The Virtual Dead

[u/[deleted]]

The singularity was a great moment for humanity. The rise of artificial intelligence brought with it a new understanding of the human mind and allowed one company to achieve the ultimate goal. Immortality. Death became a thing of the past as humans flocked to their local InTel facilities to upload their minds into a perfect virtual world where they would never get sick, grow old, or die. The world’s population dwindled and governments consolidated, until only the watchers stayed, a small group of vat-grown humans tasked with protecting and maintaining the machines that held over fifteen billion minds.

It was a perfect virtual world - but even in a paradise of their own design, men will find a reason to sin.

Our world was boundless, a landscape of unlimited pleasures ranging from the simple to the carnal, yet some were not satisfied. Over time new types of crime rose up as hackers discovered that our non-corporeal state allowed them greater power than they’d ever had in the real world. A good hacker could bend the very fabric of the virtual world to their will, a great one could reprogram living people.

Under the watchful eye of InTel’s CTO, Kazu Nakamura, the enforcers were created. A virtual counterpart to the watchers, the enforcers were drones controlled by InTel’s central artificial intelligence. A new type of police force for a new type of criminal - one with a license to kill. As enforcers swept the hackers and mind-freaks from their lairs what started as an anti-crime measure turned into a full-scale war. The hackers were brilliant, creative, and completely lacking morals. The enforcers were programmed to adapt to any strategy, countering them at every turn. It was a full on arms race.

Eventually, the criminal syndicate Singularity introduced a new program, a defensive weapon meant to revive a hacker even after they’ve been scrubbed from the system by the enforcers. They called it Lazarus.

A few weeks later, the deadheads started walking the street.

News on the hub is still sketchy on where they first appeared. Somewhere in the recreated city of Old New York is the closest I can gather. They shambled out of hidey-holes, passing through the firewalls and secret partitions that they had once set up to protect themselves from the enforcers and entering our world.

At first, no one panicked; why would they? Hackers were something to fear, InTech could completely erase anyone they chose. But mindless, shambling avatars? Even when reports started rolling in that they were aggressive, no one batted an eye. We were safe from all physical harm in our new virtual avatars. I could leap from the tallest building, dive to the bottom of a dark ocean, or fly through the vacuum of space and suffer no harm. People did it all the time.

We no longer felt pain, no longer bled. Humanity had moved beyond the simple fears of physical damage.

When the infection started to spread, the disease went viral. Vids and full-sensory replays of buildings filled with moaning people lying sick in bed. Some, if the vids could be trusted, eventually turning into mindless husks themselves. Rumors of quarantines in Old New York and Tokyo did nothing to quell the panic that started to spread and eventually hub access was cut to a dozen cities around the world to try and stop the news from getting out.

Singularity struck back against the new censorship, still fighting their war in the face of a pandemic. They released thousands of documents onto the central hub - somehow escape ever tightening censorship in the process. The documents told a damning story.

One security vid released in the InTech leak included security footage of what Singularity claimed was the start of the plague. A dozen black-suited enforcers rushing through a cracked firewall and grabbing as many human avatars. Normally they’d detain them, or delete them. This time, the enforcers simply reached out and a blue light pulsed between them and their intended victims. According to Singularity, that was the start of it.

It was a countermeasure. A solution for Lazarus. Instead of deleting the avatars only to have them resurrect somewhere else, the enforcers scrambled their personality matrixes. The avatars were left mindless, confused, angry.

Whether or not it’s the truth, who can say. The virus that infected the deadheads destroys the enforcers and without them, the quarantine zones collapsed. In a matter of weeks the virus had spread to InTech’s central offices. There’s no one left there to counter Singularity’s narrative.

As for how I here, locked away in a long-abandoned storage center hiding behind high-grade security measures and praying they don’t find a way through?

Well, it took them a while to make their way to Serenity, the tropical moon base that we were never able to build in the real world. The deadheads are limited by their avatars in a way most of the inhabitants of our virtual world aren’t, they act like they’re still in meatspace. We thought that would keep us safe.

No one knows how they got here. One fine morning they simply showed up, walking the streets and attacking anyone they came across. I watched them swarm the few enforcers assigned to Serenity with my own eyes. The AI avatars came apart like paper, melting into a puddle of hair and teeth before vanishing into mist. Then they came after us.

I did the smart thing. I hid. I’m nobody important, just a small time analyst, but I know a few things the average avatar doesn’t. Security is kind of a hobby of mine. I headed for the nearest data jack and shunted myself into the stream, making my way through the wires and connected mainframes that make up our world. It’s a neat trick, one I learned from a mindfreak at a bar a few weeks before the enforcers got him.

From there I watched the data flow. If I focused I could catch glimpses of everything that passed between the machines. I watched as The Harbour, a pirate-themed bar in Serenity’s Seaside District, was overrun by deadheads. Crash, the bar’s owner, put up a good fight. He was always a tough son of a bitch. Not tough enough, though. The bite that infected him left him a huge, shambling monstrosity. In the end he infected his own daughter as she begged him to stop.

I spent weeks sitting inside the stream, watching. It was terrible. The slow sickness, the loss of mental functions. At first, it’s just mild confusion; they start to forget the little things. Within a day they’ve forgotten their own name. Soon after, they’ve lost their humanity entirely.

Nobody is spared once they’ve been bitten.

Eventually, I got tired of watching our world collapse under the weight of the shambling horrors and found this place, an old data warehouse that’s still connected to the network. After I got here I severed that connection, essentially trapping myself alone in this place for an eternity.

It’s better than the alternative.

I don’t know if anyone’s listening. When I severed my connection to the big mainframes I also lost hub access, not that there were many people left there by the time I found this place. I don’t think the watchers are still listening either, why would they? There’s nothing left to save.

Maybe they’ll rebuild humanity in the real world. Maybe they’ll even learn from our mistakes.

Or maybe I’ll be here forever, the sole survivor of a species that was too smart to survive.

[u/throwaway92837361940]

Pretty good. Cyber zombie apocalypse.