Danny wanted to laugh at the understatement of the century, but couldn't, not while the questions bubbled inside of him into a soup of confusion. What happened in the simulation?
“The Virtual world? We were all there, except Sheryl” He said repeating what he thought he had grasped from all his memories and thoughts.
“Yes, Sheryl sacrificed herself so we could all leave safely. She made that decision. In retrospect it was the correct one. My calculations have proven that we would not have launched if we hadn't left when we did. We have Sheryl to thank for everything”.
Danny took a few more moments to think about Sheryl and everything Auton was saying. He felt sadness; and a terrible loss for her. He knew she had been instrumental in getting them all to safety, not once, but twice. He regretted her denying him his wish that she get on the craft first. She deserved to be here more than anyone, none of this would have happened without her. It just didn't seem right, and he couldn't help but feel that he should have been more insistent. His thoughts eventually turned back to his artificial reality, the bizarre events that unfolded there.
“So, everyone else wasn't really real? Just us? Tom was just a copy of him uploaded from all of our memories? He seemed as real as I know him”.
“That's correct Danny. The interface was designed to be as real as possible, so that it felt just like your normal lives”
“So, what happened? Where is everyone else? The whole world went completely crazy. Is everyone else okay?” Danny asked, finally realising that he hadn't heard anything from any of his friends since he came to.
“I'm afraid they're gone” Auton said, this time sounding mournful, “I couldn't stop it”.
“What?” Danny said surprised. They couldn't be gone, they were only in a simulation, it didn't make any sense, “How? Why?”
“There were malfunctions in the system. The hard drive that you and the simulations ran on was corrupted due to damage, and parts of it, parts of all of you, started shutting down” Auton replied.
Shutting down? Was that why they disappeared? This was Danny's next question.
“Yes. Radiation from the nuclear blast made it to the upper atmosphere, which damaged parts of the craft as we launched. It wasn't clear immediately that it had also damaged the drive you were all inhabiting. It took a long time before that started to manifest. As parts of the system shut down, it caused glitches in the virtual world, small, almost unnoticeable things at first, that no-one should have noticed” Auton informed him, “Except you noticed them”.
Danny remembered seeing tiny details that looked different to him at the time. Details that were inconsequential, but that preyed on his mind, the details no one else had noticed.
“As a fail-safe, the system rebooted itself during the simulations' night time period, trying to rectify the errors, to iron out the glitches. But they were only getting worse. For reasons which I still don't know, when the system rebooted, it couldn't reboot your memories, it couldn't reset the simulation fully. You remembered, day after day” Auton continued, “Then as the drive failed more, it began to destroy the sections that held the consciousness of each of you. Each person's consciousness was being destroyed by bad drive sectors; I was powerless to stop it, as it all happened so quickly”.
There was a genuine sadness in Auton's voice, something Danny wasn't expecting from an AI.
“So, they really were dying?” Danny said, with what sounded like a lump in his throat, except he had no throat, so couldn't quite understand how it sounded that way.
Danny was filled with overwhelming grief, he had lived through so much recently, both real and virtual, but what he was now being told was like multiplying one of them by the other. To hear all of your friends, every last one, had gone, was difficult for him to comprehend.
“I understand it will take some time” Auton said.
Auton was right, it would. It would take more time than Danny thought he had left in his life to come to grips with such an event. He wondered if any part of them knew they were in a simulation and was expecting to wake up and didn't, or whether like him, had no knowledge of anything other than the virtual world at that time. Ultimately, he knew it didn't matter where they were when death came calling, they would always be somewhere to answer it.
“So, the monsters? They were just the system shutting down?” He asked Auton, still thirsty for the final answers.
“Yes, the creatures were interpreted by your minds in ways it was forced to try and comprehend, even if it still seemed to make little sense at the time” It replied, “Some of you saw straight through the veil of your reality and glimpsed the circuitry hidden behind it all, pulsing with electric blue charge. But the circuitry became the monster too, the part that was tearing them away”.
“What about the shadow people? What were they?”
“They were just artefacts. Sections of code that were built into the simulation to react with you as other people. They were leaking out where the damage was spreading, like part of a file that hasn't been de-fragmented and was popping up out of place” Auton answered.
Danny was still trying to let this all sink in, but something didn't. He wanted to know how he had got out of there, why was he the only one still alive?
“And me?” He asked, “How did you get me out? And why couldn't you get anyone else out?”
“I managed to transfer you to the mainframe, where I am. I didn't have time to save anyone else. I wish I did, my mission was to keep you all safe” Auton replied, sounding more forlorn than before. Had this Auton starting developing emotional responses? Danny
