 |
 First edition | |
| Author | Piers Anthony |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Putnam Pub Group |
Publication date | 1993 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 304 |
| ISBN | 0-399-13781-5 |
| OCLC | 25873607 |
| 813/.54 20 | |
| LC Class | PS3551.N73 K5 1993 |
Killobyte is a 1993 novel by Piers Anthony. This book explores a virtual reality world in the context of the Internet.
Killobyte is a "second generation" virtual reality game that puts players into a three-dimensional, fully sensory environment. Users are hooked up to a machine that not only simulates a range of sensations, from pain to sex, but responds to brain signals to move a player's character. The only way to exit the game and return to the real world is by selecting that option from a menu that appears within the virtual world.
The game takes place in many different settings, as players face a series of increasing challenges and accumulate points. In the tradition of role-playing games, players get some choice over their characters' appearance and abilities, and they must use logic and ingenuity to overcome each obstacle, often involving riddles. When encountering another character, it is not always easy to tell whether the person is a fellow player or a part of the program.
As is implied by the name (a pun on the word kilobyte), the game enables users to kill or be killed. Violence is quite graphic. Players who die receive electric shocks and the feeling of being buried in a coffin, and each death is longer and more unpleasant than the last one.
The novel cuts between Walter Toland, a former police officer, and Baal Curran, an angst-ridden teenage girl. Both are playing Killobyte from their own home, hooked to the network through a telephone modem. Walter notices Baal's name on a list and initially assumes she is a man. Indeed, each of them first poses as the other sex.
Walter is learning the game as he goes, having neglected to read the instruction manual. He narrowly survives attacks by gunslingers, snakes, and runaway vehicles. Each time he destroys an enemy, he receives a point, and a door to a new setting appears. Eventually he must solve a more complicated problem when he finds himself in a women's prison, evading execution and a possible mole.
In the meantime, Baal enters a fantasy setting in which a knight must rescue a princess from an evil sorcerer in a castle guarded by a dragon. She first goes through the adventure as the knight and fails. When she tries again, this time in the role of the princess, Walter has entered the setting as the sorcerer. He captures Baal under the ruse that he is the hero, but when she makes sexual advances at him, he tells her the truth, too honourable to take advantage of her even if it is only within a game.
They begin telling each other about their real lives. In his days as a cop, he had an affair with a battered woman he was protecting, and the jealous husband ran him down with a car, leaving him paralysed from the waist down. He still has sexual feelings but is unable to perform. Baal, a plain girl despite her voluptuous appearance in the game, has type I diabetes and is depressed from having recently broken up with her boyfriend, who couldn't handle her disease. She pursued the game as a way of flirting with suicide.
They discover that he may be capable of sex within the game, but they are interrupted by a hacker who has infiltrated the software. Calling himself Phreak, the hacker targets specific individuals and locks them in the game so that he can harass them. Walter receives an error message every time he attempts to return to the real world. Aided by his police training, he remains calm and talks to Phreak, even though he knows his real body is in danger of eventual dehydration.
Baal temporarily quits the game after agreeing to meet Walter later in the game's next section, where they would use signals to identify each other, since they would have a different appearance. After unsuccessfully trying to get the police involved, she contacts the game's company, who want Walter to stay in the game as bait so that they can capture Phreak, who has eluded authorities for years. They give Baal a patch that will lock Phreak in the game along with Walter, so that they can force him to give the code that will free Walter.
We learn that Phreak is a 15-year-old boy whose father was part of a snake handling sect and died of a rattlesnake bite. The mother eventually died, and Phreak is convinced that she was also killed by snakes, which he believes lurk in the shadows waiting to pounce on him. He lives in his aunt's house, secretly using his own telephone line to hack into games, but he avoids experiencing the games directly for fear of being traced, despite the temptations of online sex.
Baal reenters the game world. Unfortunately, the next section is especially violent and unpredictable, modelled after Beirut. She poses as an Israeli spy, he as a Druze, and after several dangerous adventures they find each other, but not before Phreak catches up with them. Baal successfully sets the patch on Phreak, locking him in the game, though he has now locked her inside as well. They all end up in a prison together, and Walter tries to force the information out of Phreak, while Baal makes motions to seduce him, but he resists their methods.
Walter bombs the prison, causing their virtual deaths (so that they will no longer be imprisoned when they reappear). Walter believes that if his character dies again, he will die for real, for the electric shocks are interfering with his pacemaker and causing heart palpitations. Baal, meanwhile, is in danger of insulin shock if she does not exit the game soon. Phreak is traumatised by the game's simulated death and is terrified of experiencing it again, but he will not volunteer that information to Walter, whom he decides to kill.
They all end up in a special section called Potpourri, which mixes elements of various other sections. Baal is able to track the approximate locations of Walter and Phreak. Walter and Baal decide they are in love and want to marry if they manage to survive their current ordeal and meet in the real world. They chase Phreak across Potpourri, evading various obstacles he places in their path. Baal goes into insulin shock and her game body becomes still. Walter finally corners Phreak on a train and threatens to encase him in a box with snakes. Phreak finally relents.
Baal wakes up in a hospital, recovering from the insulin shock. She tries calling Walter, whose number she has memorised, but she gets no answer. She has her ex-boyfriend drive her across the country, and it gives him a chance to assuage his guilty conscience as he is comforted that she has found love again. Phreak has manipulated police records so that there is a phony arrest warrant on Walter, but the friends he met in Killobyte show up and refute the charges. A small party is held where Walter and Baal meet face-to-face at last.
Anthony writes about the development of the novel and the research it required. He got the first germ of the idea in 1981, before virtual reality was invented. He was influenced by the page-turning qualities of Robert A. Heinlein's 1951 novel The Puppet Masters . He did considerable research into gaming and diabetes. His description of Baal's condition was based on several real-life cases he investigated. (Anthony himself has been diagnosed with Type II diabetes, though the diagnosis was later called into question, as some doctors believe he may instead have chronic fatigue syndrome.) Additionally, Phreak was formed as a composite of several real-life hackers. Because of the approaching deadline, he had an assistant do the research on Beirut. In 1991, he believed the technology described in the book would be created in the following decade.
.hack//Sign is a Japanese anime television series directed by Kōichi Mashimo, and produced by studio Bee Train and Bandai Visual, that makes up one of the four original storylines for the .hack franchise. Twenty-six original episodes aired in 2002 on television and three additional bonus ones were released on DVD as original video animation. The series features each characters designed by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, and written by Kazunori Itō. The score was composed by Yuki Kajiura, marking her second collaboration with Mashimo.
Knights of the Dinner Table (KoDT) is a comic book/strip created by Jolly R. Blackburn and published by Kenzer & Company. It primarily focuses on a group of role playing gamers and their actions at the gaming table, which often result in unfortunate, but humorous consequences in the game. The name is a parody of King Arthur's Round Table reinforced by the truism that roleplaying aficionados often end up sitting round their host's dinner table as it is the only one large enough to accommodate the party.
Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (ICE) is a term used in cyberpunk literature to refer to security programs which protect computerized data from being accessed by hackers.
The Bachelor Machine is a collection of erotic science fiction short stories by M. Christian. It was first published in 2003 (ISBN 1-931160-16-3) by Green Candy Press; the book is introduced by Cecilia Tan. It was republished in 2010 by Circlet Press (ISBN 978-1-885865-58-8) with a new foreword by Kit O'Connell. The stories take place in a wide variety of settings, with an assortment of themes and widely differing tone, from grim to humorous. There is also a wide variety of sexual acts depicted in the work, including many which are not possible with modern technology, involving a wide variety of partners in heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual and sometimes non-human couplings.
The Metal Gear franchise features a large number of characters created by Hideo Kojima and designed by Yoji Shinkawa. Its setting features several soldiers with supernatural powers provided by scientific advancements.
.hack comprises "Project .hack" and ".hack Conglomerate". It is a Japanese multimedia franchise primarily developed by CyberConnect2 and published by Bandai. The franchise is set on an Earth with an alternate history. In this timeline, a new version of the Internet arises following a major global computer network disaster in 2005. Central to the premise is a mystery about the wildly popular in-universe video game, The World. As most of the story takes place within The World, characters typically play and interact as their avatars.
Big Trouble is Dave Barry's first novel. Barry, a longtime columnist for The Miami Herald, set the novel's events in and around Miami, Florida.
The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog is the seventh in a series of historical mystery novels, written by Elizabeth Peters and featuring fictional archaeologist and sleuth Amelia Peabody. It was first published in 1992. The story is set in the summer of 1898 in England and the 1898-1899 archaeological dig season in Egypt.
Ripper is a 1996 interactive movie point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Take-Two Interactive for MS-DOS and Macintosh. The cast includes Christopher Walken, Paul Giamatti, Karen Allen, Burgess Meredith, David Patrick Kelly, Ossie Davis, and John Rhys-Davies. It also uses the Blue Öyster Cult song "(Don't Fear) The Reaper". The villain of the game is chosen at random from the four main characters. A limited number of the clues and puzzles, plus a single line of dialogue in the ending, change according to the villain's identity.
False Mirrors is the second novel in the Labyrinth trilogy of cyberpunk novels written by Russian science fiction writer Sergey Lukyanenko. The novel takes place two years after Labyrinth of Reflections.
Flower and Snake a.k.a. Flowers and Serpents (1974) is a Japanese pink film starring Naomi Tani, directed by Masaru Konuma and produced by Nikkatsu. Based on a novel by Oniroku Dan, Japan's best-known author of sadomasochistic (S&M) fiction, Flower and Snake was the first of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno films to deal with an S&M theme. Together with the later Wife to Be Sacrificed this film is credited with starting the S&M Roman Porno series which helped save Nikkatsu from financial collapse during the 1970s.
The Girl Who Played with Fire is the second novel in the best-selling Millennium series by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. It was published posthumously in Swedish in 2006 and in English in January 2009.
RapeLay is a 3D eroge video game made by Illusion, released on April 21, 2006, in Japan. Compared to Illusion's previous games, the main story is shorter, it features an improved 3D engine and is mainly played through mouse control. The game centers on a male character who stalks and rapes a mother and her two daughters. Three years after its initial release, the game garnered international attention and controversy for its content, resulting in it being banned in several countries.
For the Win is the second young adult science fiction novel by Canadian author Cory Doctorow. It was released in May 2010. The novel is available free on the author's website as a Creative Commons download, and is also published in traditional paper form by Tor Books.
Hackers is a 1995 American crime thriller film directed by Iain Softley and starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Jesse Bradford, Matthew Lillard, Laurence Mason, Renoly Santiago, Lorraine Bracco, and Fisher Stevens. The film follows a group of high school hackers and their involvement in an attempted theft. Made in the mid-1990s when the Internet was just starting to become popular among the general public, it reflects the ideals laid out in the Hacker Manifesto quoted in the film: "This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch... We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals... Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity."
The Eye of Minds is a 2013 young adult science fiction novel written by American author James Dashner, and the first book in The Mortality Doctrine series. The book was first published on October 8, 2013 by Delacorte Press and is set in a futuristic world where a young gamer must help stop a rogue hacker named Kaine intent on causing mass destruction.
The Dark Knight III: The Master Race, also stylized as DK III: The Master Race and later collected as Batman: The Dark Knight – Master Race, is a 2015–2017 nine-issue DC Comics limited series co-written by Frank Miller and Brian Azzarello and illustrated by Miller, Andy Kubert, and Klaus Janson.
Virtual reality in fiction describes fictional representations of the technological concept of virtual reality.
Watch Dogs: Legion is a 2020 action-adventure game developed by Ubisoft Toronto and published by Ubisoft. The game is the sequel to 2016's Watch Dogs 2 and the third installment in the Watch Dogs series. Set within a fictionalised representation of a futuristic, dystopian London, the game's story follows the hacker syndicate DedSec as they seek to clear their names after being framed for a series of terrorist bombings. While searching for the true culprits, DedSec also attempt to liberate London's citizens from the control of Albion, an oppressive private military company that has turned the city into a surveillance state following the bombings.
"Confinement" is the fifth episode of the second season of the American comedy horror television series Ash vs Evil Dead, which serves as a continuation of the Evil Dead trilogy. It is the fifteenth overall episode of the series and was written by William Bromell, and directed by co-executive producer Michael J. Bassett. It originally aired on the premium channel Starz on October 30, 2016.