Gaming the System

by P A Wikoff

  Leaning in closer to him, I couldn’t help but notice that the scars I saw before were very similar to the tingly areas on my head. Forgetting that he was about to tell me something important, I asked, “Is this thing going to fry my brain?”

  Mario paused for a moment and flicked his cig off in the distance.

  I could only hope that he had a bot to do something about that as well. I wouldn’t want a fire to erupt while I had all this junk on.

  “Oh, you mean like these?” He ran a hand through his dark hair, exposing his scars. “It’s fine. That was from an early model. The tech wasn’t there yet, but we’ve patched the system since then.”

  “Patched the system? You mean this is the same models that did that to you? How is that safe?”

  “It’s safe enough.”

  “I want something newer.”

  “Can’t do it. All the current builds have been shipped for home use. They are much less bulky and less obtrusive than these older units. Wireless connections and all the bells and whistles.”

  “I want to opt in for one of those home units instead. I’m sure you can spare one for me.” I tried to get something out of what little fame I had.

  “There isn’t a big budget for prisoners. We have to recycle gear when we can.”

  “Recycle?”

  “Relax. All the bugs have been exterminated. Well, almost all of them,” he said with a laugh.

  I didn’t care for his humor one bit, if that’s what it was.

  Without warning, something sharp pricked my toe.

  “Something bit me.” I popped my head out of the chamber and sat up.

  “Don’t make this more difficult,” Mario said, waving away a robotic hand, which sprang into action to restrain me. He then gave me a reassuring nod.

  I reluctantly lay back down. I tried to find a comfortable position again, but this thing wasn’t at all designed for comfort; it was for purpose. Even the molding thing underneath me was made of hard materials.

  “That was only a test. Next time, make sure you keep completely still.”

  “Wait…that was you?”

  “No, it was the sensory suit.”

  “Take this thing off me,” I demanded, clawing at the jumpsuit or “sensory suit,” as he called it.

  “Let me adjust the setting. This time it will only be a tickle.”

  In a slow wave, I felt tiny points move across my body like a feather or soft fur.

  “That’s creepy,” I cringed.

  “Yes, it can be. It can also be very nice, but sometimes painful,” Mario added.

  “Is that what this thing is—a torture chamber?” I had no doubt those things were going to stab me at some point.

  “Not if you behave,” he said, blowing smoke right in my face.

  Never mind where he got another cigarette from, the possibility of torture is never something you ever want to hear. I had to learn more about this before it was too late. Although I might already be in way over my head.

  “Before, you were going to tell me something about how this thing works?”

  “Oh, you’ll see. We’re almost done here,” Mario said, while he signaled some helper bots to start up the operation.

  One by one, they plugged and hooked things up to the power chamber and my strange hat thing, wires, tubes, and receiving devices. As each item in the process became activated, a green light on my outfit turned on and blinked. “I hope you like video games.”

  “Is that some kind of joke?” I asked incredulously.

  “What? Well, I mean…yeah. Who doesn’t love video games?”

  “Not me, I hate them, actually.”

  “Oh, now you’re being funny.”

  I wished I could have seen Mario’s expression, but there were so many things obstructing my view in preparation for what was to come.

  “Games are so fake. You can always see the pixels, no matter how ‘microscopic’ they are. I thought you knew that about me from my profile or whatever.”

  “You mean you’re serious?” He peered into my chamber with a wide-eyed expression.

  I gave an overexaggerated nod, as a mask suction-cupped itself onto my face. Air was freely flowing through it. It smelled different, not normal.

  “Learn something new all the time. Most people request online jail, if the option is available to them.

  “How come I’ve never heard of it?” I asked, my voice muffled through the mask.

  “It’s in beta.”

  Water or some other clear liquid poured into the chamber while the cover carefully started to slide closed. It was nerve-racking slowly watching the light disappear as the liquid rose around me. Even though I normally wasn’t claustrophobic, I sure was now.

  “What kind of games would you prefer?”

  “None. I’m really not a gamer. Is there some way I can serve out my sentence without gaming? Like moderating chat rooms or anything like that?” I asked, really trying to talk through the experience, rather than lose my cool and have an all-out panic attack.

  “You need to make a lot of online currency. Games are the only real way you’re going to achieve that,” Mario said, his voice sounding muffled as the liquid rose above my ears.

  I was already feeling the effects of whatever they put in the air mask. I felt dreamlike. It was as if my body was growing limp, like pudding.

  “Okay, give me the…best game. The best one.”

  “Honestly, unless you’re good at fighting, which I am guessing is a hard no, I would say they’re all about equal.”

  “Tell me…what you got, doc.” I just needed him to keep talking so that I could get a grip on my emotions for a moment. I was so tired.

  “Let me see here.” Mario’s voice now came through as vibrations through the liquid. It was like I was hearing him without using my ears. “You have a couple of options. Frag Town, it’s a shooter. Splatter Dome, more of a survival/horror. Dreamscape Online, your typical MMORPG. Then there is…

  “Dreamscape. That one. I want it.” Upon hearing the title, I wondered if it was the game my parents were talking about. It had to be. Why else would I even remember it?

  My inebriated logic was that if I could get into that game, maybe there might be an opportunity for me to find my parents and finally talk to them. The launch had already happened a month ago. There was no way they weren’t playing. It might be a long shot, but that one had to be it. It was all becoming clear to me. This was my sole purpose now.

  “Swords and monsters it is. I’m more of a rhythm game sort of guy, but, hey, you got it. This is your next life now. Better make it a good one.”

  I looked down at my chest, and the little lights were lit up like a laser light show.

  “Holy mao. Thanks.”

  “What?”

  “I mean…holy…wow…I dunno.”

  “Okay, that’s working. Remember, questing is a far better use of your time than grinding mobs,” Mario said.

  The liquid was over my head now, and there was one final light that needed to go green. Dread filled me like the water filled this tomb.

  “What if sumping…goes wrong?”

  “We’ll start over. You don’t always find a vein the first try.” The chamber lid closed completely, leaving me alone with the initiation lights.

  “Am I going to die, or worse?”

  What could be worse than dying? Suffering? All of my worry and questions stopped as the final light on my chest piece turned green.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it going wrong. I would worry about it going right. And for the record, I really was rooting for you,” Mario said through the rippling waves of sound in the chamber.

  What did he mean by that…all of that? This was far too much information to process in such a short amount of time. I didn’t want to play some fantasy game. I didn’t want to get my brain fried or stabbed by teeny, tiny needles, but most importantly, I didn’t want to be here any longer. It was much too late for regrets. The viscous water got colder and colder
still, so much so that I could no longer feel the warming effects of the heavy sensor suit. Fissures of ice started to form all around me.

  Oh noes, the liquid, it’s popsicle-izing.

  I tried to reach my arm out, but just like that, I was frozen solid. The last thing I remember is a faint whisper, “I’m gonna buck the system.”

  Chapter Eight

  Tron

  E verything was numb—my body, my thoughts, even my emotions. At first, I was nothing, and then I became something…or maybe a glimmer of something, a speck of dust, a pixel of thought, a fragment of time and space.

  Silence was all-encompassing, but it was positively there. I could feel the stillness around me, which, in turn, was evidence of my consciousness. It felt heavy, though weightless. I wanted to think, but I just couldn’t form anything coherent. I was void—nothing, yet everything. No words could justify my existence.

  This place was a midpoint—somewhere between heaven and hell, between knowing and not knowing, between life and decay. It was a timeless state where a split second seemed to go on forever, like a teeter-totter stuck in a moment replaying itself backwards and forwards in an endless loop.

  I wanted to move on to the next moment, but I couldn’t choose a side. The line separating what had happened and what will happen was lost in the abstractness of it all.

  At the outskirts of my consciousness sat a blinking light, circular in shape. It was something to hold on to, to move toward. I don’t know how or why, but it suddenly got closer and larger. Maybe I was bringing it to me, or me to it. It was the only thing in the world, and the closer I got, the more pleasure I felt.

  It was all I had—all there was to have—so I pressed on harder towards the blinking circle. It was made of abstract colors and thoughts and emotions, yet it was here—vast, pure and simple.

  I had no way of perceiving anything correctly, nor to tell the difference between the was and was-nots.

  Without hesitation, I entered the circular light.

  Now the only sign of existence was the all-encompassing blinking light, which was now everything. It was happiness, pure and bright. At about the point where love began, it faded into the darkness of loss and despair.

  I found that I could move the circle back and forth, or up and down, but only while it was lit up.

  Then I caught on. I wasn’t moving the circle. I was the circle. That must have been my soul, my essence, my digital signal…whatever. It was me—all I was, all I was ever going to be.

  This had to be a dream. The most vivid dream I’d ever had, crisp and clear but also vague and filled with mystique.

  I needed to wake up from this dream. Except I didn’t know how to begin to do something so simple yet so complex. It could have gone on forever, or maybe it’s still going on now.

  Like a punch to the stomach, all my memories and past experiences were suddenly at my beck and call. I remembered my name, the crash, the trial, everything.

  Each memory was impeccable, although there wasn’t any information about where I was right now. It was beyond me, like trying to explain the intercloud to a dog, or trying to explain to my mom why people grief her characters in-game.

  “Hello?” I tried to speak, to form familiar strings of sounds to portray a concept, but I didn’t have lips, or vocal cords, or anything with which to speak.

  I had thoughts. That was a beginning. Only now, they were different than before. Now, they were…complete. I could remember stuff that had been long since locked away inside my memory. Like the vintage arcade where my parents took me for my very first birthday party. Before, I had remembered seeing video feeds from that day, but this was beyond that. This was outside of the camera’s lens. There were almost no children at my party. The guests were all my parents’ friends.

  The past me only remembered all the toys I got, not who attended, but here it was, clear as any MeglaHD video…no, clearer.

  How had I remembered so much about something I had long forgotten? This was getting a little scary. I had to test it further, this time on something I had never known about or seen video of.

  There was this Japanese role-playing game that came out a couple of years ago. The title graphic had a mother nursing her young, breast to face. That brought up a very interesting, and potentially disturbing, question for me. Did my mother nurse me? It was something I never knew the answer to, and I also never had the nerve to ask her about, for obvious reasons. I may be crass, and talk back from time to time, but I was not crude—not when it came to my mother and her bits.

  Without time for me to warm up to the idea of getting my question answered and all that that consisted of, I was already reliving my youth.

  Luckily, my mother hadn’t nursed me. Which was exactly what I was worried about witnessing. Seeing her bare breast jutting towards my face could have been a scarring experience. I might not have been able to look her in the eyes again. Not that I was sure I would ever get the opportunity to.

  Unfortunately, what I did see was in fact worse. Through my baby eyes, I saw the truth, and there was no way to un-see it. I wasn’t fed through a feeder, like today’s standards, or even a bottle, like in ancient times. No, I had the misfortune of being born between the robot revolution and the A.I. uprising.

  These were crude times where nothing really knew its place in the world. The A.I. units sabotaged the robots by giving them faulty code, whereas the robots sought to destroy the A.I. through physical attacks.

  The humans, however, just sat in the middle, almost in the dark about the whole thing. Eventually, people caught on when their appliances weren’t downloading their firmware, for fear that the root command prompt would delete their code. It was a digital version of mutiny.

  When they finally looked, what the humans found was deep, covert espionage between the two operating systems, which had been going on for several decades, unnoticed.

  It was widely debated if the robots had deleted their own memory banks or if the A.I. had done the crime, but the result was still the same. The A.I. had taken the victory and the robots didn’t even remember it had happed in the first place.

  What I saw in front of little baby me was a nursing bot. It wasn’t a self-aware unit, which I knew by its simple, melodious motions. It coddled me with a dead stare while I expressed milk out of its synthetically soft robo-nipples. She, or rather it, cradled me and held me tenderly—as tenderly as a glorified bottle could.

  Of course, it was a machine, but I recalled thinking she was my real mother. It didn’t feel anything for me, however. How could it? At this stage, A.I.s weren’t smart enough to simulate human emotions.

  It was truly unnerving to experience. I didn’t like it one bit. I very much hated it. If this little test had proven anything, it was that perfect memory is a curse. People needed to forget certain things so that they would be able to get on with their day. I wished I could have deleted this thought. Maybe the robots had deleted their own memories. Sometimes it was the only way to move past things.

  I needed a palate cleanser. I wanted to think of something else, but I was way too scared.

  Was this some kind of memory stimulator? Or a Magic 8 Ball for the mind? I really hoped this was a dream or at least some fabricated reality.

  To try and test this theory further, but mostly to get untraumatized, I tried to imagine my parents’ wedding day. I wasn’t even born so there was no way for me to remember it. This would prove one thing or another, or at least put my mind at ease.

  A memory faded in around me. It was dark and dank. I heard a gruff voice, and when I tried to focus on the sound, it seemed to stretch out further. It was no use. I couldn’t make out anything tangible. I felt as though I were floating, but in a constricted way, as if I were locked inside a suitcase and thrown into the bottom of the trash ocean, although I wasn’t drowning or in any kind of duress.

  I reached all around through what I can only describe as thick, heavy water. I wasn’t sure what this memory was, but it was not th
e one I was looking for. Right when I started to doubt my Magic 8 Ball theory, it hit me. My mom was pregnant with me when they got married. That was why my dad always called her his twelve gauge, referring to their shotgun wedding.

  Then I heard a loud applause followed by some cheering. I guess he was kissing the bride. This was insane.

  After a bunch of standing around, most likely taking photos and such, it was time for some toasts. I thought this would prove interesting. Unfortunately, it didn’t. I couldn’t for the life of me understand what people were saying. There was too much of an echo in the hall. My mother cried after every speech, even after the ones that made her laugh. I could feel her emotion. Which didn’t make total sense, except I was a part of her, I suppose.

  As the night went on and on, I knew my mother had had the fish option, but I couldn’t taste it. I could, however, feel the effects of the glass or two of champagne she most assuredly drank.

  Feeling tipsy, I sloshed around as they danced to some corny songs and even joined a conga line. Eventually things started to wind down. It was a very standard wedding day—well, from my perspective, anyway. I didn’t do much, but I still felt exhausted. It was so real.

  Suddenly it was quiet, except for the sound of a couple of sweet murmurs…I didn’t want to know. Remember ice cream. Remember ice cream.

  One after another, I recalled each lick of me indulging in one of life’s great miracles. I could almost taste the flavors, as if I were back there. I wanted to take a huge bite of the stuff, but I had no control over the past impression. It was more like experiencing a movie of your own life.

  The more I explored my perfect memory, the more thought pollution started to cloud my vision. Images distorted, as they blended into each other creating some sort of friction. I needed to stop over-thinking everything and just go with it before it was too late. I had to change gears, or at least do something else. This whole wicked experience was above my understanding, and I was dabbling in powers I couldn’t begin to comprehend. Was I reliving the past, or was I traveling through time itself? What if I had tapped into something which had irreversible consequences? It was never a good idea to mess with things beyond your general understanding. Nukes, blackholes, CRISPR gene editing, we all remember the damage humanity did with those ventures.