493 The Flood, Ch. 7


Chapter 7

The walled garden was my idea. After the incident with the student connecting to the internet, I thought a closed system would be safer.

We kept her in the immersion tank another few days, until we could get the fork done. In that time, she continued to struggle, even after we increased her sedatives.

As they woke her up, I watched from behind two way glass. Most of the test subjects reported pleasant experiences, but not her.

Before the drugs wore off completely, she ripped out several of the support lines. My team was utterly professional, but the scene was, well, ugly.

"Make sure the CCTV gets deleted," I told my CTO as the red-headed girl fought off two of our largest security guards. "Is that her hair or their blood on the mirror?"

My tech advisor leaned in for a closer look, "It's both."

---

The beauty of a walled garden approach to systems design is you don't need to worry about outside interference. And with basically the whole internet archived in the system, and the world's most powerful AI to fill in any gaps and continue to make the simulation feel new, I figured it was safer to live behind a firewall than to expose myself to whatever happened to her.

My team continued to monitor her after her two weeks were up. 


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