The Apocalypse Contract

CHAPTER 19 - SYDNEY

When Sydney was twelve, she went on a shopping trip with her parents. It was late in the Christmas season, and the mall was packed with people. The usually spacious promenade was crammed with temporary booths and kiosks selling all manner of gifts. One in particular grabbed young Sydney's attention. It was a display of posters, art composed of seemingly random splashes of color, but the woman running the booth swore there were images hidden in the chaos if you looked at them just right. Each picture had a label above it. Kittens Playing. Woman Smiling. Dragon Flying. Sydney desperately wanted to see them, especially the dragon. She stared and stared at it, but it just looked like smudges of color.

And then, when she had almost given up, she saw it. The trick was to not look at the picture, but past it, to treat the poster like a window. She could see the dragon clearly. She couldn't unsee it. It seemed so obvious.

Now, sitting in her fake reading chair in her simulated apartment, Sydney was having a similar epiphany. The truth had always been there, right in front of her. If she had just stopped dwelling so much on the details and looked at the whole picture she would have seen it sooner.

It made no sense to send a living human on a three decade journey when all you really needed was their reasoning skills. Air, food, water, living space... the resources needed to truck a living thing through space were enormous. That's why NASA sent robotic probes instead.

She had even put the question to them directly. With all their high tech alien skills, why didn't they create an artificial intelligence to fly the ship? And they had answered they were researching it. What they left out was that she was part of that research. She was the artificial intelligence. It made total sense. If you could scan something with enough detail to physically recreate it elsewhere, you could also model it in a simulation. No need for all that messy, expensive life support when a big honking computer will do. No need to build an artificial intelligence from scratch when you can digitize a living one.

The System Reference and User Manual sat in front of her on the coffee table. She picked it up and began flipping through it. It was like she was reading it for the first time. Previously incongruous statements suddenly made sense. Strange jargon took on new meaning. She finally had the context she had been missing.

The aliens had told her she could customize her living space. She had spent days trying to figure out how, but the user manual seemed to say nothing about it. But the explanation was right in front of her. When she had first read the section titled Modification of Simulation and Sensorium Attributes, she assumed it was all about the holographic display system in the star room. It talked extensively about virtual representations of data, not the manipulation of physical walls or rooms. Now she knew her reality was digital. Her apartment was only a simulation. She could change it as easily as changing numbers in a database.

She started small, tweaking a few minor attributes, then checking the results. She would navigate the menus on the control table, tapping on icons and sliding attribute bars, then run back to the apartment to see what had changed. It was slow going. Her first recognizable success was her closet. First she made it taller, then deeper, but she was being so cautious, the changes were so small, she couldn't be sure it had worked. Then she made it wider, and the hanger rod no longer reached the brackets on either side, spilling all her clothing on the floor. She became more bold, increasing the closet's dimensions by greater and greater amounts until she had a cavernous spare room the size of an auditorium. Then she shrunk it back down to a more reasonable luxury loft size.

Next she began to experiment with the duplication of existing objects. She decorated her new room with copies of the furniture from the living area. She experimented with changing the position and orientation of items, altering their size, even 'skinning' them with different textures and colors. The concepts were similar to the 3D modeling she had done in video game development, though the interface was far more cumbersome.

Could she find some way of using the development tools on her laptop to edit her simulated environment? She dug into the user manual for answers. At first it seemed impossible; only the control table, itself part of the simulation, had the ability to alter other parts of the simulation. Nevertheless, she continued researching.

Objects in the simulation occupied a hierarchy, with 'parent' objects being composed of many smaller 'child' objects, and those child objects being composed of their own, smaller child objects. Some objects were beyond her ability to modify. The control table, the star room, herself, and the cats were 'read only'. She couldn't, for example, make herself taller or delete one of the cats. She was actually happy about that restriction. There was nothing more dangerous than a user with root privilege but no idea what she was doing.

Pixel jumped in her lap.

"Good news, fur-ball. Even if I go crazy, I can't turn you into a lampshade. Our alien overlords made sure of it."

Pixel showed his lack of concern by grooming his own stomach. Sydney thought about the hierarchy of objects involved in the hairball he would eventually spit up. Would the hairball remain a child object of the cat, indestructible and beyond her ability to edit? Or maybe he had been cured of hairballs along with aging and the need to actually eat. Still, it gave her an idea. She grabbed a drinking glass from the kitchen and took it into the star room. After using the control table to locate the glass's object record, she smashed the glass on the floor. A list of new object records flickered into existence, each representing a shard of glass. She traced the process by which the parent glass object spawned these new objects. Embedded within the glass was the logic dictating how it could break. An object could create new objects.

A plan took shape, she could use the control table to create a new object, one that would plug into her laptop and accept commands to generate still more objects. A master control dongle. Anything created in that way would occupy a hierarchy with the dongle at its top. She could use all her favorite software development tools to create or modify objects in that hierarchy.

She sat down at the control table, user manual at hand, and got to work.