So doing a rewrite is hard. I don't know if I speak for all writers when I say that writing new content is a lot more entertaining than reworking old content. But I have had a hard time motivating myself to actually sit down and do it rather than goofing off with computer games. So progress has been slower than I'd like. I have gotten the first six chapters edited, and will include a changelog that lets people who want to skip over the old stuff. You can just check the changelog instead and it summarizes what I've changed from old version. Most of the changes are focused on the objectives of making the crew a little less antagonistic. Elaine's introduction is friendlier, Henry has been toned down a bit and I mention that he's been training for the position and was upset that he didn't get the job he took classes for. I suppose if I were a senior member of a company and took years worth of classes in my free time to qualify for another job, only to have that job snatched away by a new hire, I'd be upset too. I moved the Shipbrain's commentary in the prolog into a brief exchange between Sam and Jim, so it's more integrated rather than clunky exposition. Minor changes like that.
The sneak peek scene from last "not a chapter" is added to the end of the fourth chapter where it is what Sam does to relax after a long session of landing practice, rather than just going to sleep. I like to think of that scene as being the point in time at which the timelines of the two alternate versions of my story diverge. In the old version, that never happened, and the servers were never put into "Vigilance mode," which results in the controversial events unfolding in the old version. In the new version, Sam's decision to toggle that setting on has unexpected results in this partially recycled bit of chapter 6, which ends quite differently than how I originally wrote it (Sam escapes from Margaret).
The main reason I'm posting this chapter as a sneak peek is because I want feedback. Does this version of chapter 6 pass muster? Is it still too controversial? Does it properly address the seriousness of Margaret's actions without setting the overall tone too dark? I feel like plenty of fiction, even TV shows have attempted rape as a plot point, and if handled well, it works at providing dramatic tension without pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. What are your thoughts on the topic? I might make changes before the final version gets posted.
Here's the sneak peek of the reworked chapter 6:
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I poked the fire with my stick, watching how the fire released sparks in the form of flaming ash as I nudged it. Pretty sparkles, I thought to myself, dancing at the end of my bonfire, illuminating the strangely empty night sky. Only one moon hung overhead, but somehow I knew a second moon would soon follow. Why did the sparkles seem so familiar, I wondered.
In front of me, the tranquil waves lapped against the shore. I sniffed the damp air. It wasn’t the sea, it smelled of freshwater, how odd, I thought to myself. Why was I on an island in the middle of a lake? My mind felt dim, and my memories elusive.
I shrugged and stood up, stretching my massive muscles to relieve the strain of sitting still. My leg kind of ached, as if I’d caught it in some sort of snare and I’d had to yank it out forcibly. A memory tickled the back of my mind, but it was gone.
I was Sleeping Sam, the manly barbarian, was I not? Did it matter where that odd nickname came from? No. My past was not important, I was a simple man who lived in the now. I grabbed my trusty longbow and quiver then turned towards the forest at my back. Time to go hunting, I thought to myself, I could already taste the fresh deer meat cooked over an open blaze.
Walking through the moonlit forest, I wondered if I should feel scared. Were there monsters here? Creatures of the dark that could threaten a barbarian like me? I chuckled, no I was too strong and manly. My big muscles would carry me through any adversity. Why else was I only wearing a fur loincloth and boots? It was so my foes could see my perfect body and tremble in fear.
I trudged onwards, confidently, until I happened upon a moonlit clearing, where a beautiful elf sat on a rock, dressed in flimsy nearly translucent white silk. She saw me and her face broke into a massive, and rather predatory, smile. Despite the immense size difference between us, me a hunk of a barbarian man, her a slender elven woman, I suddenly felt nervous. Why though? I was Sleeping Sam the barbarian. I feared nothing, I reminded myself. I may not be very bright, but I could let my muscles do the talking.
“I found you!” She said with a laugh, rising to her feet. “It wasn’t easy, you know.” She said pouting her lips as she walked towards me, swaying her hips seductively.
“Do I know you?” I asked her, my voice sounding timid. I felt oddly nervous and I didn’t know why. Sleeping Sam feared no one, why would I fear this elf? I could snap her in half with a single flex of my mighty biceps, I reminded myself. But my eyes fell on her perky breasts, and the way the fabric did nothing to hide the tiny peaks straining against the soft silk. I felt my mouth grow dry and my palms sweaty. There were also other stirrings, I realized, in a place where another mighty muscle normally slept.
The elf reached me and trailed her fingers along my chin. “Were you listening when I told Tom?” She asked, “I’m a virtual slut, and look, here we are in this tiny little virtual world you hid away in. Just you and me.” Her voice was husky as she walked behind me, and then I felt her hands upon my buttocks.
“What are you doing?” I asked, confused. I didn’t know this Tom, nor what virtual meant. My mind was a fog, for all my strength as a mighty barbarian, the gods had not seen fit to grant me wits, I lamented. Sleeping Sam did not know what to do.
“Oh man, you could crack a walnut on these cheeks, you are a beast. I saw that android body at the meeting but this is even better, you’ve made it more realistic, made it your own.” She sounded eager as she kneaded my taught muscles.
I whirled and caught her arms, easily holding both of her thin wrists in a single strong hand. “You talk of things I do not know,” I told her gruffly, feeling the faint stirrings of anger. Who was this elven woman to take such liberties?
“Oh, did you want to play rough?” she asked, her face flushed and her perfect bosoms heaving with excitement. “Will you ravish this poor helpless maiden? I’m but a frail flower,” she said with a grin at odds with her fearful tone, “please be gentle.”
Mildly disgusted with myself and her, I let go of her wrists. “Sleeping Sam forces no woman,” I told her.
“Pity.” She said with a sigh and a pout. “But what if I were to force you? How hard will you resist when you can’t even remember who you really are?” She reached behind her neck and undid the clasp holding her clothes in place.
As if by magic the flimsy gown fell away, revealing her perfect form. My mind went blank, I’d never seen such perfection, the implausibly large breasts narrowing to an incredibly thin waist with wide hips? She looked a lot less slender unclothed than she had clothed. Was it magic? Was she some evil enchantress come to deceive me? I pulled my gaze away from her pale as cream curvy skin and deep red nipples up to her dark emerald green eyes. In the moonlight, they looked like endless pools of seductive poison.
“Sleeping Sam not fool, you try to trick me. Why do you do this, enchantress?” I asked hoarsely, trying to back away as she advanced closer.
“Why? Because I’m naughty and a slut. But only here, where it doesn’t matter,” she said with a laugh. “And something tells me you’ve never had sex as a man before. I want to take your male virtual virginity.”
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Was Sleeping Sam truly a virgin? Surely a mighty barbarian such as I had had plenty of women before. But I could remember nothing. It was as if tonight were the first night I was alive, and I felt fear of this tiny woman. “No, wait… I’m not...” I was backing away still, causing her to laugh.
With a wave of her hands, vines rose up out of the ground and wrapped around me, dragging me helplessly down to the soft loamy grass. I struggled to pull free, but somehow the vines were too strong even for my mighty muscles to break.
“I don’t think you’re resisting very hard,” the naked elf told me in a sultry voice, “But, I can fix that, the hard part, I mean,” She kneeled down next to me and used more magic to make my loincloth disappear. “I think I can make you very hard indeed,” she told me with a wicked grin.
I felt overwhelming confusion as the enchantress leaned in to grasp me, I felt like I should know what to do, how to feel, but my mind was blank. How should I respond, I wondered. Then I realized that I was helpless to resist, and I didn’t like that feeling. The feeling of being rendered helpless triggered my anger and I struggled harder, but the vines did not budge. Even though some small part of me felt eager curiosity, a tiny voice inside me whispered; No! Then everything froze.
There was time for a puzzled look to freeze on the enchantress’s face as we both became immobile, her hand locked in place, only centimeters away from her objective. The trees around us flickered and became jagged, almost pixelated, and the sky turned blue with strange white text. Most of the text was too small, but I could read the first few lines. They read;
“Error: Vigillegence mode has caused a fatal exception. The server has attempted to contact admin support. Support is unavailable. The server has forcibly shut itself down instead. Server mind has performed an illegal operation and will be deleted.”
I suddenly remembered. Vigilance mode was that setting Doppel and I had set up so the servers could try to get help if they felt something unacceptable was going on.
With that first memory, everything came rushing back, and as the small VR world my dream self had been inhabiting shattered apart, all my memories came rushing back.
In the darkness of the Shipnet space between the servers, Doppel reappeared. “Sam, you woke up? You look … different.”
I frown and change my virtual barbarian body back to my normal body. “No time to explain,” I tell Doppel urgently, “That server I was on, the digital copy of me it’s running on? That dreamer mind? It sacrificed itself for me, crashed itself to save me from Margaret! Now it’s going to get deleted. We have to save it!”
Doppel looked confused, then shook her head. “Sam, I don’t know… wait. I’m going to learn how to do that.” A resolute look crossed Doppel’s face as she activated her ability to slow down her perception of time to try to figure out how to accomplish my request.
I wait in silence as I watch Doppel blur. Her expressions change rapidly as she goes through rewatching what happened to me, from surprise to anger, back to surprise. Then she just looks very focused as her hands blur on a virtual keyboard she’s called up. I watch numbers and text scroll too fast for me to read on a transparent blue screen.
Finally, several minutes later for me, many hours later for Doppel, her expression shifts to exhausted satisfaction. “Ok, it’s done. I rescued the server mind before too much was lost.” Then she looked concerned, “I had to... ah, sort of fill in the gaps.” Doppel explains, “And I may not have done that very carefully. I grabbed a lot from you to do it. I think there might be a lot of your subconscious transferred over, and there’s this part of the code where the only fix was to just link it back to you and keep constantly updating to keep that Server mind intact…”
I sort of understood what Doppel was talking about, but not fully. Doppel had clearly been doing a lot of learning on her own while I’d been focused on learning how to pilot. “You fixed it?” I asked, hopeful that that was an accurate summary of Doppel’s programming jargon.
Doppel coughed into her hand to hide her amusement before continuing. “Yeah… kind of. I don’t know Sam. I made a kludge fix, probably broke a bunch of rules. A real programmer would definitely be appalled by all the spaghetti code I just threw together. Let’s call this an experimental server from now on. It’s your own personal dream server. No one else gets to use it, but you’ll always end up on it when you go to sleep from now on.”
“So I’ll always dream I’m “Sleeping Sam”?” I asked, concerned.
“Yeah, I mean… it’s your dream world now, and I’ve fixed it so you won’t lose your memories again like last time, but you’re not going to have full control over it. The server mind will have a will of its own, and it’s going to draw content from your subconscious? I don’t know… it’s going to be a little weird. And, it’s permanent, like me. Won’t get reset because that one server mind, out of all them, has a permanent link to you and doesn’t need to be refreshed when you go to sleep. If it works, if it’s safe, maybe it can be the template we use to improve the other servers and give them more freedom and self-determination,” Doppel suggests.
I nod, but inwardly I’m thinking, do I really want to be a guinea pig for a frankenstein experimental server brought back from partial deletion with bits and pieces of my subconscious? It sounds risky.
“Hey! It’ll work. That server saved you right? This was the best I could do.” Doppel sounded defensive. “Relax, it's not that risky, you can always just wake yourself up, though you shouldn't as you do need to rest remember? Time spent in your dream server will still make you feel fuzzy and slow-witted because it's your brain's resting period, but you will know who you are. The changes just mean that the server will write its own story and let you inhabit a world it creates for you, rather than normal servers that have to follow pre-programmed games, pre-built settings, or whatever the user asks for." Doppel explains, trying to put a positive spin on it.
I nod again, but more firmly. I owed it to this server to give it a chance. So long as I’m not trapped in a nightmare or something like that, what was the harm? It could be fun to be on a server I didn’t control. I wasn’t a role player in the sense of the ancient pen and paper games played by some devoted fans, but it sounded almost as if this new experimental server would be the dungeon master of my own personal roleplaying game? It could be fun, I told myself.
“But you’re forgetting one very important detail, Sam!” Doppel reminds me.
“Yeah?” I ask, distracted thinking about the possibilities of my new personal experimental dream server.
“Margaret tried to rape you!” Doppel exclaims angrily. “I watched the footage of what happened. You can’t let her get away with that!”
Oh right, I had almost managed to forget that detail. “Technically it was only attempted virtual rape…” I argue, weakly.
“That’s still a crime, Sam.” Doppel tells me, crossing her arms, looking stern. She didn’t think I could just pretend nothing had happened. There was a separate legal code that handled virtual crimes including rape in a VR. Humanity made clear distinctions between what happened in VR and what happened in the real by making separate laws often with lesser punishments to address VR crimes.
But those punishments took into account the fact that the victim always had the option to log out instantly. That was a universal right of VR users, along with the ability to block out all pain. It was actually a more serious crime to tamper with the user's ability to do those two things.
This meant that actual cases of virtual rape were very rare, as most users could simply flee any situation they didn’t like. However, it was still a crime to put a user in a situation that they felt forced to escape from, as that was a form of sexual abuse.
Users had to consent to be exposed to that sort of risk if they wanted to play a VR game where goblins or other monsters might decide to get frisky, and they usually got a reminder that they could log out at any time in case they panicked. Some users even set up an automatic logout function if their neural device detected a high enough negative emotion.
But I hadn’t had that option, I didn’t remember I could escape. Margaret must have seen in me a golden opportunity to engage in a fantasy she’d normally only be able to indulge with non-player characters or people who were only pretending to be unwilling. I couldn’t just let it go. I couldn’t afford to let my first instinctual denial prevent me from seeking to defend myself. What if she tried it again? What if she tried it on someone else?
“I’ve set up safeguards, built into the new experimental server, in case you ever pass out like that again. I don’t think she’ll be able to get in without permission. Normally, if you went to sleep at your scheduled times you would have been safe, with your memories intact inside a lucid dream. It was only because you passed out that the normal safety protocols didn’t work. I promise you won’t lose your memories like that if you pass out again. But the best safety mechanism is to just make sure Margaret learns her lesson and doesn’t do it again. Not to anyone.”
“Alright,” I mutter, feeling my anger over what had happened to smolder back to life, “I’ll confront her about it. Send me back to the real.”
Doppel snorts. “You can do that yourself,”
“Right,” I reply, feeling sheepish, then I will myself awake and project myself back onto the bridge as a hologram.