The Valcadian sky was beaming with a pale golden luminosity
as The User peered out onto the vast open field of Syanica to the north east.
The grass danced furlike in the breeze; each swaying blade tall and fluid,
randomly yet uniquely rendered, and boasting a fertile spectrum of green that
contained only a hint of digitalized color that had long since become invisible
to his eyes. Even the sunlight was synthetic, but unlike the dense plumage which
had to be downscaled due to memory limitations, made use of high dynamic range
and various filters, and thus its craftsmanship was so polished that it was
wholly impossible to differentiate from real sunlight, even to an outsider.
This and many other changes to the system were made possible only recently,
after the latest anti-fragment and blending updates had been incorporated. It
now truly was as they had said it would be : a vista so rich and majestic, that
not even mother nature herself could compete. Such were the capabilities of
modern technological artifice.
Of course, the technology had come a long way since the game first launched. In
the early days the presentation was shabby at best : a heap of bloom effects,
comparatively low-poly counts with contours of jagged linears. Back then there
was less attention to graphical reproduction and more focus on manipulation of
the psychophysics of The User himself.
The biggest deterrent as far as
graphics was the project’s own limitations to apply and integrate advancements
as quickly as they were developed. Normal industry leaps were often substantial
and this would not do. Above all else, equilibrium
was the number one priority, and so in order to maintain the illusion of
constancy, the application of changes to the engine had to occur over night
when The User was unconscious and, equally important, they must be subtle
enough so as for The User to not perceive that any foundational details had
been altered in his world. But despite the need early on for such constant
alterations and adaptations to cover or distract from graphical
inconsistencies, in the nineteen-plus years since the game's inception, there
had never once been a critical failure. Aside from the pre-forecasted simulacra
experienced in the initial weeks following immersion, and the occasional minor disparity,
The User never once questioned anything – so thus far the project had
succeeded.
It was easier now because
the current system was largely self-sustainable. Technological progress paired
with the nearly unlimited budget the project had at its disposal led to a
running version whose graphics engine bolstered a 98.2% flawless replication of
real-world visual mechanics. In the eyes and mind of The User, the entire architected
world of Valcadis, along with its many pre-fashioned locales and inhabitants,
were unquestionably, dependably real. The rich and majestic, yet wholly
man-modeled sky, was the sky, the real sky. The sun, the real sun. The
light produced from this surrogate star - emitting from what was really just a
lamp that used an amplified, augmented
bulb and which rotated in a semi-circle over the interface chamber – used UV
rays which were indistinguishable under strict scientific examination. Too much
exposure would even yield a painful sunburn, however, the parameters of the
system were designed so that any injury too serious was prevented. Most of the
time this was tended to by the autonomous nature of the system’s central
stabilizer, a kind of all-encompassing gyroscope in which most of aspects of
the software were bound together by dependent variables. But even in the
unlikely event that such an error occurred in the system’s carefully coded
homeostasis, a health tech monitored The User’s vitals at all times, and would
only need to manually inform the weather programmer who could accommodate this
potential health concern with a short hand code that would produce a
storm-bearing cloud front. Then, a gradated, semi-transparent shield would
slowly progress over the sun lamp, in perfect sync with The User’s visuals of
the approaching cloud formation over the Valcadian sun. As the virtual storm
suffused, either the system itself or one of the tactile technicians would
engage a second command which would trigger one of the three small, but
powerful turbine fans that would produce a current of cool, filtered, and
naturally scented air, which The User felt as a gust of northern wind from the
advancing front. Like all other mechanical-sensory aspects of the system - with
the exception of the sun lamp - the fan operated in 270 degrees, allowing for
subtle precision to a degree just beyond the liminal perception of The User.
Further, its temperature was modulated in conjunction with the monitoring of
The User’s neuro-transmitters until the perfect balance was arrived upon to
achieve a maximum release of serotonin. This last effect might seem
superfluous, but on the contrary, was quite relative to The User’s equilibrium.
If The User was happy, he would be less likely to scrutinize and pick up on inconsistencies,
and so this was an important consideration.
Of
course there were errors from time to time; there were too many of these little
factors to take into account for there not to be. But the central stabilizer
predicted and prevented most major foibles, and having been programmed with an
adaptive AI, could re-adjust to some contingent malfunctions as well. Anything
that eluded its radar was typically minor, but even a small variance could be a
potential threat to equilibrium, and thankfully could be swiftly and effectively
attended to by the congruency tech.
Unlike most
positions, that of congruency tech was held by only one man: a meek,
flabby-faced ex-fantasy author who saw to it that any flaws, malfunctions, or
hitches of any kind in the operation of this environment were integrated into and
explained by the scenario of The User's world. Often these were simple
distractions employed to take The User’s attention away from the particular
aberration, but in the case of more severe system or graphics errors, abrupt
fainting would be induced, later made to seem due to acts of sorcery or linked
tangentially to Valcadian mythology in some way. Best of all, this patchwork
was done in a manner that did not detract from, but alternately enhanced the immersion of his
experience. To further minimize the work of the congruency tech and other branches
that dealt with concealment, was another team of two who had the anticipatory
task of calculating a triage of factors prioritized by those which would be
most likely to be detected consciously or subconsciously by The User. Every
detail was pre- and post-managed this way; designed to be quadruple-redundant
in preventing a noticeable loss of equilibrium. Given the scope of what was
required to, it had to be. And while this micro/macro degree of planning and
maintenance might sound impossibly sophisticated or down-right absurd in
terms of cooperative human resources, in actuality, the electromechanical
complexity of the total system was really not any more advanced than the
operation of a commercial 747 airliner….albeit one that must be kept
perpetually and permanently in flight.
Time, or
really just general change, was the biggest adversary for the team collectively
and the main reason why the operation had to be as large as it was. In total,
there was a rotation of 200 employees on staff, all of whom lived on site at
the Salazar manor. Typically there were only about 40 techs on duty at a given
moment, but all were required to be permanently on-call. Most every person
employed had a singular job to perform, and whether it be design or medical or
engineering, each abided to their specialized task and each task played a
critical role in the functionality of this gargantuan project.
Of the many branches, the
sensory stabilization team was by far the most crucial and wide-ranging, as the
most important factor in achieving equilibrium was that all stimuli perceived
on a visual level by The User be responded to – immediately and accurately -
with artificial, external stimuli that would simulate non-liminal harmonization
between perception and virtual movement parallel to interaction with the
constantly evolving environment and circumstances within. They had to work
together, in a constant race to squeeze into the brief, infinitesimal window
between what was being produced artificially in the environment and The User’s
perception of these things. In other words, there had to be harmonization
between what was expected to be felt
and what was psychologically perceived to be felt. If this could be adequately counterfeited,
immersion would be total. Because of the difficulty required to achieve this in
an unbroken, ceaseless manner, both spatially and temporally, and down the
smallest factor, out of the active technicians at any given time, roughly half
attended to this particularly imperative task.
While the
result of all this was nothing short of a multi-dimensional actuality in the
perception of The User, the majority of the personnel saw only the back end,
with the exception of six individuals assigned to monitor the inner happenings
of the game. In rotating shifts, they watched the action from a dual screen
that captured in-game events from both the fixed standpoint of The User’s POV
and a tightly responsive, over-head manual camera. Each display was 100 inches,
with both in 2160 UHD resolution, but of course limited to two dimensions, so
the in-game experience was largely truncated. The rest of the team had little
or no involvement in monitoring and did their jobs entirely through metadata
from interstaff communications or instant notifications produced by the
systems’ own checks and balances. So from the perspective of most of the team,
the system was merely hardware conjoined with science; a complex array of
cables, coding, and chemistry that allowed for a very immersive fantasy
adventure.
∞
They
referred to it officially and simply as ‘the game.’ There was no need for a
proper title, because it was not a product intended for the market. Had it been
a conventional product, destined for circulation and public use, it would have
certainly been dubbed something more palatable (and depressingly cliché), but
with there being only one user (who had long-since lost awareness of its demiurgic
mechanisms) there was no need for flashy titles and taglines - or any sort of
PR for that matter. But they had to call it something, and, out of equal parts apathy and office humor,
continued using the generalized working title from the planning stages. No one
ever protested for a change, so the bad joke stuck and incidentally, became
official.
Theoretically,
games need players, but the game
existed for only one: its brainchild and funder, Roy Salazar. Though he had
chosen to keep his given birthname - something that would have otherwise been
near impossible to reverse in his identity - for professional purposes the
techs referred to him as just The User. Not a one had had any personal
relationship with him before the immersion, and saw only an unconscious,
vertically-suspended body, so it seemed more appropriate that way (and also fit
the arbitrary naming style the project had adopted along the way). But shared nomenclature
aside, the old Roy Salazar had little in common with the Roy Salazar in
Valcadis, who had long become oblivious to the memories and history of his
former self, or anything relating to the substratum of his new life. At twenty
years in, he had been The User longer than he had not, and so simply went about
his daily dramas, as if they were real and ungoverned by external forces. Because
of this, he was naturally unaware that he was coming to the culmination of a
carefully scripted story arc two decades in the making.
So The
User continued on in the direction of the now setting sun, his eyes fixed on
the abandoned Cathedral where Ardora was presumably being held, occupied by
only one thing: the face of Ganzer Greycross. Those cold, violet eyes,
partially hidden behind a sharply parted drape of blood crimson hair that
stopped just shy of his most sinister feature: that smug, sadistic, sensuous
smile. Not a single day had passed since his lover had been taken that this
visage had not been vividly present in his mind, and as it always did,
triggered a bolt of rage throughout him. Taking a last deep breath and
clenching his fist around the leather hilt of his sword, The User carried
onward towards the stone bethel ahead, fueled by visions of bloodshed and that
wonderful emotional high particular only to vengeance.
But
as this predetermined event unfolded, momentous as it was, there were greater
and more chaotic forces at work, forces outside the boundaries of Valcadis, in
what was now the forgotten ether of the world The User had left behind.
For not even the scenario techs could have foreseen what bitter twist awaited
their blissfully deluded employer. Ironically,
it was the very aspect of the real world that was at the center of Roy’s urge
to take flight into fantasy: the inevitable conclusion to the
anthropocene, that would occur with collision of human greed and nature’s own cannibalistic
inclination towards entropy.
1.2 : You Masturbate, in Various Ways…and then You Die
Roy had been raised in a bubble of affluency;
sheltered, spoiled no doubt, but with a deficiency of love. All of this created a recipe for insecurity and indeed he quickly developed into a sensitive –
some might say neurotic - young man. So while it was in his nature to yearn for
more than common conquests, the
paradox was that he was absolutely terrified
of the world. Even at a very young age, Roy displayed
an abnormal insecurity in regard to anything external or alien, and was
reluctant to participate in typical pre-adolescent play. His psychiatrist
classified this perceived growing presence of doom it as “misplaced annihilation
anxiety,” and said the cause was attributed to “predisposed castration
anxiety.” This did not help Roy. Later he came to understand his formation to
be due to several determinants, which he had worked out chronologically, and in
list form. Essentially what it boiled down to was a mixture of timing and
personal history.
But unlike most fated to
fear life but forced to adapt to it in order to survive, Roy did not have any
such requirements. His survival, in terms of basic necessities, was and would
always be provided with a guarantee. He was alive, but loveless, lacking even a
single true friend, and so had few real influences outside of what he read in
books or heard in music or saw in movies, which he indulged in commonly. To
make matters worse, he was inherently drawn to works of the maudlin and morbid
variety and his uncensored entertainment choices only confirmed what he had
suspected all along: existing
was an arduous thing.
Roy’s father had been the CEO of a major
airline manufacturing company, and happened to have a
serious phobia of hospitals, doctors, and the like. Because of these two
things, he neglected often his annual check-ups despite the pains and because
of that it was too late. By the time it was finally diagnosed, the pancreatic
cancer had spread to various other organs - and not all the money in the world
could do a thing about it.
Roy had never quite
understood why his father was almost always away on business, just that his
absence was noticeable, and that his concept of a good father included being
present and involved, two things his own dad was not. Just prior to his death,
however, his father confessed to Roy how guilty and regretful he felt for not
giving him the proper attention, and in hopes his son would forgive him, had changed his will to exclude his
ex-wife, Roy’s Mother, and make Roy the sole beneficiary of all remaining
capital and assets. The new will declared that on his eighteenth
birthday, Roy would be gifted this generous inheritance, along with 49% control
of the company stock.
But besides this, which
seemed like a trivial event in the distance future, not a lot changed in Roy’s
day to day life after his father’s passing. He still did not see much of the man, and as it had been for
most of his childhood, Roy remained primarily in
the supervision of the nanny, an old humorless Salvadorian man who did the
house chores and informed the boy of meals, but little else. Roy’s mother was
still alive, technically speaking, only now slightly more unavailable to him
than she had been before. Though she had hated him vehemently since the divorce
and especially since being excluded from the will, she was a complicated woman,
and mourned nonetheless. She still attended parties more often than not. She
still collected shoes, obsessively. She still drank her wine like water,
perhaps more frequently than before her ex-husbands death. Really the only
noticeable change between mother and son was the new routine that developed of
‘strategic financial discussions.’ Every few weeks she would show up at the
estate, usually exuding a strong odor of merlot or gin, and say “Roy, I think
we need to have a strategic financial discussion.” What this meant that she wanted
to talk about how he would manage the money when the time came, and
thoughtfully, she would volunteer to single-handedly handle the accounting in
her name. Eager for her to leave him be so he could return the silent, peaceful
corridors of the family library, Roy would nod obediently, mostly mute.
Now fatherless, Roy found himself at fifteen introduced
to a strange perplexity, suddenly unsure of his purpose in a world that seemed
concerned with only pieces of paper that he had a large amount of. It was the
common teenage crisis - the big bang into early adulthood - galvanized, and he counteracted it, as most do, with superficial
rebellion. From time to time he was able to elude the watch of his security
staff and would wander into the nicer districts of the city and pretend to be
homeless for a few hours before being discovered and taken home with not even a
slap on the wrist. After a few months of these shenanigans, he was put under
watch at all times, and eventually these outlets were sealed. But there were other ways to escape, ones
that fell within the ordinances of his many caretakers and ones that Roy would
learn were in many ways were superior.
It
was not until discovering in the basement an old Super Nintendo - untouched
from its original and now dusty box - that videogames replaced books his
primary form of therapy dealing with his problems. While his peers at the time
were playing the current generation of consoles, Roy was infatuated with the
pixelated second dimension. He ordered games online and played through all the
classics, as advised by internet consensus. A few of these virtual sojourns had
a profound and even somewhat religious effect on him and it was these particular
experiences that caused him to pursue gaming as a serious hobby.
He
decided to catch up on gaming chronologically and had one of the family
assistants find him used Nintendo 64 and Playstation systems. Before he could
legally drive a car, Roy had evolved from serious gamer into gaming elitist. At
the time he did not understand or even question what it was that was so
beautiful and intriguing about these games, but later suspected it had been due
to that quality of ambiguity itself. Around the time he had finally caught up
with the current titles, Roy soon found himself, like with all the things he
was once passionate about, no longer enjoying games as he once had. As time
progressed, this anhedonia grew and even expanded to other facets of his life,
and Roy became compelled with the impossible predicament of figuring out why –
why something which had once given him great pleasure, now seemed so inane.
After much analysis, yet still unable to rekindle that old flame, Roy had an
epiphany. His intelligence and awareness of things had matured, and he could
not convincingly transplant himself in something he knew was characteristically
fake. It wasn’t the ideal, light-hearted distillation of these worlds which had
been so wonderful, as he’d always assumed. Like all art, this was just a
metaphor of the human conditions: beauty, finitude, and all in between. It was through
the contrast that this atmosphere provided, that Roy had been able to see just
how poisoned and tragic and damned dysfunctional
things around him had become.
∞
Fatefully
a victim of both poor-nurture and poor nature, and heedful that he had been
born into a very dark and paranoid era for mankind, Roy stumbled awkwardly into
his latter teens. He did not view the modern age unlike countless eras before,
in that there was frequent oppression and suffering, but the present was unique
in a number of ways, and Roy could not help become hyperconscious of them.
Despite the glitter and neon and bad pop on the surface, many continental
shifts were happening underneath the surface. Over the course of the century,
technology, along with the accession of corporate oligarchy had carved a new
global environment. No longer was it a matter of survival of the fittest or most
adept, but now survival of the most unethical, with the whole world vying for
seats in a viscous game of musical chairs. To Roy, his own was an epoch of
hopelessness and ever-extending repression, a time when the men were trained
like dogs, taught to chase after titillating concepts of money, status, and
vanity which dangled like strings in the middle of the international pack. He
could not shake the suspicion that every aspect of culture had been cleverly
designed to be gradually hollowing. So much had become and was becoming transparent,
commoditized. Whether or not this was incidental, Roy couldn’t know for sure,
but a vast percentile of human beings on the planet had no awareness at all
that they were slowly being isolated and molded by this corrupted environment –
molded and molded and fucking molded - subconsciously into more malleable forms
to be molded and manipulated by those who had something to profit from this unquestioning
obliviousness. All about, he could not help but witness a
rampant spiritual decay. Petty and secular concerns had become supreme.
Intellectuals and radicals, as well as pariahs such as himself, were being
divided and crushed, left unable to fend in a global cultural climate unsuited
for them, and thus exponentially dying off. The written word which Roy so cherished
was quickly becoming an extinct format. Quality seemed to be vanishing from film
and music and the surviving mediums, and so too it seemed, the human soul. But
the common man appeared too busy being distracted and entertained to rise into
action, or even care. Perhaps Roy was guilty to some degree of pessimism
and projection, but the statistics agreed: the quality of life for humanity was
on a steady decline worldwide, and no one seemed to have any power to bring
positive change.
It
was all too much for him to bear. Even the most mundane happening fit into this
despondent outlook in some minor, obtuse way. It got so bad that eventually Roy
was too disgusted to leave his house in an attempt to avoid the bombardment beyond.
But even with total sequestration, he could not escape the little reminders of
reality, as these nauseating associations infiltrated his private domain and more
problematically, were deeply embedded into his mind like splinters broken off
at the surface. This ghoulish disease
spread and continued to haunt him until even the smallest pleasure was eclipsed
by an overwhelming feeling of insignificance and futility looming at the
forefront of his thoughts.
Seeking answers to these new and larger
philosophical questions, again Roy set out to learn the cause, again foolishly following
in the footsteps of the curious cat. He returned to his library,
only now focusing entirely on non-fiction. Through the many tomes on politics
and psychology and social sciences, he partially found the answers that had
been sought. Only instead of remedying his discontent, as before, the newly
obtained knowledge plagued him with greater woes. It now seemed that he
had opened Pandora’s Box and his blissful ignorance had
all but evanesced.
It
was after this ‘endarkenment,’ if you will, that the young philosopher began to see and recognize life through a lens that was not
only cynical, but explicitly misanthropic. Now, all human endeavor - every
activity, every facet of culture - appeared to him as unglorified, sucked dry
of drama, reduced to the various forms of symbolic masturbation. Desperate for solace, he toyed with esoteric
philosophies such as nihilism and solipsism, but these radical directions were ultimately
unsubscribable, and in the end only ephemeral phases. But empty and jaded as
he’d become, there still remained that dormant, rumbling something inside him, the ever-present, celestial yearning for more
than the mindless scratching of psychosocial
itches. Even had he been
able to clearly diagnose this strange desire, Roy knew for certain that no grounds
were available for him to achieve such a thing. Meaning was socially dictated
and the world was fucking mad. The one and only thing that Roy could be certain
of was that, life, the way it was arranged
and lived in the modern world, was a
problem.
∞
Though seemingly impossible, things devolved.
At
first the suicidal thoughts manifested in subtle and vague forms: daydreams and
ironic ‘what if?’ musings. But over time they increased in frequency and
transformed into practical and plausible scenarios: real, available choices
that occupied his minute-to-minute existence and seemed more and more like
logical, good ones to make. By sweet seventeen, he had become clinically
agoraphobic. After half a year in hermitude, the increasing ideation with his
own death taunted him to such a degree that there was a genuine concern he
would not live to be considered a legal adult. Something had to be done.
Indeed, a desire for death can be
quite rational in some cases, but only for those who have no control over
things, and furthermore are not creative enough to wade around the proverbial
shit bog. One can say what they will about roots and evil, but the truth is
that with enough money you could buy just about anything, and Roy would soon be
in full possession of just shy of sixty billion dollars.
It
was October of 2014 when the idea came to him. It occurred almost on a whim
while contemplating what he would do with his inheritance. In a sense Roy
already had the money, as anything he requested would be provided by his
servants through a separate endless trust. But there were many things
considered too taboo, dangerous, or absurd to even be requested, and the real
difference was a matter of power. A part of him did still veritably wished
to die and persuaded him to spend some, if not all, of his money on
accomplishing this in way that was truly ridiculous. He cycled through a number
of ideas, but purchasing a one way space trip into the sun seemed too
uncomfortable, and he was morally against the idea of tracking down and buying
existing every copy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and suffocating under the
accumulated heap. But the more he thought about glorifying his death with some
juvenile artistic statement, the more it seemed like such a waste, and he was
certain there could be something worth buying that would solve his cursed
predicament.
The only
beneficial thing that could be said about his youth of social neglect and
honest exposure was that, strangely, it kept him from becoming a tragic cliché. Nine times out of
ten, a young man standing in Roy’s nicely-shined shoes at such a juncture,
impatiently awaiting such an inheritance, would certainly be destined an
adulthood enslaved by fleeting chemical rushes and an insatiable urge for love
and security that could never be obtained. Nine times out of ten, he’d end up a
casualty with the usual spoiled bastards whose lives became typified by cocaine
and cognac, a variety of Southeast Asian hookers, plagued with despair and
punctuated with cirrhosis or auto-erotic asphyxiation. But Roy, being the critical,
intuitive, well-read, hyperphobic anomaly that he was, was able to formulate a
different and far more creative plan for his future.
It
was a proclivity that had been stewing in his subconscious for years, but the
idea of actualizing it nearly bowled him over: he had the means to do what
fantasy-enthusiasts everywhere had oft fantasized about. He shook with excitement
while researching the technological angle and the notion became less deluded
and with this renewed fervor for the future, he spent every waking hour until
his birthday obsessively planning an outline by which the game would follow. He
designed characters and settings which were ideal to his subjective tastes. When
he was finally satisfied with his custom requirements, totaling almost a
hundred pages of notes and sketches, all that remained to be done was wait out
the last three weeks. Soon he would be granted the freedom and financial means
to do as he pleased. Soon he would fix the puzzle of his life, the only way he
could presume how. At last, the world-weary Roy Salazar had something to
genuinely look forward to…
