EPILOGUE – PATCH NOTES 27.X
(Physical Conference Room 222B, Baxter Building, NERV Headquarters)
Morgan Elliott was nervous. That wasn’t unexpected, given the situation. Sure, there were always risks when doing medical testing, but what had happened during the in-game event in Sol System had major ramifications.
After all, the ‘psychic wave’ in game had rendered all Nomads in the system comatose in real life. Sure, the interruption wasn’t terribly long for most of them, what with the 4:1 time compression. Some were only out of it for a few seconds, real time. But others, like their favorite beta tester, had been out for over a day. That wasn’t something that could simply be brushed off and swept under the rug.
The dramatic failure had forced the tech staff to have to recheck all the safeties, and see where the malfunction had happened, or whether they needed to make new ones. Thankfully, there was actually some good news on that front. The safeties had actually worked.
Looking at the data, the confluence of in-game events had caused sensory data to rise to overwhelming levels, and the safeties had entered a controlled disconnect. The severity of the sensory overload depended on the psychic sensitivity of the individual characters, which made sense, since the system interpreted ‘psychic powers’ by increasing the information flow to psy users over time. This was basically training them to accept greater and greater levels of data as their skills increased.
Unfortunately, greater data transfer abilities made the users more susceptible to the sensory overload, effectively making it the same as having a lightning strike on a high-volume data center. The safeties functioned, but they worked effectively like circuit breakers, shutting down the connection, and ‘rebooting’ it. The length of time it took to ‘reboot’ was proportional to the amount of overload.
She smiled as the door opened, and the person who was most affected by the event came in. “Ah, Mr. Grosse, it is good to see you in the flesh again.”
Shaking her offered hand, the former Navy man smiled. “Well, I was eager to hear what the results were, for obvious reasons.”
“Yes, well, to start off, the engineers have gone through the data, and we’re happy to say that the safety measures put in place on the EVA-01 and -02 pods worked correctly, but they were simply overwhelmed by the scale of the psychic wave. Think of it like the circuit breaker on a small cabin getting blown out by a direct lightning strike. Yes, the breakers flipped, preventing a lot of damage, but there’s only so much they can do against what is effectively a force of nature.”
Frowning, he said, “Yes, but that doesn’t exactly make one feel comfortable about getting back into the pod, you know?”
Morgan sighed. “Well, that brings us to the real reason we brought you in. As part of the medical testing initiative, we had more information on what happened to you, individually, which was fortunate, as you were the most severe case. As we said in our email, your increased use of psy abilities in game left you more exposed to the psy-based sensory overload in game.
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“Now, the good news is that this event has exposed the issue with massive overstimulation, and scans have showed that there has been no evident neurological damage from the attack. While it is too soon to say whether there have been any long-term psychological effects, the doctors believe that the risks of it are relatively minor. And we have already begun adding more safeguards to the system, to prevent overstimulation events like this from happening in the future.”
“What are those safeguards?”
“Well, the solutions are primarily hardware related, with some software masking, to keep things in the game world from being out of place. The highest bands of connectivity are being restricted. Most players won’t even notice the limitation, because they haven’t delved deeply enough into psy powers to run up against them.”
“But I would be an exception, yes?”
“Yes, you, and others, such as certain members of the Chaos Brigade, have devoted enough energy to opening yourself to the connectivity that you may hit that wall if you are exposed to another event like the psychic wave. There will be interface options that will come up if you hit that limit, and will allow you to choose whether or not to risk exposure. A change in the EULA and waiver forms will be going out with the software patch, as well as a public post on the real-world forums, to announce the change.”
The tester nodded slowly. “I see. So that settles intentional situations where I might hit the wall, but what about freak events, like the psychic wave?”
“Well, that ties into some of the in-game cover for the changes. The wave showed people that there were serious psychic vulnerabilities, so they are adding psychic filters to existing planetary, station, and ship defenses. These won’t protect against individual psychics, especially ones already inside the shield, but they will provide some defense against events like the psychic wave.”
“And what about people outside defended areas? Or in areas where the defenses are brought down, or their ship’s shielding is damaged?”
“Forced logout, with their consciousness shunted to a ‘white room’ prior to impact. Much like how we cut out the feed just before impact if someone falls from the top of a skyscraper, or like when you were shot by that assassin at the end of the Imperial Civil War. You probably didn’t even notice, but your feed cut out just before the bullet hit your avatar.”
“So, you basically extended that existing system to the sensory overload filters?”
“Essentially, yes.”
The tester nodded once, satisfied. “Well, that’s great to know. Now that I know that my brain isn’t going to go dribbling out my ears from in-game events, what about the real-world side-effects of the wave?”
“Real-world side-effects? You mean…”
The tester grit his teeth, and grunted with effort as he pushed himself up, out of the chair he’d rolled in with. It clearly took a lot of effort, but Morgan was utterly amazed. A paraplegic man was standing in front of her!
“Oh, wow. The doctors said that there had been signs of muscle improvement, as the EVA-02 pod prevented your muscles from atrophying, and effectively started working your muscles for the first time since your accident, but this is incredible! If I wasn’t seeing it, I wouldn’t believe it.”
Carefully as he could, the tester collapsed back into the chair, clearly physically fatigued by just that effort. His muscle atrophy may have stopped, even started reversing itself, but he still had a long way to go, clearly. “Yeah, but, you know, since I had a spinal injury, I was really pretty surprised when I found I could move my legs again.”
Morgan took a breath, and said, “Well, if you remember back when we first offered you the testing position for the EVA-02 pod, the doctors were looking to test out some additional technology that was related to the pod’s creation. Obviously, we have perfected a mind-machine interface. The nervous system is, in the end, essentially the ‘motherboard’ for the body, with the brain as its CPU. With that in mind, one of the proposed procedures was to take the nanite solution we use to keep your body clean and recycle waste and bodily fluids while in long-term immersion, and see if there wasn’t some way to bridge the gap in a severed spinal cord.”
“Not that I’m not grateful, but I think that experimental surgery with nanites goes beyond what I gave consent to.”
“That’s because the procedure was still in the planning stages! While project data from lab trials on rodents had been uploaded to the nanite control center in the pod to help in getting initial data, the doctors were still six real-world months from getting FDA approval for limited human testing, at least, and then we would have gotten your consent before actually attempting the procedure. I don’t know how this could happen!”
The tester grunted. “Then I think your techs have more work to do.”