Utopia Five, page 1
part #1 of Panopticon Series
UTOPIA FIVE
AE Currie
Utopia Five Copyright © 2019 by Anne Berger (nee Currie). All Rights Reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Cover designed by Anne Currie
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Anne Currie
@anne_e_currie
Visit my website at www.annecurrie.com
First Printing: Apr 2019
ISBN- 9781093609769
To the team: Mum, Dad, Kath and the Jons
“Hello Lee. I’m you”
“The building circular—A cage, glazed—The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference—The officers in the centre. By blinds and other contrivances, the inspectors concealed […] from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence—The whole circuit reviewable with little, or if necessary without any, change of place. One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell.”
Jeremy Bentham
Proposal for a New and Less Expensive mode of Employing and Reforming Convicts (London, 1798)
CONTENTS
Prologue
Rain
Panopticon
Explosions
Reality
Company
Denizens
Happiness
Corner
Meltdown
God
Dystopia
Host
Ergodicity
Refugees
A Lift
Zoom
Time Travel
Judgement
Nemo
Dragons
New Order
Help
Enemy
Execution
Crime
Free Will
Arrival
Displaced
Angelsea
Guardians
Control
Hot Summer
Change
Two Worlds
Utopia Five
Escape
The Castle
Challenge
Lose
Trump Suit
Cheating
Epilogue
Timeline
Prologue
Control 1963
I’ll never forget where I was the day President Kennedy was shot. I was standing on a grassy knoll in downtown Dallas with the sun blazing down and a piece of lead piping in my hand
“You know that’s against the rules,” said my brother Nemo who was standing beside me. “No changes before 2025. We don’t have the data. Anyway, this is a cut scene. You can thump the shooter as hard as you like, it won’t make a difference.”
I grinned, “I know. Maybe I just wanted this for my autobiography.”
“A bit hackneyed?” said Nemo.
Analog 2053
My name is Lee Sands, and I was born on the 8th of January 2025. The day the Panopticon was turned on.
Rain
Utopia Five 2053
In grey freezing drizzle, I materialized in front of Big Ben. Even in a Utopia it rained occasionally, but this world seemed relentlessly wet. Did it have a sky? Or had Nemo not bothered?
I pelted inside the nearest pub, shivering, annoyed, and deciding I was an idiot for not appearing indoors in the first place. Cold water trickled down the inside of my collar and I grimaced. Why on earth did my suit emulate a damp neck? You could clearly take virtual reality too far. My hulking avatar was dressed in a noir-style trench coat, which was artfully unbuttoned. As a result, it wasn’t a great deal of use. I caught a glimpse of myself in one of the interior’s dark mirrors. I looked soggy.
This would be my ninth trip to this sim, and I hadn’t spotted a single thing that was good about it yet, never mind utopian. I was starting to question why I’d let Nemo pivot this world. How was this murky version of the planet something to aspire to? Whatever the clever reason, that kind of subtlety was not part of our brand. To be honest, it wasn’t usually part of Nemo’s either.
I walked up to the bar and ordered a drink. On the wall a TV was playing at low volume. The screen showed a pink chat show host interviewing a mahogany-tanned celebrity. It was a distracting contrast to my otherwise colourless surroundings. I guessed they’d be discussing entertainment gossip. Utopia Five appeared to have an endless desire for it. I’d already worked out this was a standard capitalist society. No free beer but plenty of free speech. Of a sort.
The barman was a greasy-looking guy who was holding a grimy cloth and appeared to be miserable about both those facts. For a Utopia, this world had plenty of shit jobs. Undeterred by his gloomy demeanour, my avatar gave him a (literally) patented winning smile. “Busy day?”
He merely grunted. “The name’s Eloi,” I continued cheerfully and put out my hand.
While he stared in slight bewilderment at my friendly gesture, I pondered his attractiveness. It was unusually low for one of our worlds. A sim denizen being less than Brad Pitt in the looks department told me quite a lot about his real-life counterpart. As all VR programmers knew, in an emulation everyone had to be a lot better looking than they were in reality. We humans liked to kid ourselves. Everyone’s virtual versions were heavily airbrushed. Otherwise, they wouldn’t play.
Unfortunately, by Dystopia Two Nemo and I had also reluctantly realised our games needed some normal-looking denizens, or the world wasn’t convincing. We couldn’t add any extra characters so some of our emulated folks would have to forego their looks upgrade. It was sad but necessary.
We knew the human counterparts of those unairbrushed inhabitants would never visit, because who wanted to be in a world where everyone was great-looking apart from the local version of you? It would be demoralizing and probably embarrassing. You’d need a Teflon-coated ego or a personality disorder.
We ended up writing an algorithm to identify the real-worlders we were going to sacrifice to verisimilitude. They were usually poor, dull, and lacking in prospects. We wouldn’t miss them as players, and they were low value to our sponsors. Those selected denizens stayed looking exactly as they did in life.
If you come into one of our emulations and the sim version of you looks like the real you, I hate to break it to you, you’re either exceptionally attractive already or a loser. I leave that to you to decide. I had drawn my own conclusions about the man in front of me.
The bartender eventually shook my outstretched hand. That gained me his attention and a frisson of goodwill. I’d need it.
“Weather’s pretty awful. Must be affecting business?” I glanced at the almost empty bar. A lone family in baseball caps were huddled around mugs of hot product placement opportunity. I mentally winced. We’d never sell these slightly depressed locations to our usual sponsors. Unless a mutant was about to burst through the door and slaughter everyone with a machine gun? I looked around hopefully. The only action was an ad break on the TV.
The barman shrugged. “When isn’t it?”
He handed me my requested beer along with a handful of change. I placed my pint on a mat advertising umbrellas and pocketed the cash.
“The Government, eh?” I usually found bland comments to be useful for eliciting information from the locals without giving away I knew nothing at all about the world. Of course, Utopia Five might have been an ungoverned anarchy but I could usually spot those. No beer mats for a start.
The barman nodded in vigorous agreement with my content-free statement. “Yeah, bunch of crooks. All in it for themselves.”
I sighed. I’d noticed this world of Nemo’s seemed populated with opinionated but uninformed denizens. No wonder this character was wiping down tables. I wondered what his alter ego did in real life.
My avatar raised its cloudy beer and took a large, demoralised gulp. I’d learned surprisingly little in this so-called Utopia by wandering around questioning simulated inhabitants. Since my first visit, I’d realised the newspapers and TV stations were entirely filled with bland celebrity tittle-tattle. They weren’t going to tell me much either. I swirled my pint. I needed a starting point, and I was fast running out of my usual options.
♦ ♦ ♦
My job in Utopia Five was the same as any player’s. I had to figure out how Nemo had changed the past to create the world I was now in. In half our games it was me who altered time. For this sim, the world builder was my little brother. It was my role to test it out and decide if it was worth pouring marketing money into and releasing as the next blockbuster from Nautilus Games.
Was it ready for our army of loyal players? Or only fit to be dumped in the virtual trash bin? I knew what I was currently thinking.
My plan had been to play the world through, do some investigating, and discover the pivot Nemo had used to divert the course of history. Easy. Or so I’d thought. As my avatar, I could do anything in the game a real detective could. Oh, plus instantly transport myself in space and time and change my appearance. I could also gradually make myself invisible by turning down my opacity from one hundred percent to zero. You’d be surprised how handy all that was. Apart from the fading in and out. That was completely pointless. I just lik
I’d started as I usually did in a new world: by visiting landmarks. Nemo preferred something iconic to get blown up in a pivot. He believed there was nothing more poignant than the smoldering ruin of a famous building, and he didn’t think a metaphor could ever be too heavy-handed. I’d played all his games and was forced to agree. I’d also discovered a jagged Eiffel Tower, or a toppled Statue of Liberty was an excellent conversation starter. It made a great place to begin tracking down exactly where history had gone off the rails.
To my irritation, I’d found everything in this world to be frustratingly intact.
♦ ♦ ♦
My avatar frowned at the lacklustre bartender and looked around the dingy pub again. The silent family were staring at the TV screen and out of the window, through the rain, I could see the disappointingly whole Big Ben. I suddenly realised I didn’t want to play this damp and depressing game any longer. It was time to do something I normally avoided. I needed to take a long hard look at myself.
♦ ♦ ♦
One of the ways Nautilus VR was different from the real world was players didn’t have an all-seeing, all-knowing presence they could get advice from. Nemo and I deliberately hadn’t installed a deity in any of our sims. After all, God was a well-known spoilsport and would definitely have given the game away. To be honest, we also couldn’t afford the license fees. We already handed a fortune over to Omniscience Industries for Panopticon data and we didn’t have the money for anything else. The divine word wasn’t cheap.
Fortunately, for me, talking to the local copy of Lee Sands usually had the same effect and was considerably more affordable. No version of me would ever fail to provide a free opinion, at length, on the state of world affairs and how we got there. I knew how to push my own buttons. I also knew talking to my own denizen to get the lowdown on a sim world was kind of cheating. What the hell. Nemo didn’t need to find out.
Before I spilled all, however, I decided to try one final trick. My next destination would be the North London flat in 2043 where Nemo and I had lived back then. If everything was exactly as I remembered in ‘43 I’d jump forward to 2048, halfway between 2043 and now. If it was still identical, I’d jaunt to 2051. I could hop about like that until I’d worked out where history started to diverge. In my opinion, that wasn’t cheating, and it wouldn’t take long. I was entering my first jump into the player interface when my sixth sense kicked in. A faint tingling in my spine told me someone in the seemingly empty pub was watching me.
♦ ♦ ♦
If I accepted it for publishing, Utopia Five would be our 56th commercially available simulated world. It didn’t matter if it was a Utopia or a Dystopia; the Nautilus promise was the biggest change from the smallest pivot. As soon as you stepped into one of our sims it was always clear how that world differed from ours back in reality. Giant dinosaurs fighting in the streets; a takeover by a bloodsucking zombie elite; a talking dog for World President. ‘Go big or go home’ was the Nautilus credo and our legion of fans clearly agreed.
When Nemo or I were building a new sim, first we’d decide what we wanted. Let’s say a cure for age. Then we’d work out who we would’ve had to persuade, pay, or assassinate in our own world’s past to get it. That usually took a few months of research. We had a few tricks to help us out. Of course, we didn’t know what would’ve really happened if we’d changed the past. Our new world was just guaranteed to be 100% possible.
Our speculative fiction algorithm extrapolated out from the pivot. Once we’d changed things, we ran the recalculations, rippled the consequences through to the present time, and that was our sim. Sometimes it was a Utopia. Mostly it wasn’t. If it was cool enough, we released it. “Age is Cured!” was Dystopia Nineteen. It was one of our biggest hits. Everyone loves a horror.
I’d been struggling to build Utopia Five for a while. My past Utopian worlds had been modest successes: an ecology hit, a cool solar system exploration sim, and then I finally got superpowers working. I’d even had a surprise cult hit with “Utopia Four: Talk to the Animals!” That was a bit of an accidental find. The problem was, Utopias were hard to generate at all, never mind with a small change. Dystopias were easy. They also got a bit depressing after you’d done twenty in a row, even if they did sell well. I was struggling to work out what I wanted for my next Utopia when Nemo told me he’d had an idea. Six months later, he announced Utopia Five was ready to launch and I just needed to test it out. He’d even created me a new avatar: Eloi.
The trouble was, for a game to be successful the difference between it and our world had to be bleeding obvious. How a sim world differed from the real one wasn’t the puzzle. It was the hook. If we didn’t grab players inside 30 seconds, we’d lost them. They needed a spectacular or at least intriguing idea to suck them in. I’d been playing Utopia Five for nearly fifty hours and, apart from the bad weather, I hadn’t worked out how it was significantly different to analog reality yet. I couldn’t see what Nemo was getting at. Half a year of investment and this world wasn’t going to be a hit. What the hell was he thinking? Nevertheless, I could hardly let him win. I’d solve Utopia Five if it killed me.
♦ ♦ ♦
When I talked about my “sixth sense” it wasn’t a figure of speech. Nemo wouldn’t let me give my avatars any special powers. “In the game, every player is equal,” he used to say sanctimoniously and fairly frequently, and I never broke the rules. I merely coded up a lot of publicly available avatar features. Anyone could install them if they wanted.
In release 34.762.08 I added a brand new ability. It was on general release. Not even premium. ‘Ear Wiggle 0.1’ allowed any avatar to agitate their lobes on demand. Oh, and feel the presence of other players in their vicinity with zero opacity. Well, if people didn’t read the documentation all the way to the end that wasn’t my fault. I was apparently the only player who’d turned on the feature.
It wasn’t unusual for me to detect invisible avatars in my prox. I was well known. Lots of players followed me around hoping to pick up clues about pivots. That could have worked, which was why I’d snuck my sixth sense, masquerading as a frivolous customisation, into the games platform. I wanted to be able to avoid tipping anyone off about a change I was researching. With my faux-supernatural power enabled, I was used to getting notifications about hidden onlookers in the other worlds. In Utopia Five, however, I was supposed to be the only person with a login other than Nemo. Who was watching me?
Analog 2053
Disturbed by my mysterious observer, I flipped up my visor and exited the game. That left me standing in a dark neoprene-looking suit, staring at the inside of the small flat I had been about to visit in the fictional past of an alternative world. If that was confusing, I was more than used to it.
The real-world room around me was empty as usual and featureless save for a huge photo-array of world leaders in politics, business, science and the arts. I frowned. They were due for their annual refresh. Then I wrinkled my nose and sniffed. Something wasn’t right.
Now my mask was raised, I could clearly detect the room was full of what smelled strongly like gas. I glanced briefly at the door, 20 feet away, and leapt straight out of the open window next to me. My suit could handle a fifteen-foot fall. A close quarter’s explosion was outside the specs.
I dropped unexpectedly out of the sky onto the road in front of my house. As I thumped to the ground, it passed through my mind it would be ironic to escape being blown to smithereens in my own lounge only to get knocked over by a passing car. The odds, however, were good. Hardly anyone drove anymore. I landed with just a touch of servo-assist, started sprinting and looked around at the empty street. That was good. If an...
