Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 33

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A short time later, Darla had finally gotten through the whole printout.

Not every blank had been filled in. Far from it. It was still all patchy, unstructured data, like “Feral cat crisis grows. Los Angeles citizens overrun. Tech leaders signal imminent Silicon Beach exodus.”

She couldn’t understand much of it, and much of what she could understand she didn’t care about. But she was able to piece together a lot of the answers to the questions that had been haunting us. And she was more convinced than ever that those answers were the truth.

According to the printout, our world was the crowning achievement of the real world’s Cyril Cunningham—a game called Project Do-Over. The game’s AI was like nothing anyone had ever seen, processing virtually every spec of publicly-available data as well as a lot of not-so-publicly available data to create a parallel digital reality. More than that, the printout stated, “Cunningham’s system creates consciousness.” Based on the details scattered throughout the pages, Darla gleaned that Project Do-Over really could imbue avatars and NPCs with a true sense of self—a genuine belief that they were real people with free will.

But Darla discovered that that was only half of the equation, as she came across five or six other passages, including one that read: “NeuroVista’s resurgent tech maps the mind and unlocks new horizons.”

While NeuroVista’s brain scan tech would stall in the 2020s, it seemed it would ultimately unlock the inner workings of the human brain in the late 2030s, enabling the company to, among other things, harvest memories from the scans.

By the middle of the century, that particular capability would be a widespread phenomenon, fueling a variety of applications in every field from law enforcement to medicine. People were compelled to get their scans refreshed as often as dental x-rays. And that, combined with Cyril Cunningham’s ground-breaking AI tech, was a recipe for digital clones of a good chunk of the populace.

Of course, negotiating access to the global database of scans was a huge undertaking, but not insurmountable, in light of the declining privacy laws brought on by an authoritarian trend in governments around the world. Or, as the printout put it, “Goliath thrashes human rights to build virtual clone-fest.”

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And so Project Do-Over was born. The ultimate cure for the curiosity of what could have been. What if you’d won the big game? What if you’d quit that job and taken the other one? What if you’d married her instead of her? What if you’d married him instead of her? Just spend some in-game credits to influence key decisions and find out!

But was the immeasurable amount of time and money involved to produce this game worth it? No. Not even close. Darla was able to piece it all together starting with a passage that quoted a New York times headline that read, “Cunningham’s venture backers see bright future with PDO.”

Apparently, the game was just a funding mechanism to offset costs and show investors how accurately the engine could leverage NeuroVista’s memory scans, news articles, weather reports, geographic surveys, and more to map the causal intersections of every detail of history. From there, the real potential would blossom. If the AI engine could process enough data to run a faithful representation of reality, what was to stop it from providing predictions for events still to come with unprecedented accuracy? The answer, investors hoped, was nothing. Goliath wasn’t just building a game. It was building a crystal ball.

Darla understood now that the printout was indeed a leak of both modified and unmodified data. She was reading history the way it was originally written and history as it was re-written by Project Do-Over as players spent in-game credits to alter key decisions.

In real life, it seemed her uncle and Ridley Merrick had both lived at least a couple of decades longer. And, impossibly, they’d been life-long friends and collaborators. The version of their lives that she knew had only occurred in the Project Do-Over beta, where they’d spent credits to stress-test the system.

By the time she’d finished reading, she’d connected a lot of other drips and drabs of data and made a lot of other big discoveries. But they all paled in comparison to the ones waiting in the last pages of the printout. The entries all had a different tone and they all concerned the same subject matter.

She dropped the pile of paper into her lap in disbelief. As she did, her eyes drifted to the doorway. And there, just outside the room, stood Nancy’s mother. She looked confused—as if she’d been yanked out of the abyss and dropped there. She turned and hurried off down the hallway.

Darla leaped to her feet and left Margaret dozing at Robbie’s bedside. When she reached the hallway, Nancy’s mother was almost at the elevator.

“Hey!” Darla called after her.

Nancy’s mother stopped and turned.

“I know who you are,” Darla said, holding up the printout. “I know what you are.”

“No time to say ‘hello, goodbye’,” Nancy’s mom replied. “I’m late, I’m late for a very important date.”

Then she leaped into the elevator and the door closed before Darla could reach her.