The following is an excerpt from my first anthology of fiction, THE 27 CLUB, available now.
This was an unusual situation. A credible tip, followed up by suggestive surveillance. A small business premises consuming large amounts of energy and water without the corresponding network traffic to indicate a crypto mining operation.
The Watchdog had now been informally operating for 12 years, 5 years of those in formal operation as part of INTERPOL. An international success, you might say. Although, many suspect that the likes of China and North Korea have been up to all sorts behind closed borders and firewalls.
A full neural link had been accomplished and then publicized by the US government 6 years prior, following the incorporation of various private enterprises into the state apparatus. This allowed, theoretically, the NATO bloc to keep their side of the street clean. All private use of artificial time production through the neural link technology had been banned, de jure, across all ‘developed’ nations of the world. Practical exceptions had been made for partial linking without pain input for virtual reality applications. This made for huge leaps in meta-simulated experiences, the great underclass who had been irreversibly out of work as a result of the AI explosion now had something to do. There was only so long that governments could de facto continue to ban all explicitly human-replacing forms of AI technology. The final piece of the puzzle was the convincing simulated link into neural technology and living brain circuits, this would distract the majority of humanity through varied and realistic artificial experiences. The ability of technology to avail humanity of his work, which had waited in the wings for so long, was ready to replace human drudgery. This inevitability was now unshackled and released, allowed to take its rightful place in the next epoch of progress.
The majority of humanity was now living out well-crafted dreams beyond the wild fantasies of even the most successful influencer of the early 21st century. The new womb of pod life, which gave everything lacking from the outdoors and then some, was taking hold. A state-sponsored escape into an individual experience machine, willingly and happily taken up by the vast majority of the redundant population. At first, with a steady reluctance common to all major advancements and then all at once. Most rarely left their new simulated experiences, although some sentimentality lingered. Seeing close friends and biological relatives for birthdays and holidays ‘in real life’ still persisted. However, these occasions took on the feeling of formal obligation. This social tiredness was hinted at in the physical meatspace in the early part of the century, but now it was fully realized. Physical interaction took on the metaphysics of obligation, brief interludes until we are socially permitted to re-enter digital space. The human race has a habit of broadcasting its weakness of sentimentality through the guide rails of shame. The pod was winning.
The doomscroll had been the order of the century thus far, a unique method of unthought thinking graduated from the displays of screens into convincing experiences zapped directly upon the interfaces of mammalian nerves and neurons. Digital space reflected the restrictions of reality into the ultimate open-world video experience where anything is possible. Many who came to never leave actually became convinced that the neural link was, in some sense, the true reality. Even a virtual reality is a reality nonetheless. The analytics this produced through study of neural subjects had begun to show as much. Naturally, expressions of the human will without the limitations of the biological substrate where common. Fantasies of celebrity where every person was convincingly the most esteemed in their own mind, drug binges in the best company imaginable and the ultimate in pornographic sex entertainment. A world where an elderly man can play contact sport once again in his 21 year old body, an angsty teenager can safely shoot-up elementary schools and young women can be spanked endlessly by billionaires. The only limitations on this final category being the restrictions on pain simulation and the sentimentally-driven restrictions on the simulation of underage sexual activity, both aspects considered oppressive by certain kink communities which were being considered less “kink” by the day.
The great mass of humanity in developed countries, roughly 99.2%, had willingly signed onto basic state support. This basic allowance, available universally, allowed for the maintenance of a neural link simulation machine and delivered sustenance. The financial crystal meth that was Keynesian economic principle took off into overdrive when it somehow made sense for developed nations to maintain these citizens as consumtive units of population. The human animal persisted in magic-money utility as a consuming unit was economics in its final evolutionary stage. Some still waited for the governments to support their final transformation into this new kind of human consuming. However, there also existed a divergent minority of roughly 0.1% that for reasons mental, economic, philosophical or ideological abstained from experience machines. Many of these lived in rural compounds or simply wandered the mostly empty streets babbling about the past and scanning for discarded sustenance-paks.
In the developing world simulated reality wasn’t yet an economic reality for many, for now, although progress was progressively allowing more to inherit second-hand refurbished or off-market neural link machines. The rich of such nations bribed and slave-drove their way into a western standard of living, as always. There where even charitable initiatives in first world nations which sponsored an experience machine to be provided to a needy country for each sold in a country with less want.
This leaves the ‘elite’ of this time. An ‘elite’ within the burdens of an apparently real reality, not in any traditional sense of ‘elite’. These exceptional few managed to moderate their use or fully abstain from neural link, yet made themselves useful enough to the new motives of neural simulation that they did not need take the universal stipend offered by the state. This new elite was paid far beyond the universal offering by the companies researching, designing, producing and maintaining the neural link systems.
Over the decades the economic atmosphere had been shocked by a series of pandemics, justifying the shift in economic activity away from urban centers. Expanding and improving telecommunications gave the entire globe economic potential which was previously reserved exclusively for centers of population. Space itself had been exploded apart and folded back in upon itself. Commercial real estate went bust slowly but surely as leases expired. Bright lights kept the city ablaze, coating empty offices in a baptism of florescent energy. The abandonment of these spaces happened very slowly at first, then all at once. You’d think there had been an apocalypse in the cities of the world. Buses services stopped running, traffic ran to a trickle, trains became infrequent.
This new system wasn’t hell but instead a heaven on earth where humanity was as-good-as alleviated from any danger and desire. This was done up to the point where it was existentially convincing and that was all that mattered.
Detective Anderson and Detective Knight were partners, part of the A.I.W.B (Artificial Intelligence Watchdog Bureau). Anderson was of Irish decent, orange hair and pasty skin. But, he lifted weights which took him off the bottom rung of attractiveness. Knight was African American, a short woman who had all the natural voluptuousness of her ethnic stock, without the extra weight carried by most Americans. By the time period this made her a particularly rare appearance in contrast to the overwhelming majority of American women. The tendency of obesity was heavily correlated with time spent in neural link simulations. Both detectives had been transferred from regular police work to the bureau over the last couple years. The traditional role of the police had become functionally defunct by this time, simply due to the lack of people on the street to police. The role, associated regalia and uniforms had become essentially ceremonial in developed nations.
There was a sexual tension among the pair and they likely would have started an affair by now if it wasn’t for Detective Anderson’s ability to have his way with a representation of Detective Knight during his time in neurally simulated reality. This was naturally coupled with the female restrain of Detective Knight, the selective mechanisms of the feminine which have always kept the depravity of the male sex limited. In this new world, for the few who had gone through with the formality of marriage, divorce had become almost extinct. What was the point? The grass which was greener could be covertly tasted and sampled by unsatisfied parties.
Although the work of the Bureau had been largely theoretical and legalistic, Anderson and Knight where about to take part in their first raid of regulatory enforcement. Following a tip and surveillance there was a building in Chinatown not registered for neural link use, but was pulling huge amounts of electricity from the grid. As the SWAT team and squad cars made their way across the city they moved with the pace of a rocket attempting to break the restraints of the atmosphere, there was little in their way excluding parked or abandoned cars.
As the detectives arrived, search warrant in hand, the SWAT team were already well into getting the main door off its hinges with a battering ram. The first room contained a bunch of cots and a musty air. A single Chinese man, lying on one of the cots was startled. Raising his hands. Another two men where hooked up to standard neural link machines, far too entrenched and plugged-in to notice the commotion. The team made their way up the dark staircase at the back of the room, guided by torchlight. They lit up the rising dust of the room as the smell of spent oil hung in the air. The second floor was an abandoned kitchen, this was likely a restaurant in more physical times. A final door held the stairs to the loft, panicked shouting could be heard beyond this. Quickly the battering ram was deployed as, weapons drawn, the loft was breached.
The roar of computer fans, the heat of silicon and the twitching of raw flesh. A server farm unlike any other, rows and rows of cabs hooked up in an organized networked arrangement. Neural simulation machines, sustenance tubes and network cables carefully arranged along the server racks. Each neural linking machine connected to transparent domes containing individual brains from which sprouted meticulously separated nerves. Entire nervous systems extracted, assumedly, from complete human bodies. Without limbs, without fallen flesh, without skin, without bone, without the inefficiency of organs. Only the requirements for experience augmented by a networked system of neural perfection. Floating experiences, disabled in biological substrate, now enabled by technology.
If Detective Anderson had known what he was looking at in that moment he would have taken a blunt instrument and begun to smash the equipment or he would have started to pull out wires and tubes to euthanize the entire mess. For the apparatus laid before them was no scientific experiment, no attempt to perfect the utility of man and no philosophical hypothetical. What they saw before them was the ultimate torture system. A true mechanism of malice. One which only God’s mistake, the fallen angel of man, had the ingenuity to invent and construct.
The perfect machine was simulating the maximum pain, displeasure and sadness possible to be experienced by the human animal directly onto its prime neural circuits. The central nervous system, detached from any appendage of escape was wallowing in the maximal torture and sustained indefinitely with minimal intervention. Furthermore, it was realized, once the connected software had been investigated, that artificial time production within neurally-simulated experience had been achieved. Every second in reality was an eternity for the souls held hostage in that loft. It turns out that hell was not a place in the afterlife waiting to punish the worst of humanity. Hell was now a place on earth enabled by man himself. Only man was capable of the creative hubris and totalizing malice required to create such a place. Lucifer himself would cringe.
There would have been the undying sounds of a thousand screams had the apparatus in that loft had the mouths with which to vocalize it. In short order, despite the fact it was tampering with evidence, once the facts of the situation were realized the loft was powered down and put out of its misery.
The investigation eventually found that the men running the loft were heroin addicts, paid in smack by crypto-anons and threatened with the fate of those hooked up to hell had they not kept the place running. The entire affair was but one small part of a larger operation, a shadow industry which had graduated beyond assassinations and kidnappings. For an anonymous fee a target could be taken to an underground surgical facility, deprived of what made them human, sustained in the form of a stripped-back nervous system accompanied by experiencing brain and hooked up to hell. Artificial time production and maximum torture was the ultimate revenge, man had found the final way in which to play god.
It turned out the work of the A.I.W.B. was just getting started. Rumors started to emerge that certain governments where using similar methods to these underground operations as the ultimate deterrent for terrorists and subversives. Detective Anderson carried on working on such cases, although he ended up divorced and with the burden of alcohol dependence to put his mind in auto-pilot. Detective Knight eventually put on weight and quit the force, retreating into a normal life of simulated enjoyment. Those working in the operations of the A.I.W.B. enjoyed a high rate of turnover, addiction and suicide. This was just as well and a necessary price for this minority to pay, the situation would have been much worse had certain realities been widespread public knowledge.