Manipulator (2 page)

Nick was the team’s programmer, their guy on the outside. He had been with Owen since the very beginning two years ago, scooped up by the Federal Government straight out of university. He lived for programming, and Owen had never seen anyone quite like him at work. Most people who are
that
into their jobs and are
that
withdrawn from society struggled to find common ground with other people outside of the job that they do. But not Nick.

“How does he know where we want to go?” Kate questioned. “If we’re in here and he’s out there, how can he know what we need, or where we need to go?” It was only natural that Kate had a lot of questions. There were a lot of things that Owen and Nick didn’t teach newcomers to PRoGRaM.

“The answer is a lot simpler than you would realise,” he said with a smile, pacing slowly around The White Room as he spoke. “The fact of the matter is, you’re only here in mind and not body. Your body is out there in the real world unconscious, correct?“ he asked Kate, who nodded slowly in response.

“Well that’s only partially right,” Owen continued. “You may think your body is out there in the real world, completely unconscious, but it's not. In fact, it's in more of a self-induced coma. It’s all to do with the drug that we put into your system in order to let your mind enter PRoGRaM. It leaves your body asleep, but keeps your mind awake. When you talk in here, your physical body is actually talking out there too.”

“So it’s like a one way conversation, in that he can hear us, but we can’t hear him?”

“Exactly,” Owen said, pointing at Kate to emphasise the answer. “Except that he has other ways of getting through to us in here, but we’ll get more into that later on.

"Make no mistake about it, even though he’s not amongst us in the PRoGRaM world, Nick is arguably the most important member of our team. Without him, we’re not getting out of this room. And without him, we’re not getting out of PRoGRaM.”

Silence filled the room. Kate stood there with a small grin on her face, slowly nodding whilst taking all of this new information in. Her appetite for this kind of work was showing, and Owen could tell that she just wanted to get out there now and see how this whole digital reality worked.

I haven’t known someone like this since Annie.
Owen thought to himself. But he had to stop there, that was a dark road to go down. He couldn’t,
wouldn’t,
do that now.

“Nick, we’re ready to go forward, load up the demonstration please,” he said into thin air, catching Kate slightly off guard. He continued to slowly pace in a circle around the room as he spoke, knowing that Nick was listening to him on the outside. Shortly after speaking, Owen watched the red light above the only door in the room change to green. He turned and looked at Kate. “See?” he said, noticing that she too had watched the door activate.

We’re connected.

Owen walked over to the door. As he grabbed the handle and pulled it open towards himself, the silence of The White Room was suddenly kicked out and instead filled with the distantly suppressed noise of a city. A bright, warm sunlight came filtering though the now-open door, along with a light summer breeze. Owen walked through first, followed closely behind by Kate.

“Wow,” Owen heard Kate say behind him as she walked out and looked around at the new environment. They were on the roof of an extremely tall building in the middle of New York City.
She's right in saying wow.
Owen thought.
The view is absolutely incredible from here. It's just one of the reasons that I love coming to this place.

As they had both stepped out of The White Room and onto the roof, Owen called Kate back over to the doorway. “Watch this,” he said, a hint of mystery in his voice. He reached back into the doorway from where they had both just emerged and grabbed the door handle inside. Owen pulled the door that led back into The White Room to a close. Then after only a second, he re-opened it.

The White room was gone.

In its place was a normal looking stairway, leading down into the building below them. It was as if The White Room that they had just emerged from had never been there at all.

“The White Room has a very important secondary function,” Owen began to explain, catching Kate’s expression of bewilderment and heading the question off before she asked it. “Remember, primarily, it’s used a spawn point. But its secondary function is just as important, especially once you’re inside this world. It can act as a gateway between different points here so that we’re able to travel anywhere, instantly. You can ask Nick to load The White Room up behind any door, and it will be ready in a matter of
seconds
.

"Once you’re in there with the door shut, you give him a different location, and open the door again. Just like that… you’re somewhere completely different. It's the
fastest
possible way to move around.”

Lesson one of PRoGRaM was over, and Kate seemed to have grasped it extremely well so far.
At least in my opinion.

The two of them continued to walk forwards. Kate moved slower than Owen as she looked around and tried to take it all in. Together, they finally reached the edge and leaned over to admire the scenery below.

“Magnificent view, isn’t it?” Owen asked her as he leant on the metal railing at the edge of the rooftop.

“This is incredible,” Kate responded. “It all feels so real. Even though I know it’s not.”

Around them, Kate and Owen watched as birds flew gracefully on the wind. In the distance, they could see a helicopter flying over the city. A light breeze blew the loose pieces of their clothes around, and below them, cars and taxi-cabs drove on in the hustle and bustle of the city. Everything around Owen and Kate looked as real as it did out there, in the real world.

“Where are we?” Kate asked as she looked around at the city. “I recognise the New York skyline around us, but I can’t place which building we’re on…”

This viewpoint was one of the first places that Owen liked to come to when he entered PRoGRaM. He loved bringing others here to share in the wonder of it all, regardless of the fact that it was never exactly relevant to any operation that they were conducting. It was a location that held a significant place in his mind, despite the fact that in the real world, this place no longer existed.

It hadn’t existed for a long, long time.

This building was one of the focal points of a huge event at the beginning of the 21st century.
And it’s also where my parents were killed when I was only a year old.

“Where we’re standing now is the Northern Tower of The World Trade Centre, which was destroyed over thirty years ago.”

Chapter Three

Date: December 15th 2035 (Present Day)

Location: Unknown

“Perception Recreation Geist-Reality Manipulator, or, as it’s more commonly known, PRoGRaM," Owen explained as Victoria sat listening to what he had to say. "This machine is a revolution that can take your consciousness inside a virtual world, whilst your body stays here, in the real world.”

He rubbed the underside of his chin and felt a fair chunk of stubble. It had been a rough few days for Owen Archer, and he was feeling it all over. His dark, scraggly, medium length hair was all over the place and his blue eyes looked glazed over. His body was worn out and his mind was broken, but he was damned if he was going to show signs of vulnerability to these people.

“Where is it you go in this… virtual world?” Victoria asked him.

Owen looked up at her, studying her for the first time since she had walked into the room a few minutes before. She had shoulder length brunette hair that rested on top of her black suit jacket, and dark brown eyes hidden behind her thin glasses. All in all, she looked stunning; completely out of place in the bland room that the two of them were sat in. Plain grey walls surrounded them, with one exit, and no windows. Two huge lights stretched the ceiling above him, and a huge one way mirror sat alongside the wall to the left. The room was straight out of a retro cop show.

“Well, you can go pretty much anywhere you want to go,” Owen said, answering her question. "The creators of PRoGRaM took an entire 3D map of the world that had already been captured. That was thanks to the company called Veridian.”

“I’ve never heard of them,” Victoria said, shaking her head slowly as she spoke yet never breaking eye contact.

“They’re not that well-known a company," Owen explained. "But I guarantee you’ve used some of their technology in the past.” He realised that he was rambling, going off on a tangent and away from the important things. “Anyway, back to Veridian. They’d been developing their mapping system since the beginning of the millennium. Towards the end of 2029, Veridian had a complete 3D map of the world. It included everything, even the insides of every building in existence. It had all been mapped out through a new, experimental sonar technology. The creators of PRoGRaM took this map and re-coded it to their own use.”

"And who was it that created PRoGRaM?" Victoria asked.

"We'll get to that shortly," Owen said, shaking her question off. “Back to the facts. This sonar scanned map was the beginning of what would become PRoGRaM. A massively scaled, highly detailed, complete 3D map of the world, and we could just walk around inside it as if we were in the real world, with the added ability to go absolutely anywhere we wanted to in the flash of an eye.” He watched Victoria note down the things that he was saying.

“And these creators of PRoGRaM? Did you ever meet them? After all, you were using their machine,” Victoria questioned.

“Yes, I met them. But we’ll get to that,” Owen replied, trying not to get ahead of himself.

“Okay,” she said, making a note of it for later. “Can you describe what PRoGRaM is like? I’d like to know how the experience is, in your own words, so that I can understand the story more coherently.”

Owen sat and thought about it a little, wanting to give as detailed an answer as possible. “To some extent, being inside PRoGRaM is just like being inside a video game, except that in PRoGRaM, everything looks real, and it’s pretty damn difficult to separate the real world away from PRoGRaM’s reality once you’re in there.”

"I see. And inside, how do you, look like… you?"

"PRoGRaM is capable of reading you genetic makeup. All it needs is something as small as a drop of your own blood. It translates this into an accurate representation of yourself inside the digital world. Clothing is all programmed in afterwards, but we'll get to that later."

Owen took a drink from his glass of water that was on the table in front of him before he continued. “Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Creating a world isn’t enough, it’s what you use it for that really matters. I know that additions were slowly made to the original PRoGRaM basic world model. The virtual world gradually became more realistic. The creators who coded the world added things such as avatars, these life-like people walking around the world. They programmed vehicles, added different weather conditions, absolutely everything that you can think of. Everything that was done, was to make the experience seem more
real
. Then, and only then, was the attention for PRoGRaM turned to the real world applications. The general public had no common knowledge of PRoGRaM, as the entire project was still under wraps with the FBI.”

“And still is?” Victoria questioned.

“And still is.”

“You know a lot about the development of PRoGRaM, Mr Archer,” Victoria said, probing him into explaining himself.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing?" he responded. "It’s a part of my job to know everything about the technology that I’m using. Like how I know that originally, PRoGRaM was only used for simulation purposes. One of its more
elaborate
current functions was discovered completely by accident.”

“Go on.”

“This ‘re-invention’ as you might call it, developed when a select few members of the British S.A.S. used PRoGRaM to put a soldier in the middle of a battlefield, as part of a trial for a new battle simulation. I don’t know the soldiers name, is that important?”

“No,” Victoria said back to him without even looking up from her notepad where she was furiously writing down the details.

“Okay,” Owen continued. “So, this was the first ever test of its kind. They loaded up a location in PRoGRaM that the man had actually fought at during one of his tours of Afghanistan. Some avatars that were pre-programmed to fight back were brought in and then the simulation began. Now, here comes something which nobody had yet thought about the consequences of. This soldier ended up virtually dying whilst inside PRoGRaM, shot dead by one of the in-programmed avatars.”

“You can die inside PRoGRaM?” Victoria quickly asked, surprised by this new information.

“Only virtually," Owen responded, trying quickly to explain. "Dying inside PRoGRaM cannot kill your physical body, but it is capable of doing something…
else
. This soldier, after initially waking up in the real world appeared to have come out of the trauma relatively unscathed. Apart from that is, losing a very specific piece of his memory.”

“You mean…?”

“The memory happened to be the same one that was active at the time he was inside PRoGRaM. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”

Chapter Four

Date: December 8th 2035