Dreams in Monochrome - A New Elysium Story [ongoing - hiatus]

The Prism and the Puzzle

<Establishing neural connections.>

<Peripheral neural uplink complete.>

<Central neural uplink complete.>

<Synaptic interface status: ninety-nine point eight percent compatibility.>

The artificial female voice faded into darkness, and for a moment, nothing happened.

Then, a universe exploded into existence before his eyes.

From the darkness, the virtual space seemed to unfold like a diorama with uncountable layers. It expanded and spread all around him, filling his surroundings with a blur of colors and vague shapes. At the edges, they were rapidly collapsing again and folding in on themselves. Focusing too much on these borders while the connection was established would give anyone incapable of perceiving more than three spatial dimensions a horrific headache, so Theo tried to focus on the center, where a virtual landscape began to take shape before him.

<Consciousness connected.>

<Welcome to the Prism.>

The voice quietly chimed its greeting, as the rendering completed and he found himself in the cyberspace of Eos.

The world beyond the interface followed no rules of nature, logic or aesthetic – or at least none that a human mind could readily comprehend. But the place that Erika had brought him to looked very much like a real-world cityscape. Tall, white spires grew from the ground all around him, reaching high into the darkness above. Streams of flowing code illuminated the black sky, like rivers of starlight.

But the constructs around him were no buildings. They were data structures, comprised of ones and zeroes that the visor over his eyes rendered into a shape that his human mind could comprehend more easily. He knew such structures from his work in cybersecurity – although he preferred to see them from the outside, as raw code, when he worked on them.

He heaved a weary sigh as he took in his immediate surroundings. Erika had bypassed Synthetic System's mainframe and dropped him directly into a central virtual hub, and it was buzzing with activity. This area of virtual space, known as the Prism, was created form a network of terminals all over Eos and was just like the city itself: boldly colorful, glaringly bright, utterly chaotic, and filled to the brim with people.

Theo couldn't quite decide which of these things he hated most about it.

Colorful lines, pulsing with an inconsistent glow, ran along the ground, up and down buildings, or just hung suspended in mid-air between them. Here and there, tiny spokes protruded from them, like dendritic spines of colorful neurons. These nodes could be used to directly tap into the endless flow of information that floated through this place.

Even without accessing the nodes, there was information everywhere. Windows along the smooth walls of the buildings led to different parts of this cyberspace, as well as the Transnet that connected Eos to the cyberspaces of other colonized planets through real-time quantum entanglement communication. Most of them displayed advertisements or provided a glimpse at other, even more colorful and vibrant places. Data packages hovered through the virtual streets, like bizarrely shaped little blips that trailed behind a constantly changing stream of news headlines and advertisements.

At least in here, the brazen illumination didn't hurt his eyes quite as much, compared to the real world outside. It still pained him figuratively though, thanks to the ubiquitous clashing of lime green and cyan blue and flamingo pink and sunset orange and other unspeakable and horrifically mismatched shades. All the way into the real world, a shudder of disgust coursed through him.