ERWEN SIMULATION BUNKER
Year : 2287
Location : Unknown
"Malcom, explain to me again what the protocol is here?"
The woman asking the question looked up from her screen at the man sitting directly across from her.
"We monitor them. We monitor them and add to the story." He didn't look up as he moved a holographic image to the side with a casual swipe of his hand. "Sometime between 1978 and 2010 they gained access to the simulation. We need to find out the who, why and how part."
Waving a hand to close the monitor in front of her, she sighed and sack back.
"So this family gained access to a simulation 100 years before it was created?"
"Exactly. Our division was created to infiltrate the family and recreate the chain of events of their lives in exact detail to determine how that became possible" He turned his own monitor off and stepped away from his desk.
"Catarina, I would be lying if I told you that this job was anything more than the expansive creation of a detailed journal. We are glamourous information miners."
"I understand that part." She had in fact been briefed on the technical aspects of the job. "What I'm not understanding is the format."
"We call it the narrative." He flicked his hand and the image of a girl sitting on the side of a bed in a small room appeared. "At some point during the monitoring of one of her lives..."
"Is that Tayler? The Price girl?" She interrupted him when seeing the familiar face from her training.
"It is." He circled around the projection. "As I was saying, at some point during the monitoring of one of her lives, the programmers began detailing it as The Narrative."
"When one is tasked with observing the same subject for 103 lifetimes it simply became a more entertaining way to document the details."
"A story." Catarina stood up and walked around the image of the young girl. "We are telling her story."
"Not just her. Other divisions have the same task as relates to her father, mother, brother and sister." Malcom sat back down. "Somewhere in all these Narratives is the answer to how this particular family were able to access the ERWEN simulation. We simply document every detail, layer upon layer and pass it upstairs. If it was obvious, this would have been solved long ago."
"What about the ERWEN part of the narrative?" She pulled up her own screen, manipulated a few dials in the air and a group of assorted images appeared. "Why does the narrative also include their perspective?"
"Those characters are actually the constant in the entire story. Those come from the side we have full access to as they are decedents of the original uploads into ERWEN." He came closer to where she stood. "The beauty of the ERWEN simulator technology is that the human consciousness uploads were free to create the worlds they live in. The thought was that even as a digital upload they would still in many ways continue to live."
He scrolled left to right through the characters she had pulled up. "The Master, Gabriel, Emmanuel, the hounds. All unique to this particular simulation that this family somehow gained access to. To them they are part of an individual universe of which they truly have agency in. Tayler and her fmily entering into their world is just a complex reality of the individual lives they are freely leading."
"But not really." Catarina closed her projection. "In the end it is just a simulation."
"Is it?" Malcom's voice seemed to stiffen.
"The residents of ERWEN believe they have free will. They and their descendants are so far removed from the original upload in 2186 of their consciousness that this is reality. Some live life simply as farmers or artists, others want to rule it. So some lead, some follow. They eat what they want, plan their individual days as they see fit. How is that any different from what we are right now in this room ?"
"How do you mean?"
"Well, simply put. How do we know that we are not in a simulation ourselves?" He paused. "Have you ever considered that possibility? Or even the Ebola pandemic that wiped out the population. We know that to be true how ? Because we are told it is true by people we trust. How are we any different from the ERWEN uploads if we just blindly believe that our existence is real?"
"Because we are the monitors of the simulation." The words sounded less confident than she would have wished. "We are the chosen last survivors of humanity that were assigned to maintain the simulation and protect the consciousness and health of the uploads. Many generations of our kind have been tasked and trained to do so with honor."
"Of course, it is likely the case. My mind just sometimes wanders." Malcom sat back down in his chair and let out a nervous laugh. "It just feels like that is the type of story you would program for a a common worker to believe after being uploaded to work their whole life in a simulation."
She laughed at the last line. He had a point. The miracle that was ERWEN was in fact built to be indistinguishable from reality.
"But back to the work." In a flurry of hand gestures Malcom quickly had his holographic workstation activated again. "It will be best for your first few months to just simply absorb the entire narrative to get yourself acclimated."
"From the beginning?" She turned on a separate console and the virtual image of a book appeared. Malcom had told her an information miner from the early 3000's had formatted the investigation of The Price's in that form as a retro joke, and it had stayed that way ever since.
"You could." He glanced over her way. "I would be shocked if there is anything worth mining before she was twelve. I would personally start there."
"Sounds good." She reached out towards the book, found an index and pressed on the year 2012.