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A game of Dark and Fear. by Octavian George Mirea and Bianca David.
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A game of Dark and Fear by Octavian George Mirea and Bianca David
It has been 18 years since the first human consciousness was uploaded to the Internet and since humanity reached immortality without the use of the physical body. Humanity felt saved and happiness reached a new high point as peace, love, action was programmed, saved and relived as often as one desired. Traveling online became the norm; people could travel from computer to computer and reconnect with their still living relatives or meet with other consciousnesses in “modern” chat-rooms, and expectations were reduced to how much more technology would evolve. In all fairness, the Internet became a living graveyard of those whose physical body could not sustain itself anymore. It seemed perfect, only that… this too was human made, and thus flawed. As this new world evolved, so did the capabilities of those in it…and pretty soon, being dead for good instead of having one’s consciousness uploaded started to look like the far better alternative.
Jimmy TwoBones, or Jimmy 2.0 as he would later come to be known in the virtual life, became the first and only serial killer in this new haven for humanity, the only one to kill in what was considered to be the place for immortals. His real life started out plainly enough, having been raised in Arkansas on a farm, by the bored housewife, Alice, with no prospects for herself or her son, and by his father, Bill, who was mostly on the road, as one of the last long-distance truck drivers in America. Bill was a drunk and a womanizer; Alice was older than her husband, forty-one at the time Jimmy was born, and in poor health. Jimmy, the baby of the family, was his mother’s crutch in the fights against his father and he constantly sided with her against him.
Being the youngest of six children, he came to prefer dolls to boys’ toys as he had no alternative in recreation due to the violent and mean nature of his older brothers. More worrying at the time was a fondness for frightening people as he enjoyed playing games that involved tying up the dolls and scaring his neighbors by tapping on their windows at night. After school, he became an apprentice to a computer programmer. It is here where he developed his abilities and violent nature in the way that it best suited him for the virtual, immortal life. At first, he never fitted in with the highly technological world around him and he avoided at all costs interactions online and took to his own when it came to interact with his computer programmer mentor.
He started out slowly but surely to learn the language of computers and what the limitations were, discovering in the end that there were practically none, thus unleashing his violent, true nature. His first murder was a real, physical bodied one. He killed his father, beating him to death with the laptop he used for work, after constant irony and sarcasm from his drunken father one night, leaving his mother torn between gratitude for having released her from abuse and amputation of all motherly instincts. He left home, or better put, he was kicked out by his brothers, and went on to live in hiding with his mentor, gaining further knowledge about the virtual reality humanity had just discovered.
In the beginning of this second phase of his apprenticeship, he learned to create virtual hideaways for the consciousnesses who desired that, (which was most likely caused by the guilt of killing his father) eventually landing him a job with Forever Alive, the company which held the monopoly for transfers between the physical and virtual world and thus escaped any suspicion that might have lingered around him in regards to the death of his father. It is here where he spent his entire adulthood, in silence and ever present calm… gaining knowledge like no other about the world created by humanity for the afterlife. Toward the end of his career, he even came to be the Head of Security at Forever Alive. He silenced his inner killer voice and never drew any attention to himself, by being the absolute best at what he did. Alas, he did place aids throughout the virtual world for himself, in preparation for the virtual life he had envisaged, a life that would come to shatter the entire virtual life paradigm.
Aids mostly in the form of a new set of weapons… as no one imagined possible killing someone after he or she had their consciousness uploaded. Various glitches or viruses, occasional errors where a thing of the past, mainly due to his work at Forever Alive in keeping people safe and forever present virtually. The system was so well thought out, without any back-ups as there was no need for any, but mostly because a person’s consciousness, in order to remain unique and not have issues with duplication or any other ethical dilemmas, was just one small program, infused with the memories, feelings and overall personality of the person who was about to die and who opted to have his/her waking life transferred, leaving the fleshy body to the worms for good.
From what was evident through conversations with those now forever trapped virtually, life as a computer program was not that hard. . People still congregated, still knew about their outside, previous world; they could see it through cameras (webcams, street surveillance cameras etc), experience the latest creations in art, and some were even training to be the very distant future’s “all knowing elders”, as they would come to gain knowledge spanning hundreds and hundreds of years. Every day normal life became more and more bereaved of meaningful social contact, as people knew they had time for that once they die and get transferred. Environmental issues started to wane out, and people just ended up working their entire life just to be able to afford the costs of the transfer and ensure themselves everlasting life. This way of life was no life for Jimmy TwoBones.
He thought to himself that people need to be awaken from this illusion, but he also wanted for people to do that by themselves, because they want to. So, from this desire of how the world should function, the game which started making Jimmy 2.0 the most prolific serial killer of all times was born. He designed a simple interactive game for the immortal, virtual world, between just two opponents, which would put to test their notions of general knowledge regarding the whole issue of transfer of consciousness. The only curious thing was that after “people” played it a couple of times, they would return to play it again, and again, becoming hooked on it so much so that it resembled a trance like, gambling scenario, but with no real stake.
What Jimmy had created in fact, was a way in which one consciousness could deliberately harm itself, causing small irreparable damage to their virtual integrity without raising too much fuss about what it could actually do to those trapped in immortality. But no matter how hard he tried to destabilize that world, he couldn’t; it’s not like he could just hit delete on someone. A person’s life was instilled in cyberspace in a way that it allowed someone to survive just by interacting as much as one could; by leaving traces of its whereabouts meant that someone is safe and that they are still on the grid.
This is the moment in time when Jimmy found out his true calling, succumbing to his inner voice calling for death and gore. He had made plans for himself: that when the moment of his death comes, he would be uploaded and join the rest of humanity in virtual land, where he could begin his systematic cleansing left and right, without any interference from the outside world. He had designed a way in which to kill people, reducing them to just a pile of text on a white background without any hope of escape. Their death would actually mean that someone would fall somewhere between the lines of code written for the existence of that virtual world, trapping “people” indefinitely, without possibility of communication or hope of being discovered, simply remaining alone for all eternity, awake, not able to signal anyone or do anything at all. Granted, it was the most gruesome form of murder that he could think of in the given circumstances, but it sufficed for the time being.
As a touch of authenticity, Jimmy sometimes wrote elaborate lines of code so as to give its victims a blood like experience, anguish and as much pain as he could instill. But as he soon discovered, satisfaction for something done in a different world could not be felt in another one. He knew that he had to transfer himself and start his quest in a more personal note. He was 75 years old when he decided that his time in front of the screen should come to a halt and that he had planned long enough for his voyage behind it. He had assured for himself special tools of the trade, entertainment, access to almost all Forever Alive servers and even made out a few friends who were more than happy to cause a ruckus and stir things up, once they knew they had someone who could do it.
When the time eventually came and his body could no longer cope, Jimmy finally and happily transitioned from TwoBones to 2.0, donating his body for whatever organ transplants it could offer and all of his worldly possessions to charity, as he had no living relatives. As soon as he entered this virtual netherworld, he unleashed his dormant side and soon enough, people…or better yet, people’s consciousnesses started to simply disappear, making it look like a computer error in the fleshy world.
Before his successors at Forever Alive realized what was going on, his momentum gain was so strong that an all out revolution took place virtually, with most of the inhabitants calling for help any way they could: random e-mails for help, story telling their ordeal, how they felt slowly fading away between the cracks of the program. But of no use. No one could truly help them in there, they were fish in a barrel for Jimmy and his shotgun kept getting bigger and bigger. At one point he even took a break, as he got somewhat bored with all the 100110101001010-type killing and how he couldn’t get caught, even if by a certain moment after he started his “work”, everyone knew who was responsible.
His own safety tricks instilled while still alive kept him roaming the netherworld unhindered, while people rushed to find a way to stop him, without shutting down the entire network of the afterlife. The top brass at Forever Alive could not match his code writing skills and mostly stood in awe at what was happening, seeing a decline in people wanting to live forever on a daily basis. The company was now headed towards bankruptcy, people no longer wanted to live forever in those conditions, the ones still alive scurried in hiding to their loved one’s computers, hiding in hidden folders and mimicking video or audio files, in a desperate attempt to deviate attention from themselves.
All in all, it took Jimmy roughly 3 months to kill close to 90% of the people “living” in the virtual world, with his mind set out on torturing the remaining ones. He made them e-mail feedback while they were attacked by him, causing frustration and anger in the world above. But near the end of his masterpiece killing spree, he decided to stop, giving out the following manifesto: “If more come, more die. I have pondered ending my existence forever, but seeing how attached you have become in sending people to this place, I have decided to stick around indefinitely. It you decide to create another such world, others like me will arise. Think twice and make the right choice. Oh, and by the way…what’s my total?!”
Jimmy 2.0 eventually stuck around as a grim gate keeper for whoever dared to cross the threshold into immortality, hogging that treat all to himself. Even the “killings” he performed were not technically murders, as a murder still constituted to have a dead body, and not a broken or missing string of digits on a computer screen. He eventually reached a level of fame no other human ever had the pleasure of experiencing…and several hundreds of years later, his sadist tendencies were still quenched by on/off killings of whomever he could find.
