Instance Ch. 03

Something in Ian's gaze hardened. "No." He studied Jackson's face. "No, I can see that. Forget I said anything. Go find Eli."

He turned back to his computer, and Jackson left the office. He was ashamed of his outburst, but glad he'd stood up for himself. It was odd, feeling as though he was a guest in Ian's house, and so obligated to do whatever the man asked of him. But as much as Ian was doing him a favour, getting involved in Jackson's love life was a step too far.

*

He spent the afternoon serving the regulars under Eli's tutelage, and then begged off at half one to join Brooke at the Metropolitan Remand Centre.

They sat at a small table in an open area, where the furniture was fixed in place.

Derek Lincoln was brought to them by a guard, who took up a position close-by.

Brooke's attacker was wearing an oversized white t-shirt and a sloppy green prison-issue tracksuit. He seated himself on one of the uncomfortable plastic moulded stools, and leaned on his elbows on the table.

"Hello again." He gave Brooke a yellow-toothed grin. "Did you miss me?"

Brooke smiled back at him, and there were razorblades in her gaze.

"Don't get cocky with me, prison-bitch. I'm your ticket out of here, so maybe you want to show some respect."

Jackson blinked.

Derek's gaze slid sideways to land on Jackson. "Bet she keeps you in line."

Jackson leaned forward. "Shut the fuck up, unless you want to spend the next six months in here. She's offering you a way out. I'd take it if I were you."

The man's grin broadened. "So. What do you want from me, then?"

Brooke tapped the table. "Eyes here." Derek slowly slid his gaze back to her. "First things first. What were you doing at my house?"

"I don't remember, but they tell me I'd smoked a bit of meth. Must have a bad turn."

"You followed me before that. Why?"

He shrugged. "No idea."

"How about this then—what does 'DCQE' mean to you?"

For a moment, the man's face crumpled in confusion. "DCQE?"

Jackson could see the man's mind processing furiously as he started mumbling, "Remember, remember, if you see it, it changes. If you see it, you can get out." He looked up at them both. "You're Jackson Inglewood. Oh fuck."

"You know me?"

Derek nodded. "Well. Kinda. You're the reason we're all trapped in this fucking... antique simulation."

Electric fear scrambled down Jackson's spine.

"What do you know about that?"

Derek snorted. "Oh, you are so fucked."

Brooke cast Jackson a glance. He could see wariness in her eyes, but not panic. Not yet.

Jackson pulled out the piece of paper he and Brooke had found that morning, and slid it in front of the other man.

"What do you know about this?"

Derek pushed the piece of paper flat to the table, and ran his fingers across it.

"Forgot I sent you this," he muttered to himself. "Fucker keeps re-immersing me." As he said it, it seemed to Jackson his voice sounded lighter. Younger.

Derek shook his head. "You've got to get out of here." He glanced up at Jackson. "You've got someone pretty fucking nasty after you. A jilted ex, I'm guessing. Someone who seriously hates your guts."

Jackson tapped the note. "Are you seriously telling me it's twenty-thirty-two?"

Derek laughed softly. "Oh, no, mate. The software was released in twenty-thirty-two. Today's date's the eighteenth of March, twenty-thirty-nine." He stroked a finger over the note. "That's the problem. This clunky piece of shit's still operating, but it's full of fucking security holes, like everything government-run. But yeah—we're in a virtual facility. You're logged in via your rig at home."

Jackson's head reeled. It was one thing to throw ideas around with Brooke, but to have this man, this stranger, confirm it... felt utterly surreal.

He slapped a hand on the table. "Make sense. Start at the start."

"You're right," said the other man. "I should tell you everything before they overwrite my admin access again. Okay, okay, where to start. How much do you remember?"

"Remember about what?" said Jackson.

"Okay," said Derek. "Wow. Okay. You," he nodded to Brooke, "and you," he nodded to Jackson, "you're both in an FIS—a full-immersion sim—run by a low budget, government-owned virtual treatment facility called 'Get Well Sooner', operating out of Moreland. Now, the standard treatment programme's a twelve-week full immersion therapy course, run in real-time, where you can fuck up as much as you like, without fucking up your real-world lives any more than you already have. Your body goes through the detox while you're in here, being taught how to mentally cope."

"How are we plugged into this thing?" asked Jackson.

"An immersion rig," said Derek. "Buuut, if you don't remember anything, trying to explain the technology's a waste of time. Now, your bodies should be safe... that is, unless you don't have anyone looking after you. A lot of addicts, they don't, because they've pissed them all off." He gave Jackson a meaningful look. "So, they hook up to sustenance support systems that will run the fuck out if someone doesn't replenish them."

Brooke and Jackson exchanged a glance.

"What about fail-safes?" asked Brooke. "Nothing like this would be written without fail-safes."

"Yeah, of course," said Derek. "But the system got hacked about a month ago. I got sent in to fix it, and got trapped here too. Ideally, if your sust runs low, you get a warning, and then the system pushes you out. But that's not going to help you here, because the system isn't going to release you, and all the alerts have been disabled by whoever's hacked it."

Jackson and Brooke exchanged another glance.

Something occurred to Jackson. "Wait—you're Derek Lincoln? Like, Derek Lincoln, from group?"

"Yeah," said Derek. "That was my entry point. Trying to figure out if one of you was responsible for the attack. We had complaints from the admin running the group, Ana, that glitches were happening—instance overlays and all kinds of nasty shit that'd really fuck you up if you were in a full immersion programme. You wouldn't know what was happening to you until you got released at the end of your twelve weeks. We figured since the only live participants in the sim are you lot, one of you's the hacker, and one of you's the target. The only way for the hacker to see the effects of their work is to be in there with you."

Jackson struggled to process all this. "Then, wouldn't the hacker be trapped, too?"

"Sure," said Derek. "But if their sust is being replenished, and yours isn't..."

Jackson went cold. From what he knew of himself, he doubted he had anyone out there in the world keeping an eye on his physical body.

"Derek, how old are you?" asked Brooke.

"Twenty-two," said the late forties man sitting in front of them. "And yeah, I don't have anyone checking on me either, because I'm fucking antisocial, so I'm fucked too, unless I can get us out of here in the next four days."

"Four days?" said Brooke, her voice rising in pitch.

"Yeah, Jackson's twelve weeks is up—"

"But I've been coming to group for months," said Jackson.

"No, you haven't," said Derek. "But clearly when you enrolled, they decided twelve weeks, psychologically, wasn't long enough for you."

"Back to the four days," said Brooke. "What then?"

"My sust rig runs for a month, so I'm already on emergency backup. Most rigs do one month, two months, three months. Smart people don't cut it fine." He gave Jackson a cool look. "I don't know how well-off you are in the real world, but I'm guessing three months would be a stretch for you. The simulation tries to mirror your real-world problems as closely as possible, so you learn how to deal with them when you get out."

"So, in four days, I'll start to starve to death?" said Jackson.

"Yeah," said Derek. "I mean, your body might carry on for an extra day or two. You'll still keep breathing, you'll stay hydrated, 'cause it's illegal for a rig to run out of water. But sust nutrients cost more than ordinary food, and I'm guessing yours are government rationed. Just a suspicion, no offence."

"Humans can live weeks without food," said Brooke. "Stop scaring him."

Jackson gave her a dark glance. "I'm not scared."

"I would be," she said.

Derek laughed. "You don't think you're in danger then?" he asked her.

"I just started coming to group. Surely that means I have months to go."

Derek shrugged. "Maybe."

"So, how do we get out of here?" Jackson asked.

Derek looked down at the piece of paper. "The hacker, he comes after me. Whenever he finds me, if I've got the permissions, I try and body-jump. But he keeps stealing my admin access when I'm in the middle of analysing what he's doing. I got jumped into this body last time he pushed me out of the console."

Jackson couldn't believe what he was hearing. The stool under his arse was hard and uncomfortable. The plastic table was cool under his hand. The world felt so real. How could it not be? Maybe he really was insane.

"What's the world like out there?" he asked. "Is it all autonomous cars and killer robots?"

Derek snorted. "I love the way they leave movies in here to help you readjust. All I can say is, yes—but no. If your minds are fully immersed in, what are we—two thousand and seventeen? Two-thousand and eighteen? Fuck. Yeah, it's better if we don't go into the reality of twenty-thirty-nine right now. Instead, how about you get me out of here so I can help you?"

"I asked—just in case. They said if I drop the charges, he'll be released," said Brooke to Jackson. "But what's to stop you turning back into 'creepy, stalker Derek' if this guy immerses you again?"

"Nothing," Derek said bluntly. But if you can get me somewhere quiet, I can jump into the admin console, body jump again, and hopefully buy some time before he tracks me again and starts fucking with me."

Brooke turned to Jackson. "What do you think?"

He shrugged. "What's the worst that could happen?"

He meant it as a joke, but Brooke just nodded.

"Okay then. I'll go talk to the... whoever's in charge."

Jackson watched her go, then turned to Derek to ask the question that was burning in his mind. "How do you know they're after me?"

"Mate, I've got a log of two dozen attempted hits on your avatar. I've got a log of the ones that got through. Whoever's doing this is exploiting every built-in spook in the sim."

"Spook?"

Derek looked frustrated that he had to explain even this. "You gotta realise, this thing's built to simulate what real people go through; and real people go through some weird shit."

"Hallucinations?"

"Among other things. I saw him trigger that Charles Bonnet hallucination you had the other day—"

"Charles—"

Derek ran over him before he could ask. "Hallucinations blind people get. That's why they're programmed in the system. Because they happen out there." He pointed to the windows. "Big eyes, and big teeth—and sometimes strange geometric patterns. And you've seen the instance overlays yourself. That's just straight-up breaking the fucking software. Routine pieces of the simulation stacking, instead of directing participants into their own version of that part of the world."

"But... none of that's harmful, is it?" asked Jackson. "Like, we can't die in here, can we?"

Derek looked down at the note under his hand. "Do you really want to know?"

Jackson was tempted to say 'no', get up, and leave. Drive somewhere. Get some MacDonaldson's and eat it on a park bench while he read Silence of the Calves, and people fed ducks and walked their dogs around him.

He wanted to have a beer, or maybe a case of beer, if none of this was real anyway. He wanted to shut down and go. Deal with it another day. But it wasn't just him trapped, and if any of this was true and the hacker was after him, he had to deal with it.

Four days. Fuck. How could they stop this guy in just four days?

"Jackson?"

"Yeah," he said. "Go on then."

"There are a few things we worry about with full immersion sims. One is that a patient can be traumatised by something that happens in there. When a sim works properly, if you kill yourself, or the admin suspects you're experiencing more than a therapeutic level of stress, you get pulled out into a comfort 'experience', which is built into every immersion sim. From there, you get guided back to the real world, rather than getting a hard wakeup shock. Wakeup shock, for people who live alone, led to a few fatalities before they changed the law."

"Okay," said Jackson. That made sense.

"So—that facility's been disabled here," said Derek. "If you kill yourself in here, your consciousness will be stuck in its avatar, but unable to control it. Then, because this is a full immersion sim, you'll be buried. Your sim will be placed into the ground, with you in it, and you'll be stuck there. It just shuts off. You'll be trapped in darkness and silence. No sensation at all."

Jackson stared at him, cold sluicing down his spine again.

"Dying might hurt. But you'll only experience half of what you could in the real world. And... there's one other thing." Derek sighed. "I hate telling you this, but you should know. If you're in an FIS, and you experience repeated physical trauma to one part of your body—and I do mean 'repeated', beyond the usual beating another person might give you—it can cause permanent nerve damage in your real body. The brain overloads and burns out the connection from those body parts to the control centre. A couple of people have been paralysed by hackers doing things like simulating cutting into someone's spine over and over."

"Fuck," said Jackson quietly.

"I mean, it has to be repeated, so, I wouldn't worry about it too much."

Derek gave him an encouraging smile.

Sure, Jackson thought. Not going to dwell on that in the middle of the night.

"Can't someone pull us out manually?"

"Yeah, 'course, but mate," said Derek, leaning over the table, "Only if the authorities can find your physical body. But if you've falsified your details... and I know a lot of people do, to prevent hackers from pulling our info out of shitty, unsecured government databases... then you're fucked. So... it's quite important we find this fuck."

"You got the skill to do that?" Jackson asked.

Derek gave him a wounded look. "Yeah?"

"It's just... you're trapped here too," said Jackson. "And that doesn't bode well for any of us."

"Smarmy fuck," said Derek. "I'm likely the only hope you've got. Unless you can figure out which one of your friends wants you dead, and convince them you're better alive?"

Without being able to remember anything about his previous life. That was going to be tricky.

"You know, she could be the one," said Derek, gesturing with his head to where Brooke had walked away. "How would we know?"

Brooke came striding back, a woman following on her footsteps.

"Derek Lincoln, the charges against you have been dropped. You're free to go. Come and get your things, and we'll get you processed and on your way."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This novel is fully plotted out, but due to time constraints will take time to complete. Thanks for coming on the journey so far. I'll post more when I've finished the full book.