Immortality Experiment

by Vic Connor

  A sheet of paper and a pencil floated past his face.

  Outside, the sky was black. He could see the stars, brighter than he ever could. He could see the giant glowing curve of the planet—pale, like Cygnus.

  “Welcome to orbit,” a familiar male voice sounded in Niko’s earphones, speaking Russian, slightly distorted by the radio. “How’s that for a new Territoria experience?” The man chuckled.

  “Why are we here?” Niko asked.

  “I couldn’t help showing you some new capabilities we created. Real beyond anything Clark and his team—a collection of hapless halfwits—could ever hope to achieve.” The man paused. “But enough of this, this was just a bit of fun. Hold on, Nikolai.”

  In the same blink, the cockpit disappeared, the setting changed, and Niko found himself somewhere else, standing upright. Darkness spread before his eyes, blacker and more profound than anything he had ever seen. It wasn’t just an absence of light, it was an absence of everything: dust motes, clouds, air. It was an absolute emptiness, so complete that Niko didn’t at first notice the stars, though they were closer and far brighter than he had ever seen them before.

  “Jump out,” the man whispered.

  Niko looked down and saw he was standing on a metal step above dark-brown, barren ground. Behind him stood the rocket, and around lay a desert, pocked with craters and rolling with dark dunes. As soon as he jumped off the step and came out of the rocket’s shadow, a blaze of light struck him from the right. The visor of his helmet automatically darkened.

  “Don’t look toward the Sun,” the man’s voice said from inside the vessel. “Even with your visor, it’s still dangerous. Instead, turn to your left.”

  He turned, and the Cygnus spread out before him.

  “Gospodi…” he breathed.

  Nothing in his life had prepared him for this.

  He had seen pictures of Earth from space before, of course, but they couldn’t reproduce the current effect: the sight of the fantasy planet hanging in that vast darkness, with nothing between it and his eyes but his visor.

  Glowing white and green and blue like a multicolored gem resting on black velvet, except brighter, richer, indisputably alive. It was larger, much larger, than he’d expected.

  Thoughts fled. All that was left was emotion. He felt elated, humbled, awed, intimidated, thrilled, petrified. All of them, at once. And he could not even begin to put a name to any of the feelings.

  All he could do was stare.

  “Pretty good, huh?” The voice made him jump. He hadn’t even noticed the man getting down to join him.

  Niko almost laughed at the inadequacy of the man’s words, but he had to admit, they were more than he could manage himself. Nothing could express the majesty of what he was seeing, the broad expanse of an unknown continent—shaped vaguely like Eurasia—stretching out to left and right, bordered by the cool turquoise and white of the Arctic and the warmer blues to the south and west.

  “Now, turn a little more toward your right,” the man said. “This is what I really brought you up here for. We’re coming up on it now. Take a good look, Nikolai.”

  Papery rocks crunched under his boots as Niko turned. At the far edge of the Cygnus, beyond the horizon line and the thin, blue line of the atmosphere, the moon was rising.

  Except it wasn’t the moon. Larger than that satellite had ever been, the apparition rose, a creamy purple-tinged blue, marbled with streaks and bands of white and fiery orange. He had seen Phaeton dozens of times from down on Cygnus, but it had never looked this magnificent.

  Both planets had the textured complexity of real things; as more of Phaeton came in sight, Niko could see it was craggy with mountain ranges; its small seas were a yellow-green, and something black grew on it like mold. Beside it, Cygnus’ vast oceans were fantasy blue, capped with ice and frosted over with vast forests of pale ghost pines. Niko’s breath caught in his throat. It was so handsome from here, the planet that had been his home for so many months; a fragile thing in the big dark, alone save for its fiery partner, gravitationally cleaving to one another.

  Niko turned to his companion and saw the man had ditched his white spacesuit for a white jacket and pants. He had no helmet on, and his shock of styled blond hair remained fixed in place. Niko approached slowly, and just as he opened his mouth to call out to him, the man said in Russian, “This is something different, no?”

  It froze Niko in place. “Yeah,” was all he could manage in the same language.

  The man nodded a few times. “Your mother? She loves this view. She wants to be here, you know, to tell you all this, but she is needed at the big game. Like your friend says, some things, they are bigger than us.”

  The man turned his head from the view, just a bit, showing the edge of thick-rimmed spectacles, y’know, like hipster glasses. Niko tried to swallow and couldn’t. “H-how are you not—”

  “Dying? Becoming a big, red balloon of a man, my tongue boiling, my lungs exploding? Ah. Well, you may have guessed, this—” the man twirled his thick-knuckled finger around “—is not real. You can take your helmet off, too.”

  Niko touched his helmet, unsure how to remove it, and it came off easily. “Then why all the realism of, y’know, the space flight?”

  “Your mother is coding a mod, a hyper-realistic mod to Territoria. Because she…she misses the Earth, the real world. I wanted to show you what she’s capable of.”

  Niko nodded; it made sense to him, the feeling of loss. “If we’re in the game, Clark can—”

  “This isn’t an official part of Territoria. This place, this part of the Moon, it’s also part of Anna’s mod. She built it for herself, first, like I said, and now for you. It appears nowhere on Clark’s networks, don’t worry. Anna and I, we promised to keep you safe.” He turned then with a shuffle, both hands in pockets, rocking on his patent-leather shoes. They crackled the brittle moon rocks. He smiled, just like Niko remembered him smiling in his collected memories. But before that, too, in those vague, distant washes of toddler recollection, he could see the essence of that goofy grin. Part of him suspected—knew—it was them all along, but seeing it was so, so different.

  “You are so tall!” Niko’s father, Yuri Somov, spread his arms and showed his front teeth. His broad smile hid his eyes with his cheeks, and for a moment Niko was worried he’d hug him. “I know this, of course. I have seen your dimensions on console, but is different up close.” He stopped a step away from Niko.

  “My…dimensions?”

  “Mm, yes. You see, your mother and I can access game’s console—its code. Well, your mother makes all the real changes, she is…teaching me. I placed that Phaeton monster in the forest, you see. Ah, sorry for your friend; I didn’t think it so dangerous. This isn’t my area of expertise, game rules and coding, but not much use for a biomedical engineer in here.”

  “Why are you in here? Are you and Mom the ones sending me the memories—the glitches? Isn’t it dangerous for you to be in the game? Why don’t you talk to me in the real world?” After a pause, Niko added, feeling a little ridiculous, “Aren’t you…y’know, dead?”

  Beneath the lenses of his glasses, Yuri’s eyes lowered, the mirth draining from them. “Ah.” He dipped his head. “Well, Niko, you see, we are only able to speak to you here.”

  Pieces started to slot together in Niko’s mind, but he asked the question anyway. “Why?”

  Yuri looked up and flashed him a joyless smile. “We are dead, Niko.”

  Niko’s lip quivered. For a moment, the blackness of space was a sleepy Seattle neighborhood, and his white t-shirt was hard and heavy with dried blood. “So it really did happen. Did… did I…?”

  “No!” Yuri put up his hands. “Not you, Niko. We took a stupid risk, Anna and I. We went back to our house, trying to retrieve my Vat from the basement. We wanted to develop for ourselves the same serum which you have—which makes you immortal—and we needed a Vat for that. Clark’s people were ready for us, I think; more ready than
we ever anticipated.”

  “So, what? I got framed?”

  Yuri nodded. “We don’t precisely know what happened. What exists here is the download from our hippocampus before we went back to Seattle. We had it set to upload our consciousness if we do not return, so we—our own copies, as it were—didn’t experience our real deaths.”

  Niko saw, in his own memory, the shattered, black-framed spectacles, spiderwebbed with blood, laying on the hardwood floors.

  “We can’t see much of the real world from here; we rely on our allies there to report for us. We were lucky someone gave us a heads up about you, or you’d have come in wiped like everyone else.”

  “You… My Mythic! That’s what the glitch was. You entered in and changed it.”

  With a grimace, Yuri scratched his short, pale whiskers. “Well, that was your mother. I’m not so advanced at this. She taught me how to make glitches appear, how to spawn monsters, how to boot you to different locations. I don’t have her talent for it, I’ll tell you.” He turned from Niko, looking out at Cygnus and Phaeton. “She had such high hopes for this place. You know better than we do the real world isn’t a friendly place to live. She dreamed of a game that wasn’t just an escape, but gave people hope, yeah? Place where people could fight against great odds, but if they worked together, they could win. Maybe then, odds back in the real world would not seem so impossible.”

  Yuri pumped his fist, and Niko could see from the motion that he had believed it too. It must have been their shared dream, once. “But that’s not what happened.”

  “It might have.” Yuri rocked on his heels, sighing like a deflating balloon. “Admittedly, some early testers got lost in the game world; they cared more about injustices of balance changes and character design than their lives back home. This could happen in any game, though. But others formed relationships, built confidence, expanded their understanding. It could have been great. But then, several governments saw the potential, as they say, and everything went to hell. Not just the Americans, mind. Russians, too. The Europeans. And Chinese. They put all their funding into streamlining the game’s ‘hardware problem.’”

  “Hardware problem?”

  “They wanted us to…entirely digitize players.”

  “Digitize…” Niko sucked in a breath. “You mean like, how your and Mom’s consciousnesses only exist as data now? No physical bodies anymore?”

  “Precisely,” Yuri said.

  “That’s BS. Citizens can’t afford water to bathe themselves, and the country is dumping money into a game so they can…” It hit him then, a grim truth to match the grim realities in the world he was born in. “Resource problem.”

  “Mm. A human body needs clothes, shelter, food, water. But digitized people only need a little space on a hard drive.”

  “But without their bodies, they wouldn’t be able to get out of the game,” Niko said. “The Territoria people could edit their memories, their powers, anything—and there would be no real person to go back to.”

  “They could just delete all the data,” Yuri said. “Is this murder? No laws exist for something like this, it’s too new. And with state funding and lobbying, they will work to pass the laws they need, most likely. You see now why your mother and I worked hard against this.”

  Yuri paused, looking at Phaeton, then added, “But the purpose, the original goal of digitization wasn’t murder. It was quite the opposite, in fact.”

  “But if your consciousness is in the game,” Niko said, “then Clark has already won. They can already digitize someone and make them immortal. Why are they still using the Vats?”

  “Anna and I positioned ourselves to lead the digitization team, and we worked as best we could to keep the tech out of Clark’s hands. But eventually, it did get developed. In Anna’s team. So we…stole this technology and shredded all the data we could reach on our way out. Otherwise, Clark would be in the game permanently by now.”

  “Clark…wants to be digitized?”

  “He has no choice,” Yuri said. “He has the stage four lung cancer. He is dying, Niko.”

  Clark’s bald head, his skeletal frame, his foul breath, his hideous teeth. Digitization was like death if your body was healthy, but if you were dying? It would be a form of survival—of immortality. “That’s why he was pushing the experiments so hard. He’s not just worried about the government shutting down his pet project… If the servers get taken down, he can’t save his consciousness, can he? He’ll die.”

  “Not only he. Immortality is in high demand, as you understand.” Yuri gave Niko a thoughtful, almost a sad glance. “Even this form of immortality.”

  Niko asked, “How does it feel, living like this?”

  “Hmm. It’s both limiting and…empowering. On one side, your mom and I are no longer fully human, you see. Our emotional experience here is quite deprived of variety we had back in the real world. We’re apps, basically, your mom and I, self-aware apps who can move themselves around the root directory and code other apps. No one has learned how to digitize the…human soul.”

  “Oh.”

  Yuri kicked on a small rock under his shoe. “On the other hand, the creative opportunities…they are limitless, Niko, truly so. Theoretically, we can create entire new worlds—whole new universes! We’re only limited by the power of the mainframe computer.” Yuri became silent for a while. “And here lies another problem. Those who understand this, like Clark, they’ll want to increase that processing power. Endlessly so.”

  “You mean, they’ll want to, y’know, keep building the Territoria computer?”

  “Yes. Plans already exist to move the mainframe into space. To dedicate a massive portion of the Earth’s energy production to it. Maybe to move the entire humanity—or a branch of it—into the virtual environment, eventually.” Yuri grinned. “Instead of reaching for the stars, humanity will implode into its own machines.”

  Niko considered the prospects. “It may not be, ugh, such a bad thing.”

  “Maybe. But at the cost of experimenting on thousands of young lives? Really?” Yuri said. “As it stands now, Niko, the digitization tech is pure murder. They’re frying young people’s brains with their chemicals and their electric current. And…”

  “Will it ever be different? Like, what if we learn to do it right?”

  “We?” Yuri studied Niko’s face for a moment, saying nothing. Niko felt a change his father’s attitude toward him, as if a gust of chill wind passed between them. Then Yuri looked away. “I wish we could merely shut all of Territoria down, like a living room light.” He snapped his fingers. “Ruin Clark’s and certain other people’s little God complex. Don’t you understand? We have created a new currency: the mainframe processing power. This currency will literally control people’s lives in Territoria. Control it, and you can live for an eternity in a universe of your liking. Lose it, and, well…be content with some pixelated existence as a secondary line of code, battling it out in Hunts for someone’s amusement.”

  “Like slaves.”

  “Yes. Slaves programmed to love their prison; to know nothing else.” After a silence, Yuri added, “But for now, we need to keep servers up until you the guinea pigs have all been logged out.”

  Niko furrowed his brow. “Why? If we shut the server down, won’t they all log out on their own?”

  “You have found all your memories, yes? All four?”

  “I…I think so.”

  “The last one. You remember, our basement. I poked you with a needle.” Yuri tapped the inside of his elbow, as if to reenact the event.

  Niko swallowed, remembering the plunger push the liquid into his blood. He nodded.

  “We worked with the completed digitization tech outside our lab; developed some…enhancements—safeguards, yeah? A way to both upload and download the DNA codes and real memories, so they could not delete people. When we had to take all that tech and run—” Yuri’s voice choked then, a wet swallow, a tremor, “—we had to leave you; we gave you th
ese safeguards, Niko.”

  Niko traced a line down the inside of his forearm.

  Yuri came close enough to touch the cross on Niko’s neck. “Your mother made you this. Right now, it is just a collection of code that logs you out before your body feels its death coming in the game. But it doesn’t work on someone whose body hasn’t been given the physiological safeguards yours has, the serum. If a server shuts down, everyone—everyone—would blink out of existence.”

  “But I woke Cal up and she was fine,” Niko argued.

  “You woke her in the real world, I’m guessing.”

  Niko nodded.

  “Ah. This is different. If they are physically woken up by someone opening their Vat, the game is instantly replaced with real stimuli. Surprising, yes, even disturbing, but harmless. But if this doesn’t happen, a body goes into shock. The mind is convinced it’s dead, and most frequently it dies. Territoria facilities don’t have resources to treat tens of thousands of shock victims at once. They can save maybe a few, but most will die.”

  “Jeny…” Niko whispered. She was still in the game. Along with all the others.

  “So!” Yuri clapped his hands. “Before we can shut down the servers, we need a plan.”

  “A plan? A plan to do what?”

  “To log the test subjects out manually. We need to enter the real-world facilities and wake up the players, like you did with this…Cal person. That’s why we need you, Niko. You’re the only one who can go between worlds unobstructed,” Yuri said with a tiny puff of pride.

  “So why don’t we get started now?” Niko said, indignant. “I’ll punch past Clark’s stupid guards and—”

  “Slow down, slow down, Niko, your Mythic isn’t ready. You must hit six and unlock your ultimate ability before we take you out of Cygnus permanently. Your mother was very, very insistent about this. We’re inside a computer program, Nikolai, and all avatars run on pre-coded algorithms. Including yours. We can’t change the nature of this app.” Yuri tapped Niko’s shoulder.

  “Okay,” Niko said reluctantly. “One more Hunt should get me there. I’ll schedule it for the next possible date—”