by Audrey Auden
“Don’t you love me anymore?” Uncle Frank wailed, having pounded on Emmie’s locked door for a solid minute in an attempt to recruit her to his team for a Nerf skirmish in the spliner. Emmie looked guiltily at the door before turning up the volume on her earbuds.
∞
One afternoon, as Dom watched Emmie examining her expensive immerger glasses for cracks after throwing them against the wall in a fit of pique, he felt the threads beneath his skin tingle. Emmie froze where she stood, and her face lit up with a look of amazement. Dom saw an image flicker through her mind that stirred up in him a swell of hope: a great tree, branches swaying in the wind. Then the image was gone. Emmie slipped the glasses on hurriedly, heedless of the distortions in the visual overlay caused by the cracks in the glasses’ frame, and took up her stylus.
Over the next several hours, she sculpted into the air the great tree: roots deep in an unseen earth; branches spreading into the heavens, thick with foliage and heavy with fruit; the spicy, twisted bark and pungent, waxy leaves; the play of light and wind upon it all. Dom could not resist helping her, adding to her vision bits and pieces of his own memory, holding the vision steady in his mind when it seemed at risk of slipping from hers. When at last the vision was captured, Emmie leaned back against the wall, slipped on her backup immerger glasses to improve the quality of her visual overlay, and stared at her work in amazement.
She jumped at the loud knock on the door.
“Emmie?” came Travis’ muffled voice, “Are you still in there?”
“Yeah,” she said distractedly, “Can I just have a minute?”
“We need to drive home, soon, though. Nanna made dinner, and she’s waiting for us.”
Emmie wrinkled her nose, her eyes never wavering from the great tree hovering before her.
“Want to show me what you’re working on?” Travis asked after a pause.
Emmie bit her lip, looking from the tree to the closed door.
“Fine. But I want you to be honest, if it’s not any good.”
She unlocked the door and opened it slowly. Travis smiled and stepped into the room, slipping on his own glasses.
“What port?” he asked.
Emmie checked her visual overlay.
“I’m on 51094,” she said.
Travis flicked on his overlay and blinked to bring it into focus. He stood silent for a long time.
“Well?” Emmie asked anxiously.
“Wow,” he said, a smile of intense pride spreading over his face, “Sweetheart … It’s incredible.”
Emmie beamed. Dom knew this was just the beginning.
∞
Despite several clashes with Anatolia over what constituted sufficiently anonymous content, Emmie eventually managed to publish on Emergency an immersive portfolio containing items ranging from playful and cartoonish characters possessing basic artificial intelligence; to lifelike baby animals designed to tempt the alternet’s insatiable appetite for puppies and kittens; to abstract single-sensory landscapes in visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile modalities. It was an eclectic collection, demonstrating a burgeoning sophistication in the manipulation of the senses and a still-childlike taste for the fanciful. Emmie agonized over the question of whether to put the great tree, her masterpiece, into her public portfolio. In the end, something convinced her to keep this piece private, at least for the time being.
During sessions supervised by Anatolia, Emmie interacted through her avatar Bealsio with a slow trickle of visitors to her Emergency portfolio, thanking people for feedback and swapping critiques with other designers. A few months after her debut submission, traffic to Bealsio’s portfolio surged when an influential alternet design commentator mentioned one of her pieces in an article about the effective use of tactile elements in domain design. Her portfolio hit all the bandwidth limits for a free account within an hour, and Emmie had to beg her mother to upgrade her to a professional account, which Anatolia did with a touch of pride.
The visitor traffic to Bealsio’s portfolio continued to grow. The delight and amazement of her visitors spurred Emmie on to ever more ambitious projects. Bealsio attracted growing numbers of comments and reviews in design forums, sending Emmie through the stratosphere with praise or ripping her self-confidence to shreds with criticism.
“It’s not healthy,” Dom overheard Anatolia murmur to Travis after a particularly vicious comment had dismissed Bealsio’s portfolio as, “A heavy-handed application of trendy multi-sensory varnish to the most tired of clichés … Childish at best.” Emmie lay listless on the sofa with the music in her earbuds blaring.
Travis, re-reading the vitriol on his visual overlay for the tenth time, spluttered, “This guy — I can’t believe — What a jackass!”
“I know this is what she loves, but … isn’t it a bit premature to expose her to all these crazy people?” said Anatolia, her face drawn with concern, “Look what it’s doing to her.”
Travis closed the article and took a deep breath, shaking his head.
“We can’t do anything to stop them, and we can do even less to stop Emmie. I think we’ll just have to help her ignore all the background noise.”
Anatolia’s lawyer instincts proved more useful than Travis’ clumsy attempts to comfort Emmie. Anatolia spent lunch breaks and evenings for days digging through alternet and internet archives, even hitting the physical stacks at the Cal library in Berkeley, gathering up the historical evidence of crimes against creative people by the jaded and cynical, the self-important and pedantic, and the downright mean and stupid.
Finding Emmie swinging her legs despondently over the edge of the deck one evening, Anatolia said,
“The only way you’ll become a great artist is if you learn to keep on going despite the naysayers. There’s not a single great artist in history who didn’t get called a hack, or worse.”
Anatolia pressed into Emmie’s palm the storage tablet whose contents she had so painstakingly compiled. Early the next morning, having spent a sleepless night reading every last word on the tablet, Emmie brought her mother breakfast in bed.
“I don’t care what they say,” Emmie said firmly, setting the tray on her mother’s lap, “None of those idiots are going to stop me.”
Anatolia’s eyes shone.
Mother and daughter continued to bond during Emmie’s chaperoned sessions in Emergency, and for Emmie’s sixteenth birthday, Anatolia gave her a gift so tremendous that Emmie had not even thought to ask for it: the login credentials for Bealsio.
“OMG, Mom!” Emmie squealed, staring at the coin-sized storage tablet her mother had taped to the inside of a birthday card, “I can’t believe it! Thank you!”
She smothered her mother in kisses, then raced down to her room to log on to Emergency for her very first private alternet session.
With unlimited time now to interact with the Emergency community, Emmie’s creative output was spurred to new heights. At the end of her sophomore year, exhausted by the attempt to keep up her real-life persona as passable high school student alongside her alternet persona as virtuoso designer Bealsio, she decided to give up the real-life persona.
When she announced her intention to drop out of high school at the dinner table that June, Anatolia and Travis turned to one another, a wordless conversation passing between them. Emmie had a long track record of winning arguments of all kinds, and the stakes were high. After an uncomfortable pause, Emmie looked from one to the other and said,
“I can still finish my diploma, if you care about that. I could even take college classes. You know how great the alternet education services are.”
“Look,” Travis said delicately, “I know high school isn’t great all the time, but you can’t just quit without a plan.”
“But I do have a plan,” Emmie said, “I’m going to be an alternet domain designer.”
“And there’s still a lot you can learn to help you do that,” said Anatolia, “You could go to art school, for example. Or study computer science,
or —”
Emmie shook her head.
“I’ve read about a lot of those programs. I visited some of the campus domains, too — at Stanford and Caltech and MIT, at RISD. I talked to students there, sat in on some classes. They don’t have anything to teach me. I already know more than a lot of the professors because of all the work I’ve done on Emergency and at the Lab.”
“Honey,” said Anatolia, clearly struggling to keep a level tone, “You’ll have the rest of your life to spend off in the alternet. There won’t be that many times in your life when you can be really present with other people, in person, like you can now. To make friends who really know you, and not just some avatar.”
“Bealsio’s a real part of me, Mom,” said Emmie, stung by her mother’s implied disparagement of Bealsio, “not ‘just some avatar.’”
They carried on the argument through the summer, Emmie developing deft responses to each new protest or concern raised by her parents. Emmie eventually recruited Ollie to her cause. Sitting in on the debate via video chat from the lab where she was doing summer research for her cognitive anthropology program, Ollie worked several compelling anecdotes from their childhood growing up in the Lab into her assessment that academia severely lagged industry when it came to emerging media. Ollie’s support was the final blow to her parents’ resistance, and Emmie prevailed, as Dom had known she would.
CHAPTER 4
Otaku
Emmie, now a sixteen-year-old high school dropout, set up her design studio on the bottom floor of the Bridges’ house, in the room her father called the fishbowl.
“Won’t you be lonely down there, Em?” he wondered at the breakfast table the morning she asked if she could take over that floor, “There’s plenty of room for you at the Lab. We can give you your own office, if you want.”
Emmie shook her head.
“If I stay at the Lab, I won’t be able to get any work done without Uncle Frank barging in every other minute for some immerger feedback, or the interns recruiting me for games in the spliner. There’s always something. And Mom can’t stand going down there, so she won’t bother me, either. It’s perfect.”
Dom was delighted by the prospect of spending time in the fishbowl, a marvel of architectural technology. A spiral staircase descended into the improbable room through a circular opening in the floor three flights below the house’s street-level roof deck. The staircase let out into a small, dimly-lit chamber whose earth-colored walls and moss-green carpet gave the impression of an underground cave. Cabinets filled with artists’ tools of every era — from pencils and paper to environment-sculpting knives and full-body immerger clothes — lined the dark walls. A single door led out of the dim chamber into the room beyond.
In a fit of vertigo-inducing inspiration, the architect of the Bridges’ cliffside aerie had chosen to suspend the fishbowl from the underside of the cantilevered foundation supporting the three floors above. Crystal-clear panels of inch-thick synthetic glass formed three walls and the floor so that emerging from the inner chamber to the outer room gave the illusion of stepping out upon thin air. The door closing behind completed the illusion, as the rear wall became a seamless mirror reflecting the breathtaking view across the Bay.
Although Anatolia could not even look into the fishbowl without being overwhelmed by vertigo, Emmie strode out upon the glass each morning like it was the most natural thing in the world. She tended to be under full sensory immersion before she even entered the room, though, which might have accounted for her fearlessness.
Dom remained unseen even in the clear light of the fishbowl, watching and aiding Emmie’s ever more ambitious creative endeavors. Unbeknownst to Emmie, their connection bound them in a dancing tug-of-war. Emmie instinctively pulled at her connection to Dom, longing for his clarifying influence as she struggled to manifest her sprawling visions in her design work. Dom in turn maintained a disciplined distance from her, extending measured responses to Emmie’s creative demands with patience perfected through innumerable years working with her. Though the digital media of the alternet was new to him, it was not so different from the work he had done for her in wood and stone millennia ago.
Their collaboration ushered in a period of prolific creation for Emmie that produced a thousand gardens for the senses. For days on end, sprawled across the glass floor of the fishbowl, Emmie sketched landscapes and creatures which she later summoned into existence with sculpting gloves, texturing knife, and finishing stylus. Gazing into her visual overlay, she programmed games and outlined quests. Under the influence of full sensory immersion, she contemplated her work, animating and polishing and extending to the outer reaches of her imagination and skill. Dom watched over her through it all, witness to and participant in her waking inspirations and sleeping dreams, her every struggle and triumph in her work.
When all creativity was exhausted, she would tackle a token amount of schoolwork to satisfy her mother’s requirement that she complete her high school equivalency degree. Then she would reward herself with alternet immersion, seeking in worlds shaped by other hands the inspiration for her next day’s work.
∞
Having spent the entire summer convincing her parents to take her artistic aspirations seriously, Emmie felt a huge sense of satisfaction when she stepped out into the light of the fishbowl each morning. It was like being the pilot of an amazing airship. The whole world spread out before her, and she could go anywhere, with a little help from the alternet and her immergers.
She was disciplined about her work. She spent the morning hours focused on projects for her portfolio. She was often frustrated for days and weeks on end, fighting her unruly mind into submission, searching for the one small tweak that made the difference between good and great. But it was always worth it in the end. There was nothing, nothing in the world, more satisfying than standing before a piece of her own design and knowing that it was perfect.
After she finished a piece, in the few hours or days before the itch to start something new crept up on her again, she could unwind in the alternet.
There were so many domains she wanted to see. She had spent years in the Lab peeking over the shoulders of the designers and engineers as they browsed domains that were off-limits to her without her own credentials. But now, with the unexpected boon of her mother’s trust and her own alternet identity, she had expected to find every door open to her.
What she found had been disappointing. Although the public domain was still enormous, the more interesting domains were all moving behind airtight authentication protocols to avoid the scrutiny of the alternet-regulation movement. Emmie thought the movement was pretty ridiculous. Having watched the video feeds of red-faced politicians and bombastic preachers denouncing the alternet as an underworld of pornographers, tax-evaders, and black-market business owners, she wondered if any of them had ever even been immersed in the alternet.
But the owners of alternet domains seemed to take the movement very seriously.
“No one’s taking any chances, after what those Luddites did to the internet,” Uncle Frank had said.
Unfortunately for Emmie, this meant that most of the domains she had so longed to see were now wrapped in nearly impenetrable layers of security. Foremost among these domains was Mysteries of Eleusis.
She had heard of Eleusis for the first time when Uncle Frank stumbled from his office bleary-eyed and grinning one day after playing the game for twelve hours straight.
“The most addictive game ever!” he raved to the engineering team.
“Isn’t it just a glorified game of capture the flag?” one of the younger guys had asked skeptically.
Eleusis was both, in fact. Though the gameplay was simple — work with your army, either Zeus’ or Hades’, to maintain or obtain possession of the Persephone avatar — and the audiovisual quality only decent, at high levels of the competition there was an exciting degree of improvisation and skill required. The game quickly became the national pastime at the Lab, with a majo
rity of the engineering team spending the evenings utilizing the Lab’s high-speed alternet connection to play the game together.
The gameplay itself was not what Emmie wanted to see. She had never fully understood the appeal of combat games. Of more interest to her was the fact that Eleusis was the preferred hangout for a number of influential alternet personalities, along with a diverse yet close-knit community of players: tech-savvy screen-watchers whiling away shocking stretches of time on the clock; multi-tasking jet-setters using simulated combat to process violent urges aroused by their work; stay-at-home parents with mythic fantasies; and the usual rabble of college students, game addicts, and the unemployed.
She wanted access to that community. If she was ever going to learn how to make her own domains popular, she was going to have to understand what users truly loved. The problem was that Eleusis now employed an adult identity verification system that was nearly impossible to circumvent.
She spent days searching for a possible workaround in public alternet domains, eventually posting a question on MMORPhology, a juvenile gamer forum, asking if anyone had ever been granted an exception to the adult credentials requirement for Eleusis. A number of domain members posted sympathetic comments. Many had tried, all had failed.
Then a private message popped up on her visual overlay. The message said simply,
prodigytal@Bealsio: I’ve cracked half the adult authentication systems out there. Want to chat?
Emmie read the message with a mixture of elation and apprehension. Her mom would kill her if she found out she was talking to hackers on the alternet. After a moment’s hesitation, she wrote back to prodigytal,