lit - literature

I want to contribute, but my mind is dead and cannot think, but I don't want this thread to die.

Three and a bit pages long; hope you guys like it.

*****************************

After reading.

>Tell a little story…

Sorry, got carried away. Feel free to disregard and start over, but man oh man, you gave a nice prompt :)

Some suggestions for the rest of the story:

>Maybe this was the only ‘true’ instance of anon’s personality. Maybe he stole the identity of one of V.I’s patients to gain her trust (and inhabited the identity fully, emotions and all). Maybe anon begins to take on so many personalities that his identity becomes fluid (Hello, Philip K Dick.)

>Anon has to assume various fake personas to find access to the Palace. Maybe V.I. can help him. Maybe she’s been corrupted.

>Palace could be a cyberclub where people trade illicits, drugs, etc. Palace could be an exclusive simulation of paradise. Palace could be whatever. Palace could be a decoy.

>>1124
Damn, that was good! Definitely post more when you can.

I think it would be really cool if Anon had this corrupted, decaying copy of V.I. which is his only source of information on Palace, so it's a race against time. And Anon assumes various personae to talk to different types of people in cyberspace to gather information on Palace, most of which is somewhat sketchy.

Would you be cool with us taking over the story from there, or are you going to keep working on it? I was thinking that the thread wouldn't necessarily have a plot, but we could swing it that way.

Today I was an old man.

http://pastebin.com/3eHvZuVG

>>1124
very nice story, great job!

this thread is win i will contribute sometime soon

>>1124
This is a possible continuation of >>1124 by a different author

Today, I was a warrior. Brown blood stained the white painted wood of my armor as I whiped my blade clean on the clothes of a fallen enemy. I stared into the distance but saw nothing but grass, bamboo shrubs and the foggy simulation border in the distance. An arrow passed my ear so close that it played with a loose strand of my hair. I ducked and picked up a longbow myself as the second arrow struck a stone on the ground some distance behind me. The sky was filled with clouds but they were thin and the sun shone on them from behind and made them very bright, something I had used myself many times to gain advantage in a fight. I spotted the shooter as he straightened himself for the third time, withstood the urge to duck and breathed as I drew back the string. As I released the arrow and pierced his head, for a brief time, I was happy. Then I noticed that my leg was burning and saw the arrow stuck into into my leg up to the hilt. Unlike what people generally expect, arrows can leave terrible wounds and are capable of turning a healthy body part into a bloody mess, for example when coming from a powerful longbow modeled after the japanese daikyū. Damn, far too early. If I wanted to have a chance to beat this game, I could not allow myself to get wounded so early. "Let me try from the start!", I thought.

To avoid numerous uncomfortable sensations, avatars in VR games don't instantly change when a player loads a saved game. Instead, they gently rewind to that situation, for example grow back limbs and gain back their strength and reflexes. This is convenient because it takes some time to load high-fidelity VR environments anway. I would sit in a small teahouse and look at the swirling strands of mist outside until they finally cleared up and I could once again try to beat the mighty shogun himself, using my own intellect and the astonishing talents and reflexes of my simulated body. My destiny was to kill the traitor's supporters and survive until someday I might perhaps be worthy to make my way into the city palace to confront him.

This time, however, the strands of mist froze in place instead of clearing up, and my avatar slumped to the floor as I could no longer feel or hear anything at all while my eyes still worked for some reason. My VR rig noticed that I had lost control over my virtual body while being immersed and forced the game to terminate. I swore hoarsely as my meatspace body jolted awake and blinked through the overlay goggles with tired eyes, still sore from the hard plugout yesterday. "Is everything ok, fuarrrkhead?" a voice in my head asked, full of badly simulated concern. I laughed, then answered with a confirming thought.

A childish grin on my face, I called the resources usage history of the reconstruction program and noticed a huge spike. So that had frozen my game, no wonder. The coolant pump was still humming loudly as it transported the heat out of my PC in a thin silvery hose that snaked across the floor and up the wall where it was plugged in. I sighed.
When I had woken up late that morning, the first thing I had done was trying to load the incomplete image of V.I into an artificial intelligence evaluation program. It wouldn't be able to run it, not even closely so, but might at least be able to make an estimation concerning serviceability of the stolen copy. Of course, even that had failed miserably, so I head searched the internet for a program that might be able to patch up the broken file to a point where it could be parsed. The only software I had found was called "resscon" and was an unfriendly piece of crap with a million parameters that probably not even the developers remembered how to use correctly. At least that was what the documentation looked like, there was not a single example anywhere, only huge blocks of text with little usable content.

Because AIs are usually patched together from different software packages to fit a specific purpose, data images of AIs tend to be different from each other, too. Which was really soykafty when you only had an incomplete one and were trying to find out what some almost entirely missing parts were supposed to be and how you could get reader programs to just ignore them or something instead of exclaiming "hurr durr this image is corrupted" and terminating without further ado.
Right now, it gave no sign that it was still working as intended. I went to the kitchen, poured myself a noffee (not-exactly-coffee but not soykaf either) and hungrily ate some cookies.
>to be continued.. by someone else in this thread?

>>1133
PS: I just noticed this one is pretty soykaf since the protaginst is supposed to be sad about the fact the he will probably never be able to save VI now and frustrated which is why he was slaughtering npcs in VR

if there's a couple more contributions we can merge the whole thing with a collaborative text editor or something and fix stuff liek that

>>1126

Dude, nice start - makes me wonder what he's planning next, why he chose an old man avatar, and who he might meet at the teahouse.

>>1125
>>1128

Thanks you two, really glad you enjoyed the read.

> I think it would be really cool if Anon had this corrupted, decaying copy of V.I…

Very nice idea; a sense of urgency would be a good touch: losing a friend while losing time…

>Would you be cool with us taking over the story from there?

Oh my yes, please do, that'd be very exciting to see what you guys do next with it :) I might also continue to write in private and flesh out the story, but for the purposes of the story here you're welcome to write on

>>1137

Ah yeah I can see what you're going for - anon taking his mind off the V.I problem. I like that idea. In my head, a nice way to do this is to have him play the game in total disinterest - unable to immerse himself, unfeeling, still thinking about V.I problem. Descriptions of clouds, wounds and armour set the scene but don't tell us what he's thinking. Unless, say, you start with full immersion but then he gets a highscore and doesn't feel elated. Little touches like that solidify the idea.

Don't worry about making it perfect or forgetting details though - this is first draft territory after all.

I like what >>1125 was suggesting - having anon chat with all sorts of contacts to help him out with the V.I. problem instead of going solo, so I definitely think that's worthwhile following on from.

bumpity. might write something soon.

>>1467
oh soykaf this thread still exists? bumping before it 404s