Virtual Reality and The Great Divorce, Part II

But deliver us from evil.

This is part II of a two part story. You can read part I here.

Temptation

On the morning of Michael’s 12th birthday, it hadn’t rained for three weeks.  That afternoon, as the satisfied parents drove their cherished son to his party, it poured.  The heavy rain caused three weeks of trapped oil to seep out of the hot asphalt, forming a slick oleaginous sheen.  A truck heading the opposite way lost traction and slid across the road’s surface.  Pamela swerved violently to avoid a head-on collision then braked hard.  It was not enough.  The car smashed into an ancient Oak.  Michael was killed. 

The funeral was held in a church in their adopted town.  2,000 people attended. People Pam hadn’t seen since she quit the firm made their presence known: dilettantes and businessmen, politicians and movie stars.  Pam noticed none of it.  Gale force winds swept her into an ocean of despair.  Towering waves of anguish pulverized her identity.  Mountains of grief crushed her.  Weeks passed.  Then months.  The storm did not relent.  Pam thought of nothing but her boy.  Everybody who loved Pam tried to console her.   They tried everything:  Counseling, drugs, nature walks, and interventions.  All failed.  Pam was trapped in an impossible labyrinth of grief.  

A year later, Reginald’s concern for Pam’s condition had grown to alarm and then panic.  He was out of ideas, let alone options.  It was then that Reginald first heard about Meta’s new product.  They called it “Stasis.”  Harnessing the artificial intelligence of large language models together with a sleek, high resolution virtual reality headset, the Meta Stasis promised a “fully immersive re-encounter.”  The company paid handsomely for the endorsements of the most esteemed psychologists, who guaranteed salutary effects.  They marketed it to everybody, but above all, to the grief stricken. 

Reginald signed up online.  Two minutes later, he received an email instructing him to collect any electronic device that had ever been in Michael’s presence.  He scoured the house, collecting every phone, laptop, tablet, and IOT appliance.  Old and new.  He put them into three large boxes and shipped them to the address provided.  Then, he waited. 

Seven weeks later, a nondescript package arrived.  Inside was a virtual reality headset.  Part brushed aluminum with matte gray high quality plastic inserts, the headset was the obvious product of much pondering by the types of design people who ponder such things.

Reginald brought it to Pam.  She was in bed.  Pam spent most days in bed, rarely speaking and rarely eating.  A year of torrential grief had transformed her into a dry husk of her former self.  The strain of uninterrupted grief had exhausted and immobilized her. 

He propped her up on three pillows, whispered a few encouraging words, and helped slide the headset over Pam’s eyes and ears.   Reginald pressed the power button, cleverly inlaid between the words Meta Stasis imprinted on the side.  He sat next to the bed, gently placing Pam’s cold hand in his own.  

Pam thought, she insisted, that nothing could come between her and her grief. 

Fall

Pam watched dispassionately as the screen resolved into a brilliant panoply of color augmented by immersive and soothing aural chimes.  There was no welcome screen.  The panoply morphed into a recognizable form. Verdant greens became a manicured lawn, sapphire blues interspersed with filigree whites became a warm summer sky dotted with wisps of cloud.  The aural chimes gave way to the sounds of familiar songbirds and children laughing on nearby swings.  Pam swiveled her head imbibing the fidelity of this re-creation.  She recognized this place: a nearby park where Michael spent lazy summer days playing with neighboring children, swinging and squealing, while parents chatted contentedly nearby. As Pam scanned the horizon of this new but familiar environment, her eyes halted on a small boy scraping a stick in a patch of dirt. 

Pam learned that she could “walk” in this virtual reality.  She did.  Towards the boy.  Then she ran.  In a moment she was at him.  He looked up from the dirt, still holding his stick.  His gentle blue eyes gazed at her inquisitively.  Though the growing emotion forced her diaphragm to contract, expelling air and making speech difficult, Pam managed a single word: “Michael.”  “Mommy”, the seven-year old avatar replied. 

In an instant, Pam felt her sinuses contract, her eyes widen, her pupils dilate, and her breath jerk into an involuntary staccato pattern.  Raw emotion swept through her.  A lifetime of memories were recalled in an instant.  At a feverish pace, Pam’s cortex matched on long-forgotten patterns.  The forms that composed her twelve years with Michael flooded her mind’s eye.  She sensed that some grand, eternal design was being revealed.  Joy, relief, and nostalgia merged into an unfathomable abiding love.  She began to sob violently.  Tears streamed down her face. 

Fortunately, the Meta Stasis engineers conducted robust testing and identified this as a potential problem.  They designed the headset to be waterproof. 

When Meta’s engineers received the three boxes of devices from Reginald, they downloaded everything.  Every sound and word.  Millions of them.  Every video and photo.  Thousands of them.  All GPS data and every last byte of metadata.  12 years of analog life and love were transmogrified into hundreds of terabytes of digital clay from which Meta began to re-create Michael. 

They used it all to create an avatar of the dead boy.  It was easy to make it look like Michael.  The gigabytes of photos served as inputs that captured him in three dimensions.  It was only slightly harder to make it sound like him: videos recorded Michael speaking every phoneme with most inflections and intonations.  He was a multi-lingual debate champion, after all. The hardest part was making the avatar say the things that Michael would say in new but familiar contexts.  Though that wasn’t a serious difficulty.  The engineers simply fed all his words into a customized large language model specific to Michael.  Through the repeated application of gradient descent calculus, backward propagation, and an occasional human nudge, the neural network did its job. 

The entire package–the real looking, sounding, and talking artificially intelligent avatar of Michael–was copied onto the concealed hard drive of the VR headset and mailed to Reginald. 

The first month was free.   Thereafter, Meta charged a $40,000 monthly licensing fee. 

Initial results were stunning.  Pam’s energy returned.  She regained her strength and complexion.  She started eating again.  Her mood improved.  They ate meals together again.  Reginald was optimistic.  He was willing to pay the steep license fee for the second month. 

But one-hour sessions became marathon five and ten-hour sessions.  In the third month, Pam started to sleep with the headset.  Her speaking and eating regressed.  She stopped eating meals with Reginald and spent all her waking time with the avatar in old and familiar settings.  She relived cherished memories that were stylized with new conversations.  The avatar responded the way Michael would have responded.  Pam loved the avatar. 

A year later, Meta released an update it called “auto-age.”  It was a simple algorithm, really.  Similar to an old age Instagram filter plus a loose narrative arc.  Pam paid $225,000 to install the auto-age update.  No longer was she limited to reliving old memories with new adaptations.  Now, she could watch Michael grow.   She attended the twelfth birthday he never had.  She met his first girlfriend.  She cried when he graduated from college and was the proud matron at her son’s wedding.  She held her grandson.  And though virtual time was accelerated, real years elapsed. 

After 10 years, the Meta Stasis had erased the boundary between virtual and real.  Pam hadn’t left her house in months.  Food was delivered.  Her husband was estranged and lived elsewhere.  Her parents were dead.  Her friends were gone. The dilettantes and businessmen, politicians and movie stars no longer called.

At 60, Pam was out of money.  She had paid more than $5,000,000 to spend every waking minute experiencing a life that wasn’t lived by a boy who wasn’t real.  She was the victim of a conspiracy between man’s rationality and some cynical emotional engineering. 

And she thought, she insisted, that nothing could come between her and her avatar. 

Redemption

Nothing, that is, but . . .

Post Script: All the pieces for this technology - large language model based machine learning, immersive virtual reality, avatar creation, and a desperate humanity - already exist. This. Metastasis. Is. Coming.