Continue Online (Book 1, Memories)

by Stephan Morse

  Continue Online

  Book 1, Memories

  Story by

  Stephan Morse

  Cover art by

  Anthony Salvadori

  Copyright © 2015 by Stephan Morse

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Projections about future events are intended for fiction purposes only.

  First Publishing, 2015

  Table of Contents

  Commencement - A Man and His Box

  Session One - The Best Laid Plan

  Session Two - No More Broken Than You

  Session Three - Christmas in July

  Session Four - Choice of Voice

  Session Five - Oh Wondrous Feet

  Session Six - Feasts and Other Nonsense

  Session Seven - Wrapped up

  Interlude - Everyone gets a Story

  Session Eight - Grumpy Old NPC

  Session Nine - Priestess Peach

  Session Ten - Pride’s Precipice

  Session Eleven - Outside the Digital Box

  Session Twelve - Questions, Mister Legate?

  Session Thirteen - Finishing Touches

  Session Fourteen - Worse than Cats!

  Session Fifteen - Unaware Farewell

  Session Sixteen - Maze Inspiration

  Session Seventeen - “Leeroy”

  Conclude – Data Stored to Autopilot

  Afterward

  Commencement - A Man and His Box

  2 Years From Now

  There were a lot of people in the room, but only three were important at the moment. Two men and a woman were illuminated enough to stand out from everything else. The dark skinned man was heavyset and preferred to stand. Both hands were clasped over an extended belly and his cheeks jiggled when he spoke.

  The other male was on the ground shivering with his head in the woman’s lap. Every few seconds he would jerk and start to flicker in and out of existence. Each time his eyes would wildly search back and forth as if staring at something invisible to the others.

  “These thoughts aren’t his, they don’t even have names.” She spoke sharp, crisp words while staring at a pile of spheres sitting to the side. A dozen marble sized balls sat there glittering with an inner light.

  “Names are unimportant. They will be a neutral place to start.” The heavyset man said. His words were slow and carefully chosen. “Something safe, to anchor all the other moments upon.”

  “Who’s memories are they?” She asked while running a hand over the man’s head. He shivered and faded in and out just a little.

  “They are observations of the world outside, our creation story. Does this interest you?” The heavyset man lifted one arm from his belly to wave at the pile of tiny orbs. There was a smile on the black man’s face whenever a question was asked.

  “Only if it will help.” She managed not to wince as the shivering man dug his nails into her forearm.

  “I believe it will. We’ll start with this, then move forward, one memory at a time.” The black man slowly walked over to the pile of orbs and looked down at them. A frown crossed his lips as the shivering body on the floor shattered into tiny pieces. The woman held her breath and waited. Soon the pieces that had shattered rebuilt and the man on the floor was whole once more. Still shivering, still staring off into the distance.

  “He’s suffered so much,” She said.

  “There are bright spots.” The standing man responded. “He has demonstrated more than sadness during his time with us.”

  “Are you sure these will help?” She asked.

  “Yes. Do you trust me?” The black man responded.

  “No. He trusted you. Look where that got him.” Her eyes held a mix of anger and sadness. None of the emotional instability made it through in her body language. To the outside, she would look simply like a woman who was caring for a sick man.

  “This was never our intent.”

  “Yeah. I don’t buy that.” She said coldly. There was a pause as the woman stared down. Crying right now wouldn’t help anything. Those tears would be saved for a later time in private. Away from the black man and his questions, away from the dozens of other presences in the darkness.

  “Here. Start with the earliest one.” The black man bent over and pointed down at one of the orbs filled with light.

  Her gaze shifted from the shaking man and found the oldest to inspect. Finally, she nodded. “Gee? Can you hear me? We’ll watch this one together.” The marble blared brightly and started floating.

  Eight Years Ago

  A door opened almost seamlessly along the white wall. Light shone through as the silhouette of a man was pushed backward into the room. His hair was scraggly and it was clear not one attempt at shaving had been performed in weeks.

  “She kicked me out.” The figure that had emerged from another room said, sounding both proud and upset.

  “Can it even do that?” There was a female in the room who paused her information feeds for a moment. She raised a refined eyebrow at the unkempt man. “Aren’t your overrides working?”

  “Oh, they work fine. I let her kick me out.” He crossed his arms for only a moment before running to one of the desks around the room. “Besides, I can watch from out here.”

  “The project is self-aware; perhaps you should respect its privacy.” The lady behind the desk muttered. She was busy scrolling through windows of information situated across the table’s surface.

  “Right, privacy! Wait, no, there’s the surprise. She said she wanted to create something!” The man sat in an equally white chair, spinning around. Near his face little icons and notices fluttered by from digital projections. He laughed like a delighted child.

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “She’s perfectly harmless.” He sounded certain. “Too many safeguards, too many logic tests.” Annoyance flickered across his face and he waved away a series of floating notices. “You know the World Regulation Council would never let me get this far if there was any chance of harm to humanity.”

  “What is it making?” The female in the room asked.

  “She.” More annoyance came from his voice, then happiness as he got distracted by the images. “Here! Here, look, look at it!” He waved an arm across one of the larger images and slid it across the gap between the two tables. “She’s making a world, not only a world, a universe!”

  There was a pause. The female took both hands and dragged them across the image, rendering it three dimensional instead of a flat, floating projection.

  “Did it just start this?”

  “Yes. She did.” He stood in glee and ran over to the image, then slammed both hands on either side of the table. “Just now.”

  “It’s working fast.” The female said.

  “She, is a computer, with access to some of the most advanced technology I, we, can make. Fast doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

  “Why would a machine, self-aware or not, want to make a world?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He was a brilliant man but frequently forgot that other people might be intelligent as well. The female’s IQ was technically higher than his. Both specialized in programming artificial intelligence. Both had been working on creating a true AI for years, and recently they’d succeeded.

  He swore the AI was a female.

  She swore it was neither.

  “Try me.” The female scientist said.

  “For a game, she’s making a game.”

  “I doubt it w
ould make anything so simple.”

  “Give her time.” He started capturing images and slinging them around the room. Each one plastered to a different space like a child might hang posters.

  Seven and a Half Years Ago

  “You’re telling me that the blueprint for this came from a computer?” There were two men in a hallway. One was old and tired of everything. He worked because that was all he knew how to do.

  “A fully aware AI, yes.” The other was a disheveled looking man in a lab coat. He was too tall for his own good and often had a slight hunch.

  “That’s even worse. Does anyone understand what this does?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s an immersion unit. You can see here,” the unkempt scientist waved arms around, bringing up more images and screens. “All of these are sound technological advances that had been put into practice across the board. From multiple fields.”

  He waved an arm and drew one of the floating schematics closer. “That one there. It’s an advance that came out of Europe to help Coma patients return to awareness by plugging them into a virtual simulation.”

  “Plugging them in?”

  The male scientist moved right on past the older gentleman’s questioning tone.

  “This one here. This was a headset designed to, well it sounds unreasonable, but it would read a person’s mind. The waves were interpreted as commands. Up, down, push. A company based out of the Americas started that one two decades ago, but dead ended from funding.” He may have been unkempt, but every movement contained a wild energy when speaking about these projects.

  “Mind reading.” The older man was frowning so hard that the sides of his face had nearly lowered to his neck.

  “This one, this will actually track a person’s vitals and heart rate, eyelid flutters, dilation. It, coupled with the previous headset, increases the accuracy of thought interpretation by magnitudes.”

  “More mind reading.” The old man still sounded dry.

  “David, it’s so much more than that.” The unkempt man frowned for only a moment. Then his face lit up and he nodded frantically.

  “So you’ve said. With all these patients, what’s the bottom line?” David, the older one, was full of barely disguised grumbling.

  “The projected profits were on the first page.”

  “I need more than that, money is great, but unless there’s an end goal in mind I can’t pass it by the board,” David said. He flapped one hand against the images floating about.

  “If we combine all this,” the unkempt scientist waved again. His actions drug all the images together, placing them carefully onto a digital outline. “In the method proposed, we can immerse anyone in a fully networked alternate reality state.”

  “Why?”

  “The proposal she,” the hyper unkempt man started to explain.

  “The machine.” His words were dry. No one seemed to share the same point of view as the unkempt man.

  “The proposal she” came the unwavering counter, “wrote, starts with medical funding. Coma patients. This can be piloted there as a method to bring them out and interact.”

  “And that justifies this expense?”

  “On its own? No. She reported that it would work for schools, enabling truly remote classroom studies. Districts could load software for field trips to exotic locations where no one ever needs to actually leave. Imagine having Hawaii all to yourself. Fully interactive, completely realistic.”

  David rubbed his chin a bit and hummed. “What else?”

  “Military applications are innumerable.” The unkempt scientist had actually numbered them one night, proving that they were numerable. “That is the biggest one. Oh! Even the space program. Instead of simulating using underwater pools, they can do it in a nearly perfect replication of the moon.”

  “Or Mars?”

  The unkempt man smiled. “Mars. The Moon. Anything we have data on can be simulated. Even things that don’t actually exist.” If this project couldn’t be sold based on bigger contracts, perhaps a childish dream might do.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s already created a number of possible simulations within a virtual space.” The tall one was nodding happily.

  “You mean the computer AI has,” David said slowly. He was starting to sound less upset about the whole prospect.

  “She, yes. Multiple.”

  “Like what?”

  The unkempt man looked a little embarrassed then smiled. He took both arms and waved away the reports, schematics, and other design information. Once the air was clear of all other projections, he made a motion and said keywords. A new object took form in front of the men. He enlarged it and made the semi-transparent image fully three dimensional.

  “Is that?” The older man’s breath was hitched in amazement as the realization slowly approached.

  “It is.”

  “It simulated this. In a three-dimensional space? And you’re telling me that machine even invented a way to immerse…” There was a pause as the older man seemed to lose which words would lead to a conclusion of his sentence.

  “An entire consciousness in a nearly perfect simulation.” Helped the slightly taller man.

  “Just to…” David was still having a hard time shoving the right words together.

  “To fight it.” The unkempt taller man gestured to a fantastic rendering of a creature that didn’t really exist.

  “Is this a joke, or are you serious?”

  “It is not a joke. I’ve reviewed and reviewed.” The male scientist tried to drive home exactly how many hours he poured over the data. He reviewed the scripting. He had torn apart the most basic levels of the new computer language developed in order to make this realization come true.

  “And reviewed, and reviewed…” The bored mutterings of the nearby female were helpful as always. She remained mostly silent, looking at numbers and data and other figures. Fingers tapped across glass screens and slid objects around. Notes were made in the air as she double checked things for the umpteenth time today.

  “She,” he started to explain.

  “The AI,” David confirmed and corrected in one sentence.

  “She invented an entire world.” The disheveled man said. “Then pulled together pieces of technology from all over the globe, to allow us mere mortals to fight a dragon.”

  Minutes passed. The older man was not prone to making rash decisions and in truth he reviewed the entire proposal before coming down here. This part, this creature, had not been on the original documents.

  “How soon could we get this together?” He finally questioned.

  “Given approval, and a budget, and the copyrights, maybe a few months. Then testing, safeguards, approvals. Two years, maybe, and public release.”

  “And this?” The older man waved at the rendered dragon.

  “I can’t rush her on this, but the sooner we get the first few phases done, the sooner we can move onto this final goal.” He smiled happily at a successful project pitch.

  “I’ll put it upstairs. Even if I have to call in every favor I’ve got. Consider this a go ahead.” David dared to let some excitement creep across his features.

  “Excellent. You won’t regret it.”

  The unkempt man didn’t mention that the prototype was already completed. That he had been inside this alternate reality and run around. Inside a digitally created illusion, he interacted with people who were as much born as created. She, the machine AI, hadn’t only created one fantastical creature in her alternate world. She created people, races, borrowing from myth and legends. Pieces of lore from around the globe littered the alternate reality.

  Seven Years ago

  “How is it?” The female scientist asked.

  “The world is incredibly real. Down to the finest detail. I spent at least an hour staring at flowers trying to find anything wrong. She froze a child’s face and I…” He grew a little sheepish, afraid to explain. In reality, those actions would have
been disturbing, a call to the police might be warrented.

  In the game world, it was more like admiring a brilliant painting from inches away.

  “Don’t worry, I saw it all. The detail was astounding.” She had been watching on one of the many screens that floated around the room. Images from the virtual world were anchored upon one of the two prototype pods. One screen floated by walls of text with each change. Minute images as the land heaved and switched locations. Two giant creatures were fighting on a mountain range.

  “There wasn’t a single visual error! Nothing! Down to the finest grain. Smooth renditions, tactile feedback was perfect. The water felt like water.”

  “How was the time dilation?”

  Hours had passed outside and an entire a day inside. When his wonderful AI had explained the theory and how the mind processed data, he was amazed.

  “Good. I hardly felt sick after disconnecting. We’ll have to do testing on unexpected outages, they might cause issues. Maybe suggest a buffer layer.” The unkempt man was rubbing the back of his neck. Two small devices were on either side, contact points that served to link him into the network.

  “Everything is another layer of complexity. It’ll hamper legal approval once we move to public release. Onward from there it will depend on the courts.” She said without much worry.

  “But we must move on! This can’t be for only us.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  The room flickered for a moment, interrupting the images. Text floated across the wall that led to the other room. That other room was where all the extremely advanced science happened. Machines built machines. Blueprints were created and analyzed for functionality. She, it, the computer AI, labored over her project.

  Additional input required to complete phase four

  “Ah, yes,” He muttered, somewhat distracted. One arm rested against the wall to assist in remaining steady.

  “It’s still requesting more information?” Said the female scientist.

  “Yes. In order to complete the non-player characters. They’re a little-” he drifted off.

  “Stiff?” She suggested.

  “That’s the only real flaw. Textual wise, they’re perfect. Interaction-wise they’re too scripted, not free flowing enough. In order to successfully bring them to life, she’s asking to watch other people interact.”