Karen's Narrative

Introductory Text

66th Post

Posted 24 May 2016 at 16:06:58 EDT

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> It started as a field trip twice a week. Get out of the home for a while, go play video games. Not just for a little bit on the staff's phones, but for hours on real rigs. Before then, my favorite thing was when we took walks in the woods behind the home, but this was even better. It was funny because the game we played was called *Children of the Forest*, which was basically where you walked through the woods fighting enemies.
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> In the game, you had to remember all these different paths, which were always branching off in different patterns. And you'd fight different enemies that all had different patterns. There was a lot of memorizing stuff and making decisions. Everybody liked the first 20 levels or so, but after that, most of the other kids got frustrated. Instead of going on, they just played the first few levels over and over. But I kept going higher and higher.
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> The final boss was called the Ancient Queen. You were always advancing on her castle, this huge dark castle that loomed in the background of every screen. Sometimes you would see her floating around her castle, just a shadowy bird-like shape, and she would taunt you from afar. "Come, my child, come and face me!" That kind of stuff. Man, I wanted to get her.
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> Even as a little kid, I got really obsessed about things. I wanted to beat the Ancient Queen so badly. I got to level 100, then 200, then 300. At this point, every branch in the path offered like 40 choices, and they came literally every second, plus you had to do the enemy patterns, sometimes mixing two and three enemies at once, kind of like playing two melodies at once on a keyboard. It got pretty insane, but I kept advancing. I was relentless.
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> It was nice to finally be the best at something. I was way better than any other kid. I mean, no other kid went past like level 40. Sometimes they had me play online against other people. There was a kind of battle mode. I beat everybody.
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> At first we could only go to play games like twice a week, and everybody was just dying to do it, since there was nothing to do at the home. But after a while they let me play whenever I wanted. This made the other kids jealous, and they started shunning me, so I just played even more.
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> I played all the time. I started sleeping at the game place, and I played from when I first woke up in the morning (or night) until I went to sleep at night (or morning). They brought me food while I played, whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. One of the people at the game place tried to spoon feed me while I played. It was creepy at first, but I got used to it.
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> I had pretty much gotten used to the fact that whenever something was really fun, adults would come in and take it away or tell me to not do too much of it. Or something bad would happen, and it would be destroyed. So when they told me I could play this all I wanted, it was like the ultimate freedom.
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> The ultimate freedom. Funny that.
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> I remember lying in bed one night, and I heard the theme music playing down the hall in the game room. The game was so fun, but kind of cheaply made, and it had this chintzy flute music that played over and over. I heard it now in the middle of the night and wondered who was playing, since I was the only kid there and the doctors never played it. So I got out of bed and snuck down the hall to see who it was. The game place was kind of creepy, with all white halls and everything smelling like plastic, and I was a little scared, since I was only 8 at the time. When I got to the game room, it was totally dark. Nobody was there. The music seemed to vanish. It had all been in my head. That's how much I played it.
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> I was obsessed with that damn Ancient Queen. She was like this huge mythical creature in my mind. In the game, she only had like a dozen taunts, and I must have heard each one hundreds of thousands of times. They were burned into my brain. When I was on the high levels and everything was flying at me at once, I kind just cleared my mind and let my hands play the game, if that makes sense. In these times, I would daydream about the Ancient Queen. What would it be like when I finally faced her? What would she look like? What would happen?
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> It's strange, but sometimes I imagined her as looking like my mother. That strange face that barely remembered.
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> After a few months, they gave me the surgery to install my direct sense jacks. After playing the direct sense games, I forgot all about the Children of the Forest and the Ancient Queen. I had found a beautiful, wonderful world where I was powerful beyond belief, where I wasn't just some little girl who lived in a home and didn't have any friends. So away I went...
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> A few years ago, I went back into the CIA files and found a copy of the game to see if I could finally beat it. I got past level 800. After that, it became simply inhuman. So I botted it to see the ending. It took a long time to build a proper bot. It really was a fiendish, clever game. Finally, I got one working, but it turns out that there is no ending. You get to level 1024, and it just resets. You never meet the Ancient Queen.
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> What's worse? Finding out there is no Ancient Queen? Or finding out there is one?
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### **To the New Children of the Forest**

Karen's Narrative Part 02

71st Post

Posted 27 May 2016 at 03:35 EDT

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> It's really difficult for me to tell a story with just words so please bear with me. I am trying to tell you the story of who I am and how I came to be this thing, but I have trouble organizing my thoughts into a single linear flow. I wish I could just show you the entire story all at once in all its many dimensions. Then I could make it clear why I hired somebody to put a pellet of poison into my own arm. But as it is, I must use the ancient art of written narrative. So here it goes...
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> Imagine spending your whole life in a cramped stinking prison cell, counting the days, scratching tally marks on the walls. Then one day, that big iron door creaks open, and you're whisked you off to a glamorous party full of beautiful people and delightful games, and everybody you meet is toasting you for being a genius, for being the great hope of the human race. That's what it was like to plug into the direct sense feeds after living at the children's home.
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> I can't describe that first day in the feedrealm. Though I have not cried in 24 years, I still get the ghostly feeling of tears coming to my eyes every time I think about it. To be looking around at the homefield environment, everything glittering in a new way, shining in colors that do not exist, all of it stretching out before me, all the main gateways open and waiting to be explored -- the feeling of that moment, of being a small child looking out at the beautiful new vastness of the realm, was the most magical thing I have ever experienced.
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> What I want to impress upon you is this: Every step I took towards slavery felt like a newfound freedom.
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> At first, it was just games and social mixing with other kids. We had all played the mysterious Children of the Forest game and scored highly on it. The game had been an entry exam of sorts. It turned out that I had scored higher than anyone else. A lot higher. This made some of the other kids jealous, but most of them seemed to look up to me. I had never made anyone jealous before, and I had never been looked up to before.
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> Social mixing and share-streaming was easy and fun. You had time to think of what to say, which video or ani to post to the stream, which paste to link up. It was so much more exciting than being in real life. I had a good memory and could work the Assisted Recall pretty well, so I made a lot of friends.
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> They told us we would all be going to Harvard and Standford and Tsinghua, that we would be famous mix stars and government stars, that we were the future of the world. To be fair, they couldn't have known that most of us would be dead before we were 20. That all of us would be dead before 34. But they knew damn well we wouldn't be going on to normal lives. We were part of an experiment. After we got used to the feedrealm, they began the conditioning.
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> I realize that you might not know what the feedrealm is, so maybe I should explain a little about it. The feedrealm is basically just another interface for sharing information and carrying out transactions. It is based on the metaphor of 3D space. That's why it's called a "realm." You can move through it. You can go up and down and left and right. It feels like swimming through weightlessness.
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> They made it this way because that's how the human mind works. Our brains evolved to exist in a 3D space. We naturally imagine things as existing in space, even abstract, non-spatial things. We think of the future as coming toward us, the past as receding behind us. Powerful people are considered "above," and the powerless are "below." Items belong "in" some categories and "outside" other categories. None of these spatial relationships really exist but they are useful metaphors because our minds are suited to processing things in 3D space.
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> It has always been theoretically possible, even trivial, to create a 4-dimensional or n-dimensional feedrealm. But since the human mind isn't made to process so many dimensions, it was considered pointless. But recently, a genetic mutation dating back to the stone age was discovered which allows certain individuals to experience and comprehend feedrealms of four and higher spatial dimensions.
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> While this mutation may have been useless for stone age people living in a spatially 3D world, it was also harmless, so it somehow survived. Though its initial origin is something of a mystery. Anyways, now scientists were able to hook people up to 4D feedrealms. Early test subjects described the experience in terms ranging from "nauseating" to "utterly horrifying." It was theorized that maybe if children were conditioned from a young age to exist in a higher dimensional environment, they would become accustomed to it. But such conditioning was deemed unethical.
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> Enter the CIA. Their motto: "Where ethical approbation ends, our work begins." They used their global genetic database to identify children with the genotype and collected a group of them to begin conditioning. And that brings us back to my story (see? a spatial metaphor!). At first we were just playing around in the feedrealm, getting used to it. Then they started the conditioning.
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> How do I describe higher dimensional space, so-called hyperspace? Nauseating and utterly horrifying are exactly what it felt like at first. Everybody hated it. We cried and tried to run away when they made us go into the hyperrealm. But of course, there was nowhere to run. We were all lying in hygiene beds, where almost all of us would lie until death. They forced us back into the hyperrealm, a little at a time, just showing us simple shapes at first to acclimate us. But how do I describe it?
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> It was like watching things pass through each other, but without touching each other or covering each other up, in ways that made the brain go, "Gah! That's impossible! Stop it!" There were plain gray boxes and cones and infinite planes and bottomless abysses, and the shapes would move slowly along and do things that were simply impossible. Some of the kids never got used to it. They hated it and dropped out of the program and disappeared from the feedrealm.
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> But I kept going, just like in the Children of the Forest game. I got used to 4 dimensions, then 5 and 6. I was a leader. I taught the other kids tricks for how to understand what they were seeing. And it was cool being in hyperspace, seeing everything at once like that. Was hyperspace mind-bending? Sure. But not nearly as mind-bending as hypertime. And not nearly as horrifying.
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