Alternative Dimension

Alternative Dimension

Bill Kirton

© Bill Kirton 2012

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN-13: 978-1480022058

ISBN-10: 1480022055

DEDICATION

For the many friends I met in Second Life™.

CONTENTS

What others said about
Alternative Dimension

“… for all its dystopian menace, the story is carried along by its sparkling humour and we find ourselves enjoying the fate of those seduced by the promise of virtual bliss.”

—Edgar

“I liked the humor … and the sometimes absurdly comical events that take place in AD’s world”

—Heikki Hietala

“… there is humour aplenty. Like a picaresque novel, or a weird modern version of
Pilgrim’s Progress
, or maybe even a
Canterbury Tales
for our times”

—Cally Philips

PROLOGUE

Stitchley Green hated mirrors as much as he hated his name. His parents, Samuel and Samantha, had been flower children and they’d met at a ‘happening’ in a barn which called itself The Stitchley Experience. They’d tossed a coin to decide whether to make love that night or wait until the following day and do it in dew and sunshine. It was tails, so Stitchley was conceived, twelve minutes later, on a hay bale. If the coin had come down heads, he’d have been called Dew, so his beginnings weren’t as bad as they might have been.

The two Sams stuck to their Peace and Love convictions long past the time when those who’d shared joints with them had become bankers and copywriters for ad agencies. As a result, Stitchley’s early schooling had involved sitting in fields looking at blades of grass or, with dad on guitar, singing along to his mum’s lyrics about ‘stones of repentance, trees of despair, and all the bright confusion of disaster’. He didn’t understand any of it but he did like living in a tree.

At last, though, their tree was felled and reality started to push its way into their idyll. Both Sams got jobs so Stitchley had to go to school. Which was bewildering. You’d think, with such a name, he’d be bullied. In fact, to his surprise, he turned out to be quite popular. But it was mainly because the other kids in his class were always entertained by the answers he gave the various teachers. When they were studying the Tudors, the History master had asked him how many English kings had the name Henry.

‘Well, I’ve heard of the one who killed his wives, Henry VIII,’ said Stitchley.

‘Good,’ said the teacher. ‘So how many Henrys were there, then?’

Stitchley gave it some more thought and said, ‘Four’.

It was the same in Modern Studies. The teacher wanted to know which middle east country was causing problems by threatening to make hydrogen bombs. It was the main one in what George W Bush, when he was president of the USA, had called the Axis of Evil. Stitchley tried Cardiff, then Ireland, then asked for a clue.

‘OK,’ said the teacher, and he suddenly ran down the aisle between the desks.

‘Now, what would I say I’d just done?’ he asked, panting a little. ‘I ….?’

‘Went to the back of the room?’ said Stitchley.

‘No,’ said the teacher. ‘Listen – today I RUN, but last week I …?’

‘Walked?’ said Stitchley.

And so it went on. Stitchley frowning with puzzlement as his classmates and teachers fell about roaring with laughter. He told the Religious and Moral Education teacher that the Pope was Jewish, and his efforts at Creative Writing are still kept in a special file in the school library, which gets read more often than any of the great literary masters on the shelves. People just love reading stories in which ‘Sir Lancelot was as tall as a horse which was six feet tall’, or ‘They had never met before that day, so they were like two people who had never met before’.

After school, he’d had a series of poorly paid jobs until the economic situation and some brutal government cuts ensured he’d probably never find work again. So when we meet him, at the age of forty-two, he seems to have lived down to his name with great success. One look at him explained immediately why he hated mirrors. The kindest word one might use of his appearance and demeanour would be ‘unprepossessing’ but most people satisfied themselves with sounds of simulated vomiting. Later, though, when he resurfaces here, we’ll see how a simple online role-playing game turned his life, and reality itself, upside-down and brought him satisfactions far in advance of many of those enjoyed by his contemporaries and an opulence which changed his sixty-eight year old mother’s lyrics  forever.

1 THE BIRTH OF AD

When it came to programming, Joe Lorimer was a genius. To him, algorithms were as transparent as politicians’ promises. He could knock one up in the time it takes the rest of us to key in a password, carving out immaculate solutions step by step to make life easier for everyone who bought his company’s products. But it was only that Tuesday night in the pub, when the booze had shoved his usual clear, disciplined logic aside that his gift moved up a gear and his life changed along with that of hundreds of thousands of others. It was his first step towards the millions he would make. It also led to his eventual disappearance.

It was a chat with Nathan that started it.

‘One day,’ Joe said, as he took the full pint glasses off the tray and laid them on the table, ‘we won’t need this stuff to get out of our skulls. Won’t even need a pill.’

‘Crap,’ said Nathan. ‘

‘No, true,’ said Joe. ‘No outside agencies. Just a slide into another dimension.’

His hand described the slide – a slow, graceful, confident motion.

‘I reckon you’re already there,’ said Nathan.

Joe sat back and did his ‘I know things you couldn’t even dream of’ pose.

‘That industrial revolution,’ he said.

‘What about it?’

‘Chicken feed. Paltry.’

‘Poultry?’

‘No, paltry. Compared with what’s happening now, a blip. Nothing.’

‘What’s happening now is you’re talking crap,’ said Nathan.

‘You’ll see,’ said Joe. ‘We’re right on the cusp of a virtual revolution.’

‘Well, that’s all right then. If it’s only virtual …’

Joe raised a hand to stop him.

‘D’you know there are nearly two hundred different virtual worlds on the go?’ he said. ‘With more people registered on them than there are actual people in the USA and Europe combined.’ He took out his mobile and looked at it. ‘Soon, we’ll be using these to synch our real world with a virtual one.’

‘I don’t have a virtual one,’ said Nathan.

‘You’ve got more than you think,’ said Joe. ‘People still talk about 3D. That’s Stone Age stuff. Know how many dimensions there are in string theory?’

‘Three hundred and twelve.’

‘No, don’t be a dickhead. Ten. Still not enough, though. M-theory reckons there’s eleven.’

‘Maybe, but this is the only one with real beer. That’s the way I like it.’

Joe gestured towards the others sitting round the crowded bar. It was the usual mix, punters in their twenties and thirties, a few a bit older, males and females, fat, thin and ranging from gorgeous to grotesque.

‘Yeah, but think about it. In a virtual world, this lot would all look like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie,’ he said. ‘Better, really. Heard of ray tracing?’

Nathan shook his head and drank some more.

‘It’s a way of sort of simulating 3D,’ said Joe. ‘We’re getting faster connections, more processing power, video streaming’s better. Soon you won’t be able to tell the difference between what’s on your screen and what’s going on around you.’

‘That’s been happening for years,’ said Nathan. ‘Soaps, Big Brother, X Factor. Christ, they even call it “Reality” TV. We’re living our lives through a bunch of onscreen losers and wankers.’

‘Yeah, but I’m talking about interacting with the screen people,’ said Joe, getting even more excited. ‘Being one of them, making real and virtual the same.’

‘Joe,’ said Nathan, putting a hand on his arm. ‘You’re talking shite. OK, it’s the sort of shite I like, but it’s still shite.’

Hard to believe maybe, but that’s where Alternative Dimension, or AD as everyone now calls it, started. In the weeks after that drunken chat, Joe revisited some favourite websites on programming, 3D graphics engines, physics simulation and real-time shader techniques. He’d played plenty of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. He knew the strategies and what he’d need in the way of game mechanics, network protocols, security safeguards and relational database design. He understood the fundamental architecture of the systems needed to create a stable online environment which would be permanently in place when players decided to visit.

He also knew that, to make it work the way he wanted it to, he’d need to find funding. Big funding. Bloody huge funding, in fact. And if he really did want to convince speculators that he was worth a punt, his demo version would need to offer something very different from all the ones which were already up and running.

He had all the technological know-how but it was the psychology of the game that interested him most. There were no algorithms governing human behaviour. He read how people in the normal dimension of their everyday lives (or ND as he and those who played AD came to call it) had joined role-playing games and basically created new versions of themselves. Control freaks, decision-makers, individuals in upper management – they all logged on as slaves and servants to get insights into areas of life which were foreign to them. Men chose to be women and vice versa. Supermarket shelf-stackers could be lions, dragons, emperors. The point was that, in the end, they weren’t just playing a game; the things they did with others in the games were real. Their avatars moved in magic kingdoms but the experiences took place in the minds of the people sitting at keyboards in ND.

Joe decided not to use voice-activated protocols to begin with. He reckoned that, by making players contact each other by typing messages on screen, he could slow the whole process down, give it a different tempo from that of ND and make it all more relaxed. Survey after survey showed that players, especially men, found socialising easier online and actually preferred to ‘be’ with others while they stayed in the warmth and security of their own home. Typing their thoughts gave them time to shape them with more care, and anyway, it wasn’t so different from the texting they were doing every day in their normal lives. They were just moving in a different world, one where they could lose their inhibitions, tell lies. They were free.

So Joe filled the world of AD with sensory experiences and opportunities which increased that feeling of freedom and turned promises into realities. When the investors he approached tried the game, they were excited by it, saw its potential and, just over two years from that drunken conversation with Nathan, the beta version of Alternative Dimension was launched. It took less than two months for journalists to discover it and the enthusiasm of their reviews soon had people signing on from everywhere in the world. AD had become a reality.