by Nathan Jones
Dorain shuddered. “Not at all. Just imagining the discomfort makes my skin crawl. I don't know how you managed it, even before the wolves.” He brightened. “But speaking of full immersion, the new Protean Nebulary Forces world is coming out soon. Want to dive into nostalgia and hit the Zerin world again with me? Maybe we can finally finish the Fifth Campaign. Be just like old times.”
He did his best to keep from grimacing at the unexciting prospect.
Full immersion had been his thing for most of his teen years, after exploring the universe and before he'd started his work or commissioned Eva. When he'd first gotten into it he'd been in a deep slump after having finally come to the realization that no matter where he went in the explored universe, it had all been tamed and formed to the ideal of human beauty, comfort, and utility. And anywhere that wasn't sufficiently sculpted for human use was off limits, or prohibitively primitive like the Southern Preserve.
And he'd never met any humans at any of the tourism destinations he went to, just companions and maintenance bots who did their best to make sure human sightseers never crossed paths.
So basically his space adventures consisted of a series of boring flights frequently interspersed with horribly uncomfortable rift jumps, all to visit places that felt just as plastic and fake as the images he'd seen of them when selecting them as destinations.
Even the most visually striking worlds and cosmic phenomena were nothing he couldn't enjoy just as well in his own home, or in full immersion. It made the entire universe feel as if it was part of the same sensory deprivation bubble he'd been trying to escape by exploring space in the first place.
Tycho had soon come to loathe traveling.
Full immersion had been his escape from that. It had provided scenery more vivid and fantastical than he could ever see in real life, the settings for infinitely creative stories and experiences that finally allowed him to feel like he was truly alive and part of something incredible. And it had proven to be a chance to bond with his dad, who he'd rarely even spoken to before then.
But the bonding had been shallow, and it hadn't taken long to learn that the vast majority of full immersion worlds catered to pure hedonism: sex and gluttony and other vices, as well as violence and shocking events and images. He'd been too young to gain access to most of that, but even when he'd found workarounds or had grown old enough to see for himself what the fuss was about he'd found that it was all titillating but ultimately unfulfilling.
Truly worthwhile dive experiences were few and far between, and Dorain had never seemed to appreciate them like Tycho did and eventually refused to come along on them. Then when Tycho tried to explore those stories on his own his dad treated it like some sort of betrayal, acting more heartbroken and miserable than even Laird or Lady when they'd been tiny puppies scolded for misbehavior.
Tycho felt a pang at the reminder of his lost friend and forced his thoughts back to the present. “It might be fun to check out the new world,” he told his dad, mostly to make him happy. Then with a deep breath he forced himself to continue. “Hey listen, I was wondering if you wanted to meet up in person.”
He hadn't seen Dorain freeze up like that since the charging minotaur. His dad gaped at him for several seconds. “In person? As in one of us actually travels to the other person's manor and walks inside?”
“Yeah.” Tycho fidgeted. “It's just that I've never actually met you in person, not once. I'd kind of like to. I could even come to you.”
But even as he made the offer his heart was already sinking at his dad's expression. He should've expected the idea wouldn't be well received; in spite of his gregariousness Dorain was legendarily timid when it came to interpersonal interactions, even by human standards. He was the sort of person who blocked other humans on the allnet at even the hint of unpleasantness, even if it was coming from his own end.
In fact, Tycho's dad and mother hadn't even met in person to conceive him. They'd respectively sent their sperm and egg to a nearby facility, sorted out the details and agreed Leanni would have custody, and that was that.
From what Tycho had been able to infer from overheard conversations between his mother and the various companions in her home growing up, his parents had never even bothered to try intimacy in full immersion and felt no real attraction for each other. They also had no shared interests and didn't even seem to really like each other the few times they spoke. They'd simply selected each other as suitable breeding candidates and made it happen by proxy.
And now here he was. And it was obvious his dad didn't want to see him in person any more than the man had wanted to see the woman who'd bear his child. Or at least provide the egg for him.
“I don't know, Tych,” Dorain hedged, running a hand through his messy hair. “Doesn't it just seem kind of gross? We'd be spreading germs on everything we touched, breathing each other's air. And what would even be the point when the allnet lets us do all the stuff we'd be able to do if we met up, and more besides?”
Tycho let out a heavy breath. “I just thought it would mean something special. Feel more real.”
His dad chuckled. “Real is whatever we think it is, son. All the time we've spent together in full immersion is real and precious to me, and I mean that with all my heart. Don't psych yourself out of enjoying something just because you think it's fake.”
That was about what his dad had told him when Tycho had confessed his growing feelings for Eva even though she wasn't real. Far from mocking him for loving a companion, Dorain had explained to him that most young men and women who'd recently reached sexual maturity fell in love with their new adult companions, and usually held onto those feelings for most of their lives.
His dad had gone so far as to admit that he was still deeply besotted with Alia, even after two centuries. He'd encouraged Tycho to embrace his budding relationship with Eva and see if it made him happy.
And it had, for a while. But obviously it wasn't enough or Tycho wouldn't be trying to meet with actual humans to fill the void in his life. So however sage the advice seemed it was clearly wrong, at least for him.
“Will you at least consider meeting up?” he pressed.
Dorain chuckled uncomfortably. “I mean sure, I will. And I'll also consider things we can do together on the allnet. We've kind of drifted apart in the last few years, haven't we.”
Tycho nodded glumly. In its own way that was as certain a “no” as he'd gotten from his mother. “This would be a good way to catch up,” he suggested without much hope.
“It would, it would.” His dad looked away with another uncomfortable chuckle, then abruptly clapped his hands. “Hey, listen. It's been great talking to you but Alia was just in the middle of helping me with something. I hope you'll call again, but until then look forward to seeing you.” He blanched slightly. “On the allnet, that is.”
“Absolutely. Take care of yourself, Dad.” Tycho cut the connection and slumped back on the couch, feeling more alone than before he'd tried to contact his parents.
That was it, then. He could order new companions for variety, he could try to be content with what he had, or he could go flailing around on the allnet trying to convince complete strangers to do something not even the two people who'd given him life wanted to do.
The sensory deprivation bubble shrank a little more.
Chapter Three
Full Immersion
Tycho settled into the body-temperature saltwater of his sensory deprivation vat with a soft groan of relief, feeling his muscles relax and the tension ease away.
It wasn't just the water, although that certainly felt nice, otherwise he would've been just as happy to soak in the bath earlier. Instead his comfort was more due to the countless soothing hours he'd spent in this vat, and the anticipation of an equally pleasant experience now.
So rather than tell the house AI to insert and activate the full immersion hookups, he simply let himself drift and let his mind go blank.
It was somewhat of an ironic contra
diction that even though he viewed his life as being in a sensory deprivation bubble, Tycho's actual sensory deprivation vat was one of his favorite places. There was something profoundly peaceful about drifting in it with all his senses muted. More relaxing even than lying in bed cuddled up with Eva, or soaking in a hot bath complete with electrical impulses to stimulate and loosen his muscles.
When he was tired and had no pressing business in full immersion the vat allowed him to drift into peaceful slumber, and when he was alert it allowed his mind to clear and focus for the task ahead. And as it turned out, after the chaos and doubt of the last week or so it was exactly what he needed to let his troubles bleed away.
After drifting for who knew how many minutes he reluctantly initiated the full immersion hookup and allowed himself to plug into the allnet. Immediately he was offered a choice of several frequently used portals, as well as options to find anything else that might suit his fancy.
The allnet was incomprehensibly vast, connecting thousands of worlds and hundreds of billions of humans across countless kiloparsecs of explored and colonized space in the universe. It gave users access to anything the human mind could and had ever conceived of, a breathtaking, beautiful, and occasionally disturbing variety that catered to all interests and allowed for ease of connection with people who shared them.
The allnet's AI was impossibly good at directing users to just what they were looking for. Tycho often had his preferences met within seconds after taking only a moment to think of them, usually with a provided list of options so long he could spend a lifetime just browsing through them, organized from most relevant to ridiculously esoteric stretches. He rarely had to browse for more than a minute or two, and was almost always pleased with the result.
Even with Tycho's current dissatisfaction with his life and its lack of purpose or meaning, he had to admit that the fault didn't lie with the allnet itself. Only with his growing inability to enjoy it as he once had.
In any case the most convenient portals led to full immersion worlds he'd played in with his father, scholarly and academic hubs where he pursued his interests, and a few social hubs he occasionally drifted through. But the nearest and easiest to reach portal was the one that led to his work; he could be there with a thought.
Only Tycho hesitated on that thought. There was nothing on the allnet he really wanted to explore, but the idea of sinking himself into data streams and parsing algorithms wasn't particularly exciting either. After a few moments of mulling it over he formalized a request, and soon after the AI provided him with a list of relevant choices.
But for the first time ever in the allnet, none of the results matched his preferences.
It wasn't the fault of the AI or the search algorithms, unfortunately, but of the preferences of the other allnet users: of the hundreds of billions of people who used it, not one was interested in meeting other humans in person to socialize.
For several minutes Tycho could only stare at the list, not quite sure he could believe his eyes. Was it really possible that among the mind-bogglingly huge number of other people on the allnet, he was the only one who wanted to interact with other people in person? Was access to the allnet so easy and convenient, and the ubiquitousness of companions so complete, that nobody felt the natural human need for contact with others of their own kind?
Was he just a freak for feeling the need to be in the same room as a human when they interacted?
The closest Tycho could find to what he'd been searching for was users seeking intimate encounters. Even there most seemed to cater to those interested in it solely for breeding, with hubs focused on helping prospective parents find matches with their desired traits, maximizing chances of conception, and arranging details for child custody.
It seemed that adult companions were so overwhelmingly preferred that few people even wanted to go to the bother of getting with other humans for recreational sex. When they did it was in full immersion, which offered an experience just as authentic to the senses as the real world and a multitude of options unavailable in reality, such as slowtime.
With convenience like that why bother with the time and risk of traveling?
The hubs Tycho found for intimate encounters not intended for breeding purposes were few and far between, and all on the fringes of the allnet. The bizarre, crass fringes; the search results for recreational encounters appeared to be targeted towards those seeking the thrill of onetime flings with other humans as if it was some kind of fetish. A few even emphasized the unsanitary nature of such real life encounters and the risk of infectious disease, as well as the potential for violence. Playing off other common fetishes, in other words.
After several minutes of browsing, and even longer trying to refine his search query with the allnet's AI, Tycho finally gave up in disgust and flung himself into his work hub.
One of the first options available there was to enter slowtime. Considering his current mood Tycho didn't intend to work too long or sink too deep into data parsing, so he selected one of the less slow settings, one barely double the normal flow of time. He felt the odd distortion to his perception, like he was entering a dream, and focused for a few bleary seconds until his mind adjusted.
Slowtime was one of those odd quirks of the human mind and the nature of time itself, in that the mind was actually capable of perceiving time at different speeds as necessary. Given the proper context and stimulus the mind could perceive outside time as moving slower.
Or even faster, although Tycho didn't see what point there'd be for speeding up outside time unless someone literally wanted to waste their life, since suspended animation did the same thing anyway without the detriment of the body still aging as time passed.
On the other hand the potential utility for slowtime was pretty much endless. So useful, in fact, that the conscious mind had been doing it since the earliest days of intelligent humans.
Meaning dreams, obviously. The phenomenon of more time seeming to pass in a dream than passed in the waking world was well observed, and had been known about even before mankind's explosion of technology and escape from Homeworld to explore the stars. In fact, doctors and scientists had used the way the mind operated in dreams as a way of developing slowtime once full immersion became advanced enough.
Tycho knew of some people who spent practically their whole lives on the allnet in slowtime, relying on their companions to care for their physical bodies while their minds flitted through lifetimes of experiences like hummingbirds. He'd probably clocked in a good five hundred years himself, most of it in story worlds with his dad.
Most of the remainder of his slowtime immersion was for work.
After entering his hub Tycho found himself floating in the vast void of space, surrounded by streams of information approaching from all directions. The amount of information was vast in its own right, so much so that trying to read it with his eyes alone would've taken millennia to cover the data accumulated in a single day.
Thankfully AI parsed most of that, prioritizing only the anomalous readings worthy of his attention. Even so it was far too much for him to absorb visually, so he relied on a neural feed that presented the data stream to his mind like a sort of complex picture, the readings worthy of his attention standing out like flaws in the pattern, allowing him to single them out for closer inspection.
The work was usually mind numbingly tedious, and sometimes he wondered why he bothered with it at all. But if nothing else it required concentration, so it would be a good distraction from his grief over Laird, his frustration about his situation with Eva, and his melancholy about the lack of human interaction in his life.
Or, for that matter, his life's lack of meaning in general. With a sigh Tycho got started.
Thanks to the efforts of the AI caretakers jobs were largely unnecessary. AI oversaw an incomprehensibly complex system that extracted resources from planets and planetoids and even stellar bodies, refined those resources and produced the goods needed to make humans comfortabl
e, coordinated transport of those goods where needed or requested, and terraformed new planets for human estates.
The caretakers had taken care of things to the point where any request humans might make that wasn't absurdly extravagant could be met, all for the comfort and happiness of humanity. Because of their efforts humans didn't even have to direct a moment's worry to whether their luxurious lifestyles would ever end.
Thanks to that most jobs were sought by humans looking for something to do or who wanted to make a name for themselves. By its nature AI was perennially bad at jobs requiring creativity or inventiveness, even after tens of thousands of years of refinement, and those spheres were generally where humans preferred to work anyway.
So humans invented new technology, wrote stories for full immersion, created songs and dances and other entertainment, and oversaw human interaction on the allnet as hosts or masters of ceremonies.
As for Tycho, his job was decidedly less creative or inventive, one of the rare routine jobs AI was bad at. His work was to analyze data sent from autonomous scouting drones venturing beyond the boundaries of the large section of the universe humans had already explored.
AI was good at identifying and cataloguing what was already known or understood, but Tycho had to look at anything anomalous and either figure out what sort of variation of known phenomena it fell into for cataloguing and study, or if it was something new decide which scientists would be best suited to investigating it.
Given his experience with space travel he'd considered himself suited to the work, and he'd harbored the hope that the drones could show him the mysteries of space humans were forbidden from exploring for their own safety.
Granted, he did regularly see things that moved him with their beauty or struck his interest with their exotic nature.