Inktober #2: Mindless (Patreon)

This one is actually fairly close to being a complete and publishable story, although it would need a good bit of revision.

***  

The patient was sitting on the table, dressed in a hospital gown, looking deeply irritated. “I don’t even know why I’m here. I wanted to go to Five Guys,” he said. “Why didn’t you take me to Five Guys?”

The woman with him – close to the same age, late 20’s or early 30’s – sighed. She sounded exasperated. “Greg, we have talked about this. You’re here because—”

“You know, there’s a great sale on fishing gear at Walmart. I could be at Walmart right now buying fishing gear.”

“You don’t even fish!”

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Dr. Park. What brings you here today?”

“Nothing!” Greg Landers, my patient, said. He was a white guy with brown hair and stubble on his face, medium build, and looked overall reasonably healthy. “I’m fine! I just want to go to Five Guys. Or you know, Charles Schwab is a great place to open up your 401K. They’ve got a satisfaction guarantee. You won’t see that at every investment firm!”

“He’s been like this for days,” the woman with him said. “He won’t go to work, he won’t do chores around the house… he eats, but he spends the whole time complaining that it’s not some restaurant he wants to go to. Mostly Five Guys. Greg doesn’t even like burgers that much.”

“I don’t think we’ve been introduced, Ms.--?”

“Oh, I’m Nicole Landers. I’m Greg’s wife.” I’d figured it was something like that.

“So tell me about Greg’s online activities. Do you know what he’s been doing lately?”

“Playing Hell War!” Greg said eagerly. “It doesn’t cost any money to play! I want to know if I have what it takes to beat the Lords of Hell!”

Nicole sighed again. “Two weeks ago you were telling me that Hell War was a cheap cash grab and that it’s impossible to win without spending your entire paycheck on in-app purchases. Also you’ve never liked mobile games.”

“Has he played any VR games recently?”

“Are we done here? I am really jonesing for some Five Guys. And then we can go over to Walmart!”

“Oh, yeah,” Nicole said. “We both play Fimbulwinter – that’s a survival game about a post-apocalyptic world plunged into eternal winter – and La Vie en Verte, that’s virtual gardening. He also plays Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, that’s a space game, but I’m not into that so much.”

Time to be politic. “Do you think he might ever have played a… well, a porn sim? Or been on a site for pirating games?”

“You know, I think I want my next car to be a Hyundai Annunciator. Those cars are slick. And they handle like anything, even in bad weather! And the mileage before recharge, wow. Amazing batteries on those guys!”

To my surprise, Nicole laughed. “Oh, yeah, Greg does porn sims. He’s bi and genderfluid, so he likes to go online in a female avatar and have sex with dudes. Not really my thing, but he lets me watch if I want.” My shock must have shown on my face. “What? It’s the 21st century, you think I’m one of those women who clutches pearls and has the vapors if my husband plays porn games? I can’t be a man for him and I’m too straight to want him when he’s wearing femmy clothes, but the porn sim can give him those things without him exposing himself to diseases or other risks by going with real people.”

While Nicole was explaining this, Greg told us what upcoming movies he thought were going to be “really awesome”, repeated his request for Five Guys, tried to explain the plot of Hell War in five-word sentences that were plainly marketing material, and talked about the lawnmower he wanted. Nicole rolled her eyes as he finished. “Greg, we live in an apartment. We don’t even have a lawn!”

“We could go to Century 21 and shop for a house! I know their agents will put us first.”

“And why would we want to do that?”

“So we can have a lawn! The Home Depot sells the best grass seed—”

He went on like this, but I stopped listening. “I don’t need to check anything else, Nicole. I’m sorry. Your husband’s become a zombie.”

“A what?” Nicole looked horrified. Belatedly I realized that just because she played VR games and was open-minded about her husband’s porn habit didn’t mean she was IT-savvy enough to know what I was talking about.

“Sorry, that’s not the medical term for them. He’s still alive, and physically he’s fine. But mentally, his consciousness isn’t operating his body. His brain’s been hijacked by an information virus.”

“An information virus? And what’s that got to do with zombies?”

“An information virus is like a computer virus for people. And we call people infected with this type ‘zombies’ because they’re not actually conscious.”

Nicole looked at Greg, who was animatedly explaining why TGIFriday was the best sit-down restaurant, ever, but Five Guys was in a league of its own. “He looks pretty conscious to me.”

“Ask yourself, Nicole, when Greg is normally conscious, does he spend his entire time sounding like a series of poorly mastered YouTube commercials?”

“No, that’s why I brought him here!”

“Right. The human brain can do an amazing lot of stuff without being conscious of it. You ever set out to drive a certain way, but part of it goes the way you usually do to a different destination, and you find that without paying attention you’ve somehow managed to drive halfway to the place you usually go rather than the place you’re trying to get to?”

“I hardly ever drive. We have self-driving cars.”

I controlled the impulse to sigh. That one was the best explanation. “Ok, well, if you think about how you type on a keyboard – when you start, you’re awkward and you’re hunting and pecking. But it gets to the level of muscle memory and you can just do it, without having to consciously think about it. Or mastering the controls for a new game.”

“Yeah, I guess…”

“I wanna go home and watch CSI: Racial Justice Unit! That is the best show on television today. You know it won an Emmy last year, right?”

“Greg’s brain has been hijacked by an information virus that compels him to advertise for maybe up to 40 different brands that he’s aware of. He probably caught the virus on a porn site; that or an illegal pirated game site, those are usually the biggest vectors. Some of those brands might be aware that the advertisers they’re working with are engaged in really shady practices like this, but most think they’re paying for ‘brand ambassadors’ who’ve voluntarily chosen to talk up the brand to their family and friends. The virus lets him do anything you can do without being conscious, and it turns out, that’s a lot more than people think it is. But right now he has no sense of rational judgement, his normal levels of compassion and empathy are almost entirely turned off, and he has no awareness that everything he says is an advertisement.”

“So – what can we do? Is it curable? Is he suffering? Oh, God, is he trapped inside his own mind while his body is running around spouting ads?”

“No. The real Greg, his actual consciousness, isn’t awake – that’s kind of what happens when people aren’t conscious. And yes, it’s very curable. I’m going to have him sit in this booth with a VR headset on and watch a detoxification protocol, and that should do the trick.”

“It won’t hurt him, will it?”

“No, not at all. It just nullifies the virus and wakes him up.”

“Ok. Let’s do that then.”

“Mr. Landers!” I interrupted his monologue about the Hyundai Annunciator. “Can you sit in this chair and put on this headset, please?”

“But I’m really hungry. I want Five Guys.”

“I think Nicole would be happy to take you to Five Guys after you watch this short VRdeo. Isn’t that right, Nicole?”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, sure.” From her expression I could tell she would rather swallow a live earthworm, but anything to get him to sit down and watch.

“Well, okay. Long as I can have Five Guys after.” Greg sat down in the chair, I put the headset on him, and for ten minutes, that was that. I talked to Nicole about the importance of strong antivirals on the VR headset, not just relying on your network firewall, and maybe running a quick one-minute detox scan after ending a game.

The timer beeped, and I removed Greg’s headset. “How do you feel, Greg?” I asked.

“Okay, I guess, but I still want to go get Five Guys. Hey, Nickie, you promised, can we leave now?”

My eyebrows went up. “That’s… unusual.”

“It didn’t work?” Nicole was clearly on the verge of a panic attack.

“It didn’t, but calm down. This just means I have to go to the next level and do a manual treatment. That’s going to take a while, but I’m really curious as to how this particular bug survived the detox, so I tell you what; if you can wait, I have, I think, three more patients on the schedule for today, and then we can do Greg’s treatment.” Normally I’d ask them to make a second appointment for a thing like this, but my detox VRdeo was brand new, just updated yesterday. I wanted to see what kind of bug could get through a brand new scan, and I didn’t want to wait until next week or whenever my calendar was clear enough for a half hour session.

“I… guess we can wait…”

“Well, if we’re not doing anything, then how about we go to Five Guys?”

“Just take him,” I said. “It might shut him up for a little while, and it’s not likely to do him any harm.”

“But Greg doesn’t even like burgers.”

“Greg Landers the human man with a unique intelligence and personality doesn’t like burgers. Greg the Zombie, the cookie-cutter advertising goon, does. Unless he’s got allergies or sensitivities and can’t eat burgers—”

“No, he just doesn’t like them.” Nicole looked at her feet. “I… guess I could take him. When do we have to be back?”

I gave her my best estimate of how long it was going to take to get through the last three patients, and then as I walked them to the door I let the receptionist know to expect them back.

***

Once they were back, I sat Greg down with an interactive VRdeo that I’d be running with him, and then sat down and put on my own headset.

The information viruses work by directly injecting “code” from the brain’s “operating system” through either the optic or auditory channels, or both, but you don’t perceive them as code. You perceive them as something else. I don’t know what Greg saw – for everyone it’s different – but for me, it was very brief flashes of something I could barely see, something dark and full of wrongness, accompanied by a very brief flash of panic and horror. My brain knows when something’s trying to invade it from the outside. But my headset had the newest antivirals on it and the best, most sophisticated dedicated firewall, so for me the code injection attempts were just that, attempts. 

The VRdeo that was running was highly interactive, keyed to produce full sensorium response – a perfect breeding ground for a zombie virus. Greg’s viruses couldn’t resist the opportunity to replicate and invade someone else. But that was not happening today. As the viruses struck out at me, my security grappled with them, analyzed them, and fed me images that in turn I could feed back to Greg that would neutralize that particular virus. 

When we were finished, I once again asked him, “How do you feel, Greg?”

He was looking around in bewilderment. “This… is a doctor’s office? How the hell did I even get here? Did I pass out or something, Nickie?”

“Oh, thank God!” Nicole said.

“Looks like that did the trick,” I said. “Make sure you run antivirals, like I said. Good ones, don’t skimp on the cost. If you’ve got the money to game, you’ve got the money to protect yourself while gaming.”

“Thank you, Doctor, you’re a wonder—”

“What the hell is going on? What was wrong with me?”

I let Nicole explain to her husband as they walked out the door, and I locked up for the night. It’d been a long day, and I was hungry. I could really go for some F