Dara crouched behind a pile of sandbags. Bullets shot past her left and right. She breathed quietly as the sounds of muzzle flashes whipped around. Volley after volley pelted her cover. Suddenly, silence.
Her pursuers had to reload. She rose and pointed her gun at a masked man. He was about 20 paces away, crouched behind an old oil drum and putting a new magazine in his rifle. Dara moved her index finger to the trigger and was about to fire the fatal shot. Then an unpleasant twitch went through the back of her head.
A bullet pierced her skull. It was an intense but not at all painful sensation. The entire environment took on a dark red color and flickered a little.
Dara sighed. Out loud she spoke the word "menu" and then "exit". Her eyes went black and after a brief feeling of weightlessness, she found herself back on the couch in her small apartment. The VR stimulator had disconnected from her brain and was now restoring her real senses. With a soft click, it also disconnected from her muscle blocker implant, which glowed faintly yellow in her neck.
It was only thanks to this little chip that she didn't run blindly through the apartment devastating everything while playing. Dara took off the VR stimulator and looked at it briefly. It was a thin silver ring that she was wearing on her head a moment ago. You could also see the small coils that were on the side. They were responsible for overriding the control of sensory input and reading movement commands from the brain. At the back end was a thin, transparent cable, which was stuck in her neck a few moments ago.
Dara had had enough of shooters for now. It was time to slip into her work clothes anyway. Her shift would start in a little over an hour. She went into the bathroom pulled off her light gray sweatpants and blue top and tossed both into the corner. She looked at herself in the large mirror on the wall. Smiling back at her was a medium-sized young woman with freckles on her face.
Her green eyes were shining and her long natural red hair fell a little messy down her back. She had an athletic body and full B cups, which she touched carefully and with pride. Finally, she slipped into her favorite wool socks, put on the dark gray overalls and stepped into the pair of sturdy work boots.
It was now 7 o'clock in the evening. In an hour, her night shift would begin. She quickly ran to the nearest Superloop station and boarded the next northbound train. Dara had chosen the night shift voluntarily and had not worked any other shift since her first day on the job.
She was a loner and preferred the company of other people only in virtual reality. However, she had to admit to herself that she sorely missed real sex. The last time she had sex was a little over a year ago. There she was still with her then boyfriend Aaron.
The sex with him was incredible and it has haunted her ever since as a memory she can't escape and secretly doesn't want to. As good as the sex was, the rest went poorly, which eventually led to the end of their relationship. Dara had not been able to gather enough social energy since then to get involved with another person in her life again. She never heard from Aaron again after that.
The train came to a halt and a synthetic-sounding female voice announced the name of the station: "ATEM Industrial Park". Dara worked for ATEM, the tech company that now owned half the world. ATEM started as a small startup in the early days of social media and had been growing steadily ever since.
By now, they had a monopoly on all VR technology. Almost everyone in the world was diving into ATEM's virtual worlds every day to meet friends, be entertained, or live out dirty fantasies. Dara had already lost count of how many times she had visited virtual fetish parties, BDSM dungeons and cuddle orgies.
But virtual sex was one of the few things that still couldn't be simulated realistically enough. It just didn't compare to reality. The breathtakingly realistic worlds and NPCs that were almost indistinguishable from real people were all the more compelling in return.
As more and more people wanted to immerse themselves in virtual reality, ATEM reached a seemingly insurmountable limit with its computing capacity. It simply wasn't possible to provide that much hardware for the millions of AIs that would populate the virtual world. Fortunately, they quickly came up with a solution.
The scientists at ATEM discovered that the human brain was ideally suited as a processor for artificial intelligences. Since humans never use all areas of their brain at the same time, it was possible to use the unused areas for the ATEM AIs.
ATEM offered people to spend their lives permanently in a virtual world without worries and suffering. The only compensation was to make the unused brain areas available to ATEM. It was not difficult to predict that this service would be used primarily by people who had become disconnected from society or were stuck in life. This had caused much ethical debate and calls for it to be banned.
But in the end it prevailed and became the norm. Then, when computing power ran out again, there wasn't even an outcry when ATEM started to change their terms and conditions. Since then, ATEM gained full control over the participant's bodies.
Since the people were not aware of the outside world, ATEM began to breed them with each other. The resulting offspring was also connected to virtual reality and used as an AI processor. Problems with insufficient computing capacity never occured again.
That's where Dara was working now, at the Human Coporocessing Facility. She stood in front of a gigantic warehouse that stretched almost to the horizon in both directions. A huge ATEM logo was printed on it in the company's blue color.
As she stepped inside through a inconspicuous door, a humid warmth hit her. This was the best environment for the "biological hardware", she was told back then in the introductory training course. The temperature was a constant 32 °C / 89 °F.
Dara didn't mind, but she unzipped her overalls to just above her belly button to get some cooling. This was against safety regulations, but who was supposed to control that.
The entire facility was practically fully automated and she would not encounter anyone here. Therefore, it did not bother her that her black lace bra and some bare skin could be seen through the gap. Dara made her way to her workstation. Her only task was to monitor the reproductive process.