Exposure, 1: Makeshift Solution
21 Oct 2023Meowers
Have you ever thought of what imaginary characters might do in their free time? Of them creating their own characters in games they play? What their interests may look like? Have you ever thought of what made your character who they are? What was in the background of your mind at the moment you created that virtual personality? Does it have any features you'd like to have in your own, real life, but you can't? Maybe something you're even reluctant to tell about, yet thinking of having? And now, imagine... What if your characters have thoughts of their own, wishes of their own, including those truly private, inner self moments they aren't going to tell anybody? But they have their games. And their characters. Virtual, almost anonymous environments. Where they can have what they want. Be the people they always wanted to be.
The story was written in collaboration with Kira (Kasumi) Goto, who has my warmest gratitude for the commitment.
A few months ago, ending the Duty with the episode that I boldly named The Epilogue, I mentioned in the notes section below that it was the last long, serious and dramatic story written by me, at least on this website. Yet also I pointed out that I'm not ready to hang up my keyboard completely, since there may be opportunities of writing something random, short, new, maybe teaming up with other authors, and so on. Now, we are here. With something completely different. As weird, all-out and experimental as it gets, sometimes controversial, sometimes wild, sometimes deafeningly sincere. But, mostly, weird. And I hope you enjoy it.
Due to the nature of the topics addressed, this story may not be suitable for younger readers.
Ah, hells... Hi. Long time no... hear? And, yeah, it's me again. Still alive.
Found myself in quite an embarrassing situation last day. To say politely. As friggin' soft as possible, and you don't want to end up like that I'm bloody sure. Even being discovered hugging a damn toilet, shitfaced and passed out, reeking of cheap moonshine, looks less cursed and more explainable than... This.
So. I've been laying in the bed. In my damn underwear. Clean, neat and all that shiny. With a Full-Immersion VR headset on my sorry brain kettle. Sleeping. Peacefully. When, damn those prefab block doors are weak, when Mion, accompanied by two AXDF pilots... By my direct subordinates, dammit! So, sleeping, until they slammed the door open and pulled the thing off my head, effectively waking me up. In a less pleasant way of waking up. Imagine a moment of a stupid awkward silence. When you're the source of both the 'stupid' and the 'awkward' parts. And you also want to throw up. Now, take those parts and multiply them damn tenfold. Twentyfold, once I realised there was an emergency medical team in the corridor behind them. I'd facepalm if I were one of them.
Ah, you can't just discharge your commanding officer because you think she's nuts. But it seems like all my efforts to get rid of such a... peculiar reputation were reduced to dust and sneezed at in an instant. So, I had to come up with an explanation that I didn't exactly want to let out. At least not publicly. My doc is a good person, yet I'd be better off without having an 'addiction' line on my service record, and the first thing you'd think seeing a person sleeping in a VR is 'they're damn hooked as heck'.
See, that Full-Immersion VR, essentially a highly-evolved offshoot of an old and miserably failing 'Telepresence' technology, allows you to... Literally, immerse fully, completely, into whatever virtual environment you loaded into the headset memory. Like a game with you actually being in it, not watching it on the lens or on a screen. Ironically enough, Telepresence itself is an evolved version of an old-school 'sound, picture and manual input' basic VR as we know it for ages already. "It will be super nice and safe to fly your ship from a capsule encased in thick armour," they eggheads say. "And we could also place a shiny holo of you right in the seat, it will be pulling the sticks and squeezing the buttons for the sake of it!". A damn nerdy cheap technopunk crap movie nonsense we pilots say... or, more correctly, a generation of pilots before me; to lock yourself up in a friggin' metal coffin box somewhere in the middle of the ship and float there with those weird cables and tubes attached to your head and arse, instead of facing the flow of stars like a true space cowboy. We won. Now we can bravely face the stars. Also, with a luxury chance of ending up sucked out into friggin' vacuum or suffocated to death in case you've been especially unlucky today. But, hells, this is times better than the alternative. Cable up yer arse.
And those interdicted and shot down while riding a shitter having their cruise assist doing all the piloting... Not my problem. Totally deserved, if you ask me.
Our brain is, to speak simply, a processor. It gathers incoming neural signals and does brain stuff with them, so that we can see, hear, smell, have senses, etc. And also it's a memory storage. For your memories. Good or not. Phah. The worst memory storage I ever had... And our limbs and organs, mostly, are controlled by the same neural signals, going down the spine and then to the respective limbs and organs. And the signals are, by their nature, electrical. So the 'Full Immersion' effect is being achieved by intercepting those incoming signals, deciphering them and then replacing some of them with whatever's happening in your virtual environment. Even the sense of gravity. And the outgoing signals are handled almost the same way, so that you control your virtual avatar like it's real you, nothing in between, whilst your physical body is safely horizontal and doesn't move at all. Yeah, it has a heckload of failsafes to make sure you don't get stuck in the virtual world or worse: it monitors your vitals constantly, lets the signals that have nothing to do with the senses go through untapped, and, what's most important, it doesn't do anything irreversible. So, any loss of connection or power equals getting you back to our shitty reality. In a way less than comfortable to say, with some dizziness, nausea, maybe some mild ataxia and whatever. So it's better to follow the proper startup and shutdown procedures. But you get the general idea.
Of-friggin'-course it works near flawlessly. Otherwise, that kind of tech wouldn't exist on the mass market. Though... Only if your firmware is official and non-screwed. And the manual has that giant red label discouraging you from tampering with the said firmware. So, normally, it should pull you out nicely once it detects a brain activity pattern corresponding to being asleep. Yeah, we're slowly getting to the subject now. Thing is: even if I perfectly know that what we see in our sleep is a byproduct of memory processing, it has almost nothing to do with incoming signals, and the VR thing can't change your existing memory... When what happens in your sleep keeps being a damn heinous shite for years, you won't miss a new idea as soon as you see one.
I'm so bloody tired of that crap, you know? Meds don't work anymore, at least not in the dosage I can take... Unsupervised. It's so friggin' annoying, every time I close my eyes, I see that shit. Going to sleep? Go see shit. Taking a little nap to make it through the day? See more shit. Half-dead collapsing on the bed? You guess. I simply can't biologically rest and recover, feels like I haven't had an adequate sleep for godsdamned months, it's grinding me down day after day. Like... All that complex mental stuff like what I think, how I think, how I react on stuff, how I react on how I react and how I can handle and pick apart moments I want to change, all that, it's really getting much, much better, but essentials like memory and sleeping had gone out of the bloody airlock completely. Friggin' brain, maybe it's so used to suffering that it wants to get it during the night, if the days aren't that bad anymore. Or it tries to remind me how much this life sucks. Like, I'm drifting off, I'm somewhere in between, and I can almost feel that shit creeping. Are those emotions? Maybe. Whatever. I don't want to have them, I'm not there anymore, I'm a completely different person now. I even tried friggin' screaming in my sleep, like, as strong as possible, hoping I'd make some sound and wake myself up. You damn guess, it didn't work. But I tried and tried and damn tried because you don't have so many options when you're asleep.
Yeah, you have to be a special headcase like me to try that dirty hack.
Had to record my 'nightmare' neural patterns to reprogram the failsafe. Also didn't work, it's dumb, plain and hella reliable, it's either 'on' by default or 'off' if you're nuts, and it can't see any differences: either you're awake, or you aren't.
So, that was my point. Some vague directions picked up on shady forums full of perverts, some old rusty tech skills, an old faithful set of screwdrivers, an external power supply... To, literally, have a good sleep for what looked like the first time this year. However, being cut off from anything external, anything that could possibly wake me up, I slept for, like, thirty hours because oh bloody fucks I'm so tired. I still remember how Mion's face changed in a few seconds when I finished that improvised explanation, for her and other people gathered in my room. Sitting on a damn bed in a damn underwear, dizzy, disoriented and staring blankly at nowhere. Like, from being confused, annoyed, upset and disappointed at the same time to 'oh, shit...' when she handed me the headset back, saying that I'd better reset the firmware and tell everything to the doc. That they aren't going to ground me immediately for having more funny head stuff than it's mentioned in my official files.
Now, imagine your superior officer being like that. I guess I should go and get myself another bunch of suicide missions to clean my face. Ah, no more funny simple times for me...
Yep, yesterday was... A bit chaotic. To say the least. And now, recording this, and finally free of all official mumbo-jumbo regarding my latest totally safe adventure, which I've ended having a giant bruise all over the left shoulder and lacking thirteen rifle magazines... I think I may enjoy some free time to, well, use that thing as a normal, responsible and even, phah, sane person. At least to get familiar with that universal avatar creation interface stuff and then try out something basic. Because we all know that creating an avatar could take more time than actually playing. Isn't it? And...
Back to the elephant in the room. And this elephant isn't me. I'm an elephant-sized kitten. So. Why the heck did I even buy this wacky head thingy in the first place? There's one woman I met during the same totally safe adventure, named Kasumi, and we had some moments to talk about random things in private. You know, the dark looming talks of those who have seen some shit, mixed with wacky joking most people will certainly hate you for. So, I dropped a few words about the idea along these lines, on a topic of what do we think about the human bodies we're living in, and, whilst for me it was some kind of a 'background low-key idea of what to do when there's nothing else to do'... She seemed quite intrigued. Literally. Has to do something with her own thoughts on herself or whatever. And, yeah, here goes the good old... Me. Volunteering to run that stuff with her, providing that non-judgmental environment of being next to a person who simply have seen too much shit to bother about anything at all now. So that's a deal, and, before going back to the camp, I've purchased two sets and sent one via courier service to her, telling that I'm going drop a message once I'm free enough. Actually, saw each other recently to refresh our plans. So, looks like it's a proper time to write one.
"Hey, Kasumi.
(Can I call you Kas? Mmm?)
So, with the official phase over, our desk piloting paper fighters are totally excited and buzzing over a new pile of dirty secrets. Nothing revolutionary new, as much as everyone expected, but nevertheless it should be another brownish stain on Azimuth's poopy pants. They're going to filter out the facts and evidence and feed that to Aegis, to authorities, to all those show influencers, all that. And I'm finally back to my normal schedule. That means, I'm bound to have a few free hours now and then, unless one of those rookies splat into a planet all of a sudden. And they won't, because I'm going to yell at them in such a case.
About that VR stuff. My sleeping experiment ended with... A mixed success. Yeah, it was an awesome thirty hours long sleep I really needed, but then folks stormed my door and pulled the thing off my head thinking I'm dead or worse. Anyway, I'm going to finish that 'universal avatar' now, so I won't be looking like a lab testing dummy when you see me. Also, sending you my unique ID for the friendlist, because IDs are unique and we aren't. See ya. Or, well, virtual ya."
Okay, looks like I should make myself a 'Do Not Disturb' sign first.