Free Vesta - Painworld by Jennifer Jane Pope Page A

‘Well I can assure you, by the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll feel like you’ve lived another complete lifetime.’
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    â€˜It’s still not quite right,’ Ellen said, relaxing back into the deep armchair. ‘I mean, the action’s all very convincing at the time, but those blackouts between scenes are a bit off-putting.’
    â€˜Yeah,’ Lianne agreed, nodding. ‘It’s all too much like isolated video clips. There’s no proper build up.’
    Marlon stood up from where he had been perching on the arm of Nadia’s long sofa and paced across to the huge fireplace. He turned and faced his waiting audience and eight pairs of eager eyes sparkled back at him. ‘I understand what you’re telling me,’ he said, ‘and I guessed it was coming, but it’s just a matter of time now.’
    â€˜How much time?’ Nadia asked, crossing her long legs and smiling encouragingly. Marlon gave a small shrug.
    â€˜A day - two at most,’ he replied. ‘As you will all doubtless appreciate, my energies initially have been concentrated on setting up the hardware itself and then developing a software package powerful enough to handle what amounts to an entire new world. VESTA is so far in advance of anything else in her field and now has the capacity required, as well as the necessary processing speed, but as you so rightly say, she does not have all the necessary background resources.
    â€˜To date, I have managed to programme her with sufficient data to create quite a variety of scenarios, but this all takes time. Now I have to concentrate on getting enough additional data into place to enable VESTA’s world to become continuous, without breaks and with all the subtleties of build-up and apprehension that the real world contains.’
    â€˜Sounds like a huge undertaking,’ Paul said. ‘I’m no computer buff, but I understand enough to know that what you’re talking about is no one or two day job.’
    Marlon nodded. ‘Ordinarily,’ he said, ‘you’d be perfectly correct in that assumption.’ He made a wry face and a touch of red appeared in his cheeks. ‘However,’ he went on, ‘I long ago gave up on the concept of “ordinary”.
    â€˜The idea of a realistic virtual world is not a new one and I have been working on various aspects for quite some while now, even before I first met Nadia and she agreed to finance the project to a conclusion. Of course, with my own limited resources the big stumbling block was always constructing the hardware, without which I could only ever test out the main software programme in theory.
    â€˜However, I was always well aware of the fact that, once the main system was in place and working, realism would require that VESTA digested a massive amount of background material, the sort of amount, as Paul suggests, that would require hundreds, if not thousands, of man hours work. However, computers should save labour, not create it, and so I used much of my then spare time in developing a little programme ready to cope with that.
    â€˜I shan’t baffle you with the intricacies of what I perfected. Just suffice it to say that this little wizard will not only accept material from a variety of sources, it will actually go out and actively seek, evaluate, dissemble and repackage anything it finds that fits within a certain set of parameters I’ve given it. It is also capable of making comparisons and adjustments to those parameters, altering its predestined agenda as it goes.’
    â€˜That’s artificial intelligence!’ Simon Prescott exclaimed, his gaunt frame suddenly tensing with excitement. ‘Good grief, man, you could write your own ticket in the world with that!’
    Marlon shook his head. ‘Not quite yet,’ he said. ‘Intelligence suggests an ability to think and react to any given situation, no matter how new and how