Two days later I broke the bridge simulation and escaped. Sort of.
It happened after hours, once Control had gone off for the night, or what I assumed was night, anyway. I was running one of the day’s previous simulations, this one requiring me to navigate the Chandler into a docking position at a space station. It’s the sort of maneuver that I’d done dozens if not hundreds of times, both simulated and real. There was no challenge to it whatsoever.
So I did what anyone doing a simulated run does when they’re bored and there’s no penalty for misbehavior:
I started wrecking things.
First I rammed the space station with the Chandler, because I was interested, purely for the science, how realistic the impact would be in terms of the simulation’s rendering of classical physics.
Answer: not bad. I had limited control of outside sensors, so I saw both the Chandler and the space station crumple nicely, with appropriate bursts of metal and glass due to explosive decompression as the Chandler plowed through the station. My sensors did not indicate the Chandler’s engines overloading, however, which would have created a nice bit of mayhem.
So I ran the simulation again, this time giving the Chandler enough distance to make for some impressive acceleration before I hit the space station.
This time the Chandler exploded. All my control windows flashed red before blanking out, never a positive sign for the structural integrity of the ship. The simulation did not detail either economic or human losses, but I doubt anyone in the station sections I hit, or the Chandler crew, would have survived.
The Chandler crew didn’t survive already, that other part of my brain said.
I ignored it.
The next run-through I was curious what would happen if I attacked the station. The simulations I’d run didn’t require me to operate any of the weaponry systems, so while Control was around I hadn’t bothered with them.
But I had control of them anyway, and they were fully operational, so. In the next simulation I launched three missiles at the station, just to see what would happen.
A minute later my damage sensors went bright red as ten missiles from the station struck the Chandler at various critical spots, taking out weapons, engines, crew compartments, and outside sensors. About a second after that my screens went blank, because in this simulation the Chandler had just been turned into an expanding cloud of debris.
Well, that was rude, I thought, and would have smiled if I could.
Several more simulations after that, attacking the space station, then attacking other ships at the station, firing at shuttles, basically any combination of tactics that involved surprising someone with a missile. All the simulations ended pretty much the same way: the Chandler being turned into a missile pincushion.
All right, fine, let’s try this, I thought, and ran the simulation again.
This time I didn’t ram the station, or fire on it. I just slid the Chandler into docking position, and waited until the simulation gave me the “victory condition” signal—the signal that I had done what the simulation required of me.
Then I launched a barrage of missiles at the space station, aiming specifically for its weapon systems, the ones I could see visually, but also the ones I couldn’t, going off the data I had of the space station. I timed the missiles so they would impact all the weapons systems at the same time.
Which they did. And then, while everything was blowing up nicely, I opened up the throttles on the engines and headed straight into the mess.
And as the Chandler made first contact with the skin of the space station, something happened.
Everything went black.
Not just the captain’s screens, which would have indicated that the Chandler had been destroyed. No, everything went black. There was the simulation, and then, for several full seconds, there it wasn’t.
I spent those several seconds in the complete blackness wondering what the hell had just happened.
Then the bridge simulation popped up again around me.
I knew what had just happened: I’d crashed the simulator.
And then, I’m not going to lie to you—my brain just went off.
Here is the thing about that bridge simulator: The bridge simulator was now my whole world. I lived in it, running simulations, and nothing else. I couldn’t leave it—I was in it, but I didn’t have any control over it other than being able to run the simulations Control gave me to run. I couldn’t step outside of the simulation, or close it out, or mess with the code in any way. I was trapped in it. It was my prison.
But when I crashed the simulator, it booted me out. For a few seconds there, I was somewhere else.
Where else?
Well, what happens when a program crashes? You get booted back into the system the program runs on.