Labyrinth, p.29
Labyrinth, page 29
“I’ll put it to the group, but our main issue is the truck.”
“I might have a solution to that.”
*
In our room at the hostel, I introduce Daisy to Ian and May, and everyone quickly agrees that it makes sense for the four of us to work together. May and Ian are already aware of the situation with our truck. Daisy informs us that there is really only one possibility for getting another transport: the junkyard.
“The junkyard has vehicles?” Ian asks.
“Not running ones,” Daisy replies. “But they have broken ones. And parts. We can trade for both.”
With a smile, she adds, “The guy running the junkyard can be grumpy at times, but if he’s in a good mood, he might help us.”
“It’s a lot of ifs,” Ian says.
In the silence that follows, I survey the converted classroom. While I was gone, he and May spread out all of the computer components into a sort of makeshift electronics junkyard. I sense that Ian’s frustration at his own progress on the computer and radio is coming through now.
“I don’t see what choice we have,” May says.
“Trust me,” he says, “finding parts and fixing something in this Labyrinth is easier said than done.”
“When you only have one option,” May says, “it’s therefore your best option.”
*
Outside the hostel, the wind blows and a light rain falls as the four of us make our way down the street to the junkyard. Beyond the gate, we weave through mountains of scrap metal and abandoned cars until we reach a beat-up metal shipping container with corrugated walls and spray-painted white letters that spell OFFICE.
Under the sign, someone has cut a jagged rectangular hole in the container and placed a large piece of plexiglass over it, creating a window. The makeshift window is sealed from the outside with foam and caulk.
Daisy knocks on one of the double doors, and it creaks open. A man in rain gear peers out.
Without a word, he turns and leads us into the container. Just beyond the door, there’s a sort of staging area with a grate in the floor for rain to drain.
The junkyard’s proprietor hangs his rain gear on one of the hooks welded to the container wall and marches through two layers of plastic strip curtains.
When our party has taken off our ponchos and jackets, we make our way past the plastic strips and find the man sitting behind a homemade metal desk that’s been welded together.
On the far wall, there are shelves which have been welded to the container. Below it, there’s an elevated metal work table that’s stacked high with parts.
The junkyard owner is wearing military fatigues, but they don’t have a branch or rank on them. Daisy facilitates the introductions (his name is Wally), and after we tell him what we want, he looks at the four of us for a long moment.
“Heard it before. Seen it before. Nobody ever comes back from the center.”
“Maybe it’s because they find what they need,” I tell him.
“That’s dangerous.”
“What is?”
“Hope.”
My gaze drifts over to Daisy. “Well, I’ve recently been reminded that life’s a lot harder without it.”
Wally smirks, but doesn’t say anything.
“I’ve also been reminded that when you only have one option, it’s your best option.”
Wally leans back in the chair, the front legs lifting slightly. “What exactly are you proposing?”
“You make your money repairing things and selling them. Or finding parts to sell. We can help.”
“Yeah?”
“We can scavenge the junkyard and find what you need. I assume you’ve got a list?”
“I do.”
“We do too,” Ian says quickly. “Computer and electronic parts.”
“Is that the trade?” Wally asks.
“Half of it,” I put in before Ian can say more. “We want a car too. Whatever is easiest to fix and get us back on the road.”
Wally lets the chair settle back on the container floor with a boom and sets his forearms on the welded desk.
“You don’t need a car.”
I open my mouth to respond, but he holds a hand up, pressing on.
“What you need is a transport that can withstand the storms and anything else you might run into out there.”
“I’m assuming you have something in mind?”
“I do,” he says, rising.
With that, he leads us through the two plastic curtains, and we don our rain gear and push through the creaking container doors and follow Wally through his kingdom of metal rubble.
Our journey ends at a graveyard of vehicles ranging from trucks and cars to tractor-trailers. The tires are rotting. Some are sunk in the ground as if the earth is slowly swallowing them. At the end, there’s a hulking machine that instantly makes my heart beat faster.
It’s a tan Humvee—the exact make and model as the one I was driving the day a roadside bomb tore apart my life. I stand there, staring, my heart hammering, my mouth dry.
Thanks to the face mask and goggles, my three travel companions can’t see my distress.
They wade forward, boots splashing the rain puddles as they circle the Humvee, looking it over.
Wally’s gaze is fixed on me, as if he knows, as if he’s waiting to see if I turn and run, have a breakdown, or tell them.
Instead, I steel myself and walk closer to the Humvee, to the driver’s side, and inspect the fender and the door. This Humvee was blown apart, too. I can see where large parts of it were gouged out. Metal plates have been welded on, closing some of the gaps, but there are still several openings along the side.
Wally pops the hood and begins pointing out all the parts that are missing from the engine.
“You get me the parts I need, I’ll fix this for you.”
*
Scavenging for parts in the junkyard—in the rain—is slow going. The piles of metal debris are slippery, and the pieces are hard to locate.
Luckily, the rain stops shortly after we start, and it’s just the wind we have to contend with.
As I’m crawling into the cab of a derelict box truck, I’m reminded of my work with Warren and digitally scavenging for things he can repair and sell.
With the addition of Daisy to our crew—and Wally/Warren—I’m fairly certain Amersa’s Labyrinth is somehow reading my mind. Or they’re following my every move outside the sessions and feeding that information into the game engine. That seems more likely.
Either way, it’s trouble. And I can only imagine what the group is going to say at the next meeting.
When our group here in the Labyrinth has compiled the parts Wally needs, he tells us to come back tomorrow.
By the time we reach the hostel, my health is at eight percent.
In the classroom that is our shared bedroom, Ian pores over the electronic parts he found in the junkyard (which he bartered with Wally for).
It might actually work, he mumbles as he unscrews the side of the computer tower.
“You better go,” May says to me. “We’ll be waiting when you get back.”
*
After the Labyrinth session, at home, I scour the Amersa website, looking for the man who confronted me in the bathroom. It doesn’t take long to find him. His face is on the page labeled “Leadership Team.” Same glasses. Green sweater this time. Solid white button-up.
He’s the company’s CTO or Chief Technology Officer.
Interesting.
61
Given that Amersa has sped up the pace of my Labyrinth sessions, the numbers group has decided to meet sooner and more often.
To my surprise, Isaac has opted not to join us in person. Instead, he’s tuning in via the camera feed Harold uses.
That leaves June, Rose, and me sitting around the camera, eating pizza as Isaac remotely starts the meeting.
“First,” Isaac says over the camera speaker, “Rose, did you get the blank badge?”
She reaches into her pocket and draws out a white plastic badge, holding it up to the camera. “I did.”
“Good. When you’re done with the pizza box, put it in there and throw it in the dumpster behind the building. I’ll get it. And June, I’ll send you a Signal message with the dead drop location. You should get it before work tomorrow morning.”
I can feel the tension in Isaac’s voice—well, more tense than he usually is.
“Any time gaps?” he asks.
Thankfully, there haven’t been any, but the good news stops there.
After I describe my Labyrinth sessions, we go around about what it means, but like the characters in Wally’s junkyard, we have the parts, but we can’t put them together.
“We have some new recordings,” Isaac says. “And we have a problem. Or more specifically, I have a problem.”
With that, the camera speaker begins playing a recording from Anders Larsson’s office. The person talking has a gruff, flat voice, and I instantly recognize him: it’s Terry, Amersa’s security chief.
“We’ve made some progress related to Carter. We’ve narrowed it down to a few people he was working with. We’re going to start active surveillance soon. That may well bring that particular issue to a close.”
“Good. The sooner, the better,” Larsson responds.
Isaac stops the recording. “They’re talking about me.”
“I’m assuming that’s why you’re not here in person?”
“You assume correctly.”
“What do we do?” Rose asks. She sets a slice of half-eaten pizza back in the box, her appetite seemingly deserting her.
“I don’t know,” Isaac replies. “I feel like if I quit my job, I’m outing myself, and if I go on the run, it may amount to the same thing. At the same time, none of you should be seen with me. Given what Amersa did to Lucas, I think we have to be cautious.”
“We don’t know that they’re going to find you,” Rose says.
“We have to assume they will,” Isaac responds, voice flat. “It’s just a matter of time.”
*
The following day, at lunch, June sends a Signal message to the group.
We need to meet. Tonight.
*
Six hours later, we’re sitting around the circle—June, Rose, and I eating Jersey Mike’s subs, Isaac and Harold once again joining remotely.
June sets her sandwich down, reaches into her backpack, and pulls out a stack of pages.
“I got it. The CORTEX study.”
Rose smiles. “The badge worked?”
“It did.”
June places the study between the three of us and spreads out the pages, which she’s highlighted.
“I had a chance to skim it over lunch and after work. Then I read the sections that jumped out at me. I want to spend more time with it, but what I’ve found is… troubling.”
I stare down at the rows and columns of black text, crisp against the pages, the highlighted sections glowing neon yellow under the buzzing, fluorescent lights overhead.
In the margins, June has scribbled notes in blue ink—questions, theories, and words like “neurodegeneration” and “synaptic plasticity.”
“CORTEX,” June says, “stands for Cognitive Optimization and Rewiring through Targeted Experiential eXposure. The study began roughly three years ago, and eventually grew to include 127 participants. Most were Amersa employees, family members, and, in some cases, paid volunteers. They tested early prototypes of Labyrinth—recording every session and scanning subjects’ brains before, during, and after.”
“Scanning how?” Isaac asks.
“A bit of everything. Functional MRIs and MEG before and after each play block—EEG during the live runs—plus the occasional PET scan. They even tracked their blood chemistry.”
“What were they looking for?” Rose asks.
June flips to a page filled with charts and graphs. “Neurological changes. One of the earliest findings was a shift in most subjects’ dopamine production, like what you’d see in someone with early-stage addiction.”
June turns another page. “Essentially, Labyrinth altered the way their brains processed pleasure and reward, similar to the effects of a psychoactive drug. It wasn’t just the dopamine, though. The more the subjects used Labyrinth, the more their brains rewired. Synaptic pruning started to take place.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“Synaptic pruning is a normal process during development—your brain removes less-used connections to make way for more efficient pathways. But here, Labyrinth induced it in adults, essentially rewiring their brains, changing how these people thought, what they focused on, and even how they processed emotions.”
June makes a stack of the pages she’s gone through and flips deeper into the study. “Over time, two of the subjects started showing Parkinson’s-like symptoms—tremors, memory lapses, personality shifts. There were other adverse events such as dissociative states, hyper-aggression, and something they called ‘perceptual drift,’ when the subjects had trouble differentiating the virtual world and the real one. For several subjects, after a while, they didn’t actually want to. They essentially started perceiving the real world as another version of Labyrinth, to the point of even treating people around them—family members, co-workers—more like NPCs, not real humans.”
“I’m assuming they stopped the trial,” Isaac says.
“They did—but only for those experiencing issues. They had to. And that’s actually when the worst outcomes occurred. Twelve participants experienced what can only be described as withdrawal symptoms. The team combined low-dose anxiolytics with a ‘sunset’ scenario that gradually tapered Labyrinth use over six weeks. Most stabilized; two still relapsed.”
June holds up a page with the heading Discussion and Summary of Findings beneath that. “This is when the document starts getting really strange. First, I should note that the study only had 127 participants. And they were brought in over time, and their total Labyrinth session time varied widely.”
“Why is that important?”
“The bottom line is that the study wasn’t that well-designed, and the sample size was relatively small for testing something like Labyrinth, a product with a target audience of essentially everyone on Earth. But the reasons are revealed in the discussion.”
She turns to a page with a bold heading that reads Strengths and Limitations. “The study, such as it is, began more as an internal experiment and evolved over time to be more formalized. Toward the end, there were two camps within Amersa: a group of researchers who wanted to launch a follow-up study, CORTEX 2, which would have been a more formalized trial with a larger sample size and more rigorous methodology and data collection procedures. And an opposing group that felt further limited trials were actually counter-productive.”
“Counter-productive how?”
June shuffles pages, going deeper into the stack. “The Implications and Future Research sections provide a look at these two competing ideologies within Amersa. The first group of scientists—which we now know recently quit Amersa—felt that the results of CORTEX were alarming enough to essentially hit the pause button on all of Amersa’s go-to-market plans. They felt there was a moral obligation to further study Labyrinth before any wide release. They concede that the small sample size could have skewed the results, especially given the possibility of preexisting underlying conditions, but that the severe nature of the outcomes and prevalence of adverse events demanded subsequent investigation.”
“And the other group?” Isaac asks.
“That’s… the troubling part. In the discussion and conclusions sections, this opposition group—the anti-CORTEX contingent—essentially concedes the points made by the CORTEX 2 advocates. However, they argue that further study is, in their words, ‘Fighting the Future.’”
“Fighting the future how?” I ask.
“The crux of the anti-CORTEX argument is that the adverse outcomes observed in the trial weren’t the most consequential findings.”
“What was?” Rose asks.
“It was what happened to everyone else,” June says. “Remember, many of these participants were Amersa employees themselves. Or family and friends. The R&D staff not only observed them in a clinical setting—and read the test results—in many cases they worked with them every day or went home to them at night. They observed changes in the subjects first-hand, outside the lab.”
“What kind of changes?” Isaac asks.
June stands and leans on the chair. “Positive changes. Memory enhancement. Increased attention and focus. Gains in problem-solving ability and spatial reasoning. Even changing social behaviors and shifts in cooperative strategies—this is observed anecdotally, but the patterns are there.
“The most interesting changes—at least to the anti-CORTEX authors—were the gains in input processing, specifically the ability to integrate multi-sensory input and a marked expansion in the volume of concurrent processing ability.”
Rose says what I’m thinking: “I’m not sure what that means.”
“Essentially, the anti-CORTEX group was most excited about the increases in cognitive processing.”
“Labyrinth basically upgraded their brains,” Isaac says.
June shrugs. “Simplistic but accurate. And the anti-CORTEX researchers were adamant that development of Labyrinth go forward—and that it not be taken offline.”
“Sounds like they were scared of withdrawal as well,” Rose says.
June points to her. “It might not be far from the truth. Just reading the discussion—and the subtext—the anti-CORTEX authors are emphatic that Labyrinth development continue and that the release not be delayed. And they hold themselves out as examples of the good it can do.”
June rounds the chair and picks up the stack of pages she hasn’t turned over. “In fact, their discussion reads almost like a manifesto from a group of zealots. It’s strange. In most publications, the methods and results sections are the longest. For this study, the bulk of what’s here is discussion and background and then predictions.”
“Predictions about what?” Isaac asks through the camera speaker.
“They’re actually the part I found most troubling. Forgive me, but I need to lay out some of what’s in the discussion section—it’s background, but it’s important. It traces the course of how our subspecies of humans became the dominant species on Earth.”
“I might have a solution to that.”
*
In our room at the hostel, I introduce Daisy to Ian and May, and everyone quickly agrees that it makes sense for the four of us to work together. May and Ian are already aware of the situation with our truck. Daisy informs us that there is really only one possibility for getting another transport: the junkyard.
“The junkyard has vehicles?” Ian asks.
“Not running ones,” Daisy replies. “But they have broken ones. And parts. We can trade for both.”
With a smile, she adds, “The guy running the junkyard can be grumpy at times, but if he’s in a good mood, he might help us.”
“It’s a lot of ifs,” Ian says.
In the silence that follows, I survey the converted classroom. While I was gone, he and May spread out all of the computer components into a sort of makeshift electronics junkyard. I sense that Ian’s frustration at his own progress on the computer and radio is coming through now.
“I don’t see what choice we have,” May says.
“Trust me,” he says, “finding parts and fixing something in this Labyrinth is easier said than done.”
“When you only have one option,” May says, “it’s therefore your best option.”
*
Outside the hostel, the wind blows and a light rain falls as the four of us make our way down the street to the junkyard. Beyond the gate, we weave through mountains of scrap metal and abandoned cars until we reach a beat-up metal shipping container with corrugated walls and spray-painted white letters that spell OFFICE.
Under the sign, someone has cut a jagged rectangular hole in the container and placed a large piece of plexiglass over it, creating a window. The makeshift window is sealed from the outside with foam and caulk.
Daisy knocks on one of the double doors, and it creaks open. A man in rain gear peers out.
Without a word, he turns and leads us into the container. Just beyond the door, there’s a sort of staging area with a grate in the floor for rain to drain.
The junkyard’s proprietor hangs his rain gear on one of the hooks welded to the container wall and marches through two layers of plastic strip curtains.
When our party has taken off our ponchos and jackets, we make our way past the plastic strips and find the man sitting behind a homemade metal desk that’s been welded together.
On the far wall, there are shelves which have been welded to the container. Below it, there’s an elevated metal work table that’s stacked high with parts.
The junkyard owner is wearing military fatigues, but they don’t have a branch or rank on them. Daisy facilitates the introductions (his name is Wally), and after we tell him what we want, he looks at the four of us for a long moment.
“Heard it before. Seen it before. Nobody ever comes back from the center.”
“Maybe it’s because they find what they need,” I tell him.
“That’s dangerous.”
“What is?”
“Hope.”
My gaze drifts over to Daisy. “Well, I’ve recently been reminded that life’s a lot harder without it.”
Wally smirks, but doesn’t say anything.
“I’ve also been reminded that when you only have one option, it’s your best option.”
Wally leans back in the chair, the front legs lifting slightly. “What exactly are you proposing?”
“You make your money repairing things and selling them. Or finding parts to sell. We can help.”
“Yeah?”
“We can scavenge the junkyard and find what you need. I assume you’ve got a list?”
“I do.”
“We do too,” Ian says quickly. “Computer and electronic parts.”
“Is that the trade?” Wally asks.
“Half of it,” I put in before Ian can say more. “We want a car too. Whatever is easiest to fix and get us back on the road.”
Wally lets the chair settle back on the container floor with a boom and sets his forearms on the welded desk.
“You don’t need a car.”
I open my mouth to respond, but he holds a hand up, pressing on.
“What you need is a transport that can withstand the storms and anything else you might run into out there.”
“I’m assuming you have something in mind?”
“I do,” he says, rising.
With that, he leads us through the two plastic curtains, and we don our rain gear and push through the creaking container doors and follow Wally through his kingdom of metal rubble.
Our journey ends at a graveyard of vehicles ranging from trucks and cars to tractor-trailers. The tires are rotting. Some are sunk in the ground as if the earth is slowly swallowing them. At the end, there’s a hulking machine that instantly makes my heart beat faster.
It’s a tan Humvee—the exact make and model as the one I was driving the day a roadside bomb tore apart my life. I stand there, staring, my heart hammering, my mouth dry.
Thanks to the face mask and goggles, my three travel companions can’t see my distress.
They wade forward, boots splashing the rain puddles as they circle the Humvee, looking it over.
Wally’s gaze is fixed on me, as if he knows, as if he’s waiting to see if I turn and run, have a breakdown, or tell them.
Instead, I steel myself and walk closer to the Humvee, to the driver’s side, and inspect the fender and the door. This Humvee was blown apart, too. I can see where large parts of it were gouged out. Metal plates have been welded on, closing some of the gaps, but there are still several openings along the side.
Wally pops the hood and begins pointing out all the parts that are missing from the engine.
“You get me the parts I need, I’ll fix this for you.”
*
Scavenging for parts in the junkyard—in the rain—is slow going. The piles of metal debris are slippery, and the pieces are hard to locate.
Luckily, the rain stops shortly after we start, and it’s just the wind we have to contend with.
As I’m crawling into the cab of a derelict box truck, I’m reminded of my work with Warren and digitally scavenging for things he can repair and sell.
With the addition of Daisy to our crew—and Wally/Warren—I’m fairly certain Amersa’s Labyrinth is somehow reading my mind. Or they’re following my every move outside the sessions and feeding that information into the game engine. That seems more likely.
Either way, it’s trouble. And I can only imagine what the group is going to say at the next meeting.
When our group here in the Labyrinth has compiled the parts Wally needs, he tells us to come back tomorrow.
By the time we reach the hostel, my health is at eight percent.
In the classroom that is our shared bedroom, Ian pores over the electronic parts he found in the junkyard (which he bartered with Wally for).
It might actually work, he mumbles as he unscrews the side of the computer tower.
“You better go,” May says to me. “We’ll be waiting when you get back.”
*
After the Labyrinth session, at home, I scour the Amersa website, looking for the man who confronted me in the bathroom. It doesn’t take long to find him. His face is on the page labeled “Leadership Team.” Same glasses. Green sweater this time. Solid white button-up.
He’s the company’s CTO or Chief Technology Officer.
Interesting.
61
Given that Amersa has sped up the pace of my Labyrinth sessions, the numbers group has decided to meet sooner and more often.
To my surprise, Isaac has opted not to join us in person. Instead, he’s tuning in via the camera feed Harold uses.
That leaves June, Rose, and me sitting around the camera, eating pizza as Isaac remotely starts the meeting.
“First,” Isaac says over the camera speaker, “Rose, did you get the blank badge?”
She reaches into her pocket and draws out a white plastic badge, holding it up to the camera. “I did.”
“Good. When you’re done with the pizza box, put it in there and throw it in the dumpster behind the building. I’ll get it. And June, I’ll send you a Signal message with the dead drop location. You should get it before work tomorrow morning.”
I can feel the tension in Isaac’s voice—well, more tense than he usually is.
“Any time gaps?” he asks.
Thankfully, there haven’t been any, but the good news stops there.
After I describe my Labyrinth sessions, we go around about what it means, but like the characters in Wally’s junkyard, we have the parts, but we can’t put them together.
“We have some new recordings,” Isaac says. “And we have a problem. Or more specifically, I have a problem.”
With that, the camera speaker begins playing a recording from Anders Larsson’s office. The person talking has a gruff, flat voice, and I instantly recognize him: it’s Terry, Amersa’s security chief.
“We’ve made some progress related to Carter. We’ve narrowed it down to a few people he was working with. We’re going to start active surveillance soon. That may well bring that particular issue to a close.”
“Good. The sooner, the better,” Larsson responds.
Isaac stops the recording. “They’re talking about me.”
“I’m assuming that’s why you’re not here in person?”
“You assume correctly.”
“What do we do?” Rose asks. She sets a slice of half-eaten pizza back in the box, her appetite seemingly deserting her.
“I don’t know,” Isaac replies. “I feel like if I quit my job, I’m outing myself, and if I go on the run, it may amount to the same thing. At the same time, none of you should be seen with me. Given what Amersa did to Lucas, I think we have to be cautious.”
“We don’t know that they’re going to find you,” Rose says.
“We have to assume they will,” Isaac responds, voice flat. “It’s just a matter of time.”
*
The following day, at lunch, June sends a Signal message to the group.
We need to meet. Tonight.
*
Six hours later, we’re sitting around the circle—June, Rose, and I eating Jersey Mike’s subs, Isaac and Harold once again joining remotely.
June sets her sandwich down, reaches into her backpack, and pulls out a stack of pages.
“I got it. The CORTEX study.”
Rose smiles. “The badge worked?”
“It did.”
June places the study between the three of us and spreads out the pages, which she’s highlighted.
“I had a chance to skim it over lunch and after work. Then I read the sections that jumped out at me. I want to spend more time with it, but what I’ve found is… troubling.”
I stare down at the rows and columns of black text, crisp against the pages, the highlighted sections glowing neon yellow under the buzzing, fluorescent lights overhead.
In the margins, June has scribbled notes in blue ink—questions, theories, and words like “neurodegeneration” and “synaptic plasticity.”
“CORTEX,” June says, “stands for Cognitive Optimization and Rewiring through Targeted Experiential eXposure. The study began roughly three years ago, and eventually grew to include 127 participants. Most were Amersa employees, family members, and, in some cases, paid volunteers. They tested early prototypes of Labyrinth—recording every session and scanning subjects’ brains before, during, and after.”
“Scanning how?” Isaac asks.
“A bit of everything. Functional MRIs and MEG before and after each play block—EEG during the live runs—plus the occasional PET scan. They even tracked their blood chemistry.”
“What were they looking for?” Rose asks.
June flips to a page filled with charts and graphs. “Neurological changes. One of the earliest findings was a shift in most subjects’ dopamine production, like what you’d see in someone with early-stage addiction.”
June turns another page. “Essentially, Labyrinth altered the way their brains processed pleasure and reward, similar to the effects of a psychoactive drug. It wasn’t just the dopamine, though. The more the subjects used Labyrinth, the more their brains rewired. Synaptic pruning started to take place.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“Synaptic pruning is a normal process during development—your brain removes less-used connections to make way for more efficient pathways. But here, Labyrinth induced it in adults, essentially rewiring their brains, changing how these people thought, what they focused on, and even how they processed emotions.”
June makes a stack of the pages she’s gone through and flips deeper into the study. “Over time, two of the subjects started showing Parkinson’s-like symptoms—tremors, memory lapses, personality shifts. There were other adverse events such as dissociative states, hyper-aggression, and something they called ‘perceptual drift,’ when the subjects had trouble differentiating the virtual world and the real one. For several subjects, after a while, they didn’t actually want to. They essentially started perceiving the real world as another version of Labyrinth, to the point of even treating people around them—family members, co-workers—more like NPCs, not real humans.”
“I’m assuming they stopped the trial,” Isaac says.
“They did—but only for those experiencing issues. They had to. And that’s actually when the worst outcomes occurred. Twelve participants experienced what can only be described as withdrawal symptoms. The team combined low-dose anxiolytics with a ‘sunset’ scenario that gradually tapered Labyrinth use over six weeks. Most stabilized; two still relapsed.”
June holds up a page with the heading Discussion and Summary of Findings beneath that. “This is when the document starts getting really strange. First, I should note that the study only had 127 participants. And they were brought in over time, and their total Labyrinth session time varied widely.”
“Why is that important?”
“The bottom line is that the study wasn’t that well-designed, and the sample size was relatively small for testing something like Labyrinth, a product with a target audience of essentially everyone on Earth. But the reasons are revealed in the discussion.”
She turns to a page with a bold heading that reads Strengths and Limitations. “The study, such as it is, began more as an internal experiment and evolved over time to be more formalized. Toward the end, there were two camps within Amersa: a group of researchers who wanted to launch a follow-up study, CORTEX 2, which would have been a more formalized trial with a larger sample size and more rigorous methodology and data collection procedures. And an opposing group that felt further limited trials were actually counter-productive.”
“Counter-productive how?”
June shuffles pages, going deeper into the stack. “The Implications and Future Research sections provide a look at these two competing ideologies within Amersa. The first group of scientists—which we now know recently quit Amersa—felt that the results of CORTEX were alarming enough to essentially hit the pause button on all of Amersa’s go-to-market plans. They felt there was a moral obligation to further study Labyrinth before any wide release. They concede that the small sample size could have skewed the results, especially given the possibility of preexisting underlying conditions, but that the severe nature of the outcomes and prevalence of adverse events demanded subsequent investigation.”
“And the other group?” Isaac asks.
“That’s… the troubling part. In the discussion and conclusions sections, this opposition group—the anti-CORTEX contingent—essentially concedes the points made by the CORTEX 2 advocates. However, they argue that further study is, in their words, ‘Fighting the Future.’”
“Fighting the future how?” I ask.
“The crux of the anti-CORTEX argument is that the adverse outcomes observed in the trial weren’t the most consequential findings.”
“What was?” Rose asks.
“It was what happened to everyone else,” June says. “Remember, many of these participants were Amersa employees themselves. Or family and friends. The R&D staff not only observed them in a clinical setting—and read the test results—in many cases they worked with them every day or went home to them at night. They observed changes in the subjects first-hand, outside the lab.”
“What kind of changes?” Isaac asks.
June stands and leans on the chair. “Positive changes. Memory enhancement. Increased attention and focus. Gains in problem-solving ability and spatial reasoning. Even changing social behaviors and shifts in cooperative strategies—this is observed anecdotally, but the patterns are there.
“The most interesting changes—at least to the anti-CORTEX authors—were the gains in input processing, specifically the ability to integrate multi-sensory input and a marked expansion in the volume of concurrent processing ability.”
Rose says what I’m thinking: “I’m not sure what that means.”
“Essentially, the anti-CORTEX group was most excited about the increases in cognitive processing.”
“Labyrinth basically upgraded their brains,” Isaac says.
June shrugs. “Simplistic but accurate. And the anti-CORTEX researchers were adamant that development of Labyrinth go forward—and that it not be taken offline.”
“Sounds like they were scared of withdrawal as well,” Rose says.
June points to her. “It might not be far from the truth. Just reading the discussion—and the subtext—the anti-CORTEX authors are emphatic that Labyrinth development continue and that the release not be delayed. And they hold themselves out as examples of the good it can do.”
June rounds the chair and picks up the stack of pages she hasn’t turned over. “In fact, their discussion reads almost like a manifesto from a group of zealots. It’s strange. In most publications, the methods and results sections are the longest. For this study, the bulk of what’s here is discussion and background and then predictions.”
“Predictions about what?” Isaac asks through the camera speaker.
“They’re actually the part I found most troubling. Forgive me, but I need to lay out some of what’s in the discussion section—it’s background, but it’s important. It traces the course of how our subspecies of humans became the dominant species on Earth.”
