by Isaac Stone
We spent the afternoon swimming at the bottom of a waterfall. She knew how and swam through the water like a mountain bass. I spent time on the banks with her and showed her how to write her name in the sand with a stick. Of course, I had to teach her to write my name as well.
I couldn’t understand her backstory, probably because they were writing it as we went. The leader of the cave dwellers found her at some point, but there was a human who taught her to speak and gave her some basic survival skills. She collected whatever books and magazines she found, but couldn’t read them. At some point, her instruction ceased, but I couldn’t get her to tell me why.
It was the same for her clipped language. She was taught basic English, but never had to use it to communicate with anyone else. She hid most of the time and moved around from one dwelling to the next. I did get to see the hollow tree where she slept most nights. I wasn’t sure how she kept warm in the winter, as the snow in those mountains could be deep. She left me with the impression that she had a place where she stored wood for fire and wintered near a spring. It was another reason I had to meet the person who created her character when I left the game.
If Chamita was based on a real person, I had to meet her. My logbook disappeared the moment they announced I’d won the game, so there was no way to go back and check it.
I puzzled over what would happen to this VR world once I left it. Would Sandstone Gems reset the entire universe or did they have another one ready to go for another tester? I wanted to find out when I left, but doubted they would tell me. I expected to be debriefed and handed my check. Game over.
I put my clothes back on after we left the waterfall and checked my pocket watch. One hour to go before departure time. I could decide to stay, but I Rhonda made a veiled threat about what would happen if I tried, so I continued to walk back to the former bootleggers’ camp with Chamita by my side. It wouldn’t be long now. How could I tell her I needed to go?
We arrived at the camp and sat down on the ground. Chamita didn’t seem to like to sit on chairs or benches. She preferred the ground. She’d done this most of her life, so I suppose it made sense.
“Chamita, I need to go away for a while,” I told her as we sat on the ground. Party of me felt it was insane to explain myself to a computer program, even if it did have a certain level of agency.
“Why, Vince?” she asked me as she laid her head in my lap. “Why not you stay? I take care of you.” No matter what, this would be hard.
I plucked a daisy from the ground and placed it in her hair. “I need to leave right away because of…of something I need to do… I don’t know how to tell you….”
“You be back soon, Vince?” She raised one finger and ran it down my chest. I would miss this hunk of a body they’d given me for a character. Maybe I could meet the buffed muscle boy who modeled it too.
“I will try, Chamita. I will try.”
I took out the pocket watch and opened the casing. At least I didn’t use the panic button. They had to give me that much. The screen focused as I kept it away from Chamita where she couldn’t see it.
This time it wasn’t Rhonda. It was one of the other crew members I’d met when I took the assignment as a VR game tester. He didn’t have any expression on his face, which was fine with me, since I'm sure everyone at Sandstone had watched my naked exploits now. I was beyond embarrassment, their fault for making such an incredible game.
“Are you all set to leave, Vince?” he asked me. “Glad you opted to take the extra day, gave us a chance to fix some problems and take things a little deeper. Our extraction team is ready. Are you?”
I looked down at Chamita one last time and leaned over to give her a kiss. I felt her hand on the back of my neck as she tried to hold it longer than I could. I rose up and looked at my little wolf girl and burned her soft face into my mind.
“Take me out,” I told him.
The universe vanished.
19
I felt my body melt away as the phase shift happened. Things changed. I was adrift in the sea of night and hurled down into a tunnel. The tunnel came to an end where a man at a tollbooth waved at me as I soared past it. For some reason I thought this was funny. A tollbooth at the end of a tunnel of light. What did I have? Auto-pay? Would my next life me deducted a few years for failure to pay? Did they take a picture of my soul as I zoomed past? And then I slammed into a wall.
“Vince,” a voice said to me, “can you hear me?” I looked up to see the face of one of the Sandstone Gems crew. He had on a respirator of some kind and waved a hand encased in rubber across my face.
“I’ve got a pulse!” someone else yelled from across the room. “Don’t shock him again!”
I was wet. My body was inside some kind of tank filled with warm water where I floated. This wasn’t the VR chamber. Every muscle in my body hurt like hell. I tried to rise up and found an IV stuck in one arm. Strong hands picked up my naked body and placed it on a gurney. I flew down the hall after someone tossed a sheet over me.
The ceiling lights flashed by as we traveled down the corridor. For a minute, I thought I was back in the abandoned asylum, but this place was modern and smelled of rubbing alcohol. Faces looked at me and checked my vitals.
“My name is Vincent Richards,” I said to whoever listened. “My story begins on the day I died.”
“What?” a voice questioned. “What did you say? Hurry, I think we’re losing him!”
I laughed. “That was a line from an old movie. I’ve wanted to use it all my life.”
As I lay in a hospital bed over the next few days, I found out what happened when they extracted me from the game. The VR chamber malfunctioned and the crew was forced to bust it open to get me out. Fortunate for me there was a hospital nearby with a room on standby in case anything went wrong during the game test. I didn’t respond when they got me out. By the time I was out of the chamber, one of the crew members noticed I wasn’t breathing. They got me breathing again on the way to the ambulance, but I was without oxygen for two minutes.
On the way to the hospital, I quit breathing and they lost my pulse. I’d seen a medic in a biohazard suit revive me.
“Why the biohazard suit?” I asked Jack. He was in the hospital checking up on me. I made them promise not to inform my parents.
“It was the only way I could get the funding to have an emergency crew on standby. It’s part of a National Guard training exercise. They got here fast and I’m going to see if I can use them again. Once we have all the bugs worked out of that damn chamber.”
I was paid a lot more than the bonus, so long as I agreed to sign all kinds of papers that said I wouldn’t press charges about the chamber malfunction. I signed and realized I would never get another chance to go back into that VR world until they were ready to make it commercial. From what happened to me, it might be a long time away.
After I was released from the hospital, I went directly to the campus of the game company. As part of the agreement, I had to be debriefed from the VR team. They were eager to find out what happened inside the virtual world from my perspective.
Just as before, I was seated in a conference room with faint light from the ceiling as the tribunal of the learned sat across from me. Every one of them had computer pads and was ready to find out what they wanted to know.
“How was the exit?” Jack asked me. “We need to know if you realized anything was wrong while in the phase transfer.” I could see the anxiety from the rest of them.
“I hit a wall,” I told them.
“A wall?” Jack asked. “Do you mean your conscious went to a level beyond which it could not go?” The others leaned in to listen.
“No I hit a real wall. Blam. Pow. You know the kind where bricks fly in all directions. Hurt like hell.”
They talked with me for a good three hours. From what I gathered, the team was able to monitor everything remotely from their control room, but they had a limited ability to interfere. They could watch what took place as
the VR system could project an image of what happened in real time over the room. They could even change the perspective. But they could not see what was inside my mind. The system worked by sensory stimulation and the VR world sensations were fed outside the brain.
“You mean, there is a recording of everything that went on inside while I was on the mountain?” I asked them, still tired from the ordeal.
“Yes,” Yu-Ann responded. “We do that to review the progress of the game and find ways to improve it. We need to see if the reality had any problems. Did you see anything amiss at any point? And green screens or objects out of place? We worked hard to make it 1929.”
“No, I never did see anything funny and I followed your instructions to keep the watch screen away from everyone. Did you say everything was recorded?’
“Within reason. We kept the perspective on you since the background programs were of no interest to our team.”
“There was that last night with Chamita.”
“I seem to recall you blew out the candle and we didn’t have much light,” Jack told me. “Other than when you got out of bed to use the floor for a better position….”
“Yeah, okay, I hope you keep that confidential.” Not the sort of thing you want poured over by a committee unless you happen to be an exhibitionist.
“It’s sealed.”
“Another problem is the way you killed the mob boss,” Jack said as everyone made a note on my last statement. They damn better not be looking at us on those pads, I thought.
“How does this create a problem?” I asked him. “I took out the mob boss who would have killed Chamita or me? I don’t understand.”
“You mob boss was unarmed and with an injured arm,” Jack explained. “You rammed him and sent him to his death over the side of the building.”
“I’ll repeat myself: I did that because he was going to kill Chamita or me.”
“With an arm ripped apart by a Tommy gun burst? With no gun? I think you could have easily subdued him. At least in the character form we gave you.”
I looked down. I was back in the meat and potatoes body I’d kept behind when they put me in that chamber. I no longer felt as if I was the champion of the universe. I did miss that Jeff Chandler bod.
“I made a decision,” I explained to them. “Chamita was by herself to one side of the building with a few bricks for weapons. I had an automatic, if I wanted to kill him on the spot, I would have drilled the bastard full of holes. It wasn’t my fault he lost his footing and went over the side.” Now I could feel the rage build inside me.
“It appeared to us that you’d bonded with Chamita after the ceremony in the caverns,” Yu-Ann explained. “Once bonded you were willing to do anything to save her. Even though the mob boss was not a credible threat at that point. You also wanted revenge for what his minions did earlier in the game.”
I leaned back and looked at them. “This is all hypothetical. None of the people we are talking about is real. Everyone, save me was a computer simulation. It's a video game, and we all know that morality goes out the window. Shut up and frag and all that ya know? So why are we having this discussion?”
There was a moment of silence. The people on the team turned and looked at each other.
It was Jack who spoke for them all. “We need to know how people will react when they play this game. We need to understand what their motivations are. We also need to find out what this game will do to them. Do you recall those stories of people starving to death and committing suicide in the early days of on-line gaming? This has the potential to be a hundred times worse. You are the first one we’ve put inside the game and look what happened to you. You’ve fallen in love with a computer program and we had to let you stay inside the system another day. You almost died rather than leave.”
“I thought it was a malfunction in the chamber.”
Another pause. “We’re not really sure what happened to cause the malfunction,” Yu-Ann spoke. “We haven’t been able to duplicate the error.”
“So what do you plan to do with this system if you can’t find the problem?” I asked her.
“We’ll wipe the entire scenario out and start over with another one,” she told me. “If we can’t find out what happened to cause the problem, we will assume its deep inside the nature of the scenario. No reason to risk this again on another test subject.”
So that was the big deal. They were worried about lawsuits, deaths and repercussions. I didn’t blame them. There were so many ways this VR system could be used it wasn’t funny. I shuddered at what might happen to people who wanted to leave. Already I knew of gamers who wouldn’t leave the table after playing 24 hours straight. They were right to be cautious.
“Is there anything you want to say or ask us before you leave?” Jack asked me.
“Yes,” I said, “there is one request I have to make. But first, was the character of Chamita a group effort or did one person come up with her?”
“The design team fleshed her out,” Yu-Ann told me. “But the essential concept was the result of one engineer’s efforts. So I suppose you could say she is the product of one man’s imagination.” She became quiet as Jack shot her The Look. Yu-Ann said too much.
“Then this is my request. I want to meet that man. That is all I ask.”
More silence from the crew. Finally, Jack past his judgment. “That is quite impossible. The identity of everyone on this project is highly confidential for their safety and for the legal issues involved. There is no way I can grant that request.”
I became quiet too and said nothing else. I could see from the expression on his face there was no way to argue with him. Even if he wanted to, he valued his position with Sandstone Gems too much to grant it.
I was escorted out to my car with my medical files from the hospital stay. Their insurance company already had appointments with several doctors for follow-up visits. I checked my bank account the moment I was home and noticed the money was already in the account. It would give me enough to live off and pay bills until I found another job, and let's just say that I didn't need to rush the last part.
I was only gone two weeks and nothing much changed in the world. The same politicians were mad at each other. The same popular people in the media were still popular. I’d returned to the real world for better or worse. The only benefit I could see was my bank account. In a few days the soreness when away and I was able to go for long walks for a change. I watched a lot of video, but changed the shows often as they all bored me. And I thought of my time on the mountain that didn’t exist. Can a person get VR-PTSD?
There was yet something I needed to do and get out of the way before I could look for work. The money I had would tide me over for a year. If I started to spend it, it would only last a few months. With what I had in mind, it might only last a few weeks.
“So Mr. Richards,” the man behind the desk said to me, “what can we do for you today?” He wore a blue suit with a gold tiepin and sat behind a wooden desk.
“I understand you do investigations,” I told him. He was in his fifties and much heavier than me.
"Yes, we are a licensed agency for investigative work with the state. We handle employment screening, loss prevention, and background checks. I have a brochure which should answer your questions.” He reached under the desk and shuffled around for something.
“I need to find someone who used to work for a company I did some business with recently.”
He stopped what he did and shut the drawer. “We are limited by the state as to what can be done. If you want to find an ex-employee, we have to do a lot more work than usual. This can become very expensive because we employ methods that are only known to us.” He leaned back and I could see the certificates and diplomas behind him.
“This is the company he worked for,” I handed the man the name and address of Sandstone Gems. “He was the principal developer of this game character.” I handed him a piece of paper with the name “Chamita” on it.
/> “That isn’t much to go on, Mr. Richards,” he told me. “Do you have anything else that could help?”
“I have this,” I responded and slid the envelope with the money in it across to him. “You have my contact information, when do you think you can get me his name and location?”
He counted the money. “I will have you what you want in a month. I warn you, if the man is dead you’re wasting a lot of money.”
“I’ll have closure,” I told him and left the room.
The call came three weeks later.
I woke early one morning the sound of my phone beeping. It was the investigator I hired. I pressed the answer button and identified myself.
“I have you the name and location,” the man I’d hired told me. “It wasn’t easy to obtain, but this is who you want.” He paused.
“Let me have it,” I told him. My hands trembled.
“I want you to know this may not be what you expected, but I’m sure we have our man.”
“Just give me the name and location.”
“His name is Hans Konkin. He is a resident of the Sunny Valley Manor in East Cromby. You do realize this is a nursing home?”
“I don’t care. Did you find out if he can receive visitors?”
“That wasn’t part of the job, but yes he can.” He gave me the address.
I thanked the man for his work and told them I would get back in touch if needed again.
Sunny Valley was a residential care home in the Poconos about an hour from where I lived. I called first to see if Hans Konkin could receive visitors. The administration desk told me he hadn’t had many as of late. The next question was whether or not they could verify I was a relative.
“I’m Henry Konkin, his nephew,” I lied to them. “I haven’t seen Uncle Hans in years and mother wanted me to check on him. Is that alright?” I knew from doing my research that Henry Konkin didn’t give a damn about his uncle, but our age and heights matched.
