The Words - An Autobiography

Top Secret Instances

I'd always tried to remain as distant from government and military activities as possible. But, in the early days of telepathic collaboration, I'd felt I had no option but to assist both entities in establishing their own proprietary telepathic collaboration capabilities. Otherwise, they'd have been leaning over my shoulder, breathing down my neck, every waking minute of my life, making demands, directing me precisely what to do and how, as if, like elementary teachers I'd suffered years in the past, they had a better understanding.

So, instead of futile resistance, I agreed to cooperate fully and provide them with what I promised would perpetually be our newest, most innovative technology, which they'd since bragged to have greatly and continually enhanced. But I'd made sure, over the past two centuries, that our leading-edge innovations were perpetually buried just below the surface of the updates we continued to provide them, neglecting to document those features and function calls to implement them, hidden right under their noses. So, I'd never been concerned that these bureaucracies might be racing ahead of us. The government did have more money, but they also had far too much red tape to use theirs as freely as I could. And the burn rate of their payroll alone was astronomical compared to mine, and I wasn't required to finance things like roads, schools, and war machines.

In addition to their 'Top Secret' facilities in the Real, the government and military had developed their own 'Top Secret' instances of Virtuality, with millions of 'Extra Top Secret' areas nested within each. I found it amusing the number of 'Extra Top Secret' areas where no one, other than myself, remained alive to remember they'd ever existed. Most military people I interacted with served their twenty years and were gone. They retired, grew old, and died. Some individuals serving in other areas of government tended to remain longer, especially Senators and members of Congress, as did a small percentage of those at the highest levels of the military. But they still retired, grew old, and died, even if not in the same order. They tended to grow old before they retired.

Although, the Total Health Institute, with its various names and guises, had also attracted the attention of the government and military, especially once the Institute began its commercial ramp-up. While I was walking endless laps around my oceanfront estate, growing obliviously richer with each step. Before my return to the world, the procedure was available to anyone with the money to pay for it. And, for a time, everyone in the upper ranks of the armed services, and the government, from the mayors of the larger cities on up, not only demanded to have the procedure the instant they learned of its existence but felt entitled to a priority spot in line. All attempted to coerce or negotiate some shady deal to get it free. Far too many had enough clout to succeed, at least while I was still walking endless laps.

I'd insisted upon my return that I'd have been more resistant if for no other reason than I hated bullies. I might have broken a few of their noses rather than enduring the thought of having them around forever or simply as a demonstration of how thoroughly I hated bullies. What were they going to do, have me arrested, sue me? I would have buried them so deep in lawyers and bad PR that the agencies employing them would have found it more expedient to cut them loose. It was also my company, and I felt much more entitled than my CEO buddy to tell them to fuck off.

For the most part, all that sort of pressure ended not long after my return to the world with the death of a prominent Senator, which I had nothing to do with, I promise. The investigations that followed were not the only considerations but contributed prominently to our decision to place a moratorium on the procedure.

Entering the primary 'Top Secret' instance of Virtuality required the highest security clearance, as did the data centers housing the systems that hosted its many instances. Supposedly, no one outside the highest levels of the military and government should have been aware that 'Top Secret' instances of Virtuality existed, including me. From the 'Top Secret' side, the public side of Virtuality was easily accessible, but no unwanted guests were permitted to wander over from the other direction, even if they had discovered my secret portal connecting the two.

Of course, unofficially and unnoticed, I'd wandered over many times because I was curious, and could, while I misbehaved. I was the only one alive who knew how it all worked deep beneath the surface. There wasn't anything they could prevent me from knowing or doing. But there wasn't much of their top-secret information that I found all that interesting. Although to be fair, there were military and governmental enhancements that would never have occurred to me since I wasn't looking to track criminal activity, terrorist groups, or wage cyberwar.

While I attempted to gather enough information to make sense of the situation, I made a mental note, one of many previously ignored, to prioritize patching that little security flaw I'd been recreationally slipping through for the past decade or more. I initially suspected someone other than me had finally stumbled upon it and slipped through. I still couldn't conceive why people would go wild until their Magick Hats were forcibly removed. Someone, or something, was getting into their heads. And not just when they were 'not home.'

But what individual could be single-handedly creating such pervasive mayhem? My thoughts began gravitating toward a cyber-attack by some hostile entity instead. There was unquestionably ill intent, and whoever was behind it must be technically sophisticated. I'd convinced myself that the odds against someone other than myself discovering and exploiting the security flaw I believed to be at the heart of the current issue were astronomical. But I was wrong, and no matter who was behind this, it was my fault, and I berated myself for my arrogance. I'd known that a breach was possible, although I'd never contemplated anything of such a scale, which I could have and should have prevented. I felt sick considering the improbability but also not impossibility of it being a prank by some teenage hacker that got out of hand. As if I was the only one on the planet smart enough to figure this out. Fucking idiot!

I doubted it was the military, at least ours. I couldn't believe they had any knowledge of this glitch I'd been exploiting for my personal amusement. They'd have been in a frenzy over the possibilities of what they could do with it, but they would also have been in a panic over what someone else might, and I'd have immediately been hauled in to see that this portal was patched forever. Who cared if the occasional dead driver took a few others with them?

Little did they know, just the past week, I'd paid another visit to the young wife of a general who'd been doing something he shouldn't in 'Top Secret' Virtuality or over in the public instance. Wherever he'd been going, and whatever he might have been doing there, he was 'not home,' although, in the Real, he was sitting on the sofa in his den, wearing his Virt Suit, staring off into the void. That was until I arrived, and those eyes popped open, the Virt Suit dropped in a pile on the floor, and I went in search of the lovely young woman I'd seen the first time through his old eyes on an earlier scouting expedition.

She was far too young for the general and wasn't sure what had gotten into the old man when I paid my first visit, nor those to follow. She also wasn't sure she cared. She just knew something was different because, in the six months they'd been married, he'd never once gone down on her, and he'd never managed to make her come a single time. She'd confessed, in gratitude, that she'd been taking care of that herself and was beginning to regret her decision to marry him. I apologized on his behalf and immediately took care of her again, hoping she wouldn't repeat her confession when I wasn't there to hear it. I may have saved that marriage, at least for a time. I enjoyed myself with her enough that I would have happily wandered back again many times and continued to save her marriage, if only for a while longer since I couldn't be there all the time. Except, it no longer appeared as though anyone would wander anywhere in either instance of Virtuality soon.