Despair for a lost loved one drives a pair of virtual-reality engineers into business with a suspicious corporation. The final chapter of this story was published on May 24, 2023. Jump to chapter (desktop only): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Chapter One.
She pulled light bulbs and glass ornaments from the shelves, she pulled on his jacket with both hands and kissed him, she held his hand and pulled him by the arm through the aisles. They found wire and string and things to tie them together. They found extension cords and spools of Christmas lights, white and yellow, frosty and clear, and hanging electric icicles. The glass pieces were too heavy for the string, and there were too many lights for the sockets, but they pulled all of it off the shelves and kissed in the dark corners of the store and she laughed while she pulled him along.
“I think the mirrored pieces should hang up high, so the light has space to move and fill out,” said Gabby.
David agreed. He found a thick string that wouldn’t cut apart on the glass edges and he showed her.
“That’s good, so it won’t cut up where it pulls against the broken parts,” she said, and she explained how they would break the mirrored glass into pieces and hang them up in the branches where the wind could catch them. She found colored glass balls blown into lawn ornaments and ribbons pulled into long, twisted decorations meant to spin on their lines. And lights. Fluorescent bulbs and rubber strips filled with blinking diodes, and big hanging lamps colored with orange tint, some of it torn out of the boxes and laid together on their packing paper to compare under Gabby’s eye. All of it went into the cart, along with rolls of flashing metal paper and tools for tying and taping and twisting it all together. She picked out a hammer for nailing the wires to the tree and tinsel to hang around the branches, and David lifted armfuls of sockets and fasteners down from their hangers. He adored her.
In the check-out line Gabby smiled and asked the clerk, “are you having a good day?”, and the clerk blinked and said “yes, it’s been a good day.” David took a mess of crumpled bills from his pocket and gave over everything he had. Gabby smiled at David because she loved him, too.
She rushed them into his car, and she lifted her hair up off of her shoulders and draped it over her neck. Music played on the system. They rolled down the windows, so the warm, humid air that smelled like salt could dance in through the cold air conditioning. She told him about how the ornaments would hang, lights and metal and glass pieces, how the light would shine—and to check at the stop light, were the extension cords long enough? Yes, they were. David was sick with happiness.
They drove until the salt was gone from the air and the sandy dunes by the highway blew apart. The light faded as they drove, turning through shades of blue and indigo and deep red in a panorama reel. All the smell of the ocean was gone; here the air smelled like pine and bonfire, and the cold ate up the evening and turned it into night. They drove and drove, way out into the far parts of the highway towns, past the strip malls and gas stations, where the pine trees marched their tall blue walls closer in against the road, until the stars were a strip of bright dust overhead. All the glass and the wires and the mirrors and bulbs were clanking around in the back seat.
“Where’s the turn? It’s not on the map,” said David.
“I’ll tell you, it’s a little further up,” said Gabby.
“I can’t see.”
“That’s okay.”
It was okay. They drove and sang and laughed until the signs on the sides of the road became wooden and the trees were so dense they were black. She found the turn, where the asphalt was broken apart and the trees opened up a narrow road into the woods. They drove in careful darkness for a while, two or three miles until the road was gravel and pine needles that crunched under their wheels. They parked in the familiar place, behind the row of low dogwoods with heavy branches, and left the car behind.
They walked on the trail’s edge with their flashlights, pointed them at each other and up under their chins and up at the dusty stars, switching their hands in their pockets in the cold. They talked about TV shows, and the books they were reading, and the next movie they would see together. They gossiped about their friends and the other kids at school, all the ones who hadn’t grown up yet and didn’t know all the things they knew.
When they were far away from the car, David pulled a plastic bottle out of his backpack and rolled it in his hands. He’d filled it up with vodka, stolen from his dad’s shelf and watered down from all the cover-ups before. He pulled a long swallow and shook his head like a dog. Gabby laughed, and she drank some too. Then she pulled a crumpled bag out from her pocket, pushed out a couple of long square-edged pills with her thumb and caught them in her hand. They got drunk while they walked and they talked louder, held closer together, turned off their flashlights and watched the dark pour in from behind the trees. Their sneakers crunched over the pine needles and filled up the air with spice.
They were alone, miles into the forest, but they still hushed themselves when they came to their place. David had marked it so they would see from the trail—a white towel wrapped around one of the young pines, tied and held down with a chunk of limestone. Behind it there was a long, narrow clearing through the trees, like a hallway between dark rooms, and the whole place where it led was theirs. It was waiting for them. David found the thick strands of hidden barbed wire and lifted them off of their decayed posts. Gabby gathered her hair and pressed it to the back of her neck while she swung underneath, then David hunched himself under to follow.
They walked down the hallway in silence, not a word, held in by the blue walls and the branches that touched overhead. And then they were there. It was an old ranger’s campsite, abandoned and grown over knee-high with weeds. Everything that was there, the broken shack and the steel canisters, rusted through and buried under tangles of grass; it was all theirs.
They started slowly, wading through the weeds and pointing out for each other the tall posts and the low branches. Gabby lifted their supplies out of the bags and spread them out on the ground, rearranged them, lifted them up and held them together. David paced around the yard and looked up at the trees, down over the cabin with its outlet box hung beside the door, and guessed at the angle between them. They drew the outlines of their work with their eyes; and then they began. They hung glass in the air and let shining metal hang down from bending branches and spin through the leaves. Everywhere was wire and twine and long ribbons of color. Mirrors bobbed and fell through the trees and lay in broken pools between their roots. David unspooled the bulbs from their boxes and hung them like dewy spiderwebs through the empty spaces; Gabby laid sprawling deltas of Christmas lights over the ground. When they were finished, they traced the length of each wire with their fingers, pinching them to check that none had come unplugged or frayed. Then they took their places at either side of the outlet box. David lifted the cover off its spring.
“You ready?” he asked quietly. Gabby nodded.
David pushed the plug into the box, and the yard broke open into light. Gabby was laughing. David turned, and he saw it all reflected in her eyes like shooting stars and pour over her tongue while she laughed. Her whole body was painted with it, and she was an angel. He had never seen anyone so beautiful. She turned toward him with her face of stars and moonlight, and they were around one another with pulling hands and tight breaths that shook against their ribs. They were beside the shack’s peeling door, braced against the frame of it on the ground. The air was cold, and the dry grass made little whispering sounds against their bodies like dry hands rubbed together, and Gabby’s breath warmed the space between them. The light in the grass and in the trees and along the fence posts made them a private twilight, and Gabby sighed over David, and he was happy.
They laid out blankets on the dirt and slept until the smell of morning came into the air and tickled them awake. Their lights still shone in the trees around them, but their brilliance was gone, washed out in the mist that crawled in from the woods. Now the lamps and the Christmas lights were hollowing out, turning yellow. Their treasure became litter while the morning got brighter, and it all became suddenly ordinary. Gabby lifted her head off the ground and stretched back, pulling the front of her neck up, then she twisted her shoulders over her palms to face David. The lights in her eyes were hollowed out, too.
They spooled up some of the lights and stuffed them into their backpacks, but the rest of it, whatever was too high or too broken, and all the mirrors and the hanging glass pieces, were all left behind. They walked back to the road chatting listlessly about school. In the car, Gabby’s elbows hung low below the wheel in a tired slump. Her hair was tangled and dark, stuck to the sides of her face, and her eyes were foggy.
David set his head against the window and pulled his arms in close around him. The glass was cold on his skin and wet where his breath blew against it. All along the road, the pines became thin, and the dunes grew back together, and low highway houses crept up to the curb like thirsty animals. David closed his eyes. The road disappeared into their cinderblock town, poor and flat and lonely, and lost itself.
Chapter Two.
David’s hands were eager and impatient. Years hunched at a desk had made his wrists stiff, and the ends of his fingers hovered and twitched. He was a bony, hollow man, bent over by his thirties and washed out like a brush in a cup of water. His brown hair was starting to thin just a little, so that his forehead was exaggerated at the sides. His eyes were dull.
He was sitting at a thick wooden desk in his home office, pulling at the folded top of a paper bag against staples that wouldn’t budge. The office was an addition, built onto the house in the mid-century with thick coats of plaster and a low ceiling that soaked up sound. The wooden floor had softened with incessant moisture, so that the planks bowed slightly under furniture or heavy footsteps, and every piece of molding was chipped and painted over.
David’s hands jerked, and the bag tore down the side. Its contents spilled out onto the desk: three miniature apothecary bottles that clinked together as they fell onto the wood. They rolled up against the bottom of David’s computer monitor, where they reflected squares of blue light under the screen. The bottles were iodine-brown with screw-on rubber eyedroppers. David held one of them up in front of his eyes and squinted; the liquid inside was amber, maybe a little green. He set the bottle down beside his keyboard and looked back up at the screen. He scrolled through the links that ran up and down the page, looking for the post he remembered from the evening before. The ripped-up bag fluttered for a moment under the breeze from the ceiling fan, then it skittered off the desk and floated down to the floor. David didn’t notice.
Here’s how I achieved pyschotropic ideation.
That was it. Ads for hair-loss medicine and pornography flickered at the edges of the screen while David scrolled through the post, re-reading the anonymous author’s blocky paragraphs. He found the summary of instructions:
Strangely, stronger psychotropics don’t seem to work. This is probably related to the integration problem that others have posted about here.
Next bullet:
THC works the best, although the right delivery method probably varies person-to-person. For most people, ingesting or absorbing through capillary tissue will work better than smoking. I used a tincture that I dripped in between my gum and my cheek.
Underneath the instructions, the author had put together a short chart of estimated dosages based on bodyweight. David traced across the chart to find his recommendation: 18 mg, applied in three sets between mantras. Monologues, this author called them. Memories.
David breathed in deeply through his nose, then he let the air fall out over his hands. He found the button at the edge of the monitor and turned off the screen, then picked up one of the little bottles and stood up. Eighteen drops, three groups of six, he repeated to himself.
David walked across the room to the pin-leg table where he’d collected his books. He squatted to set the tincture down on the floor, then picked up one of the books from the stack and opened it to the middle. He thumbed through to find the page he’d folded at the corner, then he held it up to his eyes and re-read the relevant paragraphs. But he knew the procedure. Just in case, he pressed the book up against his chest to crack the spine and set it down open on the table.
One incense stick for each monologue, that was the rule—so three, this time. He found the long envelope of incense and a box of matches in his desk drawer, buried under a mess of pens and cable-ties. He pulled out three sticks, struck a match, and lit them all together. He let the bundle burn for a moment, then he blew it out and watched the waxy smoke twist up and dance in the air under the fan. David set the sticks on a paper plate beside his stack of books, then he walked back to his desk and switched on the monitor to double-check the arrangement. There was something specific about the incense in the instructions—yes, there was the diagram showing its position. He went back to the table and set the three sticks splayed apart: one pointed at the office’s only window, one at the door, and the third at the grated air vent at the base of the wall. There.
He turned off his computer screen again and flipped off the lights in the room. The office was black except for the flickering light from the candles on his bookshelf and the orange tips of the incense. Through the window, a couple of stars hung low and dim over a mess of power lines and reaching tree branches. The prayer rug David had ordered was cheap and rough, made of tight polyester rolls that scratched through his shirt as he lay down. He set his hands across himself, one on his chest and one on his belly, mimicking the position he’d seen in the manuals. He closed his eyes.
Now the breathing: twelve minutes, four hundred breaths. He sucked in cold air through his nose, held it for a few seconds, and forced it out hissing between his teeth. The musky incense was bitter and warm in his nostrils. He repeated the cycle, counting each breath and maintaining a steady rhythm: in, hold, out. After a few minutes, nearly imperceptible flashes of color began to play at the edges of his vision. Stage one, he remembered—noise imagery. As he approached his final breaths in the set, and keeping his eyes closed, David reached out to his side and found the apothecary bottle where he’d set it under the table. In rhythm with his breathing, he unscrewed the cap and pinched the rubber bulb on the dropper. He set the bottle down, pulled out his lower lip and squeezed three drops into the well under his teeth. The tincture stung painfully, but he kept his breath steady. Soon the pain subsided and left behind the bitter, oily taste of cannabis in his mouth.
David re-centered his focus. In, hold, out. The colors rippled and shone more brightly around the edges of his eyes. Now, the mantras. David opened his mouth to begin, but his first words caught in his throat reflexively. He was embarrassed speaking into an empty room. He swallowed, then spoke in a slow, sure cadence:
I remember the way it felt to touch your hair. You parted it on the side with that big green clip—do you remember? I put it under my pillow, did you know that? Sometimes I would take it out at night and sleep with it in my hands. I brought it with me to college. Did I tell you that?
As David spoke, his embarrassment started to feel like a betrayal. He was ashamed. He raised his voice as he continued:
I was thirty-two when they took you. I still felt sixteen though, watching you while they carried you out of the house. They had to take you because I didn’t deserve you anymore, because being with me made you so sick that the ribs showed through your skin. I was so poisonous that they had to fill you up with ash to try to keep you alive. They took you away because you were too funny, too pretty, too smart, too good to be with an empty man like me, a hollow man. The ambulance lights lit up the street blue and red, did you get to see any of that? It was pretty. The neighbors came out to look. The siren was so loud, but I—
David’s voice broke. There were hooks in his throat and behind his eyes, threatening to tear loose. His back tightened against the floor, and the cheap rug scratched at his neck and the backs of his arms. He put his hand into his pocket and pressed his fingers around the old plastic clip, holding it tight.
—I could still hear you, the way you were coughing. It made your shoulders jump.
David grabbed the tincture again. While he held the dropper over his mouth, he chewed into the soft tissue behind his lip until he felt it pinch under his teeth. The taste of blood seeped across his tongue. He squeezed three more drops down into the well of his gums, and he gasped in a breath of wet air and continued:
You are so beautiful, honey, no matter what. I went and I looked—I leaned up against the fence they put around you, and I saw it. It’s horrible. You aren’t there. We’re still together—we’re still breathing and you’re still warm. We’re still here, together—right here. You look so pretty, honey, no matter what they did.
The colors that burned at the edges of David’s vision began to condense and take form. They followed the cadence of his words while he spoke, reaching in and recoiling in rhythm with his voice. He remembered what he’d read and focused his attention, tracing the spaces in between the flickering shapes, watching where their flashing colors faded to deep black behind his eyelids. He counted through another set for his breathwork: six minutes, three hundred breaths. In, hold, out.
He tried to feel her in each breath, pressing down against his chest and holding him. He let the feeling of her come into the black spaces in his eyes; he tried to pull the flashing colors around her silhouette. Three drops again. David hyperventilated for thirty seconds, let the oxygen crawl pinpricking over his skin into the ends of his fingers. Now there was a hissing in his ears, and layered into the hissing a clear tone that hummed and pulsed with his heartbeat. The colors rushed and danced at the edges of his vision. David slowed his breathing deliberately, ten breaths in six seconds, then five, then just one, until he spoke his final mantra:
When they took you, they made me into nothing. They broke me apart. They buried me in broken glass, and I will lie here in it forever, I will make snow angels and I will tear myself apart to remember you. I will remember you until my memory is numb and my eyes are blank and my mind peels away at the corners.
David squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath until it felt like fire was climbing up the walls of his chest. The tone in his ears was modulating, changing its timbre into something clearer. The sound rose and fell with the images that coalesced in the center of his black vision. It was her shadow, and her voice, he knew it. He could almost see her, almost hear her, and then—the horrible thought—she was trapped. David panicked. He strained to pull her voice from the tone and her image out of the flashing colors. She was a picture negative, suffocating in the red pools of chemical terror. She was drowning, God, she was drowning. The fire in David’s lungs grew fingernails and scratched at the bottom of his throat, torturing him to take in new air.
Gabby?
David’s parched voice sounded small and lonely in the empty room. The tone in his ears crackled and fell apart into hissing, and the colors in his eyes flashed magenta and yellow into her silhouette. David’s diaphragm clutched and spasmed, lurching for oxygen, but he held onto his little mouthful of air.
Gabby
And then, his voice aching with the last sour gasp of breath:
It’s okay, honey. I’ll try again. I love you so much.
A sound like rushing water tore into David’s ears. It made him shriek with surprise, and the pain curled his knees up to his chest. The torrent poured into his skull and dripped down into his stomach, congealing into nausea. A headache welled up behind his forehead. The flashing magenta and yellow twisted up and faded into blue, then burned white, then rose like fire over her outline. The flames covered her, ripping apart her silhouette, and her ruined shadow hung in David’s vision like an afterimage; then he could see nothing. David ripped open his mouth and heaved in new air. His eyes broke open; the smoldering light of the incense and the candles were bright and obtrusive against the black walls of the office. David pushed himself up onto his elbows and then fell onto his side, crying quietly, remembering her voice and her face and all the things that he had loved about her. He lay there until his middle was sore and cold, and he curled up. He pitied himself and let his grief pull in his arms and twist his wrists around each other. The dark room was silent except for his crying. He missed her so much.
David awoke around one in the morning. His eyelashes were stuck together with dried tears, and his cheeks felt hot. The inside of his mouth stung where he’d torn at his lip. David rolled onto his stomach and pushed up to his knees, then he stood up slowly and felt the cool air from the fan on his face. The incense sticks had burned down to the wood, leaving the room waxy and sweet-smelling. He stood there for a moment and rocked between his toes and his heels, then he cracked his shoulders back and walked over to the desk. He flipped over his phone. There was a new text:
Give me a call before, if you can.
David looked down at the message for a moment, then he replied:
Sorry, didn’t see this before I started.
He watched to see if Alex would reply. David was lonely, and the loneliness made him stand there in the dark, thumbing through his apps and updates and tonguing the inside of his lip. Then the phone vibrated in his hand. David’s heart jumped.
You okay?
David typed a longer, more indulgent response, but then he erased it and started again:
Yeah. It didn’t work.
I’m sorry.
It’s okay. I think I got closer.
What happened?
There was sound this time. It was like a hum. It felt like her voice, sort of. I don’t know.
David was embarrassed again. He kept his eyes on the screen and waited while Alex typed. A few seconds passed, then:
Do you want to come out?
David stood looking at the message, his face lit up by the screen. He was exhausted, but he didn’t want to be alone. The idea of being by himself made him feel empty and twisted up, and it made sticking pressure rise up behind his eyes and in his throat.
He texted Alex back and then set his phone down on the desk. David reached behind his computer monitor and pushed around a nest of black cables until he found the blinking light on his rig. He unplugged the power cord and lifted his rig up over the monitors, unclipped the wrist and heel straps, then checked the battery as he walked over to the couch and sat down. He set the mask on top of his head and balanced it there while he pulled the Velcro straps tight around his socks and under his sleeves. He stretched the elastic loops over each of his fingers and checked to make sure the thermal contacts were snug under his wrists. The skin under David’s eyes pulled uncomfortably under the mask’s rubber seal as he stretched it down over his face.
David’s home environment faded into focus around him. The thermal contacts on his wrists and in his mask warmed as his lenses shone yellow daylight into his eyes. The environment’s day-night cycle was unlinked from local time; here it was the late afternoon, and the sun dripped down warm and lazy over the rendering world. The room that materialized around David was open-air, set on a limestone slab enclosed on the back by rough sandstone walls. Overhead, the space was partially shaded by a steel-and-glass canopy that lifted apart in geodesic sections. Clusters of khaki floor pillows sat at intervals in the shade, some of them piled onto colorful wool rugs and others encircling shallow fire pits filled with chunks of glass. The room was a shelf hewn into the side of an enormous red-rock mesa, and over the edge of his lodge, David watched the panorama of the valley peel out to the horizon like unrolling carpet. The resulting landscape of red desert plains was a wide, hazy vista with colors that blended like watercolors under the blue sky. Sprays of rusty grass dipped and flowed between the miles of striated plateaus, shining in gleaming white bands where they crossed the sun’s aperture. Between the arches and shelves of red rock, splatters of pine forest and thirsty shrub oaks reached up dark and green and spread their long shadows onto the hills. The whole landscape sloped gently inward toward a narrow gorge that cut through the middle of the valley, a hair-thin fracture in the rock that cracked the panorama apart where it arced across to the horizon. In its center, a pen’s trace of clear water shone sapphire-blue in the sun.
Alex was standing at the edge of the limestone platform, looking out over the valley. His silhouette was dark and unnaturally crisp in the angled sunlight, like a cut-out from a comic book. His avatar was tall and hard-boned, with a sharp nose and stiff cheekbones that stretched up towards his ears. His blond hair was pulled back into a clip, and he wore a plain cotton t-shirt that sat loose on his narrow shoulders. The sight of him loosened the knot that was aching behind David’s eyes. He felt the loneliness wear off of him.
David’s arrival to the room triggered an audio cue. In this setting, a mission bell rang in a tower somewhere behind the lodge and echoed over the valley. Alex turned around.
“Hey, man,” he said. “I just remembered the time difference. I should let you sleep, I’m sorry.”
“I’m okay. I don’t think I could for a while, anyway,” said David. He flexed the muscles above his ankles and pantomimed walking by raising and lowering his heels. His avatar stepped forward, and David walked up to the edge of the platform beside Alex.
“I love this setting,” said Alex. He was tracing the blue thread of the ravine with his eyes. A few wisps of gray cloud hovered over the water where it disappeared behind the hills. Their edges shone bright magenta and lavender in the low sun.
“Thanks,” said David. “I thought I’d change it when the new set came out, but I just like the space. The new ones feel kind of closed off.”
“Yeah, they do. I might go back to the one I had before, with the water,” said Alex.
David nodded and fidgeted with his straps. He was exhausted, but the artificial sunlight held him up by the eyes. He wanted to lean up against Alex and let go of the weight in his chest and in his legs. The two of them stood in silence while the sun dipped lower in the sky. The shadows of the arches and the scrub-oaks stretched too quickly over the valley.
“David, listen,” said Alex. He turned to face David. His avatar’s irises shone like they were lit from the inside.
“Maybe you could take a break from it,” he said.
David frowned and looked back out over the valley. He thought about the incense and the little bottles with their rubber droppers. He pulled at the loop around his forefinger.
“Alex, you said you wouldn’t—”
“We can still do it the other way,” Alex interrupted.
“Alex,” David sighed.
“Look,” Alex went on, “we got as far as we could before, but—”
“Alex, please.” Exhaustion was dripping down the walls of David’s skull. “We can’t afford it. Even if processing gets cheaper, there’s no way we could add enough compute to—”
“I know,” said Alex. “We have to brute-force it, but—”
“Then can you let it go? Please?”
“Will you just let me talk to you,” Alex snapped.
They stood in silence for a moment. A breeze blew across the valley and made shallow waves in the grass.
“You said you heard her, right?” Alex went on quietly.
The question caught David off guard. The sound of Gabby’s voice, or the thought of it, replayed in his head. For a moment her silhouette flashed in negative across David’s vision, sinking under the fire and flashing lights.
“Yeah, there was sound. It was her voice.” It felt like he had to hold the memory up, or it would fade.
“Then she’s there. There was formation—that’s what that means, right?”
David recalled with embarrassment the articles he had sent Alex. He turned out to face the valley and nodded.
“Then she’s there,” Alex went on. “You won’t lose any progress, you can hold on. She won’t go away. That’s what it all said—once there’s formation that’s it.”
“So you’re an expert on this too?” said David. “I don’t know if it works like that.” He felt tricked. He wanted to disconnect and escape the conversation.
“No, I’m not, but—please.” Alex paused for a moment. “It isn’t a good thing, David. It’s not good for you.”
“It isn’t your business,” said David. At the edges of his vision, the blue watercolor sky was bleeding slightly into the rocks. David tugged at the rubber edge of his mask and blew a puff of cold air past his nose. Alex waited for a moment, then he continued.
“It’s not good for her, either. It isn’t right.”
David turned around to face him. “What the fuck do you mean it’s not good for her?”
“You know what I mean, it’s not—it isn’t right. People shouldn’t do things like that.” Alex’s hands were hooked together over the back of his neck.
“Fuck you,” said David.
Alex looked away over the valley. Over the mesa ridge, the evening was rising up quickly from behind the rocks. Indigo light was seeping fast into the blue sky and coloring the edges of the formations, making their outlines darker and less crisp where they touched the air. Below the plateau, a row of stars glimmered faintly into view and started to rise.
David pulled himself up straight. He held his wrist out in front of him and flipped it over to bring up his console. He was going to close the room.
“Hold on,” said Alex.
“It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
David saw the regret in Alex’s eyes.
“It’s okay, seriously. I just need to go to bed,” said David.
“I know, but—” Alex bit his lip and pressed his heel into the platform.
“David, I got a meeting,” he said.
David froze. “What?”
“A real meeting,” said Alex. Alex was looking down and shuffling his feet over the limestone. “I found someone who said they’ll sponsor it. The processing and everything. All of it.”
Cold excitement and dread rose up together in the pit of David’s stomach. The console flickered away over his wrist as he let his arm fall.
“Are you serious?”
“It’s a game designer out of Shanghai. One of the big aggregators,” said Alex quietly.
“You weren’t going to tell me?” said David.
“Of course I was.”
“And it’s real?”
“Yeah, it’s real.”
David pressed his tongue up against the back of his teeth and stared out over the valley. He tried to calm himself down.
“So what’s left?” he said.
“Nothing formal. They want me to spend some time with their development team and put together a model.”
“Jesus. So it sounds like they’re there.”
“Yeah, I think so. I think they’re there.” said Alex.
David looked over. Alex had placed his palms over each other on the top of his head. David knew he was anxiously pressing his hair down where it stuck out behind the rubber mask.
“What else?” said David.
Alex let his hands fall down to his sides. “They want you to be there,” he said.
The dread that climbed out of the pit of David’s stomach swelled, and it grabbed onto his ribs with sticky hands. David imagined the questions they would have. He wondered whether they would see his desperation, whether it would scare them—or draw them in, like predators. He knew Alex was wondering the same thing.
“That’s fine,” said David. “When do they want to meet?”
“David—”
“No, I’m fine. That works. When can they meet? Let’s do it soon.”
Alex looked over at him and tried to smile. The facial cameras in his mask exaggerated the expression, so that the pity and worry in it deformed into something strange and alien.
“Alright, man,” said Alex. “Let’s do it.”
He kicked David’s ankle gently with the side of his shoe. The haptic coils in David’s ankle straps tightened and snapped, simulating the impact. David smiled forcefully. He suddenly wanted to be left by himself. He turned around and pulled up his console.
“Hey, you okay?” said Alex.
“Yeah, just tired,” said David. “Tell them we’re good. Do you want me to leave the room up?”
“Uh, sure, yeah—I’ll stay and watch the rest of the sunset.”
“Sure,” said David.
“Night, man.”
“Okay. Night.”
The thermal contacts in David’s wrist and ankle straps switched off automatically as he peeled his mask up over his head. His small office was cold and dark except for the pinpricks of blue light on his monitors. David pulled his knees up into his chest, fell over on the couch, and fell asleep.
Chapter Three.
The conference environment was modeled after the penthouse of a mid-century high-rise. In this room, the floors were white marble tiled in tessellating parallelograms between strips of polished bronze. The ceiling was low and hollow, illuminated from its edges by ensconced incandescent bulbs, and in the center of the room a crystal chandelier hung low and wide over the polished floor. A glass table stretched across one of the walls, surrounded by green velvet lounge chairs on geometric frames. The walls were painted in a blue floral design that twisted and grew as it reached up to the ceiling, creating an impression of static motion. Here and there the design was interrupted by moulded archways overhanging passages to other areas of the environment. A turntable with wicker speaker cabinets stood near the door to the hallway, where the light was dim and orange, and a glass-and-bronze bar cart stood parked nearby. The crystal reflections of the chandelier scattered over the liquor bottles, so that behind the cart the wall was splattered with amber and green reflections.
The room was enclosed on its far end by a wide floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked a busy nighttime cityscape. For a moment, the muted rattle of a train passing somewhere among the buildings below filtered in through the glass. Then the room returned to silence.
The avatar of a tall, slender woman in her early forties was standing by the window. Her back was to the room, and she was holding a bottle of aperitif up to her eyes. She turned the bottle in her fingers and lifted it higher. Light from the overhead lamps soaked into the scarlet liquid and poured onto the woman’s face, making her look young and a little flushed in the glow. Her hair was deep black, interwoven with narrow twists of gray that reached back from her temples. She wore a maroon satin sheath dress, cut a few inches above the knees, and white Chelsea boots with low heels. The outfit was likely an auto-fit for the environment, but her jewelry was anachronistically contemporary. Rows of over-sized rubber bangles covered her wrists, and a silver rarity key hung on a chain pulled tight around her neck. The center of the key glowed bright blue while she turned the bottle around in her hands.
“Do we need to reschedule?” the woman said flatly. A hint of Mandarin touched her English. She lowered the bottle from her face and turned to face the long table. The light on her necklace pulsed once, then it faded and disappeared.
Alex was pressing his knee into his palm. He tried to relax into his chair, but in his peripheral vision it looked like he was falling straight back through the frame. His tracking cameras weren’t well calibrated to the room. He sat up straighter and put his weight onto his wrists.
“No, we’re good. He’s coming,” he said.
The woman blew a puff of air through her nose. She walked over to the bar cart and set the bottle down among the tinted glassware, setting their sides clinking together. She turned to a flat-topped bureau beside the turntable and started flipping through a stack of records.
Alex held his palm out and bent his wrist back. The translucent blue console appeared floating over his arm. It showed that David was online. Alex double-checked the room permissions, then he anxiously traced another message into their board:
Where are you?
He flipped his wrist over to dismiss the console and looked up. The woman was guiding a record down onto the turntable. She twisted a dial above the speaker cabinets until it clicked, and the tone arm lifted automatically and floated over to the platter. A down-tempo electronic instrumental faded into Alex’s headphones as the needle settled into its groove. The woman pulled out a chair across the table from him and laid her body along it like a cat’s, her arms draped lazily over the sides. She hung her head and closed her eyes.
“He said he’s almost here,” said Alex.
“Did he?” the woman replied without moving.
Alex opened his mouth to answer, but he was interrupted by the loud mechanical rattle of an elevator shuttering through its column. The haptic coils in his ankle straps shuddered as the car sidled up to their floor, and somewhere behind the walls a pressure valve opened and hissed. Alex looked up and saw David standing by the door.
“So he is joining us,” the woman said. She unfolded her figure mechanically. First she uncrossed her legs, then stretched them straight out over the floor, then folded them back under the seat while she straightened her back. She laid her hands crossed in her lap.
“David—you’re Alex’s partner?” she said, tipping her chin down a little.
David stayed where he was by the door. The setting had fitted him in a dark dinner suit with an open collar and a small boutonniere. He had crossed his wrists over one another and was scratching nervously through his coat sleeves.
“Yes, uh, that’s right. Sorry I’m late,” he said. His words were loose and a little slurred.
“Not a problem,” said the woman. “Helen. We appreciate you joining.”
David closed the distance between them quickly and sat down at the table beside Alex. Helen kept her eyes on him.
“Can I make you a drink?” she said. She stood up without bending her back and started across the room toward the bar cart.
David looked over at Alex with wide eyes, then his head swiveled back to Helen.
“Wait—does this room—can they do that?” he said. Helen laughed and looked back over her shoulder.
“No, just playing,” she said. She traced her finger along a row of glasses on the cart, then she grabbed a pair of frosted pink tumblers. The key on her neck glowed dimly.
“Hang on and I’ll let them know you’re both here,” she said. “I can give you control on the room, Alex. But leave things where they are, I forgot I’d moved over some of my personals.”
“We don’t need to reconnect to a development room?” said Alex. He looked surprised. Helen picked a bottle off of the cart with her free hand and walked over to the hallway door.
“No, just stay put,” she said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
“You aren’t staying?” said Alex. A note of anxiety leaked through his voice. But Helen had already opened the door and faded through; the knob made an exaggerated click as she disconnected. Alex looked over at David.
“You good?” he said. Alex’s eyes were worried. In this light they were caramel-colored, with dark rings around their edges.
“Yeah, I’m good,” said David. He measured the cadence of his voice while he spoke.
Alex glanced over to the window. He frowned, then he pulled up his console and started scrolling. David looked around the room, finally noticing the environment.
“This music isn’t right,” he said.
Alex didn’t look up. David pulled up his console and toggled the room options. After a moment, the turntable’s tone arm lifted off of the record and replaced itself beside the lever. The music scratched exaggeratedly and fell silent.
“She didn’t say who we were meeting with, right?” said Alex. His voice sounded naked in the quiet room. His eyes stayed on his console.
“I don’t think so. Was she your point of contact?” said David.
“Yeah. I thought she was going to lead. I’m not sure who’s coming.”
“Should be developers, right?”
“That’s what she said before, but this isn’t the right kind of room.” Alex tapped over to another page. “Dammit, the user history’s private before my connection. I’m just worried she might have set us up with the ghouls first, lawyers or something.” The glow from Alex’s console shone white against the edges of his face.
“Like a screening?” said David. Alex didn’t answer.
“Alex.”
“What? Oh—yeah, something like that.”
“Okay. That’s alright,” said David. “Does it make sense to focus on the algorithm? Or maybe—”
“Don’t mention Gabby, okay?” Alex interrupted. His eyes stayed on his console, but his jaw was stiff.
“What? I wasn’t going—”
“I mean not at all. Neither—neither version.” The word stuck in the air. It sounded like an obscenity. Alex took a deep breath through his nose, then he dismissed his console and looked up at David.
“You’re sure you’re good?” he said.
“Did I do something wrong?” said David. He felt cold.
“I just—” said Alex. He paused. “I just want to make sure I know who all we’re across from.”
David shivered. He wished he had left the music on.
“I thought you said this was real,” said David.
“It is.”
“But you don’t trust them?”
“That’s not it, I—sure, I trust them. I just want to be smart.”
Alex stood up from the table and walked over to the window. The cityscape outside looked like a copy of midtown Manhattan, but the designer hadn’t been strict. A couple of blocks behind the Empire State Building, Big Ben’s yellow clock face showed fifteen minutes past nine. Alex dragged his hands over the top of his head.
The elevator sound cue rattled through the walls. Alex put his hands in his pockets deliberately and faced the door. David sat up. The door knob turned, and two avatars faded into the room. The first was a pale, attractive woman in her twenties, with blond hair cut above her shoulders and long bangs that tapered off to one side. Like Helen, she was dressed in a sixties-era shift dress and leather boots made to match the setting, but her arms and neck were bare of jewelry or other ornaments. She held a slim leather folio against her middle and held her other hand up in a polite wave. As soon as the entrance animation was finished, she walked across the room to the table and pulled out a chair at the end. She pressed her dress down along the backs of her legs as she sat down, then turned to smile politely at each of Alex and David.
David smiled back in spite of himself. He recognized the default NPC-admin he’d selected in his build. Most rooms didn’t support one, but he’d taken the time to customize her anyway. It was lovely how the auto-fit suited her, he thought. He looked up at Alex and wondered what he saw.
“Good evening, are we ready to get started?” said the other avatar. His voice was a clear tenor that rolled over each syllable like dripping glue. He was a tall and narrow-chested man, with a crop of light-brown hair that stuck out over his forehead. Unlike the rest of them, he had declined the auto-fit, and otherwise had not bothered to put together something appropriate for the setting. Instead, he wore a white button-up under a fleece vest, khakis, and blue running shoes.
David pushed himself in towards the table, pressing the balls of his feet into the thick wooden floorboards beneath the marble. They creaked softly under his toes. His sense of place was starting to loosen as he looked up at the new avatar. The man was watching him; he was smiling, but his eyes were low and impatient. A nauseous cramp tightened in David’s gut.
Alex replied from beside the window. “Absolutely. I apologize for the wait,” he said. He nodded respectfully as he spoke.
The man looked over at Alex and frowned. His expression looked like he was scanning Alex, searching over his face for defects. After a moment, he turned around and walked to the turntable with heavy steps, swaying a little as he went.
“Given the time differences, I think it will be important for us to respect our appointment time in the future,” the man said.
He stopped in front of the tall bureau that stood against the wall beside the turntable. He pulled up his console, pinned the glowing rectangle onto the wall above the bureau, and bent down to begin rifling through a long stack of LPs. Through his microphone, heavy breaths were fighting through thick nostrils as his hands pushed between the cardboard sleeves. Eventually he pulled out a mustard-yellow album and let the rest of the records fall sideways on their shelf. Alex and David watched the man lift himself back onto his spine with a muted grunt, pushing on his knees to leverage himself to a stand. He let out a wet sigh and stepped over to the turntable while he pulled the vinyl disc from its sleeve. When he held it over the spindle, the environment took the disc smoothly out of the man’s hand and lowered it down onto the platter. The man pulled his console down from the wall and began toggling through it as he walked back to the conference table. A quiet cacophony of analog noise and electric guitars started to play through the environment.
“Are you Alex?” the man said without looking up.
“Yes. And this is my partner, David.”
The man ignored David. “You’re Helen’s point of contact?” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Take a seat,” the man said, gesturing. “My name is Noah. I advise Helen and the other members of the firm on portfolio strategy and risk management generally. In particular, I oversee structured lending products for our high-yield portfolio.”
Alex’s congenial smile faded. “I’m sorry, you aren’t from the development team?” he said.
“No, our dev team doesn’t typically sit for introductory meetings. I understand that your project has Helen’s attention, but given the size of our portfolio, there is a screening process that we have to follow. Will you please have a seat?”
Alex walked back from the window and sat down next to David. He began talking anxiously as Noah slowly lowered himself into a seat across from them.
“I understand,” said Alex. “But I think there might have been a miscommunication. You mentioned you work in lending—our proposal is for equity funding and operating support, not debt. Helen’s already said she wants to invest. This meeting was to get us introduced to the engineers so that we can put together a pro forma. Once we have an outline development schedule and budget, we can work on a valuation.”
Noah dismissed his console and looked up at Alex with his eyebrows raised. He was smiling.
“Valuation?” he said. He looked amused.
“Uh—yes.” Alex shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I’m sorry, maybe I’m not following—Helen is an equity member, right?” The words landed with a condescending bite.
Noah continued smiling, but he pressed his tongue down deep into his lip. The setting struggled to interpret the expression data from his mask’s facial cameras, and for a moment Noah’s smile stretched inhumanly outward.
“I work very closely with Helen,” Noah said. His voice was flat and disinterested. “She and I discussed her curiosity about your project, and of course we were able to make an exception to some of our processes to accommodate her. But to clarify expectations, I will say that, unfortunately,” Noah paused on the word, “opportunities originated from outside our internal pipeline typically don’t reach a final investment.”
Alex sat still and stared at Noah. For a moment it looked like he might raise his voice, but he kept his voice level.
“It sounds like you’re telling me—”
“This is a courtesy,” said Noah.
Alex turned in his seat and pulled up his console. “I’m going to see if Helen can join,” he said.
“You’ll have to wait. Outgoing messages from our personnel rooms are blocked except for technical reports and emergency contact lists, for security.”
“She gave me control on the room,” said Alex. He continued to gesture over the hologram that hovered over his arm.
“I have an override in firm rooms, regardless,” said Noah. “You can speak to Helen after we’re finished. Or, we can go ahead and wrap up, if you’d prefer. I don’t want to waste your time.”
Alex paused with his finger over his console, then he threw his arm down to dismiss it. The frustration in his face was breaking into anger.
“What is this?” he said.
“This is exactly what you asked for, unless I’ve misunderstood. And it’s a lot more than most independents could expect, in fact. I’m sorry, did you think you wouldn’t have to explain your project to an adult? Or did you think you were entitled to funding because of a personal relationship?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“What I said was, did you think we were going to write you a check because Helen decided to fuck you?”
Alex glared at Noah. Over his shoulder, a list of cryptocurrency exchange prices updated in bright crimson across the side of the Burj Al Arab. Noah looked blankly back at Alex, then he glanced over to the admin. She had brought out a yellow legal pad and was scratching a note onto it with a fountain pen. When she finished, she tore off the page, folded it, and handed it to Noah between her fingers. Noah took the note, scanned it for a moment, then handed it back.
“Something wrong?” said Alex.
Noah didn’t answer. He reached his arm across his eyes and pulled at his rig. His avatar’s face distended bizarrely again, then it snapped back into alignment. When he continued, the hostile monotone had fallen away from his voice, and his tenor rose and fell charismatically. He sounded suddenly welcoming.
“Look, I’m not trying to rake you over it,” he said. “To be honest, we’re focused on these kinds of projects right now. But it doesn’t make sense to get our engineers involved until we have a view on the fundamentals. I’ve just had to make a habit of conducting these initials myself to avoid distractions. We’ve had a few successful walk-ins, but it’s important that we’re mindful of the team’s time. We want to make sure we’re a good fit.”
“We aren’t walk-ins,” said Alex quietly. He was disoriented by the change in Noah’s tone.
“Well, of course you are.”
“I was on the design team for half of the models in here,” said Alex. He gestured toward the admin. “She probably trained on some of my work.”
The admin smiled vaguely.
“Is that right?” said Noah. “That’s impressive. Him too?” Noah gestured at David.
“No. He’s psych,” said Alex. “He’s developing the training templates.”
“Okay. Academic?”
“No.”
“Okay. But he’s your partner?”
“Yes. Sorry, didn’t you ask for him to join?”
Noah ignored the question. “Then y’all worked together before? Or what’s the background there?”
Alex glanced at David for a moment before responding. “Yeah, we’ve worked together.”
Noah smiled from the corners of his mouth. “Okay,” he said. “David, then—” Noah turned towards him. “Why don’t you walk me through the concept? You can keep it high-level.”
“I’m lead on this,” said Alex. “I can walk you through it.”
“No,” said Noah. “You said he’s psych, right? I’d like for David to give me the overview. These products are fundamentally social, I think. I don’t need to hear all the back-end.”
Noah sat still, watching David. David glanced over at Alex, then down at his wrist.
“Well, uh—sorry, if I can pull up my notes,” he said. He pulled up his console.
“No need. Please,” said Noah. “Like I said, I’m not an engineer, so I just need to get my arms around the concept. You can save me the trouble with the rest.”
Noah’s tongue slid in a thick bulge across his cheeks and came to rest in his lower lip. He kept his eyes on David. David dismissed the console and looked nervously up at Noah.
“It’s, um, it’s a variation on older NPC training processes,” he began. “Most of the framework is already widely adopted. It’s just that we figured out a way to short-cut the training material.”
Noah’s expression was unnaturally still. At the edge of his field of view, David could see Alex watching him carefully. He went on:
“Normally the datasets they train on are too large to create anything personal. You have to pull the sets from commercial aggregators, or crowd-source. The set is large and, uh—” he searched for the word, “—ambiguous. It has to be, to get enough resolution. So the NPCs always come off like a sort of person, but not—uh, not a real person. Not the kind of specific person that you would see in the real world, if the data weren’t so crowded. The peaks and valleys are all worn off by the law of averages when you aggregate—real people are inconsistent. They have sharp edges. Does that make sense?”
David tugged at his wrist strap while he waited for a response. Noah remained frozen for a moment, then all at once the subtle movements in his face and his hands resumed, like an un-paused video.
“I’m familiar with the issue,” said Noah. “But it’s a hard problem. A data problem.”
“Exactly,” David continued. “You have to brute-force it. You can’t collect enough on one person to fill out the set, so you’re stuck with the aggregators. You can try to decompress some of the more disruptive signals and split them up, but at the end of the day you can’t design personality—at least, not one that would come across as genuine. You can’t design anything genuine, almost by definition. If you could, you wouldn’t need to bother with training at all. So we thought—and we worked it out—you can apply a preset curve to an existing aggregated set. One of the commercial ones, or crowd-sourced, or whatever. Then you use a handful of behavioral samples from a single source to give it a genuine shape.”
“I don’t follow. They already shape the data sets,” said Noah.
“Right, but they do it manually. Every psych model has its own way of diagramming the set. Then they just dial up one or two of the personality metrics to create an archetype. But it isn’t personal. It’s still made-up, not really based on anyone. It’s too general. And users always pick up on it, after a little while.”
“And you’re saying that you would tune the metrics to match a specific person?”
“No, they already do that too. I think some of the archetypes are even based on historical figures. But it’s too coarse-grained, and it’s still artificial. You still have to diagram the set and tune the parameters manually, even if you’re trying to model someone. They try to map what they think are the person’s key traits over their model, and then dial in whatever metrics they picked to match the subject, but at the end of the day it’s still made-up. It’s fake. Even the good models, they’re just somebody’s guess at the fundamentals of personality. And it isn’t close. Or, it’s close, but not close enough. If they push it, the best they can do is uncanny, so they have to pull it back. You get the angry version, or the talkative version, or the shy version, or whatever—but it’s always the same zombie.”
Noah glanced at Alex, then he turned back to David and leaned forward slightly. “So what’s the alternative?” he said.
“Well, you don’t try to split up someone’s personality and map it over the model, you do the opposite. You set the experiences that you have available as heuristics on the entire set—every file—so that each motive is shaped before it’s ever expressed. The raw set is filtered through the authentic personality. And you don’t need too many experiences, a few samples of behavior is enough to provide a contour.”
Noah leaned back in his seat. “I don’t see how the expressions could get that granular. At least not in real-time,” he said.
“The operational load is actually a bit lighter,” said Alex, jumping in. “Almost all of the compute is on the front-end, when you’re processing the data set through the samples. That’s what can be prohibitive.”
He nodded at David, then he stood up and walked back to the window. He smoothed his hair over his ears and looked out over the city while David continued:
“It’s easier to understand by analogy—have you ever worked in music production, or sound design?”
“No,” said Noah.
“Well, that’s how they get music to sound like it’s real. You know, played by real people, in a studio or wherever, even though these days it almost never is. You can generate a drum track—or anything you want—using a sample. Any of the good software workstations will take a piece of audio and spin it out to match, just like the admin training. But the result is too crisp and repetitive, it’s exactly on the mark. Or, it’s off the mark in exactly the same way each time. Most people couldn’t put their finger on it, but in their gut they know something’s off. It sounds fake. It isn’t real. For a while the studios would try to get around it by randomizing each track by hand—you’d take a set of the notes or the beats or whatever and shift them around a little, so that they’d be messy. That was better, but it still couldn’t trick your ear. It was too choppy. It was wrong, but not in the right way. You can’t simulate it by hand like that. So instead, and this was fifteen or twenty years ago, somebody realized you could take a second sample, something somebody actually recorded, and just measure the overall trend of the inaccuracies in the rhythm. You’d only have to record a few measures, and the computer can grab the pulse and the notes and compare those to generate some precision function. And then you just take that and set it over the entire track. So you generate the raw set with whatever your stock is, but then another sample, a genuine recording, provides the shape for the whole thing. And when you’re done, it’s real—it’s the same as if you had somebody play it all live. Your ear buys it.”
Noah looked straight ahead at David. “You weren’t fucking with us,” he said. Then he turned around toward Alex. “You’ve actually got something.”
Alex didn’t answer. Noah turned back to David. “You’ve done this before. You’ve made one.”
“Yeah, as far as we could with our processing—but it works. The load on the front end—”
“We’ve had proof of concept,” Alex interrupted from across the room. He shot David an angry look over Noah’s shoulder, then he came back around the table quickly and sat down. David’s gut tightened up. He felt sick, realizing what he’d done.
“We’ve run a few tests, but that’s it,” said Alex. “That’s why we’re excited about the investment. We’d have the opportunity to develop something substantial.”
“Right,” said Noah. “But you have a model?”
“No. Like we said, we don’t have the resources. But we’re confident in the process,” said Alex.
Noah smiled and turned to face David. “Is that right, David? I mean, you have so much worked out—I’d have thought you would have built something with it already. Didn’t you want to try it?”
David felt his jaw shiver as he opened his mouth. He hoped his facial cameras didn’t pick up the motion. “Um, no, we haven’t had enough compute to run a full set,” he said. “We didn’t want to build something halfway.”
Noah was frozen again. A few silent moments passed, then his avatar reanimated, and he grinned wide with his lips together. The setting glitched, and for a few frames Noah’s mouth seemed to stretch outward to touch the spaces beside his ears. The setting repaired just as quickly, and Noah sat smiling blandly at David. David looked down at his lap uncomfortably.
“Sorry, was there anything else?” said Alex. Noah sat up in his seat and turned toward Alex like he had forgotten he was there.
“I’m sorry?”
“Are we finished with the screening? Can we move on?” said Alex.
“Oh—yes. Absolutely,” said Noah. He stood up from the table and looked down at them. “If the two of you don’t mind waiting a few minutes, I do think it would be productive to loop in one of our development leads. That way we can get the technical discussion moving forward. I’m going to step out and take a look at where I think we could squeeze our production schedule. I’ll speak with Helen, but I’m sure the two of you will be in touch, Alex.”
“Great,” said Alex.
Noah smiled, then he turned around and walked to the hallway door. The knob clicked loudly as he disconnected. Alex sat still for a moment, watching the door, then he exhaled and leaned forward over his arms.
“I’m sorry,” said David, “I didn’t realize what I was saying until—”
“It’s okay. Let me think.”
Alex pulled up his console to check whether Noah’s override had released when he left the room. He scrolled through the room settings, then he looked over at the admin.
“Does this environment support an interior lock?” he said.
The admin looked up at Alex pleasantly. “No, it’s configured as an open channel for our executive team and their staff. Would you like me to search for an available private room?”
“No. Confirm that recording is disabled?” he said.
“That’s correct,” the admin said. “Would you like to enable recording?”
“No. Get me the connection log.”
The admin smiled and reached down toward her folio.
“No,” said Alex, “just send it.”
The admin pulled her arm up and laid her hands in her lap. She nodded.
“Thanks,” said Alex. He looked down at his console and scrolled through the log. “Noah Stonich. Let’s see. Oh, he’s outside of Austin. Wait, fuck, he’s fifty-six. Did he look that old to you?”
The hair stood up on the back of David’s neck. “He’ll know that you opened his file,” he said.
“I know. He’s probably expecting it. He’s going to try to screw us, David.”
Alex looked tormented while he scrolled. “If he tries to get in touch with you without me, you don’t respond, alright? If he shows up somewhere and I’m not there, you fucking leave.”
“Alex, get out of his file,” said David. He looked over at the admin nervously. She was smoothing her dress over her legs, but at David’s look she folded her hands in her lap and smiled at him. Her pleasant default expression quickly adjusted to match his: she drew her eyebrows together and frowned sympathetically.
“Can I help you with anything?” she said.
“They were stonewalling us,” said Alex, ignoring the admin. He stood up and paced back to the window to stare out at the city.
“That asshole was going to lock us out, but then he pivoted. What was the change?” Alex turned around suddenly and looked down at the admin.
“Can I help—”
“What was the note you passed him?” said Alex.
“I’m sorry, I can’t recite the contents of private folders,” said the admin. She held her palms up apologetically.
“I know, but was it a system notice or a message? Did it come from another user?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t recite the contents of private folders,” the admin repeated. She tilted her head and smiled.
“She’s counting, Alex,” said David.
“I know.” Alex sat down and sank deep into a chair. He looked deflated. “He knows we’ve already finished it,” he said. “He figured it out. If they get a look at it, that’s it. They’ll engineer it and we’re out.”
“I’m sorry,” said David.
“It’s okay. I thought—it’s okay. We should have talked about it more. Can you message me his name? Hold on, don’t pull up the file. I’ll read it to you.”
David tilted his wrist back to pull up his console and scrolled across to his board with Alex. He traced Noah’s information into the board as Alex read it: Noah G. Stonich; 56; 792; 1204 Rowan St., Austin, TX.
Alex pulled up his console and waited for the message to come through, then he let his arm fall down onto the table. “I’ll tell Helen we don’t want another meeting with him. Just let me talk to the developers, okay?”
“Okay,” said David. He looked down at his lap.
After a few minutes, the elevator rattled through the floor, the valve hissed in the wall, and the avatar of a young woman faded into the room. She wore black slacks with flared bottoms and a loose-fitting shirt, and her hair was drawn into a tight bun on the crown of her head. David’s eyes fell over the rows of developer keys that hung on tight chains around the woman’s wrists. Each one likely represented a two- or three-thousand-dollar subscription, he thought. If they were licensed indefinitely, then there were almost two-million dollars wrapped around each of her arms.
“Alex?” she said. Her voice was low but sharp, and it carried a heavy Australian accent.
“Yes,” said Alex. He straightened up in his chair.
“I’m Elena—director in our engineering section. Noah told me about your proposal. Can you and your partner still hang around for a bit?”
“Of course,” said Alex. “Thanks for making the time.”
“I’m excited about the project,” said Elena. She sounded energetic. “Please reconnect with me if you would, it’ll be easier to work in one of our design rooms.”
She opened her console and toggled a set of permissions with quick, pointed gestures. David felt his wrist strap vibrate and looked down. A yellow invitation icon glowed below his palm.
“Your credentials were ported to our network when you registered for the conference center, so you won’t need a password. I’ll see you in a sec, yeah?” The doorknob clicked, and Elena disconnected.
David looked over at Alex. “Did you see her keys?” said David.
“Yeah. She’s senior. They fast-tracked us.” Alex had his hands pressed across the top of his head and was looking blankly down at the table. After a moment, he held out his wrist and gestured over the room invite. The icon opened into a yellow card that hovered over his palm.
“Just give them the broad ideas if they ask you, keep it high-level. And only if they ask you directly. Play dumb, okay? Let me handle everything else.”
“Okay. Do you think—” David started, but Alex disconnected. The doorknob clicked, and David was alone in the room. He looked across the table at the admin, who sat smiling blankly.
Chapter Four.
Elena and Alex reconnected to the conference environment together. The room was empty except for the admin, who sat quietly at the end of the table. Alex hadn’t configured the admin’s appearance, so the setting rendered its default: a bookish young man with glasses and a corduroy jacket. The admin looked up and acknowledged each of Elena and Alex as they connected, then he folded his hands in his lap and looked blankly ahead. Through the window at the end of the room, a flotilla of low clouds had drifted in over the city and was spreading itself among the towers. Big Ben’s jaundiced face, diffuse and ghostly in the fog, showed nearly two in the morning. Elena glanced at the clock, then she looked over at Alex.
“You sure you don’t want to get some sleep?” she said. Her vowels stretched under her accent. “The team’s mostly around Shanghai. We can get pretty far this evening and pick it back up with you tomorrow.”
Alex yawned. He pressed a finger down against his wrist strap to mute himself.
“I’m okay,” he said.
He ran his palms along the top of his head to smooth his hair down. The technical introduction had been a blitz; Elena’s developers were frenzied once they understood the concept. They had worked for hours, battering Alex and David with questions, distilling every nuance from their explanations and building up a framework in their platform in real time. Alex felt like he had been scraped empty. Still, he knew there were details Elena wanted to continue discussing with him. It was good momentum. Alex crossed the room a little listlessly, then he stopped beside the bar cart and picked up a bottle of Curaçao.
“What did you want to dig into next?” he said.
He tilted the Curaçao over and watched the blue liqueur slosh down into the neck of the bottle. The effect was nearly photorealistic. He shook the bottle gently and watched tiny indigo bubbles rise through the liquid, accumulate around the rim, then disappear.
“I’ve never seen anything this detailed in a live room,” he said.
Elena smiled. “Yeah, pretty isn’t it? Helen and some of the other members like to keep their personals in here. They say it’s for security, but I think they just like to impress each other.”
Alex nodded. “Worked on me,” he said.
He set the bottle down and turned to look through the window. The clouds were unraveling into a layer of mist, illuminated from underneath by the city lights. He thought about the empty landscapes and smooth horizons of the rooms he was used to.
“This whole environment has got to be proprietary,” he said.
“It is,” said Elena. “We’re usually two or three builds ahead of whatever’s available commercially. Sometimes we’ll let the staff install legacy versions at their offices, but the latest and greatest always stays here, for the conference center. We have a few rooms running it.”
Elena looked down at her wrist while she spoke. She stared for a moment at a notification, then she pulled up her console and traced a short message. When she was finished, she joined Alex at the window and held out her finger.
“Oh, look down there,” she said.
Alex followed her gesture to the edge of Central Park, where a small cloud of neon-trimmed quad-copters were flying over the trees. The sight clashed with the midcentury style of the conference center; it took Alex a moment to make sense of the anachronism.
“Are those other users?” he said.
“Yeah, they’ve been doing races in the park the last few nights.”
Alex looked over at Elena, then back at the city. He realized all at once what he was seeing.
“Is this an open world?” he said.
Elena nodded. “Sort of. It is for us. Only a few of the towers are ours, the rest are overlaps with private channels. You can’t see between them unless you’re connected here, through one of our rooms.”
Alex traced the streets with his eyes, noticing for the first time how the commotion on the ground was collected in rings around each building instead of sifting along the avenues between them. The towers were independent channels, all incorporated into the same scene by the conference environment.
“You can move between all of it? Like in a game?” said Alex. He felt wide awake.
Elena laughed a little. “Sure,” she said. “You wanna do a fly-over?”
Alex nodded without taking his eyes off the window.
Elena led them under a moulded archway into a smaller sitting room. The rarity keys wrapped around her forearms glowed excitedly as the two of them walked by shelves stacked high with digital baubles. At the end of the space, a rectangular cutout in the wallpaper marked the frame of a narrow door. Elena pushed it open: inside was a small concrete-walled closet, empty except for an iron service ladder that stretched down from the ceiling. Elena raised her arm beside it, and the setting played an exaggerated sound of tumblers clicking into their grooves.
“Grab the ladder. It’ll reconnect you to the roof,” said Elena.
Alex obeyed. His wrist strap pulsed as he put his hand onto the metal rung, and the room faded out. A moment later the environment began replacing itself around him with an effect like receding fog.
Now he was standing near the edge of a small rooftop courtyard. Cobblestone tiles meandered through stands of aspens and pink laurel, and on the far side of the roof, a shallow pond that was too still and too bright reflected stars that hadn’t yet appeared in the sky. Beyond the ledge, the crowded city loaded in concentric rings until its towers touched the horizon. The aspens rustled to announce Alex’s connection, and his contacts pulsed warmer and cooler in an imaginary breeze. Elena stepped forward beside him.
“This is beautiful,” said Alex. He was envious. He knew the excess of processing resources that must have stood behind what he was seeing.
“Thanks,” said Elena. “We’re still working out how to get it integrated with the rest of the setting. The design doesn’t quite fit. I think we’ll keep these trees, though.”
Elena toggled through the room preferences in her console while she spoke. After a moment, an electric whine played from somewhere high overhead. Alex looked up: a large quad-copter flew into frame against the stars and descended rapidly, tilting with quick jerks to find a clear place in the courtyard. It landed a few yards in front of them with its cabin door open. Elena stepped inside and sat down. Alex stayed behind for a moment, admiring the detail of the model, then he joined her. The propellers’ whine quieted to a hum as the door slid closed.
“Maybe we should’ve brought David along,” said Elena. “Want to see if he’ll join?”
“It’s fine,” said Alex. “I’m sure he’s passed out.” That was the truth—it was almost four in the morning in Houston.
Elena smiled, then she looked down and made a few more gestures into her console. The quad-copter’s propellers tilted, and they took off at a sharp angle over the city. Alex flinched at the unfelt acceleration.
“So not a night owl like you, then?” said Elena. She dismissed her console and leaned back on the bench.
“Not really,” said Alex. “He usually has to work pretty early, anyway.”
Elena looked surprised. “What else does he do?” she said.
“A couple of consulting jobs. He does graphics work for game developers, mostly. And some character design.”
“Oh. In the bay area with you?”
“No, Texas, actually. He moved down to Houston a few years ago.”
“Texas,” said Elena. She sounded surprised.
“Yeah, he had to be out there for family,” said Alex.
Elena nodded. The drone tilted subtly as it flew between drifts of cloud and soaring steel towers. The city passed by under and around them through the cabin’s glass walls. From this distance, the crowds of users that swarmed the bases of the towers were less separated from one another; they seemed to touch at the edges without quite blending or crossing paths. The sight made Alex uncomfortable. It felt like an entire city had poured out into the streets to look up at them.
“So are you friends from uni or something?” said Elena.
Alex raised his head from the glass.
“Sorry?” he said.
“You and David. You’re kind of an unusual pair,” said Elena.
“What do you mean?”
Elena tilted her head playfully. “Well, he isn’t from the industry. He isn’t a developer, I mean. This isn’t the kind of work you just jump into.”
“He’s psych,” said Alex. “And he helps with the graphics.”
“I know, but most big firms have psych in-house, right? More of a support role. I guess I don’t know how the two of you have it worked out.”
Alex looked down. He watched through the glass floor as they passed over the Burj Al Arab. Its curved spine was illuminated in shades of neon yellow.
They already know, he thought.
“We’re family,” he said, finally.
Elena nodded. “Got it. He’s your brother or something?”
“In-law. He and my sister were married.”
Elena smiled.
David peeled up his mask. The breeze from the ceiling fan was cool and dry on his face. He ripped back the Velcro straps from around his wrists, then he pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying to rub away the lingering brightness.
It had rained. The window of his office was cloudy with steam, and at its corner a small puddle had accumulated on the sill. A few drops fell down onto the carpet. David stood up, and for a moment he was blind as his blood rushed down into his legs. The light and sound of the developers’ studio had held him awake, but now thick, natural fatigue poured onto him as though released from behind a valve. He thought about lying back down on the couch and sleeping in the office. Then a cone of blue light flickered on over his desk.
David dragged himself across the room to look at his phone. There was a new message:
David, it’s Noah. Give me a call please.
The words froze him. He was awake again, and afraid. He picked up his phone and texted Alex:
Noah wants to talk to me.
He stood in place for a minute, anxiously scrolling while he waited for a reply. He texted Alex again:
He wants me to call him now.
David stared at his phone. It started vibrating in his hand; Noah was calling. David let the call fail. He turned around to look at his rig, then he started another message:
Alex, he’s—
But Noah called again before he could finish. David picked up.
“Hello,” he said.
“David—thanks for letting me grab you.” Noah’s voice was eager. “I know it’s late. I’m just looking through some of the files the dev team forwarded me this evening and had a few questions. Do you have a minute?”
David felt cold in his gut. “I don’t know if I’d be that helpful,” he said. “Maybe I should see if Alex—”
“No, this is on your end,” Noah interrupted. “It won’t take long, I just need some hand-holding on one or two pieces. I want to make sure we can get something over to the members soon, maybe this week. We can meet in your default, does that work?”
David’s stomach gripped tighter. He picked at the side of his mouth.
“Um, sure—”
“Great, thank you David. I’ll meet you there in a minute. We’ll keep it short.”
Noah hung up. For a moment David stood still with his phone against his ear, then he pulled it away and thumbed through his messages to Alex; there was still no reply.
He’s still connected, he thought.
David gripped his elbows and pulled his arms into his stomach, then he sat down, wrapped the straps around his wrists and ankles, and stretched his mask down over his face. The contacts were warm.
David’s home environment faded in around him. There it was mid-morning, and a breeze was rolling over the grass low in the valley. David spun around and started toward a tunnel that opened into the side of the plateau behind him, but he stopped himself at the sound of the mission bell clanging overhead. Instead, he walked to the side of the limestone platform and pulled up his console. He traced another hurried message into his board with Alex while Noah connected.
Noah faded in at the edge of the platform. As the outlines of his avatar hardened, a pair of prairie falcons descended into frame from over the mesa. They rolled and dove through the great crevasses in the red rock and leveled off to glide away at eye-level.
“Wow, I don’t think I’ve seen this one,” said Noah. He crossed his arms and let his eyes pass over the breadth of the panorama. David stared at his board with Alex for another moment, hoping for a reply, then he dismissed his console.
“It’s actually one of the older settings,” said David. He felt his apprehension in his throat. He tried to flatten his tone. “But I’ve updated it a few times. The textures and the light pack are all new.”
Noah nodded. “Gorgeous,” he said quietly. He turned around to face David, letting his eyes linger over the rocky shelves that enclosed the lodge.
“Do you live around here?” he said. “Looks like Arizona.”
“No, I’m down in Houston,” said David. “I just liked this one.”
Noah smiled. “We’re neighbors. I’m outside of Austin. Alex might have told you that already, though.”
David felt his cheeks burn under his mask. He tried to keep his eyes level.
“Well,” Noah continued, “I appreciate you letting me grab you so late. I just need your help getting my arms around some of these files. It won’t take long. Do you have an office in here? Just somewhere we can pull up a couple of screens, whatever works.”
“Yeah, of course,” said David. He turned and led Noah across the platform, past the fire pits and ceramic pots, to an eroded archway in the corner of the lodge. It led them into a stairwell cut into the side of the rock that grew wider and shallower as they ascended, eventually flattening out into a small basin along the rim of the plateau. A thatch of juniper branches laid overhead made the space dim and cool, and in the center of the room, a messy cluster of CRT televisions hung from a bundle of cables. Noah laughed when he saw the design.
“I love it,” he said. He walked up to one of the televisions and pulled down a keyboard from his console. It hung in the air under his fingers and clicked quietly as he connected the interface to a remote server. David stood behind him.
“Give me a second to find the file—there,” said Noah. “This is what I’m stuck on.”
David stepped forward and looked at the screen. It showed a series of long paragraphs in an unformatted text file, each marked with a hash code. Beneath his mask, the color drained away from David’s face. His eyes were fixed on the paragraph that hung in the center of the window:
I was twenty-four and you were twenty-five. I remember the smell of sweat and disinfectant that fell out of the room when I opened the door. You were joking with one of the nurses, remember? You were so tired, you could barely lift your head, but you were still joking around. I remember the tube they put in your nose—it caught on the bed when you tried to sit up to see me. You made a joke out of that too, even though it hurt. You just laughed at the ceiling, and—
David backed away from the screen. His jaw was shaking.
“Those are private,” he said. “How did you—”
Noah tilted his head in play-confusion. “My team said this file was integrated with your product.”
“We didn’t share any of the training files with them.”
“Okay, so this is the training set you were talking about. That makes sense—these hashes all look like they’d respond to the mapping call.”
David struggled for a lie. “That file’s for another project. It uses the same call,” he said.
Noah shook his head. “I don’t think that’s right,” he said. He scrolled through the file disinterestedly; pages of text rolled across the screen. He stopped at random and smiled while he read what was on the new page.
“These are so sweet,” said Noah. “Look at this one.” He highlighted a paragraph with his cursor and started to read it aloud: “I remember the way you held your elbows out to the side while you drove—”
“Please, stop.” said David. He felt sick. Noah kept scrolling.
“I can see what you mean, the amount of compute you’d need to filter a dataset through all of these. The team said there was a whole directory of them. I can’t believe y’all were trying to run this on your own.”
David stood still. He thought about disconnecting, or disabling the room. He pulled up his console and started tracing a message to Alex.
“Is he going to join?” said Noah. He nodded sideways toward David’s console.
“I—I don’t know. You weren’t supposed to have those,” said David.
“Y’all must have included them by mistake, then. They’re all copied over now, in any case. It just seems like you put so much work into this, why wouldn’t you share it? Don’t you want to see how it turns out?”
“Please—”
“David, frankly, your product proposal isn’t something we could get comfortable with as it is.” Noah’s tone was bored and ministerial. “Your technique for mapping a dataset through these files is interesting, but without seeing the result, it’s going to be hard to make the case. Should we go ahead and run it? We can tap our servers from here.”
Noah turned around to face David. David was looking down, frantically refreshing his empty message board.
“Put that away and look at me.”
David obeyed. Noah’s eyes were predatory.
“It won’t take long,” he said.
David’s horrified expression under his mask confused his facial cameras, so that they reverted to a neutral default. His avatar’s face was blank and perfectly still. Noah smiled.
Chapter Five.
Elena’s drone banked as they came near the edge of the city. Through the window, Alex saw the black expanse of the upper bay tilt into view beside the shoreline. The Statue of Liberty stood too close, her expression clear and dark. Behind her, other colossal statues that Alex didn’t recognize guarded the harbor. Their orange torches sent shadows turning through the cabin as they flew past.
Elena was tracing messages into her console. She looked up at Alex, then followed his stare out through the window behind her.
“Thought the extra statues were a little gaudy. Oh—that’s my piece of Shanghai, over there,” she said.
Alex looked across the water toward a wide island that sat low and flat in the waves. Great yellow floodlights pointed out from its seawall, and behind them the island’s waterfront was lined with tall, weathered statehouses. Alex squinted.
“It looks European,” he said.
“Yeah, the Bund, in the old French quarter. It’s right on the river across from Pudong. Bit of a colonial leftover, I guess.”
“It’s pretty,” said Alex.
Elena nodded. “I live in Changning, nearby—thought it would be a nice way to connect to some of the Pacific servers.”
“More of the offices?” said Alex.
“No, just fun, mainly—shopping and that kind of thing. A few of the members like to go there for personals.”
Alex remembered Helen’s liqueurs. He let his head swivel to follow the Bund as they continued along the edge of the city.
“Here, let’s stop in for a minute,” said Elena.
She toggled her console, and the drone tilted back towards the water. The vacant piers and shipyards of Manhattan’s shoreline passed by underneath them. The ocean ahead was deep green except for long veins of moonlight that caught in the breaking waves. The drone tilted forward and picked up speed, crossing the narrow channel between the city and the island in a few seconds. The riviera-style waterfront of the Bund filled their field of view, and the drone slowed over the breakwater. Elena guided them across the seawall and over a wide cobblestone plaza on the waterfront, where the drone descended automatically. The cabin shook as they landed, the motors’ whining quieted, and the cabin door slid open. Warm sea air blew in audibly and pulsed over Alex’s contacts.
“After you,” said Elena.
They stepped out of the drone, and Alex followed Elena across the plaza. They passed a block of pastel-colored apartments, then she led them toward a wide cobbled street that ran along the waterfront, hemmed in on one side by the island’s thin sandbar. As they turned the corner, Alex saw the silhouette of a man leaned forward against the seawall, hanging his elbows over the rail. He was looking out at the water with his shoulders pulled up by his ears.
“Is that a user?” Alex asked. Elena followed his eyes.
“No, just an admin. I dropped a few of them in here.” Elena clapped her hands as they approached. The noise was too crisp; it should have been carried off by the breeze.
“Ay,” she shouted. The NPC straightened up and turned around to face them. It nodded politely and smiled.
“How busy are the shops?” said Elena.
The NPC turned to face the row of buildings that stretched along behind them. He pointed at a squat white-bricked building with columns carved beside each of its windows. Its roof was capped with a pair of cast-iron domes.
“The Telegraph Building has been open for a few hours,” said the admin. “There are about two hundred users there. Sassoon is a little quieter, a hundred-fifty or so, there. Yangtze Insurance—”
“Thanks,” said Elena.
The NPC smiled. He nodded to each of them, then he turned, hung his elbows over the rail, and looked out over the waves as they crashed over the sand beneath him.
“We’ll go to Xin Tian Di,” said Elena.
Elena led them past the Telegraph Building and along the road another few blocks, then she turned to face a tall hotel that stood in the wedge between two streets. Its central column was crowned with a copper pyramid that had tarnished to green.
“It’s up here.” Elena walked up to the hotel’s wide double doors and pushed them open, disconnecting as she did. Alex followed.
The setting where they reconnected was jarringly incongruous with the one they had left. Here it was twilight, and in the distance modern glass-and-steel apartment buildings stood crisp against the sky. They were standing in a wide courtyard enclosed on each side by stone cloisters and busy shop windows. A fountain in the center of the courtyard surged higher for a moment as Alex and Elena connected to the room, and the extra water fell down into the basin with a loud splash.
Alex scanned across the environment. The center of the courtyard was empty except for a few users that sat under an awning near the fountain. The rest were walking through the cloisters between the shops or wandering behind their glowing windows. A young man in a cardigan and neat slacks approached them and bowed his head slightly. A rarity key glowed dimly below his collar.
“Welcome to the Xin Tian Di shopping center. Can I help you find anything? We’ve recently cut the ribbon on a new—”
“We’re okay, thank you. Dismiss,” Elena interrupted.
The NPC closed his eyes and bowed, then he turned and disappeared into the cloisters. Elena started off down one of the alleys that branched off from the courtyard. It was crowded with wooden stalls and canvas veranda that hung over the corridor, covering tables of jewelry and accessories that were laid out in the open. As the alley opened up, it curved into a busy street that curved behind the courtyard. Electric signs flashed and rotated over the shops below. Elena ran her finger through the air.
“These are all small decor, that kind of thing,” she said. “I think maybe—wait, Carter!”
Alex turned. Elena was waving toward one of the shops further down the row. Its door swung shut, and a user’s frozen silhouette was fading out beside it.
“That was one of the members,” said Elena. “We should introduce you.”
She started down the street, and Alex followed her to the shop where the user had disconnected.
“This one probably needs new credentials, stand near me,” said Elena.
Alex obeyed. Elena laid her wrist over his, then she grabbed the door’s brass doorknob and turned until it clicked. The purple twilight of Xin Tian Di faded out, and they disconnected.
They reconnected to a long, windowless room with thick curtains hung in rows against the walls. The space was dark, barely illuminated by an electric chandelier that glowed overhead, and quiet. The chandelier, shaken by the door closing behind them, made a delicate twinkling sound that suffocated in the curtains.
“Carter,” said Elena. Her tone was conspicuously affable. “We saw you down the row and had to bother you.”
Alex looked ahead and saw a tall male avatar almost disappearing into the darkness at the end of the room. The man looked over his shoulder, then he turned to face them. He was wearing a suit, a wool overcoat, and a long purple shawl draped around his shoulders. He had white hair, and his cheekbones were sharp and low in his face. He smiled warmly as he saw Elena.
“Elena! How prospers the kingdom?”
Elena walked quickly forward to meet him, waving Alex to follow. The man held out his wrist from under the shawl, and Elena extended hers to meet it.
“It suffers in your absence, sir, but we carry on,” said Elena. She gestured behind her. “I was showing Alex around the conference environment a bit and thought we’d come have a look at the shops. Alex, this is Carter, one of our members. He’s a rare one that used to do some actual dev work, didn’t he?”
Carter held out his wrist to Alex and smiled. Alex met it; his strap thumped.
“So fun how she’s set up the environment, isn’t it?” said Carter. “Used to just be the one room. Now you can play Magellan all night.”
Alex put on a smile and nodded. “Definitely felt sea-sick up in the air,” he said.
“In the air?” Carter turned towards Elena. “Sounds like there have been a few more changes.”
Elena laughed. “Alex is an indie,” she said. “He brought in something exciting. I had to impress him, we might want to poach him when we’re through.” She turned and winked at Alex.
“Well, you couldn’t find a better team,” said Carter. “What’s this project?”
Elena raised her hand politely. “It’s walled off for now, until we get the paperwork all done.”
“Ah, yes, very important we wait for the paperwork,” said Carter. “I’ll look forward to hearing all about it in the reports, I’m sure. Watch out, Alex, they’ll make your life’s work sound about as exciting as the instructions for an electric razor.” He gestured behind him. “I was about to sit down and try out one of the new models. The two of you care to join me?”
“We’d love that. Just for a bit though, then we’ve got to wrap up a few things before I let this one to bed,” said Elena.
“What’re you, West Coast?” said Carter, addressing Alex.
“Yes, sir, but I’m a night owl.” Alex looked down at his wrist to check the time. He noticed an additional privacy icon hovering over the place where his incoming messages usually updated.
“All of you are, up at all hours,” said Carter, turning around and continuing toward the back of the room. “It’s not good for you. I remember though, I remember. All work and caffeine.”
He walked them to a dark wooden table that stood by itself against a wall. As they sat down, a stained-glass lamp that hung overhead grew subtly brighter, and an amber spotlight swiveled around on the ceiling and shone onto the floor beside them. A wide console opened itself over the table, and Carter began toggling into it.
“There’s a new one they’ve just added,” he said. “There.”
The console pulsed white where Carter made his selection, and immediately the sound of footsteps played from somewhere in the shadows. The NPC who approached them looked the same as the one that had greeted Alex and Elena in Xin Tian Di, but this copy was dressed in a black chiffon wrap, and he carried a long fiberglass case at his side. A light flashed in the corner of Alex’s field of view; he looked over and saw that all of the keys around Elena’s arms had pulsed together in bright, sheer white. Neither she nor Carter seemed to notice.
When the NPC reached their table, he produced a leather folder and set it down in front of Carter like a waiter. Then, without a word, he set the case on the floor beside the table and bent down to open it, revealing an old cello that looked like it had been scuffed, scratched, and re-lacquered hundreds of times. The NPC lifted the instrument out of its velvet draping, pulled the end-pin away from the body, then stood the cello up in the center of the warm spotlight. The NPC nodded politely toward the table, then he released his grip from around the fingerboard and disappeared back into the shadows. Rather than fall over, the cello leaned slightly backward in the air and rested there, balanced on its pin. A dark-lacquered bow faded into the air beside it, laid itself over the bridge, and sat motionless. Carter sighed.
“I’ve had just the perfect piece in mind for it,” he said in a tone like he was sharing a secret.
He made another selection in the console. The spotlight over the cello brightened slightly, and the almost-imperceptible ambient noise of the room fell even quieter. A few seconds passed silently; then, the cello’s strings plucked a deep chord in pizzicato. The bow began pulling gently across them, and the warm notes of Ligeti’s Sonata for Solo Cello filled the room.
Alex looked across the table. Carter had closed his eyes and was smiling contentedly, rocking gently with the music. Elena reached across the table to take the folder from in front of him, then she laughed quietly as she opened it.
“What is it?” said Alex.
“It’s a work of the divine,” Carter interjected. He lifted his head in time with Ligeti’s lilting phrases.
“It’s a replica,” said Elena. “The Servais Stradivarius?”
“Not a replica—a model,” said Carter. He opened his eyes and exhaled deeply.
“You mean the audio? It’s modeled after a particular instrument?” said Alex.
Carter leaned in eagerly. “Not the audio—the thing itself! The material! They’ve scanned the real thing at the Smithsonian with an electron microscope and reproduced it in a physics engine. The audio is perfect—completely lossless of course, and all of that—but it’s extrapolated from the structure of the wood itself. An absolutely identical recreation. Indistinguishable, acoustically—they’ve verified it. Blew the critics’ toupees back. Doubters!”
“Their measurements of the material are that faithful?” said Alex.
Carter nodded deeply while he replied. “Down to the fibers of cellulose in the wood,” he said. “The kids who put it together deserve everything coming to them. It’s so clever—once you have the materials data, the rest is vanilla, crunching numbers, all the usual. They’re working on the Il Cannone now!”
“Might cost as much as the real thing,” said Elena. She winked at Alex.
Carter raised up his hands in defense. “It might as well be the real thing, in here.” He looked over at the Servais longingly. “I’ve had my deposit down for months,” he said.
“Wait,” said Alex. “They process, what, every molecule? That can’t be possible.”
Carter kept his eyes on the instrument. “Well, no, just a small set of them, relatively speaking. They take samples from the important areas, around the bridge and the waist, and make sure they get some from deep in the wood around the back. You measure enough of those and you can derive the resonance—all of it, mathematically, not just for the areas you sampled. The hurdle is the computing load more than anything else. You don’t need every piece of a thing to suss out the way it hits the air. Hits your ears, especially. As long as you have the compute available to simulate and re-simulate the vibrations, you can determine a statistical range.”
“And the texture—”
“Oh, the texture’s easy. Just a few photos, they’ve done that for years. But this—” Carter closed his eyes again and clasped his hands together while the Servais’ melody soared. “—this is a thing of God.”
“Well, God’s developers will be well paid,” said Elena. “What do you do with these, Carter? Set them up in your main?”
As she spoke, she looked down at the inside of her wrist to open a notification. She began scrolling through her console.
“Sure, mostly,” said Carter. He was still staring at the cello while it rocked passionately on its pin. “Sometimes I’ll put on a parlor concert, as you know.”
Alex smiled at the idea. “Do you applaud the cello when it’s through?”
Carter laughed. “I do, sometimes! But you can set up a player for it if you like. Here, let’s see.”
Carter pulled up the table console and swiped across the menu. He scrolled for a moment, then he made another selection, and the sound of footsteps played again from somewhere in the room. The NPC that approached was a middle-aged man with a sour expression, who wore a nineteenth-century suit and vest and an extravagant satin necktie. His hair looked like it had been shocked with electricity and then combed down to one side. He gave a perfunctory nod when he reached their table, then he sat down on a stool that faded in to meet him behind the Servais. He shuffled his knees out to grip the sides of the instrument while it moved, grasped the vibrating strings over the fingerboard, and laid the fingers of his other hand over the bow mid-stroke. Suddenly the NPC was playing the cello that before had played itself; there was no interruption in the performance.
“A little strange for Monsieur Servais to be playing Ligeti, now that I think about it,” said Carter. He started scrolling through the console again. Alex watched the NPC lean and swoon with the halting rhythm of the music.
“Are the players modeled, too?” Alex asked.
Carter didn’t look up. “What? No,” he said. “Stock characters. They’re all pretty much the same.”
When the piece had concluded, Carter pled with Elena and Alex to stay for another performance—but Elena insisted they should leave. She reconnected them from the hall directly to the conference environment, skipping the walk through Xin Tian Di. When the Bund faded in around them, lavender edges of morning were tugging at the water on the horizon. Across the bay, the crisp silhouette of the city was darkening against the sky, and one-by-one the floodlights that decorated the sea wall faded and disappeared. Elena walked them in a hurry back down the street toward the drone. Alex pumped his heels and his wrists to keep pace.
“We can just pick back up tomorrow if that works better,” he said. “I could pass out, honestly.”
“No, we need to finish tonight,” said Elena.
The drone’s propellers began spinning as they approached, and its exaggerated mechanical whine filled the air. Elena pulled up her console and set the drone’s instructions as they stepped into the cab, and after a few seconds it took off at an angle toward the city. Elena settled back into the bench and looked out through a window.
“Everything alright?” Alex asked.
Elena lifted her fingers dismissively. “Yeah, just realizing I’m behind on some other work.”
She looked down at the inside of her wrist, then she folded her arms and put her head back against the wall. Her avatar shuddered and adjusted itself into alignment. Alex looked down and watched the black water pass by beneath them.
When they reconnected to the conference center, the sitting room’s interior lamps had turned down to make way for the new light outside, and in the transition the room was dim and gray. Alex’s wrist strap began thumping frenetically. He looked down: a backlog of messages was downloading to his rig all at once. He started to ask Elena whether the room permissions had changed, but she was already walking past him. She stopped as she came under the archway to the boardroom.
“Is that it?” she said.
A male voice replied from around the corner. Alex caught up to Elena and looked past her. In the center of the boardroom’s marble floor, a woman in a leather shift dress was standing awkwardly with her knees and toes pressed together. She was holding a leather folio tight against her middle, and her eyes were wide and terrified, jumping around the room like a captured animal’s. For a moment Alex thought he recognized the frantic terror on her face.
“What’s going on?” he said. He looked over at Elena, but her eyes were fixed on the woman. She walked into the room slowly.
“I recognize the skin. Were you able to confirm it?” she said.
“Still in the process, but yes—it works.”
Noah stepped out from behind the woman with his console pulled up high in front of him. He toggled a few settings, and suddenly the woman closed her eyes and pulled her shoulders back. Her lips began mouthing quick, silent words, like an incantation.
“Are you sure it’s not just a custom response set for this NPC?”
Elena was circling the woman, looking over her like a mechanic over an engine. She held out her hand to touch the woman on the shoulder, then drew back.
“Which diagnostics did you run?” she said.
“Just the first few, but so far they’re all clear. It isn’t just brute-forcing,” said Noah.
Alex’s skin felt suddenly cold. He took a step after Elena.
“Is that an admin? What are you running?” he said.
His head swiveled across the room. David’s avatar was sitting motionless at the glass table, his face blank and unnatural.
“David, what are they running? Is that our set?” he said. David didn’t move.
“You guys were holding out on us!” Noah shouted. He was walking toward Alex, his console glowing ghostly blue under his face.
“Is that our set?” said Alex. His voice was shaking.
“Not according to our fucking deal it’s not,” said Noah.
“It’s proprietary,” said Alex. “You broke into our server.”
“Oh, fuck off. Your partner let me in.”
“What?” said Alex. He looked over at David. He was still frozen in place.
“Hey, don’t hold it against him, he saved us all some time,” said Noah. “I mean, in what world are we not going to see this? This is the secret fucking sauce, man.”
He laughed coldly and turned so Alex could see what was on his console. It was David’s dataset, pages and pages of it, scrolling down the glowing screen like a movie reel over a projector. The NPC was mouthing each word at inhuman speed.
“They weren’t even trying to scam us for the money,” Noah called to Elena over his shoulder. “They just needed our fucking processors. They were going to plug in and then pass the product back to their servers.”
“Turn it off,” said Alex.
“You’ve got something really special. We could have had a genuine partnership here, man,” said Noah, pulling his console back around.
“I said turn it off.”
“You guys are the real fucking deal,” said Noah. “Look at this.”
He toggled something into the program. The dataset stopped scrolling, and the NPC’s mouth fell still, her lips parted mid-sentence. Her eyes shot open and watched Noah blankly as he stepped out in front of her.
“How are you feeling, darling?” said Noah.
The NPC looked confused at the question. She looked up and started scanning over the room. Her eyes fell on David.
“Did you see that?” Elena said to Noah, laughing. Noah didn’t move.
“Hey, over here,” he said, snapping to pull the woman’s attention back to him. Her head spun forward.
“Are you scared, honey?” said Noah. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
The NPC’s confusion was beginning to congeal into fear. She twisted in place, stomping her heels and moaning quietly into her pressed lips.
“Oh! I’m sorry,” said Noah. He looked down and toggled his console again. Suddenly the woman lurched and nearly fell forward, like invisible ties around her ankles had been cut open. The folio clattered to the ground.
“There,” said Noah, looking down at her. “Sorry about that, honey.”
The woman was bent down with her hands on her knees, heaving air loudly. After a moment she looked up at Noah.
“Who are you?” she said quietly.
Noah looked over at Alex. He was grinning like a child getting ready to tell a joke.
“Please,” said Alex. “Turn it off.”
“Should I?”
“Please,” Alex said again. He turned toward David. “David, disconnect, we’re done,” he said, but David remained motionless, his face inhumanly blank.
Noah shrugged, then he looked back down at the helpless figure beneath him.
“Let’s see how it goes,” he said. Noah dismissed his console and held his arms out wide. “I’m David, honey. Don’t you recognize me?”
For a moment, the room was quiet. The NPC’s confusion softened, and she looked tenderly at Noah. Then suddenly she was crying. She stood up and threw her arms around Noah, burying her face against his shoulder and sobbing. She was grabbing at the back of his neck to pull him closer.
“I missed you so much, honey,” she said in between breaths. “I was so scared.”
The false impacts against Noah’s avatar didn’t move him at all. He hung his arms in a loose circle around the woman while she shook against him, and he looked incredulously over at Elena, who had covered her mouth with her hands. She was laughing.
Alex looked away. David’s avatar lay like a rag on the floor, its limbs splayed unnaturally across the marble. After a moment the environment detected its unresponsiveness, and David faded out.
Chapter Six.
Outside of David’s office, the rain had fallen to dripping off of leaves and telephone wires, and the puddle under the windowsill had evaporated into a moist patch on the wall. The ceiling fan shook on its stem, thumping quietly in monotonous circles, and the beaded chains that hung down from its motor tapped in rhythm. One of the candles sputtered, flared for a moment, and then blinked into a thread of smoke.
David crossed his short lawn and pulled open a chain-link gate from across the driveway. He pressed a button on his phone, and his car’s interior lights blinked on from beside the trash cans. It rolled quietly back over the cracked concrete and stopped beside him. The doors unlocked with a click.
David dropped himself into the seat and copied Noah’s address into the display. The car backed itself out into the street, turning itself smoothly around to align between the curbs. It paused for a moment, then jolted forward through the empty darkness. Its electric whine echoed through the alleys. David leaned back in his seat and reached down into his pocket to find the little brown apothecary bottles. He twisted the cap off of one and poured it into his mouth until the bottle dripped, wincing while the tincture scored the back of his throat and soured his stomach. He braced against the nausea for a moment, then he drank the second bottle, and the third. He closed his eyes and let his head fall sideways against the window.
He drove for—twenty minutes? Two hours?
The car came to a whining stop, and David bobbed up through the surface of sleep. He was in a beautiful neighborhood, parked on the street in front of a handsome house nestled neatly between strips of green lawn.
David stepped out of the car and closed his eyes while the warm air poured over his face. It fell through his collar and into the space under his shirt. He inhaled, and the air in his lungs fell down through his entire body, filling him with warmth and moisture. He sighed.
Then David was pounding his fists into the door. He pummeled the wood until his wrists bled and the screws shook in their hinges, then he listened, ear pressed into the paint, waiting with heaving breath until he heard footsteps echo toward him. He ran back to the car. His fingers shook and grasped around the steering wheel; his knuckles were white. He leaned forward against the column and waited, his foot trembling over the pedal.
Noah opened the door and walked out into the lawn, shouting. The motor hummed and whined under David’s hands while he threw himself into the pedal, and the gray sky smeared over the windows. Noah turned, his arms stretched out awkwardly in front of him, and the side of his face hung like an afterimage in the headlights. The car detected the impending collision and braked hard, but inertia pulled the cabin swinging forward over the suspension. There was a muffled thump and a crack as Noah broke over the hood, then a slap like meat hitting the counter as he slammed back against the house. His body hung there for a moment, laid on the bricks like a decoration, then slid down. Noah was a pile of limbs dropped onto the grass, a knot of bones covered in skin and sticky hair. There was a little motion, and a moan, then nothing.
David fell out of the car and left it chiming and blinking behind him. His legs shook, and his knees scraped on the ground as he lurched toward the open door, dragging his bag by a strap. He threw the door behind him as he went through, shoved it into the frame, bolted the lock. He ran through a parlor; a living room; a kitchen. His steps echoed over crisp floors until he found an office in the back of the house and fell into it, heaving thick breaths into his lungs. His whole body was shivering.
Noah’s office was a dry, technical thing, a constellation of monitors and workstations on steel racks. Black cables twisted along the base boards in neat bundles, gripped together with zip-ties, and disappeared under a rug. A few plain pieces of furniture stood around the center of the room, marked off at intervals with painter’s tape. Pallid fluorescent lamps on the ceiling sent a thin shadow behind David as he walked between the rows of black screens, flinching at his reflections.
He found Noah’s rig on a chair cushion, its mask hung limply open over its lenses. The straps were pulled apart on the floor. David opened his bag. He set the candles down at the workstations, laid his books open on top of the steel racks. He checked the pages and the placement. He struck a match under jerking fingers, then another, until incense rose in plumes up to the ceiling. Finally he took out his phone, opened his central account, and gave Noah blanket permissions on his servers. His hands shook as he pulled the straps tight around his ankles, then his wrists, and stretched the mask down over his face. Little pinpricks of light danced in his vision while the world twisted away.
The conference center faded in around him. The admin was standing alone in the center of the room, her eyes closed and lips shuddering, while Elena toggled her console from the other end of the table.
“Welcome back,” she said, without looking up.
David flipped over his wrist and scrolled to Noah’s recent connections. He selected his home environment and sent an invite to the NPC. Her eyes flew open. She looked down at the yellow icon that floated over her wrist.
“What the hell?” said Elena, looking up from her console.
“Accept the invite, Gabby,” said David. His voice was steady.
“What invite?” said Elena. “Noah, what's going on?”
The admin looked across at David. She smiled, then she nodded and pressed her fingers over her wrist. She faded out from the room.
Elena stood up. She looked at David and started to speak, then she stopped herself. She looked down at her console and began tracing a message.
But David had already disconnected.
Chapter Seven.
David’s home environment, on its accelerated schedule, had cycled through night and most of the next day.
David’s contacts warmed as he connected, but a soft breeze was whistling through the rocks, promising a cooler evening. The sky was crisp indigo over the horizon, and along the desert panorama the first pinprick stars were nudging themselves into view. A pair of prairie hawks chased one another through the air above the mesa and disappeared below the platform edge; the mission bell clanged high overhead.
“Did you make all this?” the NPC said.
Her voice was clear beside David, just outside his field of view. He didn’t turn. Without a word, he pulled up his console and toggled to the room controls. He selected the admin and changed her skin to the one he had loaded into the environment years before. He waited for a few seconds to be sure, then he turned.
It was her. She was unmistakable. Almost the same but a little older, hair a little longer. She was thin, but pretty, still, of course—even prettier—in a tee shirt and cotton skirt that fluttered around her legs. David had never seen anyone so beautiful.
“Hey, honey,” said David.
Gabby was looking down over the valley. When he spoke she looked up at him, tilted her head, smiled. Her cheeks pulled more tightly on one side than on the other, so that her grin was almost a wink.
David laughed. He held out his wrist over her hers, and she grabbed his hand. David’s strap pulled the loops tight over his fingers. Gabby turned back and traced her eyes along the sapphire river; David’s eyes didn’t leave her.
When the last magenta glow had faded from the sky and the stands of scrub oaks were black over the rocks, David turned and led Gabby toward the back of the platform. The fire pits hissed and crackled to life as they passed. David pointed out all the decorations he had picked and designed—the limestone, the canvas pillows, the cacti in their glazed pots. Gabby teased him at the arrangement—where was there to sit? David laughed as he pulled her along.
He stopped when they reached the mesa wall, where an empty tunnel bore straight back through the rock. The tunnel was crude; the sides had no color, and the light from the fires and lamps behind them didn’t render behind its entrance. It was an addition, an aberration in the environment’s careful design.
“What’s back there?” said Gabby.
“Come look.”
They stepped through together, and the home environment faded out into darkness. The air in the tunnel was cool, and little whispers of moving leaves echoed against the rock. As they walked further in, a shallow creek babbled up through the ground nearby, and a thousand lights twinkled like constellations in the trees. Their feet found a soft path of packed earth and pine needles, and the air filled up with spice.
The end.