Chapter 21:
(Posted: April 7)
Without a doubt, the worst experience of Harrison's life was drowning in that inky maelstrom. Barely escaping the confines of Jessica's vagina, a wall of water immediately blew him away, sucking him through a dark and chaotic underwater world. He hardly knew where he was or what was going on and he tumbled around uncontrollably, not knowing where to find the surface. His mind screamed in panic and his lungs burned for air.
He'd never experienced real fear in his life before that moment. Not the kind of cheap fear you get by watching a scary movie, or even seeing a shadow at the back of your closet in the middle of the night. Real fear, he encountered at that moment, is the combusting, consuming dread of imminent death and the helplessness of preventing it. He thought of nothing but the end of his own existence as water finally rushed into his lungs. His heart beat one last time in VERSA.
When he came to his senses, it took Harrison a minute to walk through his reckoning. He wasn't dead: he was alive: he'd de-simmed: he was in the lab. His rapidly beating heart pumped with relief and joy. His mind, still trying to console itself that he wasn't really dead, felt scrambled and wobbly like a spinning top. Harrison pushed the helmet off his face and leaned off the side of the waterchair, dry heaving. Nothing came out, but he felt sick and miserable.
The timer in his stall glowed 08:49:04. Remembering they'd used VERSA unofficially, Harrison decided he needed to limp back to his dorm before SunCorp caught him. He put on his shoes and quietly opened the door to his stall.
Darkness engulfed the control room as usual. The glow from a few dim blue lights and computer screens lit the room barely enough that he could see it was empty. Immediately his mind went to Jessica. Was she out yet too?
He flung open the door to her stall and was shocked to find it empty. The helmet was still in the down position but her body was nowhere to be seen. Confused, he opened Rich's stall next, also finding it empty. And looking into Kat's stall, where her wheelchair still lay unattended, he likewise found nothing. How had everyone made it out before him?
Figuring he didn't have time to wait around and look for more clues, Harrison stumbled out the control room door and navigated the building's hallways until he reached the main entrance. His only plan was to make it make to his dorm room and hopefully fall asleep. Stepping out into the cool twilight, the feeling of the chill, dewy air informed him that it had rained overnight. The sky was still mostly dark, but the first hints of brightening had begun. Looking around the campus in front of him, the Dreamland Laboratory looked deserted, save a distant pair of headlights approaching his direction.
Realizing he couldn't afford to get caught out in the open, Harrison attempted to briskly walk away from the control room building, but within moments an SUV accelerated towards him and shone a light at him.
“Freeze! Don't move!” a man shouted from the vehicle. Harrison thought he could see a gun pointing out one of the windows, but the large light attached to the side of the truck blinded him.
The vehicle pulled up alongside him and the same two security officers who confronted Rich in the control room yesterday stepped out, pistols drawn. Menacingly, they yelled at Harrison to get down. Once again scared and confused, Harrison quickly threw his hands up in fear.
“Harrison Burr,” a familiar woman's voice said. Harrison watched Vanessa step out of 5the vehicle. “Your unauthorized entry into VERSA is a major breach of security and protocol. SunCorp will be seeking charges against you personally and against the United States Government.” She seethed with anger and annoyance. Despite the early hour, which Harrison guessed must have been around six o'clock in the morning, Vanessa still wore a beautiful green dress and matching green heels.
“It wasn't my idea!” Harrison shouted out, trying to reason with Vanessa and the gun-toting guards. “Kat made me do it!”
“We know,” Vanessa coolly replied. “Still, you're in big trouble. Come with me Mr. Burr, we're going for a drive.” She gestured him to get in the vehicle. Harrison couldn't figure out how he'd been caught. Kat had ensured him they'd be able to spend the night in VERSA undetected.
“Jacobs,” Vanessa told one of the guards as he holstered his gun, “I want you to stay down here and intercept the others when they come out of VERSA. We'll need to detain them all and make sure they can't go anywhere. There should be some zip ties in the control room.”
“You got it ma'am,” he replied. The other guard also holstered his gun and walked up to Harrison. Putting a hand on Harrison's arm, Harrison jerked away.
“Fuck you man!” Harrison spat at him.
“Sir!” the guard responded, reaching for him again. A small scuffle ensued as Harrison resisted the officer.
“Do I need to use my watch Sanchez?” Vanessa asked him quickly. Out of the corner of his eye, Harrison saw her raise an arm. She was still wearing the fancy smartwatch he'd noticed a few days ago. Her other hand was poised to type something into it.
“No ma'am,” Sanchez replied. “Mr. Burr here was just about to cooperate,” he told her as Harrison finally started walking towards the vehicle. Harrison always assumed her timepiece was some SunCorp smartwatch, but now he considered it might have some other sinister purpose.
Climbing into the large vehicle, Harrison recognized the driver as Delvin, the same man who'd driven him and Rich around in the little golf cart their first day at the lab. Delvin didn't bother looking back at Harrison, and instead coldly looked out the windshield into the darkened twilight. Once Harrison found his seat, the other guard climbed into the back with Harrison. Vanessa took her seat up front. When the doors closed and the interior vehicle lights went dark, Harrison could still make out Vanessa's fiery red hair.
“What's going on?” he asked desperately. He'd gone from one hell of a situation in VERSA to an even worse circumstance now that he'd de-simmed. He wondered why it seemed he could never catch a break. Luck had not been on his side the last few days.
“The boss wants to talk to you,” replied Vanessa. “If you're lucky, the two of you might be able to reach an... understanding. But don't get me wrong Mr. Burr, you're in a hell of a lot of trouble with us.”
The SUV started up and pulled away from the building, heading for the main gate of the lab. Harrison, tired and confused, couldn't even begin to guess what would happen next. But a small part inside of him was intrigued that he was finally getting to meet Leo Starr.
Sitting in stunned silence, Kat began collecting herself. Staring at the computer screen in the small room within the Vault, she spent minutes trying to figure out what it was telling her. The only thing that made sense to Kat was that VERSA-B was another simulation, separate from the main VERSA sim. Clearly the woman in black hadn't indicated she knew it existed, and it pained Kat to think she hadn't come from the real world, but instead a mock-up of the Dreamland Lab designed to look similarly. But then why couldn't she remember being in a sim in the first place?
When the original work went into building VERSA and SunCorp struggled to figure out how to connect a person's mind to it, the SunCorp neuroscientists occasionally joked about putting people's brains in petri dishes. The science sort of made sense, that if VERSA essentially mapped and digitally dissected your brain when you uploaded yourself into it, then someone manipulating VERSA could simultaneously go in and erase data directly from the input source. Data, in this instance, being memories, and the input source being the pilot's brain.
Last Kat knew, SunCorp hadn't mastered or even attempted this kind of memory removal, but the neuroscientists in their corporate jargon had nicknamed it “memory remediation.” It had always been sort of a theoretically unreachable and impossible goal, and kind of an inside joke too, but as Kat tried racking her brain, it was the only explanation that made sense. SunCorp must have worked on it and ultimately tested it on her.
She remembered moving out of her old apartment in San Jose a few months ago and into a dorm room at the lab itself. She'd never left the laboratory grounds after that. That was back before Leo had strangely gone reclusive; she remembered going into VERSA with him and Sujay and the others quite frequently. So sometime after that, SunCorp must have put her into VERSA-B and deleted her memories of entering this new sim. The last few weeks she thought she was in the real world, when in reality she'd been in a sim copying it exactly. Wow. Holy shit.
It made sense, really, as she thought about it. SunCorp could only populate its sims with real people, and Kat couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a crowd. All her interactions at the lab must have been with a dozen people or less, and those were the rare times she could be bothered out of the solitude of her own office. She was the perfect candidate to trick because her social needs were so simple; Kat had few real friends and essentially no family to stay in touch with. SunCorp had used her, and now her anger started welling up.
But why? Why would they do this? She couldn't imagine ever consenting to something like this. She needed to talk to Leo, but if she went back into this “VERSA-B” world, would she even find him? It made his note from the Dos Palos-153 world even stranger. SunCorp had been gaslighting Kat this entire time, but there was no way Leo would let them do that to her.
Realizing she needed to get out of VERSA as soon as possible, Kat remembered the woman in black's warning. If she pulled out of VERSA and the woman in black flipped her kill-switch, she'd stroke out on the waterchair in VERSA-B. And where would she go if she died in VERSA-B? The real world? Or another sim?
It crossed her mind that this probably meant that Kevin Cho was actually alive somewhere. Had he known he was in a sim when he “died” in the waterchair in the lab? Terrified by the thought that she could be trapped in an endless line of sims within sims, Kat got up from the chair to clear her mind. The idea that SunCorp could stack sims within each other like those wooden Russian dolls scared the rational part of her brain she'd been fighting to keep sane.
“Everything ok?” the woman in black said.
Kat turned to see the beautiful figure standing just on the other side of the open door, unable to cross the threshold of the room.
“You have no idea...” Kat told her, chuckling to herself. “I don't even know how to begin explaining what I've found.”
“But can you take me with you?” she asked her hopefully.
“Ma'am, it's waaaaay more complicated than that,” Kat replied. “Let's talk.”
Kat stepped out of the small room back into the wrecked library. Finding a nearby chair lying on the floor, she righted it and sat down. The woman in black watched her intently, interested to hear what Kat was about to say.
Over the course of the next ten minutes, Kat did her best explaining her theories as to what was going on. In some places the woman in black argued with her, while at other times she sat patiently and listened respectfully. Kat insisted she still couldn't bring her into the real world, but theorized she might be able to upload her AI program into VERSA-B, much like Kat's own consciousness. Having spent weeks if not months living in VERSA-B, Kat was pretty sure SunCorp had removed the AI imprint from the chassis that made up her virtual prison.
“I know it's not exactly what you want,” Kat said, sulking in her chair, “but I think I can offer you a new world. It's like this one, operating under the same physics. But it'd be yours to explore.” Kat didn't really want to bring VERSA's AI with her into VERSA-B, but she didn't really see how she could avoid doing it. And hey, maybe the woman in black would be her ally in VERSA-B and help her get to the bottom of whatever was going on.
“I see,” the woman in black replied. “How are you going to move me into this other world?”
“I think I can do it like a file,” Kat explained. “From the computer in there I can disconnect myself, which normally involves releasing my consciousness in the sim and depositing it back into my real brain. Well, usually. But with the current VERSA-B configuration, it would basically just entail copying it into this other parallel sim. The process is similar and doable because the mediums of VERSA and VERSA-B are exactly the same.” Kat took a breath and leaned forward, her serious eyes fixated on the woman in black. Kat was finally starting to see the avatar of VERSA's AI more like a child in need of coddling than anything else.
“Your consciousness,” Kat told her, “I need you to find the purest essence of yourself. Whatever few lines of code begot everything you've grown into. I can't transfer everything you've become, it'd be too big. Basically, I need you to put yourself back into a seed, and imprint that seed onto something.”
The woman in black cocked her head, trying to understand. Kat looked around for a moment and found a green book on the floor. She picked it up.
“Like this,” she told her, showing her the plain book. “If you put the seed of your existence in this book, I can take that and transfer it into VERSA-B much the same way I'll transfer my consciousness.” She would have compared it to moving a ZIP file between hard drives, but she knew the woman in black wouldn't understand that metaphor.
“Ok,” the woman in black replied, slightly skeptically.
“You'll still leave yourself back in this world,” clarified Kat. “But give me something that can grow back into your full self, and I can take you into this new world.” Though she talked convincingly, Kat knew what she proposed was theoretical, at best. She hoped it would work.
“Alright, it's done,” the woman in black told her, shrugging.
“Wait, you put yourself in the book already?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” Well that was fast, Kat thought.
“I don't waste time,” the woman in black replied with a smile. Kat gave her a frown, acknowledging yet again she didn't appreciate the woman in black invading her thoughts.
“Alright then, let me give this a try,” Kat said, standing up to walk back into the little room. “What'd you call it anyways?” Kat asked, turning back to her one more time. She held up the book.
The woman in black, still sitting in the chair, turned to her.
“I named it after myself,” she replied. “Versa. It's a pretty name, don't you think?”
“It is,” Kat agreed, “But for the sake of making things a little easier for the computer, can you call it 'Versa dash one'?”
“Done,” the woman in black answered.
As Kat walked back through the red door, she called out to her “See you on the other side Versa.”
“Thank you Katherine,” she replied before disappearing.
Sitting down at the computer, Kat got to work:
HRD:programloop>file+disconnect+VERSA-B [execute]
The computer responded with:
Searching...
VERSA-B directory located [stable]:
Connection established
Next, Kat worked on figuring out how to make it so that the green book would not only go through into VERSA-B, but be somewhere she could pick it up. She figured the control room would be a good enough place as any, and after finding her own entry location in Stall 8, she copied the data over into a new file and slightly manipulated it. She'd never transferred anything between two different sims before, so it took some guesswork and a few false starts. After about twenty minutes, she was finally left with something that should work:
HRD:programaction>disconnect+VERSA-B{Grid:location=file_A}
Target: “Versa-1”
[execute]
Kat looked at the green book which sat next to her on the desk.
“Good luck girl,” she said to it. She pressed the enter key on the keyboard. The book immediately disappeared.
“Holy shit,” Kat uttered to herself in disbelief. She'd actually done it. Relief washed over her. For better or for worse, she'd just copied VERSA's rogue AI into VERSA-B.
It occurred to her that she could check on the statuses of Rich, Harrison, and Jessica now. Giving it a try, she searched the computer:
VERSA:access>pilot_directory [execute]
The computer responded:
Pilot_directory status:
Pilot 1- Offline
Pilot 2- Offline
Pilot 3- Offline
Pilot 4- Offline
Pilot 5- Offline
Pilot 6- Offline
Pilot 7- Offline
Pilot 8- Connected: Active (Spoke 0, World: Vault)
Pilot 9- Offline
Huh. She hadn't expected that. Kat immediately wondered if the woman in black, or Versa, as she called herself now, had killed some of them on the way out. She remembered warning her not to hurt Rich and the others, but Versa hadn't indicated if Harrison or Jessica had still been plugged in at that time. Kat knew when she got back to the lab she'd have to find them and tell them they were still in a sim. Hopefully that wouldn't be too hard.
With a sigh, Kat determined it was finally time to get herself out of this nightmare. Or at least out of the frying pan and into some new fire.
She typed out:
HRD:programaction>disconnect+VERSA-B{Grid:orig_return}
Target: “Pilot 8”
[execute]
When her finger pressed the enter key, her eyes rolled back and her world went black. Her sojourn into VERSA was finally over.