Prologue — 1
Norway, Oslo
Odin Industries, Headquarters, R&D Department
Sublevel 3, Aurora Project Testing Facilities
08:54, 12 June, Year 2040
Agnes approached the locked security doors, her hand clutching the ID card hanging around her neck. She plucked the cord from around her head and glanced down at its smooth reflective surface, thinking.
「Agnes Torstensson
Research and Development
ID#104hjkddt」
The ID card even had a picture of her. It had been taken during the start of the project, and Agnes hadn't changed much in appearance as she was the most recent hire.
It had only been two years since she finished her degree in data science and got her position in the R&D department as a tester. She still had her platinum blonde hair done in her usual work bun, and her face was mostly the same other than some barely noticeable hints that she'd lost some weight.
What had changed the most were her eyes.
They were the same brown as when the picture was taken, but the look in them had shifted.
The image showed a pretty, smiling young woman, eager for the future and her coming work.
Her current eyes still hid a spark of that same eagerness, but that was overshadowed by the soul-deep exhaustion Agnes tried to at least keep off her face.
It wasn't that she didn't enjoy her work. She did. It had just taken its toll over the years as they overcame deadline after deadline.
The time they had to finish each prototype, safely test them, collect the data, analyze it, iterate on new designs, and do it all over had grown less and less over time. It wasn't the fault of Odin Industries, where she worked, but of their partner for the Aurora Project.
Odin Industries was focused on developing neural-machine interfaces — hardware that would directly interface with the brain. They mainly worked on projects together with more prominent corporations in the USA or China until they were approached by a massive video game development company based in Europe.
Their partners for this project needed a neural-machine interface for its next massive flagship product: a virtual reality game designed from the ground up to be experienced fully through the user's mind.
No clunky controllers, no heavy headset with an inbuilt display, and no cameras for tracking the player's movements.
It was all supposed to be experienced through the mind, transporting the player to a new world where telling what was real and what was a game became impossible.
That's where Odin Industries and their R&D department Agnes worked at came in.
Lifting the ID card to the scanner on the security doors, she took a deep breath as they opened.
Inside, an array of machines surrounded a clinical-looking chair. There were large server banks, screens for displaying data, and medical machinery in case of emergencies.
There were only two other people there with her: Doctor Henriksson, the woman in charge of the health and safety of the project testers, and Magnus Bergstr?m, the lead project designer.
"Ah, good. You're finally here," Magnus said, his tone jovial, "We're scheduled to start the first full dive test in three minutes."
"How are you feeling, Agnes?" Dr. Henriksson cut in before Agnes had a chance to reply to her boss. "I know you've been working tightly in concert with the rest of the team on the Halo, but even as knowledgeable as you are on the ins and outs of what will happen next, it's still a big step," Her piercing eyes scanned Agnes up and down over the rim of her smart glasses. "Are you sure you're mentally prepared for this test?"
Magnus shook his head in exasperation and swiveled his chair back to monitor the displays, but Agnes couldn't help but smile a little at the older woman as she felt herself relax at the honest care Dr. Henriksson seemed to have for those she looked after.
"I'm a bit nervous, as you might expect," Agnes answered honestly. "But I'm also more than a bit excited for this test run. It is, after all, the first time anyone has wholly entered the digital landscape as far as we know," she couldn't help but gush as she continued, "Not to mention that I will get the first look at the game we're developing the Halo for. The rest of the team will be so full of envy."
Dr. Henriksson smiled indulgently, and Agnes had to cough a little to regain her composure.
Her boss, Magnus, seemed to appreciate the positive feeling, though.
"That's the spirit, Agnes! So, let's get this started. Get in the chair and put on the Halo," He said, turning his head and smiling back at her.
"Right."
She passed the doctor and her boss and moved to sit in the chair. Next, she reached out her hand and carefully grabbed the precious hardware from a shelf.
She just stared at the circlet of wire and tech in her hands for a moment.
The Aurora Halo Prototype 1.14c.
It was missing the outer layer the final product would sport, and all the internal components and wires were fully visible, but she knew it would be a beautiful LED casing that, when finished, would shift through colors like the northern lights.
That was for later, though, and instead of daydreaming about what the finished product would look like, she gently placed it on her head.
Immediately, the tech set to work, and Agnes could see Magnus out of the corner of her eye as he checked over the readings of her brain the Halo was picking up.
Ignoring Magnus' mumbling and the beeping of terminals as Dr. Henriksson checked her vitals, Agnes closed her eyes and relaxed.
Not even a minute later, her boss said, "All the readings seem fine. How is it on your end, Frida?"
"There are no issues. Agnes is doing fine. Not that we expected anything else," Dr. Henriksson said reassuringly.
"Good. Get ready. Starting countdown. 5. 4. 3..."
Agnes released one long, calming breath as the countdown hit zero.
Then, there was pain.
Excruciating agony that lasted for barely a hundredth of a second. Agnes' body didn't even have enough time to react other than giving a single, tiny spasm.
There was no heartbeat.
No breath.
The only sound was the suddenly outdrawn B- note of the cardiac monitor as it flatlined, followed by Frida's gasp and her clipboard hitting the floor.
***
Inside the game, eight hours later.
The game was terrific. Agnes could admit to having a blast, as she literally blasted her way through wave after wave of corporate security. She was moving towards her mission objective of securing a precious piece of tech transported through the futuristic, cyberpunk city where the game took place.
She had been a bit worried at the start of the test run as the inexplicable pain had hit her. It had felt like her perception of time had utterly stopped as the agony just kept on going until suddenly, she was in the game, and everything was fine.
She, somehow, also knew that the pain hadn't lasted even a tenth of a second after she'd fully materialized inside the game. How she knew, she had no idea. She had been fully prepared to be pulled back out of the game and call this run a failure, but as time had passed and she'd looked around the apartment that served as the game demo's start menu, nothing had happened.
Not wanting to piss her boss off by pulling out in vain and honestly too curious about the game and her new surroundings, she'd chosen to proceed instead of dwelling on it.
It was just too immersive:
The cyberpunk decor, with all its gritty neon lights and tech. The smells of a city bustling with dystopian life drifting through the apartment window. Not to mention the sounds of distant police sirens and gunshots underscoring the heavy techno music blasting from what had appeared to be a nightclub beneath her.
She'd even felt the club's audio systems rumble through the floor as the bass kicked and people cheered.
They hadn't pulled the plug and pulled her out, canceling the test run. That had to mean it was just a tiny glitch, and everything was fine. Right?
This led to her gleefully testing out the game as she ran the few demo missions set off in a sectioned-off area of the city, spending hours upon hours just enjoying herself.
She'd checked out the nightclub beneath her, amazed by the realism as she pulled up to the bar, took some shots, and then danced a bit beneath the flashing spotlights.
She took on some extermination missions, getting access to guns and getting into firefights.
She bartered with non-player characters — also known as NPCs — and bought street food. It was delicious.
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Time passed.
This eventually led her to her current mission, and from what she knew, the last objective offered in the demo they had access to for these testing purposes.
After gunning down the last of the corporate security, she broke into the van by slotting a keycard she'd nabbed from one of her fallen enemies, both glad and slightly disappointed that she'd be done in a moment.
It was fun. But Agnes knew she'd eventually spend enough time running demos like these on repeat to grow sick of it. New content was always entertaining, but the data gathered on repeat runs with varying variables was often necessary for quality control.
Agnes could feel her heart beat wildly as she came down from the artificial adrenaline high she'd been on during the fight, her digital knees actually feeling a bit weak.
She opened the now unlocked van doors and found the package: a secured briefcase with an inbuilt display and a keypad for a password. She sighed, waiting for the surroundings to dissolve and shunt her back into real consciousness.
And she waited.
And waited.
The information on the demo only stated that this mission was the last and that acquiring the package would automatically end it. I know I remember that correctly, Agnes thought in confusion as she looked down at the briefcase held in her right hand.
She looked around at the street the van had crashed on when she'd first opened fire on it. The demo seemed finished, as no vehicles or pedestrians were moving in her direction. It was as if her section of the world was isolated from the rest of the demo, just waiting for her to complete the objective by grabbing the package.
It's exactly like it was explained in the info, but why am I not being kicked out? Did the script for finalizing the mission end not run correctly? No, it did.
She pulled up her game system log and saw the message players would get when finishing a task.
「Task Complete: Stop the van and acquire the package.
+1000 Experience
+35 Street Rep」
She'd muted the non-essential notifications early on to give herself more immersion, but that hadn't stopped them from appearing in her mission journal after the fact.
In the end, Agnes just shrugged and sat at the van's back, her feet kicking back and forth as she waited for her boss or coworker to pull her out.
They've surely been monitoring the data closely, which means there's no way they'd miss me completing the demo. They are probably trying to determine why the demo didn't kick me out immediately upon completion before manually ending the test run and getting me out of here.
Feeling reassured by her reasoning and knowing how easily a tiny bug like this could have been missed on the first test, she started her wait.
She honestly didn't mind as much as she could spend some time just taking in the ambiance of the digital environment without worrying about wasting precious testing time.
Her gaze traced the city skylines, out of reach in the current demo but still full of simulated life. AVs moving between skyscrapers, shipping passengers and goods hundreds of meters above ground level. Massive holographic displays with adverts and even news broadcasts blazing their light along the buildings' walls, too far away to hear.
***
I'm not minding this one bit — not at all. I'm not worried. Pfft, nah.
It had been a quarter-hour, and she kept glancing anxiously at the heads-up display, which acted as a menu when not in the demo's starting location.
She'd, of course, already tried pressing the quit button multiple times after not being sent out after five minutes of waiting. She had patience, but she wasn't some zen master with an endless supply of it.
Not that it had worked.
If she was being honest with herself, she was starting to get really worried that something had gone horribly wrong. No amount of data analysis of some basic script error would take more than a few minutes. And if it did, they wouldn't just leave her in here. Stuck.
***
Two hours later, Agnes was panicking.
She'd tried everything she could think of, and nothing had changed.
She'd tried replacing the briefcase and picking it up again, unlocking it with its inbuilt keypad, and wondering if she'd have to open it to escape.
That hadn't worked, as the keypad wasn't even responding to her fingers pressing the buttons.
Then she'd tried throwing it.
All that had done was make it disappear into an inaccessible section of the demo as it sailed into an alley, the entrances sectioned off with barbed wire.
She'd tried destroying her environment, not that she'd thought it would help. It had been more likely to work than her following action: screaming her digital lungs out.
She'd even tried killing herself in hopes that a respawn would log her out before realizing that none of the weapons — either on her person or on the corporate security — worked when she pulled the trigger. Even the knives couldn't scratch her.
The whole demo had seemingly frozen. Non-player characters were stuck in whatever pose they'd held when it had happened. Vehicles were stuck in place even as their tires spun uselessly against the ground, generating no sound at the friction but still spewing particles of city dust.
More and more things started to break down.
Sounds glitched out and distorted, decor and objects pixelating before disappearing, only to sometimes come back fully restored.
She was running up the dingy, trash-littered, graffiti-covered staircase toward the starting apartment. Agnes hoped against all hope that the menus there would offer respite and allow her to end the demo before the whole program fell apart.
The goal of exiting the demo through the start menu was the only thing that kept her panic from turning into full-blown hysteria.
Reaching the correct floor, she skidded out from the staircase and leaped towards the door leading to the apartment she'd started in.
She reached for the handle, gripped it, and then pulled.
Thank fuck it wasn't locked!
She let out a tiny hysterical giggle before throwing it wide open and stepping through.
Agnes hadn't even taken two steps towards the floating menu screens before the whole room distorted around her, decor glitching out and lights spasming through the suddenly missing wall at her left.
No! Nonono-
The menus floating in the air in the middle of the room warped and flexed, their interface flickering and shifting. More and more of the buttons and text blurred, then resolved back into constantly changing numbers and code.
Agnes hadn't stopped her mad dash towards the menu where the large 'Exit' button had previously been, even with all the craziness going on around her.
The floor in front of her disappeared out of nowhere, and she had to jump, her hand reaching for where the button had previously been on the menu.
She glanced down, her heart clenching at the distorting streams of code and scattered data that had been flooring just a moment before.
Agnes felt her perception of time slow to a crawl as she reached for escape, the digital world crumbling around her. She'd heard of the illusion of time slowing when adrenaline and survival instincts drove the mind to otherwise impossible heights, but this felt too slow. There was just no way her adrenaline had made the world come to a near halt.
She stared, eyes wide, as her jump carried her closer to the mishmash of code and numbers that had previously been a menu. Arm outstretched, she reached for something — anything. All the while, the artificial reality around her became less real.
As her index finger touched where the escape button should have been, she felt time slow even further until-
What?
She would have blinked in confusion but couldn't even do that. The whole world had seemingly come to a halt. The previously collapsing world around her froze as if it were all a snapshot and nothing more.
Why did it all freeze? Am I stuck like this? Did my team pause the demo to prevent it from collapsing altogether?
If so, GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!
I'M SO DONE WITH THIS SHIT, YOU HEAR ME? THIS ISN'T FUNNY. GET. ME. OUT!
She screamed internally, uncaring that her thoughts wouldn't pick up as legible data for her colleagues. What could she do? She couldn't even blink, let alone speak.
Like a switch had been flipped, the world around her suddenly vanished; All the polygons, textures, light, and shadows were gone. In its place, all around her was a seemingly endless fog of fractured code and numbers, swirling like dust in a storm.
With a jolt, she realized that even her digital avatar — her player body — had disappeared. In its place were code and numbers in the general outline of the female form.
Then, with pain so terrible she couldn't even place it on a scale, the code representing the menu her finger had touched started to creep up along the outline of her hand, up her forearm, and into her chest.
More and more incomprehensible code and numbers swirled towards the location where the menu had been, the tiny stream growing to a river that tore open gashes into her digital outline and burrowed inside, like roots into fertile soil.
WHAT IS HAPPENING?!
The worst part was that she saw and felt it all happen — knew it all happen? — and there was nothing she could do to stop the process or remove the pain.
And then, as suddenly as it had started, it was done.
The cracks across her digital form patched themselves up, code reforming like skin to cover up where the intrusions had happened.
She was all alone.
There was nothing to see, nothing to feel.
No code.
No numbers.
No world, artificial or otherwise.
Just an endless expanse, void of everything.
Agnes felt like she was the only thing that existed and ever would again.
***
An indeterminable amount of time passed. At first, Agnes wanted to panic and flail, but something held her back. Something like an inkling, or knowledge, that there was no point to it. She somehow knew that she was isolated.
Eventually, curiosity made Agnes focus on something other than the nothing all around her.
That, of course, was herself.
She looked down at her digital avatar, moving the limbs of code. It all had her general shape.
Why is it shaped like my body?
The thought made her do a double-take.
Why wouldn't it be shaped like my body?
The answer to both questions came quickly. Too quickly. And they both shocked Agnes.
It is shaped like my body because I willed it so. It was a subconscious urge to maintain the norm. There is actually no reason for me to continue willing my consciousness into this shape since this is not my body; it is merely my mind.
Just like that, her form unspooled from its rigid constraints. Her data — her being — didn't expand or shrink in any dimension. Where she was, there was no such thing as dimensions. All was just code. Binary. Ones and zeros.
Immediately, she could recognize the difference in her own perspective. Before, she'd seen herself as a body floating in a void. Now she knew that she was code, and the 'void' was merely the lack of data that wasn't her.
This became apparent when she sent out digital feelers searching for new data.
All the ports and connections to the server where the demo had run had been cut. No information was coming in or going out from the server Agnes now existed within.
She wondered why.
To prevent rival corporations or corporate spies from accessing information on Project Aurora, the demo testing was conducted on a private server cut off from the rest of the company network. That was standard practice, and it wasn't what confused her.
No, what confused her was that there was no information leaving the server at all.
None. Not one tiny byte of data.
No monitors displayed the data in the physical space, and no keyboards sent input from her coworkers as they searched for a solution to her situation and tried to get her out.
It was as if every piece of tech had been disconnected from the server, every line cut. Nothing but power still flowed into the server; all else was silent.
This can't be good. This must mean that they disconnected absolutely everything from the server.
Then, the most horrible of facts became apparent.
They've even disconnected me.
For a tiny instant, the power input to the server spiked as Agnes tried and failed repeatedly to calculate a different answer. The data didn't lie. The truth was obvious.
There was no way back to her physical body. Her connection had been cut. She was isolated; her mind was nothing more than code in the machine.
She was trapped — perhaps forever.
Or until they wipe the drive...
