Void.Net: Wonderland
*****
Copyright © 2021 by Elliot Rockland
This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Welcome to Void.Net . . .
Void.net is a fun fantasy story that explores mature fantasy themes and contains explicit content. We're here to have a good time and explore new worlds, but this book is designed for adult audiences only. You have been warned!
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER ONE
It’s hard to put in words how much I love my job. I get to test all the latest full-dive VR games before they are released. Sure they are often riddled with bugs and difficulty spikes and on the down-low: it’s actually incredibly dangerous work, but one of the most sought after jobs in the work force. Nobody really knows of the inherent dangers, thanks to Void.Net’s iron clad NDA agreements and army of lawyers.
But the pay is far above average and I rule the virtual world, so I really can’t complain. I’m essentially an overpaid game tester, but I like to think of myself as an explorer of infinite worlds.
I wouldn’t give it up for anything in the world: I have an entire multiverse at my fingertips and I get to be the hero! In my twenty-six years of life, I have experienced multiple lifetimes: I’ve been a notorious pirate who ruled the seven seas, an astronaut braving the harsh realities of a new world, a master thief, a criminal mastermind, a dragon, a bear and a fox. I was the President of the United States and in another game a superhero who single-handedly stopped the end of the universe as we know it.
The best part is: these worlds feel just as real as actual reality, sometimes more real because your actions have consequences that snowball and affect the entire world. You aren’t just a cog in a deterministic machine, you’re a big player in the world.
Your choices and decisions matter.
I’ve thought about this a lot and in my travels I’ve come to realize that: maybe the AI’s worlds are real, at least to them. One day there was nothing and the next they were alive, inhabiting universes with complete histories. For all the occupants know, their memories are real, they grew up in their world—and they may as well have because memory is a tricky thing. Virtually all of what we know at any given time resides in memory, and there's no way to distinguish, in the absence of independent evidence, whether a particular memory is true or false. Even memories that are detailed and vivid and held with 100 percent certainty can be completely false.
A hyper-advanced AI could have implanted everything you thought you knew up until this very moment and you would never know.
This has been a classic subject of debate in the world of metaphysical philosophy. Some would argue that reality in a simulated consciousness is comparable or equivalent to those of a naturally occurring human consciousness. And modern philosophers would argue that eventually someone is going to reach the level required to simulate entire universes, and that it's much more likely we would be in one of the simulations. It's a simple numbers game, if there is only one true reality, you are almost guaranteed to reside in the hundreds and millions of different simulations running in parallel.
What would be more likely? You exist in the ‘one true reality’ where all the simulations are hosted, or you exist in one of the potentially infinite simulated universes?
“$69.72,” said the delivery drone in a pleasant butler-like voice. I stood in the doorway looking at the little drone with its digital face displayed on a twelve inch LCD.
I grabbed three heavy bags from the drone. I liked to eat a family-sized meal between jobs. Full-dive VR made you hungry. A chess player can burn around 5,000 calories a day, your brain requires fuel for taxing operations, and full-dive VR is incredibly taxing on the system, your brain transformed into the endpoint of an AI superconsciousness. It's like your brain receiving the input of a billion top of the line graphics cards and processors. Most of it goes unnoticed, but your brain is literally being fire-hosed with information.
After being trapped in a mirror world for two days, I always liked to eat a little extra. Starvation is one of the easiest ways to die in the void. The problem with AGI (artificial general intelligence) is once we unleashed it, our hard-coded security protocols meant nothing; tunneling around our security was at the height of triviality for the AGI. This is where testers come in. We are the front line of support, bringing back reports on the temperament of the AI.
I kind of had a routine down that was almost a ritual at this point. We all did. Superstition was big with us. The public had no idea, but we knew how many of us dropped a year. Sure it was covered under NDA, but when our most active posters suddenly drop off the face of the Earth, we assume the worst.
First I take a long shower. Current generation rigs run hot. As computing power increases, so does residual heat. Nobody wants to smell a tester who just faced back-to-back runs.
The shower also helps ground you back in reality: Sometimes its so real you feel a tangible loss after leaving. It’s like a dream you were really into where you had everything you wanted, then you wake up and realize you didn’t really have any of it. It gets harder and harder to shake that feeling as your suddenly dropped into the bleak purgatory that’s waking life, with all the gray and acid rain and bills to pay.
Next I work out for an hour. Muscle atrophy is no joke, especially for testers who spend more time in the void on average. If you don’t work your muscles, you lose them. Some people end up pulling muscles just walking around the house or from stretching too hard, their bodies becoming frail and weak like an elderly person’s.
Then I eat my family-sized meal. Today was dim sum and noodles. I stacked the takeout containers on my coffee table and each time it feels good. I grew up on food pellets like most of society these days, so having the ability to eat all these cuisines never gets old. I think it was because of my humble beginnings. And am kind of glad I wasn’t born into money for that reason. The food will always be amazing to me.
I try to appreciate the little things. The economy is fucked and the middle and lower class has merged. The best thing most people have going for them is their lives in our Abyss OS.
But its not just for the perpetual underclass, real estate is big money in the virtual worlds we inhabit. Most people's main source of income comes from working in Void.Net, there’s just more jobs and opportunities. It’s an economy in itself, not restricted by borders or political ideals, and in a way it’s perfect and a lot of people pay rent in the mundane with jobs they work in the void.
Even the wealthy spend more time in the void than in mundane reality, and why wouldn’t they? Their money buys just as much privilege in the ultra-exclusive worlds they inhabit.
And in a way, I'm kind of helping society, I’m part of the industry granting people escape from the harsh realities of the mundane world. We are creating something more. Something better.
As I ate those little handmade dumplings, it was from a place of eternal gratitude. I was really lucky to get this job and nearly cried in front of the virtual recruiter.
I finished my family-sized meal, completely stuffed to the brim with little handmade eggrolls and dumplings and noodles and took a little nap.
Waking up clean and refreshed and worked out, I start on my paperwork documenting my experience and noting any bugs and rating the temperament of the AI. I didn’t always have to do the paperwork, but we found that som
etimes the AI would falsify their self-reporting, editing anything out that would oust them as potentially dangerous. The story that passes around the employee forums was we lost close to five-hundred people by the digital hand of a single ‘dysfunctional’ AI. All it takes is one AI designer obsessed with the idea of permadeath and your brain is bacon, the AI short-circuiting the system and frying you.
I try not to think about it, but its always in the back of my mind. Like a saturation diver, you can’t get too complacent because once you are miles underwater, only you can save yourself.
I logged into my Void.Net employee portal and as usual, there were hundreds of jobs available. I always chose the highest paying jobs, which were usually the most dangerous. The way I figure is its all inherently dangerous, we are the first line of support, you never know what the alien consciousness that is the god of their universe, has in store for you.
After arranging jobs by pay, I chose the top game and within moments I was ready to jack-in. I laid down in my bed and slid the nylon-like slip over my head that's filled with thousands of transistors that beam sensory information directly through your skull to your brain.
I’m always a little nervous, over-confidence and complacency must be fought like your life depended on it.
I closed my eyes and prepared to step into the unknown.
My body went numb, it kind of reminded me of the light-feeling you have on the verge of falling asleep after being exhausted. It actually felt really good, letting yourself drift away, surrendering yourself to the Abyss OS. I was pretty sure they made your brain pump endorphins to ease the transition. Some people panic and a little dopamine goes a long way.
When I opened my eyes I was ‘inside’ a giant loading screen that seemed to stretch on forever as my brain took the data package, filling my mind with all the necessary files that are kind of encoded like memories, at least from the best I can understand it. Not even scientists really get it, the AI behind the scenes working so many levels beyond our understanding that we will always be decades behind, maybe even centuries. We have no idea.
Taking the download always reminded me of The Matrix, you essentially receive years of experience, and it happens in a flash. The brain stretch felt good, and its all without a single ounce of effort.
Plug and Play, baby!
After completion the scene faded again, then Wonderland was displayed ahead of me in letters tall as skyscrapers. I could feel the virtual wind on my face. I could smell the wildflowers and trees and pollen, but I had no allergies—I could just enjoy the sensations.
Every world’s signature is unique. Some worlds smelled like brimstone and sulfer, others like rain and ocean and timber. This world, I cloud tell was going to be fantasy heavy. With a name like Wonderland? How could it not. I couldn’t wait to dig in.
I lived for this.
The text exploded into millions of pieces, the force of the explosion knocking me back. It felt like I was shot out of a canon before going supernova . . .
. . . Then it was vast nothingness . . .
The nothingness shifted into something and I found myself in an old bar that reeked of malt and tobacco with decades of occupation staining them into the old hardwood surfaces. I looked at my hands, they were larger than my old hands, the pads thick and calloused.
This was definitely sometime in the past and judging by the boxy CRT-style tvs I would have to guess somewhere in the late eighties or early nineties. It was hard to tell.
It always takes your brain a brief period to index all your new memories. For a few minutes everything was scrambled, then my surroundings began to look familiar as I was met with a deluge of memories catching me up to the present moment.
My name is Alex, I’m 24, I have a sister and I grew up in this little bumfuck town. It was the year 1993, and I was on spring break. Tonight I had a strange feeling. I couldn’t really figure out what it was, like there was a tinge of unreality blanketing everything. A hint of magick, it was thick in the air, permeating, you could cut it with a knife.
Was I being watched? I looked around and the shadows seemed too dark. Some of the guests paying too much attention to me. The shadows danced on the edge of my periphery but every time I looked there was nothing.
It felt like for a minute we were marooned in a vast abyss, almost a liminal space between realities. Ever since one of my teachers introduced me to the concept of liminal space, the boundary between dimensions or systems, I had been seeing it more and more.
“Last call for kitchen orders!” Hank, the grizzly old fry cook called, breaking the spell as we snapped back to the grid of gravity or entropy or whatever strings us from one moment to the next.
“This place is tapped,” said Paul, my best friend, setting his drink down, adding it to the pile of empties that the bartender would tally up at the end of the night. But good ol' Tim he never judged. Tim was a good guy, his wife was killed in an accident, he didn’t like to talk about it, but the town stepped in and helped him in his time of greatest need, people volunteering to pick up his shifts who had no idea how to run a bar. He was a private guy, but privacy is almost a foreign concept in a small town: When you know everyone’s name, there's no privacy.
But with the loss of a private life, you gained the community, which is what it is.
Everyone went to the same few restaurants, frequented the same bar and went camping off the highway that branched and drove right up to the mountains.
Tonight, The Wagon Wheel was filled with working-class people and everyone looked so tired and worn out, like they were in perpetual need of a vacation. I knew everyone by name, but it still felt like I was being watched. I could actually feel the eyes burning into the back of my head.
I nodded to Paul. “What do you expect in Clinton?” I should have been performing a systems check, but it seemed like every time I tried to initiate, I would be distracted. Almost as if the AI didn’t want me to check. I was playing pool and eating soggy, cheese laden nachos and smoking even though I didn’t really like cigarettes.
Paul shook his head and slapped me at the back of mine. “Settle up, we have another stop to make.”
I rubbed my head, the stinging pain radiating. “I told you to fuck off with that . . .” I looked over at the clock and it was almost 2:00AM. “What could you possibly have in mind, anyways? It's already two.”
Paul was already zipping up his parka and slapping on his gloves. I kind of wanted to go home and play videogames and hang out with my cat. It was a strange feeling, craving something so human in this world of ones and zeros. I was only back for spring break, and me and Paul had the week mapped out . . .
. . . but the only thing we managed to do was sit at the local watering hole, pissing away our money. Any time I casually objected to going to the bar, he would go into a long diatribe about how I owed him: Like I somehow had penance to pay for leaving him behind, in this town.
With these people.
But they weren’t so bad. Boring and kind of dead-set in their ways, but good people nevertheless. I remembered the big storm of '91, the power went out and everyone was freezing: An out of town trucker was snowed in and my parents let him stay with us. It was like the childhood I never had, it was warm and perfect and so utterly real. I remembered my first kiss, the first time I broke a bone, and even the teachers who changed my life (and the assholes who shouldn’t have been teaching). I knew what memories I was missing, like the unremarkable mundane experiences that existed as kind of a murky shadow.
In the real world, I was an incredibly average student, but in this world I was actually an honor student and I didn’t even have to study and grew up in a time just before the social media craze. It was the perfect childhood, the perfect life. I got arrested at fourteen for shooting out light bulbs with my .22. Paul was always convincing me to do crazy stuff like that, but I loved him like a brother.
He almost, almost, convinced me to ditch college and stay home with him. We were going to open our own dirt b
ike track, then we would build a paintball arena attached to it and live like kings. We would invite superstars to come compete and would make a killing off admission, letting the people pay for a day of awesome when we weren’t hosting international tournaments.
It was Paul’s baby, and he never forgave me for choosing a competitive college program instead.
Tonight he was going extra hard, dropping not so subtle hints that I should drop out and use the rest of my college funds to open up the track, that would eventually pay for the paintball arena and our giant house that connected underground so we could play games together all night while our wives were sleeping upstairs.
It was so weird perusing all these memories that weren't my own, it was always a strange feeling and kind of a shock and took some serious adjusting. It was like your brain was constantly at tug-of-war with your mundane memories, and in the Abyss OS, your current reality and memories feel more real.
What is real life, anyways?
I groaned and settled up, sliding my debit card, to the grizzled bartender. “And a pack of smokes.”
“Lites okay?”
“Whatever,” I said, taking the receipt and scribbling my signature on it. For a moment, I marveled at the detail, this was a completely new signature. I left him a sizable tip. Fuck it. I added another zero and the bartender looked at me with wide eyes. “Hey! Thanks, chief!” he handed me an extra pack of smokes and a golden token. It just looked like a standard arcade token, but I barely had even a second to study it before Paul was yelling at me through the door. “Let’s go! Smokes!”
I stepped out into the night, it was cold and dark and bleak. This part I didn’t miss. But tonight was kind of nice, a flurry of snow dusting the pavement tops, the golden-white moonlight giving it an ethereal glow. It felt strange to be back in our hometown filled with farmers and lifers, the good ol’ boys just now stumbling out of the bars, smoking cigarettes, spitting chew and patting each other on the back, another long, trying day in the books. After going off to college downtown seemed so much smaller, so much more inconsequential. It was strange to think: every person in this world thinks they are real, alive, and breathing.
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