Virtual Perfection: Technology has drawn everyone into Virtual Reality, but what will happen to humanity if no one can get out? (Veiled Destiny Book 1)

by Jason Bourn

  Hope smiled coyly, stood up and said, “Follow me. I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

  Hope wouldn’t say anything more, so Calaes cheated and saw his persa indicated there was a high probability that they were heading to the observation deck.

  Calaes walked with Hope in companionable silence. She had set a fairly brisk pace, so Calaes had to make an effort to keep up. She had obviously accustomed herself with the Martian gravity in the extra hours she had been here.

  Within a few minutes they had reached their destination. Just as Calaes’ persa had predicted, they were at the observation deck.

  Calaes sucked in his breath. He had seen this all before in the stimulation, but to be actually here on the red planet was quite impressive. Of course, in his simulation he had never had a woman that he was crazy about right next to him. She murmured in appreciation as well.

  In front of them was a wide plain with sand pock-marked with rocks of varying sizes, from the size of his fist to the size of the room. The entire vista had a washed-out reddish tint.

  “Quite something, isn’t it?” she finally said. “The view is awe-inspiring, nothing like it in the entire solar system.” She checked the time and said, “It ought to be here any second now.”

  “What?” asked Calaes. “What should be here?” The moment he got out the words, he saw it. Phobos. Mars’ closest moon – closer than any moon to its parent planet in the entire solar system – was impressive. Not that it was big – it was actually quite small, less than 1/100th of the size of Earth’s moon. The impressive thing was that it moved across the Martian sky so fast. While Earth’s moon takes a half of Earth’s day from moon rise to moon set, or twelve hours, Phobos takes just more than four hours, which is about a third of Mars’ day – even though the day lengths of the two planets were remarkably similar.

  “So, what do you think?” she asked. “Pretty impressive if you ask me.”

  Whereas Earth’s moon appeared like a sphere, Phobos looked more like a potato. One end of the potato shaped moon contained a huge crater, almost ten km in diameter. Even though Phobos was so small, it was just possible to make out the crater.

  “Did you know,” she went on, “that Phobos is doomed? Every year it gets closer and closer to the surface of Mars. Don’t hold your breath though because it won’t come crashing down for another fifty million years.” She shook her head sadly, “I wonder sometimes if mankind is similarly doomed.”

  Calaes couldn’t help but want to try to make her feel better. “This is what the settlement is all about. We have a fresh start here. And no VR, which has proven to be the undoing of the human race. Just give us a chance to prove ourselves.”

  Hope looked him straight in the eye and said, “Do you really think that we can keep everyone from going back to VR? That entails such a huge culture change. In the short term we might be able to manage it, but what about the next generation and the next after that? They won’t have the first-hand knowledge of what VR has done. Do you think that the culture can be changed that much and be successful? And also, do you think that Earth is going to let us have that fresh start? We would have to get Earth to give us all the supplies and equipment to become self-sufficient, and they would have to leave us alone. No matter what we do, they will be the ten thousand pound gorilla for generations to come. What would stop them at any time from attempting to put us down, especially if we are successful and vibrant and growing?”

  Calaes thought about that. He had always assumed that once they had safely made it to Mars, that Earth would worry about Earth and allow Mars to worry about Mars. He realized that maybe that was too simplistic. He wanted to reassure her, but at the same time he didn’t want to sound naive. “Look, we have more than two years before the next launch window. I’m sure that they won’t do anything before then – actually, I don’t think there is anything they could do even if they wanted to. We have all that time to come up with the best plan going forward.”

  Looking up at the tiny moon speed across the sky, Hope murmured, “I hope so. I really hope so.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Hayden’s irritation had increased with each failure of his plan to stop the renegades.

  The latest was they had successfully landed the manned shuttles on Mars. He couldn’t believe it – he had felt certain that there was no way the renegades could succeed. It was almost like they had a guardian angel looking out for them.

  Hayden paused, thinking about guardian angels.

  Maybe that was it!

  Maybe they did have a guardian angel looking out for them. Maybe there was a secret organization that he hadn’t considered that was helping the renegades. If that were the case, it would explain so much as to how they were able to thwart what he knew were perfectly good plans of his to stop the renegades.

  Of course!

  The more he thought about it, the more everything fit. Everything made so much more sense with this factored in. Now all he had to do was to find them and he could put a stop to this challenge to his control – forever.

  – – –

  The meeting with Calaes and Hope had ended quickly since she had to get back to work immediately after they had talked while watching Phobos’ trek across the sky. It was hard to believe that was only yesterday. She had promised to meet him again today – again at the observation deck.

  He hadn’t expected to be busy, but it seemed everyone needed his inputs.

  First it was the question of how to use the climate-controlled space – or more accurately how to use the non-climate-controlled space.

  The issue was that there was only so much room available that was habitable. Of course, everyone wanted to use this space – for everything from living quarters, to offices, to storage, etc. There just wasn’t enough room for everything. The problem was that the team-leads all wanted to use the space differently – each had their own interests at stake.

  For example, the food preparation team-lead wanted the food storage close to the food preparation, and in turn the food preparation should be close to the cafeteria where the food was consumed. Of course, the cafeteria should be close to the food recycling and disposal. If the food preparation team-lead got their way, this would consume a large percentage of the livable space.

  Of course, the engineering team-lead had similar demands. The engineering team members needed offices near the living quarters. The labs and analysis centers needed to be near their offices. These in turn needed to be near the fabrication and repair depots.

  It seemed that everyone wanted everything nearby and they all wanted it to be climate-controlled. The underlying problem, of course, was that they had all been so busy ensuring the safety and reliability of the trip to Mars that they hadn’t spent nearly enough time planning in detail what they would do once they got here. Normally with major problems, he could let the team-leads figure it out among themselves. However in this case, the team-leads could find no common ground, so they came, en masse, to him.

  In short, it was a mess that needed arbitration at every turn. There wasn’t nearly enough room in the habitable section of the settlement to do everything that the team-leads wanted. The question wasn’t so much how to craft a trade-off that was amenable to everybody, since there was no way that everyone would be happy. The real question was how to form a compromise that everyone could live with that still allowed efficient running of the settlement.

  The first thing Calaes did was to get all the team-leads together so they could hash out as many of the issues as possible. He didn’t want to get bogged down in every detail – it would drive him crazy and slow things down having everything go through a single bottleneck point. Knowing this, the team-leads actually were able to take care of ninety percent of the problems, but of course they left the hardest ten percent still to be resolved.

  The major issues needed to be arbitrated – which of course required Calaes’ input. Calaes gave general guidelines, such as to minimize the number of entrance/exits between hab
itable and non-habitable portions of the settlement. This was by far the worst interface, since it took time to transition, took precious oxygen and was the riskiest point for an emergency to occur. This single guideline was extremely effective, since it was so easy to assess.

  Every activity was assessed relative to whether it was required to be performed in the climate-controlled area and whether its predecessor or successor activities required a transition in/out of the habitable areas. Everything was assessed relative to these two criteria.

  If several related activities required climate controls, they were all delegated to the habitable areas – such as food service, food cleanup and food storage.

  If all, or almost all, could be done without climate controls, they were all delegated to the non-habitable area, such as long-term storage, spares and anything associated with long term maintenance.

  With this work done ahead of time to minimize the transitions, it soon become apparent where the activities should be performed. There were a few exceptions, which were easily handled on a case-by-case basis.

  Once he had more or less resolved use of the climate/non-climate-controlled space, then came the questions about priorities. It seemed that just about everything needed to be done right away. Each team could resolve the hundreds of actions within their teams that were the most important to do first, then second, etc. But again, prioritizing work between the teams caused major heartache and invariably heightened tensions. This led to Calaes being called upon to arbitrate. He tried the same philosophy that he had used with the space allocation, namely asking the question “What absolutely has to be done today?” but results were not nearly as good. Mostly it just led to squabbles such as, “Yes, getting food put away so we can eat is great, but if we do all the food tasks first, no one will have beds or toilet paper for one week. Sure, let’s see how everyone likes that.”

  The biggest issue was that most items were still on the supply shuttles so there was congestion in getting this equipment out of the shuttles and into the settlement. When the shuttles had been loaded back on Earth, they used all types of automatic loading equipment. However here on the Mars end it all had to be offloaded by hand. It would have been too expensive in terms of size and weight to bring all the loading equipment on the shuttles. In fact, the only automatic loading equipment that was brought was for those items that were too heavy for people to manage. These devices were slow and awkward and so were rarely used for smaller cargo. Neither could the automatic dome assembly machines be converted for offloading purposes.

  Calaes realized with chagrin that a deployment plan really should have been generated, but he and everyone else had been totally consumed in trying to get the shuttles safely to Mars. So, instead of allowing the team-leads to manage their highest priority work, he pulled them all into a room and together they generated the deployment plan which prioritized and scheduled all of these activities over the next week. Those items that stretched out past one week, and it become apparent that there would be a lot of those, would be detailed planned at the end of the first week. This allowed everyone to know what order everything would be performed. It quickly became apparent that the most efficient action was to stage a mass exodus of supplies from the shuttle to the storage area, using members of every team. This meant that some low priority supplies were removed from the shuttles, but overall the shuttles were no longer the bottleneck. This allowed multiple teams to work in parallel. Once this was done, the deployment plan was updated and Calaes sat back and crossed his fingers, hoping that it would work.

  As the teams started following the deployment plan and since the shuttles were no longer bottlenecks, everything started going more smoothly. It had been grueling, but worth it, since this significantly reduced the amount of strife. However, this left Calaes utterly exhausted. At times like this, he thought how easy his life would be if he only had to deal with equipment, not people, since equipment never argued back and would mostly do as it was told.

  And here it was less than ten minutes before he was supposed to meet with Hope. He knew that he wasn’t in the best frame of mind, but he was still looking forward to seeing her. He was pretty sure that his meeting with her was going to be much better than his recent activities, especially since he had had such an arduous morning.

  Calaes shook himself free of the last of the issues that were hanging over his head, got up and stretched. He decided that he would take the longer route to the observation deck, hoping it would help clear his mind of the morning’s distractions.

  As he walked out of his office, he saw bustling activity everywhere. Everyone was moving with a sense of purpose and determination. He felt a sense of satisfaction for his part in making this all come together. He supposed that if he was going to work so hard, it was nice that he could at least see the fruits of his labors.

  But what had they really created? Could this really be the salvation of mankind? He looked around more carefully. How different the dull gray-white walls of the corridor seemed from the shiny, overly-ornate training campus. Had the opulence at the training campus been yet another way of subconsciously keeping the candidates satisfied with the status quo?

  As he approached the observation deck, Calaes saw Hope was already there. She saw him and said, “Hi, how was your day?”

  Calaes wondered whether to tell here the truth or just respond with the standard “Fine.” He chose a slightly watered-down version of the truth, briefly telling her about the two major issues which had thus far consumed his whole day.

  She smiled and said, “Well, I’m glad you have a plan going forward. Have you thought about that strategy of yours that we talked about a long time ago – does this plan fit into your strategy?”

  Actually, he hadn’t really thought about strategy in a long while. He recalled their meeting and how she had almost made fun of him. Chagrined, he tried to remember exactly what he had said the strategy was. He knew that he could easily query his persa, but then she would know that he needed a reminder.

  Without missing a beat, Hope said, “You do recall the strategy, don’t you? You said, ‘Our strategy is to get a large enough group of people to Mars so they can establish a society independent and isolated from the powerful draw of Earth-based virtual reality that threatens to eventually doom the human race.’ ” Again, the way she said it made him feel like he was a kid back in school. It was times like these that he wished he had a photographic memory.

  He knew that the value of memorizing things had fallen tremendously with the advent of the computer and the persa – since it was way too easy to look up facts, being able to memorize wasn’t worth much. He was all right with that – except for embarrassing times like these.

  The next wave of human mental deflation occurred when the value of being logical – making good decisions – decreased radically with the advent of artificial intelligence. He was less all right with that, but he really didn’t have much choice there – persas had so much data available to them that they could make better decisions than the average person, so it took a special individual to beat their persa’s decision making skills.

  The real value that people still brought to the table – where they were still better than machines – was their ability to be creative. And that was what Calaes had been trying to do when he generated the strategy. When he thought of it in these terms he didn’t feel nearly as badly that she had remembered the strategy, and he hadn’t – since he had created it and she had merely memorized it.

  She was giving him that quizzical look again, and he realized that he hadn’t said anything for many seconds while he was thinking. She finally said, “Well you must have got something off your chest because you didn’t say anything for a long time – and then you smiled. I’m glad.”

  Somewhat embarrassed that he had been caught justifying himself, Calaes brushed off the statement and said, “Yes, that’s a good idea. Let’s discuss the strategy.”

  “OK,” she said. “Do we have a large enough gr
oup of people now here on Mars?”

  “Funny you should ask that,” he quipped. “Where are the rest of your rebels? When will they be joining us?”

  She responded, “They aren’t here yet. You will be told when they are planning on joining us. I really can’t say any more than that for security reasons.”

  Startled, Calaes had thought that all the security issues would go away when they arrived on Mars. Evidently this was not so. “Can you at least tell me why you need to continue with the high level of security?”

  She looked him straight in the eye and hesitated before saying, “You should know that we are on a very high level of alert due to several issues.

  “The first issue was a series of messages we intercepted at the training campus. We have only decrypted the one that allowed us to identify the threats to the shuttle. We are still working on the others. What we do know is that there is a fairly large group of candidates that is still working with the government to bring down the Mars settlement. We haven’t been able to identify who they are, but the message traffic that we have intercepted is between much more than a small handful of people.

  “The second issue is that there was another attempt to destroy the shuttles. It seems that somehow the Mars settlement basic parameters were changed in the shuttle databases. The shuttles were programmed to land at the settlement, but the elevation was off by six hundred meters. If it weren’t for the advanced AI algorithms that we installed into the shuttle neural networks, when the shuttles were coming in to land, they would have thought they had six hundred more meters to go down and would have hit the surface with such velocity that the shuttles would have been torn apart and everyone would have died. To avoid worrying the entire team, we chose to hide this information. But you can review the logs if you’d like and share this information with anyone that you want to.”

  Calaes was stunned. He now understood the need for maintaining high security levels.