Coryworld

By Gap Yuet Bingding

In the future, it is possible to create realistic virtual worlds using a simulation lab. Coryworld is the world created by Cory Powers for his sociology 101 assignment, and he loves tweaking it. He spies on the people inside his homework assignment, scares them for fun, and makes them run around and dance for his amusement. But what's fun for Cory isn't so much fun for the expendable simulated people inside his homework assignment, and when the simulated world becomes flawed and needs to be fixed, things can appear very strange indeed if you're stuck inside and there's no escape.

This story has approximately 15000 words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781312880351

Book preview

Coryworld

Coryworld

Copyright

Copyright © 2015 by Gap Yuet Bingding

First Printing: 2015

ISBN 978-1-312-88035-1

Chapters

Chapter 1

Inside the Simlab Hotel, Cory Powers was busy spending his government-allotted simulation hours doing homework. His learning was self-paced, so he didn't have a life-or-death deadline like some of his peers. Still, the privilege of a self-paced education was costly, and in order to afford it, he needed to maintain somewhat good grades in order to qualify for a government grant that he relied on to pay off his tuition. This meant that he needed to finish his sociology 101 assignment by noon today.

He had been working on his sociology assignment for 3 weeks already, and had not slept, eaten, drinken, or defunicated at all during this time. This was made possible by an elective genetic surgery he had undergone last year which modified his genome and body. He now had a digestive system modeled after that of several desert animals that could process large meals efficiently, reuse the moisture content in his body and comfortably hold in highly toxic urine and solid waste for several weeks at a time. In addition, he had opted to pay a bit extra for university-grade fatigue resistance and the 5 year Jamie's Iron Constitution™ sickness-free warranty—two extras he now thought were well worth the money.

His genetically enhanced body had come in handy so far, and he found that his new routine was substantially more time-efficient than before. Instead of eating everyday, like he used to, he now gorged himself with delicious fatty foods once every two to three weeks and lived off the nutrient-rich fat stored in his body in between his large meals. He didn't even have to drink water anymore because he was able to live off of the moisture content contained in his food.

Cory was 84 pounds lighter than when he first sat down to do the nitty-gritty programming required for this assignment, but he didn't feel hungry because his starvation-detection system had been disabled to make his body compatible with his new DNA. He now relied on a biometric wristband that he never took off to determine when he should eat. One glance allowed him to verify that he could safely fast for another 3 days without compromising his health. Plenty of time.

The retro-style OLED display on his biometric wristband also indicated to him through a small blinking red S that he needed to get some sleep as soon as possible in order to prevent the long-term accumulation of what scientists call brain gunk, the substance discovered through years of research that was now known to cause stupidity in human beings. He'd better finish his work soon if he were to fit sleep back into his schedule.

Cory cracked his knuckles and then hunkered down to work. He made changes to the simulation's global configuration settings and performed a few system performance checks. When everything was ready, he spoke a command out loud to the computer: Resume simulation.

Immediately, the noise-dampening system kicked in and the room quieted down. The optical and background processing systems started up, and the uniformly grey hemispherical room that he had been sitting in just moments ago gently transformed into a late 20th-century classroom filled with wooden desks attached to chairs that couldn't be stolen, magnetic blackboards, printed books, primitive computers and an ancient heating system that used hot water and radiators to redistribute thermal energy.

The classroom was permanently well-lit, as was the rest of the school and the city streets. There was no need to conserve electricity inside the simulation because it was supplied virtually, and however much energy was needed by the city was supplied to it by a few short lines of computer code from the operating system.

Beyond the classroom windows, it was raining, and the faint splattering sound of water droplets hitting the glass panes annoyed him, so Cory turned off the rain using his phone app. Then, he used it to change the location of the main in-simulation camera from the classroom of George R. Allan elementary school to the dining room of a house that belonged to Robert Right, a computerized slave whom he had placed into the simulation to help him manage its day-to-day affairs.

Robert Right was originally a living human being with a different name––Cory had forgotten exactly what it used to be––who had sacrificed his life to science by allowing his brain and body to be destructively scanned and uploaded to a computer