occupied the corner itself as well as the majority of the apartment’s floor space. Right now the windows were blacked out, best not to come out of a game into full daylight. Michael’s gaming chair looked somewhat like a reclined dentist chair. Insiders called them “cradles”. Their design was intended to support and relax the body so that physical stimuli were less likely to interrupt game play. The place also had a small kitchen that was rarely used and a loft bedroom, which was reserved almost exclusively for sex, since gaming was physiologically similar to sleep. Since around the time he had turned ten, Michael Jacobs had been living, in one reality or another, an almost constant waking life.
A phone ring effect was pumped through the apartment’s built-in sound system. A caller ID tag appeared on one of the blackened windows reading: “Hey dipshit, the big dogs are howlin.” Michael had implemented the tag for his sponsor and the sight of it precipitated in him an increased heart rate and feelings of claustrophobia. It was like being one of Pavlov’s dogs only instead of food he was about to be fed corporate bullshit.
Michael looked over at the screen and glared at it. “Answer.”
Rick Bolero’s chubby, well-groomed face appeared on the imposed screen. A small air purifier attached to his septum made everything he said sound nasally, just enough to be noticeable and therefore annoying. The top of his head was cut off from view because he always sat too close to his camera. It always gave Michael the impression that Rick was breathing down his neck. That man doesn’t talk. He just grunts and wheezes through that purifier. Rick owned the company that sponsored him, and Michael was always a little disappointed to realize it.
“Tough loss today Michael, no hard feelings though, I’m sure the brass will have you back in a ship in no time.”
“They sure as hell better if you have anything to say about it. Just as soon as I get off that damn planet. People don’t want to watch me run around like a damn foot-soldier.”
“I know, I know, don’t worry about it…”
“Hey, where the hell did that enemy tech come from? You’re supposed to keep me up to date on that.”
“Ah yes, we’re looking into that as we speak. I’m sure we’ll have an answer by your next log in. Eighteen hours by the way, I was just about to tell Soren the same.”
While it was technically against game rules to bring outside information into the game, you could get away with it if you had the right tech and a conduit to slave out to the cause. This process terrified Michael. Low level and otherwise unpaid players, called conduits, who weren’t regularly scanned for game enhancing tech prior to entering the game, were basically slaved with artificial memory systems of information from outside the game. Once inside the games the data would extract itself and go on its way, leaving the people who had carried the information aware of a world that neural-programming had specifically intended them not to be aware of. The avatars of these conduits usually became schizophrenic and dissociative as a result of this process. sometimes it went away when the players clocked out, sometimes it didn’t.
“Alright Rick. See you around.” The screen flickered off and the window resumed its previous shade of black.
I guess it can’t be helped. Games are my life, and corporate money is my bread and butter. Living the dream, but only when I’m dreaming. Michael reached out and put his hand on the glass then slid it upward. The molecules in the window rearranged themselves to allow him to see out of his apartment. Trees in the park below informed him of the spinning wind.
A ringing filled the apartment once more. Michael took a step back to look at the screen imposed over the window. This time the ID was only a picture. Dark shaggy hair fell over a handsome face, eyes closed, grinning slack-jawed up into the camera. A jagged snap of static electricity was in the middle of a jump between his top and bottom incisors.
Michael sat down on his sofa before taking the call. “Answer. Hey Soren.” They were accustomed to calling each other by their last names since that was what their in-game titles were.
“Jake.” The face from the ID looked at Michael in real time now, with a more serious composure. Soren’s now open eyes revealed a pair of black spheres with blood-red pin pricks where his pupils might have been. Soren’s striking form of expression utilized one-way visibility screens that were surgically attached to the cornea in order to display images “on” someone’s eyes. The images themselves were consciously chosen by the user from artificial memory systems that interfaced with the brain. Soren had literally thousands of images and colors at his disposal, and had become so used to incorporating them in his body language that their use had become basically unconscious to him, or so he claimed. Soren’s sponsor company owned the patent for the technology involved which was otherwise fairly expensive, not that Soren had any want for money, his salary was almost as high as Michael’s. To a passerby this effect might have seemed comical, but Michael knew his friend better. This was a display of emotion, particularly anger and frustration.
“How’s the Kusanagi?”
“Blown away. I got mixed up with the same guys who got to you, what about you? How’s the Mojave?”
Soren blinked and revealed all white eyes with blue tear drops in the middle of them, “She’s hurt, if they find me before I get help she’ll be finished. Things look bad Jake.”
“Yea I know. Let’s meet up man, I want to get high for a few hours before we go back. I’ll get Sera to meet us at Rust in… half an hour?”
“Okay. See you.”
Michael hung up and then sent a quick message to Sera, their dealer in all mind altering substances, asking her to meet them with a usual sample of products.
Before leaving Michael looked over himself briefly in his bathroom mirror. His brown hair was disheveled, in a constant state of cathode-helmet hair. He didn’t care. His unmodified left eye was bloodshot, an unexplained side effect from the game. A few drops from a bottle in his medicine cabinet fixed it up, but he cursed it just the same.
“Get in line you prick. One of the last raw eyeballs on the planet, and all you do is beg to be swapped out.”
Synthetic eyes, which ranged from being only slightly modified to being completely mechanic, were better by far but maybe a real one would be worth something someday. Or at least it was an uncommon novelty. A reliable backup in case the other one ever went on the fritz. Having it made his vision worse than most because his synthetic eye had to be used at a vision setting matching his real eye. If he wanted to use the synthetic eye at full power he had to cover up the real one, otherwise he got headaches.
Michael grabbed a jacket and walked out the door. He lived closest to Rust, so he arrived a few minutes before Soren and Sera did. It was a bar and a club, his favorite in the city, themed post-apocalyptic. Everything in the place had an old and beat up look to it. Each window was set with a certain colored light filter which polluted the lighting and threw strange shadows against the walls. A jukebox played mostly Neil Young and Johnny Cash. Michael sat down at a booth and ordered a beer.
It wasn’t long before the other two walked in and joined him at the booth. Soren gave Michael a pat on the shoulder and a static shock to the neck to announce his presence. One of his other body modifications, besides his eyes, were dozens of tiny ‘zappers’ planted just under his skin. This allowed him to release static shocks at his own discretion from several points on his body. He claimed that girls loved it. Michael didn’t buy it.
Sera was a frail girl. She had attractive features but she always wore dark circles under her eyes, either by make-up or from too many chemicals the night before. Sera had the unique ability to fuse trips and reality into a single state of being without really having to try. Sometimes she was difficult to communicate with, but as far as dosage went no one knew more than Sera. Michael beheld her as a kind of fey beauty, closer friends with death than most people her age, but still somehow more lively than anyone he had ever known.
She was the first to speak up, “Hey Jake, I saw your game. Bad luck.”
Suddenly Michael realized that he felt exhausted, “It was just bad intel, we’ll take care of it.”
“You ever thought about getting an AI augmentation, to take care of little mishaps like that?”
Soren’s hands lit up with tiny sparks, his eyes flashed red and blue, “AI’s are against the game’s rules Sera, getting caught will get you kicked out; your sponsorship revoked, if you happen to have one.”
“How do you know you’ll get caught?” Sera was smirking, like she knew something they didn’t.
Blue spirals appeared on Soren’s eyes. He replied in a voice that was deeper than usual, “Because our brains are scanned every time we enter the game.”
“What if I said that there was a way to beat the scans, with an AI that would not only make it so you never lost, but would allow you to do everything with such style and brilliance that no one would be able to ignore you?”
Soren’s eyes began flashing random images and colors rapidly, like a slot machine, “I’d say you were crazy, wouldn’t you Jake?”
Michael, who had been staring at his beer glass, looked up at Sera, “I’d say you were trying to sell me something I don’t really need, but that’s all you ever do.”
Sera smiled, “Ouch. How about a demonstation?”
Instead of going to Sera’s apartment, she took them back to her pharmacy and led them behind the counter into a backroom. Her employee running the place looked at them and smiled politely, but otherwise didn’t even seem to register their arrival. They entered Sera’s office, which wasn’t so much an office as it was a dimly lit room that she and her friends used to fix before they could make it to whatever scene summoned them from the night. The realm of chemical realities was the virtual one’s biggest competition. Michael and Soren sat down on pads on the floor while Sera opened a small safe in the corner of the room under a desk. After a few seconds she sat down across from them, brandishing a small glass container full of gray liquid.
“Here it is: one completely undetectable, self assembling, nano-artificial intelligence. Introduced to the brain directly through the bloodstream.”
Soren looked directly at the container, question marks in his eyes, “Are you a pharmacist or an engineer?”
“When the machines become as small as the chemicals, that line gets blurred; I’ve been picking up rumors of other things, nanobots that can be told to reproduce the effects of any drug on command, no side effects, or little ants that sit on your muscles and chew them up, then stimulate re-growth, conditioning you while you sleep, eat, shit, whatever.” She laughed a little, “That’s not why you’re here, but this, I think this is just what you need.”
“I hope you’re prepared to demonstrate it.” Michael said.
“Of course. There’s a microscope on the desk.” She led them over to it. Once there she uncapped the container and withdrew a tiny amount of the grey liquid through a small syringe; she then dripped a small amount on a glass tray and covered it with another piece of glass and put it under the microscope.
She turned a light on below the viewing area, “They’ll activate as they warm up, watch them.”
Michael looked down into the viewer and saw the nanobots. They looked like Harvestmen spiders, writhing awake and swimming through the saline to find each other. Once a few of them got close enough to reach they extended their legs out towards each other, so each bot created about ten synapses with its closest neighbors.
“I’m going to activate a magnetic field now which will simulate the scanning process that Stardust uses.” Sera flipped a switch on a nondescript device near the microscope.
Michael watched as the nanobots separated themselves from each other, but remained mostly static in the saline.
“We know that the scans used for the game search for artificial networks in the body, that’s why a classic AI will always get detected. So this system had been trained to detach before a scan so the network can’t be located. As soon as the scan is over, they reconnect and everything comes back online.”
Michael looked up from the viewer, “How do I know that the AI’s personality won’t try to overpower my own? It has happened before.”
Sera smiled, “The other unique feature of this system is that it does not have, nor can it develop, a personality function of its own. It simply works to make you a better you, in and out of the game.”
“I’ll admit I’m impressed, but what if I need to get it removed from my system?”
“We’ll just put you under a magnetic field and flush them out of you, it takes time, but it can be done.”
“What do you think Soren?”
Red X’s appeared as Soren’s eyes, “It looks good on paper, but you’re a braver man than I am if you’re going to put that in your brain.”
Michael looked over at Soren and considered what he was saying. Where everyone around him seemed to be augmenting their bodies as much as possible, Michael had been otherwise slow to incorporate technology into his own body. To do this would be a radical step for him. If Sera was being level with him, however, this could work out great. He had no reason not to trust what she was saying; he had just witnessed the process for himself. He also knew he needed to stay on top of the game; he figured he still was for the moment, but everyday more and more new players were coming after him. Some rival sponsors were even offering bonuses to eliminate him. His allies wouldn’t be able to protect him indefinitely; he had to be able to count on himself. There was the risk of getting found out, of course, but the countermeasures seemed solid. There were no rules concerning the amount of artificial material in your body, only rules about the way that material interfaced with the brain.
“I don’t know Sera, this all seems pretty heavy. Do you know of any other players who have tried it out?”
“Well no, not specifically. This tech is pretty new. I know that it’s in the process of being distributed out to all the major gaming communities, but I don’t know who is using it. If it’s as potent as I’ve been led to believe; however, it won’t be long until we start to get an idea who is using it.”
Michael closed his unmodified eye for a moment and gently massaged its lid with his hand. He allowed his synthetic eye to focus on Sera for a moment. Today she was wearing makeup under her eyes. He also noticed for the first time that her eye color was actually a spackle of different shades of green, probably designed to stand out against a variety of different colors of eye shadow. He glanced down at her neck, the lines of some unseen tattoo reaching up from her shoulder; as if they were trying to cling closer to her, or maybe strangle her.
“Tell you what give it few hours as a trial. If you don’t like it when it starts to kick in, We’ll come back here and pump it out of you.”
Soren put a hand on Michael’s shoulder. No shock this time.
“Okay Sera… how much?”
“Eighty grand if you decide to keep it, and you have to try to get your sponsors to put an advertisement for my pharm into televised events. Oh and one more thing: the bots power themselves from your body, so you’re going to need to eat a little more. About three hundred extra calories a day is all.”
The bots were introduced into his system through a simple IV setup. Sera told them that it would take a few hours for the drip to finish and about twenty four hours after that the bots should have had the chance to fully assemble. She warned him that the system might feel a little strange as it got set up and he got used to it, so they all took some uppers in her office to ease the process. Afterwards they roamed the downtown clubs and bars for a while, Michael already began to feel the effects of the new system. Everything seemed more available to him. His senses were beginning to get sharper, and his mind was clearer and more focused than he could ever remember.
About three hours before he was set to play again he returned home and began his usual rituals before logging on. He showered and ate and then reviewed a few scenes from the last game. There was debate in the gaming community as to whether or not this did players any good, since they wouldn’t remember their outside lives in the game anyway, but Michael thought it was a good way to prepare, even if it was basically just a superstition. Meditation if nothing else and maybe the AI would be able to retain it for him. When the time to plug in finally came, he felt damn good.
#
He opened his eyes and was instantly bewildered. Hadn’t he just gone to sleep at one of his planet-side camps? Where is this? Why can’t I move?
No, that was the game.
What game? Have I been captured by the enemy?
There didn’t seem to be anyone around, although he couldn’t turn his head. Somewhere, in some non-place, Michael Jacobs felt as if he was swimming through a dream and couldn’t surface from it. He was suffocating or he was being snuffed out by something that was stronger than he was. He was fighting for himself, and losing.
A few details bubbled up to the surface.
The AI! It’s favoring the Admiral now.
He found that control over his motor functions was returning. He stood up as soon as he was able, realizing something was on his head. A helmet of some kind? He threw it to the floor, stumbled over to a black window and put his hand on it. His hand slipped –he was still unsteady- and the window became transparent. A city? I didn’t think there were any settlements of this size on this planet. Soon he realized that he wasn’t wearing the same clothes he’d last remembered.
I need to call Sera! Call Sera!
A strange ringing sound fill the room, Admiral Jacobs jerked away from the window and searched the room for the source of the sound. When he finally looked at back at the window and saw the screen he thought he recognized Soren’s face.
“Open channel…” nothing happened, “Accept.”
Soren’s face appeared on the screen, recognizable, except for his eyes, which were not correct to the Admiral’s memories.
“Jake, good game man.”
“Soren? What’s happening? What’s wrong with your eyes?”
“What are you talking about? Are you even awake over there?”
“Soren? No I… It’s the AI. Damn it! I… somehow it let my avatar take over! Help!”
Soren’s instantly eyes changed to look like normal, blue eyes, just as they were in the game, “just stay there Michael, I’ll be there soon.”
“I can’t stay here Soren, it might not be safe. Besides, I don’t think you’re Admiral Soren. Something isn’t right about your eyes and you let it slip.”
“No, Michael… Admiral Jacobs stay where you are.” Soren said desperately, but it was too late, Michael had already located the front door.
This must be a training simulation of some kind. I need to try and find a weapon and determine my objective. I may need to kill this imposter of Soren if he tries to get in my way.
Admiral Jacobs walked out of his own apartment unafraid. He was, after all, a war hero.
