The Beaten Track

“These IT people…”

“Sir, the deputy commissioner is on the line”

“yes sir ---- yes sir ---- I’m on the spot ---- Yes sir, the forensic team is on the way---- It looks like a… uhm… stress suicide, sir ---- The male and female both look like around 26 to 28 yrs old. Both are techies. The guy must have strangled his wife to death and then shot himself ---- yes sir.”

*****

Yesterday…

“Did you sleep?”

“Yes, I did”

I know… he wouldn’t have slept. I don’t even remember seeing him sleep. We’ve been working for this project for the past 3 years. And now it is almost done. I wouldn’t have done it without Sanjay. He’s been the back bone of almost the entire project. He joined me a little late. I guess it was a year ago. But he was right up there. Now we are at the verge of creating history.

I’m Ramesh, a Software Engineer. I was working for an IT firm until last year. I had to give that up for this work. I’m married to Prarthana. She still works in the same organization. Ours was a love marriage. We married against the will of our parents and we live separately. She knows my passion. She’s been all supportive. She let me do everything that I wished.

“Did you talk to Prarthana?” asked Sanjay.

“Not yet. I’m gonna give her surprise. She”ll be back in short time.”

“I’ll leave, then.”

“Yeah, see ya.”

Sanjay has always maintained a low profile. Well I too maintain a low profile, but not with my wife. She knows how important it is to me and how much I’ve put in for this project. And that is why I wanted her to try this first.

After some time…

*Knock* *Knock* *Knock*

She’s here. I opened the door for her. She came in, hugged me and kissed on my forehead. It always feels good.

“Hey baby! How are we doing?” she was asking about my work.

“Hey Prarthana, you know what… uhm… I think we are done. It’s ready to work.”

“Really?”She was visibly excited. “I thought you had something more to work”

“I guess I said that last week. As you might know, I was working for this full week… and yeah… I’ve completed. You”re gonna be the first to try this.”

“Wow! Are you sure? Yeah, I know… I shouldn”t have asked you. Okay… let us do it.” I really didn’t know why she was all giggles. Maybe she’s excited again.

“Listen, I’m gonna fix these leads on both sides of your temple and connect it to the system. I too will login along with you. Okay?”

I was trying to wire us in. And then we were standing in our home.

“What happened? We are not wired in yet? Is it not working?” I gave her my usual smile and she understood. “We are wired in! Oh my god… you said, you were making something like Johnny Quest… but it is so vivid. It is so real.” she said.

Thank God! She understood. That was what I wanted to hear from her. It is a game that we created that brings everything to reality. Virtual Reality Game. It is unfair to call it a game. But that was what we had decided to call it, in the interim. I started explaining her about the game.

“I really hope you would understand this. See, the VRG is a real time gaming application. The moment you log in the system, you land in the homepage. In our case I was the host and the environment that I chose was our home. That is where we are standing right now. BTW we are still logged in. You can integrate the VRG with any kind of console game or a desktop game. If you are playing NFS you are the driver or if you play Mario, you will be the Mario. The environment, background, sound, protocols, rules, strength and lives of the player will be dictated by the game that you are playing. In real life scenarios like what we are doing right now, all the laws that govern the nature has been included. It means that if I jump up the gravity is gonna pull me down… or if I jump into the bathtub, water will be displaced. Magnetism, Electricity, heat and cold… everything applies and holds good. Now, the environment and I, standing here are run by my imagination. Your image is run by your imagination. We are connected by a port. In our case, it’s my laptop.”

“So, do you mean to say that, we are standing in an environment that is created by your imagination and my imagination… so every time I talk or u move or the fan moves or we move to next room, the program keeps capturing all these details and repaints continuously or render a visual at a minimum of 24 fps in 3D and the necessary sounds with such vivid data that is stored?”

“Almost yes!”

“If I am not wrong that would require probably few petabytes of storage and few terabytes of buffer and the world’s fastest processor. Is it not?”

“Precisely”

“Where did you get that?”

“It took a year for us to develop the VRG. But we needed tremendous memory and the fastest processor to run it. That was what I was working for, even before VRG. The fastest CPU in the world with huge storage as far as I know is the human brain. There have been many researches to develop a processor that is equivalent to human brain, which could be possible in the near future. Adleman is still working on DNA computing. If he had completed it soon we could have had our storage issues solved. But I couldn’t wait until then. So I made the brain into a computer. The program and all the threads, they run inside the brain. They use the data that is stored in the brain. For example, our home… every detail about our home is in my brain. I’ve seen all the things in our home at least once and the program uses that detail. Other small missing details are covered with fillers.”

“So the program runs in the brain. So you are the host now. Does that mean that my conscious is into your brain?”

“Well, not exactly. It’s like you have your own imagination… but me and the environment in your imagination is driven by me. And your part in my imagination is driven by you. Synchronisation is done through the port. That is what this project is all about.”

“Oh! I think I understand now.”

“I know you would. That is not all. We’ve also worked on the blending of the virtual world and real world. Imagine if I could fly like a superman or I could walk on water. Isn’t that good? Defying laws of nature comes as a separate packaged game. Of course, it has its own rules and constraints.”

“And then?”

“I can meet and talk with virtual people. I could create a virtual girl that looks like you or much better than you and I could talk with her, touch her or even make love. I don’t have to worry about the heuristics of the virtual characters. The program will take care of it. But of course, it will be stored in my brain.”

“Okay now… does this come with a child-lock?”

“No… it doesn’t. And that’s why it’s not for kids. You know… you don’t have to worry. What I was trying to say was… the touch and feel is real… that’s because the program has direct access to the sensory receptors. Just like you could see and hear me, you could touch and feel me. People could learn a lot through this easily. Karate or music or new language or combat training… anything is possible.”

“But if it is so, then doesn’t that mean I could feel pain too. If I take a dagger and stab myself, will my conscious die? I mean, will I be locked in the program or something?”

“That is why we have set tolerance levels. It’s relative to people. Once the threshold is reached, the game logs out the subject automatically.”

“I’m gonna try that.”

She always does this. I know she wouldn’t stop even if I insist. She took a kitchen knife and started to pierce through her abdomen. I know the tolerance level for her would be very low. She would be logged out immediately.

“Ouch! It hurts.”

“I never said it wouldn’t.”

She stabbed herself completely and she fell down crying. That was not what I expected. If she had logged out, her image would have frozen the moment she logged out and it would have been inaccessible. But it wasn’t so. I immediately logged out to check on her. She was there, but unconscious. I didn’t know what went wrong. I went in again and I even lost her image there. I logged out and made her lie on the bed. I started to panic. But how could it go wrong? I was so tensed and worried.

“Hey… Ramesh.”

It was Sanjay. I don’t know how and why he came here. But I felt good after seeing him. He could probably help me. I started to explain him what happened. He listened to everything but he was standing still, indifferent.

“Dude… you gotta help me man… what went wrong?”

“Probably she slipped out of the threshold limit.”

“But how could that be possible? I was the one who set the levels. There is no way, it could have been relaxed.”

“Not unless the program was bugged.”

“Bugged?”

“If you can use your brain as computer… do you think it’s hard to bug it?”

“Sanjay… that was the first instance the program was running and entire source code is stored in my brain. The only way to bug the program is by getting into my brain and accessing my memory… no one could that...”

“Yeah no one could do that… except you.”

“What?”

“Ramesh… do you remember how we met and how we started working together?

I tried real hard to retrace it. All that I could remember was I know him for two years and we were working together for a little more than a year. Sanjay started to explain how we know each other.

“Ramesh, human brain stores everything that it encounters. The brain cells are storage units that are capable of storing almost 2.5 petabytes of data. Everything that we hear, see, speak, think gets stored in these storage houses. Another part of brain is the processing unit that uses these stored data to produce valuable results. So every time we try to access to the stored data we retrace the path to that storage unit. That means we are refreshing the neuronic path and the stored cells. That is the reason why the data that we access the most has the most refreshed neuronic path and hence we access it faster and stays in memory longer or even permanent. Numbers, language, walking and other basic activities come under this part. And the other less accessed data are less remembered. But it doesn’t mean that the data is lost. It is only the path that is lost. Certain memories which happened long time back, certain memories that we think unimportant, certain memories that we tend to run away from… everything comes under this part. But with a little help, any data could be accessed. That is what is done in subconscious memory treatments. But we don’t have to do so much, to make you remember about me.”

I was able to understand everything that he was trying to tell, because it was our area of work. And now I was able to remember everything about Sanjay.

Human brain is peculiar. It is the key for the functionality of entire body. Yet an average human uses only 10% of his brain. This means that most of the brain cells are left unused. But I intended to use my brain completely. 3 yrs back I started to work on the ways to access the human brain. The human brain could be divided as processing part and storage part. Apart from this there is a huge part that is left unused. That is almost like an unformatted memory. The brain cells in this part are totally unused until they die.

It took me a year to find the way to access the brain and the first thing I did was to create an assistant in my unused brain memory. Something like partitioning and formatting my brain and giving it a shape. That assistant was Sanjay.

“Yes Ramesh. I’m not real. I’m part of your brain. The fact that I’m standing before you, talking to you and how I look, its all illusion. For almost a year I was working inside your brain on your commands. But unlike other smart assistants that range from Microsoft Help assistant to the Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence, I could thrive upon living cells that are larger in number than your part of brain. That is how I developed myself into a separate individual. I created a personality for myself. Eventually you started recognizing me as an individual person and began to see me everywhere. When you started to work on VRG, it was me who was working day and long. All the coding was done within your brain by me. If anyone could have altered the program that was me, part of you.”

Everything fell into place. He had kept me from remembering anything about him all these days. Now he has let me remember them. But I dint understand why did he do anything with the program when Prarthana was in.

“Because Prarthana is a threat to us.”

I made Sanjay autonomous. But Sanjay was smart he didn’t let me. That is why I could never know anything what Sanjay thinks. But Sanjay could know what I think. Though he cannot control my thoughts or actions, he could know.

“Threat? To us? What do you mean by that?”

“What do you think she would have done if she comes to know about me?”

I hadn’t told much about Sanjay to Prarthana or to anyone. But after the project was completed I cannot leave his name out. It would be to her I would have said about him first and any attempt to make her meet him would have resulted in a catastrophe for both of us, mostly to him. He knew that.

“So, it is because you need me now and you cannot function individually without me, you are letting me know everything.”

“We need each other Ramesh. You wouldn’t have created me if you didn’t needed me”

“You are wrong Sanjay. I don’t need you.”

Sanjay immediately looked at my closet and he got tensed. If I had to think something, Sanjay would know it before me. And what I thought was “my pistol is in my closet”. I rushed towards the closet and took out my pistol. It’s not just Sanjay. The entire project was a failure. With VRG, what we were trying to do is create illusion inside the brains of people. Eventually it is unnatural and it could severely tamper the thought process of human beings. It has to be destroyed.

“Are you kidding, Ramesh. Are you gonna destroy everything we did? And you know, you can”t shoot me.”

“Yeah I know. I know you are inside my brain and I know what to fry.” I pointed the gun on to my head.

“Stop, Ramesh. You know Prarthana isn’t dead. Only we can bring her back. We could do that if you want to. Or we could find some way to manipulate her brain. We could use her for our research.”

“Hahaha… we both know Sanjay… it is just her memory. The last instance that she remembers is she is dead. That is the reason she is unconscious. A good psychiatrist, an Electroconvulsive therapy, she will be back. But you are my mistake, Sanjay. You are irreversible. You are a threat. I’m sorry Prarthana. I love you. It was nice working with you Sanjay. Goodbye.”

“No… Ramesh… wait”

*Bang*

*****

“Sir, the forensic team has arrived”

“Okay, have you marked the corpses?”

“I’ll do now, Sir.”

“Please, do it soon.”

“SIR, the lady is alive. She’s breathing.”

“What? Ganesan, call in the paramedics. Come on, quick.”

The End