Frank Perrotto

Find the Needle, Part One Frank Perrotto

NOTE: This is PART ONE of a THREE PART series. In 2042, scientists wishing to study how a new form of artificially intelligent consciousness will react to stress in the real world come up with a safe and easy solution: placing their A. I. in the most comprehensively realistic virtual world ever built - the L. A.-like city of Los Gatos in the latest version of the absurdly popular video game 'Outlaw'. With the A. I. connected to the game character of 'Dmitry', an Estonian career criminal, the digital consciousness is given free reign to roam inside the game in order to determine 'is it safe'?What happens instead is nothing less than miraculous as Dmitry begins to question the limits of his reality and notice inconsistencies about the behavior of everything inside Los Gatos. What begins as a safety study turns into a cat and mouse game where every in-world door that's impossible to open or tree that looks exactly the same as another causes Dmitry to wonder... why? When he spots an object on an in-game billboard advertisement, a simple question threatens to unravel the integrity of Dmitry's existence and what he perceives to be reality: What is a microscope and what does it do?The 'Find the Needle' book series consists of the in-game journals kept by Dmitry 'Find the Needle' purports to be the in-game journal Dmitry kept while exploring the limits of the 'Outlaw' world.