Empathy

Part 3

  The first thing we gotta do,” said Bomber as they crowded together in Jock’s machinery-packed room, “is figure out how they tracked us. Every bit of ID I got is fake, even the Feds would need at least a day to match my picture to a real address. No crime org could have that capability.”

  Gina had been right about her identification of Jock. She couldn’t guess his age; his chocolate skin was free of wrinkles, but his eyes had a vicious squint to them that would suit any bitter old man. Now he sniffed, indignant, and said, “I could do it.”

  “We ain’t counting you, Jock,” Bomber growled.

  “Fine, fine.” Muttering under his breath, Jock reached for a pair of black goggles studded with electrodes and slipped them over his head. A small black wire ran from the headset into the huge bank of processors along the wall. Gina marvelled at it. This was the first time she’d seen a modern VR crown for real instead of on a TV screen, and it fascinated her. The last time she’d used VR equipment was as a little girl, ten or twelve years old, in—

  No, she told herself. She didn’t want to think about that, she was done with all of it, all the old things dead and buried.

  Furtive fingers passed her a crown of her own, and Bomber helped her put it on. “Jock hates spectators,” he explained. Jock only grunted.

  “What was all that about owing the Emperor a favour?” she asked, only an hour late. Bomber looked at her silently through the semi-transparent goggles. Then Jock threw a switch, and they exploded into another universe.

  Everyone in the modern world knew about this place. It had been described to her a thousand times in exquisite detail, but now it proved that mere words couldn’t do it justice. The splash of riotous colour before Gina’s eyes almost blinded her. They called it ‘the Forum’, the central communications hub of the entire GlobeNet network. Rumour had it that the Forum had been around since the late 20th century as a primitive, communal bulletin board for written text. Hard to believe for someone like Gina who had grown up with the bright three-dimensional graphics of what people fondly called ‘cyberspace’. But even she had only ever experienced the Forum on a screen, like the majority of people who couldn’t afford VR. Now she was standing in the middle of it, shocked and awed.

  Everything was glitzy, glossy, shiny like plastic. When she looked up, the sky flashed advertisements at her in three different languages. Bright colours and white smiles beamed down at her from the little gods of TV. The actors were asian, arabian, black and white, yet so relentlessly bland that Gina couldn’t tell them apart. The only thing they said was “Buy.”

  Skyscrapers of every shape and colour towered against the neon sky, unburdened by gravity or other mundane restrictions. Orange spirals rose miles high next to straight-laced black office buildings and Roman temples more fantastic than anything the ancients could’ve imagined. Further down the street, things only got crazier. Glowing blue pyramids stacked on top of each other which constantly rearranged themselves, a medieval stone tower so tall and thin that a mild breeze would’ve knocked it over, a giant eyeball supported by columns of gooey green flesh. Geometric spheres and cubes hovered around the cityscape like blimps, shouting out their corporate logos and offering access by the illusion of long rope bridges hanging down to the surface. The only limit to their imagination was bandwidth, and bandwidth was cheap.

  “Wow,” she said, full of childish wonder at the spectacle before her. She turned to Bomber, but where she ought to find his face there were the generically handsome features of a well-known actor, all dressed up in a black tuxedo and bow-tie. Then she looked down and found herself covered by layer upon layer of thick Victorian frock. A reflection in a nearby glass panel told her that she, too, wore the carefully-sculpted and utterly generic face of a film star.

  “Here’s the rules,” said Jock. She heard both his real voice and the words vibrated into her skull by the VR crown. It sounded like an echo without background noise, the same words only separated by a slight time delay. “Don’t say your name, don’t try to touch anyone, and don’t try to change your avatar. We’re completely anonymised through fifteen nodes, so don’t fuck that up.”

  “What’s this skin I’m wearing?” Gina asked, watching the reflection as she touched her face. The flesh seemed to respond like her own.

  “Your avatar,” he replied. “‘Julia’. Half the goddamn ‘Net uses that goddamn avatar. We’ll look pretty nondescript while wearing these, a custom avatar’s a dead giveaway and a perfect lead if you want the Feds to track you down. And I am not in the mood for that.”

  Gina made an ‘ah’ with her mouth and went back to studying her reflection. She could certainly understand wanting to avoid attention from the Feds, also known as the Federal Police or, more colloquially, the government’s jackbooted enforcers, stormtroopers and secret police all rolled into one.

  She didn’t much want to think about them, though, and her attention was quickly drawn back to the incredible simulation. Even her fingertips believed the illusion as she ran her fingers along the mirrored glass -- she could feel everything, the crown sent a convincing sensation of force-feedback into her brain. Now she understood how people got VR addiction. Tearing herself away from the face she wore, she feasted her senses on the places around her, trying to take in and comprehend as much as she could.

  The entrance area resembled a garden gazebo encased in glass, and the path leading out of it looked like real gravel, disappearing into the perpendicular black line of the central avenue. She immediately knew it for what it was, recognised it from a thousand bad TV dramas. Main Street.

  Even from a distance, Main Street was perhaps more shocking than the skyline. Literally hundreds of avatars criscrossed it in every direction, a river of human and inhuman shapes flowing both ways. Gina wondered how they kept it from getting congested, then saw it explained as a large walking tree turned down one of the side streets. It waded through other avatars as if they were ghosts. Whenever avatars touched they simply passed through each other and turned transparent to allow their users to disentangle themselves.

  Gina had to hurry to catch up when the others started down the path. There was something unnatural about their gait, subtle cues that broke the illusion of reality. Every step they took was the same and their identical avatars moved at exactly the same speed. There was no variation, no hint of individuality at all.

  “You two’ll need names to get onto Main Street,” Jock said. “They’re important. Pick one.”

  Bomber’s avatar shrugged. “I’ll stick with ‘Bomber’.”

  “Beauty,” Gina murmured. She twirled and watched the frock spin around her in a way that was almost realistic. A moment later she noticed Bomber’s nickname floating over his head. The letters popped into existence whenever she looked at him, and disappeared again when she turned away. That’d be a handy feature in real life!

  Jock rubbed his hands together and snapped his fingers. “Done. Follow me.”

  “Where are we headed?” asked Bomber.

  “Everywhere,” Jock said with a thin smile.