by Jason Bourn
Calaes realized that the starship was moving faster and faster relative to the mining ships. This was really good news in that their weapons range would continue to decrease more and more as the starship continued to accelerate. That meant that they would be all right as long as the laser cuts did not hit the same place multiple times and burn through the outer walls – or they were able to launch a nuclear mining munition and explode it right on the ship’s surface.
Calaes was thankful that none of the ships had tried using the nuclear munitions yet – perhaps they only intended to disable the starship.
As they continued to pick up speed the ability of the mining ships’ lasers to score sustained hits on the starship diminished more and more. Soon the lasers’ firing solution was less than two seconds and getting smaller all the time. If they wanted to disable the starship, they most likely weren’t going to be able to do it with their lasers, thanks to the speed the starship had managed to acquire, courtesy of Mars.
Calaes was actually more worried now than he was before. The government forces now had probably come to the same conclusion that they couldn’t disable the starship. So now, Calaes was sure, they would try to use their nuclear munitions.
The highest density of mining ships was just ahead. Calaes held his breath as they passed through, waiting to feel the shock of the explosion that would mark the end of their short journey. When the starship passed, unscathed, through the largest group of ships Calaes realized that this was not the most likely place to use their nuclear weapons. With so dense a group of ships, it was more likely that they would hit another mining ship. To reduce this possibility, they most likely would wait until the ships thinned out.
Calaes queried his persa when the optimum time would be to optimize their attack, specifically the highest likelihood of hitting the starship without taking out another mining ship, and the answer was in seventy-five seconds. Calaes waited anxiously, saying a silent prayer and counting down the seconds, and just when it got to zero, he suddenly felt a strong push to the side by the ship’s engines, along with a general alert. The engines strained for all they were worth, pitching the ship with tremendous G forces. Suddenly there was a huge explosion, right where the ship had been accelerating away from. Calaes felt a huge shock wave tear through the ship, then he felt nothing.
CHAPTER 41
Hayden watched intently as sensor streams from each of the mining ships showed the pursuit of the starship. When the lasers were unsuccessful in stopping the ship, he knew that the nuclear weapons were the last resort.
Hayden watched in fascination as the nuclear weapon was launched and quickly accelerated towards the starship. There were more than fifteen ships close enough to provide excellent video of the entire engagement. When the nuclear blast occurred, Hayden almost felt it himself. Panning through each of the ships’ sensor logs showed time and again the devastation. Hayden smiled as the results of the nuclear blast clearly showed that the starship had been completely annihilated.
As he checked multiple feeds, he relaxed as each showed the starship had been torn completely apart with absolutely no hope of survivors.
Chuckling softly, he knew that he had finally won.
Adding to his victory, Hayden’s persa announced that it had finally collected enough data on the President of the United States. Without hesitation, Hayden quickly instilled his AI replica in the President’s place – two great achievements in one day to top things off.
Now, finally, he was at peace – he truly was all powerful. From now on, there was no way anyone could ever challenge him.
– – –
Elijah sat, watching the nuclear weapon as it raced closer and closer to the starship. He waited until the last possible moment, then sent the sequence of commands. He waited, looking at the results and smiled.
Elijah, still head of the of the Office of Predictive Analytics, had needed to change his plans when Hayden had found out about the entire project and Hayden had closed in on Elijah himself. It had taken a bit of technical wizardry, but Elijah had managed to neatly trap Hayden, using Hayden’s own concepts against him. Elijah had been monitoring Hayden’s inputs and outputs for several years. He had had to be careful to ensure Hayden never suspected anything.
At the moment the nuclear weapon went off, Elijah had set in motion a series of events to wrap an AI replica around Hayden. Since Elijah controlled this AI replica, this meant that Hayden saw exactly what he wanted to see – and Hayden now believed he was the most powerful person on Earth. Of course, in actuality Hayden’s every input and output over the network was being controlled by Hayden’s AI replicate, which in turn was controlled by Elijah.
Elijah smiled, since in reality the nuclear weapon had, intentionally, narrowly missed the starship – but Hayden would never know that, since Hayden only saw what Elijah wanted him to see. Hayden thought he was all-powerful – when in fact he was now living his life in a fantasy.
Elijah smiled at the irony of it all – it was only fitting.
– – –
Calaes, still slightly in a daze, queried his persa for status. His persa responded, “Major damage to the ship’s outer protective wall. Still analyzing if it can be fixed.”
Calaes’ wait was pure agony. He asked Hope, “How are you?”
Receiving no response, he waited further.
Finally, his persa came back showing the damage was repairable, as long as no other hits were received.
Calaes queried his persa as to how many more ships were still ahead of the starship.
The display showed three ships remaining that could use nuclear munitions, though none of them had as good an angle as the one that nearly hit the ship.
The ship’s engines came on full force again, this time even more powerfully. Calaes felt intense pain in his head and everything went black for a second time.
He awoke, trying to shake his head – which of course was held firmly in place by the chamber’s webbing. “Status,” he croaked.
His persa responded, “You lost consciousness for approximately thirteen seconds. During that time all three of the last mining ships launched nuclear munitions. None of them were able to disable the starship. There are no additional mining ships that could use nuclear munitions. Congratulations, it looks like we made it.”
Calaes wanted to shout with joy, but he suddenly remembered Hope. “Hope, how are you?” he called out loudly.
A shaky response came back, “You don’t have to yell so loud, I’m here and nothing seems to have fallen off.”
He was relieved that she was all right and appeared to have kept her sense of humor. “Thank God you’re alive and all in one piece. I was worried about you.”
“Well,” Hope responded, “with all the yelling you’ve been doing I knew ‘you’ were all right. Why do guys always yell so much during a battle – it must be a guy thing.”
Calaes smiled to himself. “Yes, all us guys are just Neanderthals at heart. If you haven’t been following, it looks like we’re out of danger now. Our next major milestone is to slingshot around Jupiter and continue on to our destination solar system, called Torval. Finally!”
Hope replied, “Yes, it has been one thing after another. It will be good to relax and take a break for a little while.”
“Speaking of which,” Calaes said, “we really pushed it close. We have less than one minute until we go into suspended animation. I hope you know how much you mean to me and I am really looking forward to when we wake up. I’ve never said this to you, but know that I truly love you.”
Hope smiled to herself, and said to Calaes, “And I love you too.”
Just then the chemicals were injected into Calaes’ body and his thoughts started fading away. His last thought was that he was completely happy. Going where he wanted, with the person he most wanted, and leading a group of highly trained recruits to become the best hope for a new beginning for all of mankind – everything would be all right, he was sure.
EPILOGU
E
Elijah smiled with satisfaction. It felt good to stretch out his legs and walk normally again. It had been a literal pain to pretend to have a hurt leg – it actually made his “good” leg hurt. He thought that he had played the part of Randy fairly well.
He had worked for decades on this plan. He had realized early on at the beginning of his tenure at the Office of Predictive Analytics that there was no hope for saving humanity on Earth since it was already too late to stop the VR addiction. He thought back at the entire plan, and let himself relax a bit now that the first act was complete.
Setting up the Mars Colonization simulation to identify the best prospects had been the first step. Getting every highly qualified person had not been too hard once the simulation had been developed. The hard part, of course, was to make the simulation so detailed. Nothing like that had ever been done before, but then again, no company could ever have had the resources that Elijah was able to secure from the government.
The second part, the Flight Simulation sim, was much harder. Everything in the simulation needed to be exactly like the final hardware product. They had to develop the hardware and the simulation at the same time. This took vast resources, much more than even the government could easily support. Elijah was afraid that the government would balk at this expenditure, but he had finally convinced the President that they would save much more than this by allowing everyone into VR, with its much lower per capita costs.
To start off, they had to develop all the requirements for a full-fledged starship. This wasn’t too bad, since they needed to do this for the simulation anyway. Then they had built the starship prototypes, first under the guise of needing the actual hardware to make the simulation more accurate, then by keeping each sub-team isolated under extremely tight security. No one knew that they were building more than just a key subsystem until the parts started getting shipped to Phobos and they were assembled using select personnel that Elijah had hand-picked to ensure there would be no security leaks.
All this had been set up, of course, to ensure that these key individuals were primed for VR’s only Achilles heel. That, he was counting on, was once their VR experience became just as good as real life, then if that real-life VR experience was taken away, the only thing that could compare was actually real life – but only if there was sufficient challenge and danger.
Setting up the campus for the candidates and setting up their discovery of the actual ship had been one of the more fun parts of the plan. Giving them access to the world’s treasures was another test to see if any potential candidates valued physical possessions over their vision for the future.
The most challenging part had been providing just the right amount of fear/excitement/challenge to the candidates through the use of the government plot to destroy the settlement and the ship. It had been determined that this would be the best way to keep the candidates challenged and at the same time weed out those that didn’t have the commitment necessary to found a new society. This part had worked better than anticipated, with more than one hundred potential candidates weeded out of the candidate pool.
It had been even harder to keep the discovery of the other starship that they had sent off last year a secret, since it had to be kept from both the government and from Calaes and all his candidates. The other starship had all the candidates that had embedded tech implants. Almost every member of that group was already pushing more than fifty percent tech vs original flesh and bones. With all their enhancements, they had naturally been ready far faster than Calaes’ candidates. With all the tech added to their bodies, they were already becoming almost unrecognizable. Elijah predicted that within one generation their bodies would be primarily tech, perhaps up to ninety percent
It was a good idea to send them off in the opposite direction as Calaes’ ship. After a generation or two, when they had each built up both their societies and their militaries, Elijah predicted that these two societies and the VR-dominated Earth would end up in a three-way battle to decide which aspect of humanity was going to reign supreme. Without any guidance, they could well destroy each other or set each other so far back as to permanently harm the progress of the human race, and Elijah couldn’t let that happen.
At that moment a call came through, as they had programmed it to do, so he pushed these thoughts away. “Hello,” he heard Hope’s voice say.
Smiling broadly, he said, “Hope, it is good to hear from you.”
It took several seconds, as already the ship was traveling further and faster as the seconds ticked by. Finally, Elijah heard her reply, “Yes, daddy, Calaes just went into the deep sleep. The reprogramming we did gives me just fifteen more minutes before I go to sleep too. I’m glad I get to talk to you before we’re separated by so many light years. I still can’t believe that I’ll never see or talk to you again.”
“Yes,” Elijah said, “I can’t tell you how much your mother and I will miss you too. I can’t wait to get back to Earth to see my sweet Samantha again. I trust everything went well?”
Hope’s reply seemed to take even longer to reach him, but that was probably just his imagination, “Yes. The first laser hit, though well planned, was pretty drastic. Any deeper and it could have really hurt the ship. And that nuclear explosion actually did some damage – that was almost more than necessary. Between the shock wave from the explosion and the ship trying to avoid it, I’ll be happy to never feel such strong G forces ever again.”
Elijah grinned and said, “Yes, we needed to make everything look realistic. As it was, Earth’s government was really trying to destroy the ship. One day they’ll find out about both your ship and the other one we sent off last year with the tech implants. You should be safe from the coming war for the time being, as that is not predicted to hit for several generations, and I know I’ll be dead long before that occurs. This is really your destiny and your children’s destiny, not mine. My job was to get you on your way, so my main job is done. Both you and the other ship have the most advanced AI that we have ever developed to help you out, when you need it. I will continue to ensure that no ships are built anywhere in our solar system that can challenge either of the two new societies for the foreseeable future, but that will not last forever. Man’s destiny is that they will meet again.”
Hope’s response finally came back to him, “Daddy, thank you for everything you have done. No one will ever know about it, but I will know and remember. There are only seconds before the suspended animation kicks in so I’ll have to be short and sweet. Goodbye Daddy, and I love you.”
Elijah said, “Enjoy your life with Calaes – you two do make a great team. I love you more than you can know.”
Elijah waited for anything else, but there was nothing but silence.
Elijah sat for a while longer, sighed and said to himself, “Hope, you are my pride and joy. I know you’ll do a wonderful job. Fare thee well.”
The End
MORE JASON BOURN
Thank you so much for reading Virtual Perfection. I would really appreciate if you would spend a couple of minutes and post a review of how you liked it.
On the following pages is an excerpt from book 2 of the Veiled Destiny series, Preserving Perfection, the sequel to Virtual Perfection. I hope you like this new book even more.
Jason Bourn
– – –
The far-away world of Torval was thriving, whereas the equally far away world of Ramos was in chaos.
Two ships had been dispatched from Earth, each taking their long journeys, but in opposite directions. Opposite both literally and figuratively. The humans on the ship to Torval had set up a society having an almost religious loathing, bordering on disgust, for both Virtual Reality and embedded technology. The humans on the ship to Ramos had set up a society with the same disgust for Virtual Reality, however they had fully embraced embedded technology.
Earth had become an empty-looking world, with almost everyone going into Virtual Reality. The lure was great. The technology perfecte
d, each person inside their virtual suit inside a virtual room, all five senses were perfectly fooled into believing the body was in a real-world setting. This enabled the wearer to be any place, doing anything, as if they were really there. Only one’s imagination limited what could be done. While many just used this utopian situation to play unlimited, ever more complex games, some used this capability individually, or in collaboration with others, to produce unimaginable art and technological feats, able to complete them much faster and with far more complexity than would ever have been possible with “real world” limitations.
However, submitting to the virtual world came with a price. The longer one stayed in the virtual world the harder it was to exit back to the real world. With this perfected technology, while it was possible to have children in virtual reality – after all it was just a fluid transfer like the ubiquitous automatic feeding and removal of bodily wastes – there were fewer and fewer that actually chose to have children. And the few children that were born were automatically encased in their own virtual suits that grew with them, with no realistic possibility of ever escaping the suits. Every generation there were fewer and fewer children. In short, the humans on the great world of Earth were literally dying out, and, as if in readiness for their destiny, they were already in their high-tech tombs.
One man had foreseen this mighty fall. Elijah Toriato, on par with Einstein in intelligence and creative thinking, had created artificial intelligence software to generate future predictions with amazing precision. He had foreseen the virtual reality trap and had seen to the creation of two giant space crafts to save mankind from the death spiral of virtual reality. Each ship had gone in opposite directions in the galaxy, since their cargo was so different.
