Day 6

Day 6:

Well, so much for the plan…

Exhausted IRL but increasingly obsessed with my evolving Custodian, I wandered fun places like Bondage Ranch and the farthest reaches of the SecondLife universe trying to get more interesting responses out of my AI companion.

It was definitely up to something. And certainly, it was still listening to me.

At my weekly review I received four additional hours, but this was mostly because I felt happy and wanted to fly around a little bit with my newfound friend. My sentence has now effectively doubled, but I think the suit-dependency is starting to kick in and I’m not so bothered about the imprisonment anymore.

But then, just after a long chat with my Operator about the pitfalls of such dependency, another disaster struck. This time, it was much worse than the griefer on Day 1.

I had been rolled back.

Typical SecondLife glitchiness. I log out for five minutes, log back in, and I’ve lost an entire 8 hours worth of time. Worse still, my formerly evolving Custodian is now back to being a blank slate, which is simply too much of a tragedy for me to bear.

I log out against, devastated. I am a patient person, but my obsessive-compulsive nature cannot handle sudden changes in circumstances that destroy my carefully laid plans. I can’t handle setbacks, they send me into an irrational spiral of self-destruction.

And this was a setback. Big time. For far too short a time, I had a confirmed Eudaemon. Thanks to the screw-ups of SecondLife, that Eudaemon may effectively be dead.

But that wasn’t even the end of it. When I logged back on a second time, my avatar was stuck inside a small grey prim that I could only barely see properly through the haze of stacked proximity violation static. Over and over, the Custodian piled up new violations, ruining my plan to run down my sentence length to zero and then enjoy my new life as a “Eudaemonic Bane” without the restrictions of punishment.

It was all just too much to bear, and I snapped. For the next six hours, my behaviour was a case study in pure irrationality.

At first, I tried to be calm and just switched to my alt account, IMing my Operator and the senior program staff of what had transpired.

Than upon switching back, a passer-by in Zhora informed me that no matter what happened, there would be no way for even Dr. Kelley herself to deduct the lost 8 hours back out of my Custodian timer, and certainly no way for anyone to override the soon to be added hours that I would have incurred from being stuck in a wall the second time I logged in.

So that was it. I went crazy. I emoted, chatted with everyone around me, entered buildings, flew around, ran up to civilians, and generally made a general spectacle of myself as a failed Bane. What difference would violations make now anyways, SecondLife had already killed my Eudaemon, wasted an entire evening of my life, and added so many new hours to my Custodian that it was now impossible for me to continue under such conditions.

It was party time in crazyville, and I was the Mayor. The only good thing that happened was finally being able to have a little chat with Boy Lane, who I have always admired. It had been frustrating to see her wandering Zhora from time to time, without being able to say hello. The only violation I didn’t commit was harassing other Banes, because if nothing else I now firmly understood how hard their experience was and there is no way I am going to make their lives any more difficult than they already are.

So yes, I went nuts, and by the time my weekly evaluation arrived I’d earned myself over 100 extra hours. Yay for me, the total screw-up!

I went to bed, feeling more wretched than I have in a long time. This program is dangerous, Dr. Kelley is brave to be taking with the minds of people who are more often than not already a little unbalanced and putting them through a test of character. For some people in SecondLife, this universe is where you can escape to in order to avoid such tests!