Show Us Endless Neon Vistas

[MurderWeasel]

Down the hall from the room in which a boy was practicing with a newfound toy stood a girl in pain.

The pain wasn't intense, and the intensity it had wasn't consistent, because it was self-inflicted. She stood with her left pinky finger tucked in her mouth, biting down enough to hurt, varying the pressure to vary the degree of hurt, considering the sensation and what it implied.

Interesting.

There was something simultaneously admirable and abominable about Zeph's little game. It was groundbreaking, fascinating. The ability to reach out into meatspace, to touch it from within the safety of CR, was revolutionary, and in ten or twenty years it would be the norm; this was something she firmly believed. This attack was another way in which CR proved it was real, proved that it mattered. You could kill somebody via CR now, and in its own way that was beautiful.

However, the manner in which this was being implemented was disappointing. Pain? How little faith they held in the class of Sycamore High. Perhaps it was warranted, but nevertheless it felt like an insult and a missed opportunity.

The point of CR was to go beyond human limits and to erase human weaknesses. CR promised a world in which pain need never be felt again unless one wanted to. The evolutionary purpose of pain was to signal when something was wrong, to offer a stick to contrast the dopamine carrot of pleasure. From that perspective, it made sense that there was pain here, but it proved that their captors thought them too intellectually stunted to consider this seriously and rationally without a base meatspace workaround to hammer it home. Pathetic. They were rational actors, were they not? They could decide their course of action and pursue it.

Well, that would be what she was doing regardless of pain, which was meaningless in this context. The sensation was very lifelike, she had to give it to them. The texture was different, her bottom molars digging into the soft flesh of her fingertip, while the top row were warded off to some extent by her fingernail. She flicked her tongue across the edge, felt the place where just a few millimeters of nail overhung. You didn't have to trim your nails in CR, but she'd never felt a need to have hers anything but short.

With a deep breath, she opened her mouth and removed her fingertip, then stared at it.

There was a dark spot in the middle, not a bruise but a place where the flesh was flushed, but even in seconds it faded away, and the residual pain did with it.

It wasn't quite right. In meatspace, that would take minutes to dissipate, and would do so less evenly. Here, seconds. Disappointing. Still the best she'd ever seen.

She stood still a moment longer, looking down the hall, empty in a liminal sort of way that others might have found distressing if they weren't used to such explorations beyond the veil, and saw nothing but fluorescent lights reflecting off tiles, doors one like the other.

Perhaps it was time to see just what she'd been gifted.

((Xtra Zimmermann continued in The Amazing Digital Death Game!))