Deep dream, p.11
Deep Dream, page 11
She flicks the switch on her VR headset, and the visor slides down over her eyes as a prickle runs up the back and sides of her head. The electrodes embedded in its mem-foam rest against her skin, and a momentarily unpleasant ripple of electricity hums through her spine like static. Her shoulders tense, and she takes three deep breaths to relax them. Her hands steady on the faux leather couch cushions.
“Welcome back, Safia Adeline D’Souza,” Helix, her AI assistant, says brightly, speaking directly into her mind. “Please pick a project to resume work on. Or start a new one from the preapproved list. Or put in an application to create a demo.”
She’s inside the brain of the simulator, ready to create. She can’t create just anything she wants to, though. All her project requests are generated by medical professionals to address specific patient needs. Each one has specific constraints and goals. Safia gets to decide how the sim experience achieves those objectives, but she can only build to order.
She scans the visuals hovering before her eyes. Animated 3D thumbnails show her the Halfway to Hope sim, the Sunbeam Stream sim, and the Planetary Pinball Wizard sim, each at a different state of completion, all due for review at VRFX Studio over the next few weeks.
She knows she could build the perfect sim for the person in room 609, if only they’d let her.
She shuts the thought down. That project does not exist. She focuses her eyes on the Planetary Pinball Wizard and blinks twice to confirm it.
“Let’s create some magic with Planetary Pinball Wizard,” Helix confirms. The AI manifests across her retinas in the form of a humanoid fox, the tips of their ears and tail painted all the shades of a rainbow. “Before we begin, please confirm your acceptance of the Tenets.”
Safia stifles an exhalation. This is a routine protocol governing the implementation of AI across industries. When the first AI programs began to influence the visual and creative arts a few decades prior, the livelihoods of independent human artists came under threat from their terrifying efficiency and their disregard for copyrights. AI-generated content reflected rampant, often dangerous, prejudice and bias, all the way from children’s books to pornography. Far-right extremists had a great run generating propaganda, fake news, and alternate histories, then absolving themselves of responsibility and blaming “the machine” when held accountable—after spending years attempting to convince the world that if the machine said it was true, it must be true. The International Regulatory Authority on AI was formed and, with surprising resourcefulness, created an elaborate compliance policy. Now, before each human-AI collaboration can begin, the Tenets need to be ratified by the human half of the pairing.
Safia pulls on her haptic gloves and brings her hands together to indicate she agrees as each Tenet cycles across her visual feed.
“Thank you for accepting the Tenets, Safia,” Helix says. “Commencing Planetary Pinball Wizard.”
A single black dot appears at the center of Safia’s field of vision, stark against the painted white wall beyond. It expands outwards in a perfect circle of darkness, and a tugging sensation grows to fill the space between Safia’s ribs as she imagines being drawn into it. As she’s pulled closer—as the visual creates the illusion of depth in her perception—the darkness swirls and she’s sucked across an imaginary threshold. It feels like the moment an aircraft lifts off and leaves the runway, the earth falling away.
The mobility immersion is impressive.
“Helix, did you work on the early immersion physics?” she asks.
“I did, based on your notes, Safia. Is it too much?”
“It’s perfect. Well done.”
“Thank you.”
Safia pulls up a dashboard with a flick of her fingers. The sim has dozens of levels that are generated on the fly, based on the difficulty parameters she establishes for Helix as she builds it. When the sim is being played, live data gathered by Helix—based on who’s playing through it, and how their play adapts over time—determines how the levels change, and how challenging they are. Safia wants to test the early sim experience; it’s unlikely that most users being treated with it will need more than fifteen levels if the sim does its job right.
Safia controls a small bubble-shaped spacecraft, flying through space unobstructed, a smooth ride the likes of which she’ll never find in New Luru traffic.
Space is magnificent, pinpricks of stars strewn across its dark canvas.
Out of nowhere, a neon orange planet spins into focus on her left. She tries to guide the craft away from its gravitational field, highlighted as a bright blue halo around the sphere. She fires maximum thrust with a thought, wills the planet to let her go, nearly makes it …
She collides with the gravitational field, and it sends her spinning off into the darkness. It nearly makes her throw up.
“Helix, turn down the realism on the pinball physics?” she chokes out.
“Noted.”
She bounces into another planet. It sends her careening away.
“Much better; let’s stick to this level.”
Her spaceship is now pinging off every moon-shaped orb, streaking comet, and freewheeling meteorite in sight. She’s firing her engines at maximum thrust, dropping her power rapidly, trying to coax the craft out of freefall, pleading with it to right itself, but nothing works. She careens her way across a flight path fraught with inescapable vast obstacles.
She’s running out of fuel, her craft’s taking damage—and then an entirely out-of-place, highly exaggerated eight-bit daisy with a big smile appears. She bounces off its soft, cushioned center. Her craft slows, and she attempts to right it, but now she’s in a field of daisies in space, skipping off their petals and swooping through their leaves. She laughs. And then slams straight into an asteroid. It’s terrifying chaos all over again.
Safia throws her hands in the air. She’s fed up. She relinquishes control of her spaceship. It slows. She sits back and watches. It slams into a satellite, but her flight path doesn’t go haywire. Off in the distance, a glowing golden portal is her destination.
It’s smooth sailing. She bounces off a grotesquely fluffy eight-bit teddy bear, rides out a bumpy gamma radiation field, and does nothing but wait.
She speeds towards the portal and through it.
Level Two.
“Pause. Notes review,” she commands.
Helix has been scanning her thoughts through the experience, and they generate a list of next steps.
“Great job with your dynamic response to my controls,” Safia comments. “That’s the most important thing here.”
The sim is meant to help an unnamed patient deal with their anxiety. Their psychiatrist says their issues stem from a need to be in control of every kind of situation in their life. The intent is to let them experience how letting go is sometimes the best thing to do—the more they fight for control of the spaceship, the more obstacles block their path and send them into chaos. The hope is that through experiencing both the terrifying and the absurd, the patient will realize that it’s sometimes best to sit back and watch, instead of reacting.
Safia and Helix test the first fifteen levels together. She tweaks the art—those daisies really do smile a little too intensely; Helix tweaks the physics. Together they develop new limits for each of the sim’s parameters. She sets to building an entire set of obstacles from childhood nursery objects, to go with the eight-bit space teddy.
Only the really rich or the really desperate can access what Safia does, and she hates that about herself and the company she works for. But she can’t afford for it to be otherwise. Maybe someday she’ll save enough to go pro bono freelance, but the tech she needs will have to be way more affordable, and then there’s the whole bit about connections with medically certified doctors as a client base, a license to practice, and a wretched race for survival against big companies like VRFX Studio. If she pools all her savings together and borrows money off everyone she knows, she probably still won’t be able to pay even one of the expected bribes at all the New Luru government offices. It’s all over the Group Therapy for Sim Therapists chatroom; even the rich kids can’t take it anymore. And so, it’s giant corporation employee or bust.
As long as that’s the case, she can’t independently build the sim she so desperately wants to for the person in room 609 until she has consent from the family. At least, not legally.
Safia checks the time on her display. It’s nearly 8 a.m.
“Helix, let’s hit pause for this session?”
She slips off her VR helmet, pulls on a hoodie, and stares at the door to room 609. She wonders if today is the day she goes up against them, again. She almost gets off the couch and almost knocks on the door, but finds herself frozen in place, as if glued to the seat cushions, her hands balled into fists at her sides.
She leaves the hospital before Amulya’s family can arrive.
Amulya wasn’t supposed to be at Freedom Park that afternoon.
They’d decided it was too dangerous to protest in the streets, after the Free Speech March down Sankey Road last year. Safia and Amulya had been stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic at Silk Board, cursing their luck all the way on the other side of the city as night came on and the protest wound up. As it turned out, they’d never been luckier.
Dronecams had recorded the faces of everyone present, identifying them from their smart-tech and releasing their data to the Narangi Brigade. The police made facetious arrests and the far-right group orchestrated all-round intimidation, and while none of the charges could really hold up in court, a spate of harassment crimes broke out in the months that followed. Acid attacks, muggings after dark, break-ins where protestors returned home and found their furniture wrecked, with threats scrawled across their walls. None of the perpetrators were ever found, though every indicator pointed at right-wing goons for hire. Citizens began running their own investigations; evidence continued to mysteriously disappear.
They sat out every protest and demonstration since, feeling progressively more guilty, while violence against protestors escalated. They fought over it nonstop, too—Amulya pushing Safia to “grow a spine,” Safia pleading with Amulya to consider their safety first.
“Things will change,” Safia said. “These clowns can’t stay in power forever.”
“Oh yeah, and who’s going to change things if we’re all hiding in our flats in fear?” Amulya shot back. Her thick eyebrows drew together in a scowl beneath her heavy bangs, and her entire body shook with anger.
“Let’s just wait for things to get a little bit better,” Safia said, reaching for her hand.
Amulya shook her off. “Let’s wait until there’s nothing left,” she said, turning around and stomping off, slamming the door to their bedroom shut.
Safia got used to sleeping on the couch.
It’s where she is right now. She’s turned it into a bit of a pillow fort. All the cushions Amulya made fun of her for stockpiling surround her. Blankets of varying thicknesses for different weather conditions. On the recliner, a mountainous heap of clothes. She can’t stand being in their bedroom.
It was even worse right after the Incident. Each time she needed a shower, she’d have to dash in, grab whatever lay on top of the pile in her cupboard, and run straight back out. Her vision would go blurry: Was it tears, or the blessed pixelation of denial? She’ll never know, except that her brain kicked in and told her it was dangerous to look around, to see Amulya’s side of the bed still neatly made, her half-finished copy of the Fullmetal Alchemist omnibus topping a stack of books, the only thing missing her spectacles, and of course they were missing because they’d been on her face. Safia tries to resist the surge of memory, but the day of the Incident returns to her, unbidden like it always is.
Running late at work. Review with the big boss, Amulya texted.
Ugh, sorry. Hope it goes well, Safia replied.
Thanks. He’ll probably be staring too hard at my chest to pay attention to my presentation lol
UGH. I’ll get you ice cream for dinner
Worth it, mwah!
A string of heart and kissy-face emojis popped up all over their text conversation, and Safia had felt immense relief that they weren’t going to be fighting that evening. Maybe they’d play through a sim together, hopefully cuddle and fall asleep in the same bed.
The ice cream froze rock solid in their malfunctioning freezer by the time the phone call came in. Safia doesn’t remember the words that were spoken, only that the ground was pulled out from beneath her feet even as she raced across it to flag the first EV-cab to New Luru Central Hospital, before remembering she had to book one on her smartphone, before cursing herself for being twenty-nine years old and not having a driver’s license yet, and swearing out loud at how expensive her sim therapist education and equipment had been so they’d never been able to afford a car, because even though she was highly paid she was buried in foreign university student debt, and oh fuck, how were they going to afford hospital bills when her workplace medical insurance didn’t cover Amulya because they weren’t married?—all while three cab drivers canceled on her. She considered walking before realizing she was dizzy, considered calling her sister Sonia so she could drive her there, remembered Sonia now lived in LA, and fuck, when the EV-cab finally arrived she rolled into the backseat, her hands shaking, hoping her wallet and keys were in the bag she’d grabbed on her way out.
Amulya had lied to her. She wasn’t supposed to be in Freedom Park. She was supposed to be at a review with her skeezy boss, that fucking right-wing apologist uncle who’d nearly dropped his expensive glass of whiskey when Amulya had introduced Safia as her partner at that work party two years ago. His lecherous eyes had followed them through the pub, no doubt playing some porno-inspired fantasy about lesbians in his head the whole time.
She wasn’t supposed to be at Freedom Park at all, not at the Equal Rights for Equal Love Rally. It was supposed to be a peaceful gathering, protesting against a fascist central government that was considering revoking the recent laws granting queer people the right to be legally married to partners of their choosing, regardless of their gender. And it had been nonviolent, until the Narangi Brigade had shown up and taunted protestors with ugly slurs.
Safia scrolled through her social media timeline. Video footage was all over the Rainbow Underground, a private Discord server that surfaced what a half dozen other government-monitored social media apps would not. Safia played it all as she suffered silently through the worst traffic jam she’d ever been in, including that one at Silk Board last year. Clearly the cops had created detours and diversions to let the authorities “investigate” the incident. She desperately hunted for a glimpse of Amulya in the videos.
And then the first bomb exploded. Then another. And finally, a third.
Shrapnel rained down on the protestors, video footage took a turn for the Blair Witch, screams of panic streamed through Safia’s headphones, and suddenly, she didn’t want to spot Amulya at all.
Government officials were all over the news, claiming it was an act of “gay terrorism,” a sign of what would happen to the country if the “traditional family unit” wasn’t reclaimed. Safia was sick to her stomach. She fought against the nausea and put her phone down, listlessly watching traffic crawl by until she drew up to the hospital gate.
She tumbled out, grabbed her bag, raced across the impossibly long driveway to the emergency ward, stepped inside, and called Amulya’s sister.
“Ground floor, near OT 4,” was all Kavya said before she hung up.
None of the signs made any sense. Safia could read them, she just couldn’t process them. She stopped several nurses, asking for directions. She managed to find her way to a waiting room, and spotted Amulya’s family. Her father’s face was puffy with tears. Her mother paced up and down, counting prayer beads. Her sister …
“Kavya, thank goodness. What’s going on?”
She threw her arms around Kavya and pulled her into a hug.
“Multiple head injuries, internal bleeding, they’re operating, she might not live.”
Safia felt the breath rush out of her, her knees going weak. She lost her balance. Kavya took a step back from her and gave her a gentle shove. She fell to the floor.
Spots floated before her eyes. She looked up and saw that Kavya’s face was a tight mask of contempt, her lips twisted into a thin line. “And it’s all your fault for corrupting her.”
Safia tries to pull the sheets over her head and wonders why she tortures herself with this memory as she falls asleep every single day. She wonders if she even has a choice. She supposes she should make another appointment with her therapist, but she can’t bear the thought of another conversation that ends in dry heaving and an aching chest. There are no tears left to be shed.
She calls her father, then her sister, then her mother. They’re all sympathetic, supportive, concerned for Amulya. None of them has tried to convince her to move on or said insensitive things about youth and plenty of fish in the sea, and for that, she’s grateful.
Her mother offers to fly down to New Luru from Chennai. Safia demurs, says she’ll be fine. Secretly, she just doesn’t want to clean the apartment and have to host anyone, even a concerned parent.
“Maybe next month?” she says. “I’m so busy at work.”
“Why don’t you come here?” her mother asks. “A change of scene will help.”
“Next month,” Safia lies, then hangs up.
She pulls herself off the couch, and shuffles over to her work desk—long unused for its intended purpose, now the final resting place of anything she’s picked up in the last three months. She roots around in the top drawer and finds a Dreamdust pill.
