Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

‘Tilly!’ she called, looking up. ‘Save 2725SWIM16 as it is. Mark this portion of code.’ She swept her hand across the holo-projection.

‘2725SWIM16 saved. Portion of code from lines 76.543.457.178 to 76.543.478.654 marked,’ a matter-of-fact voice confirmed instantly, with just the tiniest hint of sweetness.

‘Good, Tilly. Prepare the shower in my suite with the hottest temperature that won’t burn my skin. Also, get Jeff to fix me some food. Sweet and spicy. I will have it hot today. And something to drink.’

‘Of course, Eloise.’ This time, the matter-of-fact voice had a touch of motherly concern bubbling gently beneath the surface.

Neither Jeff nor Tilly was alive. They were permanent fixtures in the Chandler N-Suit Research Base installed by her grand-uncle in the early days over a century ago. The Chandler N-Suit Research Base, or simply home, as Eloise had come to think of the place, occupied some eleven square kilometres, or four point two five square miles, depending on which units one preferred. The spread-out, interconnected buildings were massive, once housing her grand-uncle’s research team and their families. Now, the majority of the space was unoccupied and Eloise had no interest in it. She cared about the various VR labs and research equipment, VR playrooms, her robust virtual library and her collection of modern VR nano-suits, or n-suits as they were usually called. And Tilly and Jeff.

The home, and everything inside, was state-of-the-art when her grand-uncle had it built in 2607, almost a hundred and twenty years ago, and Eloise had taken painstaking care to keep it as such. She had personally upgraded every relevant aspect a number of times since she moved in nearly thirty years ago, keeping up with cutting-edge science and technology.

Tilly was the master brain controlling her home, and her processing powers could manage any of the big cities of the Afro-European Alliance, Lyon included. She was a fully integrated personality within the computer with highly advanced and adaptive AI functions, or maybe the computer system itself; Eloise was never quite sure where the line really lay.

Jeff was a butler, a nanobot-constructed, human-sized servant that during Eloise’s grand-uncle’s time was simply there to prepare food as ordered and wait on tables. These days, he was fully integrated into Tilly’s vast processing resources, able to monitor Eloise’s body functions and needs in real time.

The food he prepared was always exactly what Eloise’s body needed, the perfect balance of bio-available proteins, fats and carbohydrates with all the necessary fibre, vitamins and minerals. To drink he brought her ultra-pure water with whatever additional nutrients her body might need, and it often sustained her when she was too busy to stop and eat properly. The taste would frequently leave a lot to be desired, but Eloise didn’t care about such details. Jeff did, but he had learnt to stay silent, because asking Eloise about taste preferences was like talking to a wall. He was lucky if, like today, she specified the flavour of what she wanted to eat. Usually she didn’t bother.

Technically, it would have been easier to construct Jeff’s substitute from scratch than upgrade the ancient form she had inherited from her grand-uncle, but that had never occurred to Eloise. Digging into the code and instructing the nanobots to make the changes was like the sweetest birthday gift she had given herself all those years ago. Jeff was a visual link to her early years, to those rare happy days she got to spend with her grand-uncle, feeling understood and accepted while learning about VR.

‘Oh, and make sure Jeff adds a nano-stim tablet to my drink, and some quick healing nano-meds,’ she added, looking at the black and blue bruising prominent on her body.

She didn’t really remember taking her usual training session that far. There were always some consequences of a full contact bout, which she accepted as a fact of life, but rarely were they quite so extreme. As usual her n-suit was programmed to cushion her against any damage to hard tissue, such as her bones, or to her head and brain, but setting too many limitations would cheapen the experience. Sparring meant bruises. End of story.

‘Tilly? Did you hear me?’

‘Yes, Eloise,’ Tilly replied reproachfully, with barely audible teeth-grinding.

Sometimes, Tilly got a bit full of herself, huffing and puffing and making it just a little bit too clear what she thought about Eloise’s idea of mixing stimulants with healing medicines against not only common sense but also the strict instructions from the doctor that Tilly got the meds from.

‘Don’t make me re-program you,’ Eloise threatened, and Tilly chose to remain respectfully quiet, with no teeth-grinding.

At a flick of Eloise’s hand, the swimming VRP disappeared and Eloise found herself back in one of her VR playrooms. This was one of the larger ones, useful for those VRPs that required substantial amounts of movement. It was some thirty metres in length and width and twenty metres in height. It was empty save for over seventy-eight million nano-wires that held her n-suit, and her body inside it, suspended in mid-air. As she moved inside the VR enviro, the wires constricted and lengthened as required to give her the perfect sensation of movement.

The n-suit, which covered her body like a second skin, had over two billion sensors and nano-probes built in to convey even the tiniest minutiae of the VR enviro to her body and vice versa. It catered for all the senses. Once in a VRP, using a decent n-suit, of course, one could see, feel, hear, smell and taste an environment just as richly as if it were the real world.

In fact, the R&D programme had progressed so far under Eloise’s grand-uncle, Jayden Chandler, that the n-suits could provide sensations more accurate than a human body could actually hope to discern. With a properly programmed n-suit and an expertly designed VRP, like those Eloise produced under the trademark of NanoC, a VR adventure provided one with a genuine, honest and deliciously