by Jason Bourn
“What?” Calaes asked. “You’re not at the third site yet?”
“No,” responded Rhonda. “I’ve had some problems with the suit.”
“All right,” Calaes said. “I’ll head over to sensor number three and Mazi will head to sensor number four. Rhonda, you go to number four in case anything happens to Mazi then swing by number three in case something happens to me.”
Calaes was almost to sensor three when he heard a scream and Mazi yelled on the radio, “Emergency, I’ve been hit. Oh God, please help me!”
Rhonda and Calaes asked for additional status, but heard nothing.
Calaes said, “Rhonda, please complete the mission at sensor four and help Mazi if you see him.”
“Roger that,” Rhonda replied.
Calaes found sensor three, opened it up and switched it to “NORMAL.”
Three down and one to go.
“Rhonda, what is your status?” he asked.
Not hearing any response, Calaes started walking to the last sensor. He found it, opened it up, set it to “NORMAL” and radioed back, “All the sensors have been fixed. But there is no word from Mazi or Rhonda.”
As Calaes started walking back to the airlock, he looked up and saw a gruesome site. Mazi was there, or what was left of him. His boots still stuck to the ship’s skin, but where his right arm should be was just a frozen stump. The hole was too large for the suit to repair. It hadn’t taken very long for him to die, thought Calaes.
Calaes couldn’t think of what else to do for Mazi. He was clearly dead. He didn’t want to just leave Mazi there, but he was too big for Calaes to bring him back to the airlock. With an utterly empty feeling inside, he radioed back what he saw and headed back to the airlock. Fighting back tears, feeling the unfairness of it all, Calaes felt a determination to complete the mission in commemoration of his friend.
Rhonda responded on a private channel, “I’m just leaving the airlock now. How is it going? I can see you.”
Calaes couldn’t believe it. “What?” he said. “You’re just now leaving the airlock? We’ve been out here for more than an hour. And Mazi is dead. How can you just be leaving the airlock now?”
Rhonda responded, “I’m not as fast as you two were. I wanted to ensure that my space suit integrity was good.”
Frustration boiled up in Calaes’ head. He was about to yell at her when suddenly a sharp pain ripped through his side. He looked down and saw that he had been struck by an asteroid, or something anyway since it had struck so quickly that he never saw it. Pain filled his entire body as he realized that with the size of the gaping hole in his suit, it could not possibly fix itself.
He looked up at the rapidly approaching Rhonda. He couldn’t believe it when she looked down at him and actually smiled. “I’ve been chewing up young boys like you since before you were born,” she said. “You’re just like the rest, just a tool to help me get to the top.”
Calaes couldn’t believe it. This meant that this young-looking woman was actually an old woman, just putting on a VR front as if she were young. And he had fallen for it – he realized now that she was going to win and he was going to lose. He would never get to the next level – what he had thought would be the best day of his life had turned into the worst day.
He felt light headed from lack of oxygen. He never thought he would feel like this – dying in a virtual suit was just like really dying. His vision darkened and the last thing he remembered was the sound of Rhonda’s voice saying on the open channel to Lieutenant Merks that the long-range sensors had been fixed but there were two casualties, Maziar and Calaes, may they rest in peace.
CHAPTER 6
The simulation stopped. A well-recognized company spokesman appeared before Calaes and said, “We thank you for playing our game and for your interest in our products. However, you have been killed and therefore you have not been selected to move up to the next level. We appreciate your business and hope you have a great day.”
Calaes couldn’t believe it. He never thought that the adventure that he had waited more than two years for had ended so quickly and with such finality. He felt a sense of loss, like a hole in his soul. He felt frustration that he couldn’t do anything about it and resented Rhonda’s role in his death. If she had done her job correctly, he wouldn’t have been out there that long to be hit by the asteroid. To top it off, she had continued on in the simulation while he had been killed and expelled. He supposed there was a life lesson to be learned there, but he really wasn’t interested in moving forward right now. His emotions ran the gamut from disappointment to exasperation to indignation and finally to self-pity.
As he thought about it, he realized that he didn’t like himself when he had these self-pity feelings. With that realization, he knew it was time to move on. The trouble, he thought, was that he really didn’t have anything else that he wanted to do.
He spent hour upon hour over the next several days trying to think what he could have done better, running the simulation over in his head again and again – how he could have changed the outcome. There were lots of small things he could easily have changed. But the bottom line was, given the information he had had at the time, he really wouldn’t have changed anything that would have significantly changed the outcome of the simulation. And that really sucked.
Calaes lay there for a while, just thinking about what he wanted to do next with his life. He supposed he could do just about anything. The problem was that he had been doing what he had wanted most, but now he couldn’t. The Martian Survival Challenge and Flight Simulator simulations were so much better than anything else he had ever been involved in. He really felt a sense of camaraderie with those that were invited to the next level. They were, or at least Calaes had previously thought they were, all good people with vision, resourcefulness and a sense of purpose. Now, Calaes didn’t know what to do.
He felt mad, but feeling mad wasn’t too constructive. Those feelings changed to thinking all sorts of elaborate ways he could get back at the simulation creators or the company behind it or something. But deep in his heart he didn’t want to destroy anything, he really just wanted to be a part of something bigger than just himself. He thought he had found it, but based upon the outcome, he supposed that he was wrong.
After thinking a lot about what he didn’t want to do, Calaes decided that he might as well try going back to the Martian Survival Challenge simulation. He had always enjoyed that, so maybe he still could, even after his debacle in the Flight Simulator sim. He logged in to the Martian Survival Challenge simulation and stood there looking around. It just wasn’t the same with his virtual suit. He had felt that the Flight Simulator sim was so real. But the Martian Survival Challenge simulation was never designed for the suit. It had been designed for the Mark IV – and had seemed really good at the time. But it wasn’t even close to the same experience he had with the suit and the Flight Simulator sim. Once Calaes had a taste of the virtual suit experience, especially with the elaborate Flight Simulator sim, anything less was just like a parody of existence.
After playing in the Martian Survival Challenge simulation for a short time, Calaes decided he really wasn’t enjoying it. He left the simulation and tried to decide what to do next. His emotions were churning: he felt sad and mad and frustrated! He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next.
Brainstorming, he thought maybe he could create a simulation just like the Flight Simulator sim. Maybe he could even figure out what he had done wrong. He tried setting up a scenario just like what he had experienced, but he found that creating the level of detail was far beyond what he could do alone – unfortunately just as he had expected.
He forced himself to give up on this approach – for it would take years to just get the smallest fraction of what he wanted. In short, he would never get there from here.
So, what to try next?
Unable to think of anything to get to where he wanted to go, a thought struck him and he smiled to himself.
“Y
es,” he said to himself, “let’s go data scraping.”
Data scraping, as he called it, was a technique that he had come up with that he thought was rather unique which allowed him to see what was not supposed to be seen on the internet. He used this as a diversion, but also as a way to spur creative thinking.
Everything stored on the internet used numerical web addresses. Even those web sites with fancy names all translated back to numerical web addresses. All the large internet search companies used bots to numerically “crawl” the Internet, so no address would be missed. Each of these companies would copy every web site and create their own exact copy of the entire internet. Since these companies’ bots and accompanying databases were well known, any information that was accidentally leaked could, for a price, get quickly erased from each of these databases. With so much information on the internet, in practice it was impossible to determine what information might be of interest to even look for. Since it disappeared from all the major companies’ databases simultaneously, intentionally so, there was no way to know what disappeared.
Calaes’ novel technique was to surreptitiously shadow the bots and make his own anonymous copy of the internet. It was critical that no one knew that this shadowing was going on – or his database would be wiped at the same time. This meant that a fairly simple comparison between a company database and his database would show what was erased.
Calaes hadn’t done any data scraping since he had started the Martian Survival Challenge simulation, so he was cautiously optimistic that his technique would still work.
Since the data from all global websites was obviously far too large to hold locally, Calaes had stored the data on a huge account located on the cloud. The comparisons were run automatically, also in the cloud, even if Calaes hadn’t had the time or inclination to look at their results.
As expected, when Calaes looked at the summary data, the number of sites that had been deleted were fairly small. This was fortunate, since looking at the sites was tedious work. But he didn’t know of any other method of going through them. It was difficult to teach his persa to find “something interesting” or “something out of the ordinary.”
Most of what he found were boring things, like web sites that were corrupted or removed for valid reasons. Others held illegal transactions – areas that Calaes knew instinctively to stay away from so as not to get the interest of the wrong kinds of people.
Most of what was left were those documenting embarrassing exploits of the rich and famous – anyway those that had the fortunate combination of luck, money and the connections to procure the hackers with the ability to remove the offending website from all prying eyes before going viral.
Sadly, Calaes couldn’t find anything of real interest to him. Truthfully, he knew his heart really just wasn’t in it.
Shutting down his data scraping tools, Calaes realized that he really wasn’t all that interested in the goings on of the rich and the famous anyway. He needed to take his mind off of everything, so on a whim, he said to himself, “I’m going to go back to the Flight Simulator sim and force my way back in.” He chuckled and told himself that he was being melodramatic and he felt this was surely a waste of time, but he had to clear his mind and he really couldn’t think of anything else that he wanted to do.
With the Martian Survival Challenge simulation, it was well documented that a login attempt was just rejected if you didn’t reach the next level. People had tried to log in thousands of times after they had been rejected, with no success. Calaes had heard this was the same for the Flight Simulator sim.
With no better ideas, he discouragingly attempted to log back into the simulation. He entered the login information and was shocked to see that his login was accepted. He had never heard of this happening. Well, Calaes was not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Maybe it was some sort of administrative error or bug that allowed him back into the simulation. Calaes just didn’t know. So, he just moved on into the simulation and mentally held his breath.
He started at exactly the same spot that he had started last time. He was in the shuttle, seeing the same flyby of the huge ship. They docked and exited the shuttle – just like before. Calaes was afraid that this was going to be just a reproduction of the last simulation, but he was also afraid that if he did anything radically different, it would disqualify him from the faint hope he had that he could somehow do something that would allow him to move on to the next level.
Calaes exited the elevator on the 225th floor and entered the conference room. Everyone and everything was exactly the same as the first time through the simulation. He recalled the awe he had felt the first time through, when the utter realism of the simulation was so new. Now, however, he found he took this realism for granted, although he knew he would miss it if it weren’t there.
He was in the conference room now and Captain Strauss’ image had just appeared on the screen. After introducing himself, the captain welcomed everyone to the Starfire, the best and fastest starship in the fleet, just like he had the first time through the simulation. His joke about it being the only starship in the fleet wasn’t as funny the second time around. Probably because he really wasn’t in a laughing mood. However, everyone else laughed.
The captain paused and appeared to look directly at Calaes – it was almost spooky. Calaes didn’t remember this, but maybe he had forgotten the details, since the first time through everything was so new and exciting and he was looking around and taking everything in.
Finally, the captain spoke, but Calaes knew that this was definitely not what he said the first time through. “Calaes, I want to personally thank you for your loyalty to the ship and crew. You put your life on the line, with no expectation that failure was anything besides just that. Placing the ship and the mission ahead of your own life is the key thing that we are looking for. In fact, dying in the simulation is the only way that anyone can move up to the next level.
“However,” continued the captain, “while dying is necessary to move up, this is not the only condition necessary to move up. Most die in vain. They get bitter or despondent, or they let thoughts of revenge fill their minds so they either go off and do something (or nothing) else, or they strike out and try to hurt themselves or others. You, on the other hand, dealt constructively with losing. You tried to find out how to improve and finally you tried to do better. We have been tracking your progress after the simulation and you must be commended. As I said earlier, only a small fraction of those who die in the simulation qualify to be asked to go up to the next level. You should be proud of yourself, as we are with you. Congratulations and welcome to the next level.”
CHAPTER 7
Hayden had learned many things from the world leaders that he was snooping on and he used this information to further his ambitions. However possibly the most important piece of information he found, not only did he not use, but he used all his power and influence to hide.
He had heard of a top-secret demographic report that had been accidentally placed on the internet, and then removed. One of the US leaders that he was snooping on had seen it and described it in confidence to a friend – which meant that Hayden now had this information as well. Hayden used his hacking skills to find the report and copied it to his own database for review.
Classification: Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
From: Dr. Elijah Tariato, Department Head, Office of Predictive Analytics
To: President of the United States of America
Subject: Virtual Suit Ramifications Assessment
Priority: Code 1: Utmost Impact to the United States of America
This report is a follow-up to the earlier prediction concerning virtual suit adoption. This report discusses the ramifications of these events.
As predicted, an overwhelming majority of adults have been ensconced in virtual suits within virtual rooms. This has been a huge change to the entire world’s economic model. Immersion within VR has al
lowed creativity to soar with removal of the old physical barriers of time and space. With the combination of AI and VR, people and artificial intelligence combined have opened up previously unexplored areas of business, science, engineering, arts, software, medicine, etc. For example, a key person in any field has always been constrained by time – they never had enough time to mentor everybody – they could only be at one place at a time. Now, with the co-joining of VR and AI, persas are so good that they are like an extension of the real person. Thousands or more persas can spread your influence simultaneously throughout the globe, each as if they were you. Every new insight you have – they have, and every new insight they get by interfacing with others – they provide to you. Obviously, the ability to be everywhere all the time without having to physically travel has only helped the creative process.
However, as predicted the most serious long-term issue is that the birth rate has fallen precipitously. Sexual encounters are, for all intents and purposes, one hundred percent virtual. Whereas virtuals do have the capacity to create a child, there are no longer any “accidents” and less and less people want the responsibility of having to raise children. The third world used to be a major driver of population growth, but no more.
Also, most sexual encounters are with persas – not real people. Think of the most beautiful woman in the world – most men would want to have a relationship, sexual or otherwise, with that woman. Previously this was not possible. Now, not only is it possible, but it is commonplace. Whereas before superstars counted the number of followers on their social media to determine their popularity, the latest craze is how many of their persas are being utilized. There are people literally spending all their time with their favorite star, in persa form. For example, Kate Upton’s daughter Genevieve has over one hundred million full-time persas, plus innumerable part time persas. That means that one hundred million men spend their entire life with Elizabeth’s persa. It is no wonder the birth rate has fallen, and it is expected to fall even more in the future.
