El Sexorcisto Z!

by Yuli Ban

  He smiled.

  Once more, he put off reading the book and thought open the internet. His eyes guided the cursor and he thought the words 'NeuroUniverse FIVR'.

  Instantly, a nigh-infinite amount of information exploded into his eyes. News articles, videos, reviews, blog posts, images, and so much more.

  'How marvelous,' he thought to himself. The dream of many generations had been fulfilled, and he was about to experience the holiest of technological baptisms. Full-immersion virtual reality. Almost twenty years to the day after the public release of the Oculus Rift, he would enjoy the finest thing.

  The suit looked properly futuristic— slate-black, pale blue linings, a vague grid-like mesh underneath the skin, and then the helmet.

  He opened a new tab and clicked onto a forum. Text spontaneously appeared in a black text box: 'Looks like the Book Recall is Near lol!'

  'Post Reply' or 'Preview Reply'.

  He decided to preview to marvel at his accomplishment. All the words seemed fine. Nothing seemed too awkward or cringy. Then he added a few more words and felt the post come together. 'I have a big Word doc filled with everything I wanna do in the Verse. Right off the dock, I'm gonna try out N.O. and play around in the full-sensory version of Super Mario 64. Then I'm gonna jump into 1042 and share a cupcake with John Lennon.' That was his signature below the post— "Marvelous, darling!"

  Message:

  The Future™ finally came and I loved every moment of it. As to when it happened, I can’t tell you. Some say it was Tokyo 2020— that festival of technology that, in retrospect, played out more like a second CES (Consumer Electronics Show) with some sporting events attached or perhaps a cyberpunk LARP (live-action roleplay) set across an entire city. And yes, that was quite the show. Others say the Future™ arrived over a decade earlier with the release of the iPhone. Can’t say I agree. Still more argue it was the unveiling of POLYBIUS in 2024, as the existence of artificial general intelligence was not expected for another generation even among the optimists. Actually, I still have a book written someone in my room by this terminal Kurzweil denier who gloated over the man’s passing in 2022. It’s hilarious how almost literally everything the late Ray Kurzweil predicted started coming true right after the book dropped.

  But all that balderdash doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Future™ is here and we get to enjoy the fruits.

  And then he laid back in his bed, opened a little orange bottle, downed a pill with iced soda pop, and started streaming anime. None of his tastes were unusual— he stuck to shonen and seinen like .X3: Awakenment, Baddmotorfinger (the name alone earned his attention), and Furīku no Akademī or Freak Academy in English. All three had goth girls as major characters, perhaps an unconscious preparation for the inevitable emo and goth waifu heaven that awaited him beyond the rift.

  He chuckled once and rolled over, right onto his still-open book.

  Page one hundred ninety-seven again. He could barely make out the words, but the header image was enough. A stock photo that clearly referenced the movie trailer of Ready Player One. Except under it was a caption: "Hollywood is free to be silly. This is the same industry that says there's sound in space!"

  Something about the caption felt stilted, as if a person with a crippling lack of imagination had written it.

  It read just as much, without any evidence that a sentient human could have done it, because no one could have been that aggressively pessimistic:

  One of the worst fantasies wrought by Dr. Kurzweil involving the near future is the promise that just round the corner lay a utopian society available only to the individual, a virtual wonderland of hedonism and dreams. Commonly this is referred to as "virtual reality". However, this is not merely as simple as placing a bulky headset over your eyes and having your stomach rediscover your mouth while failing to have fun in a 360 x 480 recreation of a Nintendo game. No, his damage was claiming that within less than a generation we will have machines that dangerously stab into our brains, electrocute our brain cells, and cause hallucinations that fool us into believing that we are in a full sensory recreation of a world.

  Need I continue about just how terrifyingly divorced from reality such a statement really is? Today's virtual reality headsets are, as aforementioned, a joke. Companies have been trying and failing to prove that these overpriced nausea goggles are the wave of the future, but all they have done is provide the barf bag industry with skyrocketing quarterly profits. Not to mention that we do not understand the brain in any capacity— as previously mentioned— and we are no closer today than we were 150 years ago or will be in another 150 years.

  All that the nightmare of "full-immersion virtual reality" promises is for commercialized schizophrenia, for lazy dropouts relying on government welfare to feed them by way of arguing that they're living a productive life in another dimension, and for pedophiles to dream of having any number of victims and never have to answer for it.

  And I can prove it.

  He closed the book, sneering at the sheer sardonic smugness oozing from the page. The proof was no better— mostly it was him arguing with a strawman over the feasibility of the technology, filled with claims that it was no different than electrocution mixed with lobotomies without any hint of awareness that what he was saying was in any way irrational. It reminded him of the 80s anti-drug ads, including the one of the doctor smoking weed while operating on a patient. Just so blatantly over-the-top in the wrong direction!

  However, he felt the urge to open to one of the later pages— two hundred ninety-eight. That had one of his favorite paragraphs in any book.

  Face it, Singularitarians! In 2045, you will still be on internet forums talking up the capabilities of the latest Markov chains and Monte Carlo Tree Searches as if they had surpassed human intelligence, sticking electric needles into your skin while wearing used twenty-year-old virtual reality consoles in a pathetic attempt to fool yourselves that you are frolicking with your elven waifu, having filled your flat houses with useless Roombas and humanoid robots less capable than Softbank's Pepper, continuously watching tech demos of whatever Boston Dynamics is lying to the world about (perhaps Atlas in SPACE!), and denying that your utopian dreams are being systematically crushed by reality every which way you look. This is the sad legacy of the crank known as Ray Kurzweil, a man who peaked far too early in life and had the world's most infamous midlife crisis.

  "Good god, man." He shut the book and threw it next to the NeuroUniverse suit. Every word he wrote deliberately tried to be as aggressively wrong as it could be, and he was probably unapologetic about it now that full-immersion virtual reality had become a thing. He wondered what a follow up would read like.

  'FIVR is a Hoax!' probably. All those videos of people claiming they feel anything are in fact case studies of people suffering from psychosis or using placebos.

  Speaking of videos, he realized that he still had his phone internet.

  He opened up the screen in his eye and navigated to Stellar, the video streaming site used by most FIVR let's players and roleplayers.

  The top five videos for the month all involved Nightmare Online. Each had tens of millions of views, with thousands currently watching.

  He clicked onto #3, which was a first person stream following a player named 'Princess Varvara'.

  The video expanded over his face and he was transported into the Romegoth world of Nightmare Online. Though he was obviously not feeling the same things as her, he was able to bring the view to encompass his entire vision.

  He flinched.

  The princess's vision flashed red and she cried out as she fell to the ground.

  Mark felt his heart race.

  She grabbed her golden longsword and threw it behind her back, bringing a banshee wail from a place Mark could not turn to see no matter how hard he tried turning around.

  +400 XP!

  He grinned. He bet the princess didn't even notice. The little red words flashed at the bottom left corner of his view.
<
br />   'I wonder how much experience she has?' he thought into a comment box.

  Quickly, a replier named "BigfootsCrustyTit" replied 'I think she said she's level 79.' Other replies piled on, agreeing with the assessment. Each brought their own mixtures of usernames. Some were modest, being simple names. Others were internet classic, and a few were vulgar.

  Mark's was simple, being his own name with a special number.

  MarkClark69: Wow, how long she's been playing?

  Tangiers Not Tangerine: One of the early installers

  ScoobyDooWhereAreYox: Varvara's been playing since December, and she's got around 15 bitcoins in game now.

  He felt amazed. Fifteen bitcoins! That put her in the category of being a millionaire.

  He sat back and watched her move onwards into a black dungeon, using a Greater Health Potion to restore 25% of her HP, and unsheath her rapier. She passed a glass pane and he caught a glimpse of her face and saw that she had elven ears and an extremely pale face.

  That one microsecond flash of her was enough to excite him. The thunder reminded him that he probably saw a lightning flash instead.

  She ambled down the dungeon, slaying goblins and banshees with what seemed like great ease. Yet he noticed that she stopped every so often, letting herself catch her breath. He couldn't see her stats, but he recognized the purple fluid in the flask she just drank as being a Lesser Stamina Potion.

  15% SP Restored

  She carried onwards, passing through a hallway where cobwebs flooded the corners and burnt out torches lined the walls. Skeletons hung from chains in various vaults while other branching rooms vanished into shadows. Spiders scurried across the floor. She stepped on several indiscriminately.

  “Spiders bug me,” she said. “You all know that. I see a spider, it has to die. It could give me Christmas gifts, bake me a strawberry and chocolate cake, and cure cancer— but it has to die. It’s getting a boot stomping out its guts. I’m sorry. But they’re all gonna die.” She found a particularly large spider hiding out next to a barrel. On top of the barrel were six gold coins, each worth a satoshi each.

  She brought her sword down into the spider, spewing its guts about. No XP earned from killing little bugs, but she still wore a face of pleasure. Then she collected her coins and continued on.

  She managed her way into a room with three arched doorways. All of the cracked obsidian doors were sealed shut with vines that pulsated and jiggled. The chat went wild, telling her to touch the vine and give the world some gory hentai.

  However, a fairy light glowed just before the middle door. She pressed her hand through the light, triggering a response.

  Its wings fluttered as it circled her head.

  'Tre tetri teschi in luce viola'

  She then stopped and spoke out loud, repeating the riddle.

  "If that's the case, then..." She lifted her sword, using it almost as if it were a torch as she carried it in front of the vines. She passed all three doors twice, then closed her eyes and bowed her head.

  "This one!" She stabbed the vines of the middle door, causing them to part. In the middle of the door, there was a design— four hearts under the sun. On the leftmost door, the design was that of a goat sitting in a pentagram. On the rightmost door, three skulls in purple light. Both seemed too gloomy.

  Once she access, she pulled a lever to lift the door.

  Mark's grinning satisfaction over her resourcefulness died just as quick as she did when a basilisk's head exploded out the door and tore her apart. It caught her in its jaws and swung her around, each swing tearing away a third of her health. Her screen went black, as did Mark's.

  'You Died A Foolish Death'

  She let out a stream of vulgarities and apologized to her audience.

  Mark still clapped, but the mistake helped her seem more like himself.

  'That's exactly the sort of thing that would happen to me,' he thought. Before then, she seemed unstoppable, laying waste to everything in her path and generally being a badass with no equal. But even elven princesses can be humbled.

  She respawned in an oikos that he recognized as being in the town of Knossos.

  You have used one of two daily instant respawns.

  Happy playing!

  The daily instant respawns! Mark felt both a sneer and a smile come to his face. The elite players had found ways to break the game in many ways, but undoubtedly one of the most unfair was the existence of Instant Respawn spells. Watching it in action with a player he supported was different than the usual negative envy he felt, but many still thought it to be cheap.

  Normally, players have to wait an hour before respawning. This was due to regulations, as well as something scientific that he didn't look too deeply into at the time but had apparently proven that dying in FIVR more than once in a single hour caused potentially dangerous mental trauma. This was the cost that the elites of the game paid, and no one was sure how well it was going to pay off for them in the long term.

  Then again, in the long term, any mental trauma they suffer would likely be rectified by machine doctors and whatever nanotechnological marvel they unveil next year and the years hence.

  Poor kids like himself would be out of luck for slightly longer until the prices inevitably came down (though some cynical types were not so sure this time). So he rationalized that it was probably for the best that the instant respawns were not spammed among the general population.

  That forum discussion of sexual deviants came back to mind. He imagined how terrifying the game could be for someone victimized by a virtual sadist could be and decided that there were better things to think about.

  Like Princess Varvara.

  She talked of how she was going to go back into the dungeon to get her loot, which was technically fair game to anyone who came across it in the meantime, but this time she was going to bring a few 'friends'.

  "You all know who I'm talking about," she said. She left the oikos, wandering into a town square and mingling with bunches of barbarian NPCs who were in the middle of trading with players. "I think desperate times call for desperate measures. It's really only right and just that I bring out the dwarf with the iron fists."

  The chat then went ballistic. It seemed everyone knew exactly what she was talking about and thought that the entire adventure was about to become that much more epic.

  He decided to not ask what she meant, instead waiting for someone else to ask. And the name "Malnov" kept getting chanted.

  "MALNOV! MALNOV! MALNOV!" So many names, all coming faster than an unlucky pervert. Many posted Malnov memes while others posted surprisingly well done fanart of the dwarf, allowing Mark a chance to see the dwarf's face.

  A few said a few unflattering words about Malnov, particularly crass jokes about his sexual preference or the weight of his mother. All of these were cast out as being jealous elves.

  Mark felt a tingle in his stomach as he imagined how awesome Malnov had to be to inspire such popularity, but before the stream could prove anything to him, the lights flipped on.

  He jumped, not expecting the sudden change. His fan came back on, and his clock flashed "12:00" over and over.

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  +1,000 EXP for reaching the end!