Piglets in Cyberspace

This is a (hopefully improved) version of "Deep Cover", a story I have previously published. It attempts to fill the several plot holes in the original.

"Virtual reality [is] a computer simulation of a body and its surroundings. When connected to a VR, the location you seem to inhabit does not exist in the usual physical sense, rather you are in a kind of computer-generated dream... The very moment we are now experiencing may actually be (almost certainly is) such a distributed mental event, and most likely is a complete fabrication that never happened physically. Alas, there is no way to sort it out from our perspective: we can only wallow in the scenery." -- Hans Moravec, Pigs in Cyberspace

"I once dreamt that I was a butterfly, flitting and fluttering around, happy with myself and doing as I pleased. But suddenly I woke up and I was myself again. But now I wonder, am I a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?" -- Master Zhuang, Book of Zhuangzi

"Good morning, Camille," he called to the secretary as he swept past her protests. "Good morning, Chief," he said as he strode into the office, tossing his overcoat onto the frayed remains of a once-fancy settee.

"Don't call me Chief. You're late."

The Director of Cyber-Ops was seated behind his ancient oak desk, chomping on the soggy stump of an unlit cigar. The old leather chair sagged and creaked under its load. He was a large, muscular man with a shaven skull and a weathered visage that still bore witness to a handsome prime of life.

"Sorry, Chief. I just got in from..."

Sam stopped. They were not alone. Perched on the front left corner of the desk was an impossibly gorgeous woman. She was wearing a barely-there yellow dress, showing off delectable décolletage and splendid cleavage. Her long, silken legs swung slowly in graceful rhythm. Her flawless olive skin glistened under the glare of the stark lighting. Honey-blonde hair swept in soft waves across her smooth, slim shoulders. Her lips were cherry-red, her eyes as black as midnight.

Sam was about to say "Nice desk ornament," but decided against it.

"Special Agent Booker, meet your new partner, Doctor Linden."

"Pleased to meet you, Special Agent Booker." Her voice had the delicate tinkle of fine crystal, though strong with self-assurance. She held out her hand to shake. The fingers were slender but her grip was firm. The woman was almost too good to be true.

"The pleasure is most definitely mine, Doctor. And the front part's Sam."

"Sam Booker? Really?"

"What can I say? My parents liked their likkers."

"And I'm Jessica. I've been told about your work for the Bureau. That was a fine job you did last month, with those saboteurs."

"Thanks; but I was just part of the clean-up crew."

"I heard you were the clean-up crew."

"It wasn't a big deal."

"Nice to know," the old man growled. "I shall put that down on your next appraisal. By the way, it was Doctor Linden who provided the intel."

Sam nodded. "Impressive."

"Thank you."

"Enough of this festival of love," the boss barked. "We have a major situation."

"Sounds drastic."

"So shut up and pay attention." The big man leaned forward until the old chair groaned. "Discretion is essential. Doctor Linden will be taking the lead. Any problems with that?"

"None at all. It'll be a pleasure working under her."

The Director dolefully shook his head.

"I hope I live up to your expectations." The young woman playfully fluttered her eyelashes.

"You already have."

Jessica's face reddened, ever so slightly, and she reflexively tugged at the hem of her skirt to draw it down over her thighs. It made no visible difference.

Sam tried to suppress a grin with a cough. He recognized the signals she had been sending since his arrival -- heck, even before. You don't dress like that to impress the boss (not this boss, anyway), and she'd admitted that she'd been checking up on her new partner. It amused him that he understood so well.

"These are my trusted agents?" The Director chewed on his cigar stub. "Well, beggars can't be..."

"Thanks, Chief. We feel your affection."

The old man growled again. "Let's get on with it. We will continue this downstairs."

They took the elevator to the room called the Switchboard. The grim-faced technicians were clinically efficient with their electrodes, probes and implants, even as the Director explained the mission. The briefing was... well, brief, and this bothered Sam. All the skill in the world counts for zip without the right preparation. But Jessica seemed to know what she was doing; and once things were set in motion the boss brooked no bellyaching. The operation was to start straight away. And it looked like a routine job -- reconnaissance, surveillance, intelligence-gathering, whatever you want to call it -- but none of the work done by the Bureau was ever truly routine.

There was a blinding flash and a tremulous blur. The white sterile walls faded. Sam and Jessica found themselves in the living room of an elegantly furnished house. Through the bay window they saw neatly pruned trees and hedges, primly manicured lawns and stiffly regimented gardens. A couple of kids were doing bicycle tricks in the peaceful cul-de-sac. The only other sounds were bird songs and wind chimes. It was your basic suburban bliss, and so far as anyone could know, they had been living there a long time.

Sam and Jessica hadn't changed physically. There was no reason to alter their looks for this assignment. In fact, whenever possible agents kept their up-world appearance, including their names. This reduces the chances of a foul-up. Even seasoned professionals can get sloppy; and a new identity is like a skin graft. It doesn't always "take."

They spent the afternoon and evening watching television. It was the best way for Sam to acquaint himself with the world around him. Jessica cooked dinner, and he was not surprised that she was a gourmet chef. That night he slept on the couch. In the morning, Jessica made breakfast. She was wearing a diaphanous negligée, and sending a silent message -- gratification merely delayed.

He finished his coffee while she went to change clothes.

"Set to go?"

"Ready as ever," she said, and dropped the nightie mournfully onto the sofa. "We won't be coming back. It's hard to throw away nice lingerie. But what would you know?"

Sam just smiled, wondering how much she knew, about the mission. Of course, when you've been in this profession long enough, and have seen so much, you begin to doubt your own instincts.

It was a sultry summer morning when they left the house. An impending storm hovered hazily on the horizon. It was a short walk to their objective, a squat, conspicuously drab concrete building. As they approached he felt a knot tightening in his gut. Infiltration is always tricky. He hoped that Jessica's information was accurate and her groundwork thorough.

There was a grim-faced sentry stationed outside; but otherwise the security appeared lax. The man inspected their credentials, waved some sort of scanning device over them, and was satisfied. Jessica had indeed done a good job. Nevertheless, these people were either very confident or rank amateurs. Sam hoped it was the latter.

Inside they were met by two attendants in dungarees and white coats who escorted them, after another cursory interrogation, to the lab. In the middle of the room was a row of coffin-like capsules, surrounded by a tangled assortment of wires and gadgets. Sam and Jessica lay down in adjoining pods. Caps with appended cables were fitted on their heads, electrodes attached to parts of their bodies and probes inserted into other parts. Suddenly the scene was different. They were standing in a stark, alien landscape which seemed to extend to infinity. It had a coarse-grained fuzziness, like an unfinished painting. Tiny, shimmery objects danced at the edge of perception. Sam used averted vision, staring straight ahead but concentrating on the periphery to bring out faint details, and this resolved the lights into a roiling foam of multi-hued, jittering prisms.

Jessica had changed. She was significantly shorter than she'd been. Her face bore distinctly Eurasian features; her hair was close-cropped and pure white, almost transparent. She was wearing a form-fitting jumpsuit made of some sort of blue metallic thread. But she looked her partner up and down and laughed.

"What's the..." Sam began to say. The words came out high-pitched.

"Now you're one of us."

He looked down... no, she looked down. On the chest were fleshy bumps where there had been rippled muscles. Further down, below the belly, there was no longer a bulge. She had on a costume identical to Jessica's. It showed off well her newly acquired curvature.

Sam shrugged her slimmed down shoulders. "I've had worse."

Jessica winced. They were not alone. A reception committee was waiting, all females. They looked precisely the same as Sam and Jessica and each other. Sam scrutinized them some more and saw something peculiar. The skin-tight uniform revealed features unmistakably feminine but abnormally smooth -- no outlines of nipples nor contours of a crease between the thighs.

"Welcome to the future," one of them said. "But as you can see, it's a work in progress." She stepped forward and held out her hand.

"Doctor Linden, please accept our apologies for taking so long to invite you here. We hope you understand our need for secrecy. We're on the verge of a revolution, but the authorities are reactionary dinosaurs. They're determined to stop us."

"Of course I understand, Professor Nouvel. As does my colleague..."

"Ah, yes; Mr Booker; welcome."

"Please, make it Sam."

"It's nice to meet you, Sam." No sambuca reference? Maybe it wasn't a thing in this world.

They shook hands. The touch was solid, but with an unnerving tingly aftereffect. "You've come highly recommended; and as you have seen, our security needs an upgrade. But I must offer you a further apology, for your... temporary emasculation. What we're doing is ground-breaking, and we are still working with a limited number of templates. Down here we don't eat, we don't expel wastes and we don't... well, you won't miss your...."

Had it been written into the coding, the woman would have blushed, Sam was certain. These people were innocent, in a sense -- something his world had lost. They had only lived in a single body, experienced one realm, known one mode of existence. And the technology was primitive. The avatars were exactly alike in physiognomy, clothing, even physical mannerisms. (Sam was sure that Nouvel herself was the prototype. And why not a little vanity?) Only when one spoke, by the nuances of tone and inflexion, could they be told apart. Yet the advances they'd made in their world-building were remarkable, and Sam regretted what was likely to be done.

They were ushered through a narrow slit which opened suddenly in the middle of that undefined space. They entered a large, white, featureless dome. The interior was congested with lookalikes who were plucking out of the air small colored hexagonals that floated and clustered in various-sized shapes, and then releasing them in ways to form new configurations. It was a novel interface. Sam was impressed.

"It's an odd way to work," Professor Nouvel was saying, "but down here we have plenty of time and resources, and better security. Any attempt to interfere will erase the program; but the principles will be preserved..." -- she tapped her right temple -- "... in here."

"How many," Sam asked, looking around at the hive of workers, "are real?"

"What is real?" The professor smiled.

Sam was not sure if Nouvel was being playfully or distrustfully coy. But over the next ten days, living side-by-side with these people in the lab's cramped living quarters, he came to the conclusion that the professor was without guile, a genuine idealist. That made the job more difficult, especially for Jessica. Sam worried that the guilt of betrayal might be eroding her resolve. Instead, when the time came, she remained firm.

Indeed, it was Jessica who decided it was time to go. They had the information they needed, knew the full scale of Nouvel's research, the details of all the professor's collaborators, the extent of the network. Nobody suspected a thing when Sam and Jessica took a stroll on a balmy afternoon. Once they were well away from the building, Sam touched the tiny stud behind the lobe of his left ear. The world dissolved. They were back in Bureau headquarters. The Director was there to meet them as they came out of their slumber. He congratulated his agents on their mission accomplished. Their report would be sent up the line, but there could only be one outcome. The non-interference policy had to be breached. Professor Nouvel and her team of visionaries would be neutralized... not deleted, reprogrammed. The laboratory would cease to exist, would have never existed. Textbooks in their world might need to be rewritten, perhaps the laws of physics adjusted. All the brave new worlds of the synthetic reality project would not, must not, come to be.

"They will never know, those people down there." The Director was uncharacteristically solemn. "They will soon be creating their own universes, unaware of how theirs came about." He pondered the consoles and monitors which lined the walls. "We had to act."

Sam stared at him, expressionless.

"You don't get it? It's not a bad thing when your children outgrow you; but in this we can't let them. We knew the simulants would become self-aware, but their evolution is phenomenal. They have already started building their own simulations, and if we allow it, eventually their simulants will do the same. But simulations consume energy. The number of worlds will increase exponentially. The catastrophe would have come sooner than anyone expected, if not for Doctor Linden. Thanks to her, we caught them in time. Had we not..."

"We'd have to pull the plug."

The Director sighed. "Crude but correct. We created the problem, of course, constructing and populating these worlds. We use them to perform the work our people no longer do because they just want to dream forever in their own worlds. So we need the simulants; but we have to control them. Jessica, Doctor Linden -- our Doctor -- realized this. She ended her experiments and came to us. We sent her down to investigate and... Anyway, nice job, both of you. They'll never know it, but you saved their world."

Sam nodded gravely. "Thanks, Chief. Now, about a vacation..."

"Go," the old man growled, "and be back in... oh, I can afford to be generous... three days."

Sam went with Jessica to her apartment. She was disquietingly silent, becoming pensive. Without the concentrating tension of a covert mission, she was beginning to think about things; so he took the initiative.

"You did well down there, handled it like a veteran. I guess I was just along for the ride."

She laughed. "Does that affect your manly pride?"

"Of course it does."

"Well, let's see if we can restore it."

But as they undressed, she paused and giggled.

"So what's your problem, lady?"

"It's still working, I see," she said, pointing to below his waist.

"We weren't gone for that long. It wasn't gone for that long. Anyhow, there's an obvious way to find out if it still works."

They found out, and he surprised himself. It was not quite what he expected. He would have to go undercover this way more often. Afterwards, as they lay in the dark, he lingered inside her, unwilling to break the bond and end this new sensation. But he was very satisfied with his performance. So was Jessica. She had no idea that it was his first.

When he heard the soft, steady breathing of deep sleep next to him, with some pangs of remorse Sam touched the tiny stud behind the lobe of his left ear. The darkness dissolved, and she awoke in the dim red light of the prep room.

As Samantha left to make her report, she felt rather sorry for the lovely Jessica and the crusty old Director, who would not and could not know the truth. Such was the nature of the mission, though it did leave a nasty taste in the mouth. Still, she had done her job, and her report was bound to create a stir in the upper echelons of the agency. Doctor Jessica Linden might not be real in this world, but her predictions were.