How OmniCorp Almost Ruined the CogNet

Ready Employee One

The time dilation effect of cognitive systems was originally discovered in immersive gaming, with players learning how to overclock their systems. They were better players because they were running at a higher base speed. In combat they could effectively set the game to slow motion to their perception and agility. OmniCorp discovered this, and paired it with technically illegal third hand data from Project Infinity.

Omni office and data workers were assigned to immersion pods and instead of desks and data terminals they were injected into a retro-vintage office-scape. The simulation handled real data and meetings and the rest of events inside the corp that were handled by lower and middle management and all the data and communications departments. Set at a base acceleration of 2 initially, operators of the enclosed office-scape slowly increased sim speed to where it remained stable and the instance of cognitive psychosis remained below the internally set limit of redacted percent.

The Competition Notices

Other Corps became aware of Omni Park Online and saw how much more efficient Omni's operation has become. They quickly followed suit, immersing entire departments of their own into online office-scapes. This marks the beginning of Cognitive Proliferation. This was a niche industry before, with most Immersion Units being used by hikikomori chasing the Floating World, the permanently online, and professional gamers. This saw the widespread growth of Nipponese style Dream Salons, and Turk Enterprises. More and more corporations got on the dream tank express train. 

The Omni Edge

Omni employees were contracted to spend, on average, thirty days in immersion. The employees were experiencing eight-month work periods, still working within the regular limits of what was legally allowed. They didn't have days that were eight times longer, they were living in a regular progression of time inside the sim. They experience a regular 24 hour period in the sim every three hours of real time. Weekends lasted six hours, and the system AISC overlapped these long down periods with real-world lulls. In comparison, other corporations were clocking their accelerators at 3-5X normal speed, and their employees were clocking in regular hours and then clocking out to live their regular lives. 

Nanomanagement in a word.

Laboroids 

It was not long before the industrial manufacturing sector grew interested in the tech. A person running at 8X speed was comparable in performance to most low to middle level automation systems, but were cheaper to employ. Industrial automation started using the same CogTech, using human brains like rental genome computers. This started to create a laboroid population, and some foreign operators started leaning into clones for this work, slave camps, and other applications of forced labor. Entire subcorps popped up to exploit the demand for this ultra-cheap source of labor by opening workstations for people who generally lacked the credit or resources to own a sim rig. This created the arinoka communities in the geofronts of the world. An unknowable number of people were engaged in gig work acting as ultra-cheap alternatives to dedicated cerebral engines, or organic memory cores.

This became a cornerstone of the original Western Cog-Economy. Thousands of people were employed as freelance brains for the 3rdNet systems. Some of these people were just remote controlling heavy machinery or using their increased speed access to remote several machines or drones at once. Others were operating through a mask of user interface games, mindlessly playing Bejeweled/puzzle/candy crusher games in full sim while the servers and AISC daemons were accessing and using their unrealized cerebral potential.

And then paying them very minimal compensation.

The Infinity, The Nightmare Crash, and Rebirth

The Infinity is a Flying Dutchman of the 3rdNet, a horrific scenario where allegedly hundreds or even thousands of people were subjected to extended and in some instances, permanent installation into the cognitive network. Infinity was the project name for a Dream Tank scenario that involved unknowing applicants who were subjected to immersion sessions lasting months and even years. This amounted to a crime against humanity, as the scenario allegedly involved suspending modern reality for an endless hellscape of endless war, grimdark, murder, death and repeated reanimation and rebirth. While other corps allegedly reaps tons of data extrapolated from Infinity, the cognitive and immersive systems manufacturers and operators gleaned mountains of information on how hard a human brain can be overclocked, how much data it can handle, and how much trauma it can internalize and manage before suffering catastrophic failure. Omni Corp was allegedly a prime financier of Infinity, and are a prime manufacturer of S3 and other immersive and CogNet dive systems. The corp lead the way in the field of immersive endurance, creating pods that allowed for longer and longer periods of immersion.

The Crimes of OmniCorp

The Petal Media Massacre

Petal Media was a small to mid-sized infotainment company that based most of its business model around CogNet content tracking celebrities, fashion trends, and the general vapidsphere that surrounds the world of celebrity entertainment. The company found that by using proprietary Omni-tech, they could increase their output of listicles, fashion downloads, and paparazzi strams, and increase their ad revenue. This saw the operators of their node move the overclock feature from the OCP standard guideline of 3.33X Analog speed to a highly reckless and dangerous 15X analog. Most of the content generated was produced in garbled, slurring Yassification, and the content bordered on psychotic. Engagement increased by 450%. Then staff reporter Andronika Tassou unplugged from her S3 rig, experienced a series of grand mal seizures, and then using a knife from the kitchen commissary, killed eleven of her coworkers who were still plugged into their rigs, two others who tried to stop her, and was only stopped in her rampage by the timely arrival of Officer Jamaldine Said of the local Municipal Light Patrol. He cut off her head and right arm with a vibro-saber. This event was buried and kept out of the news loop.

Nujack the Ripper

Nujack was a serial killer in the Londinium Arcoplex who over the course of three months, brutally murdered nine women and three men working for redacted Corp. It was eventually discerned by local PeaceForcers that Nujack worked as a middle manager for redacted and had been ramped to run his sim speed at 12.5X normal, so that he could complete evaluations for hundreds of employees in a less than a day, and he snapped. All of the murder victims were either top complainers or bottom performers at redacted and represented the 80/20 split, causing most of his work despite being an absolute minority of the employee base. He was arrested while having a grand mal seizure.

Author's Note:

I had a good bit more of this written and didn't drop a CTRL-C before submitting the update, and it was devoured by the capricious gods of the internet and the daemons of the Citadel.

Here is the gist.

The CogNet and prior 3rdNet offer humans the ability to process data and operate at many times the normal flow of time. This might have been originally pioneered in Inception or in research into dreams and REM sleep, but the point remains. Most LitRPG and FantasyPunk novels that I greatly enjoy use this time dilation effect to play more games longer. Sure, why not? I also recently read an article about how some scientists and globalists have researched and discovered that we can work in our sleep while being hooked up to internet remote systems.

How fucking dystopian is that?

So, the 3rdNet era saw widespread abuse of workers with this machine acceleration being used to turn human brains into computer control systems. This is from overseeing industrial automation, to quality control in high-speed manufacturing to security systems. It was noted that most CCTV systems in large areas are for after-the-fact evidence because one person sitting behind a bank of dozens of monitors is not able to pay attention to any of them effectively. A couple of people clocked at 10x speed can watch all the screens and make judgment calls. A person watching a waterfall of frosted flakes move past them at 10% speed can Flash game reflex pick out and discard the burnt or otherwise bad products.

It's cybernetic slave labor.

Why did it end?

It didn't.

The only thing that ended was how much can you overclock a person at a mindless job before they crack and become psychotic.

In the Cosmic Era, its 7X.