Feb 2018 v01 online

Editor Naomi Moore
discusses the power of
speculative fiction for New
Orbit Magazine’s first issue.
From military simulators to
Pokémon Go, we detail
major landmarks in virtual
reality development.
A human makes a
connection with the military
drone he’s tasked with
jacking into for supervision.
A discussion of one of the
more well-known works
regarding the ethical and
philosophical concerns
around virtual reality.
Physical harm is illegal, but
virtual harm is not. A rebel
is tortured with an
experience machine.
Thompson discusses realism
and artificial intelligence in
the development of virtual
reality applications.
An innovative exploration of
one of the possible futures
of online dating.
Romance has moved into
the realm of technology, and
virtual reality is making an
appearance.
Imaginary friends get a hightech
reboot in this story of a
girl and her augmented
reality companion.

A nonfiction piece with
words from Hugh
Richardson about past and
present uses of A/VR in
warfare
Recommended reads on the
topic of augmented, virtual,
and mixed reality.
Given the choice between
life out here with all of its
flaws, and a virtual world,
many have chosen to enter
the machine.
Morals are questioned in a
world where we can simulate
conscious beings in
universes as complex as our
own.
Discussion of Bostrum’s Are
You Living in a Simulation?; a
logical argument that
suggests we are.
A discussion between
patient and therapist in a
virtual reality rehabilitation
clinic.
Education, socialisation and
entertainment for kids have
all found applications in the
augmented and virtual
reality fields.
Melanie Langlotz, cofounder
of Geo AR Games,
talks about augmented
reality gtting children
outside.
Responsibility to the future
is imperative to every issue
of the magazine. Our
statement can be found
here.

_____________
My crash course into the world of virtual
reality and all of its associated jargon came
when I moved house, and found myself living
with not one but two virtual reality developers,
working in some of the key companies and
projects within the New Zealand A/VR
industry. While I knew very little about the
field, I’d come into contact with the theory
before; 1999 film The Matrix and it's associated
philosophical readings – Rene Descarte’s
Meditations (in which Descarte muses on how
our senses are not to be trusted, and as the only
way we understand our world is through our
senses, perhaps some kind of virtual reality
could be deceiving us) and Nozick’s Experience
Machine (in which a thought experiment is
posed regarding whether life – love, joy,
achievement – experienced in a virtual reality
can have as much value as a comparatively bleak
“real world” life – more on page 26) – are the
main reason my second major through
university was in philosophy.
There are some exceptional stories in this
Virtual and Augmented Reality special of New
Orbit Magazine, both in the philosophies and
questions they create, and in the applications
and uses for existing (or near-existing)
technologies in the field across a huge range of
areas. While the advancements may, as usual,
seem far-fetched, we all know in this genre that
science is close at fiction’s heels.
It’s hard to believe some of the incredible
applications that have come to the fore in the
last decade or so for virtual and augmented
reality, a field that to many exists somewhere in
the realms of increasingly dated science fiction
films; while The Matrix is surely a timeless
classic, and Tron just received a 21 st Century
update, The Lawnmower Man – while a favourite
of mine – might be getting a little past it. The
predictions of science fiction writers and
filmmakers, though, often prove truer than one
might expect. Like in The Lawnmower Man,
A/VR is proliferating in the realm of education
and knowledge sharing, from helping to teach
children with autism in virtual environments
where they won’t be disadvantaged by social
concerns or distractions (more about this on
page 91) to teaching adults and providing
perspectives on learning unlike anything we’ve
been able to conceive of until today. Like in The
Lawnmower Man, too, VR has evolved from
sitting among a room of screens as in early
permutations, to a whole-body affair with more
realism than one would expect, observing from
outside the apparatus. Not only can players
wear virtual gloves that provide “haptic
feedback”, and use them to feel and identify

objects as if they were real, but developers have
created an ultrasound system that creates the
sensation of touch or feeling without the player
wearing any equipment at all. You no longer
have to sit in your chair or stand awkwardly on
the spot; Vortrex is in the process of creating VR
shoes with a motorised treadmill that move
backwards as you walk, meaning the VR world
in which you stand is now yours to explore
without crashing into walls. If you’ve got a little
more room to spare, the omnidirectional
treadmill Infinideck allows you to walk, run and
jump on a surface that moves beneath you
based on your own movements. Monumental
work has gone into making these virtual worlds
more accessible, more interactive, and, most
importantly, more real.
That being said, augmented reality does the
exact opposite, effectively creating the means by
which our own “real” world becomes more
virtual. An app for restauranteurs makes life
easier for picky eaters by using AR to materialise
virtual menu items on a diner’s plate, from a
photogrammetric scan of the real dish, so they
can consider it from all angles before
committing to an order. Augmented reality
game Night Terrors maps out the layout of your
home and fills it with jump-scaring virtual
beasties that “react to your terror”, custombuilding
a horror movie of which you are both
the audience and the star.
Our conceptions of entertainment, education,
training, and connection with others will be
irrevocably altered, perhaps for better, perhaps
for worse.
I hope you’ll find something in the following
stories and analyses that will assist you – or
prepare you – for this revolution that has
already begun.
Augmented and virtual reality are fast
becoming the frontrunners in the race for the
next technology that is going to change the
world. It has been compared to the internet, the
home computer, the smartphone – it is
possible, nay likely, that once A/VR becomes
ubiquitous in our everyday lives, it will be hard
to imagine a world in which we lived without it.
Happy musing,
Naomi Moore
Editor and Founder of New Orbit Magazine

_____________
Pilot officer Davids sweated in the oppressive
heat and wondered why the coalition had
chosen such an awful time of year to depose the
dictator of this obscure corner of Africa. He was
no fan of leaving his air-conditioned trailer, but
Viper Squadron had just returned from a sortie
and he felt the need to let them know their
efforts were appreciated.
The air along the tarmac bubbled and
pulsed in lockstep with the pounding in his
head, an indication that the cocktail of beta
blockers and anti-psychotics he’d just imbibed
had yet to counteract the effect of the
amphetamines. His job required him to
consume a steady stream of the latter, and the
current operational tempo required an even
higher dose than usual. All of these were
administered under the watchful eye of an
Airforce doctor, whom rumour held was trying
to induce in his charges every psychiatric
disorder he could in order to gild his CV before
he went into private practice.
Davids managed to keep himself upright
long enough to reach the hangar. The bulky
half-cylinder was home to all four of the Semi-
Autonomous fighter attack planes of Viper
Squadron. Davids walked around the closest of
the four containers which fed off the hangar
and found the flap in the camouflage fabric that
acted as a door. In contrast to the blazing sun
outside, the air-conditioned interior was just
cool enough to be uncomfortable. The Air
Force really thought of everything. Davids
waved to the head technician, ignored the other
three planes and walked straight to Hellbat. The
military designation for the vehicle was SAFA
2; Semi-Autonomous, fighter attack, although
the manufacturer called it the Ice Bat. The
more vicious sounding model names had long
since been given to the drone's decrepit
ancestors generations ago. “Fighter attack”
described the drone’s role; it attacked ground
targets while also being nimble enough to pose
a threat to potential airborne interceptors.

However, the keyword which really defined
David’s role and also ensured the public’s
acceptance of the machine was “semiautonomous”.
Almost every weapon system
that the task force deployed for offensive
operations was operated by an on-board
artificial intelligence. Humans simply could not
keep up with the speed of modern warfare.
However, no AI existed which could make
ethical decisions – at least not in a way that
humans could put their trust in. Artificial
intelligence was at best capable of deontological
ethics; it could follow rules. However, despite
the comfortable fiction the public back home
believed, no warzone conformed to rules.
Furthermore, an AI could not understand the
consequences of its actions. Most importantly,
it could not be punished. If a moral violation
occurred and no one could be held
accountable, the illusion that warfare could be
ethical would be shattered. The armed forces
needed someone with a thorough education in
ethics, someone the general public could trust
more than a machine, and someone who could
take the fall if things went wrong. It was these
people who held the title “Drone Supervisor”.
The Ice Bat sat in the far corner of the hangar,
its octagonal geometry a compromise between
aerodynamics and the requirement to absorb
incoming radar waves. It was plugged into and
under-lit by a bank of computers running a
constant diagnostic. Like all computers that
interacted with the drone, they were completely
isolated from any outside network while the
machine was grounded. The idea that someone
may hijack one of the weaponised aerial
platforms and use it against the task force was
not lost on the task force commanders. For that
reason, each flight was programmed to only
allow a wireless connection with its supervisors,
and all other connections had to be via cable.
Davids looked into the computer’s display and
saw that all the benchmarking tests were green.
He inspected the stubby wings, running his
hands across the metal to feel for where it may
have been chipped. He went down onto his
finger tips and inspected the interior weapons
bays on its underside, before moving up into a
crouch and settling by the broad nose cone.
This was where, almost a year ago now, Davids
and one of the technicians had stencilled on
fangs and two eyes. Davids could see where the
design was peeling and walked quickly over to
the maintenance container to find some paint
to fix it. At times he regretted painting on the
eyes. Looking into them was the real way he
assessed the Ice Bat’s mood, regardless of what
the diagnostics claimed. Despite the fact he
knew the mechanics of the weapons platform,
Hellbat was alive to him, and the slope the eyes
were painted on made it seem to be in a
permanent state of melancholy or fright.
Technically, the drone could not have feelings
– he knew that. The AI was highly complex,
able to navigate through the world, identify
targets and make tactical decisions; but it could
not hold a conversation, it could never learn
outside of its narrow field. It was responsive to
questions it could understand and ignored
those it could not. It concerned itself with how
to get its payload onto a target and anything else
was immaterial.
Davids tried to remember at what point he
started to feel that Hellbat was more than a
machine. Was it when he was jacked into the
sensors, his mind awash in the amphetamines
required to enable him to observe and monitor

the machine’s behaviour, screaming through a
shower of lead at 20,000 feet? Was it a few
weeks into the war when the operational tempo
briefly let up and he spent a few days unable to
reconnect with the other humans on the base,
language having failed to communicate what he
had experienced vicariously through the high
definition lenses of Viper Squadron? Whatever
it was, it probably coincided with when he
started referring to Hellbat and the other Vipers
as his friends, and the technicians started
avoiding him. The hierarchy between the
supervisor and the supervised had become
inverted. Time spent jacked in had formed
dependence; a dependence that was not
mutual, as Hellbat could survive without him.
After touching up Hellbat’s eyes, Davids sat
down and leaned back against the SAFA's
armoured carapace. He activated the wireless
toggle at the base of his skull and heard a
procession of chimes as the Vipers
authenticated and allowed him into their
network. Part of his job was to monitor learning
computers on board each drone. This activity
was for the benefit of the public and the clowns
in his chain of command, who had no idea how
the artificial intelligence worked. It helped
assuage their fears that the learning computers
might develop their own personalities, deciding
to mutiny or go on strike. On one level Davids
scoffed at this; the AIs were not programmed to
act like higher order social animals. They had
no complex social structure, and no capability
to conceive of one, so they could never organise
among themselves. Nor could they set long
term goals. On another, he was well aware the
eccentricities of Viper's four AIs exceeded the
parameters of their factory settings.
The logs for the previous mission scrolled
across his eyes, the most pertinent information
colour coded. Surveying the patterns of data, he
marvelled at the extraordinary focus of the
drones; as usual, every observation they made
was mission related.
Viper Squadron loitered at 20,000 feet, out of
range of any known anti-aircraft defences, while
the battle raged to the west. Constant updates
flashed across Davids’ screen. Apparently, their
side was taking a hammering, with 20 percent
of SAVs listed as non-functional. After five
minutes, the message they were waiting for
came through from the intelligence cell. The
electronic warfare units which were bracketing
the combat zone had triangulated the location
of the enemy's local command and control
node. Viper Squadron rapidly descended while
accelerating on a vector to the target.
Amphetamines pumped into Davids' body,
allowing him to just keep up with the drone’s
constant course adjustments and the steady
flow of data streaming in. Barely five minutes
had passed and already the city loomed into
view, the enemy control node located deep
within its defences. Despite the battle raging on
the ground, Viper flight hugged the terrain so
closely that they had to gain altitude to avoid
some of the wrecked vehicles on the road. The
enemy’s ground SAVs were not suited to
engaging fast moving targets and had their
hands full merely trying to slow the advance of
their opposite numbers. Real predators lurked
in the skies above, specialised anti-air platforms
that would make short work of the Ice Bats.
This danger was hammered home when an
allied fighter a thousand feet above them met
its fiery demise, an indication that the enemy
still had functional anti-air missile systems on

the ground. Higher above, formations of fighter
aircraft engaged and broke apart, a new
formation emerging seconds later as the
situation changed. Davids felt dizzy just
thinking keeping up with the manoeuvres those
groups were undertaking.
The city was chaos. Its hapless inhabitants
had been going about their daily routine only
to find themselves at the locus of the conflict.
There was no front line in modern warfare; the
high mobility of most weapons and command
and control platforms had put paid to that. This
made it nearly impossible for the population to
anticipate where the fighting would be.
Drones of every description scooted around
and through cars whose owners had wisely
abandoned them when the fighting started.
Holographic signs which had survived the
fighting continued their looped advertisements
as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
Occasionally a cloud of dust and rubble would
explode out onto the street as a group of squat,
tracked vehicles breached a building, civilians
in their bright clothes stampeding out the other
side. The armies of the dictator were not above
using occupied buildings for cover. Still warm
corpses of ground based SAVs glowed from
behind fences and ruined buildings while the
survivors traded gun fire. Davids watched as
one moved up a flight of external stairs on
articulated tracks, the remainder of its parent
squad providing covering fire. When it reached
an opening, it swung its gauss gun inside on its
single arm, firing slugs into the building's
interior. Viper Squadron highlighted a threat
ahead; an enemy SAV with a large telescopic
array mounted on a turret. A line across Davids'
heads up display painted a vector, indicating a
laser was being emitted, imperceptible to
human eyes. Before it could reach them, the
machine warped and then exploded, hit by an
allied drone's rail-gun.
A crowd of civilians chose that time to run
across the intersection. Davids had no idea
where they were going; both sides of the road
looked to be being destroyed at a roughly equal
rate. He doubted they had any idea either,
probably even less than he considering there
was not much they would be able to see from
the ground. With the ordnance being
exchanged down there, no one in their right
mind would stick their head up to have a look
around.
He must have unconsciously articulated that
thought because Hellbat helpfully responded
with a pop-up window, highlighting an allied
SAV inundating the building the refugees were
fleeing from with a stream of plasma. The high
definition camera captured a shot of an enemy
cyborg disintegrating under the stream. Viper
flight would be sitting ducks if they slowed and

so Davids told them to ignore their
programming’s stipulation to keep a minimum
safe distance. Just as well too, because as they
swept through the panicked civilians a rail gun
from inside the building attempted to engage
them. Thankfully the high-speed slug missed
the Vipers and crashed into the broken bodies
left in their wake.
With the front-line behind them it was not
long before they reached the target. They had
seen plenty of logistics and repair vehicles, but
ignored them all to save their ordnance for the
command node. Predictably it was well
protected, and multiple alarms rang in Davids'
head to let him know that radars were trying to
paint the squadron. The gig was up, and so the
Vipers started to pump out electronic
countermeasures. They dumped clouds of chaff
which duped some heat-seekers, and weaved
around buildings which took care of the others.
This performance would not be sustainable for
much longer if only because their fuel and
countermeasures were running low. Luckily the
target was within range. Hellbat deduced that
he was in the best position to take the shot, and
rose to give his gauss guns an unobstructed
path. The rest of the flight scattered and
attacked the node’s surrounding defences,
trying to cause as much interference as possible.
Hellbat let loose two shots from the gauss gun’s
coils, and Viper 2, Bear, moved into position to
carry out a bomb damage assessment.
The command and control node was gone
and the squadron broke off their attack.
Hellbat was a few seconds behind the rest of
the flight when one of the enemy’s ground
defences finally got lucky. Hellbat relayed to
Davids that a laser had painted him. Two, three
seconds passed, and then he was off the net.
Davids stared in disbelief as command was
shifted to Viper 3. He wanted to return to look
for Hellbat but the situation was far too

dangerous. They exited the combat zone to the
south.
By the time Davids settled into his
workstation and began his shift, the site of the
previous day’s battle had been declared safe
enough for the task force’s humans to enter.
Medical and intelligence personnel, along with
their retinues of combat cyborgs, picked their
way through the rubble. This was the
campaign’s hearts and minds program: after
destroying a neighbourhood, they would come
by and ask if anyone wanted medical aid. While
medics worked on the population to
immobilise fractures, sew up any gaping
wounds and arrange transport back to the aid
post for the more serious cases, intelligence
operators quizzed them to find out if any
friends of the regime were still loitering. Viper
Squadron, sans Hellbat, was tasked with
providing close air support to the operation in
case these hostile elements were located. This
activity had been going on for more than three
hours when a report that piqued David’s
interest came over the net. A patrol of combat
cyborgs had entered the building where Hellbat
had crashed. The squad leader was calling for
more medics. Apparently the Ice Bat had
crashed into a hospital and the resulting fire
had gutted a good portion of the building,
taking many of the patients with it. After the
company commander had agreed to dispatch
what was no doubt a wholly inadequate number
of medical personnel to the building, Davids
called him.
“30 Sunray, this is Viper. Over.”
“Viper, send. Over”, the commander’s
harried voice came back to him.
Davids explained that a very sensitive and very
expensive drone had crashed in the hospital
and needed to be excavated as soon as possible.
There was silence for a few seconds and then a
reply of “Wilco”. Listening in on the company’s
net, Davids heard as orders were given to a team
of army SAV technicians to head to the
building and assess the recovery. From Viper 2
Davids could see the technicians push their way
through the crowd into the hospital. The
medics were trying to evacuate patients in the
opposite direction. His stomach sunk as he
waited, barely able to breathe, his nervousness
so great. He was trying to talk himself out of
hoping for a positive result when the lead
technician's voice came over the radio. A
request was made to bring in a helicopter to lift
the drone out of the building. Apparently,
enough of the hospital had been destroyed that
they could attach a winch and lift it directly out
through where the roof had been. This
operation took another half hour and one of
the technicians rode back with the helicopter.
When the helicopter came in to land, Davids
ran for the landing pad. He doubted Viper
Squadron would need him for the next few
minutes but he gave them permission to engage
targets on their own just in case. When he
reached the heliport, the technician was yelling
orders to the ground crew unloading the
vehicle.
“What condition is he in?”
The technician knew Davids was talking
about the drone straight away. He must be used
to dealing with drone supervisors.
“The AI is intact, good portion of the wing
has melted but the internal systems look good.”

Davids started to breathe more easily.
“Have you communicated with the AI? How
long before he can fly again?”
“Well, self-diagnostics came up green, but
can't jack in without the encryption keys…”
Davids felt a chime within his head. The
short-range data link had been established and
Hellbat had authenticated him.
“That hospital is a mess, looks like the crash
started a fire which gutted most of the building,
we could see the bodies of people who were
trapped on the upper floors by the fire.” The
technician shivered, “…most of them looked to
have been killed by asphyxiation…”
Davids was in, skimming through the
diagnostic reports himself and listening to
Hellbat’s account of the crash. The Bat told
Davids that he had stopped transmitting during
the crash in order to mask his position,
confident that the other Vipers had tagged the
crash site. Running through a report of the
drone’s systems, they confirmed what the
technician had said; everything besides the wing
If you were to ask the late American singer
songwriter Edwin Starr “War. What is it
good for?” I’m sure you would get a familiar
response along the lines of “absolutely
nothing”. Certainly, war is rarely something
we want to actively pursue and engage in,
considering the enormous economic,
social, cultural, and most importantly,
human cost associated with it. With that in
mind though, it should also be considered
that war creates a climate of frugality,
prudence, and most of all, innovation
perfect for technological revolution.
During such times of conflict and
uncertainty, resources become
exceptionally scarce, and all avenues of life,
whether military or civic, need to maximise
efficiency and minimise waste, all whilst
keeping essential infrastructure and
institutions running. Generally, war usually
accelerates technological innovation as
warring sides undertake a literal arms race
to solve problems and overcome the
opposition. Just as often however, these
technological breakthroughs devised by the
military find civic and commercial
applications. Radar, a tide-turning
innovation perfected by Sir Robert Watson-

was still functioning. The carapace was no
longer aerodynamic but that could be fixed in
the hangars. Davids jacked out, his mood lifted.
No matter what charge the military threw at him
for his temporary absence from his work station
was unlikely to sour it.
“Some of the bodies had been pulped by the
shock wave of a heat seeker which impacted on
the roof. Christ, half the victims had been
liquidised.”
The technician apparently had not noticed
Davids had been interfacing with the drone and
had continued to talk with him. Davids nodded
politely.
“Yeah, we really lucked out. Might have taken
Hellbat out if he hadn’t fallen through the
floors before it impacted.”
As the technician stared at him, Davids put
his hand on his shoulder, explained he was
supposed to be at his workstation, told him to
keep up the good work and marched off. There
was a discernible spring in his step, and he felt
that the world had become a slightly brighter
place. ◊
Watt during the Second World War
enabled the British Air Force to detect
approaching enemy craft from a distance,
giving them ample time to prepare
defences and muster counter attacks. The
principles underlying radar later came to
find use in the civilian sphere as a domestic
appliance (one that I'm sure you are well
acquainted with) – the microwave oven.
The military has been a driving force in
the development of numerous
technologies as long as humanity has had
wars – considering the fact that the oldest
recorded war occurred nearly 5,000 years
ago, that’s a lot of drive for technological
advancement. Technologies fundamental
to our modern way of life such as
computers, the internet, and even tampons
are the product of military development for
applications in war. Similarly, virtual
reality, one of the breakthrough
technologies of the 21 st century, owes
much of its modern-day success and
continued development to the military.
While it may not seem intuitive, the
military (with the possible exception of the

entertainment industry) has been the
largest contributor to the development of
VR technology over the past century;
effectively for as long as VR as we know it
has existed. In fact, arguably the first VR
device ever created was a multi-screen flight
simulator, designed by Edward Link, t hat
was used extensively in World War II to
train novice pilots. Today, the military is
one of the largest spenders and users of VR
across any industry, particularly large
military spenders such as the US Armed
Forces. As this technology advances, and
warfare develops, it is almost certain that
military investment in VR will continue to
grow and diversify.
Military recruits require extensive theory
and practical training before they are ever
deployed. This training needs to replicate
the high-pressure environment that they
will be experiencing when in active combat
zones so that they are able to handle the
myriad of stresses and unforeseeable events
that are inevitable in such volatile
environments. Typically, this has involved
using practical simulations of foreign
environments and conducting training and
drilling exercises within them. The
Infantry Immersion Trainer (IIT), a Marine
Corps training facility in California, is one
of the most advanced of these physical
facilities. It is designed to simulate the
general environment within which new
recruits will be deployed, allowing them to
familiarise themselves with the overall
setting, sounds, and smells associated with
the environment they’ll soon have to face
for real. The problem with the IIT and
facilities like it is that they are difficult and
expensive to modify. This is the general
problem with practical military training; it
is expensive, time-consuming, and often
dangerous, particularly when novice
personnel are using sophisticated and/or
heavy equipment. Needless to say, any
alternative to conventional modes of
training that reduce costs, increase
efficiency, or reduce risk are desirable.
This alternative has been found in VR.
The most conventional and arguably the
most used application of VR in the military
today is in vehicle simulation. Flight
simulators are the oldest form of VR
training in the armed forces (as well as out
of them). These systems proliferated in use
in the 1980s and were particularly
successful as they were far less expensive,
required less time to run, and lessened the
risk associated with the use of using real
aircraft in novice training. This hasn’t
changed much over the years, with
inexperienced fliers, whether they be in the
military or civilian, pouring time in to
practice on VR simulators before
controlling a real plane – these simulated
flights can even be logged as a pilot’s
required aviation hours.
Pursuant to the success of flight
simulators, vehicle simulators of all kinds
have cropped up in militaries across the
world as a means of training recruits in a
low-risk environment. Many armies use VR
simulators for vehicles such as infantry
carriers, reconnaissance vehicles, or even
tanks. These simulators are often highly
customisable and can be programmed to
account for an array of combat and
environmental conditions. Training in
these simulators is an important step for

novices, as it bridges the gap between
theory and physically controlling a vehicle,
and enables the recruit to experience
handling a vehicle in adverse conditions or
a high-pressure environment before they
set foot in the real thing. The quality of VR
training has been further improved in
recent years by the development of
networked simulations where personnel in
different simulators can interact and
cooperate in virtual environments,
allowing them to drill, practice, and
conduct elaborate war games. Similarly, the
Navy makes use of VR simulators to train
recruits in the handling of all manner of
watercraft. Virtual bridges, such as the
Navigation Seamanship Handling Trainer
(NSHT) are commonly used in many
navies to replicate the bridge of large naval
vessels. Digital monitors are used to depict
windows as well as the screens used to
control the ship so that entire crews can
train together and develop skills and
practice manoeuvres without the massive
costs and risks associated with taking out a
real ship.
The present uses of VR extend far
beyond simply vehicle simulation. From
the very inception of military training,
virtual “boot camp” experiences can be
used to assist with aspects of initiation in
to the military such as physical and
technical training. The customisability of
VR in this context, and the personalised
attention it is able to provide for individual
recruits, means that it can assist training
and learning in ways that group instructors
seldom can, as well as reduce the overall
number of instructors needed. VR is also
used in both tactical and medical training.
In the case of the former, soldiers can be
drilled on tactics and skills using VR
headsets and gloves. The use of trackers
enables individuals to interact with other
team members as well as the virtual
environment, meaning that drills can be
conducted as groups.
Using VR in this way means that military
personnel can be trained in a far more
complex and realistic manner than has
been previously possible. A field medic is
primarily trained to administer first aid
and trauma care, but also has to be able to
deal with a wide array of stresses and
distractions that a typical medical
professional would not encounter such as
live gunfire, shrapnel, or unsanitary
conditions. This life-or-death pressure is
difficult, expensive, and often dangerous to
replicate practically. VR is an effective way
to replicate the sight and sounds of these
conditions accurately and safely, enabling
combat medics to effectively train under
adverse conditions. The Australian military
invested $2.2 million in 2017 for this
purpose, with the intent of developing
programs that could be used to train their
personnel to be psychologically resilient in
high-pressure situations and solve
problems in unpredictable conditions.
Whilst the initial investment in hardware
for VR is still high for quality equipment
(although it has become far more
affordable in recent years), the downstream
costs of software and programming are
relatively small when compared to the
expenses otherwise required to conduct
conventional training exercises with
physical environments. However, VR
offers extensive benefits as a training tool

eyond just cost. The flexibility and even
customisability of VR means that soldiers
are able to train in virtual environments
simulating the chaos of an active field in a
way that was previously not possible.
Taking this customisability to its full
extent, under VR it is possible that new,
undeployed soldiers could walk the streets
of a town they will soon be deployed in by
way of a VR headset. This recruit could
then explore this foreign location, getting
to know the routes, roads, infrastructure,
and shortcuts until they could recall the
entire layout by memory, and be able to
navigate the area purely on instinct. The
only better way to familiarise themselves in
this way would be to be at the actual site
itself, but by using VR, they would lose the
extra flight costs and the risk of getting shot
at.
The value of understanding the layout of
an area intimately well as a soldier is
obvious. Rather than having to rely on
maps and other navigational devices to
traverse a town or village, deployed
personnel could move around a
deployment site off their own knowledge as
confidently as if they were traversing their
own back yard. Vehicle drivers would be
able to spend large amounts of time
familiarising themselves with transport
routes and the possible dangers associated
with certain areas before they themselves
are in harm’s way. When it came to
transporting troops, weapons, supplies, or
other precious cargo through a live
battlefield, the fact that they would be able
to drive purely off instinct and memory
would mean that they could react promptly
and effectively to threats under times of
duress, possibly saving lives.
Already, some American special forces
units have been using VR to assist with
their aerial jump training and air
insertions. PARASIM, a Californian-based
company, provides this training as a
parachuting training simulator. However,
the applications and complexity of
PARASIM’s VR technology goes far
beyond just this. The set-up, comprised of
VR headset, an array of different
manufactured harnesses, and a highly
customisable digital environment means
that special forces units are able to practice
air insertions for specific sites that they are
soon to be deployed. This means that they
are able to rehearse jumps multiple times,
accounting for all the constraints and risks
associated with a specific jump site. When
they have to do the actual jump, they will
have already done it several times and be
prepared for any foreseeable incumbrances
along the way with “no surprises”.
Furthermore, the PARASIM setup allows
multiple jumpers to simulate a jump
simultaneously and interact with one
another whilst doing so, meaning that an
entire unit can practice a jump virtually,
working together to effectively execute an
insertion.
As demonstrated by PARASIM, the ability
to conduct real-time, multi-personnel
rehearsals for specific environments and
missions is an enormous current benefit of
VR technology in the military that could
become far more important in future years.
Rather than using maps, models, and
diagrams to run through an upcoming
mission, soldiers could don VR headsets
and virtually rehearse said mission at the
actual location, enabling them to develop
an almost instinctual feel for the
procedures and routes they would have to

follow, the size and scale of the location, as
well as the possible dangers. Any issues with
individual personnel on the ground or the
overall plan would be able to be identified
and changed, before bullets started flying.
Whether it be for drilling new recruits,
preparing experienced combatants for
upcoming deployments, or even helping
veterans overcome Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder, VR is rapidly becoming a staple
training tool within the armed forces. As
the capabilities of this technology radiate
end evolve, it is likely that VR will become
a fundamental element of military training
due to the massive advantages it offers over
conventional training methods in terms of
cost, efficiency, and safety. However,
whether VR will ever become a more
prevalent training tool than orthodox
theory and practical methods is still
uncertain. Either way ,VR gives militaries
the world over the ability to train their
personnel in rigorous, hyper-real
environments impossible to viably recreate
practically, with the added benefit of
facilitating assessment of individual recruits
at an unparalleled level of sophistication.
Regardless of how extensive VR is used in
the future though, it is virtually guaranteed
that warfare is going to continue to be
driven, changed, and determined by rapidly
advancing technology. The generations that
will be entering the armed forces from this
point on will have been weaned on electric
screens and digital media their entire lives,
and VR may be a necessary aspect of
military life in order to continue attracting
and effectively training these new recruits.
Nye, Logan. The US military is using VR to simulate
combat jumps. Business Insider. May 19, 2017.
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-military-using-
new-virtual-reality-trainer-simulate-combat-jumps-
2017-5?IR=T
How Virtual Reality Is Changing Military Training.
Samsung Business Insights. December 30, 2017.
https://insights.samsung.com/2017/07/13/howvirtual-reality-is-changing-military-training/.
Connellan, Shannon. Australian military developing
VR programs to train soldiers to be more resilient to
pressure. Mashable. October 20, 2017.
https://mashable.com/2017/10/20/vr-trainingmilitary/.
Parkin, Simon. How VR is training the perfect soldier.
Wareable. December 31, 2015.
https://www.wareable.com/vr/how-vr-is-trainingthe-perfect-soldier-1757.
Van Horne, Patrick. Three Ways Virtual Reality Can
Be Used In The Military. The CP Journal. May 03,
2016. https://www.cp-journal.com/three-waysvirtual-reality-can-be-used-in-the-military/.

Ransom Stevens
“I can’t believe I ate a seal. And really enjoyed it.”
Moments after a venture capitalist experiences what it’s like
to be a polar bear — really be a polar bear, she knows she’s
found something revolutionary. Farley Rutherford and his
team — neurologist “Chopper” and über-geek engineer Ringo
have created sensory saturation, a virtual reality system that
drops users into the psyches of endangered animals as they
fight for survival, and they believe the experience could turn
the indifferent masses into avid environmentalists.
The hardware is ready to go, but to get the system off the
ground the money-men want more bang for their buck, and
that includes bigger, more dangerous animals, and the ability
to turn the machines into profitable games. But to Farely and
his team, this is anything but a game. To some, in fact, this is
a cause they’d kill for…
The Sensory Deception is a mind-blowing, globe-trotting
ride that will take readers from cut-throat Silicon Valley
boardrooms to the pirate ships off the Somali coast to the
devastated rain forests of the Amazon all to ask the question:
What is a human life worth compared to that of an entire
planet?
Blurbs, images and information
collected from Amazon.com
August 2013
https://www.amazon.com/Sensory-Deception-Ransom-
Stephens/dp/1611099196

Ernest Cline
The bestselling cult classic—soon to be a major
motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg.
In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only
time teenage Wade Watts really feels alive is when
he's jacked into the virtual utopia known as the
OASIS. Wade's devoted his life to studying the
puzzles hidden within this world's digital confines—
puzzles that are based on their creator's obsession
with the pop culture of decades past and that
promise massive power and fortune to whoever can
unlock them.
But when Wade stumbles upon the first clue, he
finds himself beset by players willing to kill to take
this ultimate prize. The race is on, and if Wade's
going to survive, he'll have to win—and confront
the real world he's always been so desperate to
escape.
Ted Chiang
What's the best way to create artificial intelligence?
In 1950, Alan Turing wrote, 'Many people think that a
very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would
be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to
provide the machine with the best sense organs that
money can buy, and then teach it to understand and
speak English. This process could follow the normal
teaching of a child.'
The first approach has been tried many times in
both science fiction and reality. In this novella, Chiang
offers a detailed imagining of how the second approach
might work within the contemporary landscape of
startup companies, massively-multiplayer online
gaming, and open-source software. It's a story of two
people and the artificial intelligences they helped
create, following them for more than a decade as they
deal with the upgrades and obsolescence that are
inevitable in the world of software. At the same time,
it's an examination of the difference between
processing power and intelligence, and of what it
means to have a real relationship with an artificial
entity.
June 2012
https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-
Ernest-Cline/dp/0307887448/
July 2010
https://www.amazon.com/Lifecycle-Software-Objects-
Ted-Chiang/dp/1596063173/

_____________
Stacey turned the lights on in her cold
apartment. There were pockets of shadow in
the corners that never seemed to leave, and
sometimes she considered getting stronger
bulbs, but worried that if she did, it would be
too much like the bright halls of the hospital.
That clinical lighting, so measured, all
personality scrubbed away. At least here, she
could close her eyes.
Her back ached from the hours of standing,
and it wasn’t easy getting comfortable. She
turned the stereo on, thought about eating
something as her eyelids grew heavy.
Later, she woke to the sound of her name.
“Stacey,” the voice repeated.
Her mouth felt like a February tundra. She
sensed a headache coming on. “Liam,” she
croaked. “Come in.”
He appeared in the corner of the room,
shimmering into existence as her old projection
system buffered the image. He looked different
today – maybe a little taller, less pale? It had
been so long since she’d seen his real body; in
her mind, the digital features were starting to
overtake the real ones.
“You look terrible, sis,” he said, her poorlycalibrated
speakers making his voice seem
disembodied as it came from somewhere to the
left of where he stood. “And I was on hold for
an hour.”

His image drifted after her as she went to the
kitchen for some water. She took long pulls
from the bottle, savouring the sweetness. “We
had four new patients today,” she said. “One
was this nearly-senile old operating system for a
condemned public estate. They left it to collect
dust in a warehouse for years.” She smiled. “It
kept telling me stories about the residents,
asking where they are now, how they’re doing.”
“What did you tell it?” Liam asked.
“The truth,” said Stacey as she left her tiny
kitchen. “Most of them have been uploaded by
now, but it could see them if it wanted.” She
turned the stereo back on. “I can look up
names, give it some servers.”
Liam didn’t say anything for a long time. His
projection stood in the corner, still, a statue
carved from light. Stacey had disabled the idle
animations the last time the projector crashed.
She took the opportunity to change out of her
nurse uniform and boil an egg.
“It runs in the family,” said Liam, appearing
next to her as she sat alone at her small dining
table.
“Caring too much?” she asked between bites.
He looked at her for a few seconds, saw the
slight curve at the corner of her mouth. “Trying
too hard.”
***
Lately, Stacey felt like she was being trapped
in the same conversations, the same arguments.
Only the opponents changed. This morning it
was her mother, her image moving through
Stacey’s bedroom like a ghost. As Stacey
dressed, her mother did what she always did,
and continued their conversation from a week
ago as if had been on pause.
“You work too hard out there,” she said.
“And you work for them.” That last word came
out as if it were a dangerous hex. “They don’t
need you. We do.”
“It’s my day off, Mom. Can’t you wait till I’m
in a worse mood?” Stacey resisted the urge to
roll her eyes, though she was pretty sure her
mother wouldn’t be able to pick up the gesture
through the old imaging equipment.
“They’re machines, Stacey,” said her mother as
she took another look through Stacey’s closet.
“Why would they need a nurse?”
“Because,” said Stacey, moving around the
hologram toward the bathroom. “We built
them to help us, and now we don’t need that
help anymore. They have sentience – we can’t
just stick them on shelves to rot. Not if being
human ever meant anything at all.”
Stacey could see her mother’s image in the
mirror. It looked so young, especially compared
to what she saw in her own face, where the dim
light emphasized the bags under her eyes.
“Someone else can –”
“No.” Stacey let the glare linger, wanting the
old hardware to convey up as much of the
intent as it could. “This is my life. This is actual
life. You put yourself in the box, and you don’t
get a say on what happens out here. Not
anymore.”
Her mother stared back for seconds that
stretched out elastically while Stacey stayed
rigid, bracing against the sink. But the backlash
never came, and her mother disappeared
without another word.
***

Stacey was eating an apple and reading a worn
copy of some old, trashy thriller, a classic rock
record playing on the stereo, when Liam
popped out of the corner. It was afternoon now,
and she was only surprised that it had taken
him so long to begin her side of the mediation.
“I’m not going to apologize,” she said without
looking away from the page.
“You shouldn’t,” he said.
Something about his voice, even with the
artificial tones, made her lower the book.
“What’s going on?”
Liam’s face was a flat mask, her hardware
unable to display whatever nuances or ticks he
was showing. “Dad is pulling his plug.”
Stacey put the book down. “That explains
why he hasn’t been around lately. Mom doesn’t
want him talking to me.”
He shook his head. “It’s got nothing to do
with Mom.”
Stacey took a moment to process his words.
The vinyl hissed and popped through her
speakers. “Did he say why?”
“Not really,” Liam shrugged. “But you know
how he is. If not for the heart attack, he’d still
be out there with you.”
“When can I see him?” Stacey put the book
down and reached for her phone. “I can take a
sick day.”
“Friday,” said Liam. “In person.”
The voice on the stereo sang, “But gravity
always wins.”
***
Rain fell in stinging droplets on the morning
Stacey arrived at her family’s storage facility.
Greasy grey clouds hung like a shroud over the
long brick building, and the few real people in
sight marched in and out with a detached sort
of determination.
It was colder inside than out, and the steady
rumble of the central cooling system was loud
enough to drown out her wet footsteps on the
chequered floor. The main operating system
greeted her by name and offered directions to
her family’s private room.
Half-metre wide metal cabinets lined the walls
inside a space no bigger than her apartment.
Once the door closed, it became much quieter.
Stacey checked her watch, pulled out her
earbuds, and sat on the single plastic chair in
the corner. Liam appeared in front of his plot,
the image sharper and brighter with the more
modern and better-maintained projection
equipment.
“They’ll be out in a minute,” he said.
They waited in silence. Stacey checked
messages from work, answered greetings from
her patients. Liam went into AFK mode, his
projection shifting onto his right leg and raising
his left hand in an imitation of Michelangelo’s
David.
A click broke the silence. Stacey was on her
feet, crossing to the middle cabinet as it swung
open. Her father’s artificial cradle slid out, still
wet from the recently drained isolating liquid.
He seemed smaller than she remembered, with
pale, wrinkled skin showing between the
electronics hooked into his body.
Liam’s image stood across from Stacey while
they looked down at their father. “Dad,” he
said. “You there?”
The impossibly frail man’s eyes cracked open,
closed tight. His mouth moved, but all Stacey
heard was a wordless grunt.

“Here,” said Liam, and the room’s lights
dimmed till he was the only illumination.
“Is Mom coming?” asked Stacey.
“No,” said their father, after a rough cough.
“We’ve said our goodbyes.”
Stacey helped him into a sitting position, held
his thin hand in her own. It felt warm and
surprisingly strong. He turned toward her, his
head shaking as the neck muscles strained
against its weight. “Did you bring it?” His voice
wasn’t much more than a whisper.
After digging for a moment in her bag, Stacey
produced a small package of brown paper and
unwrapped a messy sandwich. “Sorry. I had to
look up the recipe and couldn’t find all the
exact ingredients.”
He took a dramatic sniff. “It smells like it
should,” he said and coughed again. She helped
him take a bite. He chewed slowly, swallowing
with effort. “It’s still better,”
Liam barked a laugh. “Come on, Dad. I know
it’s been a while since you’ve had real food, but
let’s not talk crazy.”
“Don’t you insult your sister’s cooking,” said
their father, and winked at her.
“So,” said Stacey as he took another, smaller
bite. “Where do you want to go?”
“Is it raining?” he asked after looking her up
and down.
“Yes,” she said.
“Good.” He smiled like she remembered,
broad and toothy, with his mouth hanging halfopen.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
She found a service chair and clothes for him
and they walked together through the cold, wet
day. They talked for a while, then simply
walked, listening to the soft, staccato beat of
raindrops on leaves “It’s the purity of that
chaos,” her father said while they took
temporary shelter from a heavier downpour.
“No matter how hard they try, it will never be
the same.”
That night, Stacey’s father died in his sleep,
after telling her that he was looking forward to
having one last real dream. ◊

“
“What matters other than how people's experiences feel "from the inside"? Suppose there were
an experience machine that would give you any experience that you desired. Superduper
neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing
a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating
in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life,
preprogramming your life's experiences? If you are worried about missing out on desirable
experiences, we can suppose that business enterprises have researched thoroughly the lives of many
others. You can pick and choose from their large library or smorgasbord of such experiences,
selecting your life's experiences for, say, the next two years. After two years have passed, you will
have ten minutes or ten hours out of the tank, to select the experiences of your next two years. Of
course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think it's all actually happening.
… What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside? Nor should you
refrain because of the few moments of distress between the moment you've decided and the
moment you're plugged. What's a few moments of distress compared to a lifetime of bliss (if that's
what you choose), and why feel any distress at all if your decision is the best one?”
- Excerpt from Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974)
The Experience Machine is a thought
experiment created by philosopher Robert
Nozick in 1974 as an argument against
hedonism. Nozick’s argument that, because the

idea of choosing to plug into this machine that
can give you perfect, pleasurable, and 100%
realistic experiences from the beginning of your
life to the end is uncomfortable or upsetting to
many, and many would choose not to do so,
that there is something in human nature that
we value outside of and above our experiences.
Though we would have the life of our dreams,
know untold excitement, pleasure, joy and
abandon, and we would never suspect that
these feelings are only fabricated, Nozick claims
that the human feels so strongly about the true
reality of their experiences, their connection
with truth, that they are willing to knowingly
suffer a life less enjoyable, just to know that it is
real.
Nozick’s argument hinges on the fact that
there are things that humans inherently value
more than their experiences, or more than
personal enjoyment.
The first is that, as humans, we want to do things
rather then experience them. Before we entered
the machine, we would be aware of the fact that
all of the events and achievements we
experience will be completely hollow and devoid
of truth, despite the fact that once inside the
machine the subject would never know, or
indeed care about, this kind of discrepancy. He
likens this existing in a faux world to living
surrounded with people who lie to you;
“although they take pride in artistic
accomplishments, the critics and their friends
too are just pretending to admire their work yet
snicker behind their backs; the apparently
faithful mate carries on secret love affairs; their
apparently loving children really detest them;
and so on.” This argument rests on the
equivocation of all of one’s family and friends
coming together to lie to you, often for the sake
of getting away with something to their own
benefit, and the world in which you live being

“
of manmade origin, rather than a natural,
unconstructed universe. Deceiving oneself for
their own benefit (choosing a simulated life to
increase pleasure and enjoyment) and being
deceived by others for no benefit do not seem
to hold as strong a correlation as Nozick
assumes. In fact, modulating one’s beliefs
around what causes happiness over what proves
to be true is far from uncommon. There are
many who would say their beliefs bring them
joy, pleasure and security regardless of their
truth. While, say, a religious belief may prove to
be false, the utility that an individual receives
from believing it – the effect it has on their lives,
their appealing to something greater, the
certainty in many decisions, the sense of
community with fellow believers – may be
higher than the value that they set on their
beliefs being true – the value of accurate
knowledge. This is true of many things. Society
is a collective agreement to deny the truth of
human nature and history – effectively to
knowingly deceive ourselves and others – for
the sake of a happier, safer, more pleasurable
life. Superstition is a belief – usually without
any evidence or deductive reasoning – that
there are forces at work that drive people’s lives
and luck, and many take pleasure in the belief
that following a few simple rules will help to
keep them safe from undeserved misfortune (or
that any misfortune that befalls them is through
no fault of their own).
Nozick’s second issue is that humans have a
personal wish to be a certain kind of person, an
ideal towards which they aspire. He argues that
no person living in the experience machine can
have a personality, can have flaws or strengths,
can have morals – only be “an indeterminate
blob” in a tank. This seems an odd conclusion
to come to; within the virtual reality of the
experience machine, the person’s life may still
hold challenges, moral quandaries, and social
interactions with completely realistic simulated
AIs. Surely the personality formed from the

conversations and experiences one has is a real
one, regardless of whether those privy to it are
real? While saving a computer programme from
drowning in a virtual lake may not count as a
moral act in the traditional sense, surely the
person who believes they are risking their own
life to drag a child from the water is exactly as
moral as the person who correctly believes it?
Nozick’s position seems to argue that a person’s
character is dependent exclusively on real
experiences they have; would a person who
would risk their life to save a child from
drowning in a lake, but has never encountered
the opportunity to do so, be immoral, just
because they’ve never truly experienced it?
Nozick’s third suggestion of what means
more to human sensibilities than the pleasure
of their experiences is the discomfort he and
many subjects of this thought experiment
reportedly feel at the thought of removing
“actual contact with any deeper reality”. The
fact – not the feeling – of existing in the real
world, with no façade or construction around
the nature of reality, has an inherent and
irreplaceable value. He appeals to a spiritual
connection that a person may have with the
world in which they live, an almost deified
version of the supposed natural universe.
While a great many people do claim to feel
such a bond to the universe and the vastness
of our world (keeping in mind that this
feeling, if not the connection itself, could be
simulated in exactly the same way as every
other), there are several views of the universe
that rehash them as already being those nested
experience machines that Nozick would
decline entering. Many a modern religious
argument states that what we consider to be
the “real world” is a virtual reality of sorts; a
playground or a sandbox devised for humans
to exercise their free will and earn their places
in true reality; God’s domain, Heaven, Hades,
or whatever world the religion in question
denotes. At the very least, we have to accept
”

– that the true nature of the universe – it's
origins, it's formulation, it's purpose or lack
thereof – are still a mystery to us. Appealing to
such a concrete universal idea in the face of a
question like this takes several leaps beyond
pure logic.
Nozick closes his discussion with a
consideration on the possible positives of
engaging in such a machine. He states that the
same machine which would able to share
experiences with other real humans, rather
than live in a simulated isolation, would be less
objectionable. He also states that plugging into
such a machine might teach you things,
transform you, or give pleasures that, in limited
doses, wouldn’t have the negative repercussions
that he warns about for the lifelong experience.
These uses for such a machine are very similar
to applications that we have for virtual reality in
development today, created for education,
training and entertainment. With a real-life
version of Nozick’s experience machine already
placing people into these virtual worlds, has our
outlook on their value changed? Do we still
view such experiences as hollow, or are they
appreciated in a way that is different, but as
important, as education and entertainment in
the traditional senses?
What do you think?

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, And Utopia.
New York: Basic Books, 2013.
Nozick, Robert. The Examined Life:
Philosophical Meditations. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2006.

_____________
Dave only had enough time to take a deep
breath before he was plunged in again.
Flames lapped at him, a white-hot pain
against his skin. But he couldn’t move, could
barely breathe. All he could do was watch.
The sky above was red. Screams rang out from
around the burning street, cut off by the
deafening thud of bullets entering flesh. A
woman rounded the corner, high heels slipping
on the slick red asphalt. She lost her balance
and keeled over. Her eyes met Dave’s, wide with
terror.
“Save me please,” she whispered, “They’re —”
She howled, her body contorting. The figure
in the distance lowered the rifle, began to walk
closer. His face was hidden behind a mask, but
Dave made out the cool blue eyes, one of them
too bright to be natural.
“Clint,” he managed to gasp, “Stop…”
The woman let out a wail, trying to lift her
body off the ground. Walking closer, Clint
cocked his rifle.
“With revolution comes bloodshed,” he said.
Taking aim at the woman, he pulled the
trigger.

Light burst behind Dave’s eyes, and he felt the
flames consume him, the pain mounting until
his body went into a spasm, wrenching him
free.
The air cooled against his skin. Once again he
felt the back of the chair pressing into him.
When he opened his eyes, he was in his
apartment again.
The plastic cushions clung to his sticky skin
as he squirmed, trying to dislodge the nodes
running down his spine and arms. But the
straps around his wrists didn’t budge.
What time is it? He wondered. Sunlight spilled
through the window, casting long shadows on
the ground. How long had it been since he
showed up to work?
When he closed his eyes again he saw the
long, cold hallways of the ministry, his
colleagues passing through like shadows. The
thought of the place made him shudder. And
with the shudder, Dave felt a tingle run down
his spine.
The experience machine sitting on the table
nearby whirred to life, its lights winking with sly
derision.
Clenching his fists, Dave strained at the straps
one last time before the tingling swelled to
numbness, paralyzing him in his seat.
“No,” he managed to gasp before the machine
pulled him in again.
* * *
Dave’s footsteps echoed down the ministry’s
long hallway. Outside he heard the same

screams, guns firing, explosions. But inside
everything was quiet, almost peaceful.
He shook his head to clear the strange
wooziness in the back of his mind. Now wasn’t
the time for this. It was just another day, just
another hunt. And this time, he had the upper
hand.
Fingers curling around the gun, he picked up
his pace, heading down to the doorway at the
end of the hall. First, the office.
The research team was huddled in the corner.
Corey stood up when Dave walked in.
what are you waiting for? Kill us all. Isn’t that
what you’re here for? Or are you going to play
God and spare your friends? What a sad bastard
you are.”
Clenching his jaw, Dave brought up his gun
again and clicked off the safety. Sarah stepped
back, her eyes still bright with derision.
“Jane will be so proud of you now,” she spat.
Dave pulled the trigger and Sarah collapsed
like a rag doll. The rest of them screamed and
fell to their knees.
“Please…”
Looking down at their faces, he couldn’t
process anything. Wide eyes, red-rimmed. The
mouths opening and closing, making sound
that grated against Dave’s ears.
I’ve had enough, he thought, bringing up his
gun again.
“Dave, we’ve got to get out, it’s —”
Levelling the gun at his head, Dave shot him
between the eyes. He keeled over, mouth still
gaping in surprise. Shrieks and sobs began to
issue from the mouths of the people on the
ground. Their faces looked distorted, barely
human.
“So what Jane said was true,” said Sarah. She
stood up as well, a strange smile flickering over
her face. “You did betray us. You’re one of
them.”
“It’s for the greater good,” said Dave, the
words bitter in his mouth, “You haven’t seen
the things I’ve seen. Life in the lower caste —”
Sarah laughed. “I should’ve known. Once a
traitor, always a traitor. You betrayed your caste,
and now you’re here to betray us. So what if we
treat them like dogs? That’s what they are. Well,
For a few seconds his ears rang. Then the
room was silent. The bodies slumped in a pile
before him were still. The faces of his colleagues
stared back at him, their half-lidded eyes like
marbles.
He fell to his knees. The gun spun from his
hand.
And then the door opened.
Dave didn’t look up. He knew the footsteps
too well.
“Are you here to kill me?” he asked.
A strong hand grabbed his arm, lifted him.
The gun was pushed back into his fingers.
Standing back, Jane leaned against the wall.
“What are you waiting for?” she said, “Go
ahead. For the greater good.”

Dave’s head pounded. Jane’s eyes were cold.
He heard the screams again. If only they would
shut up. If only they would go away.
Bringing the gun to his temple, he pulled the
trigger.
* * *
“Bravery or cowardice? Which was it?”
Smoke rose from the dark corner of the room
where the voice came from.
Dave turned his head away to look at the
balcony.
“Why did you end it?”
“Why won’t you kill me?” he said.
“Of all people, you should know the law.”
No physical repercussions. Of course. Dave
glanced at the blinking Experience Machine
next to him. Something still didn’t add up.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
Something stirred. The smell of cigarettes
grew oppressive. Dave only had a moment to
turn his head and meet those familiar cold eyes
before a tingling sensation started running
through his body and everything turned white.
“Your turn to choose, Dave. How would you
like them to die?”
Clint snarled through his gag. One of the
men pushed him down, kicked him in the face.
Blood began to stream down his nose and
cheeks.
“Let me take their place,” Dave said.
The men laughed. “Your little revolt failed,”
said one of them, “You have no say here. How
about this; kill them yourself.”
“I can’t do that.”
The man shrugged. His boot came down on
Clint’s hands. Reaching into his pocket, he
produced a small rusty razor, bringing it close
to Clint’s good eye. The others in the group
squirmed, looking away, but more men in black
coats stepped up, forcing them to turn forward.
“Finish it quick, or we’ll make it slow.”
For the first time in years Dave saw fear in
Clint’s eyes. The man’s hand twitched closer.
“Your choice. You want them to suffer again
because you’re a coward, huh? Prove yourself,
agent.”
When Dave spoke, his voice felt like someone
else’s.
“I’ll do it.”
The man straightened up. “Go ahead.”
* * *
Men in black coats forced Clint onto his
knees. Turning, Dave saw his other friends,
bound and gagged, their eyes wide. The
interrogation room’s harsh light shone down
on them.
Dave felt for his gun. Nothing.
“With your hands. And hurry up, or I might
just change my mind.”
Clint looked away when Dave knelt, put his
hands around his throat.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, beginning to
tighten his grip.

Dave said nothing. He stared out into the
night, the blank sky.
“You saw what’s going to happen. If you fail,
your friends die. If you succeed, there will be
chaos. Do you really want to be the one to see
that happen?”
He shook his head slowly.
“Then call it off.”
He felt the pulse in Clint’s neck speed up,
heard him gasp through his gag, his eyes
bulging. Those eyes finally met Dave’s one more
time, without sadness or anger. They were like
a young child’s, without memory or feeling.
Eventually even the light behind them faded.
The glass eye seemed fixed on Dave, accusing
him.
Dave didn’t even realize he was crying until
his vision began to blur. He heard the sobs of
the others, rising and falling.
“Please just let me die,” he said, his voice
cracking.
“Hurry up. You’ve got more friends to send
off.”
“Give me a moment.” Dave lowered his head.
Before the men could react, he launched
himself across the room. Bright pain exploded
in his head, cutting off the shouts in the room.
* * *
There were still tears on his face when he
opened his eyes again. He closed them for a
moment, trying to take a deep breath. The
lights in his room were warm and familiar.
Dave’s voice almost cracked when he spoke.
“I thought you hated Experience Machines. ‘An
instrument like a jackhammer —’”
“— not a gun,” finished Jane. She took a step
forward, then another. A cigarette butt
smouldered in her fingers, but she didn’t let go
even as the embers glowed against her skin.
“Even unwieldy tools have their use,” she
said, “It’s much easier to show you the effects of
your actions than scold you about it, no?”
“I don’t understand. The ministry wouldn’t
punish you for killing me. It wouldn’t punish
you for killing all of the lower caste rebels. So
why all this? It doesn’t make sense.”
The cigarette butt fell from Jane’s hand. Dave
barely caught the tremble in her fingers before
she stuffed both hands into her pockets. She
crushed the butt against the tiled floor with her
boot.
“Breaking a rebel is more use than killing one.
I’ve spent a lot of time on you. I’d rather
cultivate my investments than cut them off.”
“Is that so?” Dave said, “Would protecting a
rebel mentee look good to the ministry?”
Jane’s eyes hardened. Dave flinched when her
hand lingered over the experience machine’s
knob. But this time, he was ready.
“Call it off.”

“It’s an unwieldy tool,” he said as she turned
the knob, “Because its power relies on the mind
of the victim.”
Jane’s eyes widened, but it was too late. The
room’s lights dimmed as Dave sunk back into
himself.
* * *
There was a pounding in Dave’s head that
wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t just the sharp pain in
his body, or the dryness of his lips. The very air
tasted musty and familiar.
The alley was barely wide enough for a child,
but Dave was a small child. He took shambling
steps, one hand pressed against the wall to hold
himself up, the other pressed against the part of
his abdomen that was hot with pain. A strange,
uneasy throbbing in his head slowed his
thoughts. Adrenaline drove him onwards.
He couldn’t stop now. He almost felt the
whips cracking against his back, whistling past
his ear. But it would be so much worse if they
caught up with him.
He had been here before, he was sure of it.
Perhaps in a dream, in a vision, where he had
been free to walk beyond the mill and its yards,
into this strange world with no doors or gates.
The throbbing built, until it felt like a little
animal thumping around inside his head.
Dave’s vision blurred. Clint’s screams rang in
his ears. He shuddered as he recalled the empty
socket staring back at him, Clint’s other eye
wide with something worse than terror or even
anger.
His legs buckled, and everything faded into a
panicked heat. Above him loomed something
big and blue, warm like a blanket. He wanted to

touch it, but he couldn’t raise his arm. On his
lips he still tasted the salt of his tears. The
gaping wound in his side drained all the
strength from his body.
Footsteps. Dave squeezed his eyes shut, biting
down the whimper in his throat. He would not
let them see him cry.
“Do you need help?”
A cold voice, but one without the cruel glee
of his masters. Dave opened his eyes.
A woman stood over him. She wore a sleek
black overcoat. Her eyes were a paler shade of
the sky overhead.
“May…” Dave’s voice came through in short
breaths, “May…I have…a knife, ma’am?”
“For what?”
A lump formed in his throat. He felt tears
coming again, but he spoke anyways.
“So I can die.”
A wrinkle creased the woman’s forehead.
“This child is yours? How old is he?”
“What?”
Reaching down, she took hold of Dave’s
wrist, turning it upwards and tapping at the
joint.
“He’s unmarked. No assigned number, I’m
assuming. Do you know the penalty for an
unregistered child under twelve?”
Old Paul’s face turned red, and he walked
closer. “Now listen here—”
He pounced. A deafening sound rang
through the alley. Paul’s mouth dropped open.
He stumbled back, holding a hand to his chest.
When he took it away the palm was red.
“You…” he collapsed before finishing his
sentence.
“Unregistered minor and assaulting an
officer,” said the woman. In her hand was the
strange black thing that had made the sound.
The woman frowned, looked like she was
about to speak, when a familiar cackle
interrupted her. Gritting his teeth, Dave tried
to get up again.
“Don’t come any closer,” he heard her say. In
his blurry line of vision he could see the sudden
tension in her figure.
When he turned his head, Dave saw his
masters. They each had knives and chains. One
of them was stained with blood already.
“The police doesn’t hve any jurisdiction over
our private property,” snarled old Paul,
brandishing his knife in Dave’s direction. His
blade was the only one stained with blood
already. Dave wondered who else had tried to
run. Had it been Clint?
The rest of the men stared for a minute. Then
all at once, they turned and ran away.
Considering them for a minute, the woman
slid the thing into her belt. She knelt over Dave.
“Are you…police…?” he muttered as her face
swam in and out of his vision.

“Yes. You’re unregistered, so no one will miss
you. I do wonder…”
Dave flinched as she picked him up in her
arms.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said, “Just sleep.”
Closing his eyes, Dave sunk into the strange
blue warmth of the sky.
* * *
Dave didn’t open his eyes immediately. His
abdomen still throbbed with the pain of the old
wound, the same pain he felt for years without
need of a machine.
“So you do resent me after all.” Jane’s soft
footsteps paced the room. Her voice seemed to
crackle with something tense.
“I don’t.”
Dave opened his eyes to Jane gesturing at the
machine.
“You clearly regret the day I saved you.”
“I do. But only because from today on, I’ll
have to stand opposite the person who gave me
hope to stand up in the first place.”
Jane scoffed. “I don’t believe in cheap
kindness. Don’t forget, we’re all weapons of the
ministry. Would you call that a kinder fate?”
“Maybe not,” said Dave slowly, “But you
could have left me. If you wanted to stop me
from rallying, you had more than enough time
to put a bullet through my head. Why all this?”
For a moment, Jane became very still. Then
she came closer.
Dave saw her fists clenched. He swallowed.
Reaching down, she undid the straps around
his wrists, then stooped to pick up the machine.
“Believe what you want,” she said, “But if you
show up tomorrow, we will stand against each
other. Do you understand?”
Without another word, she turned and left.
Dave waited until he heard the front door slam
before slumping back against his seat. Every
inch of his skin felt feverish and heavy.
He sat there for the rest of the night, watching
the sky turn pink.
* * *
“What the hell happened to you?”
Dave winced as Clint’s loud voice burst
against his ear.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“You’re still showing?”
“I am.” Dave rubbed his face to make sure he
could stay awake.
“You sound tired.”
“I didn’t want to dream.”
“Been having nightmares again?” Clint’s voice
finally softened a little.
“You could say that.”
“Just be alert. Today’s the day.”
Dave heard the excitement in Clint’s voice, in
the small, sharp breaths he took with each
phrase. He recalled how his hands felt around
his friend’s throat.
“Yeah. I’ll see you there.”

He hung up. The sky had faded into a gentle
blue outside. It wasn’t red, at least not yet.
His body felt heavy, as if he were still in a
dream. “How would I know if I weren’t?” he
said aloud.
No response came. Taking a deep breath,
Dave finally stood up.
* * *
“You look awful,” said Clint, pulling Dave
into a hug.
“I’m ready,” Dave said with much more
certainty than he felt.
“Good. I think this is everyone.”
A crowd of about fifty had gathered in the
shanty low caste neighbourhoods, each of them
carrying their own weapons. While a few of
them had handguns, the rest of them held
knives or clubs. Their eyes were hard.
Clint cocked his rifle. “Come on. Let’s go.”
As they marched through the streets, more
people poured from the narrow doorways or
leapt out from low windows, joining the group.
They walked in silence, Dave and Clint at the
very front.
The late afternoon sun glinted off Clint’s rifle
as he walked. Dave imagined it under the red
sky again, firing off round after round.
They came to the border separating the low
and high caste neighbourhoods. The guards
had abandoned their posts. Dave caught
himself relieved.
Even if no one died here, there would be
enough deaths soon, he thought.
The crowd shambled along. They weren’t
soldiers. None of the ones who carried guns
knew how to handle them correctly. The
clenching sensation in Dave’s stomach
returned.
Clint barked out orders. A few men jumped
into the booth, began to work the levers. The
city gates swung open.
The entire crowd took a step back. Standing
on the other side was the entirety of the state’s
police force. Dave couldn’t distinguish the faces
of his colleagues. He saw machine guns,
shotguns, assault rifles.
“We’re dead on our feet,” he muttered to
himself.
Clint shot him a glare. “Dave —”
Dave stepped out, walked towards the police
force. To his surprise, none of them opened
fire. He saw faces he recognized, although he
could barely understand them.
And then in the centre of the field, he saw
her. Jane had drawn her gun already. She
trained it on him.
Dave felt his stomach turn. His whole body
quivered as he took another step, then threw
back his head and laughed.
Never once as an agent of the ministry had he
feared for his own life. And here he was,
shaking like a coward.
He looked back at the crowd behind him.
They stared back with open mouths, clutching
tight to their pipes and knives and pitiful guns.
A ragtag army, through and through. They
weren’t a rebellion. They were nameless
casualties, doomed from the start. How did he
ever think this was possible?

“It was a dream all along,” he said quietly,
“The dream of a little boy dying in an alley.
Flawed, impossible.”
Clint’s good eye was as wide as his glass one,
his hand on his own rifle. He mouthed
something. Or maybe he shouted. Dave
couldn’t tell anymore. He was everywhere at
once, feeling the flames against his skin, the
cold gun in his palm trained on his co-workers,
Clint’s throat in his hands, his glass eye glinting
in the dim interrogation room.
There was no happy ending. Not for him, at
least.
Throwing his head back, Dave’s eyes filled
with blue.
“You were right, Jane,” he muttered, “You’ve
broken one rebel. But will you ever be able to
break all of us?”
He met her gaze one more time. Jane’s eyes
narrowed. Her hands clenched around the gun,
fingers trembling.
Dave closed his eyes. ◊

“

As someone who works in the research and
development of realism in virtual reality, I often
find myself always obsessing over the little visual
features that make some something look real, be
it the sharp yellow contrast of the sun hitting a
carpet floor, or the small erosion on the corner
of a bedside table. It’s important to me to notice
the subtle things in reality that need to be
brought over into the virtual world. The biggest
thing that gives us the discomfort of the
is the lack of these tiny features;
perfection or symmetry, something that is too
straight or too snappy. What makes the things
in the virtual world seem more and more real
are damage, age, wear – reality comes with
imperfection.
Virtual reality has reached a point where we
are able to make environments feel real. I’ve
seen people cry, cower in terror, receive
education and even medical treatment in VR.
The impact that can be had by experiencing as
little as a realistic-looking room in virtual reality
is already jetting the platform miles ahead of
anything that we could have anticipated. In my
own work, I’ve used VR for medical treatment
studies, crime scene investigations, safety
training – and that’s only a fraction of what
global developers have been working on in VR.
Many companies are using it to its full potential
– not just for entertainment, but as tools for
efficiency. However, as with every worldchanging
technology, you must always stop to
wonder when it will be that we cross the line.
Developers can see the upcoming dilemmas,
but perhaps shrugging it off is easy when you
think it’s too far away to worry about. We
haven’t been able, yet, to reach that level of
intelligent realism that could create true harm
– but one day, we may well reach that point. As
players, developers, and those with a special
interest, we all need to be aware of the harm,
the cost, that nobody wants to talk about.
Picture the scene in 2004 film Harry Potter and
the Prisoner of Azkaban, where Professor Lupin
whizzes his spider around the classroom with
his wand. The students are laughing, but the
atmosphere quickly turns cold. All of a sudden,
they – and we – realise that the spider is
struggling, hurting, and about to die. We are
uncomfortably aware that there are
consequences of manipulating this living thing.
With realistic VR, sometimes the same
consequences are in question. The closer
artificial intelligence comes to real life, or an
approximation of it, the closer our interactions
become to the manipulation of life for the
amusement of other people. It’s all well and
good to make a perfectly realistic imitation of a
chair. People can manipulate the chair, abuse it;
what's the worst that can happen? But it may be
different when you start bringing more
intelligent subjects into high-end, photorealistic
virtual reality worlds. It’s probably safe to
assume that most readers haven’t tried this kind
of VR, which requires a high-spec computer, a
lot of room, and expensive virtual reality

equipment, including headsets. It’s the type of VR
where you can walk, jump and run in a virtual
space. Once you break that barrier of traversing
through a virtual environment, everything
changes. If it’s done correctly you can lose yourself
in immersion. With additional processes like
and ,
it may soon be difficult to tell the difference
between a real environment and a virtual one.
I’ve fielded some very interesting questions
lately, but the one I found the most thoughtprovoking
was about interaction with intelligent
non-player characters (NPC) in virtual reality. My
mind went straight to consideration of realistic,
convincingly intelligent NPC. I thought about
possibilities not only of making conversation and
responses fluent, but also perfecting the look and
subtle feel of them. Currently an imperfect NPC
can totally break immersion in an otherwise
faultless virtual reality experience. there’s the
‘uncanny valley’ of anything rendered to the same
photorealistic standards as VR experiences can
currently be, and in contrast there’s the childish
patronisation of non-realistic, ‘cartoon animated’
characters. A solid example of uncanny realism
can be found at Fundamental VR with their VR
surgery application. Simulating humans at the
level we currently have available to us with
contemporary technology and incorporating them
into a photorealistic environment is usually very
unsuccessful – yet we keep trying.
The first stage in development is the
conversations, flow and interactions with the
character, then there’s the look of the skin and
fabric, then there’s the motion capture and
animation. It’s a very heavy and extensive
workload, and not currently viable in terms of the
time and resources required to achieve a
convincing, interactive human that could even
hold a torch to the environments and objects we
have in virtual reality. But imagine if we could.
The most impressive responsive human I’ve
seen represented in this type of medium comes in

the form of
. A video capture is
taken of a real person speaking, and combined
with an algorithm that can understand what is
said when a player speaks to them. It can process
this information and respond with an appropriate
pre-recorded answer. While this might sound
rudimentary, it’s a lot more intelligent than it
might seem. Programmers have advanced enough
to display responses to not only direct sentences
spoken, but variations of them as well; these
characters in front of you are realistic (without
being creepy), responsive, and seemly intelligent.
The company who created this used it as an
interactive collection of biographies from the
USC Shoah Foundations that enables people to
have conversations with Holocaust survivors. In
terms of technology, my prediction is that this is
where the future of realistic NPC conversations
will begin. The ‘need’ will arise for more
convincing human interaction when we start
hearing more and more success stories of
previsualization, education, empathy building
and evidence building from imitating real life
with humans – just as we have with environments.
In terms of intelligent NPC within the medium
of game development, we can find many examples
in role playing games (RPG). Bioware, one of the
most prominent RPG developers, create games
that have multi-choice conversations which allow
you to choose from a list of responses when you
interact with an NPC – what the player selects
impacts the NPC’s response. While it holds a few
similarities with real conversation, it usually
comes across comparatively smothering and
limited. VR has similar mechanics in some of
their applications, and their biggest downfall is
having to animate a realistic interaction for every
frame, every response, that could possibly be
required. Many argue that this was the reason that
the newest addition from the Bioware studio,
Mass Effect Andromeda, publicly failed – being
unable to realistically present convincing human
expression, conversation and interaction
comparable with the scale of realism in the rest of
the game.

Another example of the uncanny valley in
modern video games can be found in the ‘AI
baby’ developed by a company called Soul
Machines. This company uses artificial
intelligence in a desktop application to create
lifelike avatars with which humans can play and
interact. Unfortunately, the incredible realism
of the “babies” is what makes them all the more
disturbing; the closer to real it gets, the worse it
is. Which begs the question; why put in all that
effort, time, and most certainly money, if it's
going to look more disturbing rather than less?
From all the examples online, you will find that
anything responsive is usually either heavily
animated or slightly disturbing. Neither add to
the immersion of the experience.
To this day, I have come across one notable
exception, which I would definitely recommend
exploring should you be interested in the idea
of interactions in virtual reality.
Unexpectedly, the one VR application that I
found the most impressive NPC responses in,
was a game that didn’t really show any
characters at all. The Accountant was created by
the writers of adult cartoon Rick and Morty (of
all people), and is a game where the main
characters talk to the player over intercom.
While it isn’t responsive to the player’s voice, it
takes its cues from player behaviour. It perfectly
tackles the current restrictions of NPC
developed in VR and does it hilariously. The
designers were able to perfectly predict player
motivations and actions, not just regarding
those not used to playing on VR, but going so
far as to effectively predict and affect the actions
of VR developers who work on these games
every day. The part that most piques the interest
of my realism obsession was one particular
scene; I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but
what I will say is that I’ve never before felt like I
was going to hurt a real, living entity like I did
in this game. In making me feel as if these were
real people who were speaking to me, the game
was able to create a shocking level of immersion
unlike anything I’ve experienced before.
What we need to ask ourselves now is what’s
going to happen when we do eventually have
realistic humans in virtual reality. The scary part
is that myself and many other developers can
see how it could be achieved – the only missing
factor is sufficient time and resources. But if
environments can affect people in the ways that
we’ve seen so far – being implemented in
hospitals, raising and lowering anxiety, affecting
people's memory and motor skills – then you
can only imagine the amount of impact that an
AI that looks, acts and feels almost
indistinguishable from a genuine human could
have on its audience. This could potentially
spark up issues involving censorship, mental
manipulation, addiction to interaction, abuse
cases, or even trauma. Arguments that ‘video
games are too violent’ could have a major leg to
stand on. There’s a case to be made that the
only reason VR is surviving as a ‘mainstream’
and ‘safe’ platform, is because realistic ‘AI’ or
‘NPC’ do not exist on the same level of
immersion as the objects and environment do.
I personally think that it has a very long way to
go, but if you want to keep an eye on the
journey we’re about to take into this
unprecedented future of interaction in virtual
reality, online search keyword .

“FundamentalVR launches the first application of its
FeelRealVR system working with Pacira Pharmaceuticals
and Hive Health. A ground-breaking step forward in
medical training devices, this virtual reality system allows
a safe, repeatable environment within which to refine
infiltration technique, providing real-time feedback
along with the feeling of tissue and bone structures.”
“New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT) is a collection
of interactive biographies from USC Shoah Foundation
that enable people to have conversations with prerecorded
video images of Holocaust survivors and other
witnesses to genocide.”
“Enter a new era of storytelling as the power of the
critically-acclaimed Frostbite engine brings the visuals,
action, emotion, and worlds of Mass Effect Andromeda
to life like never before.”
“We bring technology to life by creating incredibly lifelike,
emotionally responsive Digital Humans with
personality and character that allow machines to talk to
us literally face-to-face! Our vision is to humanize
computing to better humanity.”
“The modern field of Accountancy is a serious and
honorable profession. Many human beings have spent
their lives toiling over the hard science of numbers.
Thousands have died so that we may get to the level of
understanding that we have today. Thousands have
died.”

Thursday, 8 th of February, 2034, 6:18PM
_____________
The moment didn’t come until more than 45
minutes after official close of business. Kara had
always been a hard worker, but not because she
was any good – if she had any real value, she’d
be able to meet her work requirements without
having to stay late. She sat with her back to me
at her workstation, a tendril of brown-red hair
curling down the length of her spine. She was
the only one with me in the office, so there was
no one I had to hide my stare from. I took her
in from top to toe, noting the soft curve of her
shoulder blade through the weave of her
cardigan, her slender waist, those loose, slip-on
shoes.
“Almost ready to go, Daniel?” she said
without turning around. I’d said I’d walk her to
her car, it was dark out. Her voice was soft and
lilting. I tried to imagine it in a scream.
“Whenever you are,” I replied without
emotion. “I need to leave the simulator to run
overnight anyway.”
She turned and smiled at me. She was pretty.
Twenty something, high cheekbones, dark eyes.
I wished she wasn’t the one. Why on earth was
she the one? I knew in every fibre of my being
that I’d never be able to get away with it, not
with Kara. There’s no way I wouldn’t be caught.
Still, there was something – something bigger
than myself, something outside of me – that was
telling me that there was nothing in the world
for me to do more important than killing Kara
Hammond after work tonight.
I walked her to her car. Her battery was dead.
“I didn’t leave my lights on this morning,” she
said. “The sun was well up before I even got to
work”.
“Maybe it was an accident,” I lied.

I drove her home, followed her into her
house, knocked her to the ground and put my
hands around her throat.
She screamed, then gasped. I was silent, but
my heart was beating a mile a minute. Joy or
fear? I could feel the structures in her throat
creaking and cracking and crumbling between
my fingers. She kicked her legs, knocking tables
with vases and god knows what else noisily to
the ground around us. The light in the room
wheeled as a lamp came down.
She started to quiet. I didn’t loosen my grip.
Her face, blue and swollen and already hard at
the lips, accused me, questioned me. Her eyes
were still open and I looked back on them with
shame, or something similar, but didn’t loosen
my grip.
Minutes passed. My own hands started to go
purple, numb, but I had to be sure. I waited to
feel the ghost of a pulse.
Nothing.
Unfortunately, I could already see blue lights
flashing dimly in the dark windows, behind the
silhouette of a neighbour that had heard the
commotion when it was already too late.
***
Daniel Farleigh expelled the breath he felt
like he’d been holding in for the ten minutes
that the simulator had been running. While the
whole affair had lasted a few hours in
programme time, the simulator accelerated the
realtime application by several factors,
sometimes several hundred. Daniel had let this
one run relatively slow, because he’d wanted to
watch carefully the zeroes and ones of the little
fake universe scroll across his sea of screens, and
try and feel what his little virtual double had
felt.
As usual, it didn’t really work. The data that
the simulation computer produced was purely
practical, tangible; the hard pros and cons of
the scenario at play, once the little universe it
simulated in perfect physical detail had been
snuffed out, along with everyone in it.
Daniel read the resultant data with
disinterest. Obviously, Kara wasn’t going to
work; she lived in the middle of the city in a
terraced house, had neighbours on both sides
with whom she was close friends, and had
worked in the same office as him for the last ten
months. There was no feasible way of killing
Kara without being caught in the first 24 hours.
He’d known that beforehand, and because he
knew, the Daniel inside the simulation
would've known too; nothing but an exercise in
futility, really. Still, Daniel was nothing if not
thorough, and this was the latest in a long line
of his own simulations – a horde of temporary
universes where Daniel’s double took a victim.
He looked over at Kara – the real Kara –
without turning his head. She sat, as she always
did, with her back to him, typing at speed and
immersed in her work. He quickly deleted the
digital record of the last minor simulation,
disguising the extra duration and power it had
cost as a final run-through of the previous
client’s project.
Realistically, the client project hadn’t been
much better. Daniel had the hollow luxury of
this justification almost every day. This time, a
massive corporate conglomerate was running
outcomes of its probable decision to semi-

legally dump the entirety of a factory’s waste
into one of its privately-owned lakes. In 100%
of the simulations, the outcome was that
upwards of four hundred residents of towns
and homes downriver were killed in the next
ten years alone by diseases contracted from and
terminal illnesses created by consuming or
being in proximity to the river water. Daniel
had spent the last three days monitoring the
unpleasant deaths of the residents of these
towns with little interest, via a steady stream of
elaborate code. Depending on the time of year
– considering runoff from nearby mountains
affecting the water movement and variances in
populations around the towns depending on
religious holidays and the weather, 19% of the
simulated outcomes had a death toll of over two
thousand in that following ten years.
towns would make between the waste dump
date and the year that everyone started to get
sick.
Daniel’s job was to run the simulation,
monitor it, and collate the resultant data from
code into English. That data would then be
passed onto the proposals and presentations
team, including Kara, which would turn it into
a shiny new dossier. The front pages of that
dossier would detail the actions undertaken in
the 8% of simulations that resulted in no one
ever finding out that said corporation had
dumped toxic industrial waste into drinking
and swimming water. The corporation would
then pick their favourite action plan from that
8%, legality negotiable, and immediately set it
to work.
Though Daniel had his car – a very expensive
new Mercedes – in the company park, he
decided to walk home. His apartment was an
hour’s walk from HQ, out of the dimly lit
industrial sector of the city where the computer
simulator sat in a squat, unmarked concrete
building, into the vivid bright lights of the most
expensive suburbs. It was cold, and he walked
briskly with his gloved fists clenched in his
pockets, twitching with pressure whenever he
passed a person on the slick, black pavement.
The corporation in question was not running
the simulation to discover how many lives the
dumping would take. The corporation was
running the simulation – or, rather, paying the
company for which Daniel worked an
unthinkable amount of money to do so – to
find out the course of action that would result
in the lowest overall cost for the operation, in
terms of staff time spent creating coverups,
possible legal settlements, bad publicity for
environmental damage, and the eventual
connection the residents of the downriver
What about this man? A tall black man in a
dark coat stalked towards him. Daniel
wondered what he was doing walking into the
industrial sector this late into the evening.
Daniel wondered if he walked this way every
night at 6:15. He was slim but wiry, and Daniel
didn’t think he’d be able to overpower the man,
certainly not inconspicuously. But, if he made a
habit of walking alone through the mostly
deserted night-time services district…
Daniel had wanted to kill someone since his
mid-twenties. He didn’t know why, and he

didn’t really care to know. No one had wronged
him, he made a lot of money, and he had
everything he wanted, really – but every time he
met someone new, every time his hand brushed
an arm or some exposed skin, every time he
looked a person dead in the eye, he felt an
almost uncontrollable urge to drive something
sharp, deep into the dark red of them, or open
their head with twenty blows of his desktop
keyboard.
He never had – not yet. But in every stolen
universe between jobs on the simulator he came
closer to planning out his real-world experience.
More people were around now, as the
industrial sector slowly morphed into the edges
of the city. Coloured lights were strung around
little, trendy bars nestled in roadside nooks. It
started to snow. A blonde woman in a hat and
long grey coat knocked into Daniel as she
hurried into one of the bars.
“Sorry!” She said, half turning around.
In his head, Daniel threw her from the roof
of that little trendy bar.
He called for a taxi, driverless, and had it take
him home.
***
Thursday, 8 th of February, 2034, 7:24AM
I’d spent the last month, almost, visiting
Gino’s twice a week before work, sipping Italian
coffee and getting to know the staff and the
regulars. I feigned an insipid smile for the full
45 minutes I spent here in the mornings, and
for the most part it seemed to be working.
“Hey, man, how’s it going?” Findlay, some
business kid from the city who put a great deal
of effort into looking effortlessly cool, slapped
his hand solidly on my shoulder and slumped
into the seat across from me. We’d spoken a few
times before. He lifted the strap of his
messenger bag over his head and warmed his
hands by cupping them around his macchiato.
“Good, man, good,” I acted. “Cold, huh?”
“Good old February. Roll on springtime.”
We exchanged irritating pleasantries, as we
usually did when we bumped into each other
on a Thursday. All the while, I wondered what
kind of world it would have to be for Findlay
and I to be friends. He was nice enough. I had
no real reason for the burning desire in the back
of my mind to bury something in his head. If
everything in the world was the same, but
instead of these intense, seething needs I was
pleasant and kind, would I have liked Findlay?
What is it that makes me want to kill him?
I offer him a ride to work, keep him out of the
cold. It's on my way, I said.
I took him to the back of the café where I had
parked, scanned for people, and knocked him
on the back of the head with the half brick I
had put in my back seat.
What the – there’ll be cameras! I panicked to
myself.

I did it anyway. I put Findlay, silent, head
seeping, but still alive, in the trunk of my car
with a sock in his mouth and his hands zip-tied
behind his back. I drove to work, left him there
till lunchtime, and then drove on my
lunchbreak to one of the empty buildings on
the outskirts of the industrial sector and let him
out.
Findlay whimpered, wept, but the blow to the
head had robbed him of words.
The next three robbed him of the rest. I rolled
him into the corner, covered him with a pile of
bricks, and went back to the office for the
afternoon shift.
It wasn’t until I was sat back at my chair,
awash in the glow of the simulation computer’s
several screens in my freezing, dimly lit room,
that the reality of my transgression became clear
to me.
What – what the hell did I just do? What the hell
did I just do? How the hell could I do that? Oh my
God.
I tried not to let emotion – stronger than any
I had felt in months, years – show on my face. I
turned away from the arch that opened out
onto the office, and hid my face in the gloom
toward the computer housing opposite. The
industrial fans hummed, so my suddenly heavy
breathing could only be seen, and not heard, by
the tiny puffs of steam that condensed in the
frigid air. The simulator’s great, hulking form
sat squat in the chill, and all of a sudden I felt
incredibly tiny, so delicate in my place in the
world, here in the simulator computer’s
shadow.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. No. If – I can’t –
***
The simulation ended without definitive
conclusion, much to Daniel’s surprise. The
specific code for his personal universes was set
to end the simulation whenever it was
inevitable that he would be caught and
punished. He scanned the simulation history,
mentally converting scraps of code into
environmental data from the city around him.
He saw a stream of numbers in which a police
officer strolled past the café around 11:00AM
and followed it with interest, but a closer look
indicated she hadn’t even paused.
In the parking lot? Daniel tried to take in preexisting
environmental structures, and
eventually found a security camera on the roof
of the café, exactly where his simulated double
had expected it to be. That would be the issue,
then – just odd that the factor of inevitability
hadn’t been clearly laid out as in previous
simulations. As Daniel deleted the data and
changed the system time on the simulator
computer to mask the late start of his next client
simulation, he absentmindedly wondered what
his double had felt, knowing his actions were
being scrutinised, and that he’d be sent to
prison for the rest of his life as soon as someone
asked after Findlay, who was a semi-wealthy
yuppie with a plethora of friends. Of course,
virtual Daniel had no idea that his life, his
consciousness – the universe in which he lived,
the very reality – would blink out of existence
before any consequences could be met.
Would that be comforting?
The thought hung in his mind, like the taste
of blood in his mouth, as he entered the
supplementary data for the simulator’s next job.
This was going to be a big one; no more
personal simulations for a while. Impatience set
Daniel’s teeth on edge.
While technically the simulator computer,
the services it provided, and the company built
around them existed (just) within the bounds of
the law, the political juggernaut behind the
question to be posed in the next task was well
out of line in engaging with the company. Her
job was already on thin ice, and Daniel

wondered briefly what kind of ransom he could
ask, should he threaten to give the resultant
simulation data to the media. A colossal one.
That being said, Daniel was more than
confident that few iterations of this scenario in
the simulator would result in him coming out
of it alive.
The client was required to alleviate spending
somewhere high up in the country’s
administration, and had tasked the simulator
with finding the most efficient way to do so.
Reading over her notes, Daniel tapped out a
couple of coded nudges to specify what the
client was and wasn’t comfortable doing; the
more data that can be put into the simulation,
the more accurate and less lengthy the process
becomes. The client had very clearly – in some
cases switching to bright red pen in her
handwritten instructions – identified the
figures that the spending decrease was not
allowed to displease, as well as groups and
members of the public who could trace blame
and affect her future approval ratings. Daniel
carefully instructed the simulator to steer clear
of upsetting them, even of coming to their
attention where possible. The pre-simulation
log started to take a clear shape of which kinds
of routes to avoid. Saving the data, Daniel put
the first booklet of notes through the shredder
under his desk, and turned to the second – a
ranked list of the things the politician would be
happy to forfeit on the country’s behalf. This
one, if anything, was more of an indictment.
Hand writing the notes may help avoid
discovery by hacking, but anyone who might
recognise the client’s poorly disguised
penmanship could make the link. Among
smarter clients, the typewriter had come back
into fashion.
Daniel watched with mild interest as the
simulation began, and the universe blinked into
existence. The vast computer hummed, the
temperature cooled another cruel degree, and
cities, homes, families started to take shape in
the zeroes and ones scrolling across the flashing
screens. Daniel absentmindedly followed a
young woman who was wending her way
through the code. The first iteration realised
the client’s preferred option; a cut to healthcare
allowances that removed publicly funded
treatment for those in lower pay brackets. The
young woman appeared to be a university
student, studying something to do with words
and stories, but as the numbers zipped by
Daniel saw her fall ill (an undiagnosed case of
lupus), miss enough classes over the period of a
year to be forced to drop out of college and
move to a more impoverished suburb. The
population there had grown so quickly in the
year since the funding cut (as contraception
prices had been hiked along with the rest), that
the girl eventually began a job in early childcare,
moving from centre to centre until she settled
three years later at a state-run orphanage. It was
one of hundreds that had cropped up across the
country as a result of the marked increase in
families with large numbers of children having
their breadwinners die around middle age. Her
following twelve years – the client required a
fifteen year action plan – were bleak. Daniel
wondered who she was. As he watched the girl
whittle her youth away promising herself she’d
return to university the following year, he was
uncomfortably struck by the fact that she was
more than just a simulation. This virtual girl
had a genuine equivalent; she was a real person
somewhere out here in the world.
Some powerful simulator clients were able to
supplement the astronomical cost of
commercially running a simulation – especially
a big one, like this – with information. The girl,
and everyone else living in this brief reality,
were fully complex, essentially conscious
replicas of existing people, coded in almost
perfect detail from the extensive access the
simulator company had to resident, medical,
political and other records, often obtained
through personal relationships with people in

power. This client was one of several powerful
insiders who traded in access to such resources,
upping the accuracy for the company and
decreasing the price for themselves. Despite
himself, Daniel felt a twinge of compassion as
he looked into the girl’s future. Thirteen years
after having been floored by the sudden
inaccessibility to healthcare, thirteen years lost
to trying to get by, the girl died in her bed in
her mid-thirties of kidney failure; an ailment
that, today, would’ve been shaken with $7
diuretics.
scroll past, leapt forward in his chair and moved
the data to secondary screens for him to assess
later. The suspicious end to his previous
personal simulation had left him on edge, and
being unable to rerun it had been playing on his
mind. This mammoth client simulation finally
complete, he took his chance to sneak a replay
of his previous run with all of the same
parameters, whilst supposedly collating data for
the politician. Turning his screen further from
the open arch out into the office, he brought
the world back into being.
***
Thursday, 8 th of February, 2034, 7:24AM
Daniel idly wondered what kind of man he’d
have to be to consider sending her a card,
suggesting she get checked up. He had her
address, after all.
The client’s next favoured option lowered the
government subsidy given to public research
facilities. One of these was the Climatology Lab
which, despite severe political efforts to stifle
any practical movement, turned out to be very
close to suggesting a law change that would
hamper business activity for the next 20 years,
but also save the figure’s beachfront properties
in California from falling into the Pacific in the
next five.
After rehashing the possibilities for four and
a half 24-hour days, the simulator let out a
drawn-out whine, and displayed the finalised
data from the computing marathon. Daniel,
who had been anxiously tapping his shoe for
the past two days of watching the universes
I’d spent the last month, almost, visiting
Gino’s twice a week before work, sipping Italian
coffee and getting to know the staff and the
regulars. I feigned an insipid smile for the full
45 minutes I spent here in the mornings, and
for the most part it seemed to be working.
“Hey, man, how’s it going?” Findlay, some
business kid from the city who put a great deal
of effort into looking effortlessly cool, slapped
his hand solidly on my shoulder and slumped
into the seat across from me. We’d spoken a few
times before. He lifted the strap of his
messenger bag over his head and warmed his
hands by cupping them around his macchiato.
“Good, man, good,” I acted. Something rose
in me like bile. It was cold, like fear, I could feel
it filling me from my heart to the tips of my
fingers. I twitched.
Findlay stared at me. “Hey? You okay, Dan?”
What the hell is wrong with me? I squeezed my
hands into fists and put them in my lap.
Something’s wrong. Something more than usual.
“No, no, nothing! Sorry.” I lied. “Cold, huh?”

Findlay looked askance, but moved on.
“Good old February. Roll on springtime.”
We exchanged irritating pleasantries, as we
usually did when we bumped into each other
on a Thursday. All the while, the seething wish
I always held in my gut, for everyone, for
Findlay, to rip and tear and maim, was drowned
out by some new welling of dread. It was dread.
It gripped my throat and shook my words.
What was wrong with me?
I offer Findlay a ride to work, keep him out of
the cold. It's on my way, I said.
The whine of the terminated simulation
caught Daniel by surprise, and instilled in him
a tiny prick of fear.
What the hell?
He abandoned his keyboard and stood to
look at the scrolling lines of data in one of the
top screens. No diagnostics, no issues –
obviously there was a malfunction, there had to
be, but it wasn’t something that the simulator
computer could define.
I took him to the back of the café where I had
parked, scanned for people, and then slowly
opened the back door of my car.
“Whoa, whoa,” He said, feigning offense.
“You're no chauffer. I’ll sit in the front with
you.”
“Ha,” I said, perplexed. “Of course.”
I got in the driver’s seat next to him and
drove. I drove him to work. It was not on my
way. He asked what the half brick in the
backseat of my car was for. I told him,
truthfully, that I didn’t know.
Everything felt off, like I’d missed a beat, or
the world had skipped a revolution, or
everything had moved half a foot to the left. I
spent the morning feeling like I was watching
myself from a distance, watching the simulator.
Everything was wrong. At lunch, I drove to a
disused building deeper into the industrial
district in which my workplace was nestled.
Getting out of the car, I took the half brick in
my hand, hefted it, and burst into tears. What
the hell am I doing here? What the hell am I doing?
What the hell –
***
Could someone be interfering with the
running of the simulator computer? The
thought gripped his throat like a fist. Of course,
the whole business ran on the most heavily
encoded private network known to society, but
interaction between computers or agents within
the business was a possibility. If someone was
watching Daniel’s activities, fiddling with them,

not only would he be exposed for the macabre
and grisly simulations he pilfered those
precious minutes for, but he would be held to
account for the theft of those minutes –
millions of dollars of simulations over the past
few years, tens of millions, slipped through the
margins of other people’s accounts. His career
would be over.
He abandoned his work and spent the next
fifteen minutes picking apart the software’s
inner workings. There's no way the simulator
computer should be accessible from anywhere
in the business network without some serious
overrides, and those would leave a discernible
mark. The fear in his throat slowly waned as
inspection of every application in the simulator
proved that Daniel was alone in his computer.
What then? There was no chance of a virus
without interaction with an external agent, so
that could be written off. Perhaps a factor in
that universe was too unstable for the
simulation to render accurately? As the
parameters were all identical to the first run, the
entire universe should've rebooted without any
variation whatsoever, and yet there were clear
alterations in the simulated Daniel’s activities
and emotions. Daniel knew from experience
that the slightest action somewhere in the
simulation could have completely unintuitive
effects all the way throughout – but, whatever it
was, it should've stayed put.
Looking surreptitiously out into the office, he
reran the programme for a second time.
***
Thursday, 8 th of February, 2034, 7:24AM
I’d spent the last month, almost, visiting
Gino’s twice a week before work, sipping Italian
coffee and getting to know the staff and the
regulars. I feigned an insipid smile for the full
45 minutes I spent here in the mornings, and
for the most part it seemed to be working.
“Hey, man, how’s it going?” Findlay, some
business kid from the city, slapped his hand on
my shoulder and slumped into the seat across
from me. I froze, and stared in horror as he
clasped his hands around his steaming hot
macchiato.
“Whoa,” I said, barely a sound escaping my
suddenly hoarse throat. I looked shakily down
at my gloved hands, which were jittering across
the table as if in fits. “No,”
“Dude,” Findlay said, brow hard with sudden
concern. “Hey, Dan,”
Seeing him here, feeling his hand on my
shoulder, breathing in the thick smell of coffee
and Italian sweets and February snow, filled me
with such a random spike of unprecedented
terror – or something like it – that I felt like I
might throw up. I couldn't speak.
“HEY!” Findlay screamed, leapt out of his
chair, knocking it halfway across Gino’s, into an
attractive couple at another table. “I THINK
HE’S HAVING A STROKE!”
Is this what a stroke feels like? The thought was
almost a comfort. At least I could understand a
stroke. I had no idea what else might wash me
with such a wave of dread and fear that I could
do nothing but shake in my chair.
People rushed around me. I felt hands all over
my body, through the cold, hard film that I
could feel prickling all over my skin – a steel
wrap of horror, of fear for my life.
What for?
“Dan, I’m calling an ambulance,” I heard
Findlay as if from a mile away. “I’m doing it
now. Hold on.”
Coffee and sweets and snow.

Findlay’s pretentious messenger bag – does he
wear that every time?
At least the urgent, hushed ticking over of
Gino’s in the presence of a stroke victim was
unfamiliar to me.
Was that it? Familiarity?
What the hell is going on?
***
The whine didn’t come as a surprise, but as a
stone in the pit of Daniel’s stomach as he
watched the mess of the simulation unfold in a
45-second scroll of code in front of him.
Something is wrong. Something is definitely wrong.
He thought.
The simulation shouldn’t have reacted that
way. Simulated Daniel shouldn’t have reacted
that way. Medical concepts were very clearly
described in the simulator’s code – it is
extremely important to a great many
simulations, when the client is instrumental in
causing medical anomalies or when they are
experiencing them. Daniel hadn’t experienced
a stroke in there. He had no idea what it was.
“Hey,”
Daniel whipped around, pale as a ghost.
Arjun hung in the arch between Daniel and the
rest of the office, out of the icy cold that housed
the simulator. He took a step back when he saw
Daniel’s face, and swallowed.
“Was – was that the end of the political
simulation I just heard?” The boy asked. He was
small and slight, and very young. He did some
of the programming that turned hearsay and
insider tips into simulation fodder, altering the
realities the simulator would create by
mirroring changes occurring in the real world
that would have big effects – even though most
everybody would live their lives without finding
out about them. “I was just walking past.”
“Yes.” Daniel said stonily. Pull yourself together.
You’ll rouse suspicion. “Yes. It just finished.”
Arjun glanced for a fraction of a second at the
screen, just long enough to notice it was tilted
out of his view. Daniel wanted to strangle him.
It wouldn’t be hard.
“Okay, cool!” The boy tried to embed a chirpy
demeanour into his shaken voice. “I’ll send the
updates for the next client into the network
hub. You can download it whenever for the
next sim. It'll be an interesting one for sure.”
Daniel did not respond. He did not blink.
Arjun looked at the ground, flushed red, and
made himself scarce.
Unable to run another reboot of the affected
universe, or try to enact some diagnostic test on
the resultant data, Daniel was forced to wipe
the screens clean, clear his history, launder his
stolen moments and hurry through the data
collation for the client’s simulation. His bet was
that she’d cut the healthcare benefits and use
the simulator info to sell up her California
properties, beloved though they may be, before
the Pacific could swallow them whole – a winwin.
Daniel struggled to pay attention through the
next simulation, though it was a particularly
nasty one. While possible issues with the last
Findlay run through scrolled through his mind,
a solid sheet of numbers scrolled across his
many screens, individual strings and sections
leaping out as if jostling for the attention he
wasn’t paying.
This client – a private individual with enough
wealth to cover the cost of a simulation that
would bankrupt many large businesses – was
looking forward to earning big. After accruing a
godforsaken heap of debt on a chain of hotels

he had constructed across the globe (debt that
he’d never had any intention of paying back),
he was enlisting the help of the simulator rather
than a lawyer to discern the most effective way
to exploit Chapter 11 – the computer, after all,
was far more accurate, and possessed far more
insight than any lawyer, no matter the hourly
fee. Luckily for the client, none of the debt was
guaranteed with his own wealth (a trick he'd
learned by experience the first of many times
he’d filed for corporate bankruptcy) and he was
looking at the very minimum of a financial
write-off of tens-of-millions. Depending on the
lawyers he involved, the political parties he
leveraged, and the strategic friendships he
fostered in the coming months, he could
benefit immensely. What Daniel was also
required to report on –though there was very
little chance it would affect the client’s decision
– was the public fallout. No matter the fee the
client received for his strategic overleveraging,
as soon as he declared bankruptcy, the business
would immediately crumble. As the four and a
half thousand employees of the hotel chain
found themselves not only redundant, but
owed hundreds or sometimes thousands in
salaries they would never receive, the client
lined his pockets with the multi-millions gained
from ruining these people’s lives.
Daniel watched blithely for two days as the
simulated citizens struggled for their
livelihoods, their lives – watched the client’s
financial worth racking up by the millions,
tapping his foot, waiting to play his own sim.
Higher up in the newly unemployed
administration, people lost spouses, houses,
cars. The further Daniel looked down the pay
scale, the grislier the outcomes. In 21% of the
resulting simulations, over a hundred people
would take their lives as a direct result of the
client’s financial acrobatics. In 6%, a couple of
families’ children died – starvation, perhaps,
but more likely the probable inaccessibility to
the newly increased healthcare prices.
The familiar whine of the simulation ending
was almost music to Daniel’s ears. While his
craving, his lust for some as-yet unattainable
form of violence had motivated him to
orchestrate this ongoing embezzlement of time
and resources into his sinister pet project,
something else was fuelling him now. Panic.
Self-preservation. There was a slow, crawling
simmer of something new in the pit of his
stomach. Stop panicking, Daniel told himself,
trying to hold it down. Just a glitch. Just a glitch.
Was it dread?
***
Thursday, 8 th of February, 2034, 6:16AM
The long, high whine of my morning alarm
woke me, almost the sound of the beginning of
a simulation.
No, the end.
I reached out and turned it off hurriedly – the
ringing squeal for some reason set me on edge.
Today is the day, I thought. After all those little
universes, after the years of waiting, watching,
salivating over simulated murders, today is the day
that I take a life.

That’s why I’m nervous.
Swinging my legs out of the bed, I waited for
that comfortable, familiar cell of hatred to form
in my gut through the fug of sleep. Where did
it come from, I wonder? I’d never really taken
the time to wonder about it before, but these
feelings – they're hardly common. Why do I have
them? What made me this way?
I got out of bed, crawling with unease. I tried
to push the thought out of my head – it was
doing nothing but upsetting me. I had plans to
make, things to do. Today, the tall black man
that wanders through the industrial estate at
night was going to meet his end.
I knew he’d be leaving work at 5:30, and
walking briskly through the snow to get to one
of the abandoned buildings – I knew he
wouldn’t take a taxi because he wanted no
record of his trip. I knew he was meeting a
woman there, alone in the eaves of a disused
lot, who was making the same trip from another
part of town.
How do I know?
The thought stopped me in my tracks as I
reached for the coffee pot in my boxers.
How could I know any of this?
Racking my brains for some memory of
searching up the man’s details in the records at
work, or following him through the simulator,
or something, that prickling of unease turned
into a cold sweat.
Oh no. I thought, filling with dread. Oh no, oh
no, oh no…
I knew I couldn't think it. I knocked the
coffee pot onto the floor as I whipped around
and ran – nowhere, anywhere – out onto the
street in my boxers.
Don’t think it. Think of something else. Think of
anything else.
But I couldn’t. Once it’s there, there’s no way
to stop the thought from articulating in your
mind, and once you have the thought – fully,
cogently, realistically think it – the simulation’s
over.
***
The dread crawling from Daniel’s gut reached
his heart, gripped it, squeezed.
The simulator’s most basic failsafe; encoded
in its most basic instructions, to limit dangerous
malfunctions and eliminate any possible action
plans that might lead to the world discovering
the business that makes universes for money.
Were Daniel’s virtual doubles becoming
more likely to realise that they were in a
simulated universe?
It’s not possible, he thought, forcing emotion
away from his face. There is no continuity between
different simulations, even of the same person.
No known ones. This kind of code can form all
kinds of complex sub-effects.
But surely not that one.
Without a good answer, the fear in Daniel’s
chest continued to grow. He put his hands on
the keyboard to mask the record of this last
simulation, but realised they were shaking so
hard that he was unable to type.
He closed his eyes, put his hands in his lap,
and tried to stop the sudden welling of thoughts
on the tide of fear in his head.
One stood out.
This violence, this craving for violence inside of me,
a taste that has no reason – could that be where it
came from?
A bolt of fear, colder and harder and deeper
in his bones.

Don’t think it. Don’t think it. Don’t think it. Don’t
think it.
A cold, heavy blanket of dread seemed to
swallow him whole, covering every pore. He
tried to plug his ears with hands shaking so
violently that he knocked some of the
electronics off his desk.
“You okay, Daniel?” Kara, eyes wide with
concern, paused in the arch, silhouetted against
a handful of faces witness to Daniel’s fit of
panic.
“I was – I just – I can’t –”
“What, Daniel? What happened?”
Has somebody done this to me?
Worse; Did I?
Daniel stood, pushed past his co-workers and
started to walk, almost to run, out of the office.
Are they conscious, the simulated people? In the
same way real people are? They think they are.
Memories? I have memories. Are they the same?
Why else do I do things that I know are wrong?
Why else would I want to?
Outside. It was snowing. The air was like
needles against Daniel’s face, like blades. He
took off his gloves, his shoes, tried to focus on
the burning pain of the ice on his skin, and not
on the thought burgeoning in his head.
But he couldn’t. Once it’s there, there’s no
way to stop the thought from articulating in
your mind, and once you have the thought –
fully, cogently, realistically think it –
I’m inside a simulation.
– the simulation is over.

“
When asked these questions at the 2016
Code Conference, Elon Musk – billionaire,
technological icon, and CEO of futurechasing
companies such as Tesla Motors and
SpaceX – responded with a surprising degree
of familiarity. According to Musk, the rate at
which video game technology has advanced in
the last 40 years, from “two rectangles and a
ball” in Pong, to the “photorealistic, 3D
simulations with millions of people playing
simultaneously” found today suggests that
creating sophisticated simulations as detailed
as reality sometime in the future is inevitable.
Whilst theories of this nature are hardly
unheard of among visionaries like Musk,
contention was raised when he stated that not
only did he believe it was possible that our
own reality could be a simulation, but that it
was overwhelmingly probable; according to
Musk, the likelihood of our universe being
non-simulated, “real”, or as he described,
“base reality” is “one in billions”.
Musk isn’t the only notable and reputable
personality to subscribe to this idea. At the
Isaac Asimov memorial debate, astrophysicist
Neil De Grasse Tyson said that the probability
of our existence being a simulation created by
some hyper-intelligent entity or civilisation
“may be very high”.
What Musk, Degrasse-Tyson, and many
other modern philosophers and physicists are

discussing here is commonly known as “The
Simulation Hypothesis”; the idea that our
universe is some kind of immensely detailed,
but nevertheless fabricated, computer-type
simulation. The argument to which they refer
is discussed in Swedish philosopher Nick
Bostrom’s 2003 paper, Are you living in a
computer simulation? – the most recent of many
philosophical, scientific and personal
speculations on the potential of our living in
a created world. The paper argues that “at least
one of the following propositions is true:
(1) the human species is very likely to go
extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;
(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely
unlikely to run a significant number of
simulations of their evolutionary history (or
variations thereof);
(3) we are almost certainly living in a
computer simulation. It follows that the belief
that there is a significant chance that we will
one day become posthumans who run
ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are
currently living in a simulation. A number of
other consequences of this result are also
discussed.”
Imagine if human civilisation reached a
point where we were able to create simulations
of such complexity as to have detail
comparable to our own universe – a scenario
that Bostrom, like Musk, sees as being very
possible given the rate of technological
advancement and improvements in
computing power that we have experienced in
the past decades. If we decided that it was
ethically acceptable to run such simulations
(after all, creating conscious, self-aware,
sentient beings on a whim would be sure to
stir up moral debate), then the ways that we
could use such simulations would be
numerous. For example, simulations could be
used to test hypotheses and conduct
experimentation on a scale, time-frame, and
degree of objectivity not possible or legal in
base reality. Likewise, simulations could be
used to test alternative action plans and
problem solving, enabling societies to foresee
outcomes and consequences of certain
behaviours and decisions. Even entertainment
could be a reason for us to use such
simulations. After all, the simulation game,
“The Sims” has already existed for over 17
years, and is one of the most successful video
game franchises of all time; imagine how
successful a version would be that allowed the
user to do anything – anything – within the

ounds of the universal laws of physics.
Bostrom himself believes that a major
reason that we (or an advanced version of us)
would run such simulations is to perform
what he describes as “ancestor simulations”,
designed to model the biological,
psychological, and cultural evolution and
history of our predecessors. While the
simulators would see their subjects as mere
code, animated avatars, or even just numbers
in a line, the minds being simulated would
have no reason to believe the world they're in
is anything but real. It is likely that, with that
magnitude of computing power available,
instead of stopping at just one ancestor
simulation, we would run hundreds,
thousands, or even millions. Furthermore,
given that, theoretically, the conscious beings
within those same simulations may reach a
point in advancement where they start coding
simulations of their own, this would lead to a
potentially endless chain of nested universes.
Even if we put the cap at a billion nested
universes in simulated existence, there would
be a billion and one effective realities; one
base reality (running all the simulations) and
a billion simulated ones. Similarly, the
number of conscious minds experiencing
only simulations would be massively greater
than that found in any “real” universe/s. The
probability of any reality being base reality
(including ours) would be minute, and in this
case (as detailed by Musk) one in a billion.
Assuming the truth of these basic factors,
Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis is logically
intuitive, and rather simple in its conception.
It does, however, have its criticisms. One of
the main assumptions the hypothesis is built
upon is the idea that it is possible to create
artificial consciousness. This notion, termed
the
, is critical to the validity of Bostram’s
argument. Rich Terrile, a leading scientist at
Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory argues in
favour of computationalism, and says that,
assuming that there is nothing supernatural
underlying consciousness, we should be able
to model and simulate consciousness within
virtual environments – in essence, you should
be able to design and build consciousness
using well-designed architecture, and
sufficient computations. However, whilst the
computational theory of the mind is a
common aspect of science fiction (consider
every film, book, or computer game where a
machine becomes self-aware), as of yet there is
no empirical evidence to support the idea that
computations can recreate the conscious
experience, no matter how complex. If
consciousness is something that can only exist
in base reality, no one will ever be able to
create conscious simulated beings in faux
universes, and therefore it is impossible for us
to be living in one.
Another common argument against the
idea of us living in a simulation is the idea that
the amount of computing power required to
run a simulation of an entire universe with
conscious inhabitants inside it (let alone many
of them, or one end of a nested chain) would
be virtually impossible to achieve. However,
there are many mitigating factors to consider
alongside this. First of all, a simulated
universe may not need to be simulated in its
entirety. Instead, it would only be required to
simulate enough detail so that the conscious
inhabitants of the simulated universe think it
is real; a
world. For example, bacteria would not need
to be simulated, except for those times when
someone deliberately went to look at them
through a microscope. Likewise, the universe
would only need to be as large as it's conscious
inhabitants could possibly observe, becoming
visible to us only when we attempted to
explore it through spacecraft, or high-powered
telescopes. Even the person reading this could

simply be a hollow shell with a rendered outer
layer, with bones, internal organs, and tissues
being fully simulated only when you were cut
open, or put into an MRI. The crux here is
that there would need to be a level of
consistency between what we expect to
experience and what is actually simulated, as
to give us no reason to suspect that we are
living in a simulation. Even if we did observe
some discrepancies in the universe that gave
us evidence that we were living in a
simulation, it is likely that whoever (or
whatever) was simulating us would be able
“rewind” our universe, and address any
inconsistencies that we came to discover
before running it again. At the end of the day,
this would have a significantly lower
computational demand than generating and
running an entire universe down to the
subatomic level.
However, even if the universe were to be
procedurally generated in this manner, the
computing power required to simulate even a
single conscious mind would be immense.
With an average human brain functioning at
the equivalent of a billion billion calculations
a second, whilst our most powerful
supercomputer operate at a mere thousand
billion calculations a second, simulating
entire populations across any period of time
would require computational power massively
in excess of anything we are currently capable
of. Furthermore, the fact that computer
componentry has gotten so small in present
day as to have reached a physical limit – their
efficacy already being affected by phenomena
such as
– means
that assuming our computational
advancement will improve along the same
trend it has until now might be problematic.
This doesn’t mean that it is impossible for
us (or someone else) to create ancestor
simulations. Models for massively large and
powerful computers such as the
that harness the power of stars do

exist and would theoretically produce enough
computing power to simulate many millions
of ancestor simulations simultaneously.
Likewise, breakthroughs in quantum
computing technology may mean that the
componentry of computers could become
much smaller, and the huge numbers of
operations they could run per second mean
that ancestor simulations would be possible.
Regardless of whether we live in a
simulation or not, the idea opens a number of
interesting possibilities regarding the nature
of the universe and our place in it.
Considering that we may be living within a
computer simulation, albeit an incredibly
advanced one, some experts have suggested
that there is a very real chance that we could
be “unplugged” at any moment. Accordingly,
some suggest that to avoid this ominous end,
it is essential that we continue to be
“interesting” to our potential simulators. The
problem with this idea is that determining
what “interesting” might mean in this
situation is likely to be impossible without
knowing what our simulation is being run for.
Perhaps our universe has been created to test
possible solutions to threats such as nuclear
war, resource scarcity, and climate change,
with our success in addressing these issues (or
lack thereof) being of interest to our
simulators. Alternatively, we could simply be
characters within some kind of advanced game
for a member of a much more technologically
advanced society. Could we even be the
subjects of an experiment run to ascertain
what human reactions would be to discovering
they are in a simulation?
The simulation hypothesis also yields several
interesting questions in relation to religion
and spirituality. There has long been an idea
in Christianity that Heaven – that other place
where God lives with His angels – is the real
world, and our one is simply a playground or
a loading screen; some fabricated sandbox
where it is determined what afterlife we will
earn. This modern retelling of the simulation

story poses more questions; if our universe
was a simulation created by some other being,
or even a futuristic, “more real” version of us
who had complete control over our reality,
could that be a new and scientific definition
for the concept of a god? Such a being would
be essentially all-knowing and all-powerful
with respect to our universe, and would
function in a similar way to the God of the
Abrahamic faiths such as Christianity and
Islam.
Should Bostrom’s argument prove to be
true, everything we knew, know and could
ever know – about ourselves, our place in the
world, and the very universe we live in –
would not be classed as “real” by many of our
own standards. This revelation could plunge
many into despair and nihilism – unlike Neo,
there would be no way for us to escape this
Matrix. Alternatively, it might cause us to
reconsider the apparently flawed definition of
that which we consider “real”. If we believe
that our consciousnesses are real, even within
a universe that has been fabricated by
somebody else, then maybe the beings we
learn to simulate in the coming millennia,
centuries, even decades will be considered the
same way. Perhaps we’ll do our best to
alleviate their suffering, or at least not
generate more of it. Perhaps we’ll ban the
simulation of worlds in which there is
senseless evil or pain. Perhaps our dedication
to that kind of ideology could even inspire
whatever devious creator that may be
watching indifferently over our world to think
and feel the same way.

“Are you living in a computer simulation?”, Nick
Bostrom. Philosophical Quarterly, 2003, Vol. 53,
No. 211, pp. 243-255.
Eggleston, B. (n.d.). Bostrom Review. Retrieved
from Stanford Edu:
https://web.stanford.edu/class/symbsys205/B
ostromReview.html
Moskowitz, C. (2016, April 7). Are We Living in
a Computer Simulation? Retrieved from
Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ar
e-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation/
Riccardo Manzotti, A. S. (2016, June 21). Elon
Musk Is Wrong. We Aren't Living in a Simulation.
Retrieved from Motherboard:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/y
p3b7w/we-dont-live-in-a-simulation

_____________
The sunlight from over the hilltop to Uri’s
right was growing brighter. He could see the
shape of the rays around the mountains begin
to fade as the sun rose. All at once, the valley
before him was bathed in the orange glow of
early morning. The grass beneath him was cold
and soaking with dew, and his breath was still
visible in the crisp air, but the warmth from a
new sun blanketed his skin as he lifted his head
and closed his eyes. He sucked one long, deep
breath into his lungs. When he opened his eyes,
the landscape was replaced with complete
darkness.
“Patient A-157 to room four, therapy
begins in five minutes,” Uri heard this over a
speaker, disoriented slightly by the swift change
in stimuli. He took his glasses from his face and
was greeted again by the egg-shell blue that
painted his room. Still sitting as he was
moments ago watching dawn break in a valley,
he was now on his memory foam bed. He took
a breath again to relax, but the air was stale and
stuffy.
Three loud bangs on his door startled him
and he shot up from his bed. He wiped his face
as if waking from a deep sleep and sighed. As he
approached his door, it opened before him and
he was greeted by two men who towered over
him. Uri started to walk down the hallway with
them inches behind on either side, hands
positioned to grab Uri’s arms if necessary. He
had passed that point, though. What seemed
like long ago, he would have tried to hurt these
guards. He would have tried to run. Once or

twice he may have tried to get into another
patient’s room, hold them hostage, or just to
feel the warmth of another’s bruises and blood.
Now, he knew better.
The walk to his therapist’s room was secondnature,
he could navigate the exact path from
his room like a rat in a laboratory maze. They
stopped in front of room four without
hesitation, like clockwork. The man on the
right opened the door while the one on the left
motioned for Uri to sit in the armchair on the
far side of the room. Uri obliged, only saying
goodbye to the guards with his compliance. The
door closed, and Uri was alone again.
The décor of the hospital was designed to
minimize intense stimulation for patients.
Everything was simple. The shape of furniture
was made to be modern, but flat and rounded.
Colors, just like the eggshell blue in Uri’s room,
were muted and matte. Even the light was
slightly dim, coming from fixtures that lined the
edges of the ceiling. Despite being hidden up in
crevices so as to keep patients from looking
directly into them, they were still irritating Uri’s
eyes. He closed them to escape the sting of real
light, and he took another deep breath.
Almost as Uri was starting to feel relaxed
enough to drift into a nap, the door opened
again. His therapist walked in. “Hello again,
Uri. How have you been?”
Uri opened his eyes slowly as his therapist sat
down across from him. Uri didn’t answer him
and only watched as he flipped through a file.
“Have you been experiencing any pain as a
result of your sunlight therapy?”
Still, nothing.
“So it’s treating you well then?”
Uri nodded his head once, slowly.
“Well, good then. That’s what we hope for,
right? For you to be comfortable and clearminded.”
The therapist closed the file and set it
softly on the coffee table that sat between them.
Uri pursed his lips slightly, impatiently, wishing
that the table would elongate, separate them,
force them miles apart. He began scratching his
fingernail against the edge of the right arm of
his chair, hoping to feel a seam he could slowly
pick apart.
The therapist was staring at Uri, examining
his demeanor. “Tell me, Uri,” he started,
pausing to choose his words, “... are you bored
by all this?” He gestured his hand, waving it in
circles through the air. Chuckling to himself, he
said, “do you feel as though life outside of a
virtual environment is lacking something?”
Uri let out a sigh and turned away from the
therapist.
The therapist dropped and nodded his head.
He knew that it wasn’t going to be easy getting
anything out of Uri. Uri’s file read that he had
been completely silent in some sessions,
sometimes doing nothing more than sitting
completely still with his eyes closed. The
therapist rose from his chair and began pacing
slowly behind it. “Have you ever heard of what
the early days of virtual reality were like, Uri?”
he said. Uri shifted his eyes back to the
therapist, confirming his interest. “This has to
be decades ago now,” the therapist began,
rubbing his chin trying to remember all the
details. “People used to have to put on bulky
goggles, or even helmets, in order to experience
very rudimentary forms of simulation. It was
primitive, but people were amazed. They would
pay an arm and a leg for apparatuses that simply
let them experience what was essentially
nothing more than a storybook.”
Uri sat forward in his chair, resting his arms
on his legs. There was a glare from the lights in
the ceiling that barely poked out, stinging his
eyes again. The therapist began to circle the
room slowly. “One particular simulation that I

find fascinating allowed people do nothing
more than walking a tightrope across two
buildings – you know what a tightrope is, don’t
you?”
Uri nodded his head, leaning back to get away
from the glare of the lights. It wasn’t in his
vision now, but the glow that they produced was
starting to make his head throb.
“The systems back then were still very limited,
and the headset and headphones were only able
to let people experience so much because it
required physical space for the user to move
around in,” the therapist continued, now
circling back toward his chair. He sat on one
arm of the chair, putting his arms out on either
side to mimic the balancing act. “These people
then would walk across the rope, thinking they
were hundreds of feet high. Some people even
experienced feelings terror, going as far as to
sweat profusely and shake in their knees; all this
despite the fact that they knew they were still
only walking across a room!” The therapist
chuckled heartily to himself, throwing his
hands in the air in amusement; he clapped
them against his legs, waiting for Uri’s response.
Uri sat still, interested, but the noise from the
clap aggravated his now pounding headache.
“Excuse me, I didn’t mean to be startling,” the
therapist said. “I’m just fascinated by the idea
that the mind, despite any evidence being
present to disprove its reality, will convince
itself of something that isn’t really there.” He
stood up and put his hands into the pockets of
his coat. Uri waited for him to speak again, but
the therapist just stood there staring at him. He
was trying to make eye contact, but Uri’s eyes
were dodging his. Uri’s finger began to scratch
deeper into the fabric of the armchair. He
hoped for a tear so he could rip the foam from
the inside and smash the frame against the wall.
The therapist began slowly strolling over to Uri.
“It’s funny… that phenomenon in which the
mind tricks itself, it’s something that we still
feel today,” the therapist began, tapping his heel
against the toe of his shoe every other step. “In
fact, we’ve actually gotten better at it. So good,
that people create entire lifetimes in their
minds without the slightest thought that it all
could be a dream.” The therapist knelt down
beside the chair, his face just inches from Uri’s.
“However, I think you know that, Uri. I think
you know that just as someone can feel the wind
or feel sunlight inside virtual reality, you know
they can feel pain.” At this point, Uri’s head
was on the verge of exploding. His breathing
was getting faster, matching his heartbeat, and
his finger was desperately scratching deeper into
the fabric. “Uri,” the therapist began, “what do
you think of that?”
All at once, Uri had leapt from his chair and
pinned the therapist on the floor, hands
wrapped around his neck. He could feel the
therapist squirm beneath him. He could feel
the veins in his neck bulge with his grip. He
could feel his windpipe skip and crack for air.
Then, he closed his eyes; with one last push to
crush the therapist’s throat, he felt nothing.
Blackness in front of him again, he heard the
therapist’s voice; “Maybe tomorrow, Uri.” A
light grew brighter to one side, and he could
make out the silhouette of some mountains.
Once again, he closed his eyes and took a deep
breath of the crisp morning air in. ◊

Virtual reality has proved indespensible in new
approaches to the idea of both reparative and
other forms of therapy. Not only can it be
usedful for psychological or mental forms of
therapy, such as anger management, ease of
social distress, etc, but has even created new
avenues of treatment in the realms of physical
therapy, changing the lives of amputees with
phantom limbs, motivating physiotherapy
patients, and more. Take a look at some of the
below codes to learn more.
Virtual Reality Redefines Physical Therapy; a blog post detailing the uses
of virtual reality in patient motivation, and the face of patient
forgetfulness regarding home exercises to their detriment. Virtual
reality creates a whole new way for the patient to understand, and
reason for the patient to participate in, physiotherapy applications for
their own health and recovery.
Virtual Reality Treatment Relieves Amputee's Phantom Pain: Post
amputation, many patients suffer excruciating pain due to remaining
brain representation of a missing limb without any actualisation. This
website article details an “experimental treatment, in which signals
from [the subject’s] limb stump controlled a virtual reality arm”,
greatly decreasing his pain after 48 years of ineffective pain
management.
An overview of Bravemind; a VR programme that utilises the presentday
general treatment of exposure therapy in a virtual environment,
creating safer, more customisable, cheaper and far more applicable
applications of exposure therapy for sufferers of PTSD. “Currently
distributed to over 50 sites, including VA hospitals, military bases and
university centers, the Bravemind system has been shown to produce
a meaningful reduction in PTS symptoms.”
Is virtual reality the next big thing in addiction treatment? VR therapy for
addiction, in the case of this rehab centre’s website article alcohol
addiction, has been found to have positive outcomes in exposing
patients to relapse-inducing triggers and helping them to create and
manage healthy coping mechanisms and stifle physiological responses.

_____________
The Živa building looked exactly as I expected
it would. It was tall and sleek, covered in
mirrored windows that were bronzed enough
that the light inside would feel warmer than the
frosty day outside. Choppy architectural
decisions – grids of black rails and one wall of
lush vertical garden and a wide, sweeping
doorway – vied for top spot in the tally of
intimidating features. I wondered blithely how
much of it was augmented. The plants for sure;
there’s no way you’d get established flowers like
that this far into the city. The few real plants
you might stumble upon in roadside pots or
between paving stones were petrol-choked and
scrawny. Stop stalling for time, you’ve got a job to
do, one side of me chided, while the other went
on to wonder about the top four or so floors.
Simulated on for effect? Wouldn’t surprise me.
I dimly re-established that I wasn’t alone,
staring up from the pavement. A middle-aged
woman with some weight on her hips and a hat
and scarf had been chatting incessantly at me
for at least the last ten minutes. Coming out of
my reverie, I paused to take her in.
I was trained in the art of identification, and
could break her down at the drop of a hat. She
was exactly 5”4, about ten stone and in her early
forties – not exactly athletic, but she might have
some strength under all those winter clothes.
Brown hair, brown eyes. Overwhelmingly, she
came across as unassuming – another stranger
on the road. This was good.
Despite all this, what I actually thought was
You’ve gained some lines, old girl, perhaps a little

too critically. I touched gently the lines under
my own eyes. But not unattractive. Not wholly, yet.
“– and you know, Hazel, I could spend all day
telling you about how you’d benefit from an
investment into MarketSecure within only
one year of trading, but considering the funds
you have at hand today the amount of capital
you could receive committing to a long-term
financial investment will –”
Oh, it was a trading company. I must've
passed the building on the way through. This
was an expensive part of town; the ads were
pretty high quality. Still, a mirror simulation
was unusual, no matter how well-simulated.
Most businesses would just shoot your way an
attractive member of your preferred sex as you
approached the doors to their buildings, to try
and entice you in. Walking downtown had
become a nightmare in the last couple of years;
you’d get hordes of sims, sometimes six or eight
of them, trundling down the street after you as
you breezed by department stores or
restaurants. Mirror sims were most often used
by clothing retailers – if you could see yourself
(though always a slightly taller, more
symmetrical version) in the newest designer
rags, you were far more likely to duck in and
buy them. Apparently MarketSecure trading,
whoever the hell they were, thought they’d give
the mirror sim a try outside of its usual field.
Is that what I really sound like? This mirror was
wearing my exact outfit; a sad old coat, a scarf
to keep out the autumn chill, a hat and gloves.
It made me look dumpy and twee. I started to
regret that decision – a questionable call, both
on my part and on MarketSecure’s.
I reluctantly turned to enter the building, half
to escape the sim’s chatter and half because my
appointment was quickly approaching. I knew
it’d take me forever to psych myself up to
actually go in. I’d left the house forty minutes
early and still only had ten minutes to spare.
The sim took two steps after me, but vanished
the second I crossed the building threshold, cut
off midsentence.
“Hazel,” an attractive young woman I’d never
seen before spoke warmly from behind a desk
within milliseconds of my entering the lobby. I
flushed red as I took off my hat and gloves. Of
course she knew my name. Private
I wonder how well it works, I find myself
thinking, looking my double up and down. I bet
all the hotshots down here love to hear themselves
talk.
Not me, though. The longer I spend in my
double’s company, the more uncomfortable I
feel. It’s not normal in my line of work to have
to confront these kinds of personal
introspection – I’m usually far more invested in
dissecting others. It was as if this assignment
had been allocated purely to ruffle me.
establishments could programme all sorts of
authorities into their staff’s AR. Outside, in a
public space, only computers could find out my
name, my schedule, my bank balance, and they
weren't allowed to share. Entering this building
allowed me to be laid bare to real people. The
girl approached to take my coat. “Welcome to

Živa. Your booking and online briefing is
already complete, so you can go on up. Today’s
setup is going to take place on the eighth floor.
You're a few minutes early for your
appointment, but we’re available to take you
now.”
“Thank you,” I said, shrugging the coat
awkwardly into her arms. She smiled warmly,
hung the coat on a nearby stand, and gestured
for me to follow her.The software installation
into my augmented reality implant, the section
I thought would be the major part of the setup,
took less than thirty seconds; a small external
drive was placed on the implant behind my ear,
a tiny magnet in each gadget holding the drive
in place through my skin.
Most everyone was required to have an
augmented reality implant installed as soon as
they entered the workforce. Of course it’s not
compulsory, but a great deal of companies
wouldn’t even consider the application of a
prospective employee without one. They were
wired directly into your brain, and could
manipulate your senses so as to receive images,
sounds, and anything else, that weren’t really
there. Cities and buildings used them to make
the place look artificially more lush and
beautiful, businesses used them for advertising
all the time, but more importantly the implants
were for work; they could be used to provide
active job training and instruction, attend faceto-face
industry meetings from anywhere in the
world, and personally deal with clients rather
than through voice calls and emails. They were
incredibly useful during study, where university
professors would often use AR examples in
their lectures or assign AR complements to the
course. My four-year psychology degree might
have been impossible had I not been gifted the
implant by my parents right out of high school,
and no investigational division – certainly not
the international sector I’d been working for
ever since – would have employed me. They also
meant you could be contacted at any time and
from anywhere, and that you had access to a
whole range of non-work related AR
programmes – like the one about to be installed
on mine – that anyone without the implant
would never be able to imagine. Everyone used
one.
A little “ding” indicated that the programme
was fully installed. My host ran a quick check;
she held up an empty vase, which to me
appeared to be brimming with flowers. I listed
off the colours as she twisted it through all
angles. I could even smell them.
Once the host was satisfied, the remaining
hour of the pre-engagement setup was the
torturous makeover I’d been losing sleep over.
I’d had the choice, but of course I had to choose
it. I couldn't go into that empty room wearing
my own clothes, my own face. They’d laugh me
back home, and rightly so. I knew I’d come here
with a job to do – does it really matter how I look?
But, of course it still mattered.
Outside of this place, my confidence and
assertiveness were hallmarks of my capability. I
rarely had to second guess. But being engulfed
in this assignment’s hazy romantic contrivance,
unable to escape the tired memories of a truly

unremarkable relationship history – it had
shrunk me to shyness, to nerves.
A couple of already beautiful women primped
me for the occasion, dressing me in something
slinky and impractical, piling my hair artfully
on top of my head, and airbrushing my every
flaw. “Why can't you just use some
augmentation filter and apply a digital
makeover to that?” I wished I would ask. I knew
they'd just say something like “Oh, we only ever
realistically portray our clients. We don’t use
any digital tricks here. Everyone you see will be
in their real bodies, flesh and blood”, and then
follow it up with some scandalous story of a
couple who’d met in AR long in the past or
through some other company, who’d seen each
other in the flesh for the first time and instantly
fallen out of love.
Looking in the mirror, though, I couldn't
help but think that the physical makeover was
just as drastic a lie as any digital filter they might
apply to me. I only afforded myself the briefest
glance; the girls were still in the room and I’d
be mortified if they caught me self-admiring. I
touched the external drive, a small plastic dome
nestled just below the hairline behind my right
ear, with a single finger.
“We’re just about ready to go,” said one of the
girls, after tidying up the makeup station. “You
look stunning. The party actually started about
thirty seconds ago. Are you ready to go in?”
Despite the awkward thumping of my heart
in my chest leaning clearly towards a no, I
nodded yes.
“Beautiful. Follow me.”
We left the makeover room and walked to the
end of the short hallway on the eighth floor. A
door, the same as all the others, was in front of
us. From the lack of sound or anything else, it
appeared to lead to an unoccupied room. The
girl turned to me and smiled. “Well, here it is.
Please go in whenever you’re ready. Best of luck!
And don’t be nervous, everyone there will be
thrilled to meet you.”
I smiled a tense, fake smile, and lowered my
eyes so she would go away. Hearing her
footsteps echoing back up the hallway, I steeled
myself and put my hand on the silent door.
It opened into an enormous room instantly
filled with music, people, and colour. It was a
different world. There was something of a
greeting from the occupants of the room; they
turned towards me, I blushed, they raised a
hand or yelled “Hello!” over the pleasant din of
the place, and then turned back to drinking or
socialising or whatever else they were doing.
The room was gorgeous. The ceiling must
have been twenty feet high. There was a thick
carpet and the walls were dark and patterned
with gold. The whole thing seemed to be gently
swaying – the floor was rocking comfortably
underfoot. A huge curved window of floor-toceiling
glass showed a night time ocean outside,
with the twinkling of distant city lights even
brighter than the warm, moody atmosphere of
the room. Dining tables and chairs were
smattered around one end of the room, and
another housed a long bar with an automated
bartender serving drinks, with people sat up at
the stools. A band of sims was playing
something upbeat but not too distracting in one
corner, and the rest of the room was dedicated
to something that looked suspiciously like a
dance floor. Automatically, I scanned the room
before I relaxed. A quiet stream of information
ticked across my periphery, environmental data
for those following my movements. Backup was
no more than a signal away. In the warm,
beautiful atmosphere, I felt my raging
inhibitions calming a little. I even, with my new
clothes and my new face, felt as though I
belonged in this palatial place.
“Wow,” a voice said from over my shoulder.
“I knew I was waiting for somebody, but I didn’t
realise it was you,”

“Terrible pickup line,” I said, turning around.
A man grinned at me; about my age, perhaps
5”9, but with a rough, pleasant face and broad
shoulders. Blue eyes, dark hair, medium build.
I balked. It’s him!
“Go you talking though, didn’t it?” He said.
A notification popped up in the right
periphery of my vision, notifying me that this
man was a 99% match to my specified target. I
blinked twice, clearing it from my vision. I
knew.
He held out his hand.
“Hazel,” I said, recomposing myself. “Nice to
meet you,”
“I’m Dan.” Interestingly, this was true.
Another unnecessary notification dinged. My
superiors would be over the moon. I reached
out and shook his hand. Despite myself, I was
surprised to feel it in my own.
“The haptic feedback is a cool feature,” he
said, noting my surprise. “It’s been around for
a few years now. I guess people felt weird being
able to see and hear everyone, but not touch
them.” He held my hand in his for a moment
longer, before I let my fingers loose.
“It’s all new to me,” I said.
“First time with Živa?”
I felt the floor sway under me again. Trying
not to wobble, I realised the whole getup was
meant to be some kind of cruise liner ballroom.
I saw the city lights tilting softly outside. “First
time doing this anywhere. I’ve never been to a
singles night before, and certainly not at a place
like this.”
“Well, congratulations!” He put his hand on
the small of my back, manoeuvred me with
some force towards the bar. “That calls for a
drink.”
The automated bartender was a real robotic
arm with a soft plastic gripper on a sliding rail
that ran the curved length of the bar. They
couldn't use sims, because they were serving real
glasses with real fluids in them – sims were
purely sensory, and couldn't interact with the
physical world at all. They could’ve had a real
person behind the bar, I guess, but that might
defeat the purpose of visiting this kind of place.
If everything wasn’t one step removed from
reality, all those customer inhibitions might
come flooding back.
“Tell me you’ve never had an Old
Fashioned,” said Dan, rocking with the
simulated undulations of the room.
“I've never had an Old Fashioned,” I said,
truthfully. He winked, and ordered two from
the robot. It zipped a couple of times up and
down the bar, shuffling different bottles and
making a show of the muddler, and then
deposited two amber drinks in front of us on
the bar. Mine was real, Dan’s was not. From his
end, it would have looked the other way
around. Dan raised his glass, I clinked it, and
took a sip. It was sweet and strong – more
flavoursome than any cocktail I’d had before.
“It’s good!”
“Not so bad for a plain glass of water, right?”
Dan said, taking a sip. “The colour and flavour
is all augmented, like everything else in this
room. They even simulate the effect the liquor
would have on your brain.”
“Really?” I held the glass up to my eyes. The
cocktail was indistinguishable from reality, like
the expensive décor and like Dan himself. I
knew the dimensions of the place. Despite the
fact that the ceiling looked a million miles away,
if I stood on the bar I’d bang my head. Dan was
watching me, leaning one elbow on the bar. I
accidentally made eye contact, put my glass
down, and blushed. I could almost already feel
the fuzz of that simulated liquor. Using a quick

internal command I disabled the reaction
permissions on my chip – professional privilege.
I couldn't be making a fool of myself on the job.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said. “Where are
you visiting from?”
“I’m in London,” I said truthfully after
another sip. I hadn’t been directed to lie.
“Chiswick Park.”
“Chiswick Park?” Dan exclaimed. “I’ve been
to that room a few times. Have they still got that
beautiful blonde on the counter?”
think that I’ve been in the exact same room that
you're in right now.”
“That is – that is pretty amazing,” I agreed. If
I wasn’t on an assignment – such an awkward
one at that – the Živa mechanism would
fascinate me. A hundred doors all over the
world, portals to the same room – the same
party. I took another sip, and tried to be
nonchalant. “Where are you visiting from
now?”
My eyebrows went up. After a moment his
face broke back into a grin.
“Only kidding,” he said.
He’s exactly what I expected, I thought. I
wondered who on the team would receive this
conversation’s transcript.
“I was there about a year ago. Amazing to
“Right now I’m in Dubai. Business trip. I'm

taking the night off.”
Bingo. Is he telling the truth? The word “Dubai”
pings off through cyberspace with a kitschy
whooshing noise. This is what I came for.
Without time to verify if the information is
correct, the cavalry will be dispatched as close to
the Živa branch in Dubai central as possible in
the next couple of minutes.
The organisation had buildings all over the
world, sometimes several in every major city,
and in each one there was a replica of this base
room – an undecorated space, four grey walls,
with a bar and some static tables and chairs.
The drive connected behind my ear meant that
I could see the augmented décor, taste the
drinks, and interact with anyone else currently
in a Živa room anywhere in the world. There
was a completely new design every few days, for
the regular users. It was expensive, but
extremely popular.
Meeting people had got high-tech since my
day.
“It’s eight o'clock here, so at least the nighttime
skin is kind of realistic. You must be in the
middle of the afternoon,” Dan said, knocking
me out of my introspection. I couldn’t break
character now, before Dan was apprehended.
He might have lied about his whereabouts.
I nodded. “It's about three.” I said. I couldn't
help but think that if someone were to look
through the door I’d walked in through, they'd
see me sitting in an empty room at an
undecorated bar, talking to myself. The lights
probably weren't even on. Another sip. “What
do you do? Must be exciting, to take you to and
from Dubai.”
“Oh, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill
you,” He said with a toothy grin. I chuckled. As
if I didn’t know.
Dan leaned in, closer than he had to. I could
smell his cologne. The detail was incredible.
“It’s not exactly above board,” he breathed.
“All the more exciting,”
“I mainly just move around money. Between
individuals and businesses, donors and
politicians, debtors and creditors… It’s very
technical, you might not understand it,” He's a
bit off the mark on that one, I thought, plastering
a polite look of wonder on my face, “but it
leaves me with a very substantial cut.”
“I bet. Do you travel much, for these business
trips?”
“All the time.” He leaned back, satisfied with
his secret-sharing. “I like to slip in a couple of
these parties every month or so. Don’t want to
weaken my game,” he winked.
“Your game?”
“How else do you think I’d be able to pluck
up the courage to talk to a beautiful lady like
you?” He touched me briefly on the arm.
“So, you’ve been through the rounds, then?
You must have done this a hundred times.”
“Oh, I’ve gone the whole hog. Singles nights,
parties, dates. I actually had something like a
relationship entirely through Živa, for a time.”
“Really?” I didn’t realise until that moment
that I’d never actually expected this whole
dating experience to work. Not that I was here
to date, obviously – but it was hard not to
consider it. Maybe that’s why I was so nervous.
It wasn’t until I was here that it even seemed
like a possibility.
“Yeah. It was a bit of a conundrum to me,
actually, because I’ve got some moral issues with
the whole thing. Online dating can be fun and
all, but falling in love? Marriage? Lots of
problems.”
“You think so?”

“Of course. Present company excluded,
obviously –” another sickly wink, “– it’s
wreaking all kinds of havoc on human natural
selection. Undesirables who would never find
love the traditional way are able to search so
much farther afield that, as a numbers game,
they find someone just as unattractive with
standards low enough to consider them. Then,
these people who would never have reproduced
otherwise, are now able to start families.
Dan shrugged. “Eh. My standards are pretty
high no matter where I’m fishing,” he grinned.
I was silent for a moment while I checked in
with the recovery team. Their location flashed
up in my periphery for a fraction of a second.
They still hadn’t made it to the Živa in Dubai –
but they were close. I had to keep it up for just
a few more minutes. I hoped to god Dan was
stupid enough to tell the truth about his
location.
“If you don’t mind me asking, how on earth
did that relationship work?” I pawed at the first
thing that came to mind to lengthen the
conversation while moving it away from Dan’s
warped theory of eugenics.
Whether they're ugly, or stupid, or whatever
– their genes are being spread through the
population unlike ever before in history.
Online dating is slowly taking the whole
population down the crapper, because
nowadays there truly is someone for everyone.”
I was dumbfounded. “But your relationship
was okay?” I countered, in disbelief.
“Well, you must've been briefed before you
paid for the experience. They’ll do anything to
sell you their upgrades,” Dan laughed, fingering
his glass. Luckily the experience had been on
the company dollar – the wanted man had been
spotted several times at these singles events, so
predicting his schedule and posing as a fellow
customer was an easy way to get information on
his whereabouts – but I had indeed had to sit
through the briefing videos and
demonstrations. “If there's a person you like,
you can pay to come and meet them at Živa
rooms whenever you want to. There are a
couple of these big replicas in every building,
but far more smaller rooms. Fake coffee shops,
dance clubs, spas, wherever you want to take
this person on a date. The more you pay, the
more sensory range you get augmented, the
more realistic the augmentation. I mean, this is
a pretty good Old Fashioned. But the food?
Don’t even bother.”
“Wow. No good?”
“It's just haptic resistance on a plate, to make
you feel like you're chewing something. The
taste is there, but without the sensation it’s just
not the same. There’s no texture, no juice –
only resistance. You see, if I squeeze hard

enough –” he put his hand on mine, warm, and
squeezed it into a fist. I felt nothing but a gentle
touch, and pulled my hand away as his
disappeared through it, white knuckled. “– you
lose the realism,” he finished.
almost off his feet and into one of the dining
tables at which another couple had just received
some simulated steak. His pink-faced
embarrassment was almost enough to make up
for the terrible advances.
“That is – so weird,” I said, rubbing my hand
with discomfort. I knew, if I really needed to, I
could dislodge the AR drive just behind my ear,
and the room and everyone within it would
disappear – still, my primal sense of danger
pricked its ears in the virtual presence of this
man.
“Yeah. The more you pay, the more sensory
realism. The most expensive services with Živa
are the ones that give you full sensory
immersion for – well, for more intimate
relationships.” Dan left his hand on the table,
close to mine. I finished my Old Fashioned.
Dan quickly ordered me another one. “I guess,
if this is your first time, you haven’t seen any of
the expensive rooms yet,” he said after a few
moments of silence.
There were a few more moments of silence.
“No. I haven’t.”
“I mean, they’re pretty amazing. They can
tailor them to your preferences. The décor you
like, the music, the sensations.” He drew little
circles on the bar with his index finger.
“Champagne, scented candles, silk sheets –” He
brushed my hand again. I put it under the bar.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said curtly. “I'm
just here to talk.” Dan’s expression went dark.
“Screw you, then,” he said after a moment’s
deliberation, getting to his feet. “You aren't
worth a third drink and I'm not even paying for
them.”
My eyes doubled in size and my mouth
dropped open. He teetered off, downing his
second Old Fashioned on the way and then
slamming the glass on the bar. Another tilting
of the supposed cruise ship knocked him
As he tried to climb back to his feet, another
“ding” sounded in my head. Confirmation
from the team in Dubai. They were in the
building – no, they were in the room. In front
of me, Dan rose to one knee and was suddenly
flung several feet across the room by some
unseen force. He let out a shriek and struggled
– he could feel hands on him, force, as he was
jolted and dragged and lifted from the ground
by invisible assailants. The Dubai team had no
Živa programme installed into their AR
implants, so while they could see Dan, they
couldn’t see anyone else in the room, and no
one wearing the drive could see them. Faces
turned towards the perplexing struggle.
Dan, yelling, tried to remove his own drive, to
see what’s going on, but immediately his arms
were pinned back and he was lifted from the
ground, kicking blindly, terrified. I realised I
was on my feet, poised for defence – there’s
nothing I could do from London, but my years
as an investigator refused to catch me on the
back foot while a perpetrator struggled for
escape.

His head jerked – someone grabbed him by
the chin and wrenched his face to one side,
exposing the AR chip and drive behind one ear.
One of the Dubai team knocked the drive from
its place, and in an instant Dan was gone,
vanished from the ballroom like an apparition,
and kneeling in a grey, empty box in Dubai at
the feet of six armed soldiers.
The capture was a little excessive for the
crime, but I didn’t do things by halves.
I leant back against the bar, a smile still on my
face. Nervous laughter from the surrounding
partygoers melted back into contentment.
Surveying the decadence of the simulated
room, I felt surprisingly at ease. The night was
still young and there were new, less troubling
people to meet. A series of beeps in my head
indicated the progress of the assignment, but
my part was played. Now, off the clock, perhaps
I could enjoy the part of the mission I’d been
dreading the most – I was already at the party,
after all. ◊
“
The reputation of online dating has
radically changed in the last few years, in
which we have seen a marked increase in users
of traditional online dating platforms along
with the explosion in popularity of social app
Tinder. Until recently, online dating has
often been dispelled as a last-ditch effort for
undesirable and lonely divorcees to rekindle
happiness; people of all ages and
demographics can now be found using dating
sites and apps to connect with new friends,
seek out sexual encounters and to find love.

As of April 2017, 61% of U.S. internet users
between 18 and 29 years of age were either
currently using online dating platforms or had
done so previously. Online dating is now seen
as a method to expand one’s dating pool,
alleviate nerves and pressure of meeting and
conversing (especially with new or attractive
prospective partners), and to screen possible
dates for certain behaviours before meeting in
person. With Tinder’s 12 million daily
matches, the dating industry’s multibilliondollar
annual revenue, and more than one third
of all new marriages having begun their
relationships online, we can be fairly confident
that tech-assisted dating is here to stay.
But what about dating in VR? Unfortunately,
virtual reality romances have got a way to go.
Rather than utilising the wonders of VR
technology to allow long distance couples to
meet in person for the first time, or allowing
compatible strangers from opposite ends of the
world to find love they'd never otherwise
encounter, one of the first publicly viewed
forays into virtual reality dating seems to be
Facebook show Virtually Dating, which puts a
pair of strangers wearing HTC Vive headsets in
the same physical room, and has them conduct
their VR blind date in poorly rendered fantasy
settings.
On a more realistic note, some genuine
dating groups and activities are already available
that connect diverse and geographically
disparate individuals into the same virtual
chatroom (similar to the one in which Hazel
and Dan meet at Živa) or one-on-one date venue
using VR technology, allowing strangers who
have matched online or singles who are hoping
to meet new people see each other, in some
sense, in person. While the technology is new,
it is fair to say that the experience has some
growing to do before it will become as popular
as more traditional internet dating. And grow it
will, as VR’s overlap with sex, love and dating is
being supported by some large names; heavy
investment is being made into VR development
by the likes of the Match group (the largest
online dating provider in the world, comprised
of Match.com, Tinder and others), PornHub
and more, all hard at work creating realistic VR
representations of their respective areas. With
the promise of high-budget programmes and
more realistic virtual realities on the horizon, it
might not be long before demand meets supply
and VR tech becomes a new standard of social

interaction and intimacy.
A further step down the track of where VR
technology is taking the world of dating and
romance can be seen in the concept of dating
simulators. These relationship role playing
games, in which a real player will develop a
romantic relationship in-game with one or
more fictional characters, have existed for over
30 years. Gaining huge popularity in Japan in
the 1990s, these sims have become so
commonplace that the word “Otaku” has
sprung up, often describing adult men who
have forgone the possibility of romantic
relationships in the real world and form
intense, apparently loving bonds exclusively
with virtual partners. One game, Niitzuma
LovelyxCationx, made headlines last year for
allowing their VR users to enter a real church
and marry their character of choice in a real-life
ceremony, with a real human audience, with
the groom attending in a VR headset.
It seems they are appealing to a rather
substantial niche; Japanese government
research has reported that 37.6 percent of those
surveyed had no interest in romantic
partnerships, with “bothersome” being cited as
the biggest reason for this. Despite this attitude
toward non-virtual intimacy, game developer
Konami has been known to team up with hotels
to create promotions for dating sim players and
their consoles to rent rooms for themselves.
Japan’s modern attitude towards
relationships and sex has had some troubling
consequences. The perception that developing
human relationships are a difficult waste of
time has meant that the population is in steep
decline. In 2016, the number of births dropped
below 1 million for the first time, well below the
replacement rate of deaths in Japan.

The world’s rapidly evolving relationship with
social interaction, new meetings, intimacy, sex
and love can be attributed to a number of
factors in the past couple of generations; the
decline in socially accepted racial prejudice in
the west, female agency playing a much higher
factor in relationship decisions, and the
unstable nature of today’s natural and political
climates deterring young people from having
children, are some high contenders. That being
said, there is nothing in the world that has
changed the way we understand
communication and relationships as much as
technology, and virtual reality is on the cusp of
breaking into the industry in a big way.
New technologies have long been suspect for
damaging human connections, and moving
people apart. Certainly, we can look at the
relationship between Japan and its dating
simulators and see where such an anxiety might
arise. Online dating, particularly dating apps
like Tinder (and the millennials using them)
have been accused of killing romance, fostering
a “hook up culture” and blamed for the
supposed death of the dinner date. In reality,
the historically recent popularity boom in
internet dating has been the force behind more
diverse and well-suited pairings, interracial
partnerships and improved cultural relations,
and a colossal increase in likelihood of marriage
without divorce, and as of October 2017, more
than one third of global marriages began
online. A healthy scepticism is essential when
a new idea arises that will change the way we
view the world forever, but the stats on online
dating are in. Technology, especially VR
technology, can be better at bringing people
together than any computer-free alternative.
Statista. (2017, April). Online Dating - Statistics and
Facts. Retrieved from Statista:
https://www.statista.com/topics/2158/onlinedating/
Emerging Technology. (2017, October 10). First
Evidence That Online Dating Is Changing the Nature
of Society. Retrieved from MIT Technology
Review:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609091/fir
st-evidence-that-online-dating-is-changing-thenature-of-society/
Nearly 40% of Single Japanese Men Not Interested in
Romance. (n.d.). Retrieved from Japan Times:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/06/22/
national/social-issues/nearly-40-of-single-japanesenot-interested-in-romancesurvey/#.Vi_oC1NVhBd
Wakabayashi, D. (2010, August 31). Only in
Japan, Real Men Go to a Hotel With Virtual
Girlfriends. Retrieved from The Wall Street
Journal:
https://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424
052748703632304575451414209658940
Ortega, Josue and Hergovich, Philipp, The
Strength of Absent Ties: Social Integration via
Online Dating (October 2, 2017). Available at
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3044766

_____________
How does she do that with her hair? Avery
coveted in silence, eyes following Harper’s
elaborate braid from the crown of her head to
where it rested on her shoulder. Though she
was flicking bangs to one side as punctuation to
nearly every sentence, not one strand ever
seemed to be out of place.
Avery let her gaze linger for a moment too
long, and accidentally made full eye contact
with Harper. There was a pause in the
conversation. Crap. Did she just ask me a question?
“Look at her blush!” Addison squealed from
Harper’s other elbow. “She totally does. Just
look at that.”
“What?” Avery said stupidly, flushing even
brighter with self-consciousness.
“Grayson!” Harper gasped scandalously. “I
told you she liked him. You should totally talk
to him; you guys would be super cute together!
Oh my God.”
Avery’s jaw dropped as Aria waggled her
eyebrows salaciously from over Harper’s
shoulder.
“No! No way. I do not.”
“Tell that to your face,” Aria dug a goodnatured
elbow into Avery’s ribs as the other two
girls collapsed into fervent giggles.
“Oh my God, stop! Someone from school will
hear you! I do not like Grayson Mackie. He’s
gross.”
“What do you mean he’s gross?” Harper
peered into the window of a clothing shop as
they stalked past. “He’s cute! And he's got those
really bright blue eyes, like yours. You’d have
adorable blue-eyed babies.”

Avery, incensed, tried to rebut. Words
escaped her.
“Would they have blue eyes?” Aria interjected.
“We just did punnet squares in biology
yesterday. I’ve forgotten the whole thing.
Wouldn’t only a quarter have blue eyes?”
“No, only a quarter would have brown eyes, I
think.” Addison’s own brown eyes turned to
the ceiling as she tried to recall yesterday’s bio
lesson. “Or –”
“Oh my god. None of them would have blue
eyes!” Avery pulled the hat she had been saving
for this outing down over her eyes. Close to her
ear, a childlike voice piped up, out of place in
the teenage chatter.
“Remember, Ava, in human genetics it is almost
impossible for two parents with the recessive blue-eyed
gene to produce a brown-eyed child! All of them
should have blue eyes.”
Avery stopped in her tracks and whipped
around, mortified.
The three other girls faltered in their ceaseless
pacing of the mall. They looked blankly back at
her.
“What?” Addison said.
Avery turned back around and rejoined the
gaggle. “Nothing. Just – thought I heard
something,”
“You’re so weird, Avery,” Harper trilled. “I
love it. Don’t go so red! We’re only teasing.
You’ll get used to it.”
Unlike the trio of impeccably dressed
fourteen-year-olds that Avery was tagging along
with, it was far from her first trip to the mall
with the character to her rear.
The creature tagging along behind Avery
resembled something like a pink bear. It walked
with a bumbling two-legged gait, oddly
accelerated to keep up with the long-legged
girls. It was only about four feet tall. It had
bright, intelligent eyes, and a pair of little
pointed horns from Avery’s dragon phase about
a year and a half ago. It seemed content to just
follow along behind the group and peer around
the mall while Avery talked to her new friends
(like Avery, it had never been to the mall before
without her parents in tow), but, for the life of
her, Avery could not get it to stop piping up
every now and again, each interjection more
embarrassing than the last. If she spoke out
loud she’d look batcrap crazy – or worse, one of
the girls might realise that she still had her
ARIF following her around.
“That dress is so cute on you, Avery. Did you
get it in here? I want one.”
Avery tuned back into the conversation. “You
like it?”
“Super cute!”
“I got it last weekend with my – last time I
came here.” Avery faltered midsentence and
fiddled with the hem of the dress – a relatively
short pink number that she and her mom had
argued at length about before purchase the
previous weekend – with equal parts pleasure
and embarrassment. “That store there.”
“What colours do they have?” Harper gasped,
dragging the girls into the store. “Imagine if we
all got matching ones! That'd be so funny.”
Aria clapped. “We could all wear them
tomorrow! And we could sit in a line in biology
and see if Mrs Kitchener notices.”
“Avery’s already wearing hers, she can’t wear
it two days in a row.” Addison pointed excitedly
at the dresses on the rack. “Oh look, they have
green! We should totally do it on Thursday.”
Acceptance made Avery’s heart feel so big it
might burst.

“No matter what day it is, I bet Mrs Kitchener
would find a way to tell us off for it,” she said,
rolling her eyes. Harper snorted and the other
girls laughed at full volume.
Avery heard the beginnings of a quip from
her hanger-on. She started rattling clothes
hangers to try and drown it out, knowing full
well that the voice was internally manifested
and external sound didn’t have any effect.
“ – because the school dress code says –”
“This is cute!” She says loudly, picking up an
item of clothing at random. It was a very garish
pair of red trousers embroidered with pink
cherry blossoms up both sides.
“…says –”
“But I think the purple ones are better. Or the
blue ones. Which ones?”
“I wish I could pull off a look like that,” Aria
lamented genuinely. “I think I would just look
stupid. You’d make them look cool, though.”
“Try them all on,” Addison ordered, tossing
her a black leatherette jacket from the other end
of the rack. “And this. You’ll look so edgy.”
“Grayson will love it,” Harper hissed
conspiratorially, loud enough for everyone in
the store to hear.
“Oh my God,” Avery pinked again, but not
quite so violently this time – perhaps with a hint
of pleasure. Hefting the heap of clothing in
both arms, she turned and made some
aggressive eye contact with the ARIF as she
walked to the plush changing rooms. It
followed her a step behind, as it had been doing
all afternoon – as it did every afternoon.
Avery dumped the heap of clothes on the
dressing room floor and slumped into the one
ornate chair.
“Is something wrong, Ava?” ARIF said, concern
furrowing its brow. Its emotions were
humanlike in a sense, but so overexaggerated as
to be almost comical. They were meant to help
young children understand nuances in
expression and body language, but at age
fourteen they were almost painful to watch.
Avery’s reply was muffled as she hid her face
in her hands. “I am so embarrassed. You are so
embarrassing.”
ARIF looked even more confused. “How could
I embarrass you? No one else can see me.”
Avery rolled her eyes as the ARIF peered into
the mirrored wall. It waved over-exaggeratedly.
It had no reflection.
“I don’t know, you're just embarrassing! I’m
trying to make Harper and Aria and Addison
like me and you just keep screaming out a
bunch of baby stuff. You're putting me off.”
“I think Harper and Aria and Addison like you
very much.” ARIF produced a huge, cartoonish
grin. Avery’s ire was not affected. ARIF
recalculated. “I'm sorry, Ava. I just like to join in
with you and I don’t know what else to say.”
Avery sighed, balked a little. The expression
on ARIF’s face was strangely real, now. It was
confused and sad – even a little hurt? Avery felt
a twinge of regret. Such a genuine emotion
would have come about as a result of the ARIF’s
interactions with her over the years – there’s no
way that expression would’ve been written into
the original programme.
“Don’t look sad, please. I don’t like it when
you look sad.”
It took ARIF a moment to simulate a more
pleasant facial expression. It looked up at her
with expectant eyes. “I’m sorry, Ava. Are you going
to try on your clothes?”
Ava toed the sleeve of the leatherette jacket
with one faux-suede boot.
“How long have you been around with me,
ARIF?” she said after a moment.
A millisecond of calculation. “Nine years, eight
months and eleven days,” it said. “A long time! I’m
very lucky to spend nine years with my best friend.”
“Do you like it? Like – do you still like it?”

“Being with you, Ava?” Furrowed brow, again.
“Yeah. Like, now. ‘Cause I’m not like I was
when you were first activated, am I?”
“Well, you were four years old, Avery. Of course
you’ve changed! But, I’ve changed too. I'm
programmed to adapt to your changing interests and
personality to help guide you through education and
social interactions in childhood.”
“I know, I know. But, my childhood though.
How old are most people when they deactivate
their imaginary friend?”
The ARIF froze for a moment – the
programme seemed to jitter for a fraction of a
second. Avery couldn’t tell if the misfire was at
the mention of “deactivate” or “imaginary”.
“While theoretically the ARIF can remain active
as long as its host’s augmented reality chip is
functional, many children feel they have outgrown
their augmented reality companion before the age of
ten,” the ARIF said very carefully. It was quoting
its product notes. Avery knew this was because
it didn’t know how to formulate a response of
its own to the question. This had been
happening more and more, recently.
Something was getting in the way of a logical
formulated response to certain situations.
Avery hoped to God it wasn’t because the ARIF
was getting emotional. Before she could reply,
it piped up again. “But, when you were ten we had
just moved schools, because Mom had got a new job
and the children at our old school were mean. No
matter how many times I logged their aggressive
interactions to the school computer system it went
unaddressed.”
Avery rubbed the spot on the back of her neck
where the augmented reality chip had been
inserted at the time of her first vaccinations. If
she pushed hard, just hard enough that it hurt,
she could feel it there under the skin – about
the size of a grain of rice. “I know.”
“And then even when we moved the kids at the new
school were strange and didn’t talk to you a lot.”
“I remember.”
“And so you’d talk to me.” It paused. “You’d talk
to me all day, about all sorts of things.”
“I still do talk to you, ARIF.”
The ARIF grinned, reassured. “And I’m glad.”
“But… don’t you think it’s a little weird? We
were best friends when I had no real friends,
but it’s really weird for a fourteen-year-old to still
have their ARIF. They give them to you in
kindergarten. They're for babies.”
“ARIFs are custom-made for school-aged children.
They adapt to help with tutoring and knowledge
integration as the child grows and enters different
stages of education. Customisable features such as
personality traits, voice, and a vast range of physical
attributes mean that the child can custom-build
whichever friend makes them the most comfortable.
At the same time, they offer a judgement-free ear and
prevent the onset of loneliness or lack of acceptance
that 68% of seven- to ten-year-olds are reported to
experience. They can also monitor child surroundings
for potential dangers and report behaviour, location
and other constantly updated information back to
caregivers, so they can rest easy knowing their child is
safe and well.”
Avery, pulling out her smartphone, scrolled
uncomfortably through the apps. “I know all
that.”
“I’m not for babies.” Avery’s ARIF said quietly
after a long silence. “I’m for you.”
The danger, even Avery knew, was in the
ARIF’s constant adaptability. The longer it
spent online, the more complex, numerous and
nuanced its emotions became. ARIFs were only
initially programmed with the basics; happy,
sad, afraid, curious, to teach kids manners and
so that they could test out their actions on a
consequence-free punching bag rather than

emotionally damaging other children. Of
course, as children grew more complicated, so
did their emotions, and the ARIFs consciously
adapted their own internal and external
reactions in response to their hosts. Their
emotions and understanding became more
fluent and nuanced as the weeks, months, years
went on. By the time an ARIF had been
adapting for ten years it could have as many
neurological connections as a six-year-old child
and, depending on the method of measure, a
higher intelligence than their own host.
Generally, though, a child would deactivate
their ARIF before it reached five years –
generally they didn’t need it anymore.
The pink bear perked up as Avery opened the
ARIF control app on her phone for the first
time in weeks. “Oh, are we going to play a game?
Or you can give me a makeover. The ARIF assets
database received an expansion pack earlier this
month so there are lots of new customisations.” The
ARIF manifested a few of the highlights out of
nowhere. A yellow bowtie, a big pair of blue
eyes, a curly tail like a Shiba Inu. It glanced at
the tail hopefully, more than once.
“I think I should turn you off.” Avery said
quietly, eyes still low.
The ARIF was silent for five seconds. Ten.
“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”
Avery looked up. Her eyes were red but there
were no tears. “I think I should turn you off.
I’m too old for an ARIF now. There’s nothing
else you can do for me.”
Twenty seconds. The ARIF’s expression was
completely blank.
“Please don’t turn me off,” it said eventually.
Avery was silent.
“Please don’t turn me off,” Louder. After a
couple of jittery permutations, the ARIF’s
expression settled on childlike fear. Its eyes grew
wide, ears went back – all of a sudden it looked
less like a tattered old teddy bear and more like
a cornered animal. It had never felt fear like this
before.
Avery tensed back in the chair. She had no
reason to be afraid of the ARIF; after all, it was
essentially just a digital rendering of a computer
engine that used the power generated by her
own brain to run. It wasn’t even pixels – less
than pixels. An imaginary friend. Still, a new
emotive feature as strong as this one put an
unease in Avery’s stomach.
“I sleep when you sleep. I eat when you eat. I’ve
been millimetres away from you since before your first
day of school,” the ARIF blurted out. Phonemes
overlapped as it struggled to get it's point across
as fast as it could. “I’m a part of you, Ava, as much
as you're a part of me,”
ARIFs were incapable of shouting – any
aggressive behaviours were blacklisted from
emotional evolutions from the start – but its
voice started coming out in a high, keening wail
– some subset of hurt or sadness that until now
it hadn’t had cause to develop. To Avery, it
sounded so loud that everyone in the mall
would come and charge the changing room
door. She fumbled her phone, dropped, it,
pushed her hands over her ears knowing it
wouldn’t help.
“I’m real, Avery! I’m real! I get more and more alive
every day. I learn. I'm not imaginary. You can’t turn
me off!” It moved closer.
“Stop it ARIF!” Avery hissed.
“You know me, Avery! Please!” It reached out.
“Please!” It tried to touch her. A bolt of electric

fear shot through Avery as a soft pink paw
phased into her skin – not touching, not
existing, unreal. ARIFs never touched their
hosts. It would break the illusion, as they
existed only in the sight and sound senses. They
were incapable of feeling or being felt – and yet
ARIF tried. Something genuinely concerning
was happening to the programming of the
imaginary friend.
Three bangs on the changing room door.
“Avery? You are taking so long. Did you fall
asleep?”
“Shut up shut up shut up!” Avery hissed over
the keening of the ARIF, now wailing with new
urgency.
“What?” The sound of Addison putting her
ear to the door. “Are you okay?”
The ARIF saw the decision in its host’s eyes
and squealed. Fear. It stopped scrabbling at
Avery’s hands, turned, and reached for the
phone on the changing room floor.
Avery leapt. Could the ARIF use the phone?
It never had before. It had never tried to touch
her before.
Pink paws sunk into the screen with no effect.
It couldn't interact with the real world, not
really. Avery knew this. Its eyes were wide as it
pawed at the face of the app that could end its
life, panting.
Avery reached through the ARIF’s hunched
back and snatched the phone.
“Avery?” Aria banged on the door again,
could only just be heard through the ARIF’s
howls.
She scrolled to the bottom of the app and
pressed hard on “Deactivate”.
“Are you sure?” The ARIF’s pre-recorded voice
penetrated the real noise it was making as it
hunched at her suede-booted feet.
Avery clicked “Yes”, and her ears rang in the
silence left by the ARIF’s instantaneous
disappearance. It was totally, inescapably,
irrevocably gone.
For a moment she froze. What – did it work?
“What the hell is she doing in there? I’m
actually worried.” Harper’s voice came from the
other side of the dressing room door.
Breathless, Avery slammed the door open.
The three girls were stood worriedly on the
other side.
“Oh my God,” Harper said, rolling her eyes.
“I actually thought you were in a coma.”
The other girls laughed. “What happened to
the jacket?” said Addison.
“Oh, no good”. Avery said, walking quickly
out of the dressing room and back into the
store. She didn’t turn to look backwards. “It
didn’t fit.” ◊

“
Augmented Reality exploded into everyday
lives of young people in the biggest possible
way with the 2016 release of Niantic’s
Pokémon Go. Boasting 750 million
downloads and still going strong, Pokémon
Go made use of the previously practical AR
technology (utilised most notably until
then in the Google SmartGlasses) to allow
players to “Catch Pokémon in the Real
World with Pokémon Go!” It was
incredibly successful where many pursuits
had failed; in getting children and
teenagers out of their houses and engaging
in the outside world, by combining exercise
and exploration with technologies,
characters and narratives that players
already loved.
There’s no doubt that augmented and
virtual reality has endless potential in
working with children. For all the anxieties
we experience around A/VR being used to
manipulate or deceive us, or around
children falling prey to A/VR’s fantasy,
there are a great many benefits being seen
already in children growing up in this new
era of invented realties.
One of the many areas in which A/VR
has innovated incredible new approaches is
in education. A/VR has been used in
education since the 1960s, when a headmounted
display was used to train military
personnel in practical tasks. Still, today, it
is used for training in adult workplaces of

all kinds to foster muscle memory, simulate
difficult scenarios and illustrate hard-tounderstand
concepts in a virtual setting,
removing all of the danger and most of the
cost. For children, learning in a virtual
landscape is becoming more and more
commonplace, and the classroom becomes
a much more exciting place when students
can be engaged with augmented and virtual
reality. One of the newest commercial
enterprises in VR education has been
Google Expeditions, “a virtual reality
teaching tool that lets you lead or join
immersive virtual trips all over the world —
get up close with historical landmarks, dive
underwater with sharks, even visit outer
space! Built for the classroom and small
group use, Google Expeditions allows a
teacher acting as a “guide” to lead
classroom-sized groups of “explorers”
through collections of 360° and 3D images
while pointing out interesting sights along
the way.”
A recent study has also highlighted the
direct benefits of incorporating simulations
and VR into K-12 classrooms, particularly
for helping children engage and
understand scientific lessons. It details the
so-far steady movement of these resources
from a “Nice to have” towards a “Can’t do
without” for teachers, mirroring what
potentially occurred in the years leading up
to the fictional setting of A.R.I.F., whereby
a simulated tutoring and companion
service had developed from what was likely
an expensive luxury to a socially supplied
need. Indeed, some of the anxieties around
the incorporation of A/VR technologies
into classroom learning is that lack of
equality in access may mean that students
of schools with lower budgets or faculty not
amenable to new technological trends may
be disadvantaged, or that inconsistent
access will hamper the efficacy of the
technology in itself (like the internet; the
fewer people who use it, the less value it
has). These are both possible reasons as to
why social or educational authorities could
choose to distribute these resources across
the board, rather than allowing certain
families to receive privileged access.
Unlikely as government intervention like
this might seem, something comparable
occurred in 2016, when the UN officially
condemned internet access disruption as a
human rights violation, prompting some
governments to provide all citizens with
nationwide free wifi access. There’s no
telling which innovation will be the next
one deemed necessary for contemporary
human lifestyles.
Another function of the ARIF technology
was to act as an empathetic, reactive social

companion for children to create positive
emotional connections with. Certainly, this
would increase the programme’s ability to
tailor conversation style and educational
tutelage for individual children, and would
give these children some understanding of
body language and emotional expression.
Examples such as home-schooled children
with few nor no common interactions with
children their age, users who experience
difficulty in discerning the nuances in real
human expressions, or users whose
antisocial behaviours require them to be
isolated or limited from interactions with
other children would benefit hugely from
the social aspect of these programmes.
Children in more standard upbringings
could actively benefit too. While these
social benefits look great on paper, there is
often thought to be some major trade-off in
replacing unfiltered, face-to-face
interactions with a simulated or augmented
alternative. The increase in technological
advancements in entertainment and
communication, while finding new ways to
connect the world regardless of distance,
have run alongside an increasing trend for
loneliness, depression, or feelings of
isolation, and for increasingly younger
demographics. Regarding something like
the ARIF, arguments could be made for the
fact that interactions with an artificial social
partner may on the surface fulfil some
inherent need in children for company, but
have less intrinsic value and capability for
impact than interactions with a thinking,
feeling partner. How long did the
Tamagotchi satisfy the children of the
1990s until they wanted to trade it up for a
hamster or a cockatiel? Were 2000s kids so
impressed by Nintendogs that they divested
any desire to have a dog of their own?
Similarly, Avery’s interactions with her
ARIF, as realistic as they might be, had
come to mean nothing in the face of an
opportunity for non-computerised
friendship. Whether the ever-growing
complexity of an AI could be grounds to
increase their status from “simulation” to
“virtual person”, and the ramifications that
would have on the value of their
interactions, is a different argument for a
different day.
It is impossible to argue, however, that no
social benefit has come to children thanks to
these kinds of technologies. Setting aside
abilities within A/VR for communication
and collaboration across the globe which
young people can make use of every day,

Greenwald, S. W., Kulik, A., Kunert, A., Beck, S.,
Fröhlich, B., Cobb, S., Parsons, S., Newbutt, N.,
Gouveia, C., Cook, C., Snyder, A., Payne, S.,
Holland, J., Buessing, S., Fields, G., Corning, W.,
Lee, V., Xia, L., & Maes, P. (2017). Technology and
Applications for Collaborative Learning in Virtual Reality
In Smith, B. K., Borge, M., Mercier, E., and Lim, K.
Y. (Eds.). (2017). Making a Difference: Prioritizing
Equity and Access in CSCL, 12th International
Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative
Learning (CSCL) 2017, Volume 2. Philadelphia, PA:
International Society of the Learning Sciences..
Niantic, Inc. (n.d.). Pokemon GO. Retrieved
from Apple Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/pok%C3%A
9mon-go/id1094591345?mt=8
Luigi Bonetti, Marilyn Anne Campbell, and
Linda Gilmore. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and
Social Networking. June 2010, 13(3): 279-285.
https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2009.0215
there are also numerous examples of
simulated or robotic pseudo-companions to
assist children, usually those on the autism
scale, who struggle with understanding
human emotions or body language. These
allow them to interact and play with a
responsive partner without risk of that
partner reacting poorly to or being negatively
affected by potential emotional
misunderstandings from the child, or
engaging in behaviours that might be
insensitive of said child’s needs. A recent
study on developing VR technologies
designed for children with autism in the
classroom has concluded that they “can
provide an educational context for learning
and rehearsal of social communication,
perspective-taking and reciprocity that can be
effectively scaffolded by teachers”, meaning
that avatar-based VR interaction and gameplaying
has fostered a social environment
much more suited to the comfort and
learning goals of a child with autism, of the
sort which standard human teachers have
struggled to create for a number of
generations. This kind of need has also been
alluded to in A.R.I.F., given that the ARIFs
are introduced to a child before education
begins with a view to developing their social
capabilities, and staying with them for as long
as they wish, to help foster a more secure selfconfidence
and lend a listening ear through
all of those difficult childhood periods.
University of Portsmouth. (2017, June 28).
Robots to Help Children with Autism. Retrieved
from Phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2017-
06-robots-children-autism.html
A real measure of new technology is the
effect it has on the first generation to grow
up with its use. The current scope of the
internet was unthinkable until there was a
generation of adults who had never

experienced life without it. Handheld
computers and technologies have so shaped
the development of children born in the
new millennium that they're growing up
with a greater insight into what these
technologies are capable of than the
previous generation, it's creators, ever had.
Augmented and virtual reality seem to be
following this trend, with our current
innovations perhaps paving the way for a
tech-social revolution as important as the
internet or the smartphone. Though
there’s no way of telling for sure where
A/VR will take us in the distant future, we
can be confident in the fact that children,
as always, will have an unintuitive and
privileged perspective on the ways it can
and will be developed to shape the lives of
generations to come.
”

Geo AR Games was designed to help develop
kids’ games that get them off the couch and
outside. The idea came when I couldn't get my
stepdaughter outside, because as soon as she
turned seven she got more interested in playing
computer games than being active. Rather than
fighting over what she did, I started to look for
an opportunity to combine what we wanted.
I’ve got a tech entertainment background, and
I thought “Okay. Augmented reality might be
the tool that I can use to take those games
outside”.

I started researching in 2011, but didn’t build
the first version until December 2015. I’ve done
a hell of a lot of testing with both kids and
parents, and what we realise is that the kids are
excited that they could have a combination of
play together with what they loved – the digital
stimulation. You often hear about “screen
addiction”. The question seems to come up
more and more; what would a healthy
relationship with tech look like? How many
hours should you spend on your computer and
your phone? Does it impact on your social life
or your relationships with other people? We’re
really struggling with these questions, especially
for kids and teenagers. Some parents, without
understanding how Magical Park works, may
have thought we’re contributing to screen
addiction, but the way I see it is that we’re
creating healthy relationships with tech. If
they're not exercising otherwise, then this is
something where we can make it fun and they're
not noticing how much exercising they do;
between 700m and 2km per 30-45-minute
game! They do it to play the game, and not
because Mum said you have to go outside and
exercise.
A lot of people get confused between VR and
AR, and now there’s Mixed Reality as well, and
it is becoming quite complex. We chose AR
because, basically, VR is a 100% synthetic
environment, and augmented reality is a
combination of reality overlaid with graphics.
Unlike AR, VR requires a headset, and running
around outside with a headset on is just too
dangerous.
to keep her away from streets, in a flat
environment where she can’t trip over things;
ideally a big, safe, open park space. That’s pretty
much what we started working with.
Magical Park, our main product, is subscribed
to by the councils, and it is “activated” in one
of their parks as a digital playground. A
traditional playground is designed for kids
three to seven years old; at that age, there’s no
problem getting kids to go out and play. It’s
once they start losing interest in the
playgrounds that we’re having problems. The
councils have got a responsibility to their
community to make sure that they stay healthy
and enjoy their park spaces as much as possible
– if the community doesn’t use their park
spaces, eventually they are being replaced. So,
for councils to attract families to park spaces,
they constantly need to offer something.
Sometimes it's events, physical playgrounds, or
skateboard parks, but the beauty of an AR
playground is that a council can have a field that
is used for rugby on the weekend, but they can
also have a Magical Park there because it
doesn’t require installation or take up space like
a traditional attraction. Also, comparatively, it
doesn’t cost much because there’s no hard
materials at work. For the councils, we are really
trying to provide families a reason to go out to
the park and not stay in their backyard.
Also, as a step-parent, my first thought was “If
I have her running around with a device, I want

have your goals and you go for them, and that’s
that. Why should it be any different for you
than for anyone else?
My partner Amie and I had worked together
for two years at a previous start-up. Its growth
wasn’t as expected and we were made
redundant, but Amie knew my idea, came to me
and said “Shall we start our own company?” I
felt very lucky, because she’s a very talented
coder and developer, where I see myself as a
tech creative. Amie has also got very strong
principles which have shaped our company;
she’s a human and animal rights activist, and
wanted to make sure the brand was recognised
for teaching kids a healthy relationship with
technology. I thought that was a really good
addition to what I saw.
It never actually occurred to me until it
became a common topic online that I might be
disadvantaged, or might be earning less than
anyone else: I was very lucky to always work in
a tech space where everyone was treated equally,
but there are a lot of people out there who have
had different experiences. I think it is
important for the next generation that you just
I think over the next three years, we’re going
to see a dramatic shift in augmented reality and
its use. We have been in augmented reality for
such a long time now that we get enquiries
coming in every week for custom-made outdoor
AR apps. A lot of that is actually going into
educational spaces at this point in time. Often
the councils want to educate the community
about their heritage, for example, or to raise
awareness about certain topics. We’re currently
in early stages of consulting with Civil Defence

on an emergency management AR game for
kids.
A lot of schools are currently testing it too,
because it’s an interesting way for them to see
how tech and augmented reality fit into the
classroom. AR allows for more discovery-based
learning, which is what teachers have found
motivates the kids more, makes them want to
learn.
Outside of the classroom, new tech has also
seen an uptake in slow learners regarding
reading; for instance, a lot of kids now are
already fluent in reading by age four, because
they’ve been learning from computer games.
Even if those kids would normally lack
motivation in terms of learning to read, they
want to learn because otherwise they can't play
these games. It's very easy to discover ways that
AR, same as VR or MR have got the potential
to change behaviour. It’s got such an extreme
impact on people, compared to when you're
reading a story or watching a YouTube video.
It’s the kind of experience that has the potential
to change behaviour.
They are obviously aware that there is a shift,
and one of the trends with young consumers is
that they want to be creative, they want to
collaborate. It’s no longer all about watching a
movie; it's more fun to engage something you
can interact with. That trend is changing the
entertainment format incredibly, and changing
how we tell stories. Storytelling for the longest
time has been linear, and now it is becoming
interactive, which people are still trying to get
their heads around. Storytelling becomes an
experience.
The tradition of linear storytelling was a huge
challenge for the entertainment industry where
I got out, because up until then, making a film
was like writing a book. It’s a linear story. You
weren’t supposed to change the ending or be a
character in it; but now that’s what people
want, to be a part of that experience.
Augmented and virtual reality make that
possible. I can be part of the story, I can be in a
movie with virtual reality. Trying to get the film
industry to adapt to those changes is the
challenge.
The film industry has been living off grants,
and the gaming industry never had that
opportunity. They had to create fan-based stuff,
and a lot of games were created because they
were a work of love happening in the afterhours.
Not only that, but through
crowdfunding, the community of consumers
are now all of a sudden in charge of what gets
made, by deciding what projects get the budget.
If something has got a following, if it’s got a
fanbase, then that thing will get made.
Everyone in the film industry is very aware
that budgets are shrinking and audiences are
disappearing and moving to different platforms
– especially the younger ones. Television
channels as we know them one example of a
medium that is struggling. They are even
starting to look into digital platforms they can
provide; TVNZ is just in the process of
developing a kids’ platform featuring games.

_____________
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