Lurranus 3 (Part 4/5)

Link to Part 3: https://www.abctales.com/story/trans4mer/lurranus-3-part-35-0

Part 3 of 4:
Adam looked around slowly.
It was a technical marvel, Lurranus, no doubt. He had been in the system for a year now, and it never ceased to amaze. It truly delivered on the promise of whatever you wanted, for the most part. If you wanted to be somewhere, you would instantly materialise there. If you decide you had had enough of the laws of physics, they would cease to matter. You could alter your appearance to your hearts content. You could literally do anything you wanted.
Yet despite the glamour of the experience, it couldn’t help but at time feel hollow.
For years, human happiness had been defined by the thrill of progress, of overcoming success. Here, the world seemed to pander to one’s every needs, providing you with instant gratification, which while one of the selling points, became trivial after a while. When you were always able to be happy, was it really true happiness. Adam deduced it was what happened in the mind that mattered. But when, at moments of a happiness, Adam tried to question his own true feelings, he was never sure if he felt more than moderate amusement. It felt like, as a species, they were progressing nowhere. They were lying back, on a sun lounger, gorging on junk food, content in the knowledge they would never get any fatter.
There was no denying that suffering and hardships were terrible things, but the pain of those experiences only served to highlight the joy of success and accomplishment.
This, however, wasn’t even mentioning the systems other... inadequacies.
A year ago, when Adam had first joined the system arriving from a Mars base with his two lifelong friends Louie and Hugh, they initial joy was soon dampened by their chance meeting with Noel Davidson in a bright anti gravity bar. He had initially spoken to the eager Louie about sports, a subject Louie was well versed in, despite the fact there had been no noteworthy developments with regards to the subject in at least a century and a half. He had initially seemed a pleasant fellow, but soon the ugly tones of his character appeared, as he confessed to his more violent urges in a casual manner, and likened the appearance of each passing women to a variety of animals. Louie had laughed lightly, trying to move away from that subject, but Noel had shrugged and defended his behaviour as perfectly human. This personality had reminded Adam of an Oaktrus sympathiser who had been on Mars, who had defended the companies violent acts and said humans were really just animals and were perfectly entitled to act as such, so he had quickly intervened, and taken his friend away from Noel. Once they were out of Noel’s sight, Adam willed for them to be somewhere else, and they materialised in another location.
Only shortly later, Noel found them again. Louie clearly looked unhappy, and just as Noel began talking at some fantasies of his, the system suddenly took Noel away from them. Then Louie too disappeared, before both of them reappeared. Then Noel had disappeared again, not to be seen again in the year since. Since then, the experience had been mostly satisfactory, bar the occasional encounter. The system had got better at keeping those people away, but they had had a few unsavoury experiences.
Still, Adam sometimes missed the real world. The weight of living. The idea that whatever you did was important. He felt like he was slowly losing something while he was in the system, but he didn’t know what. Also, sometimes, in the system, Adam would try to help others, primarily for their gain but also in the hope it would allow him to feel something. But when they system could do everything he could and more, what did he have to offer?
“What would you say the point of this is?” He asked his friends. Louie looked over by Hugh continued to stare in the other direction. It was a practice he was taking to more and more. He was slowly become more distant, less himself.
“To have fun, I assume.” Louie shrugged, slowly rolling in the weightless air. “That’s what the ad said, I guess.”
“It’s just, I feel we’re going nowhere. As a species, we’ve just stopped. We’ve no real purpose.” Adam suggested.
“I don’t really know where else we can go.” Louie said.
“Yeah.” Adam began. “I guess that makes sen...”
Then, before Adam had a chance to register what was happened, the fake world around him suddenly disappeared, as he entered a state of unawareness, in a void, not truly aware of anything. Little more than a chip of data, getting ready for transfer.

-

“Please. I need your help Alex.”
“I don’t... I’m not even meant to be talking to you. And this whole idea, it’s crazy.”
“Please, don’t hang up. You’re the only one who can help me.”
“So, say you do try to do all this, how would you even get it done in time. Writing the algorithm alone would take ages. Then, sending out the flight order. There’s no way you would make it.”
“Then help me. If I have one file, I can access the systems basic functions. I can write the algorithm up here, and set up the appropriate things to be in the right places.”
“And if they ask what those birds are doing, delivering supplies no one issued?”
“Say they’re being given to some local settlements.”
“And if they check?”
“They won’t, not if it’s something that’ll make them feel better about themselves.”
“I don’t know.”
“Listen to me, Alex. Lurranus, it was a nice idea, but it won’t work. It’s just like the real world, and if anything it’s speeding up the degradation of their consciousness. They’re seemingly regressing to a more primitive state. I don’t know why, but leaving them, that won’t help anyone.”
“What if we did just left them? Their bodies would die, but their consciousness would live on. Surely, they’d only regress so far. We could pretend to wake them, and just leave them in there.”
“We don’t know... We have no idea what would happen. Maybe there’d be nothing left of there consciousness. Lurranus isn’t sustainable. And I feel, the longer people are in it, the more redundant societies rules began, the worse they get.”
“I...”
“Please...”
“... Fine. I’m sending you a copy of one Noel Davidson. The guy you pulled and never put back. I guess everyone assumed you destroyed him, but you didn’t. His chips been out for a year. He’s really the only person I can send.”
“Thank you. I’ll get to work.”
“Look, just... just tell me when your coming back. So I can get the hell out of here.”
“Thank you.”
“No... no... no worries.”
(2256)

-

Part 4 of 4:
2257

John Closer’s footsteps echoed loudly in the empty white hall.
Wearing a dirty back tracksuit and a heavy rucksack, he had just entered the Intrexal complex, a grand white site consisting of several buildings which covered at least a kilometre of space, and were the only colour in an otherwise grey wasteland. It was built on the site of a former Empirius power station. The site included a small apartment, a weapons storage, an aircraft hanger, a massive body storage unit, a huge building consisting solely of computing databases and a massive cooling system, and a pale white reception, which John was currently powering through.
It was wide area, but was sparsely decorated. At the entrance was a wide expanse of red tinted glass windows, and at the opposite end, above the reception desk, were several elegant artworks. They were landscapes of various colours, generally shrouded in mist, haze, rain. Symbolic of the unknown, an area with which Intrexal constantly grappled.
The reception desk was manned by a robotic host. It had been painted white, and the various exposed wires can been covered up so as to provide it with some semblance of anaesthetic grace, but as it stood up to his seven foot height, John was reminded of the thoughtless, ugly war machine it had once been. The hand that gently cradled the keyboard was the same one John had seen effortlessly crush human bones and tear down walls. It had a humanoid form, and it’s concealed face had no noteworthy features.
The robot seemed to be unaware of John’s status within the company, as it began its opening monologue. It was a fact John took issue with given Intrexal was his company, but given the snippets of knowledge others had acquired before his temporary departure, it was understandable they had taken efforts to assure no more clients suffered like Noel Davidson did.
Not that John considered himself in the wrong for his actions. He viewed them as justified and, more important, necessary, to ensure humanities best chance of survival. People like Noel, killing and causing chaos, were a shackle around the ankles of the rest of the surviving population. Humanity was swimming in deep, unsafe waters. They weren’t going to let themselves be pulled under by dead weight. They had to untie themselves from that burden in order to stay above the surface. That, or manipulate the shackle so they could use it to their advantage, as he had unsuccessfully attempted when he tried to edit their consciousnesses.
He wasn’t like Oaktrus. The terrorist group that killed random innocents and passed it off as a necessary action, but seemed to take far too much pleasure in the completion of their task. It was random, irrational. Killing those who would otherwise benefit humanity in the future and leaving those alive who only hinder others. It was immoral and worse, wasteful. John wasn’t like them.
The robot continued telling him about Lurranus, with the pre-recorded female voice disclosing what he could do, emphasising how safe the experience was, how the user could leave at any time, and regularly reiterating how the whole experience was free.
John had no time for the machines scripted message, one he had had a hand in overseeing, and issued his override code.
“This is John Closer. Override code, two-alpha-seven-seven-nine-bravo-three. Take me to system control.”
For a moment the machine was still, and John worried his hidden measures had been detected, despite his best efforts to conceal the code, burying it deep with the program. But the machine turned around, and began taking large strides in the other direction. The machine issued no statement telling John to follow it, but John’s sub-routine had taken measure to return the machine to its former blunt self. This didn’t bother John. He didn’t need to be distracted with trivial, meaningless conversation, conjured by ignorant individuals with no consideration for the dire state of the future. He had once been like them. Ignorant. Not anymore.
John followed the machine as it paced ahead of him, and began to think over his plan, and reached into his jean’s pocket to feel the smooth memory stick he frequently carried with him.

As he walked down the eerily quiet, painful white halls, John became increasingly aware of the pain in his legs and all over his face. A lack of activity and abundance of painkillers of the Mimas had distracted him from the aftermath of his vicious assault, but even now, a year later, it left like it had happened yesterday.
He still remembered coming home to the silence of his family home. Normally his children were working, his wife was cooking, his elderly father singing. Instead, their dead bodies were lying on the ground. Various body parts had been laid out across the floor, and after five minutes of screaming and crying, John had registered that the body parts spelt out a name: Jamie.
One of many people he had pulled out of Lurranus, whose memories chips he had burned. It had to have been Jamie’s family who undertook the attack. He vaguely knew someone in Intrexal had a brother with that name, and given John’s families conscious had been transferred to a computer, and had been ever so slightly corrupted in an attempt to psychologically torture John, it seemed likely someone had from his own company had orchestrated the attack. How else would they know how to do something like that?
Then, after two weeks of trying to save his family, he was attacked by the people he assumed where behind his family's death. They broke his legs, craved all over his face, before leaving him in the street to die. That he didn’t was a miracle.
Further adding credit to the idea someone at Intrexal had organised the attack, was that when he returned days later, he was informed his actions had been uncovered, and a divisive vote had dictated he be dismissed from his own company. With nothing else to do, he had travelled to the space station Mimas. Quite by chance, his friend Liam Treit had come up a month later. He had slowly informed Liam of what had been to him since they met at the end of the War, but otherwise ignored Liam, despite his friends best efforts to bring John back to the world.
Instead, having now seen what Lurranus was, a polluted utopia, he knew what he had to do. He had called his friend, Alex, asking for a few favours. He had begrudgingly agreed, and once his algorithm was finally ready, had come back down to Earth.
He passed a bald man, whose name he vaguely knew, walking down a white corridor labelled “Artificial Inteligence”.
He nodded at the man, but the man seemed too distracted by John’s facial scars and outfit to give a reply. He walked of, and John hoped he didn’t tell anyone of his presence. He stopped, and lay down one of several plastic bags he had in his big rucksacks. He had several more he intended to place before he arrived at the system control. He also took a pistol out of his bag and slowly slid it into his waistband. He stood up. “Let’s keep away from everyone else, why don’t we?” John told the machine, wincing as his face contorted as he spoke.
He supposed he didn’t blame the people who gifted him with those scars. Those people were their family. They probably didn’t see them as the monsters they really were. As Lurranus had proved, even when humanity committed atrocities, they always found a way to justify their actions to themselves. It added some credence to the Oaktrus philosophy that humans weren’t evil, they were just animals, acting out their natural urges. But John disagreed. They were good people, and bad people. There existed people who possessed empathy, compassion, the genuine desire to do good and, often times, the lust for purpose. To feel fulfilled, like they had helped humanity. Something John had slowly realised Lurranus couldn’t provide, but something John’s new task could.
Wincing again, John’s past flashed before his eyes again. He thought of his family again. Molly, Tom, Jessica, his father.
Thinking of them reminded him how much he missed them, watching them grow, living in peace of mind, enjoying their little infinity in their cosy little cottage. But, as angry as John was about his family's death, and as much as he missed them, at the very least, it had given him some clarity of thought. He hated the cost it had come at but, he now knew humanity's true nature. He also now had nothing left to lose, and he knew exactly what he had to do.

They reached their destination seven minutes later. A white room, evidently the companies favourite colour, where lines of computers sat on grey desks with black spinning chairs, all of which were currently unattended.
He issued the robot instructions to go into sentry mode by the door, and to make sure he wasn’t disturbed.
He walked over to a far desk, laid his gun gently on the table and successfully logged in. He reached into his pocket, pulling out his memory stick and plugged it into the machines base. A soft ping signalled the machine had accepted the USB. It contained the file of Noel Davidson, the same file Alex had sent him, and while also storing Noel (who had now been put back in the system for the first time in a year) it also contained John’s personality algorithm.
So far, so good. It automatically opened a glossary of all the several billion people found in the system, and began shifting through the names. It was too fast to comprehend, and John turn to the neighbouring computer. On that, he order the preparation of twenty aerial vehicles, and robot crews ready to awaken the necessary personnel. He feared the machine would object in some way, but it happily complied, and confirmed John’s wishes were being undertaken with a series of low beeps and green flashes.
John moved to close the computer, and waited for the machine to finish it’s task, but stopped.
He suddenly realised what else he had to do.