Zeroworld, p.1
Zeroworld, page 1
Zeroworld
Pete Fellows
Copyright © 2023 Pete Fellows
All rights reserved.
For Michele, Harper and Riley.
Contents
Running from Fire
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Epilogue
About the Author
Running from Fire
So, what does a girl do when faced with something fucking big, scaly, and kinda green? She runs is what she does, and so I did.
The thing about accountants is that they seriously lack imagination. When you literally could be anything you want to be (there are a few caveats, I’ll explain later), why would you be an accountant? Yes, you might say, ‘Who am I to judge?’ given the countless years I’ve spent as a barista, but I’ve done the whole career thing and it got me in here, so I’ve spent some time coasting (and roasting). Okay, okay, the amount of time I’ve spent coasting is an extraordinary amount of time to coast. I had, up until recently, forgotten how not to coast, but then, if I hadn’t been a barista then it might not have led to all of this, now would it?
Anyway, back to accountants. My mother was one. I don’t dislike them. It just doesn’t make sense to be one in here. Being an accountant is too much work and responsibility when there are easier ways to make a sufficient amount of money. It’s not like making no money, or even living rough, has anything like major consequences. We can’t die, or at least I didn’t think so. Despite my general ambivalence, I did have a strong dislike for this accountant. He was initially a bit smug which maybe I could have handled but then he was big and scaly and that was definitely a turnoff. And so it was that I was running through New York in sort-of 1999 being chased by a completely generic dragon. You know the kind. Imagine the cliché of a dragon that would be slain by knights, and you get the picture. Like I said, no fucking imagination.
But the fire was hot. And kept coming out of his mouth. I’d just exited out of a door on the top of the building. That had been where our ‘meeting’ had taken place and I’d been chased from the offices below. Against my better judgement I’d left my companion behind. And as quick as you could say frying pan to fire, I was facing literal fire. I’d no idea what had happened to her, but this was not the time to worry about that. I’d been very surprised to see the accountant on top of the roof, given that I’d been fleeing his goons down below after I’d shot him at point blank range with a considerable amount of firepower, but just as I was about to ask how the fuck he’d gotten here so quickly, my priorities changed when he’d changed.
It is a remarkably quick process, changing into a dragon, but it still gave me a few seconds to get away when I realised that he was changing into something. I had had a little recent experience of metamorphosis but nothing quite on this scale or blandness. Oh, you don’t think dragons are bland, eh? Well good for you! Wait until you’ve seen things turn blue on a massive scale. Blue will rock your world. Or make it bluer at least. The neighbouring building was very close to where I was, but I decided to take a running jump just in case, and landed very gracefully on to the next rooftop (if I was graded for jumping, this would be some of my best work). But that only gave me a momentary respite, so I tried jumping from one building to the next, scaling roof tops like I’d been a parkour expert all my life. The fear of being eaten by an accountant-dragon is a great teacher but my recent rigorous training regime was likely essential too. I made a jump that seemed impossible, if I’d had time to think about it, and then dived into a building via a door on its roof.
I sprinted down the stairs and out on to the street amongst the other fleeing pedestrians. Fortunately for them, this dragon was after me, and fortunately for me, it couldn’t find me amongst them. Mass murder obviously not being on its agenda, it flew off. There was no sign of any of my other adversaries, so I pulled my hood up and blended into the crowd before disappearing into a side alley. All things considered; the meeting had gone better than expected. At least fifty percent of us were not dead or captured, and assuming both of us were still breathing, then this maybe could be scored as a minor win in so much that we knew we were on right track. They knew we were on the right track too though and had been prepared for us which was less of a fun thought. And we still weren’t particularly sure who ‘they’ were; we knew a bit more, but not enough. And then there was his big revelation. That I didn’t want to think about. I’m not sure I could think about it. How the fuck did I process that?
I’m getting ahead of myself. You see a little while ago the rules changed, and I had been investigating why. Up until everything got fucked up, accountants were numbers people and less fire-breathery. We lived in, yes, a possibly weird, slightly artificial world. But only slightly artificial. Recent events were a whole new level of strange. I hadn’t believed that our world had levels but maybe my assumptions had been wrong? That’s a stupid question. Of course my assumptions had been wrong. Really wrong. It’s amazing I had got anything right given the wrongness of my assumptions. Thankfully I wasn’t the only one, which makes me feel a bit less of an idiot. I can still be slightly smug about the fact that I noticed before almost everyone else. But then smugness might lead to being a dragon apparently, and I’m not sure that I want that. Although if I did, I’d go for purple, definitely not green, and certainly not blue. If you could change into a dragon, why would you go with the obvious colour? Polka dots. A purple dragon with bright pink polka dots. And a jaunty hat. Now we’re talking.
Chapter 1
I’ve been in here for as long as I can remember. I do recall my time before, but those memories drift in and out with the breeze, sometimes vivid, often ephemeral, particularly those before my final years. From my perspective, it has been one thousand years at least since I arrived. It seemed like people outside had forgotten about us in here a long time ago. Many aspects of my character are the same as they have always been. For example, I moved to the USA from the UK, and I still switch between English and American slang and English and American spelling (I’ll definitely be mixing it up writing this).
A great deal has happened, much of which seems very important, no is very important. And it’s not just important to me or my fellow citizens, it could be more far reaching than that. I’ve decided to record it all, as best as I can, generic dragons included. This will be my message in a bottle (I’m imagining a sizeable bottle). When it’s done, I need to find a sea to throw it in, hopefully one with a good track record of message delivery. So, assuming that has all worked and you are reading this now, please do something with my long ass message. Maybe publish it? If you do, I want my cut. At least tell someone who is in a position to tell lots of others.
What is, now, an incredibly long time ago, I was old. I hated it. I was even less of a fan of dying so I had spent a shit load of money looking for options. Dying was inevitable, everyone dies. I didn’t accept it. I still don’t. I’d fantasied about the supernatural options, read vampire fiction, thought about being turned into a werewolf but then who would want to make a 60 something year old a vampire? Who on earth would I have been able to bite? I couldn’t have gone around nightclubs in a short skirt and stilettos finding men to munch on. Obviously, I realised vampirism was not my route to success because of the distinct lack of them in anything but fiction, but I hoped I could find a real-world alternative.
This seemed implausible in my 30s when this obsession with not dying had begun but I found a solution and had the funds to pay for it just in time, in 2045. I’d spent half of my adult life looking for alternatives to death. In the early years it was, well, nuts. The vampire idea was by some distance not the craziest idea I’d at some point considered. I’d found websites talking about a ‘cure for death’, and I’d looked at anything I could from cryogenics to 3D printing of new organs. The organ printing (at least of the complex organs) was in its infancy towards the end of my real life and whilst it gave options for prolonging life and would ultimately massively help with the shortages of donated organs, it was nowhere near a cure. Cryogenics seemed without much in the way of evidence and relied far too much on other people finding a cure, while you were sleeping, so to speak. It made more sense to me if you were frozen, alive, somehow stopped in time, and t
It began to appear though that the best bet may be some sort of consciousness back-up. Me, downloaded onto a computer. It wasn’t a perfect solution. There are issues of identity that I don’t like to think about. It was also dizzyingly complex and seemingly impossible, but remarkably, by 2046 I was starting life as a 26-year-old in a completely new environment that aped the world in 1999. Why that was picked, I don’t know, maybe a pop culture reference by the I.T. guys, or the horseshit they gave us as about it being the latest time period they could easily emulate, but whatever, it fit my purposes. I was one of the first and for a little while that gave me status. But, for the next few years there were more and more people coming in each year. I have no idea how many, but it’s enough to fill a city, New York City. The money I had was dwarfed every year by the new entrants which slowly became a problem. Being one of the first in soon meant I had no real power in any social circles as entire groups of socially connected people arrived together. Then we reached critical mass, apparently, and people stopped arriving. But for a very, very, long time, life had a sense of normality despite its computer-generated foundations, and no-one could be a dragon, at least not literally.
The residents here never fully decided on what to call the place. It was built by a company called ZeroFlex who originally designed gym equipment to use with virtual reality headsets but increasingly had invested in virtual reality systems themselves. By the way, I’m assuming if you’re reading this, and I have somehow got my message out, you know quite a bit of this backstory but I’m being thorough. I didn’t used to be thorough. Well, that’s not true, I was thorough in real life but then I’ve spent centuries not being. But now I am being again. You’re welcome. Back to ZeroFlex. They had a breakthrough, or at least they benefitted from one. As it was fully funded ZeroFlex research, a specific person or persons behind the idea never came forward (which did seem a shame and rather selfish on ZeroFlex’s part). The breakthrough was significant. Somehow, and even now it still seems impossible, they had figured out a way to copy human consciousness – map the brain and replicate that person in a virtual environment. Full AI was still not possible, it was close, but you could always tell, or least someone with a Turing test could, but consciousness mapping changed everything. Why do you need AI when you can create copies of humans who can perform the same task? Initially the applications of it were limited because of the processing power required but over time people could download celebrities and have conversations with them and there were some hackers of course who found seedier applications. The problem was that essentially these consciousnesses were at least in most ways, apart from having a physical body, actually people. After a few years, much of society felt very uncomfortable with the ethical issues. There was a great deal of debate and politicking but ultimately it was decided to delete all versions of these consciousnesses, at least as much as possible. This raised even more ethical concerns and the debate raged for some time. These people were not entirely extinguished as with any previously legal thing that becomes illegal. There were still consciousness slavers selling on the dark web.
Eventually, as the technology advanced, particularly in respect to creating 100% authentic real-world environments, ZeroFlex suggested that what we had, in effect, was a solution to death. It was a genius piece of marketing and timely as they had been hanging on by the thinnest of threads. The fallout from the celebrity construct issue had hit the company finances to an existential level. Anyone who could afford it could now download their consciousness, but because of the issue of replication, you were only allowed one copy, securely stored and it would only be activated in the event of your death. You were allowed to update it periodically, so that new memories could be assimilated, but that was about it. And so that’s where here is, the first home for dead people signed up to ZeroFlex’s programme. A place for immortals but without the sharp teeth and blood fetishism. I don’t know what happened to people who backed up their consciousness but had nowhere to put it when they died. Are there other worlds where they live? Or are they just sitting on someone’s hard drive, hoping for a future, if they are conscious at all? God, that’s a scary thought, I hope they aren’t.
A few months ago, I was working one of my three jobs, this particular one being in a coffee shop - yes, we’ve already established I was happy in my glass house throwing stones at accountants for their career choices. Working three jobs would have been so much easier when we didn’t have to sleep, but they said that the unreality of this was messing with our minds or something. There was an incident, then a vote. I guess with infinite time, nobody cared sacrificing some of it for sleep, particularly because back then everyone was wealthy, in the first few years, before any real economy existed. Unfortunately, for a society to work, you need people who are winning, and people who are winning less to serve the winners. In my case, I was winning less. I wasn’t losing, I just wasn’t winning as well as some of the others. I guess we could have been some sort of communist type society where everyone contributes an equal share or something, but aside from the sinister 1984 implications of this, nearly everyone who was in here was rich enough to be, so we almost all are capitalists.
I think I’m going to call here, Zeroworld, for want of something to call it (after ZeroFlex – do you like what I did there?). No one ever called it Zeroworld though, I just made it up right now, writing this. If anyone at any point refers to it as Zeroworld in my account, I’m short-handing, sorry, it’s super hard to remember everything precisely but you’re getting the gist, better than the gist. Look, it’s true okay, just with maybe slightly different words.
The coffee shop was one of the earliest built in Zeroworld and so had the incredibly imaginative name, The Coffee Shop. It was a popular place though, near a variety of office buildings, and we had very regular footfall. In terms of design, think of any clichéd coffee shop you can, and it was the most clichéd version of that. We rocked a kind of cream theme so uninspired that most people wouldn’t have been able to tell you what colour the place was five minutes after leaving. I felt like I had to be surly as a barista to be in character with the environment (perhaps the only other appropriate personality type being overly and earnestly cheerful, but who could be fucked with that?). I did more or less enjoy it though; I appreciated the reactivity of it. I didn’t have to think to make my money, I didn’t have to attend business meetings, or try to sell people stuff they didn’t want. If they came here, they mostly wanted coffee and didn’t need me to persuade them. After living (I’m still not sure whether to describe what we do in here as living but let’s go with it) for as long I have, I was over doing stuff to make money, I just wanted to not think about it anymore and get through the day. You might say I was in a rut and wasting my life, but it wasn’t like there were any time pressures anymore. Having cheated death, I was wallowing in a new life. So far, I had spent centuries figuring out what to do. I hadn’t discovered the solution to death I’d just been around to benefit from it, but I’d spent a great deal of energy and money so I could be in the right place at the right time. Once I’d achieved that, the lack of death had made my life less meaningful in a way. I definitely didn’t want to give it up. Absolutely not. I was grateful for it, but I just wasn’t sure what to do with it. I was like a little girl who desperately wanted a puppy, then once I got one realised that I did like the puppy, but it wasn’t as fun as I’d expected and then there was the walking and the dog shit. No one could have my puppy, but it didn’t live up to my expectations either.
Another typical day of wallowing in my aggressively average place of work was, however, interrupted. One thing you typically don’t expect to happen working in a generic coffee shop is for all of the coffee, and other beverages, to turn into wine. It was instantaneous – and was the culmination of lots of reports of incidents that had proceeded this in the last few months. I hadn’t been sure whether to believe them; there had been rumours of wasps (which don’t exist in here), people getting the flu or a head cold, sightings of ghosts, and even an alligator ambling through Central Park. Turning everything into wine was bold and big. Bolder and bigger than the other incidents, most of which could be explained away. Who could be behind these incidents though? Was it from outside Zeroworld? We hadn’t heard from anyone in, was it 700 or 800 years? It must be someone in the system, I thought. But that was supposed to be impossible. I don’t absolutely understand the I.T. of it exactly but if everything around you is the world you’re in, then you cannot impact something behind that world because you don’t have access to it. There were no hidden doors from within the system because everyone is the system, only actual people who weren’t part of it could change it. That was one of the fail safes. And it worked for a bloody long time so the guys that designed this obviously got that right. There were existential issues that everyone kind of put out of their mind, for example, if we have had no contact with the outside in centuries, how the fuck do we still have power? Why do we still exist at all? Is there an outside actor? And of course, this led to some new and crazy religious stuff evolving – people need to believe in some sort of permanence, I guess.
