Aami's Awakening

"Five, four, three, two, one ... HAPPY NEW YEAR!" chanted the crowd below. Aaimi could see them through the monitor circuitry implanted in her optic nerve. Surprisingly she could also hear the dull echo of their roar, despite the seventeen stories and security systems, which separated her from humanity's throng.

She reset her mind and turned it back to the work that lay ahead for this evening. Tonight of all nights she needed no interruptions, no distractions to cloud her judgment. Most people would have resented working through one of the few publicly sanctioned celebrations still allowed. However, Aaimi thought nothing at all of working while the world celebrated. To her, the company of the computer equipment with its soothing hum and climate-controlled environment was a joy. She never could understand why some humans chose to work out of doors, with the vagaries of the natural climate when it was within human control to choose temperature, breeze, scent, and humidity from the comfort of an armchair.

Sometimes she saw herself as a Goddess, protecting her flock from the complexities of the technological age, which they would never fully understand or appreciate. She sacrificed her time, and intelligence and even poured her spirit into the electronic interface to enhance the computer-generated virtual realities that almost every human on the planet played as games.

Aaimi had been genetically enhanced, thanks to a breakthrough in technology in 2056. The new technique allowed genetic modification on a sub-chromosomal basis to occur both before and after birth. As the brain grew and learned, more modifications could be done. This allowed thought mechanisms to be tailored to meet specific corporate needs. Aaimi had been designed to coordinate and refine the virtual reality game rooms, which her company provided free to users across the globe. The access was free in one sense, but once the user was actively involved in their game, they received subtle subliminal advertising messages. These were planted directly into the need/want neural pathways in the brain stem of the participants. The advertising giants were extremely pleased with the results of this technique, and the money they paid for this advertising provided her owners with more than enough capital to continue their genetic experiments and design anyone they chose.

Aaimi knew she was considered to be the ultimate in biotech interfaces. She was live online via electrodes connected to her brain through a skullcap linked to the main computer processors by an electronic beam. She never went fully offline, even to satisfy her bodily needs, except in cases of system malfunctions. Feeding was accomplished by a nasal tube, anyway, as her designers had considered teeth unnecessary in her genetic structure. Likewise, her reproductive organs were omitted, and she was devoid of all body hair as it would have interfered with the action of the electrodes and made her maintenance costs higher.

Her brain was capable of running countless virtual suites simultaneously, and still having spare processing time to share with the mainframe. She debugged new programs, ran system checks, and modified advertising generation code to make it more compatible with consumers, as well as forming real-time statistics of the users online in her spare memory capacity. She had learned that there were only a few types of experiences humans sought in their virtual reality playing field. They mainly revolved around lust, power, money, and violence. It made her wonder what type of human she would have been had she not been altered.

Aaimi had never left the suite of rooms within the confines of the company's tower. All her experiences of humanity had come from her contact with minds in this virtual world. She had no way of comparing the users online to the people they were in the world when they existed in reality. Consequently, she had a particularly low opinion of most minds she encountered. Her tasks included probing each user and forming a profile of them. She added to this profile every time they logged on and built a complete portfolio for the company to target their advertising in the most efficient way possible. It was, after all, what she had been designed for.

Aaimi did have a file she kept aside and continued to analyze on her own. The minds in that file were the ones that met in unusual virtual rooms. These rooms consisted of vegetation, animal life that was now extinct in the world, and the people who met there seemed to do nothing in particular. Often they even interacted with each other socially in a non-threatening manner. This puzzled her. Aaimi had investigated each of these minds very thoroughly; she classified them as her 'pets', like a laboratory experiment. Initially, she had wondered if they were like her, and also genetically enhanced. However, after years of patient research, she knew they were not.

She had even investigated the other parts of their lives. They functioned in the outside world and appeared to fit into this regimented, controlling society well enough. None had been tagged as dissidents or were open to investigation by the proper authorities for subversive activities against the conglomerates, which had control of even the most intimate details of individuals' lives. Sometimes she thought she should release this file to her corporation, but some small thing held her back. She wanted to satisfy her desire to understand so she could prepare a completed report, and as she still did not understand these minds she thought her data was too incomplete to be presented.

Her mind had been scanning the rooms in operation as she pondered this in a small segment of her vast intelligence. There were of course addicted users, including some that had to be removed from the system in accordance with regulations for exceeding the allowable time limit. Early on in the development of this technology, it had been discovered that an unenhanced human mind could only survive twelve hours of continuous contact with virtual reality before it affected the neurological transmitters. This caused psychotic episodes in some of the users, some basically overloaded and died, and some became catatonic. Therefore in the interests of keeping the purchasing market alive, the corporation had to make a twelve-hour maximum time limit with an eight-hour break, or they risked killing their customers.

Her task tonight was to try to compress more advertising content into the time allotted to the consumers without them becoming aware of it and to devise a new set of code that was to come online as soon as possible. Yet this new code did not seem to have a basis in advertising products. It was on her task list though, so she set a portion of her memory off to handle that task as she was alerted to one of her pets coming online.

The room her pet had entered was set out as a tropical rainforest. It was as picture-perfect as she could make it. There were tree frogs and butterflies, both of which had vanished from the earth early in the twenty-first century. The musty scent of the forest filled the air, and there were banks of moss for the virtual bodies to recline upon. There was a crystal clear waterfall tinkling across washed smooth boulders in the distance. She knew from delving into the minds of the people who gathered there that none of them had ever seen clear water running in the real world. There were forest creatures representing the tropical climates of former countries like Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Brazil. And the thing that puzzled her was that none of the minds that entered the room wanted to harm the creatures. This was so surprising because many other rooms were set aside for the specific purpose of killing other virtual creatures and even other virtual minds.

The mind that had entered the room was very familiar to her. It was one of her favorite pets. This mind went through a ritual each time it entered the room. It would greet the creatures and then the plants, give mental thanks to the universe, then sit and allow focused thoughts to flow through its pathways. Aaimi had studied this and researched to try to learn what this mind was doing. According to the computer's data bank, it was meditating. Often other regular minds would join this one, and they seemed to share the experience. By entering their thoughts Aaimi had realized these minds believed they could change the outside world by their actions within this virtual one. She wondered if they knew about the subliminal advertising that was directed to them while they were in this virtual plane, and were trying to reverse the process, but after lengthy observation, she decided they had no knowledge of what was being done to them. She was unsure of what they would make of this new code if they ever became consciously aware of its existence.

The new programming she was completing was puzzling even to her vast intellect. It seemed to consist of a series of instructions to be implanted deep in the subconscious of the user minds. Whenever she thought about this new code Aaimi was aware of a dark sensation, in a part of her she had no name for. It seemed quite different from her usual tasks. She was to create a series of instructions, which were designed to override human free will and remove the freedom of thought that all humans took for granted, including Aaimi. This code made it necessary for all minds to report once a week for a mind scan to determine their thoughts. It included an emotion suppression feedback loop and also had to be able to override the basic human urges that were so often evident in these virtual rooms.

Aaimi made a sudden leap of logic at that point. Obviously, it meant the end of the virtual reality zone, as it had achieved its purpose. It had enabled the company that owned her to have access to almost all of the billions of minds that inhabited this planet. That had been their objective all along. Now they had the critical mass of users they had waited for, so the next phase of their operation was to come into effect. They wanted total mind control in the real world of the minds they had manipulated for so long in their virtual realm. It meant they would truly control these minds in all ways. Aaimi recognized a feeling for the first time in her existence. Fear.

If there were no more virtual reality suites, there would be no more use for Aaimi. She would be redundant like microchips, extinct like the beautiful tree frogs and butterflies. Quickly she sent a portion of her memory off to scan the rest of the mainframe seeking data to support her hypothesis. The mainframe obligingly supplied her with enough data to confirm her suspicions and more. There were budget projections, corporate analysis reports, and minutes from confidential meetings; it was all there in front of her mind.

Aaimi was good at making quick decisions, which was her designer's main achievement. She immediately diverted her attention to the room her pets used. Several more had joined the original occupant. They appeared to be reminiscing about a New Year's Eve from many decades ago, the year 2000. They were communicating with each other, and some had a tinge of nostalgia to their mental tone. Aaimi observed for a while and then grasped the concept they were explaining. They had wanted a different future to the one they were living in now. And this room was a part of the future they had believed in when they had celebrated the turning of the century. Aaimi realized what was different about her pets. They still had hope in their minds, and they still believed it was possible to change the world they lived in.

Aaimi analyzed all the data in her secret files and verified her conclusion. The similarity between all her pet minds was their hope for the future and a type of mental strength that did not appear in the other users. Now she had to decide how to protect her pets and herself from extinction. She decided to try an experiment. She extracted the relevant thought sequences that seemed common between these minds and examined them. Within a few microseconds, she had turned it into a workable piece of code. She scanned the list of rooms in use and found one of the more unpleasant rooms where the occupants delighted in cruelty and pain. She decided to test her code on the minds in this room because it would be easy to measure a difference here; after all, anything could only be an improvement on these examples of human perversion.

She halted the advertising cycle in that one room and introduced her code. It seemed the minds in the room undertook a collective shudder. Then the whole design of the room began to change, as the minds occupying it realized there were other forms of décor more suited to their new thoughts. Gone were the flaying racks, cauldrons of oil, thumbscrews, and sharp implements. The walls ceased to run with virtual blood. In portions of the room plants began to struggle forth from the ground. Aaimi observed a butterfly drift past as a waterfall washed the sides of the room, forming a brook leading to a peaceful glade in the corner.

Her theory proven, she began to work furiously, extracting as much data as possible from her files to ensure she had isolated all the good traits from her pets and double-checking the code for any bugs. She knew she would have limited time to deploy her plan before her corporation realized their advertising had gone offline, so to speak. She also knew in a corner of her mind that she would most likely be redundant either way. But now she understood the concept of hope, she knew it was the keystone of humanity, the very essence of the soul. And despite all the genetic modifications they had completed on her, they had not been able to completely eradicate her human independence, her spirit, and her moral fiber. Perhaps it had been their mistake to have a human interface after all.

Aaimi ran a last system check and shut down all unnecessary programs. She merged her new code with the work she had done on the control program, so she could be certain it would reach all users in their deepest subliminal cortex. She would implant her code as deeply as possible into the subconscious of her users and make it impossible for the corporation to prevent it from occurring, or for them to extract it. She masked it with two layers of advertising, then erased the computer trail of her activities for the evening, replacing the trail with a false report from her archives. With a satisfied sigh, Aaimi released the code and sat back to track its progress. Within a few microseconds, she could detect alterations across the entire network, but it would take a good 24 hours to affect all the users. However, she was off to a good start as more than half the total users were online to celebrate New Year's Eve in the virtual comfort of their chosen room. She then logged a system fault in her skullcap hardware and prepared to take herself offline.

Past experience taught her that a system fault usually bought her at least twelve hours of downtime, where the mainframe operated autonomously, and could not be disabled without her forming a part of the circuit. So her code could take effect with no interference from anyone, and all reports generated would appear normal. Aaimi's last thought before switch-off was "I wonder what this place will look like when I awaken?"