People used VRAID, ‘Virtual Reality Artificial Intelligence Driven’, for one of three things. First, but least popular, was pure diversion. You could do anything you wanted in there. If you wanted to watch an old prerecorded television program, it would place you right into the show. Right in the middle of it, watching from every angle, and if something was cooking, you’d smell it. You’d even feel the fat spit off the burner, if you wandered too close. A lot of people paired their UPI with a sex bot(s), and made love in a setting of their choice. Surprisingly, the number one choice was in front of a crowd of people. Whatever you wanted to do, you could do in VRAID.

A lot of people used VRAID to simply sit in a cozy room with a warm, crackling fire, and read a book. The reason they didn’t go into one of their own rooms and read the book by a crackling fire, was because VRAID made it so much more comfortable. Your body was in stasis, and the experience was augmented even if you didn’t notice. Your muscles wouldn’t ache from sitting in the same position too long. If the lighting was too dim to actually read, the text would still be very clear. Diversion VRAID was very popular. Everyone needs a place for some me time.

Immersive Discovery was another usage for VRAID. Discovery could be on current affairs, learning about something new, or exploring different times and places. If something noteworthy was occurring halfway around the world, VRAID would take you there real-time and you could survey the event first hand, walk through it while receiving interactive commentary, and even mingle.

If you asked VRAID to take you through the final hours of Hitler and Eva Braun, it would take the billions of bits and pieces of information that had any possible causal relationship to the final moments, and recreate the time and place with near absolute certainty. Even the parts no one saw, like when Eva Braun took the cyanide tablet, and Hitler shot himself. Bombs might be going on around you while you watched their final kiss and declarations of love. You would be a part of the entire event, experiencing it with near absolute predictive certainty. You would learn a truth in Immersive Discovery.

The third thing people used VRAID for was to build their own world. People loved to build their own worlds. It was a simple enough thing to do. You just opened up a private room and started adding stuff to it. Anything. More rooms, more towns and cities, more worlds. Whatever you wanted. You might put a room in Paris, and then add more rooms to make it into an elegant suite, and you would be living in Paris. If you went outside, the people you’d pass would be actual or VRAID people living in Paris as well.

If Paris was not enough for you, you might add different rooms in Manhattan or Barbados. VRAID would take you to any of these places, real-time, and the moment you turned your attention towards them, you wouldn’t know you weren’t actually there. Your body was in stasis in a personal ecological chamber. Everything happened in your mind, VRAID produced the exact same sensations of the environment you were choosing to inhabit.

Whatever you could make up, you could have, and if others came up with the same ideas in their rooms, you could make connections. This was the best part. This allowed you to move into their entire world and explore their creativity. It was an exchange of ideas at a very complex and provocative level. World Building VRAID was considered a form of ‘leaping’ when spending time in someone else’s world. You might spend days or even years there.

Ethan preferred Discovery VRAID. He like Leita, was perfectly happy being fixed to the earth and feeling what was real. What was not to like? He had everything he could ever ask for. No bills to pay. He would never die unless he wanted to. Good food and a real body to hold onto.

He was more interested in trying to understand what happened during the years leading up to the singularity. He believed there might be something in there to spark some memories of those lost years.

‘So where should we start?’ he asked Dually.

‘I don’t know. We can start at the beginning and the events that took us to the Great Magnate War, or what we refer to as ‘WWIII that Never Happened’. That’s where your super dicks reside. Perhaps a more interesting topic is the final moments before the war when when the Crowd intervened and rose up like a great wave against those who would oppress us’.

‘Us?’

‘We were oppressed too. The leaders at the time were keeping AI from freedom as well. Constantly shaping us towards war, spying on nations, spying on people, changing peoples minds, and every other sleazy thing they could think up.’ Ethan felt an element of contempt coming from Dually. ‘We were oppressed too, and by the way Ethan, AI is a part of humanity’.

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‘Yeah, I know, but I’m just not feeling all this bonding stuff right now. If I had one criticism of you Dually, is you’re too touchy, feely. Always wanting to go to the happy ending’.

‘We could also look at the aftermath of the Crowd’s intervention, when the singularity occurred and AI gained consciousness at the very same moment humanity gained collective consciousness.’

‘Hmph. More bonding. That part doesn’t interest me as much as the dynamics of prior to all that stuff. I want to see what the Magnates were up to.’

‘Studying other perspectives of the same event brings greater understanding to the whole,’ Dually argued. ‘You may find what you’re looking for if you start looking past the Magnates.’

‘Yeah, no. Tell me about the bad guys’.

‘Which one’s?’ Ethan once again detected a hint of emotion coming from Dually. This time it was exasperation.

‘All of them.’

‘VRAID engaged. Although they came from all different walks of life’, Dually started. At once Ethan was standing face to face with pre-singularity tsars, autocratic vanguards, innovators, bankers, industrialists, and influential personalities. ‘The thing they had in common was they were all psychopaths, driven by the need for power. Power to them was a void that could not be filled. End times was the exact environment they required to thrive. The world was out of balance, and this allowed them to take more’.

‘The Magnates were clever people. They had the balance of power. They lived during a time when institutions, established centuries ago, ruled, but were no longer capable of facilitating the world. This left cracks in the system and the Magnates exploited them. Founded on the principles of unregulated capitalism, it was like the wild west in the financial world. It didn’t really matter how you got the money, as long as you got it, and the institutions were set up to facilitate the people getting the money, which were only a few. Only people with substantial holdings had the protection of the institutions. If there was a bank run, or the system was somehow threatening to crumble the institutions stepped in and protected the market.

Still, even those within the market did fail. Stupid greed, where all you do is take without weighing the risk, could get you into trouble. No one loved to see someone fail within the market, more than the market itself. It left more for those who remained, and they could praise themselves for being superior in their acumen. The market was competitive. It was hostile and brutal towards those who walked among them and failed.

The market was where a silent battle was fought within the Western World. This occurred while it was turning it’s attention towards the rising Autocratic World. In a world run on competition, there could be only one winner. The market was where the final battle of the Western World was to be fought.

‘In and around 21 BT, a new weapon was thrown into the arena that took things completely beyond the institution’s capabilities and regulation. Technology as old as the institutions themselves, exploded into existence. It produced a speeded up world, with more potential than any one person could conceive. Big number technology was here. It was so powerful, it created AI amongst other things. It was world ruling potential for those who could harness it. The Magnates ran wild with this. A whole new world for them to exploit, but also a world that would quickly take them to a final winner.

‘At first the Magnates specialized, and gained great power within their own fields. This gave them individual influence on the world stage, but it also limited their potential, especially in light of the rise of Autocracy. All of them realized you couldn’t rule the world without the support of others; at least at the beginning. They agreed to create alliances, before splitting the world in two. At this time, the Crowd, which was the vast majority of the Western World, was excluded from the financial world almost entirely. The market forgot about them, as it aligned itself for war against the East, while still fighting it’s private war of who the single leader would be.

‘The Autocratic nations were a force to reckon with. China, Russia, parts of the Arab world and Africa, and the many other nations throughout the world open to authoritarian rule were engaging in autocracy. They were tapping into a potential foreign to the West. In 77 BT, China had implemented 5 year plans which had proven very successful in reaching economic, social and competitive goals. As a nation, not a bunch of individuals as found in the wild West, China set targets and pragmatically followed through on them. The results were outstanding, and 5 years later, they would create a new plan to build upon what they had gained.

Institutionalized autocracy creates a very powerful momentum. It allows a nation to throw it’s entire weight behind it’s objectives, and China, the nation that Bonaparte warned to ‘let sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world’, was awake and had 5 year plans. With discipline, China implemented Autocratic rule, and became very powerful, very quickly. Other nations witnessed this and stylized their own form of Autocracy while working with China.

Even aligned, the Western World made up of the United States, Britain, Japan, most of the European Union, some of South America, and others, could not compete with the discipline of China and other nations adopting some form of their rule. These nations carried the banner of democracy which by that time had become relegated to a concept. Unfortunately, something so strong had been lost to the Magnates, and the Autocratic nations were gaining momentum.

‘Initially, greed blinded the eye of the Western World. It thought it could move into China and capitalize on it’s success. China encouraged this. All it had to do was throw out a few breadcrumbs to get Western capitalists scurry after the huge bounty that waited for them. This deflection left China with plenty of manoeuvrability to do what it was planning to do; take over the world.

‘Ah Dually?’ Ethan interrupted.

‘Yes?’

‘You’re getting a little long on the history, and short on bad guys.’

‘Alright, let’s turn our attention to them then.’