by Jason Bourn
VIRTUAL PERFECTION
VEILED DESTINY Series
Book 1
Technology has drawn everyone into Virtual Reality, but what will happen to humanity if no one can get out?
by Jason Bourn
Copyright © 2019 by Jason Bourn
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Table of Contents
VIRTUAL PERFECTION
PROLOGUE
PART 1 – VIRTUAL REALITY
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
PART 2 – VIRTUAL SUIT
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
PART 3 – ESCAPE
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
PART 4 – OTHERS
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
PART 5 – QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
PART 6 – SETTLEMENT
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
PART 7 – NEW STRATEGY
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
PART 8 – PHOBOS
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
EPILOGUE
MORE JASON BOURN
PROLOGUE
Classification: Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
From: President of the United States of America
To: Chief of Staff of the United States of America
Subject: Head of the Office of Predictive Analytics
Priority: Code 1: Utmost Impact to the United States of America
This memo is for your eyes only. I want you to personally handle the following. Absolutely no-one is to know about this.
I received a memo from my friend, Dr Jessica Landry, whose job has been to assess the most brilliant minds coming out of our educational system. She has identified someone who is the highest rated candidate ever recorded – a savant, who looks like he could be more intelligent than Einstein. His name is Elijah Tariato. He has just completed college at Caltech – one of the top technical schools in the world – receiving a doctorate by age nineteen. All the professors agree he has the top mind they have ever seen. His area of expertise is “Predictive Analytics.” He is able to take huge amounts of data in, using artificial intelligence algorithms he generated himself that no one else understands, and determine in advance what is going to happen. Essentially, he can, given sufficient data, predict the future. Everyone agrees it is almost uncanny.
Based upon this stellar recommendation, I want you to do what it takes to install him as head of a new position, the Office of Predictive Analytics – what I consider the most important assignment in the nation. The purpose of this job will be to make high confidence predictions of transformational changes to our country. This will allow us time to develop plans and contingencies for the future. Give him whatever budget he needs out of my POTUS account so no one can trace it. Again, absolutely no one is to know anything about the position or any of its findings. Any reports or any information about the existence of this position are to be sent “For Your Eyes Only,” and only to me and to my counterpart in the next administration at the end of my term.
Classification: Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
PART 1 – VIRTUAL REALITY
CHAPTER 1
The view looking up through the dome’s transparent top was absolutely breathtaking – all the stars having a reddish tint due to Mars’ dusty atmosphere. Just then, the sun rose slowly over the horizon, glinting off the dome’s shiny surface, which caused Calaes to shield his eyes. But Calaes didn’t care – he was more excited than he had ever been.
A smile played across his face as he gazed out at the huge circular dome floor, large enough to hold several football fields. It was rapidly filling up, as nearly one hundred passengers disembarked from the shuttle. The shuttle, one of many, had just landed, bringing the latest raw recruits from Earth, including Calaes. Calaes had gone through the airlock door first, anticipation burning in his veins, wanting to experience everything at once. The immensity of the view sent shivers down his spine, with the wide panorama showing many similar domes, each showing tiny figures moving within them. The soft red of the soil reflecting off the thin Martian atmosphere made everything seem somewhat macabre with its slightly reddish tint.
As more figures passed him exiting the shuttle, Calaes’ gaze shifted and he chuckled to himself, watching everyone walking with that peculiar long-strided gait, so naturally adopted in the lower gravity of Mars. Everyone was wearing the same jumpsuits required of new recruits – gray with a small green Earth-shaped emblem indicating the raw nature of the recruits. All seasoned crew-members wore the same gray jumpsuits, but theirs were adorned and proudly worn with the larger red Mars emblem. Calaes hoped to earn the right to wear that cherished red Mars emblem one day, but he knew that only a very few were chosen – and the exact criteria for being chosen was a closely guarded company secret.
Calaes had just started the simulation adventure-game called “Martian Survival Challenge,” the new Mars self-sustaining colony game that came with his new Mark IV Virtual Reality gear. His anticipation had reached Himalayan heights, and as so many before him had said, the reality of the simulation far outstripped the hype. He had heard it was impressive, but what he experienced here was heads and shoulders above any other VR environment that he had ever seen or heard of.
It wasn’t the detail work – of course that was flawless – but that was becoming almost standard with all the really good VR simulations. The real difference between this and any other VR environment Calaes had experienced or heard of was its vast scope. There were not just a few rooms with full detail – instead there was full detail in every aspect of the simulation, covering many buildings and hundreds of rooms, each with full painstaking detail. It would take years and years even with a large staff to generate this. Even for a company large enough to produce the Mark IV, this was quite impressive and extravagant.
Well, Calaes wasn’t going to complain about the wealth of detail – he was going to thoroughly enjoy it. At fifteen years old, he was confident that he was one of the younger participants, but based upon all the other adventures he had recently participated in he was sure that he was not in over his head. In fact, lately he had been taking the lead role and he had enjoyed it. As he liked to say to
his friends, “I am green in age, not in experience.”
He had just signed in from his home and started this adventure. The sign up and authentication was much more formal and rigorous than any other simulation that he had ever participated in. They really wanted to ensure you were who you said you were. There were hundreds of other people that were in this simulation, and this was only one of many simulations being run simultaneously by the company. This was so much beyond what any other company ever did – their support for their product by sponsoring and organizing these adventures was legendary. That was why almost literally everyone was trying it. They even had a slogan that was in every ubiquitous advertisement:
“Everyone, and I mean everyone, has to try it. Yes, YOU have got to try it, TODAY!”
The next level of this simulation could be entered by strict invitation only, and very, very few were invited, from what Calaes could find out. It appeared that the invitation rate to the next level was far less than one in a thousand, but the company was extremely secretive about the exact numbers. If you didn’t make it on the first try, there were no second chances. No one had ever made it to the next level if they didn’t get invited back on their first attempt. Calaes would have to truly do an outstanding job in this free trial to get an invitation to proceed to the next level.
There were only two rules that the company required of every participant. The first was no one was allowed to share any details of the simulation with anyone else outside the simulation. The second was no correspondence of any kind outside the simulation with anyone they met in the simulation. Anyone who broke either of these two rules would be excluded from entry into the simulation forever. Calaes had only heard of this happening a very few times and knew the company strictly enforced its rules. The simulation was so good that essentially no one broke the rules – it just wasn’t worth it.
“Well,” Calaes said to himself, “enough standing around taking in the sights.”
Calaes, walking with that same long-strided gait he had seen earlier, followed the last group of new recruits to the far side of the dome to the check-in station. A middle-aged crewman behind the counter took his name and explained that Calaes was going to be in the Alpha company. He would go through basic training and then be assigned to a specific job based upon his aptitude. The speaker system announced that all recruits should proceed to their sleeping quarters. Calaes, along with all those assigned to Alpha company, took the long walk through a maze of corridors to their sleeping quarters.
The sleeping quarters consisted primarily of bunks, each with a small cubbyhole to store personal items – well over a hundred in all. There were large displays positioned on the curved ceiling, ideal to allow everyone to see – currently displaying the Martian season, temperature, atmospheric Oxygen content, and the like. On the wall closest to the pressure-sealed exit door was an entire row of emergency environmental suits. Similar to life vests in ocean-going ships, these bright orange suits were rarely used, but were required for safety purposes.
The displays briefly stated that lights-out would commence in five minutes, and would remain that way for the night. Calaes was sure that he wouldn’t be able to sleep, since he was still brimming with excitement. As the lights went down, Calaes continued to stare eagerly at the displays, still feeling the waves of excitement washing over him. Knowing that he was actually participating in the Martian Survival Challenge simulation brought a sense of fulfillment to him, like this was his manifest destiny.
Suddenly a loud klaxon sound jerked Calaes out of his thoughts and every large display suddenly showed an impossible sight. Earth was shown from the vantage point of what appeared to be its moon. But this was not the view of Earth that he had learned from the time he was a small boy. Instead, what he saw was a frame-by-frame viewing of Earth being hit by a huge asteroid. The asteroid was first seen as it started glowing from the intense heat created as it hit the earth’s atmosphere. As the actual impact occurred, it was obvious that it had hit a large land mass, not the ocean, since nothing but debris could be seen. After several long moments, allowing some of the debris to settle, what formerly had been blue oceans with brown land masses and white clouds now showed a huge continent-sized chunk of land had been lifted in the air and had slowly (compared to the asteroid’s speed) come back down, wreaking havoc on both land and sea. As if in slow motion, huge tidal waves ravaged across every continent, wiping them clean. Even the highest mountains were inundated – this must have meant that the tsunamis were thousands of meters high. Calaes mused that if the asteroid were any bigger, the continent that had been hit might have been knocked up so high that Earth might have been given a second moon.
The display indicated that the Martian colony was attempting to communicate with Earth, but between the initial strike and the land mass coming back to earth causing the massive tsunamis, it was not surprising that there was literally no response from anyone. The shock wave in both the ocean and the sky was probably enough to destroy any ship, submarine or aircraft.
For all of Calaes’ life, he had heard warnings that an asteroid of sufficient size could destroy all life on Earth – which was why the success of the Martian colony was so important. This was the only long-term colony that was, theoretically at least, self-sufficient from Earth. It seemed now this theoretical statement would be put to the test.
A general alert told all the recruits to stay in their rooms and all hatchways were closed. All seasoned crew members, those with the red Mars emblem, were told to report to the general assembly room – the only room big enough to house them all.
Calaes nervously watched the displays for any signs that contact had been made with Earth, however he was disappointed when no signs of life were received. The displays only showed a loop of the asteroid hit and the subsequent damage.
The displays split to also show the crew meeting in progress. There was a lot of debate on how to proceed. In the case of an emergency, such as this, they had supplies on hand for a year. But after that they needed to be fully self-sufficient, assuming that Earth was indeed dead. While this always had been the goal, now their lives would depend on it – and most likely the future of the human race!
The screens changed dramatically, with new simple lettering streaming across each of them. It said:
“EARTH’S DESTRUCTION WAS A SIGN THAT OUR LEADERS ARE TAKING US ON THE WRONG PATH. THEREFORE, ALL OF OUR LEADERS SHALL DIE.”
The screens showed mass confusion in the general assembly room, when suddenly there was an explosion and bright flash of light and Calaes felt the dome started madly shaking. When the monitors could process the image again there was almost nothing left of the general assembly room. The contents, including every member of the crew, had been launched into the Martian atmosphere in the giant explosion. Calaes gripped his bed as the entire complex continued to shake and moan with the stress. In looking at the camera feed, knocked askew by the blast, there appeared to be no survivors.
The new recruits were left to fend for themselves!
CHAPTER 2
Nobody liked Hayden Cantwell. That was just fine with Hayden, since Hayden really didn’t like anyone either. While others he knew enjoyed fine art, gourmet food or even watching a good baseball game on TV, Hayden was only truly happy when he had the power to tell people what to do.
His parents had both worked long hours every day of the week. Initially Hayden had gone to day care. But there, he had managed to convince all the other children, even those older than him, to stage a hunger strike to get two desserts a day. It wasn’t getting the desserts so much as acquiring the power to control the entire group. With this experience he had secured his first savory taste of power and it left him only wanting it more. Hayden had been banned from every day care agency around, but he didn’t care. He had grown up by himself, ever the loner. Being an introvert, this didn’t bother Hayden at all. In fact, this just enabled him to concentrate on his real talent, in which he was truly transcendent: designing artificial
intelligence software.
As a young adult, he had his first major epiphany when he received his first Mark IV VR gear. He could see in his mind’s eye how he could use his AI skills combined with VR to acquire the power he craved. As he thought about it, he could see the possibilities. When in VR, all interactions with anyone in the world were carried out over the network. If he could figure out how to tap into the inputs going to any individual, he could find out everything that person experienced. Similarly, if he could figure out how to tap into the outputs from that individual, he could find out everything that person did to try to influence anybody or anything else.
