Hyperlands.net

So there you have it, my first ever finished story. As I said in the introduction I’m still not really happy with it. Why? Well for one the writing still seems a bit, well childish to me. And also while the plot was always intended to leave several things a bit vague (like who was the man that destroyed the DataScape system) it seems to me that the vagueness doesn’t really add any thing to the story.
Well enough of why I’m not happy with it and some of it’s history. The name came first and then the story was built around the DataScape system, which right from the start was going to a sate of the art virtual reality system. When I had this idea set I needed a reason for the system to be built, and the military seemed the ideal customers for it. This part of the plot has stayed steady since version 1 (finished some time in 1991). The rest of the story has changed considerably from version to version.
Originally the ‘entity’ inside the system was going to be a manifestation of Satan him self. This idea came from a friend who pointed out that if you assign a number to each letter of the alphabet, starting with A as six and count up in sixes, then add up all the letters in the word COMPUTER you get 666, the number of beast. He then showed me revelation chapter 13, all the bits about needing to know the number of the beast to trade, could well mean that in an age of electronic commerce unless you have Satan’s ‘credit card number’ you’d be stuck. Interesting…
Personally I don’t believe a word of it, but it makes for and interesting idea. By the way the friend you suggested this happens to work in the computer industry… Any way versions 2 and 3 incorporated this idea with the revelation 13 at the end of the story and a few vague references to 666 (or 29A in hex) in the story.
But this idea was dropped because one it seemed half baked to me (why manifest your self in a V.R system, why not a banking computer?) and two an other idea surfaced. It came from a BBC TV series called Big Science. They had a piece on about artificial life, cellular automaton and Chris Langtons work. This my first contact with this fascinating area, and it redirected to whole story. I wrote the whole pub scene in one night after seeing this (and two pages in one night is a lot for me!).
But back to the story of the story. Versions 3 and 4 were based around this premise. Version 4 I was sure was the last one, but about a year or so after finishing it I came across a new influence. The X-files started showing on BBC, and this gave me a whole new shine on the story. The ‘entity’ didn’t just spring out of the digital data, it was created, and this gave scope for conspiracy elements in the story. ‘They’, the creators of the ‘entity’ wanted to control and use it to there own ends. But as I’ve said above this seems to me to be the weakest element in the plot now.
So there you have it a quick 5 year history of my first story