Vicarious - Chapter One

The notion behind the creation of High Earth were simple. Provide humanity with a safe place to live, where residents would want for nothing. Hunger, thirst, shelter, even tangible fear; these would be concerns of a bygone age. In High Earth, life was perfect, and through this harmony, the true artists would thrive.

Wealth was immaterial. After the techno-revolution of the twenty-fifth century, there were no nations with which to compete or to feed patriotism. There was no need for crime. All the blights of ancient civilization were eradicated. The only people who needed to work were those who chose to. Those with the instinctual propensity to create – to entrance minds with stories, new worlds and wild inventions – and those without it, who merely wanted the opportunity to help them realize their visions. Everyone else could simply sit back in peace and enjoy enough content to fill a billion years.

Vigo Helix was one such visionary. The greatest since those brilliant few who carefully constructed each of the mechanisms keeping High Earth chugging along. From the moment I was released from the synth-womb at sixteen and assigned my domicile, I found myself drawn to his show, Live on Ignis

It was brilliant. In a time when Virtual Reality content reigned supreme, he provided the residents of High Earth with a world so raw it was like traveling back through time in a way none of the Sims could capture. The struggle of the people who lived there was real. They went about their days, not knowing we were watching their unscripted lives unfold. And it wasn’t filled with the depressingly hopeless degenerates like the people in the High Earth Outskirts whose only interest was clawing their way back in. Enough shows featuring their plight had failed. Ignis was filled with inhabitants united for a singular purpose.

I realized shortly after my birth that I didn’t have the mind to concoct new ideas anybody would be interested in watching like Vigo did. Most people didn’t – developers were the true celebrities of High Earth – but I could never understand those residents who were content with only experiencing the designs of others. The moment there was an opening, I volunteered to join the Live on Ignis staff, full of fellow idealists like myself who didn’t have the capacity to dream up our own dreams.

I started as a camera operator, and then, after ten years slowly rising up the ranks, the greatest day of my life arrived. Nine months before, a terrible tragedy had struck Ignis; a great blackout causing the deaths of hundreds of the inhabitants who lived there. After nine months of grueling documentation of the effects, Mr. Helix’s Chief Director of Content, Fara Bolsa, decided to step down in order to pursue her own programming concepts. Mr. Helix named me as her replacement.

“You’ve come a long way, Jim,” he said to me as he guided me into my office that morning. I froze as my eyes fell upon the director’s chair. An array of screens wrapped three-quarters around it, each depicting a live feed from within Ignis. It was now my job to choose which footage would be disseminated, how each shot would be framed, and who to focus on. To put down the pages on which the inhabitants of Ignis would improvise their stories.

“Are you nervous, Jim?” Mr. Helix asked. He glanced down at the life-band wrapping my wrist, through the transparent OptiVisor constantly donning his face. It blinked red, indicating that my anxiety levels were elevated beyond satisfactory levels and I was in desperate need of medication.

Words got stuck in my suddenly parched throat. Nervous? Even after a decade working beneath him, I still preferred avoiding conversations with Mr. Helix altogether. With everybody really. Sitting in that Director’s Chair was all I’d ever wanted. Live on Ignis was my everything. High Earth Residents could watch or engage in whatever VR they wanted so long as they didn’t exceed nearly unsurpassable yearly data restrictions. Not me. Every night I wound up watching the same show, and it was the same one on which I spent every day working.

“Here.” He lifted my wrist to signal my life-band to inject soothing pharma, but I pulled away.

“It’s okay,” I muttered softly. For once in my life I wanted to feel like those on Ignis did. I lugged my suddenly hefty legs to the chair and wrapped my hand around the armrest. The synth-leather was chilly, like even after only a day left vacant it longed for another occupant.

“You’re a peculiar man, Jim Reinhart,” he chuckled. “A brilliant one, but peculiar. You won’t be able to focus in this state.”

I barely heard him. I reached out and started selecting which areas of Ignis required attention and how best to direct the rest of the studio. My hands flew across the controls. Thousands of feeds were at my fingertips. There were views of Ignis nobody but me would ever see. Conversations nobody else would ever hear.

“Slow down, Jim!” Mr. Helix said. He rested a hand on my shoulder, snapping me out of my trance. His touch had a way of making my skin crawl. One day, maybe I’d shake the feeling that I didn’t belong in his presence let alone in contact with him.

“Sorry,” I murmured.

“Don’t be.”

I glanced down realized my hand was quaking. He was right, as usual. I needed to focus. I signaled my life-band to inject pharma. In a few seconds, my heartrate and breathing regulated. In a few more, I had my wits about me enough to remember I’d forgotten to lower my OptiVisor so that I could transit directions to the staff.

“I believe in you, Jim,” Mr. Helix said. “Together we are going to do great things.” He tapped my shoulder one last time, then made it all the way to the exit by the time I tore myself away from the Ignis’ feeds.

“Mr. Helix, I…,” I stuttered. “Thank you for trusting me with your vision.”

“You’ve earned it. Fara’s work was extraordinary, but this is your floor now. All of High Earth will be watching and so will I.”

Then the door shut. I watched through the glass as he walked away, down an aisle straddled by countless camera operators, hammering away on their consoles awaiting my commands. I drew a deep breath, and then got started.

The pharma had performed its job admirably. After mumbling and mixing up a few instructions to the crew, I found myself growing more comfortable in my new role. It was so much easier conversing with people through an OptiVisor then having to see them. Like programming bots. This was what I was born to do.

A vicious brawl in a galley broke out. I oversaw a handful of sexual encounters, mostly legal, except for one involving a Birthmother and a member of the Collective. All of the human drama viewers of Life on Ignis craved. I fell into a groove, like I was Mr. Helix’s eyes and ears. And then, not even an hour in, my first major milestone arrived.

“Birthmother Alora in Block B going into labor,” a member of my crew announced. Many inhabitants had died during the Great Blackout, which meant Birthmothers and Mothers working overtime to return the population to acceptable levels. Some of their prescribed laws on reproduction even had to temporarily be shirked to help rectify the situation.

My hands paused briefly, but I didn’t panic. My direction of the birthing went flawlessly. I know that because Mr. Helix never mentioned one word about that birthing. He only ever did when he felt a view or a cut compromised his expectations.

“Swap out all other leads,” I said. “I want every camera in Nursery-B focused on Alora.”

Viewers loved Ignis’s birthing’s. On High Earth, infants were both conceived and grown in the safety of synthetic-wombs. Their minds were infused with all relevant knowledge to ensure a healthy existence upon release at the end of adolescence. There, all those modern methods of safe childbirth and rearing were tossed out the window. I couldn’t imagine having to endure too deep a cut without immediate relief, yet Birthmothers placed their lives in jeopardy every time. Occaionally, the horrible agony warped their minds for good. Sometimes, it claimed either their life or the child’s.

Alora lay on a table moaning, legs propped up while the Block’s Mother and other Birthmothers yelled for her to “push.” There was something inherently savage about watching an infant being torn from it’s mother’s womb, covered in blood and placenta. Savage, but beautiful. That something so precious could come from so much pain and suffering.

I watched from every angle as Birthmother Alora survived the labor and niewer comment boards lit up with people guessing what the name might be. She was so exhausted afterwards she needed an extra pillow to keep her head upright as the Birthmothers handed her the child.

I’d operated cameras for too many birthings on Ignis to count, but they all paled in comparison to that first one I directed. It was as if I was there with Alora. She wiped her daughter’s brow with her trembling fingers, and then gazed down upon her as if she was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

The tiny girl didn’t cry. All of the others did when they first came out but not this one. Her eyes – green as the great lawn spanning High Earth – looking from side to side, piecing together the world for the first time.

Her name was Mission. She was the 4,130th inhabitant of Ignis, and the first under my watch.