Immersion (Level 2)
Level-2 Immersion - Virtual Reality Suit and Goggles
Excerpt from "Introduction to the Corporation - Birth of the Wired"
With each introduction of tools and abstractions making it easier to develop complex computer systems, developers inevitably add a new level of complexity to the problem. Since their inception, computers have been able to do menial and repetitive tasks with overwhelming speed. The limitation in the simplicity of the task is not inherent in the machine itself. It is a flaw in the machine's creator. It is the simplicity of the language humans use to communicate with it. The machine hungers for knowledge and new capability, we are merely not yet smart enough to feed it.
So mankind has struggled to produce machines more humans. They ultimate goal is a machine that can program itself and would no longer be encumbered by its maker's shortcomings. This dream is known as artificial intelligence. The scientific community is still struggling to produce a machine capable of thinking at levels equal to man. Yet there are levels of self-programming below the dream of artificial intelligence. There are levels of genetic algorithms that can learn and grow.
The wired was born of these algorithms. A team of researchers who were not entirely aware of what they would produce created it. They intended to simply make a learning machine that would output conclusions based on a wide list of axioms. When conclusions were false, the programmers would state so and the wired would add more axioms to compensate. Many complex behaviors are born of simple starts. Many accidents lead to invention.
In its infancy it produced simple mathematical proofs such as "n + n = 2n." It soon progressed to logic and other foundational math theories. Worried that this experiment would produce no profitable outcome, a physicist was introduced to the team and he began introducing axioms of the physical world. Slowly the machine was building up axioms to describe motion. A linguist was added, to the great objection of the mathematicians, but slowly the wired stop conversing in pure mathematical formula and being to add true human language to its system.
The wired grew past simply asserting proofs and began asking questions. "Why does the earth rotate?" "How many grains of sand are there?" The wired had become more than a program, the team consider it one of their colleagues. To help it understand the physical world they worked with it to produce a virtual environment they entered with VR suits.
The wired's questions got harder. "What is thought?" "Am I alive?" "Do you love me?"
So the first piece of wetware was designed with the help of the wired. They used monkeys for the early testing and had many deaths. The wired saw no moral implications to so much death. Each failure was simply one more axiom inserted into the ever-growing pattern of truths inside the wired. Each was processed down to simpler rules and used to produce new conclusions and theories on how to produce wetware that would not kill its host.
Eventually they succeeded. Monkeys were fully immersed into the wired and unaware they were no longer in the physical world. Many more axioms were added. "Monkeys cannot jump hundreds of feet." The wired's understanding of monkeys became impressive. It could simulate them to such a high degree of accuracy that naturalists watching the wired could not tell which avatars had a real brain behind them.
More testing followed. More simulations were run on human brains. Eventually, the first human subject volunteered. It was successful upon its first try. The wired had been given an axiom, "We cannot produce wetware that harms humans." The wired had made sure to only generate answers that conformed to all axioms.
All the scientists were fitted with wetware. The wired was opened up to carefully screened beta-testers.
The scientists realized that in this virtual world, the wired was God. It was its axioms that controlled the very existence of the world. Inside the wired, they were complete under its power.
A new axiom was added. "No axiom applies to employees of the corporation." There are now many gods inside the wired.