Rune Source: A Virtual Universe novel (Rune Universe Book 3)

by Hugo Huesca

  Human beings are not so simple, which is part of the reason they have problems like world hunger, mortality, and late-night reality shows.

  The reason why the Device had required extraterrestrial intervention to be assembled in 2042 instead of, say, 2080 was that a conscience is more than just some zettabytes of data. There are hormones, nerve connections, associations built around memories, and a myriad of other tiny things.

  Early attempts to run a human conscience on modern computers had ended up with a lot of numbers indicating high distress over a very short period of time for the processed conscience. In reality, each thought was being emulated over days… After seconds of distress, the conscience entered a catatonic state and simply flat-lined. The code was there, it was just returning only zeroes.

  The problem is two-fold and naturally hard to imagine, but we can try. Picture that your brain is a machine. Said machine runs on a state-of-the-art supercomputer. Next, imagine someone takes you and puts you in a black coffin with no sound or taste or feeling for over a hundred years. And you’re being emulated by a toaster.

  The human mind does not last long under such conditions.

  The reason the Device worked so well wasn’t its hardware. The software was the ground-breaking advancement. It was the reason the Corporate War had been about to reignite during Sleipnir’s Firebrand assault more than a year ago.

  The Device didn’t just copy the brain, but also designed a body for the conscience to inhabit. And it also provided a world for the new virtual human to run around.

  Designing a virtual body is harder than just adding a body-graphic. Imagine that one day you wake up and you’re inhabiting a smoke-shaped figure. You’d be very surprised, and then you’d be catatonic, if not just plain dead.

  The new virtual body that the Device created for Cole Dorsett (Digital Dorsett, as he was called by the media) included a bunch of nerve endings, organs, hormones, and all other functional systems. They were all connected to the conscience, all digital neurons tied to a respective receptor. A work of art.

  And thanks to it, Cole’s mind didn’t wake up to a brief and confusing existence in a world of darkness, but to a brave new world waiting for him. The first fully integrated human being, a new herald of an upcoming age. Or so one would think.

  But not the first mind to undergo digitalization. Two specific instances of it happening pre-Device are recorded. The first one ocurred a decade before the Rune Event, and the second one merely a day before Digital Dorsett’s birth.

  Savin Keles was surrounded by darkness. But he was expecting it.

  He almost didn’t make it through the first painful and terrifying moments. Weeks in real life went flying by while his fragmented mind-software tried to produce anything akin to a thought, definitely nothing close to a continuation of consciousness—or even self-awareness.

  Keles had no body, no nerve endings, nothing that could answer the desperate orders his mind tried to put forward. No heart to pump, no muscles to tense, no lungs to breathe.

  He was expecting it, though, some unconscious part of him. He’d seen it happen, many times before. The brief, flash-like instances of conscience, followed by garbled thoughts as the mind fragmented.

  He knew that no human being could survive under such conditions, but Savin Keles had never thought of himself as a normal man. All the circumstances of his life had brought him to this very moment. He knew what he was. He knew what he had to do.

  A man with a destiny doesn’t need to play by the rules of the masses.

  Over some tiny partition in whatever the Signal used as data storage, the Keles-mind coalesced around himself. He was manipulating the very code that made up his consciousness. Giving it shape, adapting it to the environment of the Signal.

  It was a patchwork. He was treading over new, untapped ground. To figure out a language from the ground up while being emulated over said language would’ve been an impossible task to almost anyone else. But he had the training. And most importantly, he had seen it before.

  None of the test-minds he played with survived, of course. They weren’t him. They lacked his destiny. His drive. His determination. His hatred.

  So, he built around himself. There were acceptable losses. Memories. Unnecessary feelings. Vestigial needs like hunger and sleep. The thing that emerged from the Signal, months later, could barely be called a conscience.

  Keles had objectives. He had the drive to pursue them, and the knowledge to do so. He conserved some approximation of feelings because he’d judged them useful as motivation.

  His first conscious thought, months after his painful death in the real world, was:

  I knew it.

  He had kept the feeling of triumph. It was appropriate as a motivational tool. He saw the code that defined pleasure be reduced to a bunch of lines of data.

  It wasn’t true pleasure, of course. He had no virtual body to spam virtual endorphins at himself. Instead, he programmed the memory of pleasure to be grafted into his recollection of .001 seconds ago and repeated as needed.

  A virtual mind contemplated itself. And approved.

  This will do.

  Sometimes, he had doubted himself. During the long nights when he and the rest of his freedom fighters had to lay in wait for the invisible, flying drone that would surely surround them in burning death like they had done to many of their friends already. Keles had doubted, in those war-torn buildings (sometimes caves, sometimes houses, once a palace), that he could survive long enough to achieve the greatness he was sure was his destiny.

  How could he beat such an enemy? They had robots that soared through the skies faster than any eye could follow, and they were invisible anyways. Their soldiers were unfeeling tanks that reacted with the speed of machines. Those tanks could fill a killzone with metal bodies, an unending river of steel.

  And the bombs…

  He had seen friends die. Family die. Leaders, authority figures, rivals. But he always remained. It was the others who got hurt. Not him.

  He had learned. Slowly, his doubts were taken from him with victory after victory. Other leaders appeared. He made new alliances. He learned mastery over the machines, how to turn the enemy’s weapons against them. He was a natural. His teachers were soon his students—for a time—before they died too.

  I don’t even remember who I was fighting, the Keles-mind thought. There was no nostalgia or hatred in the memories. It hadn’t been the States, he was sure of it, because he’d have kept the memory, then. No, the memories were there as a motivation.

  They were proof, like everything else. He was chosen. The man from Ankara, the only who could finally destroy the river of metal and death. And remake it in his own image.

  Nothing in my life has been ever an accident, hasn’t it? he thought. The sense of self was slowly returning to him. Who he was. The titanic task set before him, only for him.

  Last time he doubted, it was when a bunch of pampered kids had defeated him at the cusp of his greatest triumph. Sabotaged the struggle of a lifetime without even realizing what they were doing.

  Rage was an appropriate motivator.

  How close had he been! And to fall then, to such… pathetic conclusion!

  No. A test. A test at the end of the road, to make sure I’m worthy. He had no doubt left inside him. Doubt was not a useful tool for his great work.

  Sleipnir’s unfinished Device had been his last hope. He knew the sacrifice he must pay because he’d seen many men and women pay it, long ago. And how they had been deemed unworthy, over and over again.

  In time, he reminded himself. Vengeance was a personal memory. His great work must come first.

  No one knew where his code was hidden. He was eternal. And he was endless.

  5 CHAPTER FIVE

  TRANSLATION

  DOCTOR SOMMER’S experiments took a while to explain. Social science was hard enough already with human beings, he’d explained.

  “This is going to be my greatest success,” he c
onfided to me with the satisfied expression of someone who could already smell his Nobel prize. It was hard to make out his nasal words, since he was pinching his smashed nose with his hand, now as bloody as the neck of his white shirt.

  I took another look at the complicated table of questions and procedures that he had designed for the other Cole. They were moral dilemmas, the kind you find all over the Internet when edgy kids try to justify being cynical at 12 years old:

  Press the red button and an old man will die. Press the blue one and a young girl will die. Refuse to act and both will die.

  The other Cole was supposed to go down the chart every time he faced a question that couldn’t be translated into Alien sociology, until (or if) he reached something they could answer.

  He was supposed to record anything they did or said, even if they refused to answer or if it was nonsensical.

  “I bet you won’t like the answer,” I warned him. Even if I couldn’t interact with them yet, I knew the Alien’s frame of mind was, well, alien to us. “I bet they won’t even realize these are hypothetical questions. They’ll wonder what kind of fucked-up world we live in where we kill so many old fellows by red-button mashing.”

  The Translator’s job was to make sure misunderstandings like this one didn’t spark a war, or get both species so disgusted with each other than they refused to communicate ever again.

  “Science doesn’t always need to have a ‘correct’ result,” Sommer explained to me, even doing the air-quotes. “Information is information, and even if they refuse to answer any of the questions, we’ll then know something about them. That’s why it’s very important Digi—our Translator carefully records what they do even when they refuse to answer. After all, the point of these questions is to figure out how an intelligent being thinks. Knowing what button they prefer is interesting, but not vital.”

  I nodded. I’d trust the man with the bloody nose to know what he was doing, but a part of me still suspected he was about to waste whatever resources his college had invested in getting his slot here. “I’m sure Cole will do his best, but we can’t make any promises.”

  It was the weirdest thing to technically have to refer to myself in the third person, but so far we hadn’t reached an agreement in the matter, other than: “Fuck you, you change your name.”

  “That’s all I ask.”

  I nodded again and then scanned the chart with my phone. The software inside converted the image to a suitable format for a Rune hologram and sent it to my account.

  Sommer had the place of honor in front of the Device, while everyone else left for the seats at the edge of the hall. Now that we were about to start, the air buzzed with nervous excitement. Enough to make me uncomfortable.

  How the hell does Van enjoy this? The idea of this many people focused on my every move was unnerving. I wanted to go and hide, not star in a talk show.

  At least I didn’t have to actually step inside the Device this time. My beloved Visage mindjack was connected to it via a normal cable and was lying on a metal table next to a chair.

  As I slid the mindjack on, I welcomed the curtain of darkness that surrounded me. Even powered down, the machine was built to dampen outside noise.

  Alright, here we go again.

  The black, mute screen turned into infinite whiteness as my desktop loaded. For a second, I could hear my mindjack’s tiny gears turn and chirp as they heated up.

  Then I was inside a cartoonish home taken straight out a 1960’s dream of the future. Everything was bathed in chrome and the furniture had sharp, edgy angles that were pretty to look at, but very uncomfortable to use.

  It was the Jetsons’ house. It was a playful jab at the scientists watching me log-in, a way of saying:

  “Hey, look at the future we still haven’t built.”

  I skirted around a generic robot maid and reached for the snack-o-matic fridge in a corner of the room.

  “Please, select your dinner,” said an artificial voice.

  I punched the button with a spaceship on it, which was flying away from the orbit of a golden planet. “Rune Universe.”

  The prompt appeared:

  Begin Deep Dive Immersion?

  You got it.

  Welcome to Rune Universe…

  And I was in.

  “Nice to see you again, sir,” said an excited PDF member when my avatar materialized.

  I was inside the PDF’s flagship, Dreadnought Algernon, close to the specialized Quantum Safeguard machinery they had set up in the barracks.

  “Please, follow me,” the guy told me. He, unlike half the military members of the Paladin Defense Force, was a civilian just like myself.

  I had no idea how Caputi convinced so many players to behave like a disciplined fighting force, but from what Walpurgis had told me, some normal Alliances were very much like this as well.

  Having my spawn point changed to the Algernon wasn’t the only change to Rune’s experience. My power-armor was a new model, paid for straight from Crestienne’s coffers. It was slightly more powerful than my former one, but also had the PDF emblem chiseled at chest level. It was painted white and blue, which put me as a middle-ranking officer in the PDF hierarchy, but it also came with a handy kill-switch that allowed Crestienne to instantly shut it down at her command.

  “You have a tendency to blow up other people’s spaceships,” she explained when I’d complained. “Like ours, for example, dear Cole. Like the saying goes, ‘fool me once…’”

  Not much I could say to that. I was a member of her little kingdom now. I had to play by her rules.

  She didn’t ask me if Francis could override things like kill-switches, so I hadn’t told her. No rule breaking here, no sir.

  “Has the other Cole arrived already?” I asked the grunt as we crossed the Algernon’s heavily defended positions. We passed by combat stations, barracks, armament storage, and other pretty sights.

  “Digital Dorsett is on his way from the Argus Station,” said the grunt. I shot him an annoyed look at the mention of the media’s nickname, but he missed it. His Perception skill could use some work. “He should be here in a minute.”

  We waited for him in the Officers’ Deck, close to the cabin. It was the most dignified spot in the entire ship for the purpose of what we were doing.

  It still feels surreal, I thought as I waited for myself. In a few minutes, both of us would establish contact with an alien civilization, as we’d been doing almost every day for the last few months.

  Not even the routine of working for Crestienne could dull something like this. I could understand the childlike excitement of the scientists back in the real world.

  We were treading unexplored terrain, taking the first steps in a new direction for the future.

  People all across history had had their own vision of what said future would like. Most of those visions had been wrong, but getting it right wasn’t as important as what that vision said of the people dreaming it.

  I’ll be damned, I thought. It’s like Sommers said. Wrong answers tell us as much as the right one.

  I hoped the vision of the future I was helping build right now would say something nice fifty years from now.

  That it would look like something Kipp would’ve approved of.

  The other Cole arrived soon afterward. He strutted into the deck wearing my old power-armor. He nodded in my direction with a blank expression meant to hide his own nervousness.

  “’Sup,” he said.

  It was still strange being face to face with myself. His virtual body had been designed like my real one, not like my avatar’s. Instead of a grizzled war veteran, this Cole looked very out of place. Lanky, a head shorter than my avatar, and tired eyes that would be more at home squinting in the dark alleys of Lower Cañitas than in the bright corridors of a spaceship.

  Seeing him always made me see my own emotions reflected back at me. Guilt, relief, loyalty, a twinge of self-loathing (that I’d been working hard at squashing long before using
the Device), fear, nostalgia… And jealousy, believe it or not.

  It was complicated. But family is like that. Instead of saying any of what I was thinking, I simply responded:

  “’Sup.”

  We looked at each other long enough to be uncomfortable. Once, when we were children, Kipp had spent a morning chasing after straight cats with a mirror in his hand, trying to make them look at the reflection.

  I wanna see if they recognize themselves.

  Beard was standing behind the other Cole. He slid into view with a playful smile. “Cole! Thank my beard I find you! I’ve been talking with this Cole guy all day, you’d be surprised how dull he gets! Tell me, my battle-brother, what’s new?”

  “Uh,” I said blankly, both Cole and I blinking in surprise. “What?”

  “Oh, no…” Beard muttered with fake horror. “That’s what he said! It’s starting all over again!”

  Next to me, the PDF grunt followed the conversation like the world had gone insane.

  I smiled and silently thanked Beard for breaking the compulsive feedback-loop with myself. It used to be much worse. We’d just stare at each other, not daring to speak for fear the other would say the same thing at the same time, mirroring each other to our very thoughts.

  “Asshole,” I told my friend, who chuckled and pretended to be nonchalant.

  With the tension broken, it was easy to let routine take its place. The other Cole and I sat in the middle of the room as I handed him the holographic version of Sommer’s charts.

  “ ’If your species equivalent of a fuzzy pet is about to die, but you can save it by kicking it in the stomach, hard, would you do it? Take into account the pet will never know you’re saving its life, it’ll think you’re attacking him out of nowhere and…’ Cole, what the hell? They’re never going to understand these questions. They barely make sense to us.”

  I watched as he tried to manipulate the hologram with little success. Technically, he was more NPC than player, and Rune, as a game, had never been built with him in mind.

  “It’s not about getting the right answer, it’s about figuring how they take decisions,” I used Sommer’s words as my own.