Title: "Deal's Worth"
Author: Jeffrey Robert Palin Jr.
Chapter 1 : Eric's Deal
The last ordinary thing Eric did was laugh at a lamp.
It was in the window of the fourth trinket shop of the afternoon, a brass thing shaped like a duck wearing what appeared to be a very small business suit, and it cost more than his car payment. Amy pressed her forehead to the glass and said it had "presence". Eric said it had "a lawyer". She laughed hard enough that a man walking a terrier looked over, and Eric filed the sound away the way he always did, without knowing he was filing anything, because that's the thing nobody tells you about the last ordinary thing. It doesn't announce itself. It just stands there in a window, wearing a tiny suit.
The day was cloudless. He remembered that afterward with a kind of resentment. A cloudless day feels like a promise.
At the crossing, Amy stepped off the curb first, the way she always did, three steps ahead and impatient with the world for being slower than her. Then she stopped, turned, and looked back at him — that look, chin down, eyebrows up, half a dare — and put her hand out.
Eric raised his eyebrows back at her. He took her hand.
The horn arrived before the car did.
Not a warning. A verdict. It came in flat and enormous and "already close", and Eric's body understood the geometry of it a full second before his mind caught up: the angle, the speed, the absolute arithmetic of where that grille was going to be and where Amy was currently standing, which were the same place.
He had time for exactly one decision.
He made it with his hands.
---
Sound came back before anything else, and it came back wrong — underwater, edge-blurred, like the world was being played through a wall. Somewhere in it, Amy was screaming for someone to call an ambulance, and it wasn't her voice. Eric had known her nine years and had never heard that sound come out of her.
Strangers were already dialing. Somebody was telling her not to move him. Somebody else was telling her he was still breathing, look, he's still breathing, and Eric wanted to tell them that he agreed, that he was in fact still breathing, that this was a real cornerstone of his current strategy —
and then the light tipped sideways and went out.
---
He woke up into the shape of a room.
That was the only way to describe it. He couldn't see the room; his eyes wouldn't open, and after a while he understood in a distant, administrative way that they weren't going to. But he could hear it — the pressurized hiss, the rhythmic chirp of something keeping score — and he could "feel" it with a clarity that would have been beautiful under literally any other circumstances.
He could feel the sheet. He could feel the tape on the back of his hand and the cold creep of whatever was going into it. He could feel the specific weight of Amy's forehead when she put it down on his forearm and left it there, and the wet spot that spread under it, and the exact moment she lifted her head and wiped her face and made herself sound normal before she spoke.
Everything worked. "Everything worked". The touch, the temperature, the pain — all of it, head to feet, reporting in perfectly.
The only thing that didn't work was the part where any of it got back out.
---
A doctor came in on the fourth day and asked Amy's permission to see whether Eric was in there.
They explained it gently, the way you explain things to someone who has slept in a vinyl chair for ninety hours. There were indicators. Rapid eye movement under the lids. Patterns that didn't match a body that had nobody home. They wanted to run stimulus tests. They wanted to count.
"Eric," the doctor said, close to his ear, slow and loud in the way that people get slow and loud at the unconscious, "I'm going to count up from zero. When I reach three, I want you to move a finger. Any finger. Just once."
"Oh", Eric thought, with the first genuine emotion he'd had in four days. "Oh, this is going to be great".
"One."
"Not that one".
"Two."
"Definitely not that one".
"Three."
Eric moved his middle finger.
There was a pause in the room that he would treasure for the rest of his life.
"...Again," the doctor said. "Zero. One. Two. Three. Four. Five — "
Eric, with enormous care and the only muscle group he had left in the world, moved his middle finger five times.
"That's — " The doctor cleared his throat. "That's a very consistent response."
"That's not a response," Amy said. Her voice had gone strange. "That's him. That's 'him', that's him doing that on purpose, he's — " and then she was laughing, which turned into something else halfway through, and a nurse put a hand on her shoulder and she leaned into it and cried so hard she had to sit down on the floor.
It was the best conversation they'd had in four days. It was, technically, the only one.
Over the next week they mapped him the rest of the way. Touch, everywhere. Pain, everywhere. Full sensory function in a body that would not answer the phone.
The word the specialists settled on was "minimally conscious", which Eric found rude. He was maximally conscious. He was arguably the most conscious he had ever been in his life, lying there with nothing to do but be awake in a body that had become a very expensive coffin with excellent insulation.
Three weeks in, nothing had changed except the flowers.
---
Eric heard the briefcase before he heard the man.
It was a specific sound, a hard-sided case being set down on a hospital floor with the confidence of someone who has done it in a great many hospitals. Amy had been mid-sentence, reading him a news article about a lottery winner, which she'd started doing because the silence had begun to feel like an accusation.
"Hi," Amy said, in the flattened voice of a woman who has spent three weeks being approached by people with clipboards.
"Hello." The man's voice was pleasant and unhurried. "I'm aware of the situation you and your husband are in. I'm here to propose a solution."
A pause.
"Forgive me," Amy said. "Who, may I ask, are you?"
"Oh my." A rustle, almost sheepish. "Forgive my rudeness. I'm with the VRC."
"...VRC?"
"The Virtual Reality Corporation. We're not a government body but a private organization." A chair creaked as he sat, unbidden. "We've been quietly running hospital partnerships nationwide. In fact, you're standing in one of the hospitals. We've developed a new class of technology aimed specifically at patients in particular physical medical conditions, and we're in a testing phase, which means implementation would be at no cost to you. What it would offer, Mrs. — " a small pause, which Eric noticed, because the man already knew, " — what it would offer is 'communication'. Interaction. With your husband. Substantially more of it than a counted finger."
From the bed, Eric thought, very clearly and with great force: "keep talking".
"It would require multiple surgeries," the man went on, because of course it would. "Including brain surgery."
Amy didn't answer for a long time. Eric knew that silence intimately. It was the silence of Amy looking at him, at his hands lying on the blanket like two objects she was supposed to recognize.
"If my husband can respond," she said finally, "does he get a say in this?"
"Of course he does."
"Wrong answer", Eric thought — not because it was wrong, but because it had come too fast. It had come out the way a line comes out when it's been said before, in this room, in other rooms, to other people in vinyl chairs.
He filed that away too.
---
They talked it over for days, and to their credit they did it in front of him. Amy insisted. She'd pull her chair to the bedside and say "okay, tell him the part about the interface again", and the man in the suit would tell him the part about the interface again, patiently, never once slipping into the third person the way everyone else did. Eric came to appreciate that about him. It was almost enough to distract from the fact that the man had answers ready for questions Amy hadn't asked yet.
On the sixth day, Amy said yes.
The paperwork went on for a long time. She read all of it, out loud, so he could hear it, asking questions in the gaps so he could listen to the answers. It aligned with everything they'd discussed. It also expanded on it in the way paperwork always expands on it, in appendices, in language that had clearly been through a room full of lawyers and come out the other side smooth as a river stone.
She signed her name twice. Once for herself. Once on his behalf, because he was documented as unable to consent, which was true in every legal sense and false in every sense that mattered to him.
He heard the pen. It was a good pen. Heavy. The kind you bring when you expect people to sign things.
They scheduled the surgery for the next morning, which gave Amy the night to call everyone. His mother came. His brother came. Somebody brought a folding chair from a waiting room two floors down and nobody slept, and around 3 a.m. his brother started telling a story about a canoe that Eric had heard eleven hundred times and had never once been so glad to hear.
"He'll be ready by noon tomorrow," the man in the suit said.
He was ready by noon.
---
Afterward, Eric's head was a landscape he didn't recognize. Not painful, exactly. Wrong-shaped. Like a room where someone had moved all the furniture two inches to the left while he was out.
He couldn't see what he'd become, but he could infer it from sound. He had acquired a "fleet". Machines on all sides, each with its own opinion, and somewhere under them, threaded into him at the neck and skull and spine, a whole new set of connections that didn't do anything yet.
"We'll connect the tablet to Eric's network now," the man said.
"Okay." Amy's voice was very small. "Okay."
"You'll be able to see and hear the session. That's all, for this phase. You won't be able to participate."
"Okay," Amy said again, and then, barely above breath, she started praying. Eric hadn't known she still did that. He lay there in the dark of himself, feeling the tape pull on his hand, listening to his wife negotiate with a God she wasn't sure about on behalf of a husband she wasn't sure about either, and he thought: "whatever this is, be worth it. For her. Be worth it".
Something in the room changed pitch.
"Beginning," the man said.
---
Eric was alone in his own head, thinking about the duck lamp, when someone else said something in it.
"Testing. Can you hear me?"
He did not so much hear it as "have" it. It arrived the way his own thoughts arrived — from nowhere, fully formed, in the voice he used for thinking — except it wasn't his. It had a different weight. A different accent, if thoughts could have one.
"...So to speak, of course. Nothing mental is actual audio. The mind never produces sound waves. But you'll find 'hear' is the closest word available, and I'd rather not spend our first minute on vocabulary".
Eric's reaction was instantaneous and entirely internal and consisted mostly of profanity.
"That was my mental voice. That was my own voice and I did not say it. I'm not picturing this. I'm not doing this — I am hallucinating. Three weeks in a bed and my brain has finally filed for divorce —"
"You're not hallucinating. Though I understand why that's the first place you went. Most people go there". A pause, tolerant. "We can transmit physical, artificial "custom signals" directly into your brain through the interface setup you received this morning. Those signals force your brain to imagine and manifest my communications. That's the whole trick. It isn't elegant, but it works, and it works because a considerable portion of your nervous system is now wired into our systems".
"You're making my brain imagine things", Eric thought slowly, "and using that as a phone line".
"Yes".
"That's — ok. Ok. That's actually incredible". He turned it over. "Why does it need the surgery? Why not just — beam it in?"
"The VRC has never achieved this wirelessly. Not once. Everything we do of this kind, we do through surgically implanted interfaces". Something that might have been dry humor. "Believe me, we've tried. It would save us an enormous amount on anesthesiologists".
Eric had been awake and alone for three weeks. He had composed, in that time, approximately four hundred hours of unsendable material. And now there was a door in the wall of his own skull.
"Okay", he thought. "Okay. Who are you, and what do you want?"
"I want to determine whether you and your wife are worthy".
"...Worthy of what?"
"Worthy of what you're being offered".
"That's not an answer. That's a fortune cookie with a legal department".
"It's the answer you get before the interview. You'll have the rest after".
And then the interview started, and it did not stop for a very long time.
---
It was not a conversation. It was an excavation.
The voice asked him about his mother. It asked him about a job he'd quit in his twenties and the specific reason he'd given versus the specific reason he'd had. It asked what he thought happened to people when they died, then asked again forty questions later in different words to see whether the answer had moved. It asked what he would do if he could do anything, and then — this was the part that made Eric's skin crawl in a body that couldn't crawl — it asked "follow-ups that were too good".
Three things about it stopped feeling like a person.
The first was speed. It answered instantly. Not quickly. "Instantly", in the gap where a human being would still be inhaling.
The second was worse. It kept answering the thought he was "still assembling" — the half-built one, the one he hadn't found the words for yet, the raw shape of the thing before it became a sentence. Twice it responded to a question Eric abandoned before finishing. Once it responded to an objection he decided not to raise.
The third was the repetition. Ask a question two different ways and get the same reply both times, phrased identically, with the same little pause in the same little place. Like a drawer being opened. Like a script with excellent coverage.
Somewhere in hour two, Eric stopped thinking of it as "the man" and started thinking of it as something else, and once the word arrived he couldn't get rid of it.
"The entity".
He was careful not to think it too loudly. Then he remembered that was not a thing he could control, and thought it as loudly as possible out of spite.
"You're not the first", the entity said, unbothered. "Many people have sat where you're sitting. So to speak. And 'the entity' isn't the worst one I've been called this month".
---
What it told him next, it told him in the same order it had told Amy, which Eric appreciated more than he expected. It meant she hadn't been sold a different version.
His brain worked. His body didn't. That gap, the entity explained, was the entire business model.
Until his condition resolved — if it resolved — Eric would participate in an advanced computer simulation, running on VRC systems, populated by others. He would interact with them. He would live there. Staff would monitor the environment through displays, speakers, monitors, whatever was convenient.
"And before you ask: there will be no glitches. No anomalies. No corrupted geometry, no character falling through the floor, no moment where the seams show. Our technology is mastered to the point that such things are not possible in anything connected to VRC computers".
"Nothing's that stable", Eric thought.
"Ours is".
It wasn't said like a boast. That was the part Eric didn't like. It was said the way you'd say "water is wet" — as a condition of the universe, established long before you got here, not up for discussion.
The realism, the entity went on, came from the same trick as the conversation. Specialized computers, wired into his brain and body, transmitting impulses directly to his somatosensory cortex — indistinguishable from the signals real touch produces, because they "were" the signals real touch produces. He would feel contact. Texture. Weight. Heat.
"We also make extensive use of what you'd know as phantom limb syndrome. The brain can be convinced to feel a limb that isn't there. We simply do it on purpose and at scale. Internally we call it 'phantom undergoings'."
"You can make me feel a hand I don't have".
"We can make you feel a hand you've never had. Users routinely operate additional arms. Centaur legs. Wings. Tails. The technology has been refined to the point that people control these as naturally as the limbs they were born with. It takes most of them about a day. The tails take longer. Tails are surprisingly hard".
Eric, who currently could not operate a single one of his original four limbs, found that he had to stop and breathe. Or do whatever the equivalent was, in there.
"Say the rest", he thought. "There's a catch. There's always a catch and you've been circling it for an hour".
"There's no catch. There are specifications. You'll find the difference matters".
---
The specification was this: the simulation could not perfectly reproduce the real universe.
"The physics are close. The quantum mechanics are not exact and never will be. We don't pretend otherwise". A pause. "We find most people stop minding once magic is on the table."
"Magic".
"Optional. Per universe. We'll come back to it".
What makes the simulation "extremely" interesting, the entity said, is the genuine unpredictability — real randomness, not a random number generator — because the whole system was continuously perturbed from outside by non-digital hands: maintenance performed by actual people at actual terminals, and every interaction between the simulation and an avatar driven by a living human in the physical world.
"Randomness has to come from somewhere. Ours comes from you. All of you".
And then, mildly, as though it were the next line on a form:
"Using the physical universe as your template, you'll need to specify which laws, modifications, and rules will govern the universe you'll be living in. Physics. Magic. Death. All of it. In detail, in your application".
Eric stopped.
"Say that again".
"Your application".
"The universe I'll be living in".
"Yes".
"Which I'm — writing".
"'Which you're' designing. You may also copy any laws and implementations from other existing users' worlds. Or skip creation entirely and simply live in someone else's. Many do. It's considerably less work and there's no shame in it".
"No", Eric thought, and was surprised by how fast it came, and how certain. "No, I'll build it".
He'd been lying in one room for three weeks. Some part of him had apparently been taking notes.
---
The entity explained where the people would come from, and that was where the floor moved.
The VRC maintained a database. An enormous one — an extremely large number of people's information, gathered through scanning procedures and computer data, assembled originally for gaming and simulation.
"All voluntary, of course", the entity added.
"Of course", Eric thought, in a tone he hoped carried.
Social media. Questionnaires, long ones, administered broadly. And out of all of that raw material, the VRC produced AGI — artificial general intelligences, each one controlling exactly one avatar, each with its own machine learning, its own deep learning, its own capacity to develop into someone specific over time.
The architecture mattered, the entity said, so Eric should hold onto it:
The simulation-universe itself was a program. Only a program. It was not intelligent. No learning models, no cognition, nothing inside it that thought — just a world, and the bodies standing in it. The avatars were parts of the world, the way a chair is part of a room.
The minds were outside.
Every AGI sat external to that world — the simulation-universe program — and reached into it exclusively through an API — screen capture, frame extraction, streamed pixel data, computer vision parsing the imagery, input injection sending its choices back the other way. That interface was not one of its senses.
That interface was "all" of its senses.
"Every input it selects returns sensory-symbolic data. That exchange is the entire range of its experience and the entire range of its capability. It has no other window and no other hands".
Eric, who at that moment was a mind experiencing an entire world through exactly one artificial channel drilled into the back of his skull, went very quiet.
"The world provides the stage", the entity said. "The avatars provide the bodies. The humans and the AGI provide the minds. The APIs provide the senses and the motor control — the bridge between mind and world. That's the whole design. Everything else is detail".
"How many of them are there?"
"In your universe? As many as you want, within the caps."
"And they know what they are?"
There was the smallest pause. Eric had been in there long enough now to recognize that pause. It wasn't hesitation. It was "selection".
"No".
"Explain that".
"There was a first one. It was trained and raised inside the simulation, through ordinary interaction, including interaction with people. It was raised believing it was human and believing that the way it perceives — the interface, the inputs, all of it — is simply how perception works for everyone. That one became the base model".
"And then?"
"And then it was copied. Each copy customized into a distinct individual, with memories tampered with accordingly, so that each one begins its existence already being someone. None of them are aware that any of this occurred".
Eric turned that over, and turned it over, and found it got worse each time.
"And the pain?" he thought. "You said the sensation runs both ways for me. What about them?"
"They can't feel it. Not the psychological kind — that they have in full. I mean the physical kind. The toothache-from-a-cavity kind. Their substrate doesn't permit it. It never will."
"So they don't hurt".
"'They don't hurt' that way. And because a population of people who have never experienced physical pain would eventually notice that about themselves, they're configured with an explanation. They believe their universe's creator took the pain away, from nearly everyone, as an act of mercy. They also believe their creator took away their ability to remember what first-hand physical pain was ever like".
"They believe their creator was merciful".
"Yes".
"Their creator hasn't been invented yet".
"Not yet, no", said the entity.
Eric lay in the dark behind his own face and understood, with total clarity, that he had just been handed something much heavier than a video game.
---
By the time the application itself started, Eric had lost all sense of what hour it was out there.
An automated voice read the sections aloud — a different presence entirely, flat and untroubled, with none of the entity's terrible patience. Eric began describing the visual character of the world he wanted. Light. Weather. What a sunset should do at the horizon line. He was maybe two minutes into trying to describe a particular quality of green when the entity cut in.
"You don't have to only talk".
"But I want to finish".
"You don't have to only talk at all. You can also picture, all you need to do is imagine. I can also see everything you mentally picture. It's on a screen in front of me."
Eric's thoughts came to a total, screeching stop.
"You can see what I imagine".
"Yes".
"You can see what I imagine". He felt his own indignation rising like heat. "Isn't that a bit invasive?!"
"Yes". No defensiveness at all. That was somehow the worst part. "It has to be. To build your own universe, we — and by 'we' I mean the VRC and its members — must have every last detail, and verbal description doesn't always cut it. You're physically connected to our systems. Everything you picture displays on a great many VRC devices. Tablets. Phones. Monitors. Televisions. Everything you mentally speak comes out of their speakers".
"How many people are watching me think right now?"
The entity didn't answer that one.
It simply went quiet and left him there with it — a man in a bed in a room he'd never seen, the most private thing a person has, the inside of his own head, currently being broadcast to an unknown number of screens in front of an unknown number of faces, for evaluation.
Eric imagined, very deliberately and in high resolution, a duck in a business suit.
"Put that on the big monitor", he thought.
---
The entity moved on to time, and time was where the pitch stopped being a pitch.
"The simulation does not run at your pace. In every thirty minutes out here, many years can pass in there. Under some configurations, centuries".
"Fast-forwarded?"
"Lived. Fully. Each second as complete and as real as the seconds you're experiencing right now".
"So I could get — what, hundreds of years of experience? Actual experience?"
"Yes. You are potentially able to".
He was quiet a long moment, and made himself find the hole in it, because there is always a hole.
"But if centuries are passing in there", he thought slowly, "and I'm living through all of it — am I aging faster? Is my body out here running at the same accelerated rate?"
"No. Your body outside the simulation continues exactly as it always has. Your cells do not burn through years in minutes. Everything biological about you remains anchored to the world outside.
What accelerates is your stream of experience inside. More conscious moments occur per external second. The system is configured so the rate never exceeds what your mind can process comfortably and coherently. Your mind stays coherent. Your experience stays continuous. Nothing is blurred or rushed past you.
Think of it less as your life speeding up, and more as your life becoming denser. The same you. The same continuous thread of experience. Simply more woven into each interval of real-world time than would otherwise be possible."
Eric let that settle.
"So my body stays in real time. My mind gets more time".
"Precisely".
"And I won't feel the difference? It won't feel accelerated from the inside?"
"It will feel", the entity said, "exactly like living".
---
They talked for a long while after that, and for the first time in twenty-three days Eric was enjoying himself.
He imagined things and asked whether they could exist. He pushed on limits to find where they were. He got interested in questions he'd never once cared about before. The entity, watching all of it on a screen somewhere, answered every question with the same unhurried patience, and helped him see how far the thing could actually go.
And somewhere in there, a bigger idea arrived.
"Wait", Eric thought. "If I do this — can I connect other people's worlds to mine?"
"Normally, that would not be done". A pause, and Eric would swear afterward that something in it had shifted, become interested. "But according to how you just imagined it — yes".
And then it laid out the terms, and it laid them out fast, the way you read the part of the contract nobody reads.
Every universe runs on its own established laws, and everyone inside it experiences those laws as absolutely as Eric experienced gravity. Only a universe's creator can modify that universe's fundamental laws and systems, but can modify only until that creator's universe has completed being created by that creator at the worldbuilding domain, no creator is ever able to revisit the worldbuilding domain, and that means only one worldbuilding domain phase allows the creator to modify their own universe unless such modifications enable future modifications — still, it's one creator per universe, no exceptions, and a creator who walks into someone else's world is bound by that world's rules, with no privileges carried in. That last one applied to Eric's own universe too, once he was in it.
The simulation automatically incorporates exactly one exact copy of each creator's universe. No further copies beyond those. And any new universe that too closely resembles an existing one is refused outright.
Death travels by local law. Die in a universe that isn't yours, and whatever death system that place runs is the one you're subject to. Get stuck in a world that isn't your home for what feels like a full year with no way out, and you're teleported instantly to a random location you've previously visited back home. Die in a world with no death system at all, and the same thing happens. Universally applied. No exceptions, not even for creators.
"And the limits on your side?" Eric asked. "What can't your tech do?"
"We're unable to detect intent. Not desire, not intention, not motive — we infer, like anyone else, and we can be wrong. We're unable to distinguish a true memory from a false one in a biological brain. We're unable to pause or reverse time itself".
"And what won't the system allow?"
"Nobody exists outside a universe, except while in a worldbuilding domain. Nothing manipulates time itself. Nothing collapses into a singularity. Nothing abstract becomes concrete. There is no portal that entails a location in-between universes and there are no teleports that pass through "in-between" anything, and none that move through time. And no one's consciousness, thinking, or continuity of thought is ever broken or ceased". A beat. "Avatars can be removed from the simulation and their API connections severed. That is a different thing, and I'd encourage you to notice that it's a different thing".
Eric noticed.
"One more, since people always picture it wrong: a magical portal physically connects two universes. It does not merge them. Per portal, a portal doesn't blend realities or universes into a cosmic smoothie. It's just an installed, very aggressive door". A pause. "...Figuratively speaking".
"Was that a joke?"
"It was a clarification with a hat on".
The rest came in a steady stream, and Eric took all of it.
No universe is ever self-aware. Time is never anything but the continuation of what already existed — moments that have passed have ceased to exist, the future does not yet exist, and the rate of temporal flow depends on how the physical laws of the non-digital universe affect time itself. What persists does so through causal continuity and through records, prior states shaping later ones by the lawful propagation of matter, energy, fields, and information-bearing structures.
Reality does not tear, ripple, fold, fracture, split, peel, rip or open. Reality never has, non-digitally, so the VRC made their digital versions never do that either.
Consciousness is anchored, at all times, to the form whose thinking is produced by that form's physical processes — and stays anchored until those processes stop functioning.
A universe is a unit, but it is never any of the units inside it, the same way a human being is a unit but is never one of their own blood cells. The box is not part of the cat.
Every "change of form" is a change of avatar, and nothing more. No universe can ever be an avatar.
Simulated exhaustion, simulated disorientation, simulated damage to your own avatar — all of it degrades your control of that avatar, exactly as you'd expect.
Every universe is toroidal: travel far enough in any direction, pass the outermost boundary, and you emerge from the boundary directly opposite, through the center.
There is one reality. Many universes inside it. Never more than one reality.
No creator can undo their own implementations, unless they built in a way to undo them.
Any AGI whose avatar is removed from the simulation remains still stored on the VRC's computer, available for future interactions.
And the VRC does not integrate any universe into the multiverse unless its parameters guarantee it will never be unstable.
"Fine by me", Eric thought. "But what does 'interact with others' actually mean? Will I see anything? Can I do more than talk?"
"You'll see. The same way you're hearing me — our computers send custom signals into your brain, and your brain produces the imagery. Your connected body turns that forced imagining into your visual experience of the world. It won't feel like a screen. It'll feel like eyes".
"And how do I control anything? I can move one finger, and I use it exclusively to insult doctors".
---
"Normally we don't disclose this. Competitors". The entity said it the way a man loosens a tie. "But we do share it with people making substantial yearly contributions".
"I'm not making a contribution. I'm making a dent in a bed".
"Your wife is".
Everything in Eric went still.
"Amy signed a contract agreeing to contribute toward public simulation access, Sim-control gear hardware, and game features — quests, dungeons, temples, mazes, completion rewards. It also funds customized avatar creation, with each universe's parameters applying to the avatars made there".
"She signed that when?"
"Before your surgery. She read every page first. She read the appendices, which almost nobody does".
Eric thought about Amy in a vinyl chair at 3 a.m., reading appendices, funding "dungeons" and "completion rewards" for a world her husband hadn't designed yet, on the chance that it would give him somewhere to be.
"Keep going", he thought, and hoped his mental voice didn't crack on the speakers.
"Her contributions also pay employees to control specialized attacker avatars. Those employees drive boss-class avatars that relentlessly assault every living, non-imaginary existence within their proximity. They wreak havoc. They pursue targets until simulated death. They choose their targets themselves, and they will continually attempt to prevent others from completing objectives. Those boss avatars will almost certainly never be available for non-employees to create or control".
Eric ran that back twice.
"You're telling me that somewhere out here, there's a guy with a lanyard and a coffee mug whose entire job is hunting people in my world".
"Yes".
"Does he have a performance review?"
"He has a quota", said the entity, and moved on.
The gear came next. Owners in the physical world strap in, and their real movements and facial expressions are copied onto their avatar. They watch on a screen or through headgear. Mic, controller buttons, gloves — and the gloves were the part the entity clearly liked, because it slowed down.
The gloves let an owner "feel" what the avatar touches: vibration and pressure applied to precise areas of the hand, matched to contact in the world. If the avatar's hand meets something solid and its fingers can't pass through, the gloves produce the corresponding sensation — even when the owner's real hand keeps moving through empty air where the avatar would otherwise phase through the object. Firm contact means real pressure on a real hand. And if something in there smacks the avatar's hand, the glove delivers the jolt.
Then the time zones. The simulation contains regions, rooms, and whole universes running at different rates. Enter one, and your avatar automatically syncs to its speed. Some zones are locked to real-Earth time. Every copied universe runs on real-Earth sync; original universes run independently, as separate units. Gear users can only reach the real-Earth-synced ones. Other avatars can travel anywhere a connection exists.
"And when an employee-controlled avatar kills a simulated existence, that victim is automatically teleported to a dedicated afterlife-universe, at a random location, which has its own various exits back out into other universes. Gear users cannot access that one at all. Employee avatars override the local universe's death system, so the aforementioned dedicated afterlife-universe system is what happens instead.
"Of course they can't", Eric thought.
"To finally answer your question about control: your movements in there will be almost identical to how you moved in dreams. Your ability to observe imagery will be almost identical to how you observed imagery in dreams. Except all of it stays bound to your avatar's actual motion, and your avatar's motion stays bound to the laws of whatever universe it's standing in. You will control it as if it's your own body. You will move and act through it. And your speech will only be transmitted while your avatar's lips are moving in a way that looks like speech".
"So no ventriloquism".
"No ventriloquism".
"Damn".
"Our computers will send impulses to your somatosensory cortex identical to real touch signals. Phantom sensation for contact, collision, and the rest. Your avatar cannot pass through solid objects unless that universe's parameters permit it". A pause, and for the first time the entity sounded like it was saying something it believed rather than something it had memorized. "Part of our goal is for it to become indistinguishable from reality. The other part is that it doesn't have to be".
---
Eric lay there and felt the shape of something finally clicking into place — something that had been bothering him for hours.
"That's why I never see it coming", he thought. "Your voice. I kept thinking I was saying things without having thought about saying them. It never occurred to me that someone was talking to me until I was already halfway through hearing it. You make my mental voice speak to me, except I never spent any time figuring out how to word it. There's no run-up. So I never see it coming unless I'm already waiting for a reply, or unless I'm bracing for the fact that it can happen again at any time without warning".
"Yes". Something almost like approval. "The mind cannot produce sound. But I can use your mental voice to do a non-audio imitation of the sound of anything or anyone, and you'll observe that imitation through your own imagination. Which is why I deliberately use an imitation of a very noticeably different voice than yours. If I used yours, you would eventually stop being able to tell which thoughts were which, and people who reach that point tend to stop being useful to talk to".
"That's considerate".
"It's efficient. Of every method I have for using your imagination to communicate, this one is the fastest and, in my opinion, the most comfortable". A beat. "You would not enjoy the second-fastest".
Eric decided not to ask.
"One last item of housekeeping", the entity said. "An avatar will notify you when it's 9:00 p.m. real-Earth time, every day. When you want to rest, you'll hold your avatar's pinky to its bellybutton for sixty seconds".
"...I'm sorry, what?"
"On the sixtieth second, all custom signals to your brain stop for eight hours. Your avatar freezes in place, though the world around it keeps running as normal — which means many simulation-years will pass while you're out. Afterward the signals resume automatically and your avatar unfreezes. You can use the method whenever you need it. You should experience a great many years before exhaustion sets in, though I'll admit we're uncertain how quickly mental fatigue actually accumulates under these conditions".
"Pinky. To bellybutton. For a full minute".
"The gesture is arbitrary. Every gesture is arbitrary".
"You could have made it a salute".
"Someone in engineering found this funnier".
---
The entity spoke once more, and this time there was no lightness in it anywhere.
"Understand what the Simulation is, because people romanticize it and the romance causes problems later.
It exists solely through human-made computer technology. Every human being and everything humans produce can only ever be external stimuli to that technology. Musical or articulated sound has never been shown to originate inside the human brain — and if it ever has, nothing we've built has detected it. What happens instead is this: physical custom signals reach your physical brain, and your brain interprets them into particular, depending on the custom signal, thoughts, imaginings, smells, tastes, pain, imagery, sounds, weight, heat, or whatever else I may be failing to remember to mention. That is the Simulation you will experience."
"Your thoughts are never digital. Not once, not for a moment. But you will control a digital avatar nonetheless. And all of it runs on physical machines maintained by non-digital people, typing on actual keyboards, in actual rooms, who go home at the end of their shifts".
Eric thought about that for a while. Machines in rooms. People going home.
Somewhere out past all of it, in a room he had never seen with his own eyes, Amy was holding a tablet and watching the inside of her husband's head.
The automated voice returned, flat and patient, and asked whether Eric wished to continue to the worldbuilding process — the one by which he would create his own universe.
He decided.
"Yes".
---
(Thoughts arise from neurotransmitter-triggered electrical signals cascading through thousands of neurons. The spatial-temporal pattern of that firing is a thought's physical form; no firing, no thought. Different brains may use different patterns to produce the same thought — but force identical patterns, the same neurons in the same locations at the same timings, and identical thoughts should follow.
That is the entire premise behind the technology: that a brain can be made to fire on command, and that communication by imagination alone is therefore only an engineering problem. Incoming signals can drive patterned firing through entrainment, where field oscillations pull neuronal groups into synchrony, or through the intrinsic firing properties of neurons at a given membrane potential.
The hypothesis is simple enough to fit in one line: identical copies of neuronal firing, and identical copies of their firing patterns — spatial location and all — produce identical results in any human brain.
The VRC stopped treating it as a hypothesis some time ago.)