To the New Children of the Forest

It's really difficult for me to tell a story with just words so please bear with me. I am trying to tell you the story of who I am and how I came to be this thing, but I have trouble organizing my thoughts into a single linear flow. I wish I could just show you the entire story all at once in all its many dimensions. Then I could make it clear why I hired somebody to put a pellet of poison into my own arm. But as it is, I must use the ancient art of written narrative. So here it goes... Imagine spending your whole life in a cramped stinking prison cell, counting the days, scratching tally marks on the walls. Then one day, that big iron door creaks open, and you're whisked you off to a glamorous party full of beautiful people and delightful games, and everybody you meet is toasting you for being a genius, for being the great hope of the human race. That's what it was like to plug into the direct sense feeds after living at the children's home. I can't describe that first day in the feedrealm. Though I have not cried in 24 years, I still get the ghostly feeling of tears coming to my eyes every time I think about it. To be looking around at the homefield environment, everything glittering in a new way, shining in colors that do not exist, all of it stretching out before me, all the main gateways open and waiting to be explored -- the feeling of that moment, of being a small child looking out at the beautiful new vastness of the realm, was the most magical thing I have ever experienced. What I want to impress upon you is this: Every step I took towards slavery felt like a newfound freedom. At first, it was just games and social mixing with other kids. We had all played the mysterious Children of the Forest game and scored highly on it. The game had been an entry exam of sorts. It turned out that I had scored higher than anyone else. A lot higher. This made some of the other kids jealous, but most of them seemed to look up to me. I had never made anyone jealous before, and I had never been looked up to before. Social mixing and share-streaming was easy and fun. You had time to think of what to say, which video or ani to post to the stream, which paste to link up. It was so much more exciting than being in real life. I had a good memory and could work the Assisted Recall pretty well, so I made a lot of friends. They told us we would all be going to Harvard and Standford and Tsinghua, that we would be famous mix stars and government stars, that we were the future of the world. To be fair, they couldn't have known that most of us would be dead before we were 20. That all of us would be dead before 34. But they knew damn well we wouldn't be going on to normal lives. We were part of an experiment. After we got used to the feedrealm, they began the conditioning. I realize that you might not know what the feedrealm is, so maybe I should explain a little about it. The feedrealm is basically just another interface for sharing information and carrying out transactions. It is based on the metaphor of 3D space. That's why it's called a "realm." You can move through it. You can go up and down and left and right. It feels like swimming through weightlessness. They made it this way because that's how the human mind works. Our brains evolved to exist in a 3D space. We naturally imagine things as existing in space, even abstract, non-spatial things. We think of the future as coming toward us, the past as receding behind us. Powerful people are considered "above," and the powerless are "below." Items belong "in" some categories and "outside" other categories. None of these spatial relationships really exist but they are useful metaphors because our minds are suited to processing things in 3D space. It has always been theoretically possible, even trivial, to create a 4-dimensional or n-dimensional feedrealm. But since the human mind isn't made to process so many dimensions, it was considered pointless. But recently, a genetic mutation dating back to the stone age was discovered which allows certain individuals to experience and comprehend feedrealms of four and higher spatial dimensions. While this mutation may have been useless for stone age people living in a spatially 3D world, it was also harmless, so it somehow survived. Though its initial origin is something of a mystery. Anyways, now scientists were able to hook people up to 4D feedrealms. Early test subjects described the experience in terms ranging from "nauseating" to "utterly horrifying." It was theorized that maybe if children were conditioned from a young age to exist in a higher dimensional environment, they would become accustomed to it. But such conditioning was deemed unethical. Enter the CIA. Their motto: "Where ethical approbation ends, our work begins." They used their global genetic database to identify children with the genotype and collected a group of them to begin conditioning. And that brings us back to my story (see? a spatial metaphor!). At first we were just playing around in the feedrealm, getting used to it. Then they started the conditioning. How do I describe higher dimensional space, so-called hyperspace? Nauseating and utterly horrifying are exactly what it felt like at first. Everybody hated it. We cried and tried to run away when they made us go into the hyperrealm. But of course, there was nowhere to run. We were all lying in hygiene beds, where almost all of us would lie until death. They forced us back into the hyperrealm, a little at a time, just showing us simple shapes at first to acclimate us. But how do I describe it? It was like watching things pass through each other, but without touching each other or covering each other up, in ways that made the brain go, "Gah! That's impossible! Stop it!" There were plain gray boxes and cones and infinite planes and bottomless abysses, and the shapes would move slowly along and do things that were simply impossible. Some of the kids never got used to it. They hated it and dropped out of the program and disappeared from the feedrealm. But I kept going, just like in the Children of the Forest game. I got used to 4 dimensions, then 5 and 6. I was a leader. I taught the other kids tricks for how to understand what they were seeing. And it was cool being in hyperspace, seeing everything at once like that. Was hyperspace mind-bending? Sure. But not nearly as mind-bending as hypertime. And not nearly as horrifying.