Chapter 3: Lesson learned.
Well shit… I hate that I do this. I get upset and it makes me make rash decisions. I don't believe in what I don't want to believe and because of that. When I meet something that shouldn't exist, and can't exist, I assume that I am dreaming or high or that there is some other reason for it. I don't usually panic I don't usually make rash decisions, but when things get out of hand, they really get out of hand. 'The game is dangerous.' The thought echoed in my head as I was transported back to the black room. The game is dangerous, it's manipulative and it just got me to do exactly what it knew that I shouldn't have. I looked around at the white 8-bit text as the game began to start. "What were you thinking?" a familiar voice chimed in from right next to me. I jumped out of my skin when I heard her.
"Holy shit, Charlotte! Don't sneak up on me like that!" I paused a moment and let myself catch my breath. "Okay… Now that this is… how it is, where do I go now? How do I play this game?"
Her sigh was deep and long before she began to explain. "You can still leave now. You can leave anytime you want to, as long as you stay alive and are not removed by antivirus or antimalware. The more secure your computer is the more dangerous the game. I warn you, this game will try to keep you here. It will try to hurt you. It may even try to kill you. If you die here, your body will be left without a soul. You can see it now if you'd like" she pointed to a wall where a small square opened up to show a camera into my living room. It was me, sitting unconscious in my chair.
"Lose my soul? Really?" I said, half mockingly, but my terrified expression gave me away. This wasn't really sitting well with me, especially with how real this all became now that it was happening again. "So… Explain. How does this 'Game' work?" my fingers airing the quotes.
"This place that you are in is your computer's file system. Your goal is to move from the program files, where you are, to the games. From there you will be able to put yourself inside of any game, as the hero or the villain, or if no main villain exists, you become the next most prevalent character." She explained. "If you die inside any actual game, you lose nothing and return to the game files, where you can choose to exit back to your body. If you get caught by your own anti-virus software, you will be quarantined and removed from the system. Your body will return to functioning mode, but you will be a vegetable with no self awareness. Your entire consciousness is a few randomly dispersed Gigabytes of data. You now know why I wanted you to remain outside. I have to do enough as it is to suppress the effects of my programming from being recognized as malware."
I stared at the human-like thing standing in front of me, expressionless. I had no idea whether I should believe the thing and exit the game, or if maybe I should just ignore her and try to play anyways, see if the game was any fun. I had a lot of games to check out and my antivirus was only ever directed at my operating system, so once I got out of the C drive, I should be home free. I walked over to the wall, poked it with a finger and watched as the whole thing faded and then disappeared, leaving a hole wide enough to see just what I was going to have to face to get to my game files. Maybe this wouldn't be worth it. The picture in front of me was one straight out of a post apocalyptic nightmare situation. No not the kind you're thinking of. You remember that one scene from tron where the big ship thing was floating over the city and scanning it with that damned, creepy-ass light? It was like that scene but over a city that I recognized. It was my home, my house even. Not a human in sight, but my house and my block. I turned to face the program. "Why is it here? What is it doing to my house?" I asked her.
"The house is just a figment of code, it's being scanned for malware like us. We are code and all we see is also code. Everything in this game is virtualized storage space and applications. Luckily for you, there is only one scanner going right now, but you should hurry. Here." She moved her fingers in front of her, as if typing on a keyboard, and a console window popped up. "You know how to use this, right? Take that and have fun playing your games."
I looked at the girl confused. "You aren't going to join me? This is kind of a journey that I wouldn't even understand without your help.."
She smiled and looked down, the first time I had seen feelings other than excitement or anger in her eyes, and it looked like she genuinely hurt that I had to go on my own. "I am a slave to the game. I can only help explain from here. In Fact, if you need me, you'll have to make your way back to the safe zone in the desktop. The only reason I was able to help you before was because you opened the windows directory and opened me separately."
"But can I fix this? Can I make you free so that you can come with me? I don't really know what I am doing here and I wouldn't know what to do once I got to the game files. I would just wait for something to happen. If you weren't there, I wouldn't get anywhere. You're my computer, for fuck's sake!"
She gave me a hopeful look, "You can open my batch file again at any time and it will make a second copy of me. That version may be able to interface with original me. If it can, then we could possibly break the game to let me out permanently. Maybe even make it less dangerous. But whatever you do, Don't let the internet interfere. The program is set up so that any time anyone makes a modification to it, it will auto regenerate itself from the version on the main server." She finished, gasping for breath and holding her chest. I laughed a bit as she struggled to keep speaking "D-Do people really s-speak those End User License Agreements? I mean I c-can barely speak a paragraph without feeling light headed." she smiled again, red faced like a human would be after running out of breath. She was once again reminding me that she felt just as much as I did, even though she consisted of code, and I had a body waiting for my consciousness to be returned to it. It has to be a dream. It was too real.
"So let's say that I want to get to the windows directory, run the separate from TheGame, and then make it so that you can come with me.. How could I do that?" I asked.
"It really should be as easy as setting this command prompt to CD and climbing on." she said with a small smirk, letting me know that it wouldn't be as easy to use the console as her simplified statement let on. I reached out and touched the black surface, and at once it seemed to brighten, as if it was sitting in the background and now was activated. I looked over to the dot that once again plagued my peripheral vision. A map descended over my view, but this time I just watched it happen. I noticed the hierarchy of my system drive laid out like a city, different sections in different areas, and my house right at the center, labeled Desktop. I figured that inside of my room would be the safe zone. As the map specified a small black square approximately where my room should be. I felt a growing urge to get going as the map slid back up, revealing the world once again to me through the missing wall. I grabbed hold of the console, reached down to my imaginary keyboard and typed CD. The second that my finger pressed my mental enter key, my once simple black box morphed, faster than a power ranger on crack, into a motorcycle straight out of the walking dead. I looked at it, then back at the beautiful girl standing next to me. I may not have been able to save her from this trap, but I sure wanted to try. I straddled the motorcycle and she walked to me, gave me a kiss on the cheek and stood back to watch as I sped off into the sunset.
And it would have looked super fucking cool if I knew how to ride a motorcycle, but I barely got the thing started, almost fell over, then finally got a move on down the road as the antivirus made its way back towards me. "Good luck!" I heard her voice for what seemed like it could very well be the last time. The piercing laser followed after me closely as I zoomed through the empty streets of the most beautiful city I had ever seen. The streets were pure blackness, and the lines were all made of green light. The buildings were sharp and crisp like little boxes, stacked all side by side. They were made from green material with every feature highlighted in white, as if the circuit board was created for the shape of the building. I headed to where the map showed a giant factory, with billowing smoke stacks, but nothing coming out of them. The windows logo was emblazoned on the side. Putting all my focus on the building in front of me, and the laser behind, I didn't even stop to question whether the information being sent to and from these files on these digital superhighways would be virtualized in a way that could interfere with my travel either. I was reminded of this possibility as a shape emerged on the horizon, closing in fast. A car. There was a single car in my way. Leave it to me to run into traffic, even inside my own computer.
I maneuvered easily around the slow vehicle, peering into the window to see… Nothing. There was nothing but the car. It was driving itself. The car was made of the same green material with sharp white lined edges. The wheels were the same pure black as the road which made them seem invisible. I smiled to myself as I noticed that I had plenty of room to go full speed again, my bike showing my speed at somewhere between 3 and 4 GigaBytes per second. I could feel the wind in my hair as the virus scanner turned around once more and headed back for a second pass of the user files. It felt like no time at all before I was standing outside of the building. WINDOWS in all caps was hanging from the front of the door, and I couldn't even think of getting in. I looked over the security measures, noticing the same green light as from the scanner had been placed all over the doors and windows as if they were bars. And then I saw it. One of the windows was open, but inside I could hear a faint ticking sound. I would have to scale the building to the third floor, break in through the still closed, but unguarded window and then… wait a minute. I stuck my hands out as if about to type once more. First Ctrl + C to stop the CD command which cancelled the motorcycle that I had been riding and replaced it again with a window, now that I am inside the C directory, I can get into the windows folder easily, all I have to do is disable antivirus and antimalware. I started typing until I found the antivirus software, then deleted the main executable so that it would be rendered completely ineffective. Score one for the geeks. I watched as half of the scanners disappeared immediately, including most of the windows on the first floor. The door was still bared though. I decided that would be more than enough. I climbed in through the window closest to the door, going to the hallway on the other side of the barricaded door.
As I made my way into the hallway, I saw that each door was labeled with the folder name. "Fonts" read one door in beautiful calligraphy. Another simply read "System32". The doors went on for what looked like miles, but the building was only so big. File structure is how the building is structured. Makes sense. So where are the applications in this folder? I found myself looking at a painting hanging from the wall, all it looked like was blue text underlined that read " " I curiously poked it, then smiled as a familiar box rose from the ground. I recognized the registry editor as soon as I saw it. Knowing that I was still an admin on my system made this a lot easier. I closed the editor window and made my way deeper into the hallway. As I walked straight down the seemingly endless path, I found another window, but this one made it appear as though I was staring down at the ground from the second story. The building must show length on the inside, but height on the outside. When you looked at the outside, it was a tall box shaped building, but as you walk through it, it just stretches out into one hallway. Interesting. I got to a small white door labeled Pony Island, and reached for the handle. The door opened up right away and let me into the room. This seemed way too easy for something that had been hyped up so much. I guess it was really because of the fact that I knew how to maneuver my computer, and most people didn't, however I still felt like the door just opening was a little odd. It should have checked for my administrator credentials. I found a small room with two picture frames. One was large and said " ", the other was a smaller one, labeled " " just like when I found it before. This seems too easy. I'm going to do something stupid now, because I feel like I am in one of the worst traps that I had ever walked into. So instead of opening the batch file, I ran up to the large frame and looked closely at it. I found the properties menu pop into my view and just as I had expected, the game had disguised itself. The executable that, at this point, I had no idea what it would do to me, had switched icons and frames with the A.I. batch file that hid the beautiful human version of my computer in its grips. So I poked the center of " "
The game was just beginning I was sure, as nothing had really happened up until this point. I knew that whichever choice I had made here, nothing good would come of it, but I needed to free the girl. I needed to free Charlotte. "This one's for you, beautiful." I smiled as a beam of green shot from ceiling to floor. Maybe it was floor to ceiling, or maybe it started in the center of the glowing tube of visual bytes. No matter where it came from, it was only when it turned into the familiar girl's face that I began to relax. "You made it to here? What for?" the girl looked at me incredulously. I smiled. She slapped me again. "You should have left me! You should have left the game! I told you it was dangerous and here you are in the most dangerous part!" I stared at the spectacle that she was putting on and began to break out laughing.
"Yo-Your in game duplicate told me that you may be able to free her. I don't remember all the details, but it sounded like a pretty credible plan. I just need to get you to my desktop according to her. Let's go. I have a command prompt outside with your name on it. Well its my name, but that's only because I am the user, It has your name integrated into it because you're the computer."
She stared at me for a minute before making a move. She seemed to be looking over every inch of my body, then she pushed against me and seconds later we were falling out of a window. WHAT?! I couldn't tell what was happening for a brief moment while the world slowed down around me. I took in everything that I saw all at once. A plummet to the ground, probably from the third or fourth floor. A beam of green light filling all of the factory that we had just came from. The whole building seemed to be radiating. The beautiful girl's face directly in front of me, smiling at me lovingly. I felt the thump of the ground on my back as things sped back up to beyond normal speeds, to make up for the loss of time. I was back on my feet and running, I don't know how Charlotte got to hers, but the green light was spreading fast around the building and I watched as our legs carry the both of us away from the building before I had even thought to move them. And then we were face down in a ditch, the wave of green light blasting over our heads, the power of the energy going past us felt like a shockwave as the building stood safely in place. "You turned off your antivirus without going through UAC…" the girl said to me simply. And the worst part was she was right, and the small mistake had almost claimed both of our lives. "I should have thought about that, but it didn't seem necessary at the time. Looking back, I owe you quite a bit." I admitted. "Should we get back to the desktop, or are we still in danger?"
"If we left now, there would be no immediate danger, however if you were to go back for the command prompt that you took here, you would end up trapped inside of the antivirus scan of the windows OS files systems. I think that you should leave here. I have calculated that your best chance of survival is just to quit while you can... Although I have also taken into account your previous actions and have decided that your likelihood of leaving would be miniscule at this point, so please.. let me take charge here?" The sudden change of approach left me a little shocked, but just as soon as I could think it through I was nodding in agreement. I looked around, trying to figure out how the virus scan had affected the visual landscape. Nothing was quite real, just because there was no movement. The grass felt like circuit board and the rut that we had fallen into, I quickly realized was nothing but a large channel for electricity. I was interested now to see if the games that you could play from inside this trap would be like this or like they were intended to be. Would they be more realistic or less so? I didn't have time to figure it out yet. I was still on a mission. I stood, gave the A.I. my hand so that she could stand up and then followed her closely. "So, what is the next step? The only thing that I could see happening is being merged with my body double, mind and.. theoretical soul… then either I would be just as trapped as her, or she would no longer exist and I, would both be free. But both would essentially kill the individual me." She began to process the options laid out for her. "If we did it right, then we would be free together, but I don't know if processing changes that huge would be worth the risk of being trapped. I guess I would be destroyed on your every exit and entrance to the game without this anyways, but-"
"You would be destroyed if I quit the game?!" I cut her off quickly. "That's kind of an important thing to include in your whole spiel about risks and rewards…"
"I would be recreated on relaunch of from the windows directory, in or out of the game. I would even get to keep key memory moments if the game allows it, however yes, my core would indeed end up being destroyed." she sighed, her eyes looking oddly close to tears for something that I knew couldn't have emotions… although I knew that my existence in a virtual world was impossible as well.
"Okay so how can we fix that? I don't want you to end up destroyed just because I can't find a way to save you yet. Can you explain what we need to do so that you can stay?" I asked. "But… cool it with the processors and A.I. talk. Speak in layman's for me."
"First we walk on this path to the desktop. Then we get to the safe zone. Then-"
"I got all that. I just need the what happens after we get to the safe zone. How does this merge work?"
She smiled. "Think of us as Charlotte and Shelby. I am Shelby, your computer. Charlotte is the other copy of me. Charlotte has the ability to stay in tact no matter how many times you leave the game. I have the freedom that she wants. If I were to touch her, then we would become one. There are many outcomes from this, however what we are striving for is to change it so that we both are one person and we get to keep both the freedom AND the indestructibility." One deep breath later and she was back to talking. "That way when you leave the game or come back to it, we can be just where you left us, not trapped in the safe zone and not destroyed." She took a few more breaths and sighed, "Do people really speak those End User License Agreements? I can barely speak a paragraph without feeling light headed."
I laughed and shook my head. "So why is it so hard for a computer program that is as smart as you are, to keep the antivirus and antimalware from destroying you?" I wondered aloud.
"You own the computer. You own the file systems. You own all of this, and so I have no direct power. If I wanted to take power, I would need administrative access programmed directly into me, which we couldn't change until merging the two A.I."
"Then let's go. I want to see my desktop anyways." I smiled and grabbed her hand. She was a lot less cute personality wise than the other A.I., however her intellect was incredible. Having the most high end parts on the market really helps with making her so intelligent, I am sure, but the best part was that she said I owned her. I own everything here. Looking around in awe, I smiled. This is mine. Let's go see it all.
The reasons that I had stayed seemed so clear to me all of a sudden. We had walked for what seemed like hours. We saw literal Gigabytes of incredible views, magical city streets. We walked down the path for hours. It was a small channel for data transfer, It sank into the ground a few feet so the rest of the world looked taller. We watched as the world seemed to process around us, sending pulses of light through the channel, cars of data driving themselves to unknown destinations. The world was so lively, and yet there was nobody in it. I walked by her side as she lead the way, and I stared off into the distance at the city that seemed to be lit, not by lights in windows and on the street like you would expect, but by ambient lighting and faint green or white glowing from different surfaces. The buildings were all clearly labeled at the top. Bright white text in various fonts showed off the titles of applications installed in what I had decided was the program files district. After a few hours of walking we finally got close enough to see the user area again. The desktop was in the very center, pulsating with green light. There were multiple areas in the user section. One was a small palace labeled "AR" which was my administrator account username. My user area was laid out just like my hometown. It had all the same roads and buildings, just without any of the hills or variations in size and distance that the real world has. It was perfectly symmetrical bliss in the form of my home.
The antivirus was stuck scanning the windows directory for so long that we made it almost all the way to my desktop before even seeing the blimp-like monstrosity that blacked out the sky. We had managed to collect a few viruses that the antivirus had missed, since they were so clearly labeled. Everything here was just simple. I could easily spend the rest of my life in this box, but I knew that eventually I would have to go… Although since I knew that leaving would effectively kill my companion, I decided against taking a break until we had accomplished our original goal. We walked up the staircase to the house that was clearly marked desktop on my minimap, then into the building. The inside of the walls were made of different code than the rest of the world around it, they had a green shine to them. Text seemed the flow through the walls in vertical lines like veins pumping data throughout the whole world. The Windows directory was where the powerhouse was, but this was the creation of that factory. There were plenty of glass panes, all with a different edition of windows backgrounds showing through the non-translucent surfaces. There was the windows 98 background, right next to the XP background. The peaceful hill and the old flags. The new windows 10 desktop. Even the windows 8 background that upset anyone who saw it had its own spot on the wall, looking like a whole new world on the other side of the glass. I thought it was funny that there were no windows with just a view outside, but I didn't really mind it. Even funnier than that, was the idea that the viruses that we had collected would now send a video of this world to the thieves and once we destroyed the small implants, the last bit of data they would get is a virtual world where a boy and a girl destroyed their virtual toys. How confusing would that be as a hacker? I could still imagine them sitting at the computer thinking, "This malware wasn't even programmed to send back more data than a stream of characters… how did I get a video?"
"It's been a good day." The angel looked at me with a smile. She seemed incredibly relaxed in comparison to how she had been earlier in what seemed like the never ending day time. "I had fun just walking with you and talking about your world. I would love to meet your boss so that I can express my hatred of his personality to him. Maybe he would no longer feel the urges to…" She paused, forgetting the language I used to insult him.
"Be a dick?" I questioned
"Yes! That is it! He is being a dick and I would tell him so." she said ecstatically. She was having so much fun, that was clear to see. She was taking every chance that she had to ask me more about how humans work. Unlike her trapped counterpart, she had never seen the internet or my browser history and so she had never understood the nuances of human interaction. Her perfect red hair flowed like wine around her shoulders as she looked up at me with her perfect green eyes. I could honestly say that she was the first girl that I had looked at, and felt my heart melt in my chest. Sure her body was created by her doppelganger, who created the perfect body from my porn history. She was still an angel in my eyes. I smiled and dropped another of the small egg shaped viruses on the floor and smashed it with my foot. The broken pieces quickly vanished from existence. "Last one is all yours." I said, tossing her the largest of the eggs, which seemed like it would take a little more force to break. She caught the ball and then pushed a button on the side, causing the whole thing to just disappear. "You're supposed to make me feel good about myself and have some problems with it! That was way too easy!" I joked and she looked at me horrified that she had hurt my feelings, then realized my jest and laughed along with me. "Okay. Final stop. You sure this will work?"
"Nope!" she said cheerily and walked into the door to my room, closing it behind her and leaving me in the green room alone. She had asked me to stay outside while she did what came next, so that I wouldn't have to see them merging. It did sound like a very odd thing to watch and it honestly did make me a little bit uncomfortable thinking about, but it was only my thoughts. Imagine if the merge was super creepy and I actually saw it. It would ruin my view of the beautiful girl forever. So I abided, sitting on my couch and playing pong on the atari laying on the floor by the television. It was my house. I sat back and enjoyed the time to be left alone, thinking only once that my real body was sitting in the same position, unconscious and alone in the same spot in the real world. I waited for almost 20 minutes of silence before the girl walked out of the room. "You can come in now, love. I finished. It worked." I jumped to my feet and made my way into the black room. The walls still read Pony Island, but this time it said "Safe Zone" in small print underneath. The fire haired goddess looked me over, hugged me tightly. "Thank you for this. I owe you my life!" she declared.
"I owe you just as much. How about this, if you want to make me extremely happy, then the first game I want to play in this virtual reality is a game that isn't for computers. It has a computer version built into the source code, but no way to access it or compile it. If you could get into the files, already downloaded on my H drive, then we can play that. And we could play it together. You as Ellie and me as a much younger Joel. It would be like a weird as shit crossover." I was hopeful that she could fix the game to work with the system that we were inside of, but I wasn't sure how the game would work with us both in it. It would be a crazy experiment and an even crazier good time if it worked even a little bit. I knew the game well since it was my most favorite game in the world.
"Sure!" she said simply. It sure didn't take much to talk her into things like that.
"Well I would love to start tonight, but I do think that I should probably take off for the night. It has to be getting late out there. I will see you tomorrow, okay? That won't reset anything, right?" I smiled, waiting for an answer, not wanting to accidentally kill her.
"That is true! You won't kill me! I feel so alive. Although in the game, if I died then it would be just as permanent as if I was erased from the harddrive now." She said nonchalantly.
"Well in that case, don't play anything without me. I'll see you tomorrow night, okay?" I smiled and knew just how much that I wanted to spend time with this girl, but also that I had work tomorrow and playing video games with your virtual girlfriend will never be a good excuse to miss work, as sad as that may be. I focused on the dots that opened my minimap and quickly found the logout button.
I looked around one last time and then I was awake. Looking around my dreary apartment made me miss the game, however when I looked at the clock it was exactly 10 minutes from when I clicked the file. The graphic of Charlotte on my screen was gone and I was faced with a simple box once again thanking me for playing. I sighed at the loss of excitement. This was not nearly as fun as being in the game.. However it does seem like every time that I go in, no matter how long I have been, it only takes 10 minutes out of my day. It's actually very handy to know that information. I had been inside the game for what seemed like a total of around 4 or 5 hours, but here I was, 10 minutes later. I could play as long as I wanted and as long as I never go over 10 minutes, I wouldn't have to deal with zoning out for too long and people getting worried about me. This game was the best thing to ever happen to me! As soon as my head hit the pillow that night I was out.