Quarantine

I just felt it was time to post about an idea for a story I've been working on for a while called Quarantine. Maybe posting it will help formulate it better into a more coherent story.

This story takes place in the not-so-far future. In this world technology has advanced so that we can "dive" into the human mind. I haven't decided if this technology is wide-spread or restricted, but it exists. Through government funding, and the dramatic rise in crime rates and life-sentences due to a failing economy, prisons are being rigged with the ability to house large numbers of prisoners in a restricted area in which the prisoners are connected to a computer using the "dive" technology. While connected to the super computer, the prisoners are put into an induced comatose state and given basic survival care.

While connected to the super computer, the prisoners' conciousness is moved deep into a simulated world. Inside this new world, prisoners are given a chance to build a new, simulated life. Most use this chance to make something of themselves and learn a lesson or two while some reject the new world and revert to their old habits of criminal activity. The new world is primal. Everything must be built by hand and nothing but basic resources are supplied by the administrators of the new world. There is nothing different in this world except that time passes much more quickly than in the real world (I'm thinking 2 days for every one in RL but it might be more like X4).

Eventually the program is shutdown because the prisoners are almost useless inside the world and funding begins to slow. The final cut results when the creators of the new world discover there is no way to return a person injected into the new world back to their body. The programs assosiated with death and "retrieval" (the return of someone to their body), which worked alright in beta stages have become corrupted and fail to excecute successfully. In the end, the government decides to host the power required to maintain the new world until all the prisoners' have deceased.

Unfortunately, the prisoners within the new world do not age normally. The remain stagnant while the body ages outside in the real world. Thus, even if the prisoners were to awaken they would be awakening from fit, young, healthy bodies to dusty, old, worn ones tested by years of being bed ridden. The debate to just shutdown the computer entirely is still bouncing around the courts with arguments as to whether or not the people are actually salvageable or are forever bound to electronic existence.

Key things of note are: the people inside the new world can be contacted by the real world, the new world can be manipulated physically to some degree by real world technitions, there are a small amount of programs that resemble people within the new world that create order when nessesary but this enforcement is largely uninvolved with 95% of happenings within the new world. The only problems that the enforcement team deal with are A) severe disturbances and B) illegal activity.

Now, time passes much faster in the new world and soon the prisoners build a whole new world that functions much like the real world, just in a more rustic environment. I was thinking almost like a modern medieval experience... but more harsh. This is a realm ruled by former criminals after all.

Next time I'll post the primary plot for Quarantine.