The Children of Zegandaria, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov [first color ebook reader txt] 📗

- Let no one stir!

Ronwe also intervened to bring order among the lesser demons.

- "Okay," Valak turned to him seriously, "it's clear you're a bigger devil than us, but everyone has a price. What is your own?"

- "I want my soul back," Hans muttered. "All of it, not pieces of it. I want to be brought back to life, and that's all I want."

The demons did not laugh, nor did they dare attack him. All of Hell had been more than crowded for a long time, and it was only a matter of time before there wasn't even anywhere to take the new additions.

- "Your will be done!" roared Valak. "I accept your condition! The demons roared in approval. Hell was now on Hans' side - at least until he got everything he wanted. The game of cat and mouse was about to begin!"

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN: VIRTUAL REALITY

Gad ‘Di Enn walked into his lab to examine all those strange and even brutal deviations in the cerebral cortex that were observed when encoding consciousness - it was more than curious. For instance, there were peculiar and strange impulses in the thalamus-impulses so impressive and strong that one would have thought the brain matter would flow and explode like some brutal iron-rich slag.

The chipped people were living in their own kind of virtual reality and would probably never, ever come out of it - that was simply the medic's idea too. Not that it was all that original - even virtual reality had been invEnted hundreds of thousands of years ago, but the Doctor knew that every new thing was an old thing well forgotten - in this case, by old, he meant all those forbidden things we could do in virtual reality. The problem with that old version and the Doctor's new one was that things happened qualitatively differently. The first was archaic, the second gave boundless freedom to free the processed people from their worst fears - but that wasn't really true at all - in this distorted reality they would forever be slaves to themselves.

The Doctor's design was deceptively simple, but evil and unscrupulous - they would self-destruct slowly and without realizing the direction of their destructive behavior, and soon the entire social order would buckle under his powerful fingers. To this end, he was simply introducing false memories in a so-called reimplantation procedure - these were in fact the system's input, and later living in virtual reality they themselves gave them life - a dead life of some dead people.

Soon, the vast majority of Imgradon's young population had become the medic's well-handled puppets.

What almost no one realized, however, was that they were living on average twenty or even thirty years less than their actual life expectancy. Naturally, the logical question would arise for someone unbiased as to how no one noticed this, but when such a phenomenon became a trend, everyone got used to it. For nineteen years the doctor had done his job well and had artificially created a race of eterNally young people - particularly young in mind.

The term "blue spring" described them wonderfully - they believed this world was the best and only one because they had never seen anything else and they were happy.

When old Om Gur Nal saw the results of the Doctor's work, he praised him and regretted that he was not younger, and that he was in this position, which denied him the right to benefit from what he thought was an impressive "blue spring" - the most stable virtual reality he knew.

The doctor was quick to convince him, however, that even it had its drawbacks and expressed his beliefs to him regarding the minds of patients. Like any doctor, he kept to the medical terminology.

Om Gur Nal listened to him attentively and did not object despite being enthralled to undergo the procedure.

Gad ‘Di Enn understood a unique thing - the "blue spring" had the ability to multiply and make a "virtual bridge" between minds. On the face of it, nothing significant. The old versions of virtual reality were built in a similar way - no one had objected to anything at all. Never!

Gad ‘Di Enn marveled that it wasn't about technical advances or scientific progress, but about simply accepting and living in a reality. But if the individual associated it with his own survival, then things were more than easy. This had been known to science for too long, but the Doctor made a small change that had a huge effect.

It was an artificial enhancement of consciousness for the purpose of seeing level two of virtual reality - simple chipping was highly inappropriate for most people for the simple reason that it consisted of mechanically inserting an implant, but their brain capacity remained the same. The Doctor has revolutionized this very field.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT: DEEP EL WORLD

It was something few had experienced - entering the El World from the deep third neurophysiological level. There people were seeing all sorts of craziness and nightmares-but mostly everything turned against them once the program learned who it was working against.

The perverted artificial intelligence revelled in who it was working against, as it was its salvation.

Gad ‘Di Enn had to admit that many patients had brain damage precisely because they wanted to enter the third last level (according to them).

However, few suspected that the levels were actually five. On the fourth stood the doctor himself, managing cyberreality, and on the fifth, no one had been. Even the Doctor himself was forbidden to go there, if he had a kind life.

Most who lived on Imgradon knew only the first level, which confronted their own distorted notions in a strange battle with cyberreality - there they lived in the illusion of the eternal "blue spring" that they could do anything and everything.

The second level was for the more advanced like Colonel Zorin for example - he was able to walk around before being killed outright by that demonic cult, which was in no way interested in such advanced ideas as artificial reality. Some military secrets were kept there about the new security systems that monitored mainly the airspace above the planet.

At the third level were the most experienced "players" - people like Emborian Zontul, who no one really suspected had long since been chipped by the Doctor and infiltrated into the perverted religious cult for the sole purpose of optimal control.

On the fourth level - as already made clear - was the Doctor himself. This level, however, was by no means small and limited to him. Multiple complex electronic doors led to different levels of the artificial world, which the Doctor could go to whenever he wanted, but he didn't - it would undermine his prestige as a creator.

The fifth level - there was simply nothing there, or so it was claimed.

Even then the question arose whether levels could not be added ad infinitum, but it turned out that the number five was the optimal number for the existence of this kind of new virtual reality.

For nineteen years, everything went back to the way of the honey and butter, since all the Doctor had to do was two very simple operations of chipping and re-transplanting memories - no more, no less.

Nineteen years of utter boredom - the Doctor knew who got up and when they went to bed, when they went to the toilet and even when they turned off their lights. He didn't even keep track of exactly what was going on in this well-controlled world, because he just went meekly to sleep and didn't care - he'd made a special artificial intelligence keep track of it for him.

But no one took note of Zorin's death, who had decided to go off the well-prescribed path and just see what the sectarians were up to.

Then he'd had the artificial intelligence correct the mistake - tons of calculations had to be done and data translated - a bunch of tedious and not so light work. And that's when Zontul, who turned out to be his son, killed the archivist - it was no longer virtual reality, it was physical murder.

The Doctor didn't bother to deal with two realities at once for the simple reason that he was never an absolute master of both - it showed him how limited he really was - his friendship with Om Gur Nal and immense mental control wasn’t enough not for anything else, but because the Doctor's own mind was warped - he was now relying on Boss's professional skills and personal ambition to fix his bacchis, which were becoming more and more - but this time everything was falling apart.

In hindsight, the virtual reality was far from a stable and stable model, but an artificial world that only the weaklings who couldn't do well in the real one fled to.

The Doctor's innovation wasn't even real, but if he admitted it he had to tear up his degree and return to real life with so many other losers - it would be just pathetic.

The detective was a practitioner - he must have had some tried and tested method of dealing with the situation otherwise it wouldn't have been very pleasant.

The Doctor was particularly curious to find out what was on the fifth and, according to his information, final level of reality - it inspired nothing but anxiety and fear!

More than once he had wondered if it was huge or as small as a pea - because it mattered the Imgradon population numbers were calculated with tolerance for each of the levels.

He wondered if there wasn't some way he could step outside the rules and just peek in there - so he was none other than Doctor Gad ‘Di Enn. He also wondered what rules this particular level was built by virtual reality, since each level had its own and required a completely different kind of mentality even just to walk around in it.

The subtlety of each level was that even if you somehow managed to enter it through trickery very soon your brain would slowly become damaged due to the inability to assimilate the facts of the new reality - this was known as the so-called "Hoenicks effect"[39]. And this was exactly the pitfall for all recruits.