NewU Pt. 07

"I knew you'd look!" Evie laughed from behind the door.

"No wonder you and him get on so well." I laughed, nodding towards Jimmy and tying the drawstring before collecting Evie's clothes and passing them around the door. The lyrical, almost musical sound of her thanking me echoed out of the bathroom just before being replaced with the sound of the shower being turned on.

I arched an eyebrow at Jimmy as he turned back to face me and he knew what I was thinking. "I think he's pissed 'cos he can't join her in there," he whispered comically to Lori. She only laughed again.

"I think I'm gonna have to invest in a deadbolt," I said with a wry grin as I walked over to the kitchen, flipping the switch on the Keurig and pulling a bottle of Dr. P from the fridge. "Keep out unwanted visitors."

"Might be a good idea. Wait, you're drinking coffee?"

"Not for me," I answered as the machine hissed and hummed to life. I poured a large glass for myself before putting the Dr. P back into the fridge. "You want one?" I asked, looking up at Lori.

"Oh, no thank you. I already drank this morning." She winked at Jimmy who almost choked on his own tongue. I didn't need to be able to read minds to know what they were talking about. "So," she said, drawing out the syllable as she leaned over the kitchen counter, her dress from the night before doing nothing to hide her cleavage as she looked at me. "Have a good night, last night?"

"I did." I smiled back, making a point of maintaining eye contact as Jimmy did the exact opposite.

"Care to share the details?"

"Nope," I said with a wink.

"Aw, come on," she teased. "You know she's gonna give them to me anyway."

"No, I won't," Evie called out as the door to the bathroom opened and she stepped back into the room. She looked dazzling with her damp hair tied in a loose ponytail and cast over one shoulder, still wearing my shirt over her top from the night before. I had almost forgotten how good she looked in those jeans, but there was something indescribably sexy about the way she looked in my shirt. She smiled and blushed a little as she noticed me looking before turning her attention back to Lori.

"Spoil sport." Lori playfully pouted. "What if I told you what we got up to last night?"

Jimmy choked on his tongue again.

"No, thanks," Evie and I said in unison as she stepped off the raised part of the room which contained my bed and into the kitchen area, kissing me on the cheek as I handed her a cup of steaming coffee and not questioning for a second how I knew how she liked it.

Even Jimmy noticed the smile on my face as he tried to remember how to breathe.

Lori huffed and checked the time on her phone. "Oh, we've got to be going soon."

"Have we?" Evie asked, looking confused.

"Yeah, dress shopping, remember?"

"Err... No. What dress?" Evie was squinting now, eyeing Lori from over her coffee cup.

"The dress... for the thing?"

"What thing?!? What are you talking about?"

A simple perusal of Lori's thoughts told me exactly what she meant. There was no dress, and there was no 'thing,' as if anyone needed mind-reading powers to tell that. Lori genuinely wanted to grill her friend for the details, not necessarily the sordid, blow-by-blow account of our time together, but all she knew for sure was that Evie had spent the night. She was excited and happy for her friend. Apparently, Jimmy had spent a good portion of the previous evening telling Lori how much of an outstanding guy I was, so neither of them was entirely sure if we had done more than just sleep.

It would appear that Jimmy's vow of celibacy hadn't survived the night with Lori either, and I had to force myself to tune out of her mind as pictures of her own escapades began a slide show behind her eyes. Contrary to 'looking for trouble,' as they had put it, they were up the stairs and into Jimmy's apartment less than five minutes after we were. I managed to tune out at the point where Lori had shredded Jimmy's shirt in her long-awaited conquest of my friend. As far as I could tell, the offending garment was still in pieces on his floor.

I did a quick mental sweep of the room. Lori was joyous; absolutely delighted that she had finally scored with Jimmy, but also inordinately pleased that Evie had come out of her shell a bit, and with an apparently decent guy, no less. Evie was in an almost euphoric state of mind. She thought she should be feeling awkward as she had done in every other one of her previous relationships after the first night together, and more so at the arrival of our guests. But the only thing that was even remotely concerning her about the whole situation was how utterly content she felt. She felt like she belonged.

Jimmy was just plain happy. Jimmy had gotten laid. Jimmy was always happy when he got laid.

I chuckled as the back and forth between the two ladies continued. By now, Evie had caught on but was still making Lori work for it. The slightest hint of a smile tugged at the corner of her lips.

"Evie, how could you forget? I've been talking about this... err... wedding for ages."

"Wedding? This is the first I'm hearing about it. Who is getting married?"

"My... um... my cousin."

"Oh, Jonny?" Evie asked, still trying to hide her smirk. "I thought he was already married."

"No, Gwen."

"Isn't Gwen like, fifteen years old?"

"Shut up, we're going dress shopping." Lori had given up on maintaining the lie. Evie rolled her eyes and finally let her smile show as she looked towards me. "Oh, I hate you." Lori had finally caught on and poked her tongue out as the rest of us burst into laughter.

Evie put down her finished cup of coffee and stepped towards me. "Well, apparently, I'm going dress shopping," she laughed and leaned up to kiss my cheek again. A small squeak escaped her mouth as I turned my head and pressed my lips against hers, surprising her.

"Alright, you two. Get a room." Jimmy chuckled.

"You're in my room." I quipped back before turning my attention back to Evie. She had picked up my phone and was tapping the display, waiting a couple of seconds before her phone dinged and then repeated the procedure on her own.

"There, numbers exchanged," she said with a smile. "I'll text you later in the week?" Her smile faltered a little as her confidence left her for a moment. As much as she knew how she felt, she was suddenly worried that she had overstepped.

"I'm looking forward to it," I smiled back before kissing her again. The two ladies said their goodbyes, Lori and Jimmy sharing a chaste kiss before they headed out the door. With one look over her shoulder at me and another happy smile, Evie followed Lori out of the apartment.

Jimmy turned and looked at me. "Should I even bother to ask?" he smirked.

"Nope," I smiled back and made my way over to my desk.

"Thought not." He laughed before crossing the room, dropping himself onto the couch, and loading up the Xbox as I went back to work on my college project.

* * * * * * * * * *

A games engine, for those not in the know, is a difficult concept to explain. Imagine, for a moment, that you are trying to build a house. You don't just walk up at an empty plot and start building. There are zoning laws and planning permission to take into account, the availability of power and water supplies, the cost of materials, tools, and equipment, architect and engineering plans, and even the laws of physics and the local weather come into play. Then there are the tools--where you get them from, knowing how to use them, which ones are needed, and who is going to operate them. When you build a house, a hell of a lot of work has already happened before the first brick is ever laid.

Essentially, this groundwork -- for lack of a better description -- is what a game engine is: it is a platform on which a game developer can build their game. It determines the level of graphics that can be used in the game, the number and complexity of the assets within it, the physics algorithms that will determine how each of them will interact, and the coding structure that will allow the programmers to develop their games.

Load up any game, any one at all, anything from Minecraft to the newest Grand Theft Auto title, and what you are looking at are the assets -- the blocks, the people, the cars, the buildings, the guns, the everything -- interacting with each other via the physics engine and rendered through the graphics engine in a way that the programmer wants them to so that you get a playable game.

It is the architecture behind any game. Maybe that would be a better way of putting it. But however you wanted to describe it, that is what I was trying to build. The problem with game engines is that very few of them are truly unique. Almost all of them are improvements on previous iterations and even the new ones that had been built from the ground up still heavily borrowed their construction from older generations. It was very much a case of 'this part works, so we will keep that, but we can improve this other part and call it new.' The one area in which these engines could be distinguished from their predecessors was in the field of artificial intelligence.

Now, I know what you're thinking: we aren't talking about some science fiction Skynet type of AI here, just a generic -- albeit elaborate -- system of "if this happens, then do that" to the point where the computer is able to manage the game assets without the programmer having to account for every single variable in a world of increasingly complex games. The final area of improvement was size. The better the engine, the bigger the game that could be fitted onto it. That is why even open-world games like Grand Theft Auto, or the Fallout series had to have border. The maps couldn't go on forever.

But what if they could? Sports games took up a large chunk of the gaming market, but there are only so many football fields in existence. It was the ever-increasing number of 'sandbox' games and first-person shooters that dominated the market. What if the next Modern Warfare game had the ability to generate huge, randomized maps, each one different from the last? What if the next GTA spanned not just a single intricate city, but an entire country? What if the newest addition to the Fallout or Skyrim franchises weren't restricted to a single, albeit large, map, but instead spanned an entire planet? And what if the game's AI was capable of populating those areas with enough visual detail and randomly generated tasks and quests -- without a programmer's input -- to keep them interesting and playable? That is what I was aiming for.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it, I have said many times throughout this story that I was a shy and isolated child, mainly thanks to my parents, but I had tuned out my own bleak existence by delving into the world of video games. I had mastered every single one in my possession. I had built soaring cities whose residents lived in perpetual bliss. I had led grand armies on historic campaigns. I had battled demons, monsters, and zombie hordes and lived to tell the tale. From the seclusion of my bedroom, I had dominated galaxies and conquered worlds.

But as much as I loved them, as much as I had enjoyed every single game, each one had eventually ended. It didn't matter if I deleted my progress and started again or how complex the story's programming was, there was always the same plot, the same strategies, and there was always the same endpoint. Eventually, I would get bored and move onto the next pastime, that game being relegated to a shelf from whence it would rarely escape.

I was aiming to build something endless, or as close to endless as could be identified by a single player. There was only one game out at the time that came anywhere close to what I was imagining, and that was No Man's Sky. It was revolutionary in that it had randomly generated worlds, trillions of them. So many that no single player, not even a huge group of players, could ever hope to visit them all. In fact, it was so large that it was unlikely that every player combined could still visit every world. Yet, it was still limited, these worlds only had a certain number of variables to differentiate between them and what you did when you got there was restricted because most of the game engine was dedicated to its admittedly impressive size, rather than the functionality of the game. You could go to a new planet, walk around for a bit, maybe fight some local wildlife, build some shit, and that was about it. After the first thirty planets or so, it became quite repetitive.

It was playing this game that had first given me the idea. As I took off from my elaborately constructed base, flew out of the atmosphere, docked with the space station that was exactly the same in every system, sold my mined minerals for credits -- remembering that I had nothing left to spend them on - and hopped back into my ship to repeat the process for the umpteenth time, a thought occurred to me. What if each one of these planets was alive? What if every single one of them had the intricate detail of Grand Theft Auto, the backstory and questline of Fallout, and the cultural depth of Skyrim? What if each of them was a living, breathing, distinctive planet where people could be met, missions could be found and completed, and where whole story arcs could be discovered, lived through and completed before moving onto the next world instead of moving onto the next game?

"Isn't the whole thing a bit... much?" Jimmy asked as another green mutant thing fell to pieces in some overly dramatic cinematic mini-cut scene as he battled through Fallout 4. "I mean, look at this game: hours of fun." He grinned maniacally as he dispatched another irradiated monstrosity.

I spun around in my office chair to face him. Jimmy had said very little about the previous night since the girls had left an hour or so ago. He hadn't mentioned Evie at all, nor Lori, nor anything else that would have seemed completely out of character for me before the accident. He had evidently gotten used to my new playboy lifestyle better than I had. He had taken to regularly walking the few feet from his apartment to mine to play games simply because I had the nicer TV, and it would appear that this was what prompted his visit today, although the timing of it was all Lori. I didn't mind; in fact, I enjoyed his company, but with the third year of our course already a few weeks in, I was getting more and more concerned that his pep-talk from Professor Jacobs had gone to his head. As far as I could tell, he hadn't even looked at his final project, let alone done any work towards it. But still, his question was a valid one.

"All right, Fallout 4..." I started in reply. "It's a good game, there is no arguing about that. You've got the main quest which can only really be done in one or two ways up until a certain point, which you have to do, then it branches off into another point you have to do, then you can finish the game in three or four different ways..."

"Don't forget the side quests," He interrupted.

"And the side quests," I conceded with a roll of my eyes and a shake of my head. "But once you have finished the main quest in every different way, found and finished every side mission, found all the cool shit they have hidden in the map, built the best base you can, and completed all the DLC... then what?"

"What do you mean?"

"What do you do next? You can't buy another game, the map and the enemies can't really be changed, there is no real progress after the end of the story... So what do you do?"

"I dunno," he said with a shrug. "Start again, maybe?"

"And how many times could you do that before you got tired of the game completely?"

Jimmy frowned for a second as he considered the question. With his mind occupied elsewhere, he failed to take cover, his character taking a round to the head, which in turn, unceremoniously blew up. "Fuck!" He spat, throwing the controller down onto the couch next to him. "All right, I see your point. Maybe four or five times before I'd get bored of it."

"Okay, so what if, once you have finished in Boston, where the game is set, you take a walk over to Chicago or maybe down to New York. There are things to see and do on the way, maybe even whole story lines before you even get there. And once you've finished there, you decide to head down to Phili or keep heading west? What if, after seeing a dozen different cities, you decide to go back to Boston and the house you built is still there, what if there is a whole new story waiting for you that is based around the decisions you made the first time you were there? What if the faction you sided with and the decisions you made led to a real difference to the rest of the game world? What if these cities and the country around them are laid out so realistically, that you could actually go and find your real house in the game?"

"Dude, we're in the UK, I don't think Trans-Atlantic flights are still running in a post-apocalyptic reality." He shrugged again. I arched an eyebrow at him. "All right, yes, that does sound pretty cool. But c'mon, there are whole departments of eggheads with huge budgets working on these kinds of things in some massive software companies. Isn't this a bit much for you to be taking on for your final project?"

"Probably," I replied with a nonchalant shrug of my own and turned back to the computer.

Jimmy could only blink a few times before picking up the controller and resuming his quest from the last checkpoint. "Well, as long as you've thought about it."

It says a lot of my arrogance and sense of invincibility in those days to think that if Jimmy had been paying a little bit more attention, he would have seen lines of entirely self-invented code sprawling across my screen as if by magic. One trick I had learned through my many conquests over the past few weeks was to be able to look like I was doing something in the real world while being busy in either my bunker or in the mindscape, but even so, the typing of my fingers on the keyboard in no way correlated to the lines of code that were flying across the screen.

In my bunker, Jeeves and I were busy. My abilities and the self-editing aspect of my bunker had given me more than just a comprehensive understanding of computer game development. It had allowed me to understand the ways that a computer's software works on a fundamental level. Specifically, it allowed me to understand what a computer was capable of and it came as something of a surprise to me to find that modern computer hardware is grossly underutilized. We have all heard the rumor that humans only use 10 percent of their brain's capacity. And, apparently, the same could be said for computers. The way that coding systems were being used was unbelievably inefficient. and by writing a totally new coding language that streamlined the way that software and hardware interacted, I could speed up the process exponentially. More speed meant better performance and what I was creating was the equivalent of jet engine power in a propeller-powered world. It wasn't just faster; it was a completely new way of doing it.

"Have you given any thought to your project yet?" I asked without looking up. "Time is a-ticking."

"Mine is already almost finished." He answered with a smug grin as he wandered the electronic wasteland on the TV.

Even I was incapable of processing that nugget of information and working at the same time, so I turned around to face him with a look of utter astonishment on my face. "You're gonna have to run that one by me again." I said after a few blinks of my own.

Jimmy remembered to pause the game this time before turning back to face me, his smirk remaining firmly fixed to his face. "It's simple, I take the virtual reality interfaces for games like Modern Warfare, alter the code a little bit to make them more realistic... ammo count, health bars, that kind of thing, and then write up an essay on how this could replace training for the military or help with post combat therapies. Aside from writing up the theory, most of the work has already been done." he said with a triumphant look.