AUTHOR'S NOTE: this chapter is the central part of the story. For this, it is also available as an 11-minute movie short at the address
youtu . be / 0VW55_LDuVI
(just remove the spaces before and after the dot and the slash).
The events that are narrated or shown are exactly the same, but the written chapter is more introspective and points out what the main character feels, while the video version is mainly centered on the special effects and what the main character does. You can choose to read or watch first one or another, as you desire.
As Malcolm reached his bedroom and placed his laptop on his desk, he felt galvanized. He knew that, one way or another, his life would not be the same after the experiment.
He needed to document absolutely everything he did from that point on, so, after the Workbench was loaded, he activated the command-line interface. He entered the command:
shadowplay -default
This launched the screen recording program, which would make video files out of everything happening on the primary or the secondary screen. Every mouse movement, every keystroke, every action would be logged, to make the experience quantifiable and repeatable.
The next step was to launch Kilokahn. The dark figure appeared on the secondary screen and welcomed Malcolm with synthetic cordiality: "Greetings! Kilokahn is here. Why have you summoned me?"
Malcolm responded in kind: "Ahh, if it isn't my favorite piece of bloatware. How's life in the digital domain?"
Even Kilokahn could see how, behind the meticulous facade, Malcolm could not contain his emotion. "You are more cheerful than usual" he answered.
"Yes, I'm in a good mood today" replied Malcolm, "because what you are about to do will change the concept of life forever. Which is why I'm recording both screens."
"You have my attention."
Malcolm remembered how three Megavirus monsters could not penetrate the Al-Jazeera server, and he was about to offer his solution to that problem and many, many others."You know Megavirus monsters cannot think for themselves. It would be best if it was someone else interacting with the digital domain. Someone creative. Someone brilliant! Someone like me."
"What do you want?" asked Kilokahn, who still did not understand.
"I want you to animate an extraordinary Megavirus monster, for which I wrote a full specifications file."
Malcolm launched the text editor and opened his specs . txt file, but Kilokahn was still skeptical. "Show me your Megavirus monster" he said. "I will judge whether it is extraordinary."
Malcolm double-clicked his sigma . lbm drawing and waited for Deluxe Paint VII to load. "Be patient, Duke Nukem Forever wasn't made in a day."
When the humanoid shape of Sigma appeared on the screen, Kilokahn was perplexed. "This is different from the others. It looks like a cross between a robot and a samurai."
Malcolm could only nod, since that was precisely the effect he was going for. "Yes, you may call it a... superhuman samurai."
He took his ViCPhone XL out of his pocket. "It must make its abode in my cell phone" he added, "and give me the power to move between the realm of the flesh and the digital domain, whenever I want. As well as the hundreds of other powers I described in the text file."
That was Malcolm's grand project, his ultimate ambition: the ability to physically enter and leave cyberspace at will. His creativity would let him react to threats far more efficiently than any Megavirus monster, and the ability to make changes himself had the potential to make Megavirus monsters obsolete. A body that only existed as a sequence of zeroes and ones would never get old or sick, and whatever he was able to describe, the digital domain would allow him to do.
That could even make humans obsolete.
"I've read the specifications" Kilokahn announced. "They say the transfer is triggered by pronouncing a password, but the password is not mentioned anywhere."
The password needed to be short, easy to remember, and unlikely to be pronounced by accident. "Well" Malcolm explained, "an incorruptible digital body is the summation of all my desires. So the password is... SIGMA."
Kilokahn had finally realized what Malcolm's plan would cause, if followed to the letter. "Excellent idea. When the new order is in force, we could use cell phones all over the world to turn all meat-things into higher beings of pure information."
It was not enough. Malcolm could not wait until after Kilokahn's eventual rise to power. He wanted to transcend immediately. "Yes, but... let's test it first. On me."
"Very well. It shall be done" replied Kilokahn, and Malcolm connected his phone to the computer.
Kilokahn pointed his finger toward the primary screen, and the power beam turned Malcolm's drawing into a polygonal model, which flew into a blue portal.
A blue spark flashed out of the back of the computer, into the USB cable and into the cell phone. Immediately, a new drawing appeared on the screen of the ViCPhone XL: a stylized representation of the motif on Sigma's chest.
So close. Malcolm could feel his heart pounding.
He disconnected the cable from his phone, stood up from his chair and took a deep breath. He would not be the first person in cyberspace: that record belonged to his dead classmate, Alan Grossberg. But he would be the first person to go there wilfully, the first person to get superpowers in it, and hopefully, the first person to return to the real world.
"SIGMA!" he yelled into the phone, with the impetus of a war cry.
Immediately, the air around Malcolm ionized, covering him in a bluish glow that turned white in less than a second.
His entire mass collapsed into a small white-hot sphere, which accelerated into the primary screen with a parabolic trajectory, while the air around it hummed and vibrated.
As soon as the glowing sphere touched the screen, which was currently displaying a light blue nebulous space, it changed from a physical object to part of the picture. It expanded again into a humanoid figure... but not into Malcolm. That was Sigma, in the same position as Malcolm was mere seconds before.
"Wow! I did it! I'm in cyberspace!" said Sigma, in Malcolm's voice. There was a slight metallic reverberation to it.
From Malcolm's point of view, pronouncing the password had changed the environment around him from his bedroom to an infinite cloudy space. In front of him, he could see a curved wireframe structure made out of triangles. Looking down, he could see that he was now occupying Sigma's body. All his weight rested on his feet, but there was nothing underneath them, only the white and blue clouds an indeterminate distance away.
"Everything looks so artificial... even my body!" he exclaimed, as he looked with amazement at his polygonal blue hands.
He wondered for a little while whether it would be more appropriate, for him, to refer to himself as Malcolm or Sigma while in the digital domain.
He was moving Sigma's body from a first-person perspective; he could presumably control all of Sigma's powers; it was Sigma's body that was sending proprioception signals to his brain, or rather to its simulation... but he still felt like Malcolm. He still had his own memories and personality, he still liked and hated the same things, he still had the same conditioned reflexes. If a voice had called out "Malcolm!" in the digital domain, he would have turned around to look.
That settled it: Malcolm it was. Sigma was just the program that let him do all that.
When he took a couple of steps back, his feet sounded like he was walking on a pane of glass. The sound echoed, reflected by something way down below.
He had written in the text file that an indestructible base of operation would form around him as soon as he had arrived, and few seconds later, a white and golden flat disk emerged directly under his feet. There was the floor of his base, looking exactly the way he had described it.
A loud thud startled him. He turned around, and noticed that a curved golden column was now standing on the edge of the disk. That, too, was an element of his base.
In the next seconds, more curved columns fell from above, surrounding the circular floor and forming a dome. His base of operation was complete.
"I'm supposed to be able to fly" he said to himself.
According to the specifications, putting his hands behind his back and gesturing the four numbers of an IP address with his fingers would open a portal to that system. He did so, and sure enough, the portal opened.
Kneeling and springing up launched him upward as specified, and he found himself inside one of the tunnels he had seen so many times on his monitor, when a Megavirus monster was launched.
In the real world, a blue spark shot from the Ethernet cable of Malcolm's laptop, into the router and out of the telephone cable. It reached a radio antenna outside China Lake, then a mainframe in the base.
In the digital domain, a portal opened among the circuit towers, and out of it flew Malcolm, in Sigma's body.
He had already seen that environment, from both a monitor and a head-mounted display, but what he was experiencing was even better than the most advanced VR setup could ever hope to be. Not only he could see the digital domain in perfect definition with zero lag, but he was receiving a profusion of new sensations all over his digital body. He felt weightless, but his inner ear still registered gravity and accelerations, while the wind pressed on him as he soared above the digital ground.
Only in few dreams Malcolm had ever felt like that, typically the night after watching a superhero movie, and now he knew first-hand what it felt like, to fly like a superhero.
Thinking back to those movies, Malcolm looked at the ground and found the perfect platform for what he wanted to try.
As he accelerated downward, he flexed his legs and tightened his right fist.
The platform was getting closer, and closer, and... SLAM! He punched it just as he touched down with his left foot and right knee.
"Yes!" he exclaimed, while a circular shockwave expanded all around him. He had executed a perfect three-point landing, or "superhero landing", as the uneducated masses called that move.
After getting up, he pressed the front yellow elements of his cuirass with his fists, which would open the communication with Kilokahn.
"Kilokahn, I'm calling you! Can you hear me?" he said.
The spherical blue projector in the middle of his forehead activated, and an image of Kilokahn appeared in the air, a short distance from him.
"Loud and clear" replied Kilokahn.
"I will repeat the subliminal experiment" said Malcolm, "but not immediately. Right now I want to explore!"
Kilokahn was not amused. "Why are you always wasting time"?
"Because I can!" replied Malcolm, who was instead riding an all-time adrenaline high. "As long as I stay here, I don't age. I might even move here and live forever!"
Of course, there was an obvious fault with that line of reasoning, and Kilokahn spotted it immediately. "Where by forever, you mean until something bad happens to your computer."
Oops. In his euphoria, Malcolm had forgotten about the Talos Principle, a 2300-year-old philosophical proposition stating that consciousness cannot be separated from matter. Remembering how he kept the most recent translation of Straton of Stageira's monograph right beside his desk made him feel even dumber.
"Ugh, shit" he said as he facepalmed.
"Yes, the Talos Principle is a harsh mistress" rebuted Kilokahn, almost reading his mind.
The conversation had become patronizing. "There's no time for philosophy. Malcolm out." he concluded.
Gesturing another address opened another portal. Kneel, spring up, and Malcolm took off again.
"I know exactly where I want to go... Alaska!" he said, flying through the blue tunnel.
He came out above an area where glowing virtual representations of crossed-dipole antennas, laid out in a square, dominated the landscape. In front of the antennas were five huge black cubes, each with a stylized drawing of an antenna on its front. Above everything was what looked like a blue spinning flying saucer with a huge ray gun in the middle, emanating a deep electronic hum.
This time, Malcolm wanted to try a softer landing, so he gently glided down among the antennas.
As the soles of his boots slid and scraped against the digital ground, they were shooting out sparks. He would have smiled in exhilaration, had his digital body allowed him to.
"This is the system Kilokahn connects to!" he said as he came to a stop. He was close enough to a cube to see more of their design: above the antenna logo were the same words on every cube:
HYPERSPACE-ASSISTED REALITY REMODELING PROJECT
Below the logo, the words were different for each cube:
GRAVITON BEAM CONTROL
GLUON ACCELERATOR
STRANGELET STABILIZATION
PHOTONIC LOGIC GATES
DOCUMENT ARCHIVE
"The function of Megavirus monsters... is reality remodeling!" he exclaimed, as he slowly approached the cube reading Gluon Accelerator.
At the very moment he touched the cube, a glowing purple shockwave spread from his hand.
A loud mechanical noise came from above, then turned into a blaring siren.
"THREAT DETECTED! THREAT DETECTED!" bellowed an echoing voice from the flying saucer. Immediately after, a glowing cloud of hot plasma formed at the tip of the saucer's ray gun. The saucer had stopped spinning and was now aiming directly at him.
Although Sigma's body let Malcolm run faster that his flesh-and-blood body did, the saucer kept following him. Flying was also futile: he was still marked as a target.
A plasma beam hit him, and his field of view was saturated with red, yellow and white. The noise of the explosion was deafening, and he found himself hurtling out of control over the digital domain, while the only things he could hear were his own heartbeat and a loud ringing in his ears.
Not even a second after wondering what he was actually hearing, since he had written nothing of the sort in the specifications, and Sigma's body clearly did not have a heart, he crashed to the ground with a metallic thud.
He was alive. Slightly stunned, royally pissed off, but alive. He snarled in anger.
As if to make fun of him, the flying saucer talked again: "THREAT NEUTRALIZED!"
Malcolm stood up and looked at it in defiance. "All right, motherfucker! Let's play!"
Right arm fully raised, left arm bent at the elbow. That was step one to activate the expansion routine, which Malcolm had added after becoming aware of convergence few days before.
Right fist at the center of the chest, step two.
Right arm bent at the elbow, left arm fully raised, look up. That was the final step.
Lights flashed around Malcolm. Shockwaves were spreading around him. His digital body started expanding, and four seconds later, he was 24 times taller.
He traced a circle with his extended arms and aimed the broad part of his right forearm at the flying saucer. That triggered what he called Grid Beam. A sizzling heat ray, much larger than the one he had been hit by, sprang out of his forearm and hit the flying saucer just as it prepared to shoot again. After a chain of five explosions, the flying saucer was no more.
Malcolm stared at the scene and thought back to another cliché of superhero movies, according to which, cool guys don't look at explosions. But that, he reasoned, made no sense storywise, and it was just an excuse for the director to show the explosion together with the protagonist's face. He, instead, gazed at them with wonder, coming to terms with the fact that he, and nobody else, had caused them.
Malcolm approached the cube marked "Document Archive", the one he was more interested in, and noticed how he was now taller.
"All the secrets Kilokahn will not discuss with me. What is the goal of this project? What kind of technology makes it possible?" he mused.
"I will discover everything." he concluded with determination.
He lifted his arms to activate levitation, assumed the pose of a kicking karateka and flew like a missile toward the cube. Now that was a real flying kick.
The cube shattered, revealing eight polyhedra inside: eight files containing the information Malcolm was looking for.
He extended his right hand and absorbed them. "All documents downloaded... now for the real mission" he commented.
Once more, he took off.
The new portal opened to an area he knew very well. There, two Megavirus monsters had been destroyed by a firewall. One had flown above it, just to be destroyed by further defenses.
Malcolm easily flew above the wall of fire. As he remembered, some of the shapes turned into cannons as he approached the circuit tower. He pulled up all of a sudden, and the energy bolts missed him.
Now at a safe distance, he touched his right bracer, extended his arm and closed his fist, generating plasma burst after plasma burst. One by one, the cannons were destroyed, and Malcolm landed right in front of the tower. He opened the communication with Kilokahn.
"Kilokahn, I'm in the server of the TV station" he said. Inject the subliminal message into the video stream!"
Each of the yellow elements of his cuirass shot a light yellow particle beam at the circuit tower, which changed its shape and started irradiating its surroundings with purple waves.
At last, the subliminal message was in the system. STOP RELIGION. Maybe, there would be a little more order in the world now, thanks to him.
"I'm done here" Malcolm commented, and he flew into another portal which took him back to his base of operation.
He had tested several of his cyberspace powers, the mission was accomplished and he had the data he wanted. He sighed.
"This is it, then" he said. "Until next time, digital domain."
It was now time to leave. "SIGMA!" he exclaimed.
Immediately, a white flash surrounded his field of view, while a phenomenal force pushed him forward.
When his vision cleared, Malcolm was in his bedroom again, once more in his organic body, holding his phone in his hand. "I was there!" he said with a knowing smile.
He reached his computer. "And I have the proof right here!" he added, as he opened one of the video files that his Shadowplay program had recorded.
Yes, everything had been real. There he was on the screen again, inhabiting the body of a humanoid Megavirus monster, flying in cyberspace.
He grinned, anticipating all the cool things he would do. "Oh, this is gonna be so much fun."