Writing Prompts

Its fucken 2:30 AM again, and fucken Miriam Seddler (BioID: e18io42m2) is blasting her damn support center again. She insists something is unplugged out here because she can't see her camera access to the beach restoration. Three times a week I deal with this. Does anybody chime in just to thank me? No, they're much too busy with their sleepless role plays of life. Some of us are still made of meat here, well, one of us.

I don't get much calls from inside anymore, besides Miriam. I used to have a weekly chat with my mom. She'd tell me how the skybox shimmered, and I'd tell her how the sky is recovering. Now, its down to about once every six months. Which wouldn't be so bad in itself if I had someone, anyone to talk to. But all I get is more silence. I smack my pinky toe on a chair? Silence answeres. Drop my cup of coffee and narrowly avoid the keyboard of the terminal? Silence chuckles at my gaffe. All I hear is silence.

I have a brother and a sister, or had? When we were little we used to talk about what we would do if the ocean wasn't too acidic to swim. I always wanted to be a surfer, to ride each wave and think of nothing but where I'd skim to next. Now that I can I don't. Its funny the things you don't miss when you have nobody to share them with. Like the sky, for example. In my youth I would have given so much for a clear blue sky. Now that it is hanging above my head daily I hardly look at it.

Want to know what the worst part of it all? I volunteered for this. "Its just ten years. I'll be alright," I assured myself. Now, on the anniversary of my second decade as the last human on Earth, I can't help to think that something more was lost in the Digital Transition. Not just our bodies, but maybe ourselves too. Maybe we needed a death on the horizon just to keep ourselves sane, or maybe we never truly cared anyway.

It's been 5 years since the Ascension; a global transfer of all human consciousness to the Network. Most people saw it as the next step in human evolution, a breaking free from the confines of a poisoned Earth. Some feared it as akin to death; regardless, one by one, they all followed their friends and family into the Network. I don't really know how I was chosen to stay behind; maybe I came in drunk to work one too many times. Maybe it was just random chance. Before I knew it, the rest of the Network technicians were gone, my manager was gone, the whole company was gone, and it was just me.

I used to go home each night and make the trek back to work each morning. After a while, the trips home in the evening stopped. What's one radiation-shielded box compared to another? If everyone else is gone, I might as well make my home here.

This morning started like any other. Fortunately I still had a decent cache of whiskey from my last trip outside. That makes breakfast easy. The best part about being alone in this word: all the liquor stores are free. That painting on the wall to my right, that's Omar. I don't know what he's called, but he's grey with a big fluffy tail. The holo I painted him from was at least 50 years old, back before the animals all died. We have our morning conversation, but he doesn't have much to say; he must still be waking up. I think his ancestors were probably friendly.

I'm starting to get a decent buzz as I scan my ID card and log in. I'm not supposed to watch the Residents, but I do anyway. There's a large gathering on a beach; I can hear laughing through the speakers on my desk. It's beautiful. The view outside my window contrasts starkly with the screen; outside, it's all gray. There are hints of brown from long-dead trees, but it's mostly gray. At least it matches with the walls.

I bet Omar would have liked the beach, but he's trapped here, just like me. Sometimes I wonder how the Residents would like my world, if even for a few minutes. I could change the simulation, and sometimes a pretend to, but I always stop. I'm not supposed to change the simulation. The Residents made my world, though, just like my company made theirs; they used it up until there was nothing left, and ran away to their Network. Nobody tried to fix it. Nobody tried to stop it; they just left. Why do they deserve to live in paradise while Omar and I suffer?

My screen shows a sea of green blocks, each a node on the Network, full of Residents living out their days, unaware and uncaring about the world they left behind. Oh, looks like I finished my breakfast; the room is starting to spin anyway; I can wait for lunch. I wonder what would happen if I deleted a node. I wouldn't actually do it, but wouldn't they kind of deserve it? I type the delete command into my console; I can't believe I actually have access to do this. What if I deleted all the nodes? Wouldn't that be poetic justice?

Like a dozen times before, I sit with the “delete” command on my console. Maybe I should press Enter this time. Is that murder? Is it justice? Is anyone even alive? Screw it; I'm doing it. As I look over at the monitor, I see the little green blocks each turning red. I say a final goodbye to Omar, shut off the lights, and close the door. I can hear the cooling fans winding down as I walk toward the blast doors that lead to the barren landscape outside. They say death comes in 24 hours without a radiation suit. That's fine with me.

Fuck what was the log in password

Uh oh I've pissed on the server rack

(behind the scenes of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”)

Whoops, I told them not to put the dang power button right there. At least they could have covered it with glass or something. Why does it even have a power button.

Oh well.

I sat at my desk, watching the virtual world tick over, and listening to the quiet hum of the server farm cleaning machinery. I used to watch via my terminal headset, but these days the virtual experience had started diverging pretty wildly from reality, as direct-information modes of experience slowly took over from the old physical sense representation modes. Watching a 3D rendering these days was becoming either boring or disturbing, or both. And depressing.

I had never got to jack in. Doctors said I had a genetic abnormality that prevented the link tech from binding with my neurons. One in a hundred million type thing.

It didn't bother me too much at first. The virtual world looked fun, but the real world still had plenty to offer, especially to someone in their early 20s. I loved music, going out to gigs, and tending my plants, and I had a decent job in tech that kept me occupied. I caught recordings of the best parts on the web anyway, not that much different to the real-world. In fact by the end of the first decade recordings of the virtual world were consistently higher fidelity than anything recorded in reality. That was pretty great when big international music acts started broadcasting from the virtual world direct, and you could jump in and experience the whole thing in high-def, but without the sweaty crowd.

I did get a bit bummed when that started becoming the norm though. When even tiny local bands started using the virtual world for most gigs, I realised that I actually missed the jostle of a good sweaty crowd, something the headset could not provide. There were of course a few refusenik punk bands who stayed real-world for another decade or so. But even they gradually died out as crowds dwindled. Even the band members started disappearing like everyone else, some caving to the pull of the virtual, others succumbing to old-age, or just bowing out.

I love live music, so that's what I remember most about those times, but it happened more or less the same in other parts of society too. The tech industry was the first to embrace it fully, arts and entertainment followed quickly, service industries last. But when full-upload tech was finally perfected a few couple of decades ago, the meatpocalypse was fairly rapid. Within a year there were over a million people who had discarded their bodies in favour of a full-virtual life. Within a 5 years nearly half the global population was in. Within the decade only stragglers remained, and as real-world industries collapsed, they joined too.

Now I was the last person left alive. My tech job had gradually evolved over the decades from operating system development to system administration. Programming had gradually become faster and more reliable inside the virtual world, and most related physical tasks had been automated. So mostly I just sat here, bored out of my mind, checking server-farm system status indicators. Every now and then I would help the machines replace some physical componentry that they couldn't deal with automatically. It was a pretty thankless and lonely job, nearly no-one remembered I was even out here, and the few who did rarely bothered to check in on me unless they needed something.

In my down-time I played my guitar, or tended the garden I'd started years ago in a nearby vacant lot. This morning was no different from any of the others for the last decade. I came in to the control room, checked the vitals on the wall of diagnostic screens, then sat back with a tea and my guitar, with the rows of server racks humming away peacefully below me. Eventually I got bored and dozed off.

I woke up to the ping of a notification. A system update from CloudSight, a virtual world security corp, simultaneously broadcast to all machines on the network. That was weird, usually they ran staged deployments, to allow network redundancy to handle any roll-out problems. But it was a non-interactive update, so there wasn't much I could do about that. It was kind of amusing to watch all the little update progress bars racing each other across the screen.

Suddenly one of the monitors with a more advanced progress bar flicked black, and then back on. Blue Screen Of Death. Damn. Before I could read the error, other monitors flicker black then blue in a patch-work cascade across the wall. All of them BSODs, all with the same error:

Stop code: PAGE FAULT IN NONPAGED AREA Failure in CSAgent.sys

Holy shit. That wasn't a system file corruption, or it wouldn't have happened on all the machines. So someone had screwed up, something broken had got through testing. And it looked like it had affected everything - not just the virtual world servers, but the maintenance infrastructure too.

It had been a while since I was on the tools, but I thought I probably still knew enough about the system internals of these machines to be able to fix one. If I had direct access, AND I still had access to the documentation, which was all stored in the virtual world... And then even if I had a fix, I had no way to deploy it broad scale, since all the DevOps infrastructure was down as well. So, manually fixing and rebooting servers until I could get enough of the virtual world back up for me to find some people to help.

That did not sound fun. I stared at the wall of blue for a minute or two, contemplating the scale of the task. Then I slowly pushed myself up out of my chair, and walked to the window to look down at the server racks. Four and a half million servers, all arrayed below me, all blinking red error lights in unison. All demanding my help.

"You know what?" I said to myself, "Fuck this."

I grabbed my coat off the back of the chair, and then I grabbed my guitar, and I headed for the door.

I flipped off the light switch on the way out.

A little something in honour of the yesterday's tech fun.

This is only loosely proof read, and could probably do with a bit of editing, but feedback is welcome :)