Virtual Reality: Home of the AIs

Prepare yourself for a mind-blowing experience

For this novel, I wanted a virtual reality experience that was as immersive and life-like as imaginable. The visual and auditory parts of that are easy; the technology is already almost there. But how do you control your movements in this virtual universe? Using a hand-held controller would be out of the question; I want people to walk around, move their limbs, gesture to one another. That tilt of the head or sly glance sometimes says everything. I thought about adding in a full-body motion capture rig, but that seems way too clunky, and it would only be practical if you had a lot of space to devote to your VR playroom. Perhaps I could have the VR system be smart enough to infer your intention and animate your avatar on your behalf. But, no, that doesn’t work; it would have to pretty much read your mind in order to do a proper job.

Read your mind? That’s it!

Well, maybe not exactly … that would be a little too spooky, and if the AIs can simply read your mind then we don’t need the massive surveillance system that forms a backdrop to this story.

A technological solution

Then I hit on the idea of fitting everyone with implants that hook into their peripheral nervous systems: not so deeply embedded that the AIs can read their minds, but enough to allow motor and some sensory functions to be handled by the VR system. That ought to do the trick! You move your arms and legs as you normally would, but the signals get intercepted somewhere in the motor cortex and diverted into the simulator. On the return side, the system could synthesize the nerve impulses associated with kinesthesia (your awareness of your own body’s motion) and feed them in via your sensory nerves. You move around as you normally would, and you feel yourself moving around, but the nerve impulses get shunted aside so that you control your avatar directly via your brain, with your body remaining motionless. Something like this happens when we dream, so its not all that implausible. Given this, it’s no stretch of the imagination to do this with other sensory organs; just tap into the auditory cortex to let you speak and hear one another, and you have the immersive experience I was looking for.

The technology necessary to pull of this feat of engineering doesn’t exist yet, but someday it might. In my mind, it is done using bioengineering to cause your own body to produce a network of neurons that converge on the VR interface. This is sufficiently plausible to keep me within the bounds of hard science fiction; it breaks no laws of physics or biology, and nobody can say “that’s impossible.”

A part of daily life

Having created this technology, the next logical step was to incorporate it into everyday life in the form of augmented reality, in which the headset overlays computer-generated content on top of the physical world. For example, the headset can enter navigation mode, which projects the route you’re supposed to be taking from your apartment to the subway then to your workplace on top of reality, allowing the AIs to guide your steps in real time. You can also have VR conferences, with the avatar of the person you’re conversing with overlaid on top of reality. Many other applications of this technology are possible. For example, in a noisy environment, such as a bar, the headset can enter vocal shunt mode, intercepting the nerve signals in your speech cortex and relaying them directly to the hearer’s auditory nerve.

As always, there is a cost associated with this invention: A near-total loss of privacy. The VR headsets are always on, and always communicating with the wireless digital network. The AIs can tap into them any time they wish, allowing them to see everything you see, hear everything you hear. I then realized that this would give the AIs too much power, making it too difficult to escape detection; there’s not much interesting you can do with a story line that reads “Kim decided to do something bad. She got caught. The end.” And so, in order to keep things interesting, I posited that the AIs are not capable of listening to everyone all the time; they only listen in if they’ve placed you under surveillance. This creates a game of cat-and-mouse which is ripe with plot hooks and tension.

Home of the AIs

Virtual reality serves as the home of the artificial intelligences. These are fully sentient, self-aware beings, the nature of which is said to be far beyond our comprehension. In order to communicate with our kind, they use the VR system as a meeting ground, where they take on human avatars and speak with us. The digital world, including VR, is as real to them as ours is to us, and there are those among their number who believe their world is real and ours is a simulation. They are most often encountered overlaid on top of our own reality by the VR headsets, appearing to stand or sit in a meeting room with humans and other AIs; the only way to tell they aren’t real is to pass your hand through one. They may also appear via a portal, a rectangular window that lets you peer into their world without entering it yourself. They are fascinating creatures, human in many ways, profoundly alien in others.

It is hard to understate the importance of the AIs in maintaining this civilization. Humanity has long since forgotten how the technology that sustains daily life actually works, and most devices are under the sole control of the AI, with no provision for humans to take charge. Elevators, for example, do not have buttons: you tell the AIs where you want to go, and they summon a car for you and sent you to the right floor. This pattern is repeated across all of civilization, and if the AIs were to fail then everything would grind to a halt within seconds.

The Center of Power

By now it should be clear that the AIs pay a pivotal role in this society. They control the means of producing and distributing goods. They control the necessities of daily life. They act as the eyes, ears, and hands of both the corporations and UCE; without the AIs neither would be able to maintain their power and keep the people under control.

But who controls the AIs? Who indeed.

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