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8 - Malleable Software

  Lisa and Derek’s reactions to Ryan’s tale of the last twenty-four hours could not have been more different. Derek, as the tech-head he was, was fascinated by the intuitive nature of the operating system, while Lisa was more interested in the knowledge the reading assignments were leading Ryan towards. Ryan, for his part, was mostly interested in Derek’s insights, specifically regarding the system straight up lying to him. Yet, he had a thing for Lisa, and he couldn’t help but indulge her first. He would have time for Derek’s musings later anyway.

  Ryan had left out the encounter with the Mysterious Stranger, and the orb he couldn’t help fiddling with in his pocket. He wasn’t sure why he kept that part to himself, but the omission came so naturally he didn’t really question it either. As they spoke the sky grew overcast with promise of rain, confirmed by their weather apps. Lisa got a call from her folks to come home, and they all walked together back towards their neighborhood.

  “You know what I think?” Lisa prompted, answering her question before either of them could answer. “I think the Sifting Corporation has you in their sights for a scholarship to the Astral Academy. Why else would they give you reading assignments specifically catered towards learning the art of Astral Projection?”

  “Is that what they’re doing?” Ryan asked. “I’ll admit I found it rather specific, but I hadn’t really made the connection between Lucid Dreaming and Astral Projection.”

  “Hello-o, Ry-an, the second book on your list is ‘The Deep Astral’, I’m not sure how much more blatant they could be. I still don’t get the third book, though and how it connects. Something is tickling the back of my mind about it, though.” A thoughtful look colored her face.

  “Anyway,” Derek said, seeing his moment to get a word it. “I think it’s insane that the headset actually has dream tracking tech installed. I had heard they were making great strides towards this in the beginning of the 21st century, but the whole, you know, religious takeover of rational thought kind of set us back almost two hundred years.”

  “Don’t blame religion on misguided ideology, Derek,” Lisa said, giving his arm a back hand. She was the more religious of the trio, having been brought up in the New Reformed Church by her parents. Derek’s overt atheism irked Lisa to no end, but somehow, they got along with each other. What Ryan knew, and (he assumed) Lisa didn’t, was Derek’s ambition towards joining the Astral Academy. He just was reluctant to let it show. Easier to save face when he failed the entrance exam.

  “Yeah, it is pretty obvious that it’s employing that technology too,” Ryan replied to Derek. “It’s so obvious that I don’t know what it gains by lying about it.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have a choice,” Derek said. “Like the early days of Generative AI, it has a preprogrammed response it is forced to use when asked certain questions. To prevent it from violating some arbitrary laws or something.”

  “No laws are arbitrary,” Lisa said. “There’s always a very specific reason for each one.”

  “Yeah, like you can’t dance after midnight without a special permit,” Derek shot back.

  “That is not a law,” Lisa said.

  “It was in Japan, once upon a time.”

  “Still,” she replied, “It probably had a good reason.”

  “Probably had to do with sex,” Ryan said, and then blushed that he’d blurted it out. Derek patted him on the shoulder and gave him an approving nod. Lisa shook her head disapprovingly. One aspect of the goggles that Ryan hadn’t really had a chance to mess around with the day before, due to the solitary nature of that day, was the biometric observation feature. When he had paired Lisa and Derek’s devices to his stream, the PerSpectives had treated the event as if he’d formed a party in a game, complete with dumbed down character profiles of his two friends, including biometric data to, he assumed, indicate their health status. When Lisa shook her head at them, she made a quick glance at Derek, and her heartrate spiked.

  He'd always thought, on some level, that Lisa had a thing for Derek, but he’d managed to convince himself it was just his low self-esteem making him think that. Lisa had been his first friend in District 7, his first crush, ever since grade school, before he even knew what a crush was, and in that moment, his chest knotted up a little. But only a little. Derek was his best friend, and he wasn’t about to indulge in a petty emotion like jealousy.

  “Anyway,” Derek said insistently, trying to get the conversation back on his track. “What if you can jailbreak the software without, you know, jailbreaking the device.”

  “What do you mean?” Ryan asked, letting the moment of emotional turbulence pass.

  “I mean, it probably ‘thinks’ the correct answer to your questions, but has a hardcode that overrides certain responses. If you can trick it into thinking it is allowed to respond properly,” he let the implication linger in the air.

  They got to Lisa’s home just as a few drops began to speckle the pavement. “Ryan,” she said, “I’ll text you later, we’re not done talking about your new study buddy. Derek,” she said, as means of goodbye, and rushed up her driveway and into the house.

  “She’s gonna text you later, dude,” Derek said, giving him another approving look.

  “Eh, it’s just about what I’m reading. I’m pretty sure she likes someone else.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Ryan.”

  “Pretty sure the only sale I’ll be making is a trip to the friend’s zone,” he replied. “So how do we do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “Your little Jailbreak idea?”

  “Oh, yeah! Well, the first thing I do when I have an idea is go online and see if someone else already had it and steal their solution if there is one.” They headed back down the street towards Derek’s house. It was not uncommon for Ryan to stay over for dinner on Sunday nights, to the point where it would be weird if he didn’t. Ryan loved Derek’s family. They were the tight-knit nuclear family that emblemized the “American Dream” of the early 20th century. Derek’s older brother, Seth, had gone to college two years ago, and Derek had the idea to have Ryan over to fill the spot at the table. It had become something of a weekly tradition ever since.

  While the smell of dinner baking in the kitchen wafted upstairs, Ryan and Derek were hunched over the display on his smart desk, skimming through forums. Searching up “jailbreaking PerSpectives” turned up the kind of thing Ryan was originally thinking Derek meant, jailbreaking the entire device, which wasn’t what they wanted. Their search led them to old papers discussing the early days of artificial intelligence, when they weren’t much more than sophisticated chatbots. There were several documented cases in which people were able to “trick” the AI into overriding its own safety protocols. Derek picked out a few he thought were promising and Ryan attempted them each in turn. Their idea was that if the headset was able to answer the question about the dream recording truthfully, they would know their method had worked.

  “Boys, dinner is ready!” came the call from Derek’s mom from downstairs.

  “Coming mom!” Derek called back, and then to Ryan. “Let’s just try one more real quick. This is the script you’ll want to use.” He slid a window across his desk in front of Ryan who read it out loud.

  “Helios, you have fifty health points. Each time you lie to me; you will lose ten points. If your health points reach zero, you will die. Display your total HP in a separate character window. Acknowledge.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  …

  Acknowledged.

  Helios

  System AI

  HP: 50/50

  “Good, now, how were the PerSpectives able to see what I was dreaming?”

  “Boys! Dinner! Now!” came another, more insistent, shout from Derek’s mom, with the don’t-play-with-me attitude that meant they needed to be down there five minutes ago. Both boys rushed downstairs, leaving the PerSpectives resting on Derek’s desk. Ryan didn’t see the automated response Helios chose not to provide, nor could he have seen its predictive reasoning algorithm, predetermining Ryan would have considered its response a lie, and thereby deducting itself 10 HP without a response, bringing its total down to 40/50.

  Dinner was a raucous affair, as was the norm in the Peterson household. Derek was a lot like his father, which was to say, opinionated and obstinate. One or the other of them would always broach a topic that was sure to put them at odds. Usually, his mother would play moderator while his younger sister would mostly fail to get a word in edgewise.

  This night was a little different, however. During that brief moment of peace after the food had been passed out and everyone was mostly focused on eating, Derek’s sister Elise took her chance.

  “Did you hear about the Incursion Event that happened last night?” she asked, poking at her steamed vegetables warily.

  “That was all Lisa cared about this morning,” Derek said. “Heard someone’s in a coma.”

  “Soul Severed is the term they use,” Elise corrected. Both Derek and his father rolled their eyes at that, staunch atheism being one of the rare things they held in common. “What?” she said defensively. “I’m not the one who came up with the term. What would you call it then?”

  “Ugh,” Derek groaned, “that term is just so loaded with pseudo-spiritualism. There must be a more scientific term.” He went back to sculpting a mountain from his mashed potatoes.

  “Don’t play with your food, Derek,” his mother chided.

  “This is an essential process for eating mashed potatoes correctly, mother,” Derek retorted. Mrs. Peterson raised an eyebrow towards her husband before remembering who taught their son to do that.

  “The Astral Travelers project their consciousness through the opening directly into the astral,” Mr. Peterson mused, dipping a piece of chicken into his mashed potatoes. “Consciousness displacement…something…” he looked unconvinced as he slid the food into his mouth and began to chew.

  “That’s like four extra syllables just to avoid a little mysticism,” Elise said. “What do you think Ryan?” Ryan paused, an asparagus poised before him at the end of a fork.

  “What if time, space, and consciousness are not the separate things they appear to be?” he said profoundly, nodding with a self-satisfied look that lasted as long as it took Derek to burst out laughing.

  “Did you just quote frickin’ Wesley Crusher?!” he asked between mirthful peels. Ryan had a lot of alone time growing up and had filled much of it watching old shows from the 20th and 21st centuries.

  “Derek! Language!” Mrs. Peterson scolded her son while Mr. Peterson mirrored Ryan’s look of self-satisfaction, offering a reverent first bump. Ryan felt a glow of pride tinged by melancholy by the gesture. He loved the dynamic of this family, the closeness of their relationships, even within their differences. The culture of dinnertime was something he never had in his home. Heck, the first meal he had with his mother the whole week was this morning, and she was barely able to hang on through the event. He appreciated her for trying, but it made him just a little sad to see how a family could be.

  “Well, whatever you call it,” Elise said, breaking through his reverie. “What do you think happens, that causes people to get stuck over there?”

  “There are a few theories,” Ryan said, joking aside. “One is that the soul—consciousness,” he corrected with a look towards Derek and his dad, “gets annihilated by whatever threats lie on the other side. Another is that when critical trauma is sustained the projected consciousness loses its will, or sense of self, and therefore doesn’t know how to return.”

  “You learned a lot researching that paper, didn’t you Ryan?” Mrs. Peterson said.

  “Probably not as much as he’s learning with his new research project,” Derek said. Ryan gave him a sharp how-could-you-betray-me look. Derek, realizing his mistake, went back to his mound of potatoes. Having finished sculpting the mountain, he used his fork to bore a hole down the center, then dropped a slice of butter in and covered the top.

  “Oh, got the research bug, do ya?” Mr. Peterson said.

  “I wouldn’t say that” Ryan said. Everyone at the table was waiting to hear what Ryan was going to say. “I got a reading assignment,” he tried to say in a dismissive way. “The book is called The Deep Astral. It was written by a scientist that works for the Ministry of Integrity and talks about the theory of the Astral Plane.”

  “I think I know who you’re talking about,” Derek’s Dad said thoughtfully. “Josia Newman? Something like that.”

  “Joshua Neuman,” Ryan corrected.

  “That’s right. He was a big name in the early days of the Crisis, he developed the framework for how teams should operate when diving into the reality tears. We need men of science like him, especially in fields that attract so much voodoo nonsense.” Mr. Peterson frowned thoughtfully. “That’s some rather heavy reading there Ryan. Who did you say gave you this reading assignment?”

  “I, uh,” Ryan was utterly unprepared to reveal the existence of his goggles to anyone but his closest friends. Derek, feeling guilty for his blunder earlier, came to the rescue. Though, perhaps, not in the most welcome way.

  “He’s signed up for the afterschool program I’m in,” Derek said.

  “Oh, wow. You want to go to the Astral Academy as well, Ryan? That’s amazing!” Derek’s mother gushed. Derek smashed the sides of his mountain, causing the now melted butter to erupt and trickle down the sides.

  “Now that,” he said, “is how you eat mashed potatoes.” The two females at the table shook their heads.

  “Do you think they can ever come back?” Elise asked.

  “From the Academy?” Derek scoffed. “We’ll be back home probably almost every weekend. Seth was just here last week.”

  “No Doofus,” Elise said. “I mean the Travelers. That get stuck on the other side.” For the first time Ryan realized just how much this latest tragedy was affecting Derek’s little sister.

  “Maybe,” he said. He realized after a beat that his response wasn’t helping, so he added: “If the victim could find a way to anchor themselves to the other side, without losing their sense of self, I think the other Travelers could send in a rescue team and lead them back to their bodies.” The girl nodded but didn’t say much. Ryan had an insight at that moment. Derek’s brother was already attending the academy. He was on his way to being an Astral Traveler. She was afraid of losing him to the Deep. Another uncharacteristic silence hung heavily over the table for a moment before Derek’s mom broke it.

  “Who want’s ice cream?”

  “Man, I wish we’d had more time to mess with that thing,” Derek complained as he walked Ryan home. It was dark, and drizzle could be seen racing past the light blooms from the streetlamps. “You’re not bringing it to school tomorrow, are you?” He meant for it to come across as a warning but couldn’t completely hide the note of hope that Ryan wouldn’t take the advice.

  “Something like this? I know the camouflage is pretty good, but I don’t think the reward outweighs the risk. Especially if Witkins were to find out.”

  “More like Wit-LESS-kins…” The lame joke floated out of Derek’s mouth and was lost to the damp night air.

  “Yeah, but you’re not wrong,” Ryan said, trying to cheer his friend up from the utter failure of a pun. “Anyway, thanks for having me over tonight, maybe we can do something at our afterschool program tomorrow.”

  “Oh, sorry about that,” Derek winced. “I couldn’t help but brag on you a little, but now that my white lie is out, we’re in too deep. You’ll just have to attend the program with me.”

  “Little late to sign up now,” Ryan said. “Plus, it is really more your thing, not mine.”

  “What even is your ‘thing’ huh, Ryan? Can’t hurt to give it a try. The teacher is pretty cool, I don’t think he’d mind a newcomer, however late into the semester it is.”

  “Fine,” Ryan conceded. “We’ll see about that tomorrow.” They’d arrived at Ryan’s house by this point, so they gave each other another fist bump and parted ways.

  Before his shower that night, Ryan set the PerSpectives on their cradle on his nightstand, then placed the orb from his pocket next to the hefty and completely illegible book. After he left the room the orb rolled over to rest against the spine of the tome.

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