by Edward Brody
Dr. Winston took a deep breath and looked uncomfortable. “I’d like to think those situations were few and far between.”
I snorted. “I assure you lots of people were separated. I lost my girlfriend, even.”
“Oh, I’m certain there were separations on launch day. But it was necessary.”
I shook my head. “See what I mean? You don’t look at people as people. You just see them as part of your master plan. It’s actually quite sickening when I think about it.”
Dr. Winston huffed. “It sounds like someone is disgruntled because they didn’t get a little piece of ass today.”
“Oh, fuck you,” I snarled. “Half my village is gone, we’re going broke, and it seems like I’m constantly bombarded with new things to take care of, so I can’t do what I need to do. It’s stressful. You know, a quest log would be nice! I don’t even know when I’ll have time to get out there and really start looking for Rachel.” I rattled my head and waved my hand around. “Actually, you know what? Forget about it. No matter what I say, you’re going to have a retort. You don’t understand what it’s like to lose someone and not have freedom of choice. You’re not a good person.”
The doctor looked down and sighed, nodding his head ever so lightly. “You’re right… I’m not a good person.”
I snorted and looked away.
Dr. Winston walked past me and sat down on the bed. “But you’re wrong that I don’t understand.”
“Am I?” I asked cockily.
“Please, have a seat, and let me tell you more about me and how this world came to be.”
“Or you can just go,” I said. “I’ve got to wake up early so I can trek across the orc-infested Freelands, because our village needs gold.”
“Please,” Dr. Winston said. “It won’t take long. I want you to hear this.”
I took a deep breath, slowly walked over to my storage chest, and sat down on the lid, leaning my back against the wall. I crossed my arms and propped one leg over the other. “Alright, I’m listening.”
“Okay, well to begin, I was born to a poor, poor family. My father was a coal miner…”
“What? People haven’t mined coal for ages,” I said.
“He was one of the last in his trade,” Dr. Winston explained, “but he died of chronic lung inflammation when I was still a child, leaving me and my mother alone. There were no jobs in our town, and my mother didn’t have the funds to pick up and leave. She did what odd jobs she could to put food on the table, but the stress of raising a child alone with no consistent income broke her down, and like so many, she turned to drugs.”
I uncrossed my legs and shifted my jaw, realizing there were similarities that Dr. Winston and I shared that I would’ve never imagined. My mother too had faced addiction problems.
“Mom was dead before she was dead. She was never the same once the drugs took hold of her, but eventually she overdosed and passed.” He sighed. “I was alone, left to fend for myself. I was lucky enough at the time that my uncle took me in and allowed me to work for his trash collection company, even though at age fourteen, I wasn’t legally of working age.”
“That must have been hard,” I muttered, trying to show some compassion through my still-simmering anger.
“It was,” Dr. Winston continued. “I wasn’t even able to finish High School… But I got a lucky break one day when an old laptop fell out of someone’s trash. I was sixteen at that time. It was clunky but still worked well enough, and I was suddenly opened up to a world of possibilities.
“With that device, I learned most of the important things I had missed out in high school, and in my free time I taught myself to read and write computer code. At eighteen years old, I released my first app.” He snorted. “It was a juvenile program that replied to your input like you were chatting with a friend, though it didn’t work very well. But regardless of how shitty it was, I made just enough money from it to form a startup called Nexicon.”
I rolled my eyes at hearing Nexicon referred to as a startup—as if it wasn’t the most well-known tech company the world had ever known.
“I continued to expand on my skills, and Nexicon grew faster than I ever expected, especially our games division. And at 21 years old, I met my first wife.” He lifted his hands and waved them around as he continued. “It was unbelievable. I had money, friends, and a beautiful wife that loved me dearly. I couldn’t believe how far I’d come when just a few years earlier I was virtually alone, picking up other people’s trash. The world was at my fingertips… or so I thought. Three months into my marriage, my wife was killed by a drunk driver.” His face went blank, and his eyes deadened.
My stomach turned. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“She didn’t have a choice, nor did my parents.”
“But they—”
Dr. Winston held up a hand to stop me from talking. “But I had a choice. I was devastated and barely left my room for months. I could’ve let my depression kill me, but I picked myself up and tried to move forward with my life, as my wife would’ve wanted.
“I continued running Nexicon, making better and better games and applications, always improving the artificial intelligence. And I never stopped studying, eventually earning a PhD. That was right around the time I met my second wife.” The doctor smiled. “For the first time since I had lost my first wife, I felt complete again. And the day when we had our first child, I was…” He smiled and shook his head. “…wow. I was the happiest man in the world. Happier than I could’ve ever imagined. I wished my mother and father could’ve been there to meet my baby girl.”
Dr. Winston continued staring straight, lost in his memories. He waited several seconds before continuing his tale. “Then the plague came. We did everything we could to avoid it… We wore masks, stayed at home as much as we could, avoided people, washed our hands. But it still got her.” He shook his head. “My wife fought for her life for weeks, but she wasn’t strong enough. My daughter survived but was left with brain damage and a breathing condition.” He clenched his teeth and exhaled. “I felt she was still there, but she no longer had the ability to speak or breathe on her own, and nothing the doctors could do changed anything. No amount of money I had could change anything.”
I swallowed hard. The man had clearly been through a lot of trauma.
“That’s when I began work on a new effort. I wanted my daughter back, so I thought I’d try to find a way to transfer a person’s consciousness into digital form.” He homed in on me and looked deep into my eyes. “Our brain is essentially a computer, after all, and the rest of our body is nothing more than a power supply and peripherals attached to our brain.”
“That’s one way to put it…” I muttered.
“No, it is,” he said. “I must have studied every resource there was about artificial intelligence and neurology, and thank goodness I had money at my disposal. The bribes I had to pay to experiment on animals and living brains—it cost a fortune.”
“Living brains? You mean living people?”
“Alive but comatose or dying. I also experimented on the brains of people who had just died, trying to retrieve the data before the brain tissue oxidized.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was a little grossed out actually.
“But I finally made a breakthrough. Through an optic nerve connection, I was able to transmit visual data back and forth between computer and brain, and eventually I cracked the code to allow all brain data to be transmitted and written to a computer.”
“That’s how you made Eden’s Gate,” I said.
“Not yet,” he refuted. “I just wanted to save my daughter. To get her back… to talk to her again.”
“So, you saved her?”
“No…” he said, shaking his head. “Her brain damage was more extensive than I thought. The portion of her brain that stores memory had been too heavily damaged by the plague. All of the data that made her who she was, was essentially corrupt. I was able to transfer her consciousness into d
igital form, but it was no longer anything… just a blank slate, like a newborn child that could be shaped into anything. Basically, she was an NPC without any programming.”
“Wow… I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said, his eyes dark and cold. “But don’t tell me that I don’t understand loss or not having a choice. Everyone I loved never had a choice… not a single one of them—my parents, my two wives, my child. And that’s what led me to Eden’s Gate.
“Even with the professional success of the magnitude that I had achieved, it meant nothing to me without my family. I saw how imperfect and unfair the world was, and how quickly life was taken from us all. Hell, the first 18 years of my life were a nightmare. 18 years of poverty and struggle.” He bobbed his head from side to side. “It might have been a small amount of time in the grand scheme of things if our bodies didn’t live such short lives. But when the average lifespan is only between 70 or 80 years, half of which are spent as immature or elderly, it makes things seem… less than ideal. Am I right?”
“If you put it like that, yeah. Of course.”
“But I had a unique opportunity,” he continued. “I had the ability to create worlds and a loyal programming team backing me. In addition, I knew how to transfer consciousness from one place to the next. And… I already had the blueprint for a blank slate NPC.”
“Don’t tell me… your daughter?” I questioned with a gulp.
“The base code for all NPCs in Eden’s Gate.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I felt a little creeped out by it all. “You’re saying that every NPC in Eden’s Gate is your daughter?”
“No, not really,” Dr. Winston said. “All the data that made my daughter who she was, was unusable and erased. She merely left me the code for advanced interpretation and development. I had a completely blank ‘human consciousness’ slate, but a slate that when copied and assigned values could be transformed into the most lifelike artificial intelligence ever seen—dwarves, orcs, elves and countless others that could behave like they were real. By definition, they actually are real.”
I shook my head again and blinked several times, just blown away by everything I was hearing.
“I set off to create a world that people could enter and never face hopelessness again, at least not as easily as they could back on Earth. A place where every Reborn had an equal chance, where lifelong disease and illness could be cured, where everyone could have a purpose. A place where even if you had a bad run, you still knew you had a long life ahead of you and plenty of time to change everything.”
“But you still left people with no choice,” I said pointedly.
“Yes,” Dr. Winston said and nodded in agreement. “But I had no choice but to leave no choice. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever made.”
“A decision is a choice,” I countered.
“I had a choice in doing it, I suppose, but I had no choice in how to do it. The first alpha tests for Eden’s Gate were designed to leave people alive on Earth, to log in and out of the world, to only transfer into the game if their bodies died. That created two problems. One, they had to be attached to the headset when they died, since your consciousness can only exist in one place at a time. As you might imagine, that opens up the possibility of someone planning to transfer but dying outside of their headset before they transfer. And two, people simply acted like fools when they knew they could log out at any time. There were too many mindless murderers and degenerates running around to make the world feel like anything real at all. People treated it like a game rather than their lives. It ruined the world entirely.
“Then there was the problem of acceptance. I quietly spoke to lawmakers and people in power about the idea of transferring, and it was met with more fear than anything. Those who weren’t afraid thought I was joking. And If I had simply ‘opened’ up a new world initially devoid of Reborns and had given people a choice to be the first pioneers, more people would be afraid than not, and the whole world would try to shut it down in fear. But…” He held up his finger. “If millions of people transferred all at once with evidence that the world was alive and functioning? It would give everyone pause to think and consider things. Are there really people in this other world? My loved ones even? Should I join them?”
I shook my head. “It still seems wrong.”
Dr. Winston nodded. “And it is… I know it is. But in very, very rare cases, people do things that are wrong for the greater good of humanity. I hide it well, but I think about those that were hurt in this process every day. But at the same time, I know that people here are happy or at least have near unlimited chances to create happiness for themselves. And after all, I didn’t really kill anyone. I simply kidnapped them and placed them in a different realm of reality. And don’t forget I gave them immortality as well.”
“Immortality…” I muttered low as I thought about all the things he was saying.
“If a cult leader were preaching to his followers to kill themselves so they could go to some sort of afterlife, I would despise him, because he’d be talking people into taking their life without evidence or science. Any sensible person could deduct that if such an outrageous claim were true, you could still live a normal, happy life, and still go to the afterlife after you died of normal natural causes, right?”
“I’d assume so.”
“So why would a person kill themselves for a cult leader or for a profound claim?” he asked. “It’s madness.”
“Yeah, but you—” I started.
Dr. Winston held up a finger. “But should I be despised when I created a real world based on science and provided proof of its existence? The people on Earth saw the proof, and now you’re living in that proof. Eden’s Gate is real—not a cult or a religious fantasy, and no one has been killed. They’ve been extended.”
He sighed again. “If something happened on Earth that caused a player’s relative or friend to suffer because they transferred here on launch day, I’m sorry for that. I believe it’s a small price to pay to give eternal life—the option to live as long as you like and die when you’re ready—to millions, billions, and as time goes on, even trillions of people.” He laughed. “Eden’s Gate is not the afterlife. Sometimes we say that we’re in another world, but really, we’re all still on Earth, just contained in a vast computer system setup to run for eternity.
“You saw the world before you left, right?” he continued. “Coastal cities were under water, new plagues and viruses were rocking the world year after year, and the weather had gotten so bad in some places that they were no longer inhabitable. The blockchain system we’re in will survive even long after life ends on Earth and the planet begins its healing process. Hell, if enough people come here and stop destroying the planet, we might have saved Earth before life has to end there at all.”
I nodded. “I get it… Or at least I understand where you’re coming from. I still don’t know if I agree with what you did, but I am glad to be here. I just wish you hadn’t split people up. It eats at me all the time not knowing where Rachel is in the game.”
“You’ll find her in time if she’s in here.” His brow wrinkled. “Wait a minute… Did you say she’s in the game? How do you know she is in the game if you weren’t able to find her yet? You seemed unsure before.”
“The Old Ones,” I said. “They granted me the knowledge when I went to the Eternal Ravine. Pretty weird that you couldn’t find her but they could.”
“Oh-ho…” Dr. Winston said with a chuckle. “I don’t have direct access to anyone’s memory in here—that’s too much power for a Reborn. But the Old Ones are part of the world, and given the right circumstances, certain systems can access your memory and provide feedback. The character you spoke to must have accessed your memory of her on Earth to match it with her character in here.”
“Okay, well whatever,” I said, shaking my head. “The point is that it shouldn’t have to be like that. Not being able to find her stresses me out,
so I can only imagine how hard it must be for other people—married people and whatnot.”
Dr. Winston frowned. “I wish there was another way, but if everyone spawned in the same place or people could spawn with who they choose, the world simply wouldn’t be balanced and fair.” He shrugged. “The sex thing you mentioned earlier though—that really is a bug and one I’ll look into it and try to adjust. The fear of death programming was intended mainly to impede people from doing stupid and suicidal things in order to complete quests, fast travel, kill monsters and such. It never crossed my mind that it would stop horn-dogs from being debaucherous in stupid places. But it shouldn’t…”
I laughed and yawned. “Well, thanks for the update, but I’ve really got to get some rest so I can get up early tomorrow.”
“Any other bugs you want to report?” Dr. Winston asked.
“No, that’s all for now.”
“Okay, well thank you for the report and for listening calmly to my explanation. I hope one day you and everyone else can forgive me.”
I shrugged. “I can, but I don’t know if other people will.”
Dr. Winston nodded as he headed out the door. “I’m sure most people won’t for a long, long time, but I can hold out hope that maybe one day they will…” He opened the door, glanced back, and smiled. “We have eternity, after all. Have a good night, Gunnar.”
“Good night,” I said.
Dr. Winston closed the door behind him, and I lay in my bed a while thinking about everything he had said. I wondered what I would do if I were him, and I figured I wouldn’t have the same courage—or cowardice, depending on how you looked at it—nor the motivation to do half the things that he had done in his life.
If I had been born a hundred years before Eden’s Gate, the prospect of a Dr. Winston would terrify me. But if I had been born a hundred years after Eden’s Gate, I may look back and think of Dr. Winston as a hero who saved humanity, depending on how things on Earth played out. But falling victim to his plan on launch day confused the hell out of me. I could forgive him but never forget what he did, and while I couldn’t approve of his methods or madness, I was thankful to be where I was, even if things hadn’t been going so well recently.
