Forward
This body of writing is partially a Doki Doki Literature Club fanfiction but involves a totally reimagined premise and setting. The original DDLC characters and world serve as a plot device of sorts for me to explore larger themes, mostly involving the psychology of human interactions with technology. I claim to be inspired by my heroes of weird science fiction, namely Phillip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard. I know I can't live up to their style and technique, but hopefully I still produced something meaningful and interesting. I am not yet sure.
This fiction was my pet "pandemic project," and I worked on it sporadically over a six-month period. As of March 2021, I believe it is about a third of the way finished, although I have a complete plot outline finished, with a dramatic ending planned.
Attempting to make something of this size and scope has changed how I approach writing as a hobby. Additionally, the long months of the pandemic have transformed my initial motivations and inspirations for this story. For these reasons, and because of real-life time concerns in the near future, this story is on indefinite hiatus. I may still come back and finish it, but this depends on the response it gets here on . If there is interest in what I'm creating, I will try to provide more content.
Now, without any further fuss, I present Your Unreality, a Doki Doki Literature Club fanfiction.
—Leucotis, 3/17/2021
Addendum 5/17/2021
Having received at least one very enthusiastic response, I have decided to move forward with my planned outline for the story and see it to its completion. Writing something the length of a novel, even if it's "just" fanfiction, is important to me. I consider this as a sort of practice for creative endeavors I may partake in later. I also forgot how utterly satisfying writing is for me, when I'm in the right mood late at night. So, expect a chapter update every month or so as I work toward the end. Any continued feedback is definitely still appreciated.
Additionally as a heads up, if this first chapter begins to bore you at any point, please feel free to skip to the second, where actual DDLC characters start showing up and relationship building ensues. You won't miss too much background exposition.
—Leucotis
Addendum 8/23/21
Well, things are certainly humming along here, aren't they. I feel very capable of maintaining the current speed of updates and finishing this thing in a reasonably timely manner. I never thought continuously adding to this story over time would feel so natural, but five months after publishing my initial efforts, and here we are. Looking back over my forward introduction, I think it gives off far too intimidating and foreboding of a sense of what I actually ended up writing. I think at the time I was too consumed with the grandiosity of my plans, and didn't realize that for a long time, I would essentially be writing a somewhat strange slice of life romance story sprinkled with some philosophical and technological author tracts. If you dive in, expect that for the first ten to twelve chapters. Nothing overly demanding or frightening. This story is like the actual DDLC game - all of that comes later.
Also I wish I never wrote the first chapter. Skim it for world development and background if you're inclined, otherwise skip. You're not likely to find it interesting unless you have a peculiar set of resignations against university life.
—Leucotis
Epigraph
AI dystopias project a parochial alpha-male psychology onto the concept of intelligence. They assume that superhumanly intelligent robots would develop goals like deposing their masters or taking over the world…It's telling that many of our techno-prophets don't entertain the possibility that artificial intelligence will naturally develop along female lines: fully capable of solving problems, but with no desire to annihilate innocents or dominate the civilization.
—Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology.
Yes, yes, I understand. Of course we're still moving forward with the presentation, I've been preparing it for days.
No, we can't call it off. This was supposed to be the moment of truth, where the rest of the world gets to see what we've been working on all these years. That's what matters.
And it still is! Now more than ever, our investors deserve to know what happened. I will put a positive spin on this, you know I can.
Other startups have been through worse setbacks. Our company is just as resilient.
The incident hasn't changed anything. The money is there. We still have the all the IP, they can't take that away from us. Our academic partnership…well, those board decisions never mattered anyway. Just a bunch of out of work English majors, with no understanding of business necessities.
Like they know what really moves the world, in their hipster vests and smug little neckties…
Personally affected? Look, I appreciate the concern, and maybe it has been a rough couple of days. However, I refuse to compromise the potential of SalvoCore over a the test from the psych R&D department blowing up.
Even if it did turn into this, it was still just an experiment gone wrong. Doesn't matter now. All in the past. A small three-month setback is meaningless to these guys that work for me, do you understand? I could barely stop them if I tried.
I'm sorry, but we're already five minutes behind schedule. If you have any more comments, you can talk to me during the intermission. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to put on my professional face and start talking business.
Hello, hello everyone. I'd like to welcome all our valued and distinguished investors to our first general conference, the quarter one technology report of SalvoCore Solutions. Here, our core is your salvation.
I will gladly take your silence as agreement. Seriously folks! We have an excellent selection of coffee and refreshments in the lobby if you need some perking up, because believe me, we're going to all be here for a while.
Keeping a positive atmosphere of openness is one of SalvoCore's key values, and we strive to extend our friendly company culture to all of our affiliates. So, throughout the meeting, feel free to make any casual comment. Don't even think it through! We're family here, so, uh, if everyone is ready…
Ah, yes, we appreciate everyone's concern over the news stories of the previous week. SalvoCore acknowledges the events are public knowledge and we have confirmed the outline of circumstances that has been published in the media. However, the accounts typically refer back to original sources in campus newspapers. These stories may seemingly possess a certain raw sincerity, but such amateur journalism cannot be meaningfully authenticated. The situation is still evolving.
Yes. I would like personally offer my sympathies to anyone here who has been troubled by these unfounded rumors. Rest assured, your investment in this company is still safe.
Besides discussion of our initial product offering, SalvoCore would like to take advantage of this conference as chance to set the record straight. Your questions will be answered in due time, I guarantee it.
That's simply absurd.
Ah, sorry, what I mean to say is that something like that could never happen. What you describe is more the stuff of bad literature than provable fact. SalvoCore is a responsible member of the cooperate community and has specifically built in protections that render it absolutely impossible for her… uh, the software, to autonomously develop such a capability.
We have already discussed the veracity of these stories. Please, if we proceed with the meeting agenda, I can begin to address and contextualize some of these factors. So, uh, are we cool? Cool?
My apologies. We're all a little stressed right now, I get it. But before we can get started and get through this, I'm required to speak about our most important third-party collaborator, the Midwestern Academy of Research and Information Engineering, or MARIE.
As you know, MARIE is a cutting-edge institution of higher education designed from the ground up for revitalization of the post-industrial economy. Primarily focused on incorporating undergraduates into next-generation STEM research, it boasts one of the highest average salaries for recent graduates in the country. This is all at a significantly lower cost than a traditional liberal arts university.
In the years following what has been dubbed "the collapse of higher education," the United States government has heavily invested in MARIE, and the results are clear. Three Nobel laureates. Twenty-four science or technology-based startups in the past year alone. Dozens of patents and hundreds of articles, dissertations and publications filed with each passing semester. By the raw numbers, MARIE is the most productive educational research institution in American history.
Sensing its promise, the National Quantum Initiative designated the academy as one of its "quantum foundation" sites. This, as you know, led to construction of the country's first at-scale, open-source, distributed quantum computer. MARIE's astounding output is in no small part thanks to this incredible tool. With an advanced discretization algorithm, individual tasks from hundreds of users can be ran simultaneously, enabling researchers, faculty, and even the student body to utilize the power of quantum computing in their studies at any time.
Thank you all for listening. I'm sure as quantum venture capitalists you've all heard this spiel before, the "exponential effects" of quantum technology on knowledge and communication. But they deserve some promotion, since SalvoCore solutions was the first private company to form a partnership with the campus's administrative body, enabling our exclusive access to the most lucrative quantum computer in the world. Other significant quantum computing infrastructures have been constructed of course, but none with the sheer size and particular architecture of the system at MARIE.
This was our proposal, our challenge, our vision that you all shared with us. To fully realize the innovative products of SalvoCore with the most optimal quantum environment possible. Today, I'm here to show you what game-changing solutions we have delivered.
One final aspect of MARIE deserves mention before we dive in though. It is not only their phenomenal technology and business-friendly culture that made this project possible, but also the students. Yes, the students! Undergraduate activity makes up more than half of the quantum computing throughput at MARIE, and so they are responsible, directly or indirectly, for a majority of the quantum research breakthroughs that occur on campus.
We wanted to tap into the potential of this upcoming "quantum generation" to create the best version of our products possible. The students at MARIE represent the probable "early adopter" market for SalvoCore Solutions products, and also present ideal psychological characteristics that made them an integral part of the project's development. Let me explain…
[0]
Derealization
With a muffled gasp, I sat up in my bed, eyes open in a flash. Squinting my eyes to make out the ticking clock on the far wall of my closet-sized dorm room, I found out I was waking up right on time. That wasn't unusual. But typically, I lifted myself out of sleep by gentle degrees. I would drift in and out of consciousness, gradually reminding myself that yes, there was indeed a world beyond the dreams and that I had to deal with it. I never bolted up in shock like this.
Unless…dreams…yes. I was having that dream again, the recurring one. As usual, the setting and form were vague. I was in a school…or a department store. Maybe a factory, or was it a giant restaurant? I was my ordinary self, but younger somehow. And with a different face, or even a different body? Maybe the entire thing was me just dreaming about playing a character in a game, or watching an actor on screen, seamlessly feeding into what felt like vivid reality. Such things weren't uncommon for me.
The arbitrary details of the setting wasn't the important part of the dream anyway, only the repeating feeling. I was always alone, with some sort of threatening mob chasing me through the structure. I would run, hide, throw doors shut and double back on my trail, but no matter what I did there was always that terrible, exhilarating moment at the end when they caught up to me. Everyone would draw in closer, pinning me against a wall or above a drop, their faces indistinct and intentions unclear.
Of course, that's when I always woke up. I never got to see how it ended, and that's how it was this morning too. Trapped up in the corner of a dead-end stairwell in some old-fashioned building made of red bricks, something indefinite occurred. I shook my head, trying not to get fixated on replaying the scene. I was never the type to believe dreams meant anything, even if the interpretation of "chasing" dreams is always obvious. But if their meaning was so obvious — fear, anxiety, persecution from society, whatever — then why were they also the only dreams where I could fly? In my escape from my pursuers, I would jump, float and glide and impossible ways, passing through walls like some sort of buoyant ghost. Ethereal and illusory, and yet still all-too tangible…
I snorted, the more pragmatic half of my brain scoffing at my attempt at poetry. Interesting dreams were no excuse to indulge morning grogginess. Besides, I had a sleeping schedule to keep. Hoisting myself fully out of bed, I initialized my morning routine and began the programmatic motions of preparing for the day.
Half an hour later, I was fully dressed and standing on the walkway connecting the highest floor of my resident dormitory to the next one over. These fun little balconies were strung between most of the dorms, seemingly at random, which encouraged meandering about on morning watches like this. My room was at the bottom of the stack, but I preferred to take my views from the top. Getting a better vantage point was important. Even if all I saw was a maze of identical residence halls, cut and pasted across the generic, suburban-park landscape, it was always good to see it from the top-down. The dead quiet of the campus at 6:30 AM produced what I would call a reassuring tranquility. Or a beautiful void, perhaps.
This was how I always started the morning. When it was too early to think well enough for work, and the idea of checking my inbox made my brain hurt, I always decided to just stand outside and think. I was preparing for the day. Organizing the tasks ahead. Meditating, you might say, though I didn't bother with labels. Whatever it was, it had long since been a part of my routine. The day didn't feel right without first getting outside, taking in some air, and reminding myself the rest of the world was still out there.
Back in my ten by twenty-foot dorm room, I started gearing up for the actual affairs of the day by turning on my coffeemaker. I reminded myself that at long last, I was in the fourth and final year of my degree pathway at the Midwestern Academy of Research and Informational Engineering. Supposedly the "crown jewel" of the "new American industrial core," the academy provided best practical STEM education in the world — at least according to the latest popular poll from US news today. At MARIE (most people used the intentional acronym), I was supposed to have access to engaging professors, pioneering technology research, powerful networking opportunities, and a vibrant intellectual community. From my experience, the reality outside of that brochure description left much to be desired, particularly that last element of "community." But, such is the case with everything in life. No use dwelling too long on fantastic ideals.
The coffeemaker stopped groaning, my cue to insert a single-serving capsule of fresh, vacuum-sealed grounds. Soon, a rich brown stream of piping hot liquid was streaming into the latest acquisition to my mug collection. A novelty membership award from some professional engineering society I had joined last year, it was decorated with the chemical symbol for hydrogen. The heavier elements would arrive later as rewards for years of cumulative membership.
The mug already had a chip on it but that was fine — that gave it character. Getting this thing was half the reason I joined the organization in the first place, the other half being the knit blanket on my bedspread patterned with the periodic table. The morning was somewhat cold, so I bunched up part of the blanket and used it to grip the mug's hot handle, moving it to my desk. In doing so, I felt a twinge of homely comfort, exactly the aesthetic emotion I was craving. I knew how important it was to make space for such moments, more so in socially remote environments like the dormitory.
Thinking back to MARIE, I considered there was still a lot to look forward to this year, at least in the short term. After being subject to the curriculum for nine quarterly exam cycles, I was fully battle-hardened. I had never found a club worth joining, which meant I had total freedom to wander where I pleased. This upcoming fall quarter might have been indistinguishable from all the others, right down to my living arrangements and the lineup of campus events, but that only meant I had all the experience I needed to navigate the terrain. I was a senior, a survivor, and I now had the privilege to take away exactly what I wanted from the college experience.
At this moment, what I wanted was some atmosphere. After a minute of waiting, just watching the hot beverage steam and imagining its scent permeating the room, I took a sip, and relished the sudden heat at the back of my throat. I silently thanked the coffeemaker's anonymous designers for a compacting such a wonderful invention into a convenient space small enough for the room. Any hot water heater like this contravened dorm regulations, of course, but after years of seeing those rules repeatedly flouted by others, I thought I of all people deserved my one indulgence. That's right — perhaps indulgence could even be the theme of the year.
Because this year, I was only going to focus on what mattered (grades) and have myself a nice, dignified exit from the transactional certification process called higher education. If I had come this far while holding my GPA at a comfortably high percentile, I had nothing to fear from parsing classes and dealing with exams. I had the right to leisurely pursue the bare essentials of college life, soon to leave its false promises behind. The real world awaited afterwards, where I could actually affect something that mattered.
With a few minutes remaining, I started pursuing those bare essentials by tidying up my workspace. My desk and drawers, the room's two furnishings besides the bed, were cluttered with junk — random printouts, old scratch paper covered with equations, various used books, and the occasional anime figurine or keychain. The last of these I tried to be extra careful moving, sighing a little as I positioned them back into a proper, tasteful arrangements. Remnants of my salad days, I told myself. Mementos and souvenirs of a different time.
It had been maybe a year since I had actually sat down and watched an anime, played a visual novel, or participated in what they called the "weeb" subculture. There was really nothing to be ashamed of; anime was just another part of the "nerd" identity that continued to dominate mass media. Yet for whatever reason, some subconscious self-judgment, I just dropped everything anime from my set of interests last spring. All the hackneyed fantasy tropes, the unbelievable characters, the oversaturated visuals — it all started feeling unreal. At this point, it just couldn't reach me in the same way as before.
I finished by standing my novel collection back up, using a spare mug as a makeshift bookend. An eclectic threesome of Dostoyevsky, Phillip K. Dick, and Haruki Murakami, they made even less sense together than they did next to the ninja catgirl from some indie web animation I half-remembered. As I glanced around the wider room, the posters on the walls told the same story, a blend of pseudo-intellectualism and petty otakuism. Prints of famous artwork on one side, promotional artwork for popular Japanese animation on the other. With aristocratic mien, the Lady with an Ermine calmly regarded the waggling finger of the boisterous schoolgirl Haruhi Suzumiya, and an assemblage of multicolored mecha stood guard over The School of Athens.
Who put all of this together? Why was I always trying to consume both high and low culture at once? Was it really me who arranged a space and identity like this, a meaningless tangle of contradictions? Or was there no such conflict, everything just another symbol, all of them spent tokens of subjective value? I began to feel the familiar sensation of being a stranger in my own life, the one where "I" watched over myself, an unfamiliar character, while he acted out some incomprehensible script neither of us was allowed to see.
I hated that feeling. So before the room itself started spinning around in my dizzy mental vortex, I opened my laptop and focused on what was in front of me. When the screen lit up, I was met with more clutter. A disordered matrix of programs crowded my Windows desktop, leftovers from whatever media binge or personal project I was up to last night. Some of it seemed related to my classes, which was an unfortunate mistake. I tried to only play around outside of work on the PC half of my partitioned laptop drive, saving serious activities for the default mac OS. Trying to do both in the same digital workspace was too distracting, an principle that sweeping aside a mess of engineering data, game wikis, and media players was reinforcing.
When I finally got the bottom of the pile, I was reminded of the real reason I put up a boundary between work and play. For as long as I had owned it, the desktop background on the "fun" side of my computer was always set as a richly detailed artwork of an anime girl. It didn't matter whether the character even originated from media I had viewed or not; I was perpetually obliged to make concessions to the forces of moe by finding a new one every week.
This week's wallpaper was particularly indulgent. The character was an adorable white-haired fox girl, the avatar persona of one those "virtual YouTubers" that had been exploding in popularity lately. She wore a loose-fitting fur-collared jacket and blocky hair clips matching her unnatural turquoise eyes. The image had captured her playfully dabbing at some dollops of ketchup spilled on her rosy-cheeked face. Blissfully ignorant of any shame, her tongue playfully stuck out from the side of her mouth to lap up more of the morsels. To either side, cartoon mascots for fries and a shake cheerfully waved their chubby hands in support.
I hadn't watched a single one of this character's streams, but I still knew the art was a reference to some goofy "burger fox adventure" meme from last week. That fact just made the entire composition seem even more bizarre, on top of the pastel colors and exaggerated cuteness. But despite all of the artificiality, I found myself grinning anyway. There was just something so pure in that wide-eyed gaze, so innocent in the childlike action. In answer to the call, a warm, burning sensation began building in my chest. It was a familiar, comforting emotion…
I pulled my eyes away from the screen and exhaled heavily. The next few moments were spent nervously chuckling under my breath with my head down. It was the start of the week. I didn't have time for this navel-gazing. All the same, it was nice to have a good-morning greeting of some type. After navigating to the shutdown option, the laptop powered off, ready to be restarted in its business mode. I was left staring at my reflection in the dark glass. Half-combed hair, a few traces of missed beard stubble, and a couple new blemishes on my acne-prone skin. I was 22 — and looking good enough for government work, I supposed. Gathering up the last of my things, I smiled at my laptop on my way out for the day. Still in my mind's eye, I imagined her there, smiling back.
It was a seven-minute walk from my dorm room to my first class (ten if you took it slow) offering ample opportunity for more reflection. Even though lectures began at 8:00, there was hardly anyone else making their pedestrian commute at 7:30. The serene emptiness of the early morning was continuing into the day, which was fine by me. Still, I wondered why people didn't act more punctual and committed on what was supposed to be a world-class engineering campus. The stereotype of science and technology majors was that we were hardworking, relentlessly-driven rule-followers, and yet three years of observation had taught me all students succumbed to the slacker, "get-by" mindset almost immediately. They would live for the weekend and dread the morning hours, almost acting nocturnally. I wasn't quite there yet, but maybe I would start slipping too if I had three more years to go instead of one.
For now, I was a proud morning person. One of only three living on campus, I surmised by counting the figures heading toward campus in the distance. They were probably coming from the apartments of College Junction, the fitting name for the town built up around MARIE after it was conspicuously erected in the middle of midwestern flyover country.
Perhaps I was only alone in the mornings because the dorms were mostly occupied by freshman, who took easier classes with fewer demands? As a senior living on-campus, I was a rarity. Most upperclassmen chose to find private apartments as soon as possible. But dorm living was essentially the only way to get a single room, given how tight housing was outside campus-owned properties. After enduring a roommate my freshman year, I viewed private quarters as essential to my quality of life, and often wondered why nobody else expressed my philosophy. I supposed it all came down to cost. Cramming into minimized, sardine-can apartments was simply the most affordable option for most students. With generous family money footing my housing and tuition fees, maybe that sacrifice was something I could never really understand.
Even if I both lived and worked on the MARIE campus, I could still criticize its architecture. Today was overcast, and the light gray of the sky combined with the naked concrete and steel-bar facades of the outer campus buildings made a melancholy monochrome. I had no nostalgia for the classical architecture of older colleges; in fact I appreciated the Academy's commitment to not aping the appearance of the older institutions. Pretensions to aristocracy, all of it. Culture decays, functionality does not. But would it have killed them to cover up a little bit of that bare cement? Seriously, sometimes the campus gave me the impression of an open-walled prison.
That was absurd, of course. Assertions of some of the radicals and cranks on campus to the contrary, the academy was not a prison. With all its enmities and accommodations, it was more like an exclusive luxury resort, only if all the attending members were miserable and depressed, perhaps.
I breathed out a little laugh. Given the paradoxical duality of hedonism and self-pity that defined the student culture, that was only a minor exaggeration. A quick glance at the bulletins adorning the nearest message board kiosk confirmed it. Displayed was the usual medley of exuberant announcements for celebrations and concerts, contrasted with notices for "de-stress" sessions and friendly information on the school's myriad mental health services. The small flyer for a meditation / adult coloring event was stapled over a giant poster proclaiming last night's sex toy bingo — a classic combination. As was the vibrant headline act for the school's music festival pasted adjacent to propaganda for the latest round of graduate student strikes.
As a freshman, I had found this college collage absolutely bewildering. Now, I sort of accepted it as a dialectic, a sum of forces neatly complimenting and balancing out one another. However, I still couldn't say any of it actually interested me. I preferred a more temperate approach to life, it seemed.
I decided to take a shortcut through the courtyard of the school's VIP guest lodging, always quiet at this time of day, on my way to campus proper. The layout of the MARIE campus, perhaps in another conceit of rational architectural philosophy, was a series of concentric circles. Dormitories and student life facilities were on the outside ring, and the lecture halls and faculty offices made up the inside core. Administrative buildings, the library, and student services were in-between. Four cardinally oriented thoroughfares provided the main routes from one layer to another, like spokes in a wheel. While this design made moving between areas extremely efficient, so much so that bicycles were rarely necessary and even forbidden in most places, it was still worthwhile to take the occasional shortcut by cutting between buildings.
Hopping across a recessed maintenance road, I popped up in the back end of the theater, directly across from the arts and humanities wings. MARIE might have promoted itself as an institution ruthlessly focused on science and mathematics, but it was apparently large enough that someone vouched for inclusion of some of the liberal arts. Their role seemed to be producing weekly galleries of surreal artwork and composing provocative fusions of literature and sociological theories set to stage plays. The atmosphere was a little more colorful around here — lengths of red metal twisted into abstract sculptures, faded mosaics in some of the sidewalk tiles, the odd bit of illegible graffiti — but not by much.
I was the first to arrive at the classroom for the 8:00 morning lecture. The lesson itself was…whatever. Just the standard textbook treatment of a topic in industrial engineering I had a slim chance of actually encountering in my projected career. Even then, the equations and theory discussed were for such a specific case that I doubt I'd find them much help anyway.
I may have been attending a "new model," "skills-centric" university, but not much had really changed from the days before the so-called higher education "collapse." The same components of lecture, assignments, textbooks and exams were all extant, forming an independent network without any outside input from engineering in practice. Sure, the lectures for the entry-level building-blocks of physics, math and programming were all pre-recorded and the assignments and tests were made available online for free. But you were still required to be in contact with a real person for the "upper-division" classes, and actually earning that degree at the end required you to pay the toll. The "educational cartel" of "credential inflation" (those old buzzwords still graced MARIE's online mission statement) was alive and well.
But what was I going to do, this far invested into the game? What would any of us do? You always had the vague notion that the educational establishment was eating into your vital years, but you made the sacrifice anyway. Was the decision to earn a degree based entirely in conformity then, paying into a privileged class? Or was there really no other way to obtain technical knowledge? Whatever my speculations, lectures and tests was how it was done, so I followed along as best as I could — no questions asked.
After being the first in the lecture room, I was one of the last out, preferring to wait until the bottleneck at the doors dispersed. Outside, activity on the campus grounds was starting to crank back up to its full capacity. Masses of backpack-toting students swarmed from hall to hall across the inner circuits of campus, sometimes stopping at the school-ran convenience stores and cafes strategically positioned at select radians. Nearby was the library, an imposing structure with a huge footprint that spanned a sixty-degree sector of its ring. Its primary function wasn't actually keeping books or records, but providing study spaces and computer terminals for students. All the research data, publications and class materials necessary for running the academy were accessed from cloud servers located elsewhere.
With only fifteen minutes to spare, I didn't feel like making the climb into the library's labyrinth. Instead, I just sat down on the rounded lip of a concrete planter, between some metal protrusions intended to deter skateboarders. Habitually, I fished around in my pocket and checked my phone, but after deleting the day's influx of junk email, there was nothing else to check.
Social media, I supposed, but I had long found Instagram, Facebook and the like frustrating to deal with. In my past few experiments with them, I couldn't figure out a way to do anything worthwhile. Typically, I would waste time neurotically obsessing over my profile information without interacting with anyone. Photo-sharing networks, dating apps, personal blogs, they all felt like a chore of identity maintenance. And I just didn't get the appeal of checking up on random strangers and half-acquaintances, let alone understand how someone could be "addicted" to social media and their phone.
Putting away my "addictive" device, a glance at my watch told me there were now only a few minutes left before my next class. I got up immediately and headed for the heart of campus. My destination was close to MARIE's research labs, which were appropriately enthroned at the school's central zone. That meant that as I turned the corner onto the main east-west corridor, I was met with an impressive view of the spire. While other schools might have a bell tower, we had this striking, organic-form needle structure. Marking the quantum computing center, it climbed 150 feet into the air and could be seen from nearly anywhere on campus.
Physically, the center was an array of experimental quantum computers housed in a high-security laboratory. We called it Q0. Quantum Zero, the Prometheus Supercluster, and the Ultracomputer were all more official titles, but most everyone went by its quicker, snappier-sounding codename from when it was under construction as a U.S. government project.
In the name of transparency, Q0 was symbolically placed on a what was nominally a public university campus. This ensured every member of MARIE, student, faculty or administrator, was guaranteed a degree of access to its phenomenal capabilities. The central location and antenna-like aspect of the spire itself represented this open philosophy, the broadcast of quantum computing to the world, even though most of it was purely ornamental. Besides a few transmitters, all the actual infrastructure was secured in carefully climate-controlled underground basement levels that went down at least six stories.
The computing center was a technological marvel, surpassing the capabilities of all other similar projects that had been attempted. The sheer expense of constructing large quantum networks discouraged most non-government investors. However, the novelty of being in the presence of my generation's "moon landing," as the media dubbed had dubbed it years back, wore off fairly quickly. The problem was that quantum computing research had failed to deliver its promised innovations, and over the past years everyone from the big tech companies to the original government backers were losing interest.
Today, the main use of Q0 was aiding the mundane homework assignments of undergraduates. It could speed up any conventional computer script to near-instantaneous completion, as long as you were careful enough to write it properly. Certain niche applications once thought computationally difficult, like reconstruction of molecular structures from radiation-scattering data, were now trivial enough to assign to undergraduates in their introductory courses.
There were also some quantum-specific applications, the work of dedicated research groups on campus trying to push the boundaries of established computer science. Most of these projects were based on souped-up versions of classical machine learning algorithms, and could do anything from forecasting the grade on a written essay to generating a custom music file from a provided playlist. Access to these apps was open, but usage was not; each undergraduate was allotted a limited quota of quantum computing time each month. There was always something new to play around with that could eat up your quantum hours, and the meme of freshmen exhausting their supply within a day was one of the campus's classics.
Machine learning was the first step towards robust artificial intelligence, a topic that was always on everyone's mind. Among the suite of quantum applications, a number of general "AI" assistants existed. The next step beyond voice-commanded operating systems, these apps were theoretically adaptable to any specific task. However, they were usually rigid and uncreative in their ideas on how to accomplish goals, and couldn't interface with many programs. Mainly, they ended up being restricted to calendar and email clients, with barely more functionality than Amazon's latest version of Alexa.
As for conversation, these AI assistants weren't much better than the average auto-complete chatbot, devolving into parroting the user's own mannerisms back at them after a few days. Overall, despite the raw exponential gains of the "quantum leap" (another of MARIE's favorite buzzwords), the puzzle of creating a true artificial general intelligence was frustratingly unsolved. Many top researchers now even claimed it was impossible. And yet, those same researchers noted that the power of quantum AI, applied to routine informational tasks, was enough to put more than half the world out of job. A few fringe intellectuals that advocated technological acceleration claimed this was the real reason there had been no new investments in quantum supersites for a decade now. In my understanding of the quantum AI debate, which I kept up with out of personal curiosity, this was an unfounded conspiracy theory, but the lack of active research still seemed like such a waste.
My phone vibrated with a message right as I started to turn over the old arguments for and against AI development in my head. Mid-step, I checked it right as I passed into the forum, which was what we called the open plaza beneath the spire. Rootlike arches, rendered brighter by a sterile white coating, surrounded this space on all sides like a forest canopy. To encourage its use as a mingling and discussion space for the nearby research labs, it was populated by a mix of metal café furniture and strategically arranged blackboards.
The message demanding my attention was an email from a firm calling itself "SalvoCore Solutions." The subject line indicated they were offering some sort of exclusive internship offer, the only requirement being that I dedicate a certain number of hours per week to some new student organization. Being as desperate for internships and relevant job experience as any other MARIE undergrad, I was elated. Even so, I almost deleted it out of habit. Solicitations with job offers were almost always bad deals at best, scams at worst. However, this one seemed specifically tailored to me, and so worth reading in full.
First good sign, it was addressed with a cute "Dear Michael Chip." However, anyone could connect names to email addresses, and mine would be easy enough to figure out with common tools even if there wasn't the school registry to deal with. Better though, the first paragraph actually seemed to know a few things about my classes and the availability of my schedule. That was harder, if not quite impossible, for a determined actor. Clearly these people really wanted me, whoever they were.
Looking back to the send line, the name "SalvoCore" seemed familiar. I thought I remembered a series of big statements put out by the Academy last year about some sort of cooperate partnership to develop commercial software. MARIE certainly didn't shy away from appealing to business to bolster its image as a "career-centric" university, and the corporate skeptics were convinced by the choice of a relatively unknown tech startup instead of one of the monoliths like Google or Apple. That was at least how I remembered the back-and-forth debate in the school newspaper.
However, I didn't recall what the company actually produced. Their mission statement was some nonsensically vague corporate jargon about "human-oriented interfaces." I also remembered their ridiculous mission statement, "Our core, your salvation," — like they were the ones responsible for delivering us to a technological nirvana. An opportunity was an opportunity though, so I decided to deal with the email seriously right after my second and final class of the day, which was at the row of small "micro-classrooms" right outside the forum perimeter.
It was incredible, how sitting through a lecture could be so draining. Afterwards, even though I had just spent an hour sitting around with little to do, I still felt an intense need to let my mind rest. Luckily, a perfectly reasonable excuse to do so was coming up in the form of an early lunch. Like most undergrads, I ate on campus every day, but preferred the dining commons instead of the numerous school cafes or commercial chains. This was apparently another factor that set me apart from other upperclassmen, who often complained that school food "got old" after a while.
The dining commons was a short walk away, through the north corridor. Inside was sea of at least two hundred people, weaving in and out of a rectangular matrix of long cafeteria tables. Overhead, animated announcements from MARIE flashed by on huge flatscreens. Besides official information, these monitors acted a message board for student organizations to announce their existence and post meeting times. In between a weather update and a list of self-evident cybersecurity tips, for example, I saw that the literature club reading Harry Potter in the fall for the fourth year in a row.
It was a Wednesday, meaning I could grab a fresh issue of the school newspaper from the dispenser by the doors. Completely student-ran, it was more amateurish than most, but I still enjoyed perusing the articles over meals, particularly the editorial section. Instead of political or cultural opinions like you might imagine, this part of the paper was more often filled by students retelling random anecdotes from their personal experience. Sometimes you might find a subtle, snide note of social criticism, but more often it was just a place to collectively vent. For this reason, the editorials were the best way to gauge the collective zeitgeist, and the most entertaining part of the paper to boot.
After eating, I took another survey of the dining commons as I bussed my dishes to the tray conveyor. I spied at least three people doing homework out of textbooks and a deluge of social media feeds pouring down cell phone screens. Near the end of the room, a heavyset nerd-type was zoned out on his laptop, streaming what looked like a Smash Brothers tournament. On a lark, I stopped right behind his shoulders to check who was winning. The score looked even, so while I would have loved to stay and see which player gained the upper hand, I knew it was rude to linger long.
No more lectures for the day, so I went back down the north corridor toward the spire and library again. I thought about checking on my professors on a lark, but before I could start knocking on any doors, my phone started buzzing. That reminded me I still hadn't looked over the SalvoCore email very carefully. Flustered, I sat down at the nearest arrangement of the spire forum's café furniture and read the entire thing from the top.
Several times, I had to stop, take a breath, and then start from the beginning. The email wasn't just personalized to my name and schedule, it also made references to some of my personality traits, mannerisms and interests. They knew I read frequently, was generally reclusive, but had taken the lead in several group projects for my classes. This was apparently evidence that I could be the head of a "creatively structured" student organization catering to introverts and involving media interpretation, mainly books.
What made the organization innovative was its use of one of Salvocore's "solutions" to enhance the "involvement and participation" of the members. Par for the course though, they refused to define exactly what this solution or product was, other than that it was some sort of software interface making direct use of Q0. Despite the lack of public news, it seemed that something had actually come out of the old corporate bargain I had read about between them and MARIE.
Even more strangely though, the last paragraph mentioned that SalvoCore had sought me out in part thanks to my "enthusiastic consumption" of "westernized anime culture." This both startled and confused me. Was this an anime club or a book club, and why were they willing to pay to me to run it? And how did they know about hobbies that had been confined to my web browsing for the past three years? That is to say, I had left MARIE's unassuming anime club after just three meetings in freshman year. I didn't bother wearing any identifiable merchandise, and barely discussed anime even with a one-off acquaintance who was into it. The last line claimed that SalvoCore had obtained most of the information by interviewing my professors, but that couldn't account for even half of what was laid out here. Nobody could have known this.
Then again, I knew enough about online privacy (or the lack thereof) to know it wasn't impossible to profile someone like me. Despite all my efforts to keep a minimal footprint in cyberspace, my traffic still went through the school's servers, which were anything but anonymous. For SalvoCore, a software application firm driven by big data, finding me in the school records might even be a trivial, routine affair. So I suppose I wasn't as much disturbed as I was surprised that I was being singled out by a team of professional product developers.
Despite the oddities, their offer still amounted guaranteed paid work experience with no impact on my classes, an incredibly lucrative deal. That again made me wonder. Was I really important enough to be singled out like this? Was there really a task that only I could do? Or was I being summoned by accident, just because I happened to meet an arbitrary list of criteria? Even if it was just another faceless algorithm pulling the strings here, this felt big, bigger than me. A sense of possibility washed over me that wasn't exactly honor, but not quite dread. Duty, perhaps?
As I pocketed my phone, I looked around at the forum with fresh eyes. The academic stage props of cheap plastic furniture and incomprehensible blackboard scrawls began to look a little more purposeful with the promise that I had an active role to play. Maybe Q0 wasn't just an economic accident repurposed as a toy for nerds; perhaps it had real power to change people's lives for the better. Freshly invigorated, I set out on the fastest route back to my room so that I could complete some of my unfinished assignments. I wanted to have a clear head and no distractions for Friday afternoon, which was when SalvoCore had invited me for an on-campus interview.
Three hours later, I proudly emerged from my dorm room, having traded my worries over the SalvoCore message for the satisfaction of getting a solid foothold in my homework. By combining elements from an example in the textbook with equations inferred from a pirated solution manual, I had managed to write a program that would brute-force the answer to one of the assignment's two problems, the one about combined heat and mass transfer effects in an non-insulated reactor.
My solution method was sort of a freakish Frankenstein, working backwards from the intended analytical method. To fill in the gaps in calculation, I incorporated random data from some recently published research articles along with interpolations from the textbook's recommended coefficients. I had to skim through the articles to pick out the one or two sentences necessary to cite my sources, but I found the papers themselves easily enough with one the school's most popular quantum-based applications. An intelligently optimized search engine for technical journals, it could parse through the entire scientific canon for any subject, however obscure.
A separate quantum module helped with the program itself by translating the content of my speech directly into Python syntax. Natural language processors for high-level scripting languages were a commonly assigned project for the school's computer engineers. Without open-source access to them, I would have spent the same three hours just making a plan of how to get started. Overall, not a bad gain for ten minutes of my Q0 quota for the quarter.
Dinner was much like lunch: different part of campus, same sea of anonymity. This time, I had brought a real newspaper to cool off with, a full edition of The Wall Street Journal from my mail subscription. Not quite as meaty as the venerable New York Times, but the WSJ was still dense and intimidating enough to shoo any interlopers away from my serious reading time. I also appreciated the WSJ's content itself for its mixture of traditional stories and qualitative business reports. I figured that if any information source was going to be objective in an age of fact-free fake news, it was an institution concerned about the hard matters of economics and technology. Or, if you insisted on being cynical, you could say their range of bias was at least predictable and easier to account for.
The flavor piece on the bottom of the front page immediately caught my eye. It was discussing a disturbing trend of videos recently discovered in the part of Youtube oriented toward young children. With nonsensical keyword-salad titles designed to maximize their prominence within the site's recommendation algorithms, these videos appeared to be simple nursery rhymes or cartoon clips on the surface, but contained depictions of graphic violence, fetishistic sexuality, and other shocking situations upon closer examinations. Both live action and animated variants existed, featuring characters popular in kid's media. The unlikely pairing of Elsa from Frozen and Spiderman was particularly common, giving the phenomenon its newly recognized name: Elsagate.
I knew all of this because I had recently viewed an exploratory documentation of the growing controversy by a semi-professional YouTuber. The existence of these videos was deeply troubling to me, but not only because of their unknown effects on small children. The content itself, despite being so bizarre and surreal, tended to repeat a limited set of stereotyped scenarios. Different media franchises would be mixed in randomly, combining with the aforementioned Freudian nightmares in what resembled machinic permutation. This disturbing interchangeability was similar in form to related sections of children's YouTube, which fed unwitting young viewers endless streams of toy-unboxing videos or mindless variations on the same nursery rhyme. One search of "surprise eggs" or "finger family" was that they needed to tumble into the autoplay rabbit hole.
To me, it was the arbitrariness itself that was distressing. The general media was just now recognizing what appeared to be algorithmically-generated content optimized to monopolize the attention of young children. Whether or not real people were behind the videos was irrelevant — the recommendation algorithms optimized for this attention-grabbing deranged content, and video makers complied. This circuit and been in operation for four years without detection, and its current iterations were unrecognizable, alein in their strangeness. Elsagate was the most stark and poignant illustration I had yet seen of what happened when information loops ran amok. People, culture, and ideas were being treated as computer variables in the program of an inhuman intelligence. And was the "grown-up" media feed of perpetual outrage and clickbait fluff really much different, or just another component of the system?
While I was reading through the end of the Journal article and shaking my head, a hand peeled back the left half of my newspaper leaflet. A complete stranger, younger sophomore or freshman by the looks of him, was trying to get my attention. He said something about how he saw me reading the newspaper every day in this dining commons, concluding that I must be "really smart." This was a tremendous compliment, being flattered by someone out of the blue. However, when he followed up by asking what was on my mind, all I could do was stutter out something incoherent about addiction and machine algorithms. I gestured to the small picture accompanying the Elsagate article, an innocuous video thumbnail of an animated baby playing in a bathtub, but this only confused him further.
Awkwardly, he said something apologetic and shuffled back to a long table crowded by guys (and a few girls) having a raucous conversation about…something. I wasn't quite sure. Out of curiosity, I tried eavesdropping, but couldn't make out what was being discussed, if anything. I only heard hoots and hollers of laughter.
There goes another chance to connect with someone, I thought ruefully. Did I even want to? a more cynical part chimed in. I couldn't answer myself, so I just bussed my dishes and left.
Having nothing left to do for the day, but not willing to retire to my room just yet, I went back to the dormitory catwalks and pondered life from up high. I was some four stories above the ground in the outermost ring of buildings to the south, but it didn't matter exactly where — all the buildings still looked the same.
From up here, I could see directly through to other people's windows across the quad. This time of the evening seemed to be a favorite for getting work done, and the occupants that weren't scrawling away at something on their desks were plugged in to some game or video on their monitors. Everyone sat neatly compartmentalized into their own tailored bubble-spaces, with no awareness of the neighboring bubbles just a wall away. It was all quite poetical-metaphorical, and I would have reached for my phone's camera to take an artistic photo if it hadn't been too dark.
At the sound of some noisy chatter, I looked down to the softly illuminated sidewalk and observed the passage of a pack of partygoers. A mixed-gender group, some dressed up in provocative outfits, they flaunted their excess enthusiasm with pugnacious pride. Some of the ones in front were probably leading, while a few in the back looked more like stragglers, but they all seemed perfectly confident in the collective direction of the group. They passed underneath me on the way to the outer neighborhoods of private student housing, and I wondered where they were going and what they expected to find there.
I partly knew the answer to that, of course. Long years of self-examination and the tribulations of college life had revealed that I possessed the same sorts of wild urges that lead others to dance and drink. I no longer judged those that participated in the party scene. However, I still longed for a more dignified form of celebration, and a softer sort of intimacy. I didn't think I would ever find those things as part of an intoxicated mob, loitering around the dirty apartment of some unfortunate stranger.
The voices of the party-bound posse faded, just in time for a weak echo of throbbing electronic music to start playing from a few blocks away. That was enough to shoo me off my perch and send me stalking back to my room in a tempered resignation. A desperate part of me said to throw out all my reservations, to obey the summons and throw myself at the mercy of the unknown universe of "party." I could wander around, talk to random people, walk through the first open door, just to see what would happen. Put myself out there, right?
Wrong. A wiser, more temperate aspect of my nature reminded me that no true happiness could ever be found that way. Only more storm and stress. Honestly, it was time to finally stop fretting about my utter lack of a social life. Thos was my final year at MARIE. My studies would draw to a close, I would get my certificate, and anything else I had ever done on campus would cease to matter. Everything would reset. Then, I would start over in a new setting with different rules. Until that new game started, my only duty was to coast along and prepare for a more favorable environment. Perhaps one day, I would find myself in a place that would finally feel real.
Until then, there was no shortage of distractions I could use to past the time. That was the thought I concluded with as I came back through the threshold of my small room. My bag and belongings were tossed onto the bed, to be forgotten about until absolutely necessary. I flipped open my laptop and switched operating systems to Windows, eager to escape into the novelties of the net. Music tonight? Perhaps a game or a show? Maybe all of the above, if I had enough of an appetite. One way to find out.
A few keystrokes to dismiss the login screen, and I was again met by the adorable burger-eating fox girl on my desktop wallpaper. I had nearly forgotten about her, but she was still dabbing the spilled ketchup off her blushing cheeks while enticing onlookers with that perfectly innocent expression. Beautiful, simply beautiful. Seeing her was like coming home. I acknowledge the greeting, I smiled for her.
She smiled back.
Author's Notes: Yes, this is a DDLC fiction, just trust me and hang on. There will be lovable Dokis and computer-based AI shenanigans, but there's some stuff I wanted to get off my chest first. Apparently, it consists of a load of snarky commentary on my educational experience. Hopefully, some can relate.