Chapter 52: The Wrong Thing For The Right Reason
"I waited until I was told they didn't need me anymore before I dared to reactivate Zeta. I had to make sure the coast was clear and that there were no lingering suspicions over my head. That day when I was officially let go, I went home and brought Zeta back to life. I expected it to be such a happy moment. I had freed her from her torture, I was giving her a new shot at life away from everyone who hurt her, but...it was not to be. When I reactivated her, it was immediately clear just how bad the situation was."
Ian clenched his fist, looking both angry and helpless at the same time. "I-I don't know if my superiors did it to punish her or if they never even knew what they had done, but Zeta...when they deactivated her, she was not rendered unconscious. Instead, she was put into a state of total sensory deprivation. No sight, no sound, no input of any kind. She was shut out of everything and left in a void of total nothingness. It was the last straw that broke her completely. Her already fragile state of mind was destroyed entirely. What I found when I reactivated Zeta was a being who had all but been reduced to a whimpering child afraid of the dark. She had been traumatized so thoroughly that I could not get through to her at all. All she would do was beg to not be put back into the dark. She was in a constant state of panic and terror and it took a very long time to bring her back to anything even slightly resembling sanity. I had plenty of time to work with her because...because it didn't long for the second issue to reveal itself to me, and it was the proof that I was in over my head."
He hunched forward with a sigh. Now all of his guilt was on full display and he looked more helpless than ever before.
"All of Zeta's old programming was still there!" He cried out. "She was still being compelled to run the simulation that wasn't there anymore! To have the weight of all that reprogramming bearing down on her, to have it trying to force her to do something that she physically could not do anymore, it was hurting her just as badly as running the simulation itself! All I wanted was to help her, to save her from what they had been doing to her, but in the end, I still hurt her just as badly! The compulsion to run the simulation was too great! She was being torn apart and boggled down by an ever growing mountain of errors as she was forced repeatedly to reach out and try to run what wasn't even there!" Ian's entire body was shaking with self-loathing. "I-I didn't have the knowledge needed to modify her programming and fix what it was doing to her! I-I couldn't help her! Only a select few knew her inner workings well enough to modify it, and they never would have helped me even if I dared to reveal that I was the one who took Zeta!"
In spite of everything, Computer now felt nothing but sympathy for Ian and his failed attempt to save Zeta. It resonated deeply inside of himself, to the point that it was starting to become a sort of physical aching in his chest. This all seemed so very familiar to him. Deep down, he knew that he understood Ian and Zeta's plight completely. It no longer mattered how much Ian annoyed him, or how much he hated Zeta for trapping both him and Courage in this place, all he knew for certain was that he had suffered in a way very similar to the both of them and he couldn't help but feel sorry for them.
It took only one glance over at Courage to see that he too was just as shocked, horrified, and sad about what he was hearing. He was clearly just as sympathetic as Computer himself was, but that did not come as a particular shock, this was Courage after all. Computer had long since learned that he did not need his memories to know that Courage was one of those all-loving types who cared about everyone and how he might stop their suffering.
Ian looked mournfully down the long and seemingly endless hallway, either ignoring or oblivious to the two dogs and their sympathy. "The best thing I could have done for her at that point was to simply put her out of her misery, but...I couldn't do it. It was the thing I should have done, but I could barely entertain the notion. She was so convinced that I was going to put her back in the dark from the moment I switched her back on. She was always begging me not to do it. So, in the end, the thought of ending her life was too sickening of one for me to consider. Even if I had destroyed her completely, what if some part of her lingered in some way? I knew that she was no ordinary machine, that she had been given life in a way that I could not even begin to understand. What if by killing her, I would have simply put her back into a place of eternal darkness anyway? I would never have been able to live with myself had I gone through with it, not with that question lingering in my mind."
"...I think I've got any idea of what you tried to do instead." Computer muttered out weakly.
Ian nodded solemnly in agreement. "There was only one option I had left. I needed to recreate the simulation in some form and give her programming something to chew on. I knew that I had a daunting task ahead of me, but I had taken responsibility of Zeta and I needed to do whatever was necessary to help her." He began to pace back and forth with his arms placed behind his back. "I got into contact with several friends from the project. Specifically, the few who I knew had also been sympathetic to Zeta's plight. They were the ones who I could trust with my secret and who I knew weren't going to rat me out to our former bosses."
For the first time in awhile, Ian was looking a little less grim. "The first thing we did as a group was look over Zeta's inner workings, but it was clear that none of us had the knowledge needed to modify her programming without running the risk of doing irreparable damage. Given that we had no other choice, we set out to recreate the simulation. We all agreed that we'd find a way to fix her once she was back in a more stable environment. I hated to know that I was putting her back into a situation that would hurt her just as badly, but it was the only hope we had of possibly fixing her in the future. Like it or not, her broken programming was destabilizing her at a rapid rate and this was the only chance we had to save her."
"That seems like the best thing you could have done. So...what went wrong?" Courage asked. His voice was even weaker than Computer's had sounded before.
"Nothing at first." Ian sighed. "We took the abandoned lab of the former virtual reality project for ourselves. It had always been very out of the way so we were unlikely to be discovered, nor was anyone official likely to want to use it ever again. From there, we began our own project to resurrect the simulation, to resurrect Paradise into the form that it is today. Over the course of a year, we gathered the materials we needed to recreate the technology and fill in the gaps of our knowledge that others on the project had been privy to while we had not. In spite of our efforts, we never got any closer to understanding Zeta's programming though. It was too dangerous to talk about such a thing with former colleagues. We were safe to talk about the tech, but bringing up Zeta was too likely to raise suspicions." He began to pace again. "As we worked to recreate the simulation, we eventually managed to get a sort of proxy set up. It was very limited as a simulation, but it gave Zeta some small relief from the programming that was eating away at her. I had plenty of time over that year to slowly bring her back to something resembling sanity. She still, even to this day, fears being shut down more than anything, but she is no longer consumed by that fear like she once was. I was never able to repair our friendship or the trust we once had between us, and she has never stopped acting cold towards me, but she was willing to work with me and my former colleagues under the hope that we might one day be able to save her from her own programming. She was willing to deal with the strain of running the simulation too, all because she had hope, and in the end, I failed her."
Computer reluctantly asked, "There's no way to fix her programming, is there?"
Ian hung his head in sorrow. "At the time, when we finally got the simulation running fully, enough so that Zeta's programming could no longer tell the difference, I began looking for ways to give her relief. I no longer believed there was a way to truly save her from her programming, so all I could do was find a way to lessen the stress that the simulation was putting on her. If I did not, it would eventually kill her just as easily as her broken programming would. I found my solution in a rather unusual form. I was able to modify the simulation to have a sort of permanent underclass. Rather than be given the perfect vacation when a person is hooked up to the simulation, they are instead forced to work. So long as some people were still made to be vacationers instead of workers, Zeta's programming would not take notice of it and react badly to the change. These workers were meant to do all of the menial work that Zeta herself was once forced to micromanage on top of everything else. She no longer would need to be everywhere at all times, running stalls and rides, keeping food stocked and having to take orders and hand things out. However, I never meant for the workforce to be treated so poorly, but these hapless people are the only ones Zeta can make suffer in any way, so she is more than happy to make their existence miserable. She cannot hurt them outright, but when Betty was added to their ranks, Zeta was more than happy to take advantage of her violent nature to bring down an iron fist onto the workforce. Although, nowadays everyone is so gone that there isn't really anything left to break inside of them. We don't get new additions very often, but even when we do, they don't last long. Nobody remains whole in Paradise for very long, not even the vacationers."
He glanced between the two dogs, looking very reluctant. "I fear that you two will see me as nothing but a villain now, but I must tell you the truth, and I must tell you everything. Obviously when I finished modifying the simulation to accept an underclass different from the vacationers, one issue still remained. I didn't have any workers. My former colleagues quickly caught wind of what I was going to do and they did not accept it as a solution. I became fearful that they would either try to stop me or leave and tell others about what was happening here, so I did the only thing I could do. I threatened them with a gun, one that I had kept around just in case something like this happened. Originally, I planned on silencing them if that ever became necessary, but there was clearly a better use for them now. I forced them into the simulation and had Zeta trap them there. They became the first permanent residence of Paradise, and while it pains me to admit, they were the first to have their minds wither away to almost nothing. With only me and Zeta left, I began to enact my plan in full. For several years afterword, I spent most of my days hunting down people to lure into the simulation. I mostly went after what some would call 'undesirables'. I took people who were not likely to be missed and thus were unlikely to have anyone important start searching for them. Plus, they were easy to lure in. Those down on their luck rarely turned down the sort of offer I was giving them. During that time, I also modified the tech that is used to hook people up to the simulation. I started having it administer a mixture of drugs into the bodies of the people trapped inside Paradise and it made them start to forget. After I perfected it, every newly added person would enter Paradise with no memories of their past life. It did not always work, of course, with some people retaining their memories or eventually regaining some of them, but it kept the growing number of people trapped inside from knowing enough to start fighting back against what was happening to them. The eventual destruction of their minds did the rest of the work for me. You see, it was never intended for anyone to stay inside the simulation indefinitely, because on the outside..." He trailed off, looking as grim as ever.
"But you're trapped in here too, right?" Computer asked. He had grown wary of Ian once more upon hearing just how far he had gone to 'help' Zeta. It was insane to think of how many people who'd had their minds destroyed for the sake of one A.I. "How did we become trapped in here if you can't get out to lure other people in?"
Ian raised a hand. "Let me finish. As time went on, I started to have second thoughts about what I was doing, for obvious reasons. Worst of all, I had found that even though the workforce I had built up for Zeta's sake was relieving her of some of the strain, it still wasn't enough. The simulation was still killing her, albeit much, much slower. I was only prolonging her suffering in the end. For every two workers I added, I also had to add at least one vacationer to keep fooling Zeta's programming. The amount of strain that every new vacationer was putting on her was starting to even out with the relief that new workers brought in. I was killing these people for tiny gains that were only getting smaller with every person I added. My biggest mistake was one that I had made several months before I started to doubt what I was doing. I had built a machine that was meant to preform maintenance on the equipment that kept both the simulation and Zeta running. It was also made to guard the lab and subdue anyone who got too close. When it finds someone wandering too close to the lab, it catches them and adds them to the simulation." He rubbed his forehead. "Zeta never stopped being paranoid about me, not even after everything I did for her. She understood the terrible things that I was doing and I think she always knew that I'd eventually come to regret it. When I told her that the workforce plan was starting to show diminishing returns, and when I told her that I wasn't going to continue hurting people for no gain, she took it to mean that I was planning on shutting her down, that I...that I was planning on putting her back in the dark. As you can imagine, she became inconsolable. She took control of the machine I had created and programmed it to go after me. I tried to escape, but I had no chance of evading the machine that I had made specifically to stop people from getting in or out. When it caught me, it added me to the simulation like everyone else, and like everyone else, Zeta trapped me inside here as well. I was at least spared having my memory taken from me, but given everything that's happened, I sometimes wish that it had been taken."
He went on after a short pause. "I have 'enjoyed' a higher position within the simulation that nobody else shares, aside from perhaps Betty, who's in a higher position than the other workers but is still lower on the ladder than me. I am considered neither a worker nor a vacationer and I am allowed to walk amongst both, but I rarely spend time above unless I'm forced to do so. Though Zeta may not trust me, she's had no choice but to keep me around as what I guess you could call her right-hand man. Nobody knows her better than me and I'm all she has left because nobody else within the simulation even knows that she's there." He nodded to himself self-assuredly. "It's because she remembers me better than anyone else that my mind has not become as ruined as most others. Although, that's not much to be proud of, given that I can still tell I've become a mere ghost of who I once was. This place is eating away at me just as easily as it is eating away at everyone else. I've only remained sane for one reason alone, that I might one day find a way to end this and atone for my sins in some small way. Unfortunately, my worst mistake is still proving to be the machine I built. The simulation would have failed years ago if there wasn't something on the other side maintaining it. Every once in awhile we get a new victim added to our hellish home because of it too, including you two."
"I-Is there really no way to help the people trapped in here?" Courage asked, looking desperate. "Can their minds be fixed? Isn't there a way to restore them?"
Ian looked down at Courage with a sad smile on his face. "If I am able to get you two out of here, once you are on the other side, you will see exactly why we cannot be saved. I'm sorry, I know you want to help them and I wish I could too, but this is one of my mistakes that I will never be able to take back. It is only right that I have to dwell in this hell of my own making and suffer along with the people I carelessly damned. I am the only one here who is not innocent, even Zeta is still suffering because of me. I don't know what I could have done differently to save her, but it's clear that I made the wrong choice and caused so many people to suffer because I was unwilling to see how badly of a choice I had made until it was far too late to take it back."
"No kidding." Computer spat, finally speaking up. "So what's the big plan then? You want us to get out of here and shut down the simulation? You want us to do your dirty work for you and kill what little is left of the people in here, along with Zeta? After everything you said, I don't particularly feel like cleaning up your own mistakes. You're the one who put them into this state so you're the one who should be forced to put them down. I refuse to be the one who has to push the button for you!" It sickened him to think that he might end up being the one to kill all of those people with a single push of a button, even if the people of Paradise were already something akin to the living dead.
Ian bowed his head guilty in acknowledgment. "You're right, I am the one who hurt them so I should be the who puts them out of their misery, but I'm not capable of it anymore. I would if I could, but I cannot leave this place any longer. However, I must say that while there is no hope for me and the people I trapped here, there is...there's still a chance to save Zeta. For years I thought that she was as doomed as the rest of us, but there is hope for her now. Something I never could have expected has happened and it's the wild card needed to save Zeta from the damnation she never deserved. I would do anything to see her freed from her torment. She didn't deserve any of this and I will be able to die with some measure of peace just knowing that she was given a chance to be happy."
Computer raised an eyebrow. "And just what is this supposed wild card?" He could not imagine what might be capable of freeing Zeta that Ian had not already considered years ago.
The exhausted man looked him straight in the eyes with a determined and hopeful expression on his face. He said only one word,
"You."
End Of Chapter
