"Get locked. I'm just not taking any chances." Fredericks paused for a moment. Orlando felt sure he was doing the online equivalent of looking at himself in the mirror—studying his specs. "I mean, this is just an ordinary body."
"Still pretty musclebound, as usual." Fredericks didn't respond, and Orlando wondered for a moment if he'd hurt his friend's feelings. Fredericks could turn sensitive pretty quickly. "So, you ready?" he asked.
"I still don't get it This guy's just going to send us there? We don't have to do anything?"
"Basically, he wants to stay in the background, I think. Elaine Strassman—this recruiter—wouldn't tell me his name or anything. Just said, 'You will be contacted,' all spyflick. And then he rang me up, calling himself 'Scottie'. Blacked-out visual, distorted voice. Said he'd go up the ladder, whatever that means, and then when he was in, bring us aboard as guests. He doesn't want us to know anything about him."
Fredericks frowned. "That doesn't sound good. How do we know he'll really do it?"
"Oh, and instead what? He'll just whip up some little simulation that will fool us into thinking we're in the most chizz major bandit outpost in the history of the net? Come on, Frederico."
"Okay. I just wish he'd hurry up and do it." Fredericks floated to the MBC display and stared balefully at the Martian diggers.
Orlando opened a data window and checked to make sure that he had all the information straight on the various handles and company names linked with the watch-gryphon, but he was just killing time. There wasn't really any need to memorize. Even if TreeHouse's security gear prevented him from connecting directly to his own database, there were other methods he could use to move information back and forth. He had been planning all evening. Now, if his mother and father would just leave him alone. . . .
He had gone up to his room early on the pretext of feeling tired after the appointment with Doctor Vanh. His parents hadn't resisted much—it was pretty obvious that Vivien wanted a little private time with Conrad to discuss what the doctor had said. It was ten o'clock now. Vivien might come in to check on him before she went to bed, but he didn't think he'd have too much trouble pretending to be asleep, and he should be able to hide the new t-jack with his pillow. Then he should have at least another seven hours, which should be plenty of time.
He looked up at Fredericks, who was still peering worriedly at the MBC window, as though he were a mother hen and the little digger robots were straying chicks. Orlando smiled.
"Hey, Frederico. This could take us hours. Are you going to have any problem with that? I mean, at home?"
Fredericks shook his head. "Nah. They're coming back late from some party on the other side of the complex." Fredericks' family lived in the West Virginia hills. Both parents worked for the government, something to do with Urban Planning. Fredericks didn't talk about them much.
"You know, I never asked you where the name 'Pithlit' came from."
His friend gave him a sour look. "No, you didn't. Where does 'Thargor' come from?"
"A book. This kid I used to go to school with, his father had all these old books—y'know, paper. One had a picture on the cover of this ho ying guy with a sword. It was called 'Thargor' or something like that. I just changed it a little bit when I first started out in the Middle Country. Now, how about 'Pithlit'?"
"I don't remember." He didn't say it like it was the truth.
Orlando shrugged. You couldn't drag something out of Fredericks with a tractor by arguing with him, but if you let it alone, it would come out all by itself eventually. It was one of the things Orlando had learned about him. It was strange to think how long he'd known him. For a pure net friendship, it had lasted a long time.
The doorway of Orlando's electronic hideaway blinked. "Who's there?" he asked.
"Scottie." The distorted voice certainty sounded the same, and it was no easier to copy a distortion pattern than an actual voice.
"Enter."
The naked sim that appeared in the middle of the room was very basic, the face only dots for eyes and a slit for a mouth. The eggshell-white body was covered head to foot with tattoo-like calibration marks. Apparently a typical engineer, "Scottie" hadn't bothered to change out of whatever he was wearing before going out. "You kids ready?" he asked, slurring and crackling like an ancient recording. "Give me your handles—you don't need indexes, but you need designations."
Fredericks was staring at the test-sim with a mixture of distrust and fascination. "Are you really going to take us to TreeHouse?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"But. . . !"
"Shut up, scanmaster." Orlando shook his head. Fredericks ought to know better than to expect this guy to admit to something illegal while visiting a stranger's node. "I'm Thargor."
"I'll bet you are." Scottie turned to Fredericks. "You?"
"Uh . . . I don't know. James, I guess."
"Beautiful. You set up a blind link, so you can follow me, like I told you? Beau-ti-ful. Here we go."
There was an instant of darkness, then the world went mad.
"Oh, my God," said Fredericks. "Dzang! This is unbelievable!"
"It's the net, Jim," said Scottie, "but not as we know it" His laugh was a strange thing, full of wow and flutter. "Never mind. Old, old joke."
Orlando was silent, trying to make sense of TreeHouse. Unlike the commercial spaces of the net, which had carefully enforced certain real-world rules such as horizon and perspective, TreeHouse seemed to have turned its collective back on petty Newtonian conventions.
"You're on your own, kids." Scottie raised an index finger that was ticked with red markings. "The system will spit you out at 16:00 GMT—about ten hours from now. If you want to go before then, you shouldn't have any problem, but if you drop offline and then change your mind, I won't be around to get you back."
"Got it." In ordinary circumstances Orlando would have chafed at the engineer's patronizing older-brother tone, but at the moment he was too busy watching a wave of distortion ripple across the structures just in front of him, leaving changed colors and malformed designs in its wake.
"And if you get in trouble and want to mention my name, go ahead. It won't do you any good, though, since that's not the handle I use here."
Jeez, this guy thought he was real funny. "So are we not supposed to be here or something?"
"No, you're guests. You have as many rights as any other guest. If you want to know what those are, you can check the central index, but this place is caca for organization—you might still be looking for the rules when your time runs out. See ya." He curled the upraised finger and vanished.
As Orlando watched, a blue diesel truck made of what appeared to be twigs and branches sped out from between two structures and rumbled through the area Scottie had just vacated. Its blatting horn was loud even by TreeHouse standards, and made them both jump, but though it passed within inches of them there was no wind, no vibration. It turned a corner and headed uphill at an angle, climbing across open air toward another cluster of buildingish things hanging overhead.
"Well, Frederico," said Orlando, "here we are."
Within the first few hours they had received several invitations to join discussion groups, several more to attend demonstrations of new gear—which, under ordinary circumstances, Orlando would have been happy to accept—and two proposals of group marriage. What they did not get was any closer to having their questions about gryphon-manufacture answered.
"This index is impacted utterly!" said Fredericks. They had found a comparatively quiet backwater, and were staring at a data window which resolutely refused to give them useful information. "You can't find anything!"
"No, it's perfectly good gear—great gear, even. The problem is, no one updates it. Or rather, they do, but it's all haphazard. There's tons of data here, terabytes of it, but it's like someone tore the pages out of a million paper books and dumped them in a pile. There's no way of knowing where anything is. We need an agent."
Fr
edericks loosed a theatrical groan. "Not Beezle Bug! Anything but that!"
"Get locked. I can't use him, anyway—TreeHouse is sealed off from the rest of the net, and Scottie kept us from seeing how we got here. Beezle's in my system—I could talk to him if I wanted to, or send him out to check other net databases—but I can't get him into this system."
"So we're scorched."
"I don't know. I think we may just have to ask around. One of the natives might be able to help."
"That's perfect, Gardino. What are we gonna do, offer to marry them if they do us a favor?"
"Could be. I thought that turtle-woman was kind of your style."
"Get locked."
A sequence of musical tones intruded above the muffled clamor. Orlando turned to see a whirling yellow tornado hanging in the air behind them. The tones repeated in ascending scale, a questioning sound.
Orlando wasn't quite sure of TreeHouse etiquette. "Um . . . can we help you?"
"English," said a voice. It was high-pitched and slightly metallic. "No. We help you?"
"What is it?" asked Fredericks worriedly.
Orlando waved at him to detox. "That would be nice. We're new here—guests. We're trying to get some information, find some people."
The yellow tornado slowed its spin, resolving itself into a cloud of yellow monkeys, each no longer than a finger. "We try. Like to help. We are Wicked Tribe." One of the monkeys floated closer, pointing at itself with a tiny hand. "Me Zunni. Other Wicked Tribe—Kaspar, Ngogo, Masa, 'Suela. . . ." Zunni went on to name a dozen more. Each monkey waved and pointed to itself in turn, then returned to spinning, midair shenanigans.
"Who are you?" asked Orlando, laughing. "You're kids, aren't you? Little kids?"
"No, not little kids," said Zunni seriously. "We are Wicked Tribe. Culture club number one."
"Zunni says that because she is youngest," said one of the other monkeys—Orlando thought it might have been the one named Kaspar, but they were all identical, so it was hard to tell. His English, though accented, was very good. "We are culture club," Kaspar went on. "When you are ten years, we kick you out"
"No Wrinkles in Wicked Tribe!" shouted one of the other monkeys, and they began to spin in a circle, around Orlando and Fredericks, laughing. "Wicked Tribe! Mejor club! Ruling, ruling tribe!" they sang.
Orlando lifted his hands slowly for fear of hitting one. He knew the tiny bodies were only sims, but he didn't want to offend them. "Could you help us find some people? We're strangers here and we're having trouble."
Zunni peeled off from the group and hovered before his nose. "We help you. Tribe know all things, all places."
Even Fredericks had to grin. "Saved by the flying monkeys," he said.
In fact, the Wicked Tribe did indeed prove helpful. Children seemed to be indulged in TreeHouse, allowed to go more or less wherever they wanted. Orlando guessed it was because privacy was so easily attainable here that if someone remained visible to other folk then he, she, or it truly wanted to be part of the community. The tribe seemed to know most of the hundreds of TreeHouse residents who crossed their path in the first couple of hours. Orlando was enjoying the experience, and repeatedly found himself wishing he had the leisure for a real conversation, even if none of his new acquaintances could provide the information he sought.
I could hang out here all the time, he thought. How come I've never been here before? Why didn't anybody ever bring me?
He balanced this sliver of resentment against the knowledge that one of the things that seemed to make the TreeHouse community work was that it was only a pool at the edge of the great ocean of the net: the anarchic lack of structure only worked because it kept itself exclusive. So what did that mean? That you couldn't trust most people not to ruin something? He wasn't sure.
Led on by the Wicked Tribe, they were introduced to the variety of TreeHouse in greater detail. For longer than they had intended to, they watched a group of candy soldiers fighting a massive battle on a plain of marzipan. Cannons fired marshmallows against the battlements of a taffy castle. Sticky little men flailed and fought across fudge swamps and barbed wire made from cotton candy. In the exertion of battle, chocolate pikes and bayonets melted and drooped. The monkeys themselves participated gleefully, flying over the battlefield and dropping Lifesavers to soldiers drowning in the fudge pits. Zunni told the visitors that the battle had been going on for a week. Orlando reluctantly dragged Fredericks away.
The monkeys took them to many corners of TreeHouse. Most of the inhabitants were friendly, but few seemed interested in answering their particular questions, although they continued to receive other sorts of suggestions. A living breakfast even offered to help them "rethink their entire approach, sim-wise"—and urged them to accept its help toward a complete makeover of what the breakfast called their "rather unfortunate presentation." It seemed surprised when Orlando politely declined.
"I think you'll want to sit in on one of the programming discussion groups."
The speaker was a European-accented woman in a more than usually understated sira. In fact, except for a few giveaway indications, such as overly smooth rendering and a certain indefinable stiffness of movement, she looked very much like a person you might meet in RL, perhaps at one of his parents' parties. The Wicked Tribe called her "Starlight" (although Orlando also heard one of them refer to her as "Auntie Frida"). She was making weather over a large stretch of virtual landscape, moving clouds, adjusting wind velocity. Orlando couldn't decide if it was art or an experiment. "That would give you a chance to ask around," she continued. "You could comb through the accounts of previous discussions, but there must be thousands of hours of that stuff, and to tell you the truth, the search engine is kind of slow."
"Discussion?" said one of the monkeys, buzzing beside Orlando's ear like a mosquito. "Boring!"
"Talk, talk, talk! Boring, boring, boring!" The Wicked Tribe whirled into another spontaneous dance.
"Actually, that sounds like a good idea," Orlando told her. "Thanks."
"Will anyone mind?" Fredericks asked. "I mean, if we ask questions?"
"Mind? No, I shouldn't think so." The woman seemed surprised by the idea. "It might be a good idea to wait until they've finished with the other business. Or, if you're in a hurry, I suppose you could ask the discussion leader to let you put your questions before they get started."
"That would be great."
"Just don't get into any arguments with the real crazies. At best, it's a waste of time. And don't believe about ninety percent of what you hear. They were never as dangerous and cool as they'll tell you they were."
"Don't go!" Zunni's tinny voice swooped past, "We find fun game instead!"
"But this is what we came for," Orlando explained.
After a few moments of midair colloquy, the Wicked Tribe formed themselves into hovering monkey-letters, clutching each other to spell out the word "B-O-R-R-I-N-G".
"We're sorry. We'll need some help afterward, probably."
"We come find then," said Zunni. "Now—fly and make noise!"
The Tribe contracted into a small yellow cumulonimbus.
"Ruling tribe! Yeeeee! Mejor prime monkeys! Wicked, wicked, wicked!"
Like a swarm of bees, they circled Orlando and the others, then vanished through a gap in TreeHouse's higgle-piggle geometry,
"The clubkids are a lot of fun if you're not trying to concentrate," Starlight said, smiling. "I'll tell you where to go."
"Thank you." Orlando did his best to make his Thargor-face return the smile. "You've been a lot of help."
"I just remember, that's all," she said.
"Do you understand any of this?" Fredericks' sun was frowning, a not particularly subtle creasing like a lump of bread dough being folded in half.
"A little. Proprioception—I've done some work with that stuff in school. That's where all the input—tactors, visual, audio—works together to make you feel like you're really in the place you're supposed to be in. There's a lot o
f brain science in it"
They were sitting in the highest row of seats, far away from the center of the discussion, although every voice was still perfectly audible. The amphitheater, Orlando guessed, was supposed to be like something from ancient Greece or Rome, all pale stone, attractively weathered. The greater chaos of TreeHouse was not visible here: the amphitheater sat beneath its own bowl of blue sky. A dim reddish sun crouched low on the horizon, casting long shadows across the benches.
The shadows of the discussion's participants were more or less humanoid. The four or five dozen engineers and programmers, like the mystery man who had brought Orlando and Fredericks to TreeHouse in the first place, didn't seem quite as interested in personal adornment as the rest of the place's inhabitants. Most wore very basic sims, no more lifelike than test dummies. Others did not bother to wear sims at all, and were only distinguishable as physically present by small points of light or simple iconic objects indicating their position.
Not all were so boringly functional. A giant gleaming bird made of golden wire, a plaid Eiffel Tower, and three small dogs dressed in Santa Claus suits were among the most vociferous debaters.
Orlando was fascinated by the conversations, although he found them difficult to understand. This was high-level programming as discussed by a highly unorthodox group of hackers, mixed up with TreeHouse security issues and general systems operation for the whole renegade node. It was a little like listening to someone argue existential philosophy in a language you'd only studied in junior high school.
But this is where I belong, he thought. This is what I want to do. He felt a swift stab of mourning that his apprenticeship with Indigo Gear and return visits to TreeHouse were both so unlikely to happen.
"God," Fredericks groaned. "This is like a Student Government meeting. Can't we just ask them some questions and get out of here? Even the flying monkey-midgets were more interesting than this."
"I'm learning things. . . ."