Phoenix in the Machine

By Leigh Kimmel

Dreams come true in cyberspace -- but so do nightmares.

 

Roger remembers dying in a fire on the launchpad. He's reconciled it with being alive again. However, being an infomorph in a simulated environment has been a difficult adjustment. Toni tells him he went mad the first time he awoke, and she had to crash the computer. Now he helps her playtest the games her employer designs.

 

But cyberspace outside Toni's local area network is a dangerous place. A disastrous experiment in Bangladesh left the world in a moral panic about AI and machine consciousness. When a careless connection betrays him to those who cannot distinguish between an AI and a post-biological human being, he and Toni must flee. Their cross-country journey will either destroy him or deliver him the spaceflight he's awaited for a century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Starship Cat Press
• Release date: Apr 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223008767

Book preview

This level is easy. Almost too easy. In the production version of a game, it would be a warning to watch for subtle traps, but Roger was playtesting one in development.

According to the developer documentation Toni had shown him, this part of Mythos and Madness would require the player character to infiltrate a secret Tcho-Tcho temple somewhere in Southeast Asia. However, the precise goal remained under discussion, leaving the boss character still in development.

Ahead, the trail wound its way through the jungle to the mountain's mist-shrouded peak. Roger paused from his uphill slog to take a panoramic view of his surroundings.

Toni claimed a lot of the team had also worked on Mekong Mighty Fighters, Digital Dreams' Vietnam War combat game. However, Mythos and Madness was supposed to be set in the period of Lovecraft's best-known Cthulhu Mythos stories. That would place the setting several decades before the US began sending forces to Indochina to stop the Communists.

Roger narrowed his eyes to study the patches of mist hanging in the air between the distant mountains. How much of the setting had its basis in actual historical Vietnam, as opposed to the descriptions of creepy Oriental jungle in the various source materials upon which the games were based?

On the other hand, a lot of the storyscape remained a digital sketch, enough for the playtesters to get a feel for how gameplay would proceed, without the detail of a finished full-sensory-immersion virtual reality game. In the tropical heat of Southeast Asia, he should be sweating buckets right now. Just like the jungle should be full of life, from birds and monkeys to clouds of insects.

Even with the storyscape in such an early state of development, the sheer magnitude of it made the one in Toni's workstation downright claustrophobic by comparison. Roger knew that much of that sense of scope came from tricks of data management. For instance, the distant mountains were created with a fractal algorithm rather than mapped individually, since gameplay wouldn't take player characters to those locations. Until Toni had lifted her prohibition on his communicating with any computer outside her local-area network, he'd used similar methods to eke out the memory and processor power of Toni's workstation when he created several acres of game preserve so he could go hunting and fishing. From his research, the techniques traced back to the beginnings of video games, to the dungeon crawls of the early Atari and Coleco console systems.

However, the vast majority of the difference came from the far greater digital horsepower of the servers on which this storyscape ran. Even the beta-test servers could maintain all the game's major locations simultaneously, albeit with some fudges on travel between them that would go away once the game went operational and migrated to a full server farm.

As he worked through the storyscape, Roger could detect the seams where the various servers' work joined. If he were to set aside the simulation of a biological body and communicate directly with the computers running the game, he'd be able to observe how the servers passed player characters from one sector to the next.

He could never do so and maintain the illusion that a biological human being was operating this player character. He'd already exercised far too much flexibility and original thought to pass as an intelligent agent, and thus legal under the COMPUTE Act. Toni was known for using intelligent agents for routine tests of games in development, but even her best still had to remain under the limits Congress had established after the disaster in Dhaka.

It would be a foolish indulgence anyway, Roger reminded himself. The entire point of playtesting, at any stage of development, was to see what actual players would. Did the storyscape and gameplay provide an enjoyable gaming experience?

Which meant a creepy one, in a game based upon the Lovecraft Mythos. Just a little bit ahead there'd be a clearing where he'd see the ridge on the other side of the ravine.

Roger resumed the hike with renewed determination. Ah yes, here it is.

Even forewarned,