Nightworld

By E W Farnsworth

Genius programmer Daniel Archer, fired from his day job as a guru shader, has recruited Janice, the Artificial Intelligence, guardian of the portal for Nightworld, to develop the future virtual environment for the universe.

In the zone, programming his new software, Archer unintentionally discovers a weird synchronicity of the virtual and the real. Software constructs of the murdered, mad genius, Maud Integer, become addicting. They lead Archer to implicate his girlfriend, Monique Stark, in the first transference of an AI into a human body and back again to the virtual space. Nightworld, his AI teaches, is the nexus of hard-core pornography, organized crime and black operations of the CIA.

E W Farnsworth is working on an epic science fiction poem, 'Voyage of the Spaceship Arcturus'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9780244064976

E W Farnsworth

E. W. Farnsworth lives and writes in Arizona. Over two hundred fifty of his short stories were published at a variety of venues from London to Hong Kong in the period 2014 through 2018. Published in 2015 were his collected Arizona westerns Desert Sun, Red Blood, his thriller about cryptocurrency crimes Bitcoin Fandango, his John Fulghum Mysteries, Volume I, and Engaging Rachel, an Anderson romance/thriller, the latter two by Zimbell House Publishing. Published by Zimbell House in 2016 and 2017 were Farnsworth’s Pirate Tales, John Fulghum Mysteries, Volumes II, III, IV and V, Baro Xaimos: A Novel of the Gypsy Holocaust, The Black Marble Griffon and Other Disturbing Tales, Among Waterfowl and Other Entertainments and Fantasy, Myth and Fairy Tales. Published by Audio Arcadia in 2016 were DarkFire at the Edge of Time, Farnsworth’s collection of visionary science fiction stories, Nightworld, A Novel of Virtual Reality, and two collections of stories, The Black Arts and Black Secrets. Also published by Audio Arcadia in 2017 were Odd Angles on the 1950s, The Otio in Negotio: The Comical Accidence of Business and DarkFire Continuum: Science Fiction Stories of the Apocalypse. In 2018 Audio Arcadia released A Selection of Stories by E. W. Farnsworth. Farnsworth’s Dead Cat Bounce, an Inspector Allhoff novel, appeared in 2016 from Pro Se Productions, which will also publish his Desert Sun, Red Blood, Volume II, The Secret Adventures of Agents Salamander and Crow and a series of three Al Katana superhero novels in 2017 and 2018. E. W. Farnsworth is now working on an epic poem, The Voyage of the Spaceship Arcturus, about the future of humankind when humans, avatars and artificial intelligence must work together to instantiate a second Eden after the Chaos Wars bring an end to life on Earth. For updates, please see www.ewfarnsworth.com.

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Nightworld

NIGHTWORLD

A Science Fiction Novel

E.W. Farnsworth

Copyright © E.W. Farnsworth 2018

All rights reserved

NIGHTWORLD

A Science Fiction Novel

E.W. Farnsworth

ISBN 978-0-244-06497-6

Published by AudioArcadia.com 2018

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole

or in part in any form. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including

photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods,

without the written permission of the publisher. Publisher can be contacted via

email at [e-mail]

Acknowledgements and Permissions

E. W. Farnsworth’s story, ‘The Plasmoid’, was first published in another form in February, 2016, in the Oh So Naughty Anthology of Full Moon Books of Horrified Press in the United Kingdom. It appears as part of this novel with the gracious permission of Nathan J. D. L. Rowark of Horrified Press.

E. W. Farnsworth’s story, ‘The Murder of Maud Integer’, will appear in another form in Finding Harry Diamond, A John Fulghum, PI, Novel, forthcoming from Zimbell House Publishing, LLC in the spring of 2017. It appears as part of this novel with the gracious permission of Evelyn Zimmer of Zimbell House Publishing, LLC.

Dedication

For Grace and Scott

Chapter I. The Computer Game for All Time

It was the computer game for all time, a faceted world where anything goes because everywhere is night. It was not Disneyland or Disneyworld. Walt Disney never had the black vision of the denizens of Nightworld. Walt saw the imagination divided into only four domains. In Nightworld, infinite domains were possible. If you did not want to choose one of the existing domains, you could invent your own. The software would configure itself to accommodate your unique vision. The only part of the terms and conditions that impeded anarchy was the agreement to allow others to join in any contrived environment. Though you might begin alone, you might always be joined by others. Your choice would be either to remain and accommodate or form a new reality and start anew.

Lead Programmer Daniel Archer had suffered a particularly bad Friday. This morning his manager and supervisor Troy Pimpleton had summoned him to his office to put him on a five-week work plan pursuant to termination of his employment. This afternoon he had argued futilely with his programming team about the new security environment they were not building under protest.

Just a few minutes ago, his girlfriend, Monique Stark, had texted she would not be going to dinner and a film tonight with him, as planned, because she was having menstrual cramps. To top it off, his 401K stock portfolio had taken a savage hit in the week’s trading.

As he badged out of the building and walked to his Volvo in the gathering darkness, he tried to keep positive. He put the best forward construction on events: with Monique off his calendar, he could order in a pizza and pull on his Virtual Reality visor and full-body suit. If he was lucky, he could enter Nightworld four hours earlier than he had planned. He would spend the three-day weekend there. Perhaps by Tuesday, he might intuit where he was going in the ‘real world’. At minimum, he would relax. Janice, his Artificial Intelligence, would see to all his special needs.

Daniel and his pizza arrived at his apartment simultaneously. He took the steaming box into the kitchen and set it on the table. Deciding not to let his meal grow cold, he ate three pieces, burning the roof of his mouth in the process. He put the box in the refrigerator and walked back to his bedroom to remove his work clothes and pull on his surfing suit. He looked at his haggard face in the bathroom mirror and shrugged. Soon he would be wearing his VR visor. Who would then care what he really looked like?

The computer room featured a special ergonomic chair, form-fitted to his body and capable of giving him full rotational movements without injury. He checked out the chair to be sure its gears required no maintenance. Turning on his computer, he sat in the chair and put on his VR visor. He saw the logo for Nightworld, the image of Janice and her yellow-eyed wolf in a dark glade. The image came to life in three dimensions.

The Artificial Intelligence smiled and said, Good evening, Daniel. I’m glad to see you’re well.

Hovering in the air behind her appeared a statistical display of Daniel’s vital signs compared with his normative readings. The data came from electrodes embedded in his suit. All displayed data were green, signifying ‘healthy’.

The data may be green, Janice, but it’s been a hard day ending a difficult week for me. What can we do about that?

The AI was aware of Daniel’s history. She knew his fantasies better than he did. She was able to perform predictive analytics, to extrapolate from his past his desires for the future. She swiped her hand and the vital statistics display disappeared. The she-wolf snarled and bared her teeth as she did at every transition.

Janice did not tell him her recommendations. Instead, she revealed them to him, one by one. Tonight she showed Daniel’s first love, April, in a French meadow full of red poppies. She smiled shyly and ducked her head to the side coquettishly. Daniel also smiled, but the AI sensed he was not committed to that option.

Her second image for his consideration was a massive multi-player computer game competition where he saw not only the highest ranked players plying their skills but also the 3-D arena which informed their actions. It was a post-apocalyptic war game, and among the slain were his boss and the whole programming team. Daniel smiled again, but Janice understood by his silence that, gratifying as the idea seemed, it still did not hit the spot.

She invoked a third image, one of adventure whereby Daniel could participate either as a spectator or as the protagonist. The exotic, aquatic setting was appealing. He thought he heard faint martial music. The idea of distant individual action appealed. He wanted to have a double perspective. Janice and the wolf entered his mind.

Daniel began telling the story as if it were his own:

Nothing is as alluring to me as the prospect of exploring mysterious and forbidden places in a world where everything is presumed to have already been discovered. If a place has been fully charted and mapped, modeled and surveyed, made a destination open to anyone with the money to go there, I do not waste my time. If, however, a place has no clearly defined coordinates, scant or no records of exploration and no amenities for the masses, I take notice.

If such a place has an aura of mystery and lore suggesting the possibilities of death and destruction caused by unknown forces, I am hooked. Such a place was the unnamed archipelago in the Andaman Islands, rumored to be the habitation of a line of proto-humans who first proceeded from Africa in the earliest migration from that continent before the Ice Age.

I am not an anthropologist, so the humans in the dense jungles of that archipelago held little interest for me except they were recorded as fiercely hostile in the three accounts that had survived contact. They routinely met potential explorers with hails of primitive yet lethal arrows. One of their number was recorded as having shot an arrow into the leg of a sea captain in a rowboat off the beach and then smiled at his accomplishment before retreating into the undergrowth. According to another account, several shipwrecked sailors spent the night on the same beach and in the morning their comrades rowed ashore to find no remains except for the head of one sailor which looked as if it had been ripped from his body by a giant hand.

The island at the center of the archipelago was the only habitable area. It was surrounded by coral reefs so labyrinthine that no ship could hope to make land or even anchor out without risk of breaching or foundering. Only the smallest boats could make shore if they were lucky enough to thread their way through the barely submerged coral. Google Earth® satellite imagery showed one foundered wreck in the coral reef. The captain and crew of that hapless ship had all perished, leaving only the captain’s log as a memento with its final entry, ‘Going ashore to see what became of the crew’.

I would not have had the opportunity to explore the mysterious island except that I do special missions for my government, and one of those missions involved scouting out a possible Chinese intelligence station in the Coco Islands.

After successfully performing my mission - I found the station and radioed its description and location via encrypted means to my headquarters - I learned the hard way that my planned extraction went totally haywire.

My government did not send the navy vessel to pick me up, even on the third scheduled backup time. My orders under such circumstances were to pilot my small craft by night and go to ground in the safest place I could think of, communicate my geolocation coordinates and live off the land until someone thought of a way to extract me without raising interest among the Chinese or Indian intelligence agencies or their navies.

The best hiding place I knew of was the unnamed island, but I decided to make my base in the remains of the foundered ship in the archipelago. I fancied the Defense Intelligence Agency folks would get a kick out of my nautical quarters, and they might become fearful lest I be taken prisoner by one of the many patrols in the nearby waterways.

I would have steered straight for the beach and gone into the jungle on the island except for the documented accounts of the hostile aborigines who lived there. I thought I might be safe on the foundered ship since it lay well within the coral formations because there was no record that the aborigines ever ventured from the safety of their island home even to explore the reefs and archipelago which surrounded it. So I holed up, radioed headquarters and made myself at home in the sun-bleached remains of the wreck. It was not as if I had nothing with me. I had an abundance of MREs, my diving and snorkeling gear and my spear gun. I planned to eat well and catch some rays on this unplanned vacation from my usual routine.

I made the wreck at first light and hid my craft inside its hull. I watched the surrounding waters but observed no traffic. The placid waters, deserted white-sand beach and the forest rising behind it, were like a picture postcard of Tahiti or Bora Bora without the hordes of tourists and signs of amenities. I decided to explore the wreck thoroughly before I ventured off it. My intention was merely to discover whether any remains of the captain and crew of the vessel might have been overlooked by the salvage folks who had found the captain’s log and no other items relating to the shipwrecked sailors. I moved through the wreck slowly, careful not to touch the jagged remains.

The first thing I deduced was that the ship had been flung well into the coral formations by a fierce typhoon. It had been carried high above the coral barrier and, when the water receded, it was impaled on the coral where the churning sea and the tempest’s gusts made quick work of the hull against the sharp coral.

Little remained of the hull, and the under sides of the ship were worn by the constant actions of tides, coral and winds. Coral had worked its way into the wreck, soldering the hulk to the coral bed as if it were an ornament or prize.

I was puzzled by indications that some elements of the superstructure, including the bridge area, appeared to have been crushed by an unseen hand. I guessed the damage must have been caused by the violent storm, but I could not see how it had occurred if the ship had not rolled over on itself numerous times.

Inside the bridge area, I saw some pieces of the furniture had been ripped from their foundations. The captain’s chair, for example, was still bound to the deck to which it had been attached by heavy bolts. How it had been torn apart that way was a mystery which stimulated my imagination without suggesting any rational conclusion.

I found many other inconsistencies in the wreckage which I ascribed to the violence of storms. Since there was no reason for the salvage crew to damage the foundered ship further, the many unaccountable structural injuries to the craft appeared like superfluous actions of an angry god rather than the intentional damage by men.

I went through the wreck from fo’c’sle to stern and saw no sign of the sailors or crew, not a single bit of graffiti or sailor’s knot or garment. Returning to the bridge area, I went through the furniture carefully and then looked under the deck. Satisfied that I had inspected the wreck itself, I began to plan my exploration of the coral under and around it. This posed two problems. The first was the deadly coral itself, which could rip open an arm in an instant. The second was any sea creature which inhabited the coral. The last thing I wanted was to be bitten by an eel. I decided to take my spear gun on my snorkeling adventure, and I thought of harvesting dinner without myself becoming dinner for the denizens of the shallows. The wave action was gentle, and the day was excellent for a swim. Why not enjoy myself? I asked out loud.

I had suited up and gone below and was about to begin my adventure when I heard a slapping sound which could not be the sea or the working of the vessel against the coral. It was not regular slapping. Instead, it was a slap, followed by another slap, followed by a metallic sound and a bang, then a long silence. The sequence began again.

I made my way back to the bridge area to see what was happening. When I arrived, the first thing I noticed was the captain’s chair was not in the position where I had left it. It was jammed sideways against the side door to the wing. It was so heavy that whatever caused its shift in position must be very strong. Yet the sea had not risen - it was placid. For a moment, I thought the ship might be haunted and that the chair had itself decided to change position. I told myself to stop thinking about such supernatural causes.

I heard sounds below decks like the slapping and grinding sounds I had heard before. I descended onto the weather decks and then went below once more. The slapping and grinding sounds stopped again. I shrugged and returned to my small craft to pick up a few extra spears for my spear gun.

My craft had been crushed as if by a giant hand. It was still buoyant, but oddly shaped. I gathered my spears and salvaged my rations. I then decided to remove everything I needed because the craft was no longer seaworthy. I struggled to shift my gear from my craft to a high and dry compartment of the wreck. I was truly marooned by my own devices. I had only the option of swimming to shore or swimming to a craft outside the coral reefs.

Perhaps, I thought, coming to this infernal wreck was not a good choice, although it seemed a good idea at the time.

I was determined to have a good day diving. I went to the waterline and sank beneath the cerulean water in my snorkeling gear. At once I was in my element. Through my mask I saw a wonderland of color and light. The coral reef was the perfect environment for colorful fish and crustaceans. The bottom was covered with edible seafood, so I began to harvest at will. Particularly delectable and unusually numerous were the octopuses, an intelligent species which had mastered the Skinner Box. I caught one specimen in my hand and watched as it writhed to get free, tangling itself around my wrist and, when I let go, jetting along to safety in a cleft in the coral at the bottom of the reef.

As I made my way along the periphery of the wreck, just as I had planned to do, I marveled at the way the coral was devouring it and making it a part of its natural design. I looked for signs of debris that had escaped the wreck and saw a few relics scattered here and there, but nothing I considered important at the time.

Foundering can cause dislocation of many parts of a ship, and the tremendous force of the storm which had beached this vessel surely could have scattered bunk beds, internal fixtures and furniture far and wide as I now saw them. The reef was claiming those items as it was claiming the foundered ship itself.

I changed my focus to harvesting dinner. I selected some bivalves, a score of baby octopuses and a squid which had tried to escape by spraying its ink behind it. I figured that if all else failed, I could survive on the octopus in this coral reef alone. I had never seen such a teeming bed of seafood in my entire diving experience. I wondered at the island’s people I had read about. Apparently, they never ventured off the island to partake of this bounty. In fact, they rarely ventured out of the jungle, which lay a good thirty feet from the sandy shore. Were the people so primitive that they had forgotten how to swim or to make boats? With such musings I returned to the interior of the wreck to cook and