Read The Demi-Monde: Winter for Free Online

little conflicts that our country keeps finding itself fighting in hellish places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. They are wars without rules and without honour and, to be blunt, they are wars that the US Army isn’t particularly good at fighting. When the US Military began to study its performance in Asymmetric Warfare Environments it discovered that its soldiers, especially its officers, weren’t effective because they had no appreciation or understanding of what sort of war they would be fighting. So in order to prepare them better the US Army InDoctrination and Training Command came up with the idea of creating a computer simulation that would let our combat personnel experience what was waiting for them in Peshawar and desperate places like it.’
    ‘The Demi-Monde?’ Ella ventured.
    ‘Got it in one, Miss Thomas. The Demi-Monde is the most sophisticated, the most complex and the most terrifying computer simulation ever devised. It’s a simulation which recreates the visceral anxiety and fear of being in an AWE …’
    ‘An AWE?’
    ‘An Asymmetric Warfare Environment. To play the DemiMonde you have to be hard-wired into it and the hard-wiringcreates a full sensory bypass: you believe you are in the DemiMonde. For those in the Demi-Monde it is the only perceivable reality: neoFights – military trainees – are utterly enveloped in the simulation.’
    ‘That sounds scary.’
    ‘It is and it’s meant to be. It’s also vitally important if the training paradigm is to be as realistic as possible. AWEs are scary so the simulation of them has to be scary. With conventional computer simulations the player always knows that what they are involved in is just a game, they know that if he or she gets uncomfortable with what’s happening in the simulation all they have to do is press “Pause”. This isn’t an option for Demi-Monde players.’
    The General took a sip of his coffee as he gathered his thoughts. ‘But this isn’t the only remarkable thing about the Demi-Monde. The US Military has employed computer simulations for training purposes before, but the problem with modelling Asymmetric Warfare Environments is that they are so unpredictable, so chaotic, so non-linear as to make modelling them almost impossible. Contrarily, the very act of programming AWEs means that we impose rules on the simulations and hence make cyber-representations of AWEs predictable. It’s a Catch-22 situation: we need a computer program to replicate the anarchy of an Asymmetric Warfare Environment but the very act of programming makes it unanarchic.’
    Unanarchic? Is that a word?
    ‘The solution, Miss Thomas, was to make the Demi-Monde program heuristic.’
    ‘Heuristic?’ asked Ella cautiously.
    This was getting to be, like, Big Words 101.
    ‘It means “self-taught”: we provided the initial programmingto get the Demi-Monde up and running, we defined the basics of the cyber-milieu and the formatting modality of the simulation but after that the computer did its own thing. The computer changed – optimised – the function and the actions of the Dupes who populate the simulation to make their performance more arbitrary and, hence, more realistic. What this means is that from a simulation point of view immediately the Demi-Monde was activated how it performed and developed was out of our hands. The Demi-Monde is an unpredictable environment, which is perfect when describing an AWE.’
    ‘Look, I’m no nerd,’ admitted Ella, ‘but this sounds kinda freaky. And aren’t you gonna have to use a pretty big computer?’
    ‘The Demi-Monde is the first program to be run by ParaDigm CyberResearch’s ABBA class of quantum computers.’
    ‘ABBA?’
    ‘ABBA is a computer developed by the British. It is the most powerful computer ever devised. It has an almost unlimited processing power … enough to simulate sentience in each of the thirty million Dupes that populate the Demi-Monde.’
    ‘Thirty million? That’s one hell