by Toby Weston
But now he seemed to have randomly decided to start a record-breaking speed-run, grinding through the beginner missions surrounded by hundreds of other low-level players, who seemed happy to run side-quests and gather ingredients. As Marcel watched, four players closed in on Clive and handed him the item ingredients he needed to craft a fishing net.
The whole swarm of players moved along the beach towards a fisherman NPC. Marcel remembered this from when he completed the same quest years ago. The scrawny man needed a new net because the old one had been dragged off by mermen…
Watching with respect, Marcel saw how the swarm was farming low-value items and partially completing recipes, which they handed to Clive so he could complete them and earn the big XP.
—an angry merman emerged from the sea to challenge the fisherman, and one of Clive’s helpers arrived with a trident. Clive presented the newly gifted trident to the merman, restoring his family’s honour and ensuring peace between the human fishermen on the beach and the royal house of Merpeople—
@Clive044 gained another level.
He was working ceaselessly. The hub of a growing whirlwind, he didn’t acknowledge Marcel or the small crowd of spectators which had started to form around him.
The group of players moved together with seamless coordination. Smaller hubs were forming away from Clive. These were levelling up other players so that they could take on mid-level quests, leaving Clive, the apex, to be accelerated forward at the limit of what the game would allow.
Clive’s AOL speed-run became a heavily trending meme as his relentless grinding was picked up by the Mesh. Then, thirty-six hours after the record-breaking marathon had begun, Marcel and thousands of others applauded when Clive finally reached level one hundred.
—the sky flashed and a giant effigy of the Fish King leant down from a rip in the clouds to bestow @Clive044 with his key—the soul-bound token which granted level one hundred characters the right to establish a dwelling—
Marcel was there when Clive completed his run. Like the others who had been caught up in the trending meme of the speed-run attempt—which Clive had crushed, shaving two entire days off the previous record—Marcel expected something, some nod, a bow to his audience of new fans, even a statement from the Klan of twinks who had helped him. Instead, most of the twink minions disconnected en masse, and Clive simply turned and walked away.
Confused, Marcel and a few others followed him a few hundred metres back from the beach to an uninspiring piece of territory where mounds of planks, tiles, glass panes, bricks and other ingredients had already been piled up by Clive’s helpers. Without pause, Clive began to craft the most basic dwelling, a simple wooden hut. Minutes later it was done, and, without looking back, Clive used the key the Fish King had given him to enter the dwelling. He shut the door behind him.
Marcel and the others were left outside. They watched for a few minutes as quite extraordinary quantities of parchment, paper, leather, ink and quills were delivered by the minions. Then, even this activity ceased. They milled around, confused by the anticlimax, then most just shrugged and blitted away.
Marcel knocked on the door, but there was no answer. He wanted to have words with the infuriating Clive, but it would be impossible to force entry. The whole point of owning property was that one’s integrity and privacy were cryptographically guaranteed by the Mesh, Atlantis and the Crown of the Pontomedon.
***
Having established vis cryptographically secure safe house, @Clive044—who knew verself as CLV17—proceeded to regurgitate terabytes of memory and experiences onto a succession of notebooks, which ended up entirely filling the available library space within the hut.
Chapter 7 – Bootleg Geometry
His face was cold.
That’s what woke him.
Cold and wet.
He sat up. His body hurt. It hurt a lot—but it was nothing compared to the pain in his head.
His head didn’t hurt, it was pain. It was a sun of pain. A sun of pain rattling around in a glass which was his skull.
“Fucking hell!” Ben said.
He hadn’t had a hangover like this for years. In front of him was a glass of water. He lunged for it and took a huge, desperate gulp. He’d swallowed half of it before he realised it was vodka. The rest he spat onto the table, where it further lubricated an eclectic array of his personal possessions.
“Oh, Jesus,” he moaned, clutching his temples. Then, half sobbing, he tried a pathetic, self-indulgent, “Help?”
He’d been sleeping on a bench, in a bar. He thought it must be morning. A couple of waitresses and a barman were taking chairs off tables and getting ready to open.
Another waitress put a pint of something clear down in front of him. He looked up at her with one eye—the other was clenched shut. He had a horrible suspicion that, if he opened it, he would find it was looking in some random direction.
He sniffed the drink and mumbled a “Thank you”, trying hard with each syllable. The liquid felt good as it flowed through the furry cave of his mouth.
The waitress shook her head and continued taking the chairs down from an adjacent table.
Ben drank a few more mouthfuls, then began to rescue his keys, Companion and Spex from the little lake of vodka—and, judging by the smell, a good mix of Sambuca and something minty, too. He moved to retrieve a hundred Mc note from under an espresso cup, neglected and still full, near one corner of the table.
“Nope, leave that,” said the barman. “That’s your room and board, that is. You said so yourself when Art were trying to chuck you out last night. Got a flick of it ’ere.” He began waving his Companion at Ben as evidence.
“Fine, fine, really it’s fine. Thanks,” Ben said. He reached for the tiny cup of coffee and tipped both sachets of sugar in, then gulped it down in one dreadful mouthful. He finished the rest of the water and struggled to his feet.
“Anybody got a mint?” he said.
The waitress shook her head in disgust, but fished in the front of her apron, chucking the box of mints to Ben in a gentle under-arm throw. Ben missed the catch and knocked the box back, where it bounced off the waitress’ bosom. She picked it up from where it had landed by her feet, stepped towards Ben and delivered the box, very deliberately, directly in his hand.
“Take them. You’ll need them all, judging by the stink of you!” she said and turned to get on with her work.
It was half past fucking eleven. Only Christ knew when he’d got to bed—or, rather, passed out on the bench. He stumbled into a chemist and, before he’d even opened his mouth, a small white box dropped into the output tray. Ben’s eyes would still not accept his Spex—without Spex, the pharmacy was stark white and void of any sales oids. Ben retrieved his Companion and manually flicked over the appropriate Coin, picking up the packet of meds from the tray’s slot.
Companion still in hand, he noticed the many ignored alerts jostling for attention. Most prominently, a fifteen-minute warning for his next meeting. He’d already missed three, while sleeping off his excesses, but they were internal and nothing critical. This one, however, was actually important; and taking into account his recent precipitous fall from grace, he couldn’t risk putting it off.
The meeting was a three-way call with Hobart and Buenos Aires. There was no chance of getting back to the office in time; and anyway, he couldn’t show up this dishevelled and stinking of Sambuca. Luckily, it was only him at his end, so he could have his Companion generate an appropriately fresh avatar for the meeting and nobody would be any the wiser. The only thing he needed to find was a compatible geometry.
The meds were working fast. The crippling headache faded to become merely uncomfortable. His stomach was complaining; luckily, however, they would be meeting in a restaurant, and Ben was already visually undressing the fantasy of a juicy blue cheeseburger and a fried egg.
The meeting invitation stated Shared Casual 6. Shared Casual was a simple and common format, so it wouldn’t be a problem find
ing one. He popped on his Spex and had his Companion search for the nearest location advertising compatibility; but this was Soho, which had always resisted standardisation, and there was nothing nearby. His Spex, re-established on his face, had found something local while he had scanned along Brewer Street’s physical shop signs. A few establishments along, he saw a scruffy attempt at a Shared Casual logo. It was clearly bootleg; almost the right sky-blue colour, roughly the right symbol, but painted by hand with no verification in the digital.
Legit or not, it seemed to be the best currently available option, so Ben pushed open the double doors. Narrow wooden steps, not recently swept, led up to a café. He ascended, squeezing to the side to let a massively tattooed lady come down.
Upstairs, it was actually nicer than he had expected. He’d emerged, head first, into a bright, high-ceilinged room. A slight haze of smoke hung in the air; it smelt of weed. The floor looked like original parquet. The walls were hung with interesting, if rather grotesque, art. Three large chandeliers hung from hooks screwed into the ceiling’s intricate mouldings. To his left, at the back of the long room, were two pool tables. At the front, arranged in front of the tall windows, were a handful of tables, screwed to the floor. He plonked down at one; he still had five minutes. He rubbed at the smudges on his Spex with a tissue. His head might have been an indecipherable racket of glitching signals, but his Spex were well calibrated and had no trouble deciphering his subvocal mutterings. In the meeting invitation, he selected the Hobart location, a restaurant called Le Bol, as his point of immersion.
His Spex were not happy to join the consensus of the local non-compliant topology. They flashed warnings, identifying a list of significant departures from the Shared Casual 6 standard. Ben dismissed them and then deactivated further warnings.
As the Soho café faded, it was replaced by the restrained classic luxury of Le Bol. Ben’s table acquired a tablecloth, glasses and silver cutlery. The shocking art became romantic landscapes; the pool tables disappeared and, in their place, an internal window revealed the kitchen in all its polished stainless steel glory. The ceiling dropped a few centimetres.
There were small changes in Ben’s peripheral vision, which he ignored. Focusing now on himself, he selected a business-ready avatar, one that his human assistant—or, more likely, her Sage—had pre-configured in anticipation of the meeting. Ben’s jeans morphed into smart, salmon pink trousers, while his polo shirt, missing a button and impressively stained, became a primrose yellow blazer and stiff white shirt. When he was sure he was presentable, he grabbed a handful of mints, took a few deep breaths and punched into his Companion to join Le Bol’s consensus.
“Ben! Great to see you, chum!” somebody called over from a nearby table, almost the instant he manifested.
“Charles, how’s it hanging? Liz, long time no see.” He walked over to join them.
“You look good, Ben,” Charles said.
A waiter approached and helped Ben to a free chair at his colleagues’ table. The geometry in the bootleg Soho café was a bit rough around the edges; the backs of the chairs were a non-standard height and the tables themselves not entirely Shared Casual compliant. But small deviations could be handled on the fly by Ben’s Spex, manipulating his visual perception, misrepresenting the real position of his arms, able to guide his hands to the back of a Soho chair. Spex were usually pretty good at resolving minor inconsistencies, but they could sometimes lead to noticeable irregularities. That was precisely why standard topologies, such as Shared Casual, were so popular. If the layouts were identical, one could navigate between tables, and visit the bathroom, without breaking the spell and leaving whatever consensus you were joined to.
Ben pulled the chair out and sat down. Their last party member, the CEO of a nasty South American arms company, was still to arrive. Ben ordered a drink from the Hobart waiter—hoping the backend financial plumbing was working and that his order would make it safely through the net to reach the Soho café, where a drink would be brought over by the local waitress.
“Heard you had a bit of a hiccup the other day, Ben?” Charles enquired politely.
“Ha, yes,” said Ben. “What a fuck-up. Very embarrassing.”
“You going to get any blowback on that?” Liz asked.
“No, Shaun runs that unit now. I’m glad to be out of it. Pain in the arse, actually.”
“Oh, I hadn’t heard that,” replied Liz. “Clearing House is merging with Persuasive Technologies?”
“Yeah, something like that. Oh look, here comes Joaquín,” Ben said, glad of the distraction.
The water arrived, brought over by the chubby lady with the shocking facial tattoo Ben recognised from the stairs, now clad in Le Bol’s fancy white shirt, bow tie and ankle-length skirt. She also seemed to have lost twenty kilos and a few square feet of bloodthirsty artwork from her face and arms.
“Ben, my good friend,” Joaquín said, greeting him with the type of contactless hug which, twenty years ago, before the complications of Mixed Reality, would have been the unique prerogative of retired high society dames.
“Joaquín. Nice to catch up again.”
They chatted and ordered their food. Ben’s mouth was watering obscenely as he read the Le Bol entrée menu. Despite the temptations of foie gras and snails, he kept it simple and ordered a gourmet steak sandwich with fries, getting adventurous with a saffron risotto to start.
The agenda for the meeting was light. There would first be a brief catch-up with the two Ozzies, who were part of the BHJ merger team working to integrate the ANZDS acquisition, followed by a jolly client dinner with Joaquín, representing an existing major customer of ANZDS who wanted to be smooched and reassured that it was going to be business as usual going forward.
The four made small talk, Joaquín taking every opportunity to probe politely for dirt on the recent BHJ PR disaster. Ben danced around the topic. Feeling too fragile to do any effective damage control, he was relieved when the food arrived.
“I feel like I can trust you, Ben,” Joaquín said, shaking his napkin and placing it on his lap, while letting the waiter place a bowl of moules marinières in front of him.
“Let me reassure you that you can,” Ben replied.
“We want nothing more than a continuation of the relationship we have built with ANZDS over the past two decades,” Joaquín said, using one mussel shell as a tweezer to pinch out a mollusc.
Ben waited while the same waitress placed his risotto in front of him. Liz used this pause to answer, perhaps noting that Ben was not quite on the ball today.
“Joaquín, of course! We don’t want to rock the boat. Between us, it’s the Cog IP that BHJ is interested in. ANZDS pioneered some very important work in Zeno Cognition, which could potentially save us millions in energy costs. But ANZDS has a strong book of work, industry leading products and…” Here, she smiled at the South American before continuing “…great customers! We are not about to jeopardise any of this…”
“I had heard rumours that the quantum cog was why you purchased the company,” continued Joaquín. “You must be very concerned with the disappearance of Dr Majorana.”
Ben had not heard anything, so had no idea—but this was far from an unusual situation for Ben. He went seamlessly into bullshit mode. “Brilliant mind. We are very concerned. I know her well, actually. I hope she turns up soon. Probably nothing. Australia’s a big place. Probably just catching up on some reading on a nice beach somewhere.”
Joaquín raised an eyebrow sceptically. “Really? You are not concerned that she might have been poached by Niato? Going to the competition, as it were?”
Ben had only seen the doctor a couple of weeks ago. She had shown him around the Zeno Cog lab and then they had gone out to dinner. He felt a niggle. Perhaps he had laid it on a bit strong? He did recall some good-natured boasting about BHJ and then a rather awkward parting at her home after he apparently misunderstood her body language. But, all in all, he felt he had left a good impression of
BHJ and head office.
Charles picked up the ball. “We have no idea at the moment where the doctor is. She might, as Ben says, be chilling with a book on the beach. Mergers can be stressful. But, if she has chosen to leave us for Atlantis, it’s a nuisance, nothing more. We’ll find a backfill.”
“She’s a single cog in a vast machine, Joaquín. We are not overly troubled,” Ben chipped in.
“Okay, I’ll take your word for it,” Joaquín said, amused, clearly not buying a word. “It’s not something that really worries me, anyway. Our interest is in the more conventional products we purchase from ANZDS. Nothing fancy, you know—bombs and bullets…” He smiled sheepishly, surprised by his own crudeness. “My team only needs convincing that BHJ is serious about carrying forward these, hmm, bread and butter product lines...”