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Chapter 2:

(Posted January 14)

 

Harrison awoke staring at a fish tank. It was a simple aquarium filled with water, a few rocks, and what looked like two small fish swimming lazily around each other. He noticed the pale outline of his face staring at him through the reflection of the glass. Suddenly an ominous thought overcame him as he looked through the reflection of himself at the fish: none of this was real.

He stood in a small room that could have been the waiting room at a doctor's office. Linoleum tile, white walls, no windows, and end tables and seats scattered around the room. Sujay sat on a couch. Rich was standing just behind Harrison, also waking up and collecting his thoughts.

“So what do you two think?!” Sujay asked with glee. He gestured to the room.

Rich coughed as Harrison blinked his eyes as they tried to understand their consciousness. The harsh lighting and white walls made the room feel sterile. It was certainly bright. The only sound seemed to come from the fish tank, which bubbled faintly. Where the hell were they?

“You guys spent nine years building this room?” Rich said, pulling himself out of his initial daze.

Sujay stood up. Harrison realized Sujay's clothes were different, now in the sim he was wearing a tuxedo with purple trim. “Nine years, ha! This, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg. Come, stretch your legs and get comfortable.”

He gestured for them to take a few steps around the room to orient themselves. Harrison felt like he had just awoken from a long night of drinking. He was unsure of the past and where he was. He knew he was in a simulation... but the whole thing felt strange. For instance, the brown door against one of the walls, where did that lead to? He couldn't be certain of anything anymore.

“This room here,” Sujay began to explain, “is just an entry point into VERSA. There are others like it, but I picked us to start here. Imagine this world is like a giant continent, this is just our first port!”

“You guys really broke the bank on decorating this place,” Rich said sarcastically, surveying the prosaic room. “The fish tank is a nice touch though.”

“Hey Sujay,” Harrison asked, “how'd you change your clothes?” Harrison and Rich were still in their suits and ties. Harrison remembered taking off his shoes and jacket before lying down on the waterchair, but now in the sim they were back on him.

“Do you like it?” asked Sujay, showing off his tuxedo. “Something important to learn about VERSA: although the world was created by our engineers, so much of how you perceive things is resolved in the data VERSA pulls from your own mind.”

“You mean our memories?” Rich asked.

“Sort of. For instance, VERSA builds your image, or avatar, in this world based on how you perceive yourself. You both entered expecting to be wearing the same clothes you left the real world in, so that is precisely what happened. I, on the other hand, thought of myself wearing this as I came into VERSA, so VERSA made it so. Simple manipulation.”

“How far does that kind of thing go?” Harrison asked. “What can I change now? Can I change into a tux?”

“No you can't now, you're already in the sim,” Sujay continued to explain. “Once you're in, your appearance is fixed, unless you do something to yourself in the sim itself. But another thing too, when you're entering, you can't imagine something impossible, like that you have blue hair. You have no frame of reference for that. You can't imagine yourself with muscles if you don't have them either.”

“Well that's no fun,” Rich said.

“Ah, but once you're in VERSA, there are plenty of ways to modify all sorts of things, not just appearances. You just need to find the right triggers in this world. We designed VERSA to be interactive and manipulative. It allows us to sim near-impossible situations. We didn't want the average user to be able to change much, but if you're a manager, we've hidden tools throughout the world that lets you change things.”

Harrison was looking at his hands. It all looked real. Very real. The feel of his clothes, the air going into his lungs, the sound of the fish tank. It was a perfect copy of the real world. “This is amazing,” he muttered out loud.

“Ah, you haven't even seen anything yet!” Sujay said with excitement. “But trust me, VERSA is still full of bugs. Most of the obvious ones have been fixed over the last few years, but from time to time you'll notice a few things out of place here and there.” He smirked.

“For instance, it took us about a year to get smells working correctly in VERSA. And every so often you'll expect a scent and get nothing. It's a small thing that, until we fix it all, will help you remember that none of this is real.”

“Shit this sure feels real Sujay,” Rich said. “The application of this kind of program is... unlimited! I just, I can't believe this is all unreal.” He was still taking the time to process what this all meant. Harrison couldn't blame him.

Harrison gestured at the brown door on one side of the room. “Where does that go?”

“I'll show you,” Sujay said as he walked over to it. He opened the door outwards. The door didn't lead to anywhere. It merely covered a couple shelves set into the wall. Harrison didn't realize it was actually a bookcase until Sujay grabbed a red book propped up on one of the shelves.

“This book, “Sujay said, “is our tool I was telling you about. If you don't know the secret, you'll be trapped in this room with nowhere to go. It's a security feature built into VERSA. There are many tests like this we built in so unauthorized users can't access more than they're allowed to. It doesn't really matter much now, since everyone accessing VERSA is a SunCorp employee, but we're thinking more long-term for when we use this technology commercially.”

“Good idea,” Rich said. “You guys really are thinking end-game with this thing.”

Sujay began flipping through the tome. It looked old and musty with yellowing pages, but Harrison had to remind himself the book merely existed in his mind. “Ah here we go,” he said, finding the right page. He began to read.

“Spoke Eighty-five, grant access to Pilot Three, Pilot Four, and Pilot Five. Execute.” he said.

“What does--” Rich began to say before their entire world blurred and Harrison's stomach suddenly dropped out from under him. It was like falling down the first drop of a roller coaster. The falling sensation didn't last long, but Harrison and Rich both lost their balance and crumpled to the floor.

“What the hell?!” Harrison yelled. He put himself back on his feet. And then he noticed the room was huge.

It was massive, having grown to unbelievable proportions. The ceiling, once a few feet above him, looked a mile high now. Harrison stood on the linoleum, looking out across the vast plain that was the floor. He could see Rich and Sujay far away, but within shouting distance. He could hear Rich yelling profanities.

As the trio began walking toward each other, Harrison looked at the chair legs around himself to judge his height. Had to room expanded? Or had he gotten smaller? Wait, he reminded himself, it wasn't even real. He didn't think it was possible for the sim to become more disorienting, but it had.

After a small walk, the three men reconvened. Respectively, their heights were normal, Sujay a little shorter than Harrison, but Rich taller than both.

“What is God's name was that?!” Rich yelled at Sujay. He was clearly angry and amazed.

Sujay had a smug look on his face. “Sorry about that, we usually do that unexpectedly to new pilots.”

“What's happened to us?” Harrison desperately asked. He noticed the red book on the floor nearby where Sujay had dropped it. It was massive. Harrison pointed at it. “How do we get back??”

“Relax, relax,” Sujay assured them. “I told you we built levels of security and access into VERSA so the wrong people didn't go farther than they should. This is one of them. I had VERSA change our size so we can navigate the roads connecting the different worlds of VERSA. You can't do that in VERSA at our entry size.”

“What're you talking about?” Rich asked, clearly confused and still a little angry.

“Ok let me explain. VERSA is universe, or one cloud, if you want to think about it technically. Everyone exists in this one universe. But within the universe, we have different rooms. Or worlds.” Harrison and Rich looked at him blankly. “Ok, I'll put it this way. Imagine VERSA is an archipelago made up of thousands of islands. Normally, if you're on one island, you can't go to another island. But in our current state,” he gestured to their small stature, “we have, let's say, administrator access to pass into to different parts of VERSA.”

“You say we're going behind the scenes?” Harrison asked.

“Precisely!” Sujay answered. “We call it the side space. It's still a part of VERSA but it's not really its own world. It's actually the skeleton that holds the entire thing together. We built it specifically to facilitate movement throughout the system.”

Rich was thinking. “Why do it this way?” he asked, befuddled. “Why not have it be locked doors you pass through? What does shrinking us do? Where are we going?”

Sujay grinned. “Look,” he said calmly, turning toward the massive brown door that he'd left open. The bookshelf was still behind it, but for the first time Harrison could see under the bottom shelf. There was another door, this one green, but the green door was their size. “That's our real door.”

Harrison and Rich stood stunned, mouths agape. Harrison tried thinking of something to say. Rich finally spoke.

“This is some real Alice in Wonderland shit you've got going on here!” he said, baffled and awed. “But Sujay, why shrink us? Why not make the doors all normal sized, but locked?”

“If we have locks, then we need keys. It adds a whole other layer to keeping track of access to parts of VERSA. But if you are the key, as in your size, you only have to control yourself, and thus you control your access.”

“Ok, that's actually kinda smart,” Harrison admitted. He looked at how far away their door was. “Too bad it's going to take us a few minutes to get over there though.”

“Yes, that's true,” Sujay sighed.

“How do we get back to our original size?” Rich asked.

“Original size?” Sujay asked.

“Yeah, the size we started.”

“Is any of this real, Rich? What does it matter?” Sujay asked him and smiled.

Rich rolled his eyes. “This shit is so damn trippy.”

The group began walking over to the door under the bookcase. Harrison had determined by now that if the room was normal size, they couldn't be more than a couple inches tall. Sujay explained there would be more books and other tools they'd use to change size and do other things in VERSA. But a lot of that would probably come in the next few days, when they had more time. Eventually when they were done with their session, he'd show them how to exit the sim. Sujay though failed to explain how that would be done. Harrison kept following him on trust, and mostly because he had no other choice.

When they finally reached the small door, Sujay opened it outward and they followed him into a corridor. The hallway, like the waiting room, looked incredibly spartan in appearance but at least it was the correct size. The ceiling was right above their heads and the hallway led down a bit before forking to the left and right. A few similar green doors lined the walls. It became quickly clear that Sujay was looking for a particular door.

The two followed Sujay down the hall and around a few corners. The halls seemed endless and after making a few turns, Harrison was already lost. Everything looked the same. He couldn't imagine getting lost down here.

“Where do these doors all go?” Rich finally asked Sujay.

“Different parts of VERSA. But don't open any, some don't lead anywhere. At least not yet. Most should be unopenable if they're dead ends. Any locked door you find in VERSA can't be opened because it doesn't go anywhere.”

Sujay finally found his door. It was green, just like all the other hundreds of doors they'd already seen. Though not every door had a word stenciled on it, this door said “COAST-85.” He opened it and the group stepped through.

Harrison could smell the ocean before he could see it. But it was there, just down the cliff from them in the distance. A cloudless blue sky hung above them, and from the colonnade where they stood he could see a sweeping landscape in three directions, clear to the horizon. The door had brought them under a stone cloister that by the look of the columns must have been modeled after the Greeks or Romans. Sujay let the plain door shut behind them.

“Holy shit,” Rich muttered. “You guys built a whole fucking world.”

He was right. From their elevation, Harrison could see more temple-like structures in the distance along with an abundance of trees and even flocks of birds flying high in the sky.

“Sujay, this really is incredible,” Harrison said to their leader. “Who... who built all of this?”

Sujay sighed. “That's a tough question to answer. I certainly contributed some. But it's not like building Legos or programming in every blade of grass.”

He began trying to explain how VERSA worked. “The initial designers and programmers created the original code that governs the physics and looks of many of the aspects of VERSA's virtual world. But VERSA is more than just a program running and executing code. There's also an intelligence built in. The more people interact with it and open up their minds to program, much like you both are doing, it learns what the real world looks likes and strives to replicate it. This door here is one of my favorite worlds, but for every one world like this, I guarantee you there are ten more that make no sense.”

“Wait, did you say VERSA is learning from us? Like an A.I.?” Rich asked.

“Yes,” he replied, unfazed. “The intelligence part of VERSA obviously has access to your memories and extracts them and compares them to what it already knows, then modifies its existing algorithms to create a more perfect simulation.”

“Are you guys able to control it at all?” Harrison asked next. “Like, it's not just doing it's own thing the whole time right? You can reign it in?”

“Yes, we can, mostly. It's difficult but we can go in and edit code it writes and change the programming. Once VERSA started creating its own worlds a few years ago, we discovered if we found the right place on the servers we could go in and delete things or archive things we don't want. And of course, we still have the ability to create our own scenarios and worlds, which is the real value of VERSA. Tomorrow you'll see some of those. It's time consuming when we build out own worlds but much more precise than letting VERSA spool out new places at random. Let's walk.”

Sujay motioned for them to walk onto the lawn next to the cloister and begin exploring. As Harrison stepped out from under the covered walkway, he felt the warm sun on his skin. It's not real Harrison, he had to remind himself. It scared him that it felt very real.

Once out in the open, Harrison could see their cloister was part of a much larger classical structure. “What are these buildings?” he asked Sujay, marveling as the architecture around them.

“Who knows?” Sujay replied. “You'd have to ask VERSA. It just made them up.”

Rich stopped and turned to Sujay. “Ok I've seen birds in the sky, which aren't real, like everything else...”

“Yes and...?” Sujay said.

“But now we have all these buildings,” he said, searching for his words. “Are there people in here?”

“No, not at all,” Sujay reassured him. “VERSA can do a lot of things, but it can't make people. Well, at least, it hasn't tried yet. If it did, it'd fail; people are too complex to create from scratch. You'd have to build personalities, language abilities, free will or at least the illusion of it, there's just too much, even for VERSA.” Sujay looked around, as if he was scanning the horizon. A small breeze picked up and rustled the trees. “If you see anyone in VERSA, it's another pilot, like us. We only have nine stalls, so that's the maximum amount of pilots that can be inside at one time. So yeah, don't worry about it.”

“Wait, so if VERSA can't make people, what military value is there in training here if you can't create people to fight against?” Rich asked.

“We're working on that,” Sujay replied. “For the last four months we've started working on scripted versions of people that we can run inside VERSA. It's very basic. Like, we created a simulated person that can run from point A to point B. Nothing too complex. There are a few worlds we're testing them out in, but we've isolated these experiments from VERSA's mimicking ability so it can't run wild with them.”

“How long do you think it's going to be before you have something marketable to the military?” Harrison asked.

Sujay let out a long sigh. “Don't quote me on this,” he prefaced. “But a year or two, maybe. It depends on what we want our finished product to look like.”

“Well it looks like you've already done quite a hell of a lot of work!” Rich said, gesturing out to the world around them.

Sujay smiled. “I guess you're right.”

Harrison started walking down the hill they were on. He could faintly hear the waves of the ocean crashing against the shore which was some distance down to his left. He had so many questions for Sujay but he didn't want to overwhelm the man. He couldn't stop thinking how unbelievable all this was. SunCorp was going to make a killing on selling VERSA one day.

“Where to next?” Harrison heard Rich ask Sujay behind him.

“Doesn't matter really,” Sujay shrugged. “Follow Harrison?”

For the next twenty minutes Harrison aimlessly walked through the world at his own leisure. There were no paths or roads that he could see, but the vegetation was minimal and the elevations gradual. Strange birds chirped in the trees and the air temperature felt comfortable. A perfectly idyllic world. Of course it was all imaginary.

After a while, Sujay caught up with Harrison. “Next time,” he said, “we can go into these buildings around us. It's interesting to see what VERSA comes up with.”

“We can't go now?” Harrison asked, pointing to a nearby columned temple.

“We should probably get going, actually,” Sujay admitted. “We should disconnect from VERSA soon since everyone at the lab is getting ready to go home.”

“How do we do that?” Harrison asked.

“Another surprise for you. I'll show you.”

The two of them walked off to get Rich, who had wandered off towards a small pond. “There's fucking fish in here!” he exclaimed as they walked up.

“We're going,” Harrison told him. “Sujay is going to show us how to get back.”

Sujay was looking past them at the trees. He began talking, but Harrison quickly realized he wasn't just talking to himself. “There's two ways to get out. The simple way is for our Tower to disconnect us. He can do it any time, but it's usually only in case of emergencies, and it's not really up to us in the sim. But then there's the way to disconnect yourself from the inside, which is the normal way to leave. Ah, here's one.”

Sujay walked over to a nearby tree with faintly purple leaves and plucked a small fruit off of its alien branches. It looked like an apple. “Bite this, it's special,” he said, handing it to Rich.

“What'll it do?” he asked.

“It'll get you out, just eat it.”

“Okay, you're the boss,” he said, taking the apple.

“There are many out-keys in all of VERSA's worlds, the important thing is remembering what they are. Apples, for instance, if you eat them, will take you out.”

Rich brought the apple up to his mouth and took a bite. He began to chew, but a second later his eyes rolled back into his head and he collapsed to the grass. Except he didn't. Harrison was stunned to see his body disappear before it hit the ground.

“See, easy,” Sujay said. “Your turn.” He had another apple in his hand.

Harrison took it from him, eyed it for a moment, then took a bite. It tasted tart, and Harrison almost had another thought before he fell unconscious.

 

Once again Harrison woke up, confused at first, his body aching all over. His vision was blurry, but he slowly recovered to dim lighting as the helmet automatically lifted off his face. He was on the waterchair. He was back.

He tried sitting up, but it took him a few tries. When he did he could barely make out the inside of his stall, but the only real illumination was the timer that Kevin set before he went under. The digital display read 00:08:34. Did that mean he'd only been in the sim for eight minutes and thirty-four seconds? Unbelievable.

He regained his strength quickly as he stood up in the stall. He didn't know where the light switch was so he simply opened the door. Although the control room was naturally dark, it helped him see where his shoes were. He put them on and stumbled out of his stall.

“That was some crazy shit man,” Rich said when he saw him.

“What'd you guys think?” Kevin shouted from across the room.

“Insane,” Harrison calmly. “You guys are nuts.”

“Government's gonna love this though,” Rich remarked. “I'm starting to feel now that just a couple days at the lab isn't going to be enough time to see everything.”

When Sujay walked out of his stall they struck up another conversation about VERSA. Sujay promised that he'd try getting them back into the sim first thing tomorrow after breakfast to demonstrate more. He implied they'd barely scratched the surface on their first dive.

Sujay walked the three of them out of the control room, back through the regular part of the building, and finally back outside. It was already late afternoon. Harrison caught a glimpse across the laboratory yard of a couple cars pulling out of parking spaces and heading toward the main gate.

“Do these people commute here?” Harrison asked.

“Yeah, most live in San Jose or Gilroy,” said Sujay, “but a few live here at the lab. The dorm building where you're staying houses some people. I lived there myself for a few years in fact. It's small but comfortable.”

“How many people work here on any given day?” Rich asked.

Sujay sighed. “A few hundred maybe? I'm not sure.”

“Huh, really?” responded Rich. “Since we got here the lab's felt kind of empty. Like a ghost town. You hiding them all from us?”

Giving a weak laugh, Sujay replied, “No, it's the holiday this weekend. We give everyone the week off but some still come in.”

“I guess there's always work to do, right?” said Harrison.

“You have no idea,” Sujay muttered.

 

Because of the time change from the east coast, Harrison and Rich were both already hungry. Sujay escorted them to one of the onsite cafeterias until Vanessa could meet back up with them. When she found them eating away at a table in an empty dining room, she approached them with a big smile on her face.

“So what did you think?” she said in a chipper mood. Harrison felt exhausted from all the reality-jumping but put on his professional smile.

“Quite the product you have here,” Rich said. “I don't think I need to tell you how interested the military would be in purchasing or leasing VERSA when it's available.”

“That's great to hear!” exclaimed Vanessa, but Harrison knew she had no doubt of Rich's response. “So tomorrow,” Vanessa said, “we have an entire itinerary for you two. In the morning after breakfast there's a SunCorp development meeting I'm going to have both of you attend at nine o'clock AM to discuss the future paths for VERSA and some of our goals with the program, then after that I'll introduce you to a few more developers besides Mr. Rajeev. And after lunch you'll both be able to get back into the sim! Sound good?”

“Sure, works for us,” Harrison said. Not like we have much choice, he thought. They were SunCorp's guests here, and it wasn't like they were calling any of the shots.

 

After dinner, Harrison and Rich got set up in their dorms. They occupied next door rooms on the first floor of a small building set at the periphery of the lab complex, against one of the fences. Each room merely contained a cot and small fold-out desk with a chair. A communal bathroom was at the end of the hall.

Harrison and Rich kept to themselves as they started writing their reports and recommendations to their respective agencies. Harrison still didn't have reception for his phone and there was no wifi or internet access for his laptop, but he could still write and then upload to the agency later. It was strange at first being completely disconnected from the rest of the world, but as the evening dragged into night he began enjoying the solitude.

At one point after dark, while Harrison calmly typed away, a knock came at his door. He got up and opened it. It was Rich. And a bottle of 12 year Glenlivet scotch whiskey.

“You thirsty kid?” Rich asked.

“Where'd you get that?!” replied Harrison, shocked.

“Brought it.”

“We're not supposed to drink while on government time.”

“Fuck it, I've been doing this for decades.” Rich looked around Harrison's room. “No cups though. Looks like we're sharing from the bottle then.” Without asking he sat down on Harrison's bed.

“How's the wife and kids Rich?” Harrison asked politely, sitting back down at his computer.

“Oh they're good, they're good,” Rich replied with a sigh. He drank from the bottle. “You got a girlfriend at least Harrison?”

“I did about five months ago.”

“Was she hot?”

Harrison chuckled to himself. Rich was so blunt sometimes. “Yeah she was pretty cute and tall. Wasn't a bad break-up though, it's not like we hated each other.”

“Hmmm, that's good.”

“What'd you think about today?” Harrison asked him.

Rich paused to think about his question before answering. “Well, VERSA looks like the real deal, but today was just a bunch of staged tricks. I want to see how much of VERSA is really done. Like, go to the places they don't want us to go.”

“You think they're bullshitting us?”

Rich took a sip of the scotch then frowned at it. “Not necessarily, but today was very on-script. Everyone does that when they're entertaining possible government contracts.” He sat up from his reclined position and offered Harrison the bottle. Harrison declined.

“Hey, I meant to ask you,” Harrison said to Rich, “do you have cell reception out here?”

“No, I lost it while we were in the car somewhere,” he replied.

“Remember when you made fun of Ms. Bright's dress pockets when we were driving around in that cart?” Harrison asked him. “She was making a call on her phone. How'd she have reception?”

Rich sat back and tried to think. “Maybe they're jamming outside signals here? Dunno though. That's weird. What do you think of her and Sujay, for that matter?”

Harrison shrugged. “They seem nice, I guess. Guarded, maybe a little.”

“Definitely guarded. I can't really explain it,” Rich said, “But I get the feeling so far there's a lot they're not telling us.”

“Well it makes sense if they're protecting such a prized piece of technology. VERSA is going to change the world in the next decade!”

“No, I think there's something else,” Rich disagreed. “But I can't put my finger on it. If VERSA is such a big secret and it's still a couple years from being marketable to the government....” he looked at Harrison. “Why show it to us now?”

 

 

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