naught101
I sat at my desk, watching the virtual world tick over, and listening to the quiet hum of the server farm cleaning machinery. I used to watch via my terminal headset, but these days the virtual experience had started diverging pretty wildly from reality, as direct-information modes of experience slowly took over from the old physical sense representation modes. Watching a 3D rendering these days was becoming either boring or disturbing, or both. And depressing.
I had never got to jack in. Doctors said I had a genetic abnormality that prevented the link tech from binding with my neurons. One in a hundred million type thing.
It didn’t bother me too much at first. The virtual world looked fun, but the real world still had plenty to offer, especially to someone in their early 20s. I loved music, going out to gigs, and tending my plants, and I had a decent job in tech that kept me occupied. I caught recordings of the best parts on the web anyway, not that much different to the real-world. In fact by the end of the first decade recordings of the virtual world were consistently higher fidelity than anything recorded in reality. That was pretty great when big international music acts started broadcasting from the virtual world direct, and you could jump in and experience the whole thing in high-def, but without the sweaty crowd.
I did get a bit bummed when that started becoming the norm though. When even tiny local bands started using the virtual world for most gigs, I realised that I actually missed the jostle of a good sweaty crowd, something the headset could not provide. There were of course a few refusenik punk bands who stayed real-world for another decade or so. But even they gradually died out as crowds dwindled. Even the band members started disappearing like everyone else, some caving to the pull of the virtual, others succumbing to old-age, or just bowing out.
I love live music, so that’s what I remember most about those times, but it happened more or less the same in other parts of society too. The tech industry was the first to embrace it fully, arts and entertainment followed quickly, service industries last. But when full-upload tech was finally perfected a few couple of decades ago, the meatpocalypse was fairly rapid. Within a year there were over a million people who had discarded their bodies in favour of a full-virtual life. Within a 5 years nearly half the global population was in. Within the decade only stragglers remained, and as real-world industries collapsed, they joined too.
Now I was the last person left alive. My tech job had gradually evolved over the decades from operating system development to system administration. Programming had gradually become faster and more reliable inside the virtual world, and most related physical tasks had been automated. So mostly I just sat here, bored out of my mind, checking server-farm system status indicators. Every now and then I would help the machines replace some physical componentry that they couldn’t deal with automatically. It was a pretty thankless and lonely job, nearly no-one remembered I was even out here, and the few who did rarely bothered to check in on me unless they needed something.
In my down-time I played my guitar, or tended the garden I’d started years ago in a nearby vacant lot. This morning was no different from any of the others for the last decade. I came in to the control room, checked the vitals on the wall of diagnostic screens, then sat back with a tea and my guitar, with the rows of server racks humming away peacefully below me. Eventually I got bored and dozed off.
I woke up to the ping of a notification. A system update from CloudSight, a virtual world security corp, simultaneously broadcast to all machines on the network. That was weird, usually they ran staged deployments, to allow network redundancy to handle any roll-out problems. But it was a non-interactive update, so there wasn’t much I could do about that. It was kind of amusing to watch all the little update progress bars racing each other across the screen.
Suddenly one of the monitors with a more advanced progress bar flicked black, and then back on. Blue Screen Of Death. Damn. Before I could read the error, other monitors flicker black then blue in a patch-work cascade across the wall. All of them BSODs, all with the same error:
Stop code: PAGE FAULT IN NONPAGED AREA Failure in CSAgent.sys
Holy shit. That wasn’t a system file corruption, or it wouldn’t have happened on all the machines. So someone had screwed up, something broken had got through testing. And it looked like it had affected everything - not just the virtual world servers, but the maintenance infrastructure too.
It had been a while since I was on the tools, but I thought I probably still knew enough about the system internals of these machines to be able to fix one. If I had direct access, AND I still had access to the documentation, which was all stored in the virtual world… And then even if I had a fix, I had no way to deploy it broad scale, since all the DevOps infrastructure was down as well. So, manually fixing and rebooting servers until I could get enough of the virtual world back up for me to find some people to help.
That did not sound fun. I stared at the wall of blue for a minute or two, contemplating the scale of the task. Then I slowly pushed myself up out of my chair, and walked to the window to look down at the server racks. Four and a half million servers, all arrayed below me, all blinking red error lights in unison. All demanding my help.
“You know what?” I said to myself, “Fuck this.”
I grabbed my coat off the back of the chair, and then I grabbed my guitar, and I headed for the door.
I flipped off the light switch on the way out.
A little something in honour of the yesterday’s tech fun.
This is only loosely proof read, and could probably do with a bit of editing, but feedback is welcome :)
Thanks for the feedback! Pretty new to fiction, so this is useful.
Yeah, I didn’t do an edit of this, posted more or less straight after writing. I am definitely starting to get the value of an edit/re-write to add some telegraphing of what’s coming and to clean up the pacing and remove or do more to tie in loose pieces (like the knee hole). Will do that more in the future.
I might come back to this one, see how I’m feeling in a few weeks.