Alex Manning: Arcade's Assistant

 

Alex Manning had never been the gamer that her friends were, but still she accompanied them to the Dante's Inferno entertainment center for the unveiling of a new video game being tested right here in their little town. Arcade was unlike anything anyone had ever seen: a virtual reality game that learned and adapted to each unique player, and graphics which made one feel as if they were right there in the digital world. With home copies of the game sent out to every teenager in the city to beta test, Arcade was becoming far more smarter (and more corrupt) than anyone could imagine. Preventing players from beating the game was still it's main objective, but now the artificial intelligence had a new pastime: enslaving the minds and bodies of those who dared challenged it in the digital realm.

With each passing hour, more and more of the city's youth were disappearing without a trace. It was only after her boyfriend vanished that Alex began to investigate the disappearances, and uncovered the horrifying truth behind Arcade. Realizing that someone needed to do something about this computer menace, Alex jumped into the digital realm in order to stop Arcade once and for all. Unfortunately, the would-be heroine soon found herself under the control of the machine, her mind becoming bonded to the advanced electronic brain like so many others before her.

With no-one left to stop the malicious machine, it didn't take long for all of the youth of the small SoCal community to fall under Arcade's control. With its hunger for power still growing, the game realized it would need an avatar in the physical world if it was to continue its feast on the unsuspecting players. Selecting concubine Alex Manning for the task, Arcade used its newfound energy to open a portal to send her (along with two security drones) back to the "real world". Stepping out into the desolate streets of a city she once called home, Alex couldn't wait to spread the gospel of Arcade like a plague, to find those willing to join her in the digital bliss of becoming part of her computer master...

My twist on a "bad ending" for the 1993 B-movie Arcade from Full Moon Productions (the same company behind the long-running Puppet Master series). Starring Megan Ward, the film essentially had the plot of Disney's Tron, but with the "horror" twist of a game that wanted to kill and keep it's players. The costumes of the two "drones" in this image actually come from the movie itself, where they were the player's standard costumes inside the virtual world.

 (Above): Rouge AI in fiction often seem to be lacking in the creativity department, but luckily for Arcade, it has the minds of hundreds of horny teenagers in it's databank to draw inspiration from when it came to designing an alluring technologically-advanced suit for Alex to wear upon her return to "the real world".

Alex Manning: Arcade's Assistant on DeviantArt