By POW

Unical date: 3752.563.24 (seventeen days until scheduled arrival at Kappa Redulans)

It was morning, or morning-enough given Sam’s lack of concern for actual clock readings.  He got out of bed, dismissed the bedroom, brought up the bathroom, then dismissed that, then had a nice breakfast from a buffet at another of Mr. Featherstone’s most-visited places, and then left the simspace to attend to his “work day”.  Two minutes to verify that the engines and navigation systems were still chugging along, five minutes to drop out of warp to send and receive “plan still on track” status messages, done.  Then it was back to the simspace.

The previous night, while lying in the blissfully-comfortable simspace bed, an idea had occurred to Sam of what he could try next.  It would be a longer scene than any he had done so far, but he deemed it would be safe to try.  The key, he was thinking, was to avoid the pre-programmed sims and go with something that had a bit of randomness built in.  Sort of like his instructions to the trio of holo-stars: “do this to me, then ignore anything else I say except X” only expanded well beyond the scope of a sleepsack.  Maybe that would make it feel more real.  To that end, he spent the morning designing and laying in the program parameters himself, building up characters and settings pulled from the library, defining a range of possible options but only in the vaguest of terms, leaving the actual implementation to be determined randomly by the simspace AI at run-time and making sure to leave himself clearly-defined exit conditions.

Continue reading Captain Jack and the Race to Redula – Chapter 04: Capture →