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 (nobody)...and 158 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
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I have begun writing a sci-fi serial epic. It is called "reperceiver". Be sure to read this thread oldest first: *** Raul and Cindy sat at opposing terminals, ready to enter Reperceiver for the umpteenth time, digesting their lunch. Raul, adjusting the straps attaching his feet and goggles to calibrate his comfort, says “I am glad this has all worked out so well, the start-up and all.” Cindy, her eyes clear and bright, nods her head in agreement. “It was so easy—easier than I’d imagined to venture a company with so much promise. You’d guess it would be obvious to people, to generate and perceive these recreations of the past with computer programs like this.” “People just don’t realize what computers can really do these days-- Or people, for that matter,” says Raul with a smile. They are comfortable, and done anticipating their venture into the past-- their own personal copies of the past. Computers do so much for people in this day in 2051, they have time for new and exciting applications of technology, thinks Raul. With this wonder his eyebrows arched like brown caterpillars inching along, ripe for the plucking by one of the few remaining birds in protected government apiaries—if only those birds could still live and fly and eat. Not much to be done when you’re on preservative synthetic blood and artificial stasis. Some people speculate that they still think, though no one has the guts to put a cybernetic brain augmentation on them to find out. |
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There were birds in Raul’s copy of the past. He had returned many times to the date of protective wildlife acts and engineered a social ruckus of preservation. In his 2028, when the truth and justice counselor programs running on the globalnet were given complete authority over the moral matters of species survival (all of them), a diverse many living things were still encoded. Though the moral programs at that time had less umph than they would develop later, their combination of ethical spinvertizing and a literate, conscientious, public was enough to preserve diversity for a more hopeful evolutionary future. Raul had learned a lot from the way his computer recompiled the universal chronology. They were things that he had only known from intuition before, or at least he felt that he knew them before. He knew the instant he looked over the effects of his time tinkering that he had desired the experience of a more harmonious world, even if it was just a simulation. Cindy had applied a different approach to rendering the past. In all but two years of life had she missed her father. He died fighting in a continental conflict thirty years prior, and for her his death was shrouded in mystery and confusion. She had returned to a time in her copy of the past before her father met her mother. This was before they raised two children in a government funded Families of Veterans of Major Conflict-Resolvers facility, even before he enlisted. She befriended this father and boldly asserted that she was his daughter from a real world, effectively representing the future. A prolonged transition composed of paranoid suspicion cloaking anger, then denial, and eventually acceptance ensued. It was very difficult for him to accept that he was a character in a computer simulation, but felt a deep bond with this simultaneously strange woman which engendered his trust. |
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Cindy and her father graduated from stalker and victim to daughter and father over about fifteen visits. He entirely accepted her assertions after she reappeared sporadically at key events in his life, delivering apparently advanced and intriguing information from an independent world, the reality of which was very difficult for him to grasp. However, in her guidance, he managed to pre-empt the entirety of his fate in the armed forces, excel in his education, and become an adviser to powerful political lobbies who were awed by his seeming prescience. The conflict in which he had died in Cindy’s real world never even occurred. Nor did her birth occur. Reperceiver was the name of the computer program that made all of this possible. It ran on an immensely powerful processor capable of simulating yottillions of interactions discerned from an analysis of all known knowledge available to the public of Earth. The real power ran on the globenet cybernetic entity, but for their purposes Cindy and Raul had designed their own program. They had the idea over dinner one evening as inspired by a co-worker of Raul’s. The man had been raving about an article he had read about ‘Recreating reality’ and ‘All your fantasies realized’ and a video of a wild orgy that had been entirely synthetic, orchestrated by one human participant, a Professor and his computer running a simulation. Raul realized he’d heard talk of this sort at his Uncle’s house at family gatherings. He phoned his uncle, and was quickly in business. Raul knew little about this sort of business, but his uncle was accommodating and informative. His uncle worked for the government developing software to run new deep VR, immersive reality environments on the wildly fast new generation of computing substrate. His uncle would hook him up with what he needed to “Experience mind-blowing augmentations of the once-presumed limits of human experience!” |
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It took less than three daily sessions for Raul and Cindy to go from first-timers into avid manipulators of this rich tool for exploration. They quickly realized while experiencing realities far more compelling than their own that they had hungered for it. They took a copy of the software home to run on their own entertainment system. Before this, virtual realities had really been lacking something, they thought. “I guess we’re just lucky my Uncle is on the front wave,” said Raul, eager to tap the enter key and get start re-experiencing things that had never happened. “You uploaded all the new data, right?” “Sure did, I even entered some creative suggestions my fa—“ answered Cindy, prematurely ending as Raul tapped the key and his body tensed with the brief startle of being zipped from one realm of sensory input to another. Chromatic snow, everywhere. His vision looked the way it did when he was in grade school and pressed his fingers against the vessels supplying blood to his retina. Little flurries of scintillating rainbow bursts. This was wrong. Raul had intended to return to the end of the first decade of the century, where he could take part in rallying critical masses of intellectuals to explore their wide open future. There was divide between scientifically literate communities and the consumer pure capitalist masses. In his reality this had been a historic juncture, and in his tinkering he had learned very much about cause and effect. He wanted to see what would happen if drastically altered the plan in ways that encouraged species survival, if the program’s limits could be stretched that far. Maybe he had already stretched his computational allocations and this was the program crashing. He moved to pull the headpiece from his eyes and ears and flesh. |
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To his utter surprise and subsequent horror, the storm of optical pyrotechnics did not subside with the removal of Raul’s goggles because he could not find them. This was quite wrong. “Ack! Cindy, what has happened?” he wanted to say but found himself unable to speak. Nor could he feel his limbs or see himself, he discovered. All his sensory experience had seemingly become homogenously baffling. He could hear (or feel, or something like it) only the harmonic wash of pleasant noise that appeared one in the same with the rainbow flurry. He could hear, he thought, but where were his ears? Raul began to feel quite distressed at his situation, but was comforted knowing at least that he still had some sort of feelings. Like rain materializing in a thick fog, a distinct sound with familiar pattern became apparent to Raul. His visual world pulsed in congruence with what he slowly recognized as human speech. It was a warm voice, brimming with hope and optimism of a sort Raul had never encountered. “It is alright, this is a good thing,” the voice proclaimed, and suddenly, for Raul, it was. He instantly felt desire for more of whatever it was he was experiencing, the a warmth welling up in him where confusion and dread retreated. A world came into focus around him, and promptly overloaded his senses. He was standing in a dense tropical forest, surrounded by the calls of wild animals and fruit dangling voluptuously from trees both ancient and young. Some of the sounds he heard he recognized—insects, birds, rodents, some large thing shuffling through the underbrush. He thought he could make out the sound of distant drums and possibly tribal singing. Other sounds were like many of the fruit on the trees in that he had no prior experience with them and had no luck identifying them. A fierce repeating noise like a rhythmic pulse of cat meows yowled by far overhead, and Raul heard voices of similar origin respond from the heights of the forest canopy. |
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A bug adorned with dazzling geometric color sequences buzzed precariously near his eyes and nose, and he swatted at it. Ah, a there is my hand, he thought! “Did you think you’d lost it?” said the voice which had reassured him earlier. Following the sound to his left revealed a man with a familiar face sitting atop the a sideways log of a fallen redwood tree. The man had dark cropped hair past his ears tan skin with gentle lines next to his mouth that betrayed a propensity for smiling. “You have many questions. You don’t need to ask them all, I’ll just answer as best I can, alright?” “Please,” said Raul and seated himself next to this evidently kind entity. His mind connected the face to it’s name, and he asked, “Aren’t you Carl Sagan?” “Please yourself!” said the man playfully, “I said I’d answer your questions—do you need to ask them outloud? Yes, just thinking them is enough. I mean, in normal situations you might want to keep the feelings and speaking whole for a more meaningful exchange, but this is hardly a normal situation, for what you’re used to.” “Oh,” thought Raul, “Please go on.” “Yes, I look like Carl Sagan, and to some extent, yes, I am he. This presentation is good because of the great rapport induced by the workings of the man. You can trust him, because he is looking out for you. He is the patron saint of exploring other worlds, and is has a great reputation for the credit of his information. In his life he dedicated himself to these things, exploring new worlds, promoting reliable information, and most importantly, he made every act an act of love.” |
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“Other worlds? Like this simulated one in the computer?” asked Raul. “Yes and no. Some other worlds exist under the under the same umbrella as your own. Some are under other umbrellas. It is not hard to traverse these worlds—you do it in your head as easily as your computer has, only on a different scale. The limiting factor is . You, yourself, are a world of worlds of a great many probabilities.” “Myself?” “Yes. Some worlds are easy to comprehend, some are more difficult. What really makes a difference is the complexity of the information, and the system you use to perceive it. For example, all of the worlds you are conscious of traveling in so far share certain kinds of complication. Try to imagine, if you will, a world outside of the umbrella of time.” “Like sleep?” asked Raul, his mind balking. “Actually, yes, like dreams.. But consider the place from which I come, a place where the time of lower systems is bought and sold like shares in a early twenty-first century stock market. My reality is one of near pure information, where the scope and scale of changes there are deep and wide in their effect on other isomorphic worlds.” |
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“Bought and sold? How do you buy and sell time? Why, even, is this done?” “There are forces that mind the gaps of lower realities. Any energy that can be siphoned out of the realities of the ignorant and unenlightened is energy that these entities can use for their own devices. This is part of why I have come here to see you. The question of ‘why’ is one that cannot be answered in any language that your brain structure renders into meaning. The deepest ‘why’ is only satisfied by a holistic relationship with everything in existence, here or anywhere else. Luckily, all beings are given a sense of holism to which they can have access and use to divine more complicated, lower level truths.” “I see,” said Raul, telling a bit of a lie. “You do. Whether you do or not has been up to you, on your time, in your most familiar realities. That is another part of why I am here—you’ve been doing well, but what you can do in retrospect is only so much, and the longer you spend doing is less time for doing what really matters for particular purpose for which you have evolved.” “Thanks for all the great information,” said Raul, his eyes wide. He felt different. He was satisfied in a way for which explicated few words, and sat contentedly for a few minutes. His friend said nothing in this time, only smiling and appreciating the good cheer. |
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Then a point of worry dawned across Raul’s mind and face. “Can I go back?” he asked. “Back where? Oh—no, never. You’re still there, all of those places.” “Where?” “The world where your uncle gave you the program, the other where you did so much good—there are versions of you still there. Good thing, too, they need you. When we’re done here, which we nearly are, you could go back to a place nearly identical to those realities, but not the exact same. The exact nature of them exists only in you now. You’re going somewhere a little different.” Raul had little time to absorb all this. His friend, whose existence was compelling and intriguing enough, mysterious vanished as did the lush rainforest diversity. Rainbow noise. For no more than a second did he perceive this and then like some infernal aurora borealis his mind lit up with golden fireballs. His physical form was gone once again. He saw only this turbulent amber, gold, and orange field, before a shape arose in the center of his vision like a black sun. It was a black dot, and it appeared to be flickering at intense frequency. This buzzing dot emerged as two dots, cycling between one and two in circular oscillating dance. Two dots, three dots, more dots, and a warm sensation on his face. He had a face, and it was quite comfortable. He was awake, and peeled the face from his drool encrusted arm. “What wonder is this?” he thought. He was rested and slowly becoming more aware of his surroundings, as if awakening from a deep slumber, but he knew still the wonder of what had been far too complicated to compare to any dream he thought himself capable of experiencing. Why, he could still hear the rainforest, or, rather, what he thought to be the rainforest that on further cogitation he perceived to be birds chirping outside. “Birds,” he muttered in amazement and sat up. |
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I am currently too cross to read your carefully crafted story. When my blood has cooled i will read further |
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Raul climbed from his cotton sheets eyeing the walls of the wide airy room with more than a little suspicion. There was art on his walls he did not recognize, and everything seemed to be in a state of disrepair. It was at least less shiny, he thought. A great din accompanied sunlight brighter than that to which he was accustomed through a window that looked out onto a busy city street. The air smelled fresh and was rich with foreign smells. Despite the surreal detour, he was immersed in some version of Seattle, in the United States of America, in 2008, exactly where he had expected to materialize, but in a manner that he could do no more than play at understanding. He reached his hands to his face and they touched his eyes with no resistance—there were no goggles to remove. Certainly, this could not be a simulation. |
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yeah- that's the first installment. |
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