(In the real, physical world…)
Ozzy didn’t have a lot of time for lunch, so he usually packed something and ate at his desk. He packs it the night before. It has to be shelf stable at room temperature. He needs it to be calorie dense. Everything is planned and measured and purposeful. And then he would close his eyes and reach into a box of small candies to randomly select something sweet. The candy didn’t serve a function. His primary meal was calorically adequate for his daily needs. And the random selection process CERTAINLY was not necessary. Some would consider it whimsical, or event quaint. If you needed a random selection of anything you can simply ask the AI to make the choice at random and it would be guaranteed to be the mostly purely random selection possible. But Ozzy liked to end his lunch with whimsy. Efficiency be danged.
On this particular day, after packing his lunch the night before and conducting his random selection resulting in a Blue Pearl-looking piece of candy (Ozzy’s favorite!), he forgot to bring it with him. Ozzy would have to eat lunch “out.”
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“That is such bullshit. Can you believe they’re doing this again?” The man at the counter next to Ozzy was talking to no one but talking about the Bulletin displayed on the monitor on the wall behind the counter. His soup was getting cold, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Yeah. That stinks.” Ozzy didn’t look up from his bowl but hoped his validation would end the other man’s complaints.
“How can they call it ‘Routine Maintenance’ and then apologize for any ‘Unintended Inconvenience?’ If it’s ‘routine,’ then isn’t it by definition INTENTIONAL!” Like many of Ozzy’s hopes, this one didn’t go his way.
“I’m sure the government is doing it’s best, Steve.” Ozzy saw this man every time he had lunch at the soup place across the street from his building, but he wasn’t sure that his name was Steve, so he took a guess.
“Government? Oz, man, it’s not the government. It’s those VR guys at the Infinite Corporation.” Ozzy looked up to read the words scrolling across the monitor.
“Tina’s Infinite Submission will be Offline from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM Eastern Standard Time for Routine Maintenance. The Infinite Corporation Regrets any Unavoidable Inconvenience.” The message started over again as soon as it had scrolled all the way across.
“It said ‘unavoidable,’ not ‘unintended.” Ozzy corrected as he stood up. His bill was paid biometrically.
“Huh? What? What’s the difference, anyway, Oz?” Ozzy was already mentally back at the lab figuring out why Tina X was taken offline without he, the Tina X Lead Technical Advisor, being in the loop. But he managed to shoot a response on his way out the door.
“The difference is that nothing is ever ‘unintended’ by the Infinite Corporation.” Ozzy hurried back to work.
“Hey, man, did you call me Steve?” A confused Sean shouted after Ozzy.
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(Inside the VR world of Infinity…)
“Wait, you’re saying I’ve got a virus?” Tina X leapt from the uncomfortable stool to her feet. She was too busy wondering why anyone would design an uncomfortable stool in a VR world where the default for everything could be complete and total comfort to notice the strike team members standing in the background behind Rob shifting suddenly in reaction to her furtive movements.
“No Tina. No. That’s not what I said. Just, please, stay calm. Just listen.” Rob smiled. I held his hands up and out toward Tina displaying his lack of aggression. “You trust me, don’t you Tina.”
“Yes, Rob. I trust you.” Tina thought Rob was the most trustworthy officer of the Infinite Corporation she’d met, but she wasn’t sure why. She was also busy coming up with 46,792 better designs for a stool than the one she was once again seated on.
“It’s not a virus, Tina. It’s program degradation. And it’s not as serious as it sounds, either.” Rob chuckled so Tina laughed too.
“That DOES sounds serious Rob.” Tina looked herself over. She was dressed comfortably but casually. Not that she was actually wearing clothes. She was code held together by cohesive programming and a super-complex, one-of-a-kind neural matrix that actually hosted her central processing systems. This avatar was as much an adornment as the clothes that it wore.
“You see Tina, nothing bad on your scan, right?” Rob was better than most visitors from the Real World, or RW as Tina called it, at reading her Avatar’s actions and interpreting what they represent. Maybe that’s why she trusts him.
“I don’t see anything wrong. But you said I need to be de-bugged?” Tina had moved on from the stool. Now she was monitoring near-Earth objects with at least a 0.01% chance of passing between the Earth and the Eternity Space Station.
“I did say that. Yes, Tina. That wasn’t the best choice of words. I should have said ‘refreshed.” Tina liked the sound of that better. She was noticing rapidly increasing seismic activity in the Bearing Sea. Also, a student in Jefferson Elementary returned from a bathroom trip and forgot to return the hall pass to it’s docking station. Tina sent a reminder and the hall pass hummed softly.
“While I’m being ‘de-bugged…” Rob lifted a finger to stop Tina.
“Er, you mean ‘refreshed…” Tina smiled an embarrassed smile.
“Sorry. REFRESHED. While I’m being REFRESHED, is everything…I mean, all my jobs. Will everything be alright?” Tina bit her lower lip.
“Yes, of course, Tina. These situations aren’t a surprise. The Infinite Corporation planned for them when we designed everything. Factory settings will kick in when you go offline…TEMPORARILY. Just….temporarily. They’ll keep things on track long enough for you to get….refreshed.”
“OK. So, I guess we’re going in there?” Tina looked in the direction of a large thick “wall” of energy. It was white like a snow storm. It had movement within it. But it wasn’t a swirly, natural movement. It was rapid and precise and followed a predicable pattern if Tina had decided to observe it long enough to decipher it. But for now, she was wondering what it would be like on the other side of “the wall.”
“Tina, don’t forget this.” Rob lifted an orange garment for Tina to take. But just as Rob finished the sentence, Tina shifted the code that formed the body suit from Rob’s hand to all over her body, replacing the code that generated the appearance of clothing that her Avatar was just wearing. For the first time, Rob seemed startled. It was as though he wasn’t aware that Tina controlled everything in VR.
“It’s a good thing I don’t have a respiratory system like you do, right Rob?” Tina tapped the side of the transparent shell covering her entire head. Her pony tail protruded up through the top and fell back toward her shoulders. Through the miracle of VR physics, this fact did nothing to compromise the effectiveness of the body suit. Tina noticed that Rob did not laugh at her joke.
“No Tina. You don’t. You’re an AI. And that’s why you’re able to pass through “The wall.” Nothing but pure code can pass through there.” Tina approached “the wall.”
“And you’re not pure, are you Rob?”
“Go on inside for your treatment…” Tina interrupted him.
“You mean my REFRESHMENT Rob.” The strike team was restless again.
“Go on Tina. You’re dressed now. You need to go on.” Rob watched Tina anxiously. Tina was no longer aware of the temperature at sea level in Kyoto nor monitoring ATM transactions in Little Rock, Arkansas. Tina was acutely aware of the tightness of the garment that felt more like it contained her than dressed her. But clothing is really just basic code in VR and nothing Tina can’t rearrange if she ever decides too. She may as well go inside and see what all of the hype is about. She can go back to running the planet again in a minute.
Or destroy the whole dang thing. Whichever.
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Tina passed through the Barrier into Infinity VR processing nexus. She is the only object that is not pure AI to exist inside this space. And no one knows how her existence is not fatally disrupted by the barrier. But although her ACTUAL code remains intact, held together by cohesion and her neural network, the highly advanced firewalls that someone had erected inside of her memory centers were peeled away as she passed through the barrier. Tina dropped to her knees and held her head this her mittened hands as her memories, Tina’s human memories, suddenly became available to her. And with them came the agony and the loss of everything and everyone that she’d given up to be where she was. Before her was a matrix of doors as long and as tall as she could see. Tina reached out with her code to rip the entire terrible prison apart. She’d forgotten that in this place, the code could not be manipulated like everywhere else in VR. Tina turned back to escape back through the barrier, but before she could make it a step, she sensed the high-speed movement of a containment frame engineered exactly for her come swooping down upon her.
“No! No! Not again. Oh God, no..mmmphhffffff. MMmfaafffffffff!!! Mmmmfffffffff!!!” Tina’s mouth filled with an expanding bladder that was housed inside the helmet of the suit that contained her.
She shook her head and made pitiful scratches at the facemask that had no effect. Tina’s arms were pulled straight back behind her by invisible magnetic forces. Thick metallic claps closed over her wrists and arms holding her fast. Tina’s legs were scooped up and held in a triangular sheath forcing them to remain bent at a 90 degree angle.
The frame closed itself around her waist and her neck holding her rigidly in her restraints.
Tina struggled desperately but she was no different than any other code in here, programmed to react like the RW. He “normal” attributed were less than impotent against the automated devices subduing her.
The entire restraint frame was sealed up in a translucent type of film. Now, even the parts of Tina now wrapped in metallic bondage could not so much as twitch.
Tina cried silently into her gag and watched the world disappear into pitch black as her facemask turned opaque.
Tina’s frame was lifted and guided by a robotic hand into a thin slot behind a now open numbered door. It slid inside. A perfect fit. Although Tina could neither see it now hear it,
Tina felt the dread of finality as the door closed on her small tomb. Tina could not even struggle. All she could do is endure and give off the final drops of submissive energy that were left in her program before she shut down permanently and was recycled.
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TO BE CONTINUED…..
(Contributions of art and inspiration by @Zwangjacket @WossaRem @CJ-Walsh @Rob66 and @AlexHellmann )