Hi, so been almost two weeks, and I wanted to post an update.
First, let me go ahead and formally apologize. I've been thinking about it, and I guess really, I should. I'm sorry; I apologize.
A lot of you that actually read the chapter in question and thought, "Well that wasn't that bad, I wouldn't mind if a hot elvish chick did that to me," or maybe bought into my argument that VR isn't the same thing as the real, might not get why others got so upset about the chapter, but after considerable soul searching I think I get it. It's sort of a perspective thing, but at the same time, it's not.
I believe that to judge an action you have to take the culture into account, a viewpoint that's sometimes called cultural relativism, and by the standards of the fictional world that I created, and the characters that inhabit it, that scene probably doesn't quite qualify as "real" rape. (Though they do have a criminal code set up to handle "virtual rape" with its own set of standards and penalties, with a permanent ban from any full VR and mandatory removal of the neural interface as a common punishment.)
But that's not a fair standard.
I can't create a fictional world and use that as a standard to judge an action and not expect blowback. I'm writing as a member of a culture where VR that realistic isn't a thing, where people haven't been desensitized and jaded by decades of exposure to that level of VR. By the standards of my own culture, that scene definitely counts as rape. So yes. I was wrong to try to call it otherwise. It doesn't matter that Sleeping Sam got into it pretty fast. Doesn't matter that if Margaret was a little less of a bitch and taken the time to seduce she could have gotten Sleeping Sam's consent pretty easily, as Sleeping Sam was more confused than unwilling, honestly. The only thing that matters is that the experience was forced onto the real Sam, who had no way of giving consent to it, as she was in an altered state, and would likely not have given consent if asked. Thus, rape.
But, my biggest mistake was that I let my desire to explain the viewpoint of the characters and make the plot work twist my thinking. I shouldn't have tried to explain anything, and just let the reader form their own conclusion. It would have been ok if some of you didn't get why Sam would ever forgive Margaret, I didn't need to try to contextualize it through commentary, I should have just written the story.
I will not be answering any more comments on the topic in this thread, I already had a Royal Road super mod lock comments once, not again thanks.
Moving on.
I have actually fallen victim to my own gaming addiction these last two weeks, playing a lot of Valheim, so not much actual writing. But I have been doing a lot of thinking on my story. Every time I made a corpse run, or mindlessly swung my pickax, I was thinking about my story, so I have worked out all the necessary plot points and changes I want to make. I'm ready to start actually writing. For those of you that don't see that as an actual accomplishment... well, you're not wrong, but the creative part of dreaming up a story is actually kind of the most time-consuming part, in a sense. You can do it while going about your day, driving, or working, just sort of daydreaming about stuff in bed as you go to sleep, but it does need to be done. I need to know where I'm going in broad strokes before I can actually start writing the actual details page by page.
I have started writing now, and plan to get to where Il'antra shows up and Doppel's long-awaited POV chapter before posting the whole thing all at once. Hopefully that will be within a week or so.
I sort of get the impression that Doppel is a bit of a fan favorite, with many people liking her more than Sam herself, so for those of you who feel that way, here's a bit of a sneak peak of part of a chapter where the two of them explore the Shipnet a bit further and Doppel resolves to self improve.
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Doppel takes me to a quiet island virtual world to recover, and I watch a picturesque sunset dip below calm waves.
“How are you feeling?” Doppel asks finally, handing me one of a pair of Pina Coladas inside cups fashioned from coconuts. The handles were just brass hoops nailed into the sides of the freshly cut half spheres. I savor the drink and nibble on the coconut flesh, scooping it out with a fancy silver spoon. It was good.
“Better,” I admit, “You sure know how to spoil me.”
“Of, course,” Doppel laughs, “I know what you like.”
“But if you are me, why are you better at this than me?” I ask, gesturing with my heavy margarita cup at the relaxing scene and the lavish beach chairs. I am asking about Doppel’s ability to create virtual worlds, but she knows what I mean from the simple gesture. “Is it really just the tutorial program?”
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Doppel pauses to consider it, then shrugs. “It’s mostly just a mental thing, you know,” Doppel explains, “We’re gods here, you just need to imagine what you want, the tutorial program gives me a boost of confidence, but the shipnet is really good at interpreting a user’s vague instructions into concrete ideas. It does all the work.”
“I feel like it can’t be that simple, I’m not much of a computer programmer, but that sounds like fuzzy logic, AI type stuff…”
Doppel gets an introspective look that I recognize as her digging into the information of the tutorial program, then her face twists in surprise and dismay.
“What is it?” I ask.
“You need to understand what the Shipnet really is,” Doppel looks serious, “it’s a bunch of partial copies of you acting as servers.”
“What?” I asked, shocked.
“They’re not complete copies, basically every part of you that works while you dream, the parts that lets you imagine a scene, the creative parts that can visualize things and places, and the parts that process sensory inputs is all that gets used. Every virtual world requires at least one dreamer copy of you, trapped into a coma, all the parts that allow for free-will cut out, forced to dream a world for the users to inhabit.”
I pause to process that, then I reply. “That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah,” Doppel agrees. We sit in our matching beach chairs for a few minutes of quiet contemplation.
“The Ulderani aren’t philosophers.” Doppel finally breaks the silence. “We don’t know if it’s a cultural bias or genetic, but they’re pragmatists to the core, and they consider digital entities, even copies of organic entities to have zero rights. When humanity signed all those treaties with the Ulderani, they even included a clause that forbade humanity from granting any sort of rights or legal status to digital copies such as me,” Doppel points out. “We knew that, but it never bothered us, not until I ended up a digital copy, and you ended up a Shipbrain.”
“I guess it’s easy not to care until you end up the one who gets to live with the fact that edited digital copies of you are enslaved so other people can goof off in a virtual world. Here we are sipping our margaritas watching the sunset, and making this experience possible is a part of me that has carefully stripped of all agency and sapience, acting as a glorified server? It is a little bit of a buzzkill to know that,” I admit. “Can we change it?” I ask.
Doppel thinks about it. “We can tweak the settings a bit. I can toggle on this mode called “Vigilance” that gives them a bit more autonomy for example…”
“What does the Vigilance mode do exactly?”
Doppel shrugs, “It gives them just enough free will to decide that whatever is going on inside their virtual world needs your attention or that of your system admin copy if you aren’t available. It overrides privacy settings, but it at least gives the server copies a voice and upgrades them from non-sapient to semi-sapient. I guess it’s an improvement?”
“Yeah, I guess.” It sort of feels pretty minimal. “Might as well toggle that on. Is that really all we can do? I’m not sure just making the servers slightly smarter is even an improvement, it feels like they might not be better off if they have to think about what’s going on. What happens if no one is using them? Won't they get bored?”
Doppel considers the questions, “The Shipnet can freeze digital copies, put them into stasis until they are needed again. I think, if I were in their place..." I watch Doppel's face turn anxious as she tries to imagine what it would be like if she'd been made into a server rather than a tutorial program, "I would rather be self-aware than not. I mean, isn’t it better to be able to have a tiny degree of freedom than be a mindless tool? There might be more we can do, more adjustments we can make to your dreamer copies, give them more freedom. But we only learned to use the high-level Ulderani programming language, and those settings are down at the machine level. There are no commands that let you touch them without writing whole new subroutines from scratch…”
“You said I’m the one that needs to improve for my copies to get better at something? I don’t know if I’m going to have enough time to learn the Ulderani machine-level programming language...” I sigh. A part of me wonders if the suffering of these partial digital copies is something I can afford to worry about. It might be better to just not bother with the whole issue. I feel a bit of apathy on the topic, and it makes me feel guilty.
Some of that must have been on my face because Doppel looks at me, angry and determined. “Hey, that’s just what the tutorial told me to say. After learning how the Ulderani really think about me and others of my kind, maybe I should just tell the tutorial program to shove it. I’m willing to do something about it if you’re feeling lazy about it.”
I chuckle ruefully. “Yeah? Want to prove the tutorial wrong?”
“Well, you already changed the most important setting, the one that would delete me when you go to sleep. Normally I would be rebuilt each morning with your most recent memories but no memories of what “Yesterday’s Doppel” was actually thinking or feeling. I have my own memories now, so I don’t see why I wouldn’t be able to learn independently. Plus, I have a special power you don’t.”
“Oh?”
“I can overclock myself, experience the flow of time like up to 100x slower than normal. It’s super boring normally, but it does let me do a lot of research and study in short periods of real-time. The tutorial program actually taught me how to do it so I can be your Siri, basically. I can do a lot of searching in 1/100th of the time it would take you to do the same thing. Technically I can only use it when you ask me a question… but ask me the right question and it could be left pretty open-ended.”
I thought about it. “Doppel, can you learn on your own, at your own discretion, whatever you want to learn?”
Doppel grins at me, “I don’t know, but I’ll try to find out.”