Jim's PoV
Jim always hated philosophy. If he could create a world where one million inhabitants didn't even know they were fake, what did that make him? He had always wondered why the world was so screwed up, and this might be the answer.
Was he just some figment in someone else's imagination? Maybe there used to be a real god, but he accidentally made himself into a vegetable while the simulation kept going. Was he a god? He created something from nothing. Man if he was a god, someone must have really screwed up. He tried to stop wallowing in self pity and started looking at what he created more rationally.
He created over a million unique minds in only a couple hours. And he could do it again too. He could create an additional copy, it would be as simple as loading another copy of the game in his noggin. Man that would only be weirder. He only had two eyes, how was he going to look at three different worlds at the same time when the next dog comes along and chews his boot off?
Then his mind went into the gutter. It didn't have to be a copy of the one he had already created, it could be anything he put his mind to. Jim was drooling a little bit as he imagined creating "Waifu World."
Every single anime and game character in existence could be all rolled into one world. And then little Jim piped in helpfully, "Well, only the female ones."
But no matter what they looked like, once the world was initialized, they would be people. Real people. People with emotions, hopes, fears and dreams. It was wrong. It was more than wrong, it was evil.
If this tech hit the open market, how many fantasy worlds would be created? How many worlds of suffering and death? How many worlds would be filled with telemarketers? Yep, there would be telemarketer worlds.
He could already see the arguments that large corporations would put to the courts. "Your honor, these people are not real. They are just a bunch of ones and zeros being converted into signals that your brain can interpret. It's no different from shooting people in a video game. They are not people."
Unfortunately the data he collected says otherwise and only around fifty people around the world would be qualified to answer that question. But when money is involved things can go sideways.
His game world was sloppy but still the uses were endless. Right now his world was a closed system but with another helmet and the right software, people inside the game world could connect via the internet to people on Earth.
That legitimately meant that if a telemarketing firm wanted to create a world with an army of digital people, all they would need is what Jim had in his hotel. They would just need one person to wear the helmet and have their copy in the new world spawn in with a helmet. That would create a connection between the worlds that could be wired into the internet.
The person wearing the helmet wouldn't even need to do anything useful. Just wear the helmet and not die.
And that's not even the true horror of it. Companies will want to figure out how to tweak the digital people to make them biddable. They would create loyal zombies that won't be able to object to anything asked of them. It would be slavery all over again, only worse. They would own their body, mind and soul.
Then there was the military potential. Each soldier could have his own world that he could train in, except he would never be the one to die. Worlds would be created that were designed to push soldiers to a new limit.
They would be able to experience what a real firefight was like over and over. Entire battles could be played while one soldier focuses on their single task. The dead would be uncountable. They would be uncountable and have no rights to even their own mind.
It truly scared Jim. He thought of these scenarios in only a couple of hours, where would it end up in the years and decades ahead?
It was then Jim knew he could not let this technology out. If he did it would have to be a bastardized version, one that was incapable of creating digital people. He would need to bury the implication that digital people could be created from nothing so deep that no one would ever find out that it was a possibility.
Then there was the problem of a few million people living rent free in his head. Since his program was based off of a game there happened to be a 'game over' flag that would do very… interesting things should the function be called.
There were over a million new people in the world, and they would all die when Jim died.
When he found that out, it was a nice kick in the nuts. Turns out 'erase all memories in game' went a hell of a lot deeper than just forgetting what would happen in the game world. If game Jim died, it would trigger the 'game over' flag.
Normally in the original FF3 if your HP reached zero, the character never died. They were just knocked out. Only when the entire party got knocked out did the player get a 'game over.' But because he insisted on making it more lifelike, It was now possible to bypass being knocked out and go straight to being dead.
When the 'game over' event was triggered, the connection would be severed between the two Jims. It would be like getting kicked back to the start menu if you never saved. Your game stopped and you would have to start all over.
Just like the real FF3 game, when a 'game over' was reached, his simulation would stop. IRL Jim would forget all the people he interacted with. The 'game over' function would delete all the resources that the program was using, then revert the program to its original pre-installation form. Those resources included all those new people in his world.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The thought of being responsible for millions of souls left a heavy weight on his shoulders. It was supposed to be a game. Just a fun game that he could have a nice mindless adventure on.
Jim took a deep breath and tried to relax. He didn't want to be a god. He needed to find a long term solution for his new extended family. While Jim was still young, he wasn't going to be young forever. Hell, accidents happen all the time. He needed a solution, preferably a quick one.
Realizing this, two major goals solidified in his mind:
1: Stop the potential exploitation of digital people and
2: Figure out a long term solution for the people of Final Fantastic 3.
Millions of souls were on the line in the world of Final Fantastic 3, and potentially trillions of lives were on the line if this technology wasn't lobotomized. Jim needed to get ahead of the wave and make sure that his little accident didn't happen to anyone else.
He was still on the path of being the grandfather of the next big thing in virtual reality. Jim realized he was going to need a boat load of money.
The first major obstacle to his path was 3D Tech. If he could come up with a good offer, it would be accepted. They were really hurting for money right now. He needed to somehow buy the project from the company.
Jim sighed. That was tens of millions of dollars. Absently he shifted his right eye over to the game world and started throwing a gold piece up and down that was worth 10,000 gil. It was kind of hilarious. He could literally be swimming in a pile of gold, but that wasn't going to help him pay the bills. It was kind of hilarious that he had a fortune in gold while looking through one eye, yet in the other eye, he could see his thin depressed looking wallet on the hotel desk.
Absently he started looking at his inventory with his right eye. Quickly dragging his right index finger up and down the blue menu, he watched the item list scroll one way then the other. Jim leaned back in his chair and stretched. Just where in the world was he going to get a boat load of real money? It would be nice if he could just go to the bank and take out a small loan of 100 million dollars.
Grabbing a pen from his desk he started twirling it through the fingers of his left hand while he still had his menu open in his right eye. He couldn't think of a way to get a boatload of money without spilling his secrets, and that wasn't happening. Jim started throwing his pen and juggling it with his left hand. Man he hated money problems, they were so boring.
Whenever he got rich, he was totally going to hire someone to take care of all these boring things. Still stumped, he accidently made a terrible throw with his pen. He was half blind, so he made an estimated guess and tried to catch it. Brick.
Damn thing entered the blind spot of his right eye and he missed the grab. Annoyed, Jim started looking for the pen. It didn't make a clattering sound, so he figured he must have thrown it to his bed.
Five minutes later and he still couldn't find his pen. Dammit. He liked that pen. Grabbing a crappier one, Jim sat down and finally accepted that he somehow lost his good pen in a tiny hotel room. He even checked behind the desk and headboard of the bed and still found nothing.
Oh well, he would have to buy another one. Twirling cheapie ten cent pens just didn't have the same feel. The heft was wrong. Jim sat down in his chair again and started fiddling with his inventory while tossing around the new crappy pen. Where in the world was he going to find a few million dollars just laying around?
As Jim was absently scrolling through his item list, he was confused when he found an item that he only had one of. He should have had 99 of everything. Scanning to the right to find out what it was, his heart stopped.
Looking him right in the face in the item list was "Jim's Pen x 1."
Hesitantly Jim clicked on the item in his game inventory. Jim was now holding a pen in his right hand, which with his right eye showed him that it was in the game world. A chill went up his spine. The theory for a vegetable god just grew a ton in probability.
Jim carefully replayed his memory of tossing his good pen. Then he realized the trajectory of the pen did intercept something. The blue box menu of the game. Was it really something that simple? It was in his blind spot before, but what if he scooted the blue box menu closer to the center of his vision?
Carefully he dropped the cheap pen using his left hand to where his inventory screen would be. This time his left eye saw the pen drop and then disappear when it would have hit his inventory tab. Next Jim started scrolling through his massive inventory list to see if he could find another item that he only had one of. Sure enough, it was there. "Jim's Cheap Pen x 1."
But was it all just one way? Could he only move items into the game world or would it work the other way around? Jim thought of how the blue boxes worked like a computer screen. How he could drag the window just like a computer tab and make it larger or smaller by clicking on the bottom corner.
If he thought of his two eyes as computer monitors, how would he get one file over to the other screen? Tapping on an item just used it. What else could he do? Maybe he could try to drag and drop it?
Jim tapped on the cheap pen in his game inventory, then instead of releasing the tap, he held it and started moving his finger to the left side of his vision. Only when he couldn't see his moving left hand with his right eye did he release the tap. Sure enough, the cheap plastic pen was once more in his left hand in the real world.
Jim sat there in a stunned stupor as he looked at the cheap pen in his left hand. There was one more experiment he needed to do. He had yet to materialize anything new. Would it really let him take items from the game and bring them over to the real world?
Jim scrolled over to the gil counter and tapped the icon in the menu. Under the gold column he pressed one. Before he hit the okay button that would materialize the coin in the game world, he dragged the gil menu with a one under gold to the left side of his vision.
The scientific part of his mind was telling him he should try to do a regular item, but the monkey part of his mind was screaming money, money, money, money! Sure enough, once the blue box with a one under the gold count fully crossed to the left side of his vision, he had a gold coin materialize in his left hand.
A ball of lead hit the bottom of his stomach. While the monkey side of his brain was saying, "Free money! Free! Yahoo," his scientific mind realized this should be an impossibility. This gold coin represented definitive proof that the world was not what it seemed to be.
Matter cannot be created or destroyed. But he had living proof of doing both. The only way for it to be possible for matter to be created or destroyed was if the place was not real. The world of FF3 was known to be not real, so no shocker that it is possible there.
However if a fake item can be forced to materialize on Earth, only one conclusion can be drawn. That Earth is also fake. In the back of his mind the word simulation was ringing.
It wasn't even a new concept. People had been speculating that life could just be a simulation for a while now. Taking a deep breath Jim refocused himself. Whether he was a simulation or not did not matter in the least. He was the author of his own tale. He would bend not one, but two worlds to his will.
And then his stomach growled. Well, the whole bending to his will could wait till after dinner. Even simulations got hungry. Jim picked up the phone to place a call to the local pizza joint.