Rebel's Construct: Sim-Verse: Book 1, page 4
“Yeah, everything’s good. Just had a message from home.”
“Oh, that’s great,” she said. Then, seeming to read his expression, she added, “I think.”
“Yeah. Sure,” he said as if he was trying to convince himself. “It’s all good. Alright, Doc. Tell me what to do.”
“I’ve done a bit more digging since you left,” she said. “It seems pretty simple. We’ll just put her cap on you, close the pod so you don’t float away, and the computer should do the rest.”
“What about the tubes she had in her mouth?”
“The respirator and food tubes aren’t necessary, not for as long as you’re going to be under. If you seem a bit puny, I can always give you IV fluids myself.”
Then she placed her hands on the open pod as if she was a display model on one of those old-fashioned game shows from the twentieth century. “Climb in, big boy.” She immediately caught her inappropriate informality, and her perennially tanned cheeks threatened to blush.
Taven reached down and released his magnetic boots, the one piece of his spacesuit he was still wearing, and immediately his body began to rise. He grabbed the edge of the pod.
“I’ve got you,” Ferah said, as she placed her hands on his hips, steadying him. He liked the way it felt for someone to touch him, the way her hands felt small and delicate. “It’s okay. Let go,” she said.
He did, and she effortlessly swung his body into a lateral position. Then, gently, she positioned him into the pod. She placed one hand on his chest, pinning him into the glass pod, and with the other hand she grabbed a belt and pulled it over him and fastened him in. Then she did the same with another belt by his knees.
“There, that ought to do it,” she said. “Now for the neuronal interface.” Floating above them was the cap the woman had worn. To Taven, it looked like an impossible knot of spiderweb-thin wires, and he had the distinct sensation of disgust when he noticed the cap’s flesh-like color and pliability.
Ferah grabbed the object expertly, making the impossible look easy. As she attempted to squeeze the cap onto Taven’s head, it became apparent that his head was bigger than the woman’s.
“Lift up a bit,” she said as she reached one hand behind his head and pulled the tight elastic skull cap.
She stood back and assessed the situation.
“Well?” Taven asked, wondering if his hair would mess up the neuronal interface.
“It ain’t pretty, but it should work,” she said finally. Then she walked around to the other side of the pod where the small console was. “Okay, just relax. This shouldn’t hurt.”
Taven started to protest that she couldn’t have picked a worse expression if she wanted him to relax, but the pod’s glass doors quickly wrapped over him, shutting him off from the outside world, and he knew his words wouldn’t be heard.
He tried to relax, but this felt like a nightmare: tied down inside a glass coffin. He wasn’t buried alive, but that seemed like a distinction without a difference. If he’d had time to think about what he was getting himself into, he probably would have lost his nerve before getting into the pod.
Just as his emotions were reaching a fevered pitch, threatening to send him into a full-blown panic, Taven saw a streak of light pass before his eyes. It was fast, like a shooting star, but the colors were deep, dark, vibrant: blues, greens, purples. Like the northern lights. More streaks of light, then blips of darkness, like he was watching a vid console that had a faulty connection.
At first the colors were both stimulating and calming, distracting him from his thoughts. But the blackness, the dark blips, revved up his fear again.
The light and dark moments continued alternating, and each time the sensations became more intense and lasted longer until the point when he could no longer see outside the pod’s glass anymore. He knew that Ferah could still see him. He hoped so, at least.
Just as he reached a dark blip that no longer constituted that descriptor—it seemed to go on for several minutes, and he felt his heartrate rise as the buried-alive-sensation promised to overwhelm him—the lights came back on, vivid as before, but this time they weren’t streaks. They were merely colors.
He squinted, rubbing his eyes as if he’d been asleep for hours, and then it hit him: his hands weren’t tied down. He looked around and a rush of vertigo struck him as he noticed he was no longer lying in a pod but was standing upright.
He stuck his hands out as if he was falling and needed to grab hold of something. And to his surprise, his hands found purchase: He squeezed a bathroom sink, the old-fashioned kind of porcelain white that was impossible to keep clean. Yet this one was spic and span.
Taven released his I’m-about-to-vomit grip of the sink and examined his surroundings. He was in a small bathroom. Nothing fancy. But wholly unfamiliar.
He was in. He must be. This was the construct. He saw himself in the mirror and recognized he was wearing different clothes, a fashion he didn’t recognize.
He continued to gaze deeply at his reflection. It wasn’t the clothes that bothered him. Something else wasn’t right.
He moved his face closer to the mirror, and then it struck him. The scar that had been with him for years was absent. He touched his face for confirmation.
It was his face, but it was younger and wrinkle free. He could have sworn he’d regained five years of youthful looks and vigor. In fact, he couldn’t remember feeling this good before, like his entire mind and body were beaming with light and energy.
He examined his new clothes. He wore tall leather boots over brown pants and a long poncho. He looked like a gaucho, and he had a chuckle at what seemed like absurd garb. He grabbed himself, turning from left to right, surveying his new self.
Then he grabbed his clothing and lifted to reveal his exposed torso. What he saw was more shocking than his missing scar: muscles upon muscles crammed in tightly together across his waist and chest. He was the iconic image of health and vitality.
He dropped the clothing down and noticed his jaw-dropped expression turn to a smirk. “No wonder she didn’t want to wake up,” he said.
Then he noticed the small window with frosted glass and filtered light coming in. There was an outside to this place, it seemed. He turned to the only visible door and examined the brass handle. It looked slightly worn, used by a previous tenant, perhaps.
He didn’t know why, but he must have stared at the handle for thirty seconds. And when he finally reached for it, he noticed his hand shook in anticipation.
CHAPTER 8
THE NEXT SEVERAL moments were a blur. Taven had the unique experience of living out one of everyone’s secret fantasies: pilfering through someone else’s home and belongings with no risk of being caught, of no negative consequences.
The home was a Craftsman style house, an older design, like some of the historic sites he’d visited with wooden floors and painted sheetrock walls. Several times he scared himself by the creaks and cracks he made walking on the hardwood floor, an unfamiliar experience. But despite its antiquated structure, the house felt familiar somehow.
The kitchen’s technology held true to the historic style: a behemoth refrigerator with the compressor visibly on top, an early era microwave with a mechanical wind-up timer, and the kind of gas range that Taven had only seen pictures of.
He opened the heavy refrigerator door and peered inside. It was replete with food he hadn’t had since his last furlough on Earth including two marinating steaks, fruit of all kinds, and—in the very back of the fridge—Red Runner IPA. It was cheap beer but his favorite, nonetheless. He thought about popping one open, but he promised himself he’d grab one later, on his way out. Right now, he needed to keep his head.
He spun in circles, examining each facet of his new surroundings. It was full of oddities, small gadgets and knickknacks from a bygone era, and, somehow, they were exquisitely complete, belonging together in the exact right places. It was a level of feng shui that Taven had never witnessed before, and he found himself in joyous rapture over the look and feel of simple, everyday—albeit less contemporary—items. He couldn’t explain it. It just felt good.
As he passed the dining room window, he stopped to appreciate the view: The backyard was ideal. Muted green grass met a wooden perimeter fence. It was a snowless winter, and there were two ancient looking maples that had lost their leaves months before. Taven thought how glorious they must have been in the autumn season.
Beyond the fence were woods that rolled gently for what looked like miles before swiftly rising, turning into a steep mountain whose snow-covered peaks touched the sky.
Images flooded his mind, a rural paradise he conjured where he could spend days or years hiking and exploring. Something about the view and the possibilities it evoked made Taven ache deep inside. It was soul ache; a suffocated part of himself that suddenly gasped air for the first time in years.
Taven turned his back to the window, and he felt regret that he was here on a mission, that none of this was real and that whatever he felt while he was here would never be substantive. He decided then and there to keep himself in check. He wasn’t on vacation. He was on a mission: to warn the passengers and get out.
“What do I do now?” he asked himself.
The only idea he had was to keep exploring the home. There had to be a way to converse with the other passengers, but so far, he hadn’t seen any communication tech. He was inside a pre-internet house, and he hadn’t even seen a telephone.
He decided to head upstairs, and when he began climbing, the wooden planks creaked loudly, surprising him again. He passed the first landing and started up the second flight of stairs. He moved faster, his excitement and sense of adventure returning.
The upper floor was simple, a series of three bedrooms, and two seemed unused. The master bedroom—Taven assumed it was the master bedroom because of its size and the attached bathroom—had that same familiar feeling he experienced in the kitchen; everything was in its right place.
He opened the closet, expecting to find the woman’s clothing, but he found more outfits like the one he was wearing. Apparently, the construct was not only changing his appearance but also the contents of this home.
As he turned back around from the closet, he noticed two pictures on the bedside table that he didn’t remember seeing before. He moved closer and realized they were photos of Amy and Evelynn. He didn’t recognize the pictures, didn’t remember when or where they had been taken, but there they were. They were crystal clear, beautiful, and he fought off a tear at the sight of his daughter’s face.
After deciding there was nothing left to uncover upstairs, Taven descended the staircase and moved toward what he assumed would be the front door. Before he got there, he was dumbstruck by the view out the dining room window, the same window he had looked out minutes before.
“Those trees,” he muttered. He stared at them as if they would change, confess their deceit, but they stood stoically firm with brilliant red leaves decorating their crown.
“The season changed,” he said.
The first question was, how? But he quickly admitted the foolishness in that line of thinking; this world was a computer-generated construct. Fall was as easy to make as winter. The real question was, why?
He probed his mind for the answer, and it became obvious. This world, this house and its contents, changed to accommodate his desires. Plain and simple—that was it.
He shook off his astonishment and reminded himself to keep it together. He was acutely aware of the rush of adrenaline and dopamine in his system, the inevitable rise of ego and vanity that reared their heads when the promise of unlimited power became a reality.
He wondered how willing people would be to leave this place after spending months or years in it. Real life, reality, might be too unpleasant, too unpalatable.
“Where is everyone anyway?” he asked out loud.
The backyard, beautiful as it was, didn’t seem to promise any encounters. Maybe there was a front yard with a street like the suburban neighborhoods this old house purported to belong to.
He moved through the den until he reached a heavy oaken door with a smoked glass window through which light filtered in.
“That must be it,” he said. And he grabbed the handle to open it. When he did, the door itself changed and became translucent with bright, intense light that hurt Taven’s eyes.
He let go immediately and stepped back. Now there was no door there, no real door anyway. And he was briefly reminded of the absurdity of the moment, that he was thinking about real and unreal in an entirely artificial reality.
Before he even knew what he was doing, Taven felt himself move forward, his feet thinking for him. He reached out his hand to test the portal. When he touched it, his hand passed through and disappeared behind its membrane.
His arm felt cool, but then he realized he couldn’t actually feel his hand behind the doorway. He pulled back reflexively but to no avail. The doorway had him. He couldn’t retract no matter how hard he pulled. If anything, he was losing ground, being slowing sucked into the portal.
“None of this is real,” he reassured himself. Then he swallowed hard, relaxed his body, and let the doorway draw him into the vortex.
CHAPTER 9
THE VORTEX DREW Taven in, and as his face disappeared through the membrane, Taven saw the same glow, the same streams of lights he had seen when he first went under in the sleep pod.
But then the fantastic colors disappeared in an instant, replaced by blackness. Taven tried to feel in the dark, but he was discombobulated, his hands and feet not even feeling like they were attached, that he was bodiless in form.
Then like the first stars at dusk, tiny lights began to emerge. One by one, they shot out through the darkness, a cascaded emergence that painted four walls, alive with digital activity.
Taven looked down at his hands. They were there, though dimly lit, and he felt a wave of relief that he, though part of this artificial construct, still existed.
Before he could make total sense of his surroundings, a vid-screen suddenly projected over one entire wall. On it appeared a woman’s face, black shoulder length hair with bangs and green glowing eyes.
Taven was stunned by her larger than life size and by her intriguing appearance.
“Hello, my name is Cat. Welcome to the Hudson Colony,” she said with a subtle Aussie accent.
“Thank you,” Taven replied. “My name is—”
“Undoubtedly, you were taught in the training modules as you traveled here with other passengers about what to expect in this new world you’ll be calling home,” she interrupted.
Apparently, this was a prerecorded message, Taven realized.
“As you were told, your home is your castle. No one can forcibly enter this world of yours without your expressed permission. And, as I hope you noticed, this domicile is designed with adaptive programming, allowing your home to mold to your likes and dislikes.”
“That would have been nice to have known,” Taven said, though he’d figured it out himself.
“Our new home, our new universe is specifically built with our organization’s founding principles at its core. You are here because you agree that the initiation of force is anathema to living a virtuous life.”
“Crazy cult,” Taven yawned.
“So, it should be no surprise that the worlds you are able to choose from now preserve this basic ethic. Only activities expressly welcomed by the world’s creators are permissible, which means you must pay attention to the delimiting codes of conduct. Don’t worry. You’ll know if you misunderstand, and soon these multiworlds will hum with harmonious synergy. You’ve paid a high price to be here, but I’m certain you will soon find your place as together we roll out the next phase of conscious human civilization.”
She paused and looked directly into Taven’s eyes as if she could really see him and said, “This is the first day of your new life of freedom. The Hudson Colony welcomes you.”
Then the screen disappeared, and the backlighting brightened so that Taven could better see the consoles that surrounded him on every wall. They were stacked to the ceiling.
Taven thought for a moment. Somehow, he was supposed to enter another construct from here, but he had no idea how. Cat, as she called herself, had said nothing about how to navigate, choosing instead to speak the gibberish platitudes of her cult.
“Computer, how do I enter a different construct?” he asked.
There was no response. Apparently, this system didn’t use voice recognition. How primitive, he thought.
“Alright, I guess I’ll just have to start pushing buttons. Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he told the computer that wasn’t listening.
At random, Taven stepped up to one of the consoles, peering at its symbols. Fortunately, the writing was in Commerce, the common language of the last two-hundred years. Then he had the thought that the computer might be translating it for him, that it could be originally in any number of languages and that he would never be the wiser.
“Whoa,” he said. “That’s trippy.”
Each line on the console had what appeared to be a name followed by symbols that Taven didn’t understand. Most had question marks, exclamation marks, and other punctuation marks or language symbols that either were in bold type or had slashes through them.
Just as Taven started to press one arbitrarily, he caught sight of what he figured was a constructed world called Streetside Café. The name didn’t impress him so much as the lack of language symbols that followed it plus the bold print word UNRESTRICTED.
“Unrestricted—that sounds right,” Taven said. “Here goes nothing.” And he pressed the line of text.
At first, nothing happened. Then he felt what was becoming a familiar sensation as the lights darkened and streams of color flashed before his eyes.
