LifeGames Corporatoin

by Michael Smorenburg

  In a single day, an unskilled worker using an automated applicator kept in a locked strong room could prepare enough patches for a year’s requirement.

  “Ready on-line… Audio.”

  “Ready on-line. Visuals.”

  “Ready IT…”

  “Subject prepared; Hypnosis sequence launch…” The intercom speakers in each monitoring booth repeated the checks with drilled regularity, all were in a general announcement mode and every department involved in the run was hearing the call.

  It was much like the launch sequence of orbital rockets, as Ken had explained earlier, “The program can either be controlled centrally from up here or by using the tablet running a control app.”

  He’d shown her the interface.

  “With it, a single operator can run the entire show, but we generally man each station to fine-tune aspects of the subject’s experience.”

  What he had failed to mention was the safety aspect of running unmanned.

  “My run’s not going to be with a full house?” Catherine whispered with alarm.

  “I wouldn’t share it for the world, Darling.” Ken assured.

  Not fully understanding the technology, and assuming it integral to the virtual reality, hypnosis was the aspect, that most troubled Catherine.

  She was certain that Ken was no hypnotist, so how was he planning to put her under when it came to cyber-sex? She’d met and liked Leon, but she was definitely not going through with it if he was to be present.

  Hearing her terms of engagement, Ken soothed her fears with a thorough explanation;

  “As you can see, everything’s computer controlled and monitored. Each booth has its own screen and audio repeater that displays only their exclusive responsibility. They’ve got an override to correct errors that might get made up here,” he gestured to the main control room, “Look, there are Leon and Mark down there.”

  He pointed to a glass-fronted room where the two men sat with earphones about their necks and a microphone between them as they hunched over a screen.

  Oddly, although Leon’s voice had been counting the subject into trance through the intercom, the two men were chatting at their own pace;

  “Who’s doing the talking?” Catherine asked.

  Turning to the operator, Ken ordered, “Kim, show Catherine the repeater.”

  Kim immediately executed a few keystrokes and one of the screens on her monitor console divided into a split of windows.

  Within each window was a different aspect of the words being uttered. One window contained the written text complete with a tracking cursor, keeping tempo with the spoken words. Other windows contained graphs and data that pertained to the voice quality, modulation, and feedback from the wireless telemetry smock worn by the man in the gyroscope.

  “My God!” Catherine exclaimed, “I had no idea,” she was no stranger to technology but the extent of it staggered her.

  “See,” Ken pointed to another glassed booth, “there’s Stuart, this screen is a split responsibility. Stuart in audio must ensure that all of the technical aspects of the sound quality are maintained—are authentic.”

  “Is it a recording?” Catherine had asked.

  “No, it’s A.I… the Artificial Intelligence I told you about. Computer data parsed through a neural network,” Ken smiled, “…impressed?”

  “Impressed doesn’t come close… it’s overwhelming. Hang on,” Catherine scowled, spotting a flaw, “If this is pre-recorded, why when Leon isn’t here, is his voice necessary? What if you want to give a command that he hasn’t pre-recorded?” she’d posed.

  “What a clever little thing you are,” Ken pinched her rump.

  It was unexpected—inappropriate—and Catherine whirled on him, offended; but something in his look obliterated her furious response, instead she smiled idiotically and hated herself once more for doing so. He could do things nobody else could, and consistently get away with it. It was like he had a grip on her mind.

  “Everything is computer controlled, that’s not Leon’s voice that you’re hearing.”

  “It’s not?” she was perplexed.

  “Well, in a way it is. We used his voice, or rather its intonation. He has the perfect modulation… we synthesize it… build up each syllable, inflection by inflection so that whatever we key in will be reproduced in audio.”

  “And other languages? Could this synthesized Leon do it in other languages?”

  “Absolutely. The unit is online, it taps into the cloud and draws off of the characteristics of any language we need.”

  Catherine’s mind leapt to the implications of what just this aspect of the technology might mean for political diplomacy; the media could put words in anybody’s mouth without them ever having uttered them!

  As if reading her mind, Ken added, “…more than that, the voice will stand up to fingerprinting. Nothing will tell it apart from Leon’s voice.”

  The fact of it had Ken previously entertaining whether Craig’s voicemail to him had been just such a hoax fabricated in the studio.

  It wasn’t inconceivable. Delivery to his phone would be easy for the computer to achieve through VOIP—Voice Over Internet Protocol. The only question would have been who would have had the motive to create such a bizarre ruse, and to what ends?

  All of the routine checks were complete and the hypnotized subject hung like a helmeted crucifix in a futuristic torture rack.

  As she stretched to touch the main screen, set into the console before her, Kim spoke into her microphone;

  “All systems are a GO!”

  The instant her finger contacted the touch-screen’s pulsing “Start” window, the speakers erupted into a cacophony of sound and the man in the web raised his head off of his chest.

  From their elevated viewpoint, Catherine watched as television repeaters around the stadium complex burst into life and action.

  “Let the games begin,” Ken heralded the unfolding drama and Catherine’s mind leapt to the Coliseum in Rome.

  This modern scene was for her an unsettling echo of that dark age when the persecuted fought beasts in just such a pit as the warrior would now face his fabricated adversary.

  For a Twenty-first century woman it was a strange déjà vu and she forced herself to snap out of the momentary trance;

  “He’s seeing all of this?” she asked, startled by the life-like images on the monitor screens.

  “You sound surprised Cath, didn’t you work with these visuals in the commercial campaign?” Ken queried with a sarcastic flavour.

  “Yes, but you hear it’s computer footage, it just doesn’t seem possible. I know it’s dated thinking, but ‘virtual reality’ conjures up grainy animated images in the arcades.”

  “If it makes you more comfortable, think of this as just another multi-billion dollar arcade game.”

  Catherine ignored his gibe. Minutes later, still in awe by the activity that bustled around her, a reckless thought bounded into her mind, “Can you hook me up? Now?”

  Ken turned slowly to face her, his mouth agape, “Do you want me to get you a doctor?”

  “Why?” she felt admonished by his reproach.

  “Maybe you took me too seriously, Cath… This program is not a game. None of our programs are.”

  Jilted, but not defeated, she fell silent brooding a few moments on his justified point;

  “What if you don’t hypnotize me…?” she came back at her most persuasive, “…if I can sample it while my nerve is strong, there’s more chance of me trying it some other time,” She was blackmailing him into giving her a tryout at the peril of the sex game.

  Ken caught the drift of her none too subtle threat and wasn’t prepared to call her bluff;

  “I suppose we could tone down the tempo… Kim… we got any down-time today?”

  Kim opened the bookings roster on an auxiliary screen, “There’s a space from sixteen thirty till nineteen hundred, Mr. Torrington.”

  “You’re on!” he informed Catheri
ne.

  As she looked down from a level above, the lightly dressed gladiator tumbled with the ease of a trampoline acrobat and Catherine’s heart leapt with mixed emotions of dread and elation.

  Like a child swept away in the war of his imagination, his every move was a balletic response to his private vision. He dangled weightlessly in the rigging evidently hiding, crouching, crawling and rolling, running and peeking around the next non-existent corner, telegraphing no warning of what he might do next. In isolation he looked demented, but the monitor offered a glimpse of sane redemption for his actions.

  To glimpse from man to monitor was a queer study of the interplay between an event and its victim.

  Catherine watched in fascination as the tunnel vision with which she had worked so much during the production of the commercials unfolded in an unceasing sequence of action.

  After a few minutes they departed the spectacle and made their way up to the reception where they’d part ways until their four o’clock rendezvous.

  As they moved along, yet another memory kept playing through Catherine’s mind. It had its foundation in a procedure that Ken had given her the option of not watching;

  She had considered the option as a challenge, a test of her will, and she’d accepted. But watching that aspect of the ritual had been horrifying and simultaneously stimulating.

  The man had stripped completely naked and a female doctor had inserted the catheter and a rectal bag apparatus. The scene had continued flashing through her mind in deliciously decadent flashes of voyeurism.

  Now, unable to control her aching trepidation any more, she asked Ken if she’d have to undergo the same procedure later in the day.

  “Of course you don’t have to, sunshine,” he replied cheerfully, “just don’t wear your best underwear!”

  Catherine’s heart sank and they walked on in silence. It took several more minutes before she was about to depart, and during that interim she had steeled her heart against the predicament that she was soon to be in, consoling herself with the fact that at least it would be a female performing the task.

  Ken walked with her to the car. He had been wearing a sadistic grin ever since she had asked the question, and finally she tired of his amusement at her expense, lashing out with a playful blow that caught him harmlessly in the middle of his chest.

  She punctuated the action with a stern rebuke, “Enough!” she pouted, her face pinching into a pantomime sulk, “I’m not going to play anymore.”

  Ken plucked at his lower lip in the manner of a childlike taunt and Catherine made as if to chase him. “All right,” he cried in a laughing retreat, “I’m only kidding with you. You won’t be time dilated, you’ll be able to take care of your own potty training.”

  Relief washed over Catherine, yet she growled with sham furry at being hoodwinked; then another penny dropped in her mind, “If…. and only if, mind you, I do play the sex game,” she raised both eyebrows in question. “What then?”

  Before answering, Ken moved to a safer distance out of her range;

  “Don’t worry,” he let the pause hang as he increased the gap between them, “those bits will already be occupied.”

  He’d begun to run before finishing the sentence, but Catherine had anticipated something vulgar and she was quicker over the distance than he’d reckoned, planting a glancing slap on his back as he tried to dart.

  “Bastard,” she shouted after him as he fled, then she turned back to her car.

  “See you at four!” he taunted.

  Chapter 10

  The bed was jackknifed to support Roger Daly’s torso, his face serene and when he spoke, his voice gentle.

  This was not the man that his comrades-in-arms would be familiar with, they knew the brooding Roger, the deadly Roger, the Roger whose voice on the rare occasions it did breach his self-imposed reclusion was gruff and monosyllabic.

  Throughout his life Roger had been a man of few words and precise action. He had been trained to follow orders and not to partake in careless chatter; in his vocation there had been little need to communicate.

  Leon was Roger’s alter-ego, his world was one of unceasing communication; talk, the tool of his trade. A trained communicator, Leon was quickly winning the battle against the warrior, Roger’s intense character crumbling to the superior armaments.

  Leon’s unorthodox treatment had begun causing consternation in military circles; training men up to Roger’s extreme capability did not come cheap, and the military bean counters had their calculators out.

  Roger increasingly looked like a write-off; he’d soon enter their balance sheet as an acceptable loss—an innocent sounding euphemism for quantifying a life through statistics.

  Like any business, the military had their budgets and lives were an asset or liability; in the equation, death a less expensive option; funerals being cheaper than welfare.

  A classified report on the Roger incident had been drawn; the negative outcomes weighed against the savings of field-training causalities; LifeGames training remained the preferred method; “acceptability rates for resulting mental disorders may be allowed to remain at elevated levels while the company overcomes teething challenges associated with the Time Dilation technology.”

  Ken had managed to lay his hands on the report. “My kind of businessmen!” he’d chirped happily.

  With his psychological analysis disqualifying him from ever retaining his former status, Roger’s file was officially closed. Roger had been no ordinary soldier drilled for marching and cannon fodder, he was an elite killing machine, a stud bull amongst the herd.

  Roger knew he’d made the shift onto the debit side of the military budget; it left Leon scrambling to shore up the depressive void and collapsing self worth that the man was tumbling into;

  “How are you feeling today? More chipper I see,” Leon patted Roger’s foot through the blanket.

  Although no voice breached his lips, Roger offered a brief nod to confirm the question. Deep within the troubled eyes stirred the promise of a smile.

  “Good old boy, good,” Leon squeezed the foot with camaraderie.

  Just then Doctor Andrew entered the room, “I heard that you were in, Leon. What’s on the program for today?”

  “Oh, I thought we’d put a few more historians out of business… put them out of business, yes,” Leon bantered cheerily, “How about that, Andrew, you up for it?”

  The two physicians had developed a good friendship. Though Leon was officially not supposed to be in the wards, “To hell with them!” Andrew had declared when the signal had come through from Operations Headquarters.

  According to the signal, Roger was to be stabilized expeditiously using only the prescribed and trusted psychological and pharmaceutical methods; “This,” According to the signal, “will affect his most hasty discharge from the armed forces.”

  Official word was that Roger had become a burden that the military no longer intended to entertain.

  The entire dehumanized affair had caused Andrew to respond angrily. He’d openly flouted ops authority over him;

  “I don’t know quite how and it makes no sense to me, but Doctor Goldstein is achieving results which far exceed the prescribed patient recovery rate that Operations expect of me,” he’d told the hospital superintendent. “I don’t give a continental damn what they think, but on my watch Doctor Goldstein is quite welcome to proceed with the good work that he has been doing!”

  The superintendent was a true military man who was more than a little cautious about crossing swords with a psychologist. He had dismissed Andrew with a clear instruction that the official line should be toed; it was clear that a blind eye would unofficially be turned.

  “So be it!” Andrew had punctuated the status quo with a victory for justice.

  “Defeat at last!” Leon cheered.

  Andrew hadn’t intended to omit answering Leon’s question regarding his own plans for the day, his failure to answer only due to distraction in the details of the
graphs and statistics that hung on a rather dated looking clipboard at the foot of Roger’s bed.

  “Defeat!” Leon repeated.

  “What was that?” Andrew inquired, puzzled.

  “No time to appeal the decision, old boy… no time,” Leon enthusiastically sealed his latest victory in the tussle of their opposing philosophies.

  It was a claim that Andrew’s failure to oppose him on the question of putting historians out of work through regression hypnosis. It was tantamount to Andrew’s tacit acceptance that regression hypnosis is bona fide; a silly perpetuation of the mind sparring the two had played from the moment they’d met.

  “Some day I really must stretch you out on my couch for counseling old chap, you’re more senile with each passing day.”

  Leon ignored Andrew’s counter offensive as he hummed a victory tune to himself while maneuvering a chair into a comfortable position to begin his session with Roger.

  “Don’t listen to a word he says, Roger,” Andrew circled his own ear with his index finger, gesturing Leon’s derangement.

  A hint of smile touched the corners of Roger’s mouth.

  “Run along then, run along,” Leon called after Andrew as he left the ward on rounds. “Now where were we Rog, where were we?”

  Over the weeks and many hypno-sessions, Leon had all but removed the character of Fernando from Roger’s conscious mind. It had been an arduous task made more difficult by Fernando speaking with a heavy Spanish accent in a 16th century English dialect.

  Through long and in-depth negotiations, Fernando had accepted a retreat back into the recesses of 20th century Roger’s mind, where he dwelled with the two former personalities. Each of the three additional personalities that inhabited the mind called Roger, had their own clearly defined memories and outlooks.

  Leon had dabbled into those who predated Fernando. He’d discovered some promising results, yet only Fernando held the link between Ken and Craig and the terrifying prospects of Demonic dabbling that Fernando growled about.