“The Infinite-Sided Mind”
Working premise: A cynical 25-year-old Metaverse Game Master plans to escape society’s omnipresent global brain by building a secret application that will delete all his data from the global brain, when a Tech Billionaire who owns the global brain discovers his plan and imprisons his mind in a virtual brain called the “Mentagon”.
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What is a “working premise” you ask?
Excerpt from the first chapter in progress. Posted 7/26/2022.
Here is a snippet from a first draft of the inciting incident scene. You can leave comments or feedback at the bottom of the page. Thanks for taking an interest in my passion project!
Posted 6/29/22.
Supra quickly logged out with his gold. The gold seller, who was playing a warlock named SicSkillz, turned his attention to his two friends, who were gambling with a pair of dice.
Johnny scrolled through all the known data about the person playing SicSkillz. His real name was Liam Hughes. He was 23, black and Haitian, and connected on a Miami IP. His social credit score was 3.68, he was single, he’d had a history of childhood bladder infections, and had never voted.
Plenty of other details of Liam’s life were available. This included a picture he’d tweeted of a ’95 Honda NSX an hour ago and every review his friends, ex-girlfriend, and former employer had ever written about him. What stood out to Johnny was his history as a [name TBD] customer.
Liam had four game accounts that had all been closed for terms of service violations. Every time he was banned he just made a new account and logged back on. Now he was on his fifth one. It was shit like this Johnny hated because it meant he’d have to talk to Liam like a child. He didn’t like having to police grown adults. It was petty and a little embarrassing. Plus, Johnny thought, if the guy was selling gold he should have been smart enough not to get caught.
Johnny pointed at SicSkillz. He spoke, and as he spoke Liam could hear Johnny’s voice and read his words as they appeared in a floating chat bubble. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Game Master Riot. I need to talk to you about some activity in your trade log.”
The three players froze. Johnny saw a spike on Liam’s biofeedback panel: a flutter of anxiety. “Oh shit,” Liam laughed. “Hey Game Master what’s up?” The two other guys snickered.
“Yeah I’m looking at the trade logs. It shows you just traded a player named Supra 10,000 gold. But I see he didn’t trade you any items back. That’s a lot of gold to just give away. So I’m sorry but I need to ask you, why did you give him 10,000 gold?”
“No problem. I was just paying him back. He lent me some gold the other day.”
“Oh really? What day was that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Tuesday or Wednesday.”
“Okay. Let me check the logs here.” Johnny scrolled backward through the history displayed on his dashboard. “No I don’t see that trade.”
“He mailed it to me.”
Johnny scrolled some more. “No. I don’t see that amount was mailed either.”
“Yeah well you guys probably lost that data when the server reset.”
Johnny looked up at him. “That’s not how server resets work.”
One of his friends, a rogue named Psykho, spoke up. “That dude sold Sic a Frozen Band a week ago. Just look at your log and you’ll find it.” Johnny didn’t say anything. He grated his teeth with rising irritation. He searched for the trade.
Then he saw there was a trade, on Sunday June 29th. There it was, listed on the server log, floating before him in electric blue text.
[Date: 2042-06-29 Time: 01:23:45 Supra opens trade with SicSkillz]
[Date: 2042-06-29 Time: 01:23:47 Supra trades {Frozen Band}]
In the real world Johnny squirmed in his gaming chair.
“Ah shit,” Johnny mumbled. “Yeah you’re right. I do see that trade listed here.”