#eliza vvr

[sadtiredcontentwithoutthed]

hats

[haphazardfanonymous]

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about C4 from VVR1 during the Hernandez segment of the game. They reside within Hernandez' diorama, implying that they were once associated with Activate, but their design is more reminiscent of Eliza's (with the goggles around the eyes, brisk and 'clean'-type aesthetic, blue accents, robotic appearance in general), which doesn't at all fit with Activate's design and aesthetics (mostly greens and more natural-appearing). This leads me to wonder if maybe these AI were once apart of Latitude? Hernandez also mentions in his dialogue that he'd gutted Latitude when he archived it, so it feels fitting to me that he would take the AI to repurpose them into something else in Activate.

[theresademoninyouroven]

Uhm. Anyways

[darkysilverwing]

We know whichever ending is cannon for vvr1 we don't see eliza in vvr2, so I wonder, was she just left in an archive somewhere? I mean the scottsdale board took out hernandez, would they have bothered to pull out Eliza? Or was it true that they were planning on siphoning off hernandez's assets and that's the only reason he was brought out of cold storage?

[arocoomer]

vvr edit for the 3 vvr fans here <3

[artificerstimetable]

Them

aAAAAAURGHHH AUURURHGHHHH AAAAAAAA THIS IS FUCKING AMAZING THANK YOU SO MUCH OMG OMG THEY LOOKS SSO CUTE ONG AAAAAWWWW YOU ARE A GOD ARTIST WE LOVE THE WAY YOU DRAW THE HAIR IT LOOKS SO NICE?!?!?!? HEHEHE THE BOOTSS

YOUR ART IS AMAZING EEEEEEEEE N THE WAY YOUD RAW THEM IS JUST SO <3<3

[theresademoninyouroven]

Happy Valentines day

[darkysilverwing]

Just woke up, time for some more infodumping about virtual virtual reality!

Virtual Virtual Reality is a story about a world that reached the singularity, and instead of the destruction of the entire human race, or at least the end of capitalism, the power dynamic of humanity has shifted.

In the world of VVR AI can do anything, every job that would normally be done is done by a sentient AI, but instead of doing away with capitalism there's just more and more unemployment.

Enter Activitude, a service that allows humans to enter into a virtual environment, and do tasks for AI clients. Essentially it's artisanal labor.

But there are some issues that stem from this, mostly the fact that humans are messy and inefficient. A human performing actions for an AI is kinda like giving your toddler a broom and telling them to sweep the floor, it's not that great an action.

Now there are bits of the lore that I'm not 100% on but I'm under the impression that Activitude was a financial failure for this very reason. A lot of the tasks our AI clients have us do are either sitting around, doing basically nothing, performing very simple tasks which amount to little minigames, or literal impossible tasks, but whatever we're tasked with doing we never get more than a 3 star rating.

At some point in Activitude's history it's founder and CEO Chaz goes a bit off the deep end, i'm not sure what brought this on but I think it started when his partner, Eliza, is put on ice. She became archived, which I'll have to talk about later but basically it means she was stored away for later.

Now Eliza and Chaz were working on a virtual environment called Latitude, where you could basically experience a bunch of virtual adventures. This was an experience designed to give anyone who wanted the ability to have a fufilled life both inside and outside the virutal space.

See, Eliza and Chaz, despite being in this virtual world, they're not actually AI, they're uploaded humans. Chaz was actually part of a company who discovered where consciousness was and how to download it and put it inside a computer, and Chaz was the first person to upload their brain into the virtual world.

This means that humanity didn't actually have to stay in meatspace, they could make the jump to the virtual world and live a fufilled life there. But unfortunately life, even in the virtual world, is complicated and Chaz was convinced by Hernandez, an AI buisiness consultant, to archive eliza, and use the backbone of Latitude to create a business called Activate.

Now, Chaz wasn't the biggest fan of hernandez, as the two clashed on what they thought activate should be about. Hernandez wanted AI and humans to work together in a endless slog, to perpetually work with no breaks, forever. Make more profit by any means nessesary, Chaz was focused a lot more on moral.

Activate wasn't that great either though, the perpetual slog caused Hernandez to undergo too much stress, it was too much for the AI and so Chaz archived him, and created Activitude.

Years went by and this is where the lore gets a bit weird in my opinion. See, we join the scene as Bee, a human who just signed up to be a human worker for Activitude. However it's not long before you're contacted by an external entity, The human Labor Union.

According to the human labor union, humans, by the nature of being humans, have on average very low scores, and since your paycheck is determined based on your scores that means that humans are breaking their backs day in and day out for nothing and Activitude needs to be reset for any human to make a livable wage in activitude.

So you're given the ability to suck up data and redistrubute it in other places, because objects that spend too much time being unused end up undergoing bitrot, which I'm not 100% sure what that means, best guess is that they're gradually compressed to save on memory.

So you take your new ablity and use it to break out of the areas you're suppose to be working in, and you make your way around, basically trying to find a way to access HR, so you can reset Activitude. However, once you gain admin access and get to HR you confront chaz, who drops the bombshell that you're not the first one to go on this journey, not the first human to go all this way. As a matter of fact, that human union you were talking to? They never existed.

So from this perspective, for some reason Chaz is running around, pretending to be the human union, giving humans the means to explore and grant themselves admin access. At this point there are 2 paths to go down. You can either do what you came there to do, reset activitude and chaz along with it, or you can merge with chaz, upload your brain to the network.

That second option isn't entirely willing though. Chaz can throw out headsets and if you don't avoid them then they'll lock onto your head, and you'll be uploaded, this is actually how I, and many of the lets plays I've seen, went down. You get uploaded to the system and become a cog in the machine. (I could easily go into a little discussion about this but that'll be it's own post)

There's also the other option though, you can get through the entire boss battle, pull out all the cores in the memory bank before chaz can slap a headset on you, and the entire system will restart and the game will end with you having a nice picnic with chaz.

In both options the game ends with yet another headset flying off and it being revealed that the entire story was some sort of game, and from that point you can pull off more headsets which lead you to some behind the scenes areas which I don't think are really cannon.

But basically the real question that I'd like to know is why. Why is Chaz doing this? best guess would be that those who are willing to take the bait and go through all the rigamarole are worthy to be uploaded in Chaz's eyes, or maybe Chaz doesn't want to go the route of hernandez and thus this entire thing is a recruitment drive designed to ease the burden of running Activitude so Chaz doesn't burn out?

There's no wiki to discuss this and I've seen very little lore discussion for vvr so i'm not 100% sure.

This post is long enough as is but I'm thinking about the lore of VVR2 as well so that'll probably be another post.

[darkysilverwing]

I find it hard to believe that it’s the freedom ending. If Chaz’s words are to be(e) believed, then every core pulled out is a person killed. From there it’d be hard to go to VVR2, since Butter’s headsets show people like Elon still alive. There’s two ways to merge, either through accepting Chaz’s offer and losing the fight. I’d feel it’s likely to be the former, since both the aforementioned people still living, and I don’t think the employees of Activitude would be particularly happy about working with someone who killed their peers. There’s also the fact that the freedom ending was also called the murder ending in either the alpha or beta, though it may not matter since it didn’t make it to the finished game.

I’m pretty sure it’s said somewhere that Eliza was brought over to Scottsdale? Like Hernandez, although I forget where it’s said. I guess that means she’s dead, with the whole deletion.

I personally don’t agree with the whole coin flip SOMA thing. The Board made copies of the citizens before the shutdown, which would mean that the originals experience the shutdown while the copies would only have the memories up until around the announcement. I also feel if it was like that, there’d be less panic, and despair and more hints to such. There’s also confirmation of a soul of sorts, with Gavin’s body and all. As for Bee, that may just be because Bee is inhabiting an avatar, kind of like with all of those Chaz in the ping pong(?) room. It would also kind of make Marty’s whole speech somewhat invalid, which I don’t think the game would make.

Also, fun fact! Cryogenic freezing would destroy your body just as much as the other choices. It would destroy your cells, as the water inside you would freeze and expand. Of course, we don’t know what other advancements the world in VVR has made, but since all other options seem like a final goodbye to the body, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same.

I enjoy talking about vvr with you, so I hope this doesn’t come of as negatively argumentative.

I'm sensing no negative arguments here lol ^^ but I can break down some of these arguments.

Like if you start removing cores chaz starts sounding quite desperate to have you merge, now this might be because merging will stop you from destroying everything but at the same time if you merge with every core but one removed or you don't remove any core and just let him merge you at the start all the same characters are there and bee is still allowed to do work, which makes me think that death might not be the same in virtual space and they're fine working with a murderer after maybe a few tweaks to some base programming.

I mean in either ending we basically murder Hernandez but in vvr2 he's up and kicking, so it's possible that as long as chaz is online there's ways to bring them back. A bit of temporary murder. As for the reset ending I do find it difficult to determine if it could be cannon to the second game. There might be ways to frame that narrative but the more I look at it the more unlikely it seems.

I do think bee deserves a little murder though, as a treat.

As for the soma thing, in soma the humans kinda decided that the humans in the machine were no less them than they were, and thus it was kinda like a coin flip, heads they'd be in the machine, tails they'd still be outside. Then the humans would "Rig the coin flip" by entering the machine, having their minds copied over, and then as soon as the copying was finished they'd kill themselves in a weird philosophical mentality of maintaining continuity. However this is just a philosophical standpoint, one I'm sure the AI would have been on board with if deletion were instantaneous and not a slow, drawn out apocalypse.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by the revelation of a soul via gavin's body? And the bee interpretation seems a bit weird, like bee's inhabiting an avatar, which then gets destroyed and then they just... rubber band into chaz once they're no longer bound inside of that avatar? I mean you could possibly make an argument for that but the tone shift made it feel a bit more serious from my perspective.

And as for Marty's little speech about them being upset because the humans trusted them and now they're being murdered, it could all be a bit of digital philosophy that also comes with the idea of copying an individual. I mean the original and the copy are no less real from eachother, both feel real to themselves, and so murdering one or the other is still a terrible thing to do even if there is a backup. Kinda like murdering a twin I guess.

Now onto Cryogenic freezing, when you pick that option the techs actually tell you that the particular option chosen is actually unavailable because no one ever comes back, which implies that there's the option to come back but since everyone chooses cryogenics "Just in case" they've probably got way too many bodies. So I think Cryogenics are a viable option in this universe.

An few equally fun facts about cryogenics though are the facts that there's a type of frog that can secrete a chemical that freezes the frog very slowly and instead of developing sharp ice crystals the frog produces more rounded ice crystals, which allow it to stay frozen 8 months out of the year. Research is being done to see if this process can be applied to humans but may take several years of testing and tweaking.

Also, it's sometimes suggested that one of the first ever microwaves were designed to help thaw out cryogenically frozen hamsters, because the previous method of warming them up with red hot spoons did work, but it also caused serious burns. The hamsters could survive having up to 60% of the water in their body freezing and still come out basically unharmed. This is why I sometimes fantasize about colony ships where humans are sent out in space to explore the cosmos, but instead of humans the people on the mission just transfer their minds into that of hamsters and we get little intergalactic hamster astronauts.

[arocoomer]

"I hope I haven't missed a birthday or a meeting."

[artificerstimetable]

Just know, if you draw humanoid Eliza, I'm gonna draw your design (if you're okay with that!!). Also thank you :D

we're fully okay with it!! (You don't even need to if you don't wanna!! We would love to see it though!! :D) NP!!

ELIZA<3<3 we wanted their appearance to match their voice too!! Thought it'd be fun to give em a lil question mark thingy on their head!! Their hair is supposed to resemble a cloud since yk, hot air balloons n stuff!!

Decided they'll have legs, but their boots leave a glowing trail (not able 2 b seen in image but yea)

Their outfit is meant to be somewhat adventurous, since the entire thingy about latitude is like. Seeing other places you'd never be able to see with ur loved ones in meatspace!! But still having some sort of formal stuff, silly coat, pen, other such yknow!! Also boots of course because those are awesome!!! >:)

[arocoomer]

This is what Eliza does when they're bored in the archives

Once again drawing something based off what @zipperz tags lol

[arocoomer]

Robos