The Feedback Loop (Books 4-6): Sci-fi LitRPG Series (The Feedback Loop Box Set Book 2)

by Harmon Cooper

  Doc: What did the others bring?

  Me: Sophia brought a veggie tray with bunch of mutant space veggies I’ve never heard of and some no-calorie Ranch-esque dip-like substance, and Rocket brought himself, a smart-alecky T-shirt, and two boxes of Men’s Pocky.

  Doc: Damn, too bad you guys aren’t near me. We’re having moules marinières, pâté de foie gras, beluga caviar, Eggs Benedict, a leek tart, frogs’ legs amandine and quail’s eggs with puréed mushrooms all mixed in a bucket with the quail’s eggs on top and a double helping of pâté. For the main course we’ve got jugged hare, with a sauce of truffles, bacon, Grand Marnier, anchovies and cream. We’ve also got six bottles of Château Latour 1945, a Methuselah of champagne, and half a dozen crates of brown ale. Should be good.

  Me: Wow! Really?

  Doc: No, of course not. Arnie made Swedish meatballs; Freedom Fries with onions, jalapeños and bacon bits; fried okra; coleslaw; buttermilk biscuits and chess pie.

  Me: That really sounds way better than here. So what’s up, Doc?

  Doc: Gee – never heard that one before; did you come up with it all your own? Okay – Veenure has logged in. I’ve got her location and information. It’s a doozy, a real doozy. It’s unfortunate that we didn’t blast her with the new OMIB hacks, but we do have her real world location.

  Me: Shit, this is big news! Why didn’t you start with this?

  Doc: You’re the one who started talking about food and I just followed your lead.

  Me: Okay, so where is she?

  Doc: She’s at Strata’s place. Remember all those dive vats Frances and Arnie saw when they were extracting Luther?

  Me: There were hundreds.

  Doc: Not that many, but yes, there were a lot. Point is – one of those is Veenure’s dive vat.

  Me: So she’s in a digital coma?

  Doc: Unknown. We may need a team to go to Strata’s place again.

  Me: We have a team.

  Doc: True, but I thought I’d skip the part where the bad guys win and y’all get captured, tortured, chucked in a wood chipper and killed and go right to a team of real-world professionals as first choice.

  Me: Don’t you mean ‘killed, and then chucked in a wood chipper’?

  Doc: I said it the way it’d probably happen. Look, we got lucky the first time, even with the big bang-bang, shoot ‘em up at the end; that could have turned to shit in a big fat hurry. This time he’s going to expect us to come after him, so we need to do something he’s not expecting, and it needs to be done by professionals – real professionals, not you guys.

  Me: Understood.

  Doc: And there’s more - Veenure’s real name is Victoria G. Mays.

  Me: Okay, so we have a last name on her. Good.

  Doc: True, but that’s ‘G’ as in ‘Godsick’.

  Me: Well that puts an interesting spin on things.

  Doc: Yes indeedy – but wait, there’s more. Strata was briefly married when he was twenty and had it annulled a couple of months later. This should be public record, but it’s been very thoroughly concealed, as was the name of his wife – Serena Mays, who was seventeen at the time.

  Me: And they had a kid?

  Doc: And they had a kid, Victoria, who was born three months after the civil marriage, and that kid, now twenty, lives with daddy in a fortified McMansion outside of Denver.

  Me: And the mother?

  Doc: Involuntarily committed to a continuing care facility for the Developmentally Disabled and Psycho-Socially Impaired in Colorado Springs, associated with Cedar Springs Hospital. It’s one of those places where the rich and powerful stow the inconvenient relatives that they don’t want to actually kill just yet.

  Me: Hokey smokes!

  Doc: It’s a lot to process, and I’m going to have to see if there are any biometrics out there that can positively confirm her identity. I haven’t been able to find a birth certificate yet, life chip tag, SSAN, medical records, school records, driver’s license, nothing. She’s almost a ghost, which ain’t easy in this day and age.

  Me: She was right there, with us this whole time!

  Doc: Yeah she was, but since I’m not 100% sure on all this, keep it to yourself until tomorrow’s briefing. I’ll have a full update by then.

  Me: Shit! How am I supposed to keep this a secret?

  Doc: What, are you a twelve-year-old girl at a slumber party or something? Just man up, act like a mature, responsible adult and keep your frickin’ piehole closed. Don’t drop hints, don’t allude to it, nothing. Just STFU about it. See how easy that is?

  “The fish is here!” Frances announces. “Rocket, please go down to the EBAYmazon pick-up point and grab it.”

  “Why do I have to go?” He whines. For once, he’s relatively immobile as he sits on her couch with his feet up on the coffee table. No nervous tic or other display of manic energy evident, I suspect that he’s finally reached Bull Bean equilibrium. Next to him is Frances’ dive rig, an NV Visor and a pair of haptic gloves.

  I swallow hard, trying my best to bottle the information I’ve just heard.

  “Because you’re the youngest,” Sophia says as she arranges her veggie platter on the dining room table.

  Rocket stands and stretches his arms over his head. “I’m going, I’m going.”

  I blink my peepers shut to see another message from Doc.

  Doc: Remember – testicular torsion. We need Luther in the RW and the PG. We already have him here, and tomorrow we’ll get him the Proxima Galaxy. We can deal with Veenure at that point, but first Luther. One mission at a time.

  ~*~

  Mum’s the word during dinner. For once I barely speak, which really is saying something for me. Luckily, everyone is too busy recapping today’s experience to notice I’ve crawled into my little shell.

  Sophia and Rocket leave after dinner, Frances retires to her bedroom. I’m on clean up duty, which is fine by me because I got a lot on my mind and I’d rather not spill the beans to Frances. I scrub the food off the plates, salvage what is salvageable, and constantly check my iNet feed for a message from Doc. I finally get one just as I’m shutting the dishwasher.

  Doc: Life chip tag confirms it, but that’s all I could find, and I only just barely did. Someone who isn’t me never would have found it.

  Me: Thanks. Keep me up-to-date.

  “Are you finished cleaning?” Frances calls out.

  “Sure am.”

  “Well what are you waiting for?”

  I enter her bedroom to find her lying on her bed laughing at something she’s reading over iNet. She opens her eyes and pats the bed. “Are you coming?”

  “No, just breathing hard.” Again, sometimes my mouth has a life all its own.

  “Ha! Good one. That’s probably as close as you’re going to get tonight. Come to bed, it’s almost eleven.”

  “Is it that late?”

  “And we have a big day tomorrow.”

  I kick off my shoes and get in bed in my work clothes.

  “Ah, there’s the suave, debonair Quantum I’ve come to know. Clothes off, brush your teeth, and at least give yourself a squirt of deodorant under both arms.” she says.

  “Yes ma’am,” is my reply. Dammit, new and improved Quantum shouldn’t have to be told that.

  She spoons up next to me as soon as I’m in. As we cuddle, the A/C kicks on and startles me. As I hold her close, I think about what Doc’s just said, what I’ve been through since I’ve gotten out of my digital coma, and what I miss most about my former life.

  The lights dim and I recall my Loop life, the place where it was so simple, so easy, so comfortable. I rest with Frances’ head on my arm until she falls asleep.

  Frances stirs and mutters in her sleep as I slide my arm out from under her. I turn to my other side and try to get a little shut-eye as well, but it’s just not gonna happen. My thoughts jump between my most recent experiences in the Proxima Galaxy. I keep seeing Dolly as she was, just before she tossed herself into the source code bomb that
destroyed The Loop. I know what I have to do, and I know better than to do it.

  I cast the thought aside but it loops in my mind repeatedly. I can hear Frances breathing next to me, softly, and I remind myself that this is real, and that The Loop isn’t. If I really wanted to, I could message Sophia about any dangers associated with logging back in to a world devastated by a source code bomb.

  But I don’t.

  Instead, I roll out of bed, paying careful attention to the crick in my back. I make my way to Frances’ living room and relax onto the couch. Her NV Visor fits well enough, and the haptic gloves are tight, but they’ll work.

  I fiddle with the login details for a moment and the coordinates for Cyber Noir appear. The screen reminds me that it is no longer an active world, and it asks me if I’d like to spawn there anyway.

  I select ‘yes’ and the Brian Eno tone plays.

  The End

  The Feedback Loop Book Six: Cyber Noir Redux is out now.

  Check out the preview at the back of the book and…

  Get it here!

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  Back of the Book Shit

  Dear reader,

  If you are reading this before the release of book six, Cyber Noir: Redux, don’t hate me for ending this one with a cliffhanger. My sincerest apologies, but the title of the next book should tell you where this is all going. Book Six, Cyber Noir Redux, is available here.

  What? You thought I’d forgotten about The Loop or something? Fugeddaboutit.

  Message to the board of directors: I’m happy to report that readership of this series grows by the day. It’s a wonderful thing, and I appreciate those who have already made it this far. The Feedback Loop series will end on the eighth book, so we are well into the second half. What do I have in store for the last three books? Oh, big things, and an angle that I’ve been brainstorming all year.

  I am also planning another series of books that takes place in Tritania, the first one tentatively titled “Fantasy Online: Ultima Thule”, which will be an offshoot of the Feedback Loop series but with different characters, and possibly a few old favorites. I’ll have more details on this in the future. Think Japan, Akira and Ghost in the Shell, Yakuza, Tritania and the overall state of the Proxima Galaxy in the 2070s, a good 12-15 years after Quantum’s narrative wrap-up. A real litRPG, I dare say! The story is in me and it floats to the surface every now and then. I usually swallow it back down, but I plan to let the story out of the bag (as it were) sometime next year, 2017, possibly by summer.

  Would you dive to a dream world if it were possible?

  I asked this question in Book Four’s BOBS, and promised an answer this time around. At the time I was leaning towards “no”, but I’ve started meditating again and that makes me lean towards “yes”. I have a long history with poor meditation practices. I’ve studied near the Dalai Lama’s home in McLeod Ganj, India, where I attended a daily session that forced me to walk up a steep hill to get to class. During a few of these trips, I even fought off monkeys alongside a Tibetan nun and I had to fight off repeated attempted monkey assaults.

  Fun stuff (the nuns, not the monkeys. I mean, the monkeys, not the nuns).

  Long story long, I’ve dabbled in meditation for years; maybe not well or effectively, but dabbled nonetheless. I was a much stronger meditator back in my ‘Austin,Texas Hippie Phase’ around 2006-2009, a time in which I partook various entheogens, got my Carlos Castaneda branded lucid dreaming on sans a cult-y group of followers and talked about a lot of stupid shit that I had no idea about. Eventually, I became more pragmatic.

  That isn’t to say that I haven’t kept parts of what I experienced during this time, but I have seen a good handful of once semi-sane people stray too far from the front porch of our shared reality with ill effects. Stoners; people who jump knee-deep into an Eastern religious practice that they will always be once-removed from (a good book regarding this is called Karma Cola); those who can suddenly ‘see’ other people’s auras after a short practice– I’ll stop there, but anyone from a place like Austin – and there are many in America – have likely experienced this to varying degrees. Further, I have written about some of these experiences in my book, Boy versus Self, if you’d care to experience them in lit form.

  All this to say that while there were a couple of ‘wasted’ years on my part, a few good things did come about – namely meditation, the desire to write, yoga (I’ve been practicing this since 2006, also perhaps not especially well or effectively), and the realization that there are vast untapped portions of our minds. Dream worlds? Yes, I do believe it’ll happen. By the timeline I’ve proposed in this series of novels? That remains to be seen. Sure, I’d love to Nostradamus that shit, but I wouldn’t be the first sci-fi/LitRPG author to put these advances in technology right around this time period, 2050-2090.

  So to answer the question as to whether or not I would dive to a dream world if it becomes possible within my lifetime, I’m going to go with probably. I’d like to check it out, but the implications on another space shared by humans frightens me.

  Neural lace and VE dreamworld musings update

  Leave it to Elon Musk to coin a term much better than my terms - life chip - for a computer interface woven into the brain that will keep AI from overpowering us by uniting us with AI. Brain hacks as early as 2030? Earlier? Yes, please. I mean, please no.

  Here’s where I’m at right now, as of fall 2016, regarding how the Proxima Galaxy and a Neuronal Visualization Visor (NV Visor) could theoretically work. (Note: some of the portions of this musing are copy/pasted from the previous musing as a refresher, others are brand-spanking new.)

  If you recall, I mentioned in the last installment of the Feedback Loop that a NV Visor would need to be able to control electrical synapses in the brain at the onset of REM sleep possibly through subdermal implants, such as a life chip, or through a neural lace. The visor would need to manage PGO and any associate waves, and create a spawning point that would allow the person to dive into a dream, or the shared dream of the Proxima Galaxy. The firing of PGO waves coincide with REM sleep. As I said last time around, think of a PGO wave as ‘refreshing’ a website to update the information displayed.

  So how could an NV Visor create a lucid dream?

  A lucid dream occurs in REM sleep, registering on an EEG as a 40 hertz electrical wave coming from the prefrontal cortex. In 2014, German researchers placed electrodes on their subjects’ heads and waited for them to show signs of REM sleep. They delivered small shocks via the electrodes using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, a process that has been used in neuroplasticity in a number of ways. Recently, TMS therapy has been used to treat depression and other disorders, such as Asperger’s syndrome and autism. Are we talking about A Clockwork Orange here? Not quite, TMS is non-invasive and as its name suggests, it uses magnets to produce short magnetic pulses. For more on the differences, go here. But to sum it up, German researchers discovered that creating a 40 hertz electric wave using TMS therapy produced lucid dreaming 77% of the time, which is pretty neat if you ask me.

  What I envision as a Virtual Entertainment Dreamworld (VE Dreamworld, as coined in The Feedback Loop Book One) would take place during lucid dreaming, giving the dreamer the ability to modify objects, equip things, make digital offspring – you get the picture. If you leave a matchbox on the table when you log out, it is still on the table when you log back in – this sort of thing.

  As previously mentioned, a new type of computational processing would be necessary to manage the amount of data for this to work,
and for a large group of people to dive at the same time, something stronger and faster than LAMSTAR (Large memory storage and retrieval neural networks) or for that matter, anything we currently possess as of 2016. Enter quantum computing, which was first imagined in the 1980s. Quantum computing doesn’t do things in a binary way; instead, it uses quantum bits or qubits for processing, which differs from our current model of computing through the way the bits are polarized. A classic bit can only be one of two states; a qubit can be either/or, which allows it to be in a superposition of both states at the same time. All this to say, the ability to process an unholy amount of information will soon be at our fingertips, or more appropriately, at our mind tips.

  But what about the matchbox? How will the matchbox stay on the table after a person logs out and logs back in? Nick Bostrom’s famous piece, Are You Living in a Computer Stimulation?, first published in Philosophical Quarterly in 2003, may shed some light on this dilemma, at least philosophically. The ‘simulation hypothesis’, as it has come to be known, posits that we are already living in a simulation that we are completely unaware of. Yes, The Matrix, but let’s dive a bit deeper. Bostrom paper doesn’t argue that we are living in a simulation per se; rather, he argues that one of three premises must be true:

  1) “The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (capable of running an ancestor simulation) is very close to zero”, or

  2) “The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero”, or

  3) “The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one”

  I bring this up not to debate skeptical hypotheses, nor do I necessarily agree with Bostrom’s statements. I’m more interested in the substrate-independence thesis, later explored in his piece. Namely, the concept that mental states can supervene on any of a broad class of physical substrates, which I read as, I think, but it was there to begin with. The substrate-independence thesis contends that chemicals (neurotransmitters, nerve growth factors) affect subjective experience “only via their direct or indirect influence on computational activities”, that a synaptic discharge is tied directly to a subjective experience, that the “detail of the simulation is at the synaptic level (or higher).” If you program it, if one accepts it, if it is indeed programmable at the neuronal/synaptic level, it’ll stick, and it’ll be there when you log back in.