Dreams of Jupiter

Part 2 - The Gamble

The second possibility certainly would explain why I doubted the realism of my hands. Because they weren't really mine. I had been in the Rift long enough that I had started developing a sense almost like intuition, for the deviations VR made from Reality, however slight. Such intuitions had saved me more than once. Which led me to wonder: could it save me now?

Concentrating on that intuition, which pushed itself forward enough that I realized it was responsible for me questioning the sensations coming from my hands, I glanced around the interview room. It was a fairly standard one, the kind that I had been in dozens of times during my so-called treatment, a plain cube with nondescript lighting and light green walls.

Now that I was alerted to where I was, it didn't take long to spot the first anomaly. It was a spot near one of the top corners, an irregular patch of color that seemed to move when I put it in the periphery of my vision. If this were a real room, the spot wouldn't actually be moving, a physical constant regardless of the number of observers.

While I didn't know much about gaming in VR, I knew a thing or two about VR, thanks to a story I did about VR training used for emergency services personnel. In VR that used neural interfaces to create full sensory immersion, the system relied on sensory feedback from the observer to keep perception of physical objects consistent. Put more than one person in a room and the system jumps back and forth between the two sensory streams, comparing and validating the feedback information as a consistency check.

Normally any high powered system had enough power to seamlessly jump back and forth without either observer noticing. But if the system was overburdened and information lagged slightly through the feedback loop, then the consistency check would fail and the system would glitch in its real time rendering of the scene.

Like creating a spot on the wall that visibly moved.

Staring at the spot, I slowly stood, the move putting a confused look on the face, his watery eyes narrowing.

"What ... are you doing, Mr Bennett?" he asked.

Ignoring him, I stepped around the table and to the wall. As I did, I watched the patch continue to jump as if it was alive. When I reached the wall, I began to lift my hand to the patch to see if it could be physically manipulated.

"Mr Bennett, I'm speaking to you," the face began, his words colored with warning notes and uncertainty. And something else I hadn't heard before in the voices of the smug psychiatrists that treated him.

Fear.

Again I ignored him, stretching for the spot with my hand.

"Mr Bennett, you must stop what you're doing. I insist."

"Why?" I finally said in reply. "I'm just touching the wall."

That drew the washed out eyes to where my hand was. Then they were widening when they caught sight of the glitch.

Without warning I was hearing a voice. But it didn't belong to the face. In fact I could safely say it wasn't even speaking out loud. I was hearing it my head.

- Abort, abort. The subject has become aware of the artificial environment. Abort! -

"The subject is attempting to take physical control of the scenario!" the face shrieked. "Initiate emergency disconnect now!"

I had just enough time to blink. Then the room and the lab coat with a face disappeared to be replaced by blurred shapes seen through a pale green light. No, not light. Suspension fluid. I was looking through a layer of suspension fluid, the kind they used in sensory depro tanks. A heart beat later my body was jerking and twitching as normal sensation returned in a rush.

I didn't get long to enjoy the pins and needles that chewed their way through my limbs like rabid piranha. A few seconds of twitching in the fluid with my extremities on fire then it was popping open like a giant perverse egg, spilling me out onto the cold concrete.

As I fell forward, there was a hard tug at the base of my skull as the neural jack's connector was pulled taut by my forward motion.Then it was disengaging with a loud 'pop', my vision swimming and my skin burning as a final feedback surge was sent through my nervous system. A heart beat went by with me momentarily suspended in the cold air before I flopped onto the ground along with a hundred gallons of slimy fluid.

Stunned by the rapidity of my ejection from first VR then the tube, I laid there, body throbbing with agony. An agony that was all too real and pervasive to be artificial.

For a long second I was torn between exulting in the fact that I wasn't losing my mind after all. And being terrified that the horror I lived through was all too real.

Earth really had been invaded. We really had lost. And now the enemy was ... Well, that part I hadn't quite figured out yet. While it made sense to put prisoners into VR to cut down on maintenance and exercise costs, what was with the harshness of the Rift? If they wanted us terrorized, the invasion had done that well enough. The Rift was overkill.

Then there was the thing with the secondary scenario, complete with an attempt to convince me I had come out of VR and was suffering from some of delusion. It was almost if they wanted me to question my sanity and accept what ...

My thoughts paused there as I carefully pulled my arms beneath my shivering body, the cold that now lashed at me also all too real.

The shrinks had worked very hard to get me to accept their version of reality, almost too hard. As if that acceptance meant something beyond the face value of a so-called cure.

Thinking of that stirred something in my head. Something I had read about using torture to break a mind down so it was easier to manipulate into accepting lies as truths, a time-tested method of mind control. Well, the Rift had certainly been torturous enough to the point where I thought I would break several times. The fake therapy sessions must have been them testing to see if I was broken enough to start accepting their lies as the truth.

Instead of doing that, I recognized I was still in VR and the scenario as the lie it was, throwing their mind control plan into disarray. With that done, that left only one question:

What was going to happen now?

I was still trying to push myself up when my answer arrived in the form of black bio-hazard suits, the vibration generated by multiple pairs of boots shivering into me wherever I still touched the ground. I looked up as they approached and felt my stomach sink at seeing at least a dozen of them coming towards me.

Their gloved hands weren't gentle as they pulled me to my feet. At least I wasn't naked, like I was in the false awakening scenario. Unfortunately my clothes, the ones I had been wearing when I was captured, were soaked through from my long time in the tube and did nothing to warm me. Nor did they cushion me from the hard hands that took hold of me.

I winced as they pulled me to my feet, holding my shivering body as several more bio-hazard suits appeared out of the gloom.  A number of them had their face plates down and I recognized with a start a couple of the people that had been trapped in the holding pen with me. Then the one in the front captured my attention by drawing a weapon and pointing it at my face.

"It would appear our efforts to break your mind have failed, Mr. Atlas," he said in a hard, accented voice. "If you will not turn, you're of no use to us."

I jerked at the hands and found myself caught fast.

"That's it, then?" I said, grimacing, a part of me wishing I was back in VR. "You can't break me so you're going to kill me?"

"Precisely," the speaker said, taking aim.

"I don't see too many faces from those that were taken with me. You must have a big pile of dead bodies in the back from all your failures," I said, desperation making me bold.

"There are enough," the speaker replied and I hoped it wasn't my imagination that made me hear frustration in his alien voice.

"It's going to get bigger, the longer you stay here," I pressed.  "You can't break us all."

The speaker pressed his gun to my forehead.

"You won't get to find out," he growled and pulled the trigger.