In the time we have been together Carrie and I have traveled to not only the suspicious theory that we extracted from but others as well.

For myself I come from the brain-machine interface. Two men, John and Jacob, entered from outside my machine, directly connecting their brain to the machine. For years the machine transmitted sensory data to me, reading and responding to my desires and actions and in return; in this manner I interacted with the simulated world of 2112 and received feedback from it. The two guys who found me interrupted the machine’s attempts at inducing me to forget, temporarily or otherwise, that I was inside a virtual realm. And slowly I became ready for extraction. I remember looking into John’s eyes at “the crossing” as he suggested I head to Moon Pass to find my extraction device. He would head towards Dobson Pass in hopes of finding a telephone. I knew there was no phones in Dobson.

The suspicious theory I found Carrie in was different then mine. Hers was a virtual people theory. In a virtual-people theory, every inhabitant is a native of the machine. They do not have a “real” body in the external reality of the physical world. Instead, each is a fully simulated entity, possessing an appropriate level of consciousness that is implemented using the simulation’s own logic. As such, they could be downloaded from one simulation to another, or even archived and resurrected at a later time. It is also possible that a simulated entity could be moved out of the simulation entirely by means of mind transfer into a synthetic body. Since she did not have a body anymore it was my mind that spawned my version of her. And she was able to take it on and extract. I do feel funny that she is a figment of my idea of a perfect mate. But it was her eyes, her soul, that captured my heart. That part is real.

It is not good to go back to your original suspicious theory simply because the machine has a lost pointer and continues to search for it. They do that so the theory or virtual world remains intact. The more people we extract the more the machines fall apart. I used to hang out in the emigration suspicious theory before I met Carrie. I liked this one because getting in was much like my own theory, the brain-machine interface, but to a much greater degree. On entry, the I could use a variety of hypothetical methods to participate in the machine including mind transfer to temporarily relocate my mental processing into a virtual-person. After the journey is over, my mind was restored along with all the new memories and experience gained within. Mostly my selection of hypothetical method was trying to ride my bike 300 or more miles at a 24 hour race in a place called Spokane Washinton. Only humans would suspect this as impossable.

Where Carrie and I ran into difficulties is the intermingled suspicious theory. A simulated reality being dynamically constructed and modified using real-world matter and energy within an enclosing container or hunk of land. Upon entering such a space, we would effectively feel immersed in the simulated environment, with a variety of potential methods being used to convince the human users of the possibility of extraction. An intermingled theory supports both types of consciousness: “players” from the outer reality, Carrie and I, who are visiting (as a brain-computer interface) or emigrating, the humans we were trying to reach, and virtual-people who are natives of the theory and hence lack any physical body in the outer reality.

Our mistake was to trust the emigrants. We were blind sided by the fact that a master machine had started to create bots to enter the intermingled suspicious theory. One of them convinced us to extract them and take them to the virtual people theory to look for a lost relative. We did not know it was a bot and once in Carrie’s home theory it called in the machines. And now we had taught these bots our mechanisms. And now they were after us. We didn’t know where to run but we needed to at least get out of this theory … fast.

Carrie went to the phone first …