Mind Mapping, Part 4: Reeducation Intervention

Copper and the Agent walked along a beach. Copper was having trouble focusing, feeling extremely isolated and helpless. The waves lapped against the shore, though the sound gave her very little comfort.

Agent spoke, his expression inscrutable behind his dark shades. “Copper, please relax. This place is completely safe. Once you learn to act independently, your training here will be complete. But until then, if your mind isn’t free, then you aren’t truly free no matter where you are.”

“I can already act independently! I think for myself!”

“Really? Let’s test that. Jump in the ocean.”

Copper immediately turned and ran into the ocean, turning back once she was already up past her waist and sputtering with water as she ran back onto the shore, stumbling and coughing. She glared at Agent.

Agent snapped his fingers, and Copper was instantly dry. “I must say… it’s interesting to have permission to use my admin access so blatantly in front of simulation occupants. This is a very odd situation you are in, to have such deep psychological problems that a simulation is the best option.”

“You make it sound like I’m crazy! I don’t have psycho-whatever problems!”

“You just jumped in the ocean because I told you to.”

Copper fumed, only temporarily displacing her feelings of loneliness. She thought she had adjusted to being alone after fleeing her previous master, but she had gotten used to be around people again when she joined up with Steve’s crew. Despite the short time spent with them, she already couldn’t stand being away from all of them.

The Agent turned to Copper. “So, tell me Copper… what type of climate do you prefer?”

“Right now, I want to be around people.”

The Agent waved a hand, and the two were suddenly in a bustling city with all kinds of people. “Like this?”

“No! Those are all fake!”

The Agent raised an eyebrow. “So? They can act exactly like a real person. As far as social needs are concerned, what’s the difference?”

“That’s stupid. There is a huge difference! They don’t care about anything, YOU don’t care about anything! It’s all cold. I can feel it.”

“You are cold? I can increase the temperature you are perceiving. Just let me-”

Copper crouched down, hugging her legs as she sat pouting. “You don’t understand. You are just a simulation – a fake. I don’t care how much you try to appear real, you aren’t.”

The Agent didn’t laugh or act offended. He barely reacted at all. “That is all true. I am a tool, built by people I have never met. I don’t try to appear real, I am merely pursuing my goal. Which, at this moment, is trying to get you past a mental block.”

As Copper was about to respond, the simulation glitched. The people stretched and distorted before vanishing completely, and the textures on the buildings flashed invisible for a moment. The Agent looked around, just as confused as Copper. He waved a hand, and a holographic control board appeared in front of him as he started making adjustments. “That was quite a large processing glitch… was there a power outage somewhere?”

A blurry figure appeared next to Agent, as Copper eyes went wide with fear. “AGENT! Look out!”

The Agent spun around, equally surprised but unafraid of the entity before him. “A hacker? It seems you disabled the intrusion alert, and cut us off from alerting the mods. You are not authorized to be here. You will be autokicked shortly.”

The being spoke with echoing voice. “No. Run Auth code TYUA-II-GYQWE. Disable Agent.exe.”

The Agent’s image flashed a dark red before fading away completely. Copper turned to run for her life, but was stopped as the blurry persona stood in her path. “Copper…”

“What… what do you want with me!? Why did you destroy Agent!?!”

“Chill, lady. He’s just a process, I suspended him is all. I need your help with something, as I don’t have any other options. It won’t be for nothing, of course… quid pro quo, and all that jazz.”

Copper was intrigued, but still more terrified of the entity in front of her than anything else. “What? What do you need from me? I can’t do anything here.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, kiddo. You have certain permissions while existing in this simulation, and I can transition your connection to another place to escalate my own permission. Those noob kidnappers didn’t think of that when they nabbed Steve.”

“Steve?! He’s been kidnapped?”

“Affirmative, you could ask him yourself in a moment. So, are we in agreement? Are you willing to help?”

“SEND ME NOW! I need to save Steve!”

The blurry figure vanished, as did the buildings before the environment faded to black. Suddenly, an extending bar titled loading… appeared, vanishing as Copper found herself in an entirely new environment.

It was a strange building with sparse equally strange equipment Copper couldn’t understand. Outside a window, she could see vast extending plains that she eventually realized were roads. But they were massively wide and extended almost indefinitely, as if they were made for Giants. The buildings she saw outside seemed boxy and uninspired, as if the entire world felt bored with trying to build something more unique. She walked around the mostly empty building, feeling creeped out, until she heard a familiar voice from a room she passed.

“Copper? Is that you?”

Copper ran back to the doorway. She saw a human, wearing a simple white shirt and black pants with no shoes. He had blonde hair and amber eyes, looking nothing like the Drone Copper remembered. But she knew instantly it was him. “STEVE!”

Copper tackled Steve to the ground with a hug, causing him to squirm and eventually push her off as they both got back on their feet. “Dang it, Copper… how are you even here? Did they get you too?”

“No, some kind of weird blurry thing heard you were in trouble, and brought me! Now we can break outta here, no problem! Where are the enemies?”

Steve struggled to comprehend the lunacy of what Copper was saying. “Copper… I don’t know what you think happened, but you just got played. We can’t leave this simulation, and we have no control here. The kidnappers don’t even need to exist within the simulation to hurt us if they want!”

A blurry figure appeared in front of Steve. “Oh? I didn’t think I played Copper, though I was a tad surprised at her immediate cooperation. I expected more convincing to be required. But don’t worry… I got dis.”

The blurry figure vanished again before Steve could ask any questions, and suddenly voices cut in from nowhere. “-stopped the cycles. It was a crap show from the very start.”

A different voice responded. “Huh. Sounds like poor planning. But what percent are we at?”

The first voice answered back. “Uh… about two. Gonna take quite a bit longer, and that’s assuming we don’t come up empty handed. Erc is smart, but I don’t think he quite understands yet what we are pursuing.”

Steve spoke out, wondering if the voices could hear him, or knew they were listening in on them. “Hello? What are you talking about?”

The voices were silent. Steve could hear shuffling, followed by cursing. “Who patched our connection into the simulation!? The occupants can hear everything, and it won’t let me disconnect!”

The other voice spoke just as the gray Drone was reappearing in the simulation, revealing he was the second voice as he was clearly speaking. “Just spin up a new connection, it’s probably just some glitch. No need to… wait, what? I didn’t reenter the simulation, what’s going on? Why can’t I leave?”

Copper immediately roasted the screaming Drone. The other disembodied voice was panicking. “WHAT THE- FOLD IT! FOLD IT ALL TO RIFT! It’s the EPIC!”

The other Drone appeared in the simulation, already running for it’s life. It was completely red, in the same design as the now badly burned Drone. Steve and Copper followed in hot pursuit.

The Drone couldn’t stop panicking as it threw all kinds of hastily generated simulated assets at them, from bombs and spiky spheres to old shoes and a rubber duck inflatable. If Steve hadn’t been so focused on chasing down their captor, he would have thought the sight hilarious.

Eventually, Copper tackled the Drone to the ground. With a great inhale, the Drone flailed as Copper torched him.

Steve scratched his head. “Does… that actually do anything, though? We are in a simulation. I was also hoping we could have… I don’t know, interrogated him? Or something?”

Copper spun around. “I don’t care about any of that! I’m fighting back any way I can!”

The simulation began collapsing around them. Buildings crumbled, and the floor fell apart. As everything faded to black, Steve again jerked awake.

He was strapped into the chair he had previously sat down in the exorcist’s business, which he now knew was at least partially a front for finding Drones like him. He struggled for a moment, but the bindings held firm. Eventually, he managed to pull off one of the shackles, as it apparently wasn’t designed to hold a conscious Drone indefinitely. With a free hand, he quickly extricated himself from the rest of his bounds, and stood up out of the chair that had been until now his prison.

He wondered where he was, or if he was still in Tempora. It took him only a moment of wondering where Copper was before he realized they met only digitally; she was likely still in the underground vault where they put people into simulations, and he was almost definitely in a different location only connected by network. Why would they have connected to the same network? Was it the only way they could access the necessary processing power? He didn’t have time to think about all these questions now, though. Given he was now alone in a dimly lit room, and he could here people rushing around and yelling outside the door, his focus was on how to defend himself while escaping.

And on finding Jane.

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Also, if you are enjoying the series, you may want to check out the book I published right here. It is set in the same universe as this story, so some of the characters can show up in that book, and others might show up in later ones.