492 The Flood, Ch. 6

Chapter 6

Well, that was weird. 

Walking along with the dogs on the sidewalk, I was zoning out looking at the grid of concrete squares. When Princess started pulling, I wasn't really paying attention.

The memory came to me like a jolt.

A hot tub. The redwoods. I'm 40 years old. This is my hot tub, but it's not the big one on my estate. Not the one attached to the infinity pool. We're at the guest house. 

The little house used to be my favorite. Sunny never understood.

"What are you doing here?" She asked me one day, finding me on the floor asleep. 

"I was taking a nap."

"Why don't you do that in our bedroom, where there's a bed and everything?" she sat down beside me. "I promise I won't disturb you."

"It's quiet here," I said. 

"The big house is quiet. It's like a tomb," she said. "You can hear a mouse squeak."

"Do we really need to keep arguing?" I said putting my hand on the small of her back. "You just made my point."

She reached over and touched me, "No."

---

Up the street, Dozer starts pulling. 

His sniff brings a vision that is a little more vague, but now I understand the meaning of these concrete squares around me. The grid. Of my feeling like I have no power over this life. The algorithm. I really am living in a simulation. 

There are rules to this simulation. I know because I wrote them. No, I didn't write them, the team of designers and programmers I had working on this little pet project wrote them. 

Here's a hitch: I thought I knew what the rules are, but I don't. 

This is my hell, but I don't have the keys. I'm stuck here.

---

Princess pulls me around a corner. Sniffs the bottom of a sign post.

A memory.

There's a problem with the student tanks. One of the experimental subjects has figured out how to connect to the internet. Now she's dealing with a virus, and we're not sure if maybe she's been hacked.

My chief technology officer is giving me a lowdown on the situation. We're in my office.

"So you're saying she looks uncomfortable?" I ask. 

"The supervising physician says she's showing signs of struggle," she says. "He wants to wake her up."

"A rash and a bruise?" I looked out the window at our campus. It was designed to be peaceful like like a college, but no college ever had the kind of money we did. Instead of seeing ivy league out the window, I saw a dream machine capable of making anything possible. "That sounds like maybe she just bumped herself, having a nightmare or something."

"Her heart rate is still elevated," she said.

"For how long?"

She checked her notes. "Two days."

"How elevated?"

"Twenty percent over her baseline."

"She signed up for a two week experiment," I said. "I thought the immersion tanks were supposed to take care of the bed sores."

"And they are but..." her voice trailed off.

"Well can you just disconnect her from the internet?"

"It's not that simple, she's fully jacked into the system right now." My CTO had a look something like panic in her eyes. "If the student knew what she were doing, she could reset the whole program. We don't know if someone is using her as a backdoor, or..."

"I thought we fully checked her credentials," at the time I thought I was spending way too much time on a trivial matter. "So what are you going to do? Unplug her?"

"Are you authorizing me to?"

"No." She had another week to go, I reasoned. "Just monitor her."

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