Realms Unreel

by Audrey Auden

  Over the next year, Owen’s undergraduate studies fell by the wayside as he and Emmie produced a series of domains together. Anatolia scolded him about this, and Owen was loathe to disappoint her, so he kept up the bare minimum of work to scrape by his graduation requirements.

  Owen and Emmie’s work together resulted in a portfolio of simple but addictive game concepts, foremost among them Fractal Sphere, an evolution on the first portfolio piece Owen had shown to Emmie the day they met.

  In Fractal Sphere, two players entered an empty arena, each with a fractal seed of their own design, and over a series of turns extended these seeds into ever larger and more complex fractal forms. The object of the game was to be the first player to completely enclose the fractal of the other.

  The game initially attracted only a small, unsurprisingly geeky subset of the alternet gaming community. However, the mesmerizing quality of the game replays, in which enormous works of fractal art unfurled from the simplest beginnings, eventually caught the attention of game commentators and critics, who compiled libraries of the best Fractal Sphere matches as judged on various artistic, mathematical, and entertainment criteria. Communities of fans sprang up around individual Fractal Sphere players, and alternet entertainment forums began hosting Fractal Sphere competitions and tournaments that drove sales of the game skyward. The game won several design awards and became a bona fide commercial success within six months of its release, pushing Bealsio and Otaku into the mainstream spotlight for a short time.

  Even after the spotlight had moved on, Fractal Sphere continued to produce a significant stream of income. Awash with cash, Emmie found herself contemplating the benefits of moving out of her parents’ home, heedless of her mother’s desire that she remain living with them forever. Emmie gladly delegated the task of finding a suitable place to Nanna, who approached the task with the relish of a real estate connoisseur, applying decades of experience remodeling area homes to choosing the perfect location, architectural style, and floor plan for her granddaughter’s needs. That place turned out to be a three-bedroom cliffside cottage just down the road from Emmie’s parents’ home on Skyline Boulevard, to Anatolia’s evident relief.

  For the first time in her life, Emmie enjoyed the privacy of a space she could truly call her own, beyond the confines of her parents’ house and the Lab. While she had never lacked access to immersion gear growing up, her considerably improved income now allowed her to indulge more extravagant tastes. She kept herself in fine style as far as immersion tech was concerned, filling her closets with every new gadget and stocking her software library with only the most sophisticated new tools of her trade. Although the basement of her new home could not rival that of her parents, Emmie at last had the space and the means to install a small spliner for her personal use, and she did so with glee.

  While Emmie spent her Fractal Sphere earnings, heedless as a child who had never worried about money, Owen saved religiously, expressing a desire to someday accumulate enough to travel the world. Long after the trip was financially feasible, however, he remained rooted in the Bay Area, either unable to give himself such a luxurious gift or unable to part for such an extended period of time from the Bridges, who had become his foster family.

  ∞

  Owen, possessing a more outdoorsy inclination than Emmie, dragged her out of her new house as frequently as possible. (“Your mom is not kidding when she calls that spliner a death trap. You’d rot in there if it weren’t for me!”) He led her on daily hikes through the redwoods and eucalyptus groves in the surrounding hills, which Emmie eventually came to love almost as much as he did, and taught her to ride a bike on the scenic shoulders of Skyline Boulevard.

  For Emmie’s eighteenth birthday, Owen persuaded her entire family to go on a camping trip in Yosemite on one of Ollie’s too-infrequent visits home from graduate school. This was an ambitious maneuver, but Owen rallied three generations of Bridges with charisma and fearlessness born of the Eleusis battlefields, overcoming in the course of the five-hour journey the grousing alternet access withdrawal of Emmie, Dad, and Uncle Frank; the recurring interruptions of Nanna’s loud smartcom conversations with her assistant; and the constant bickering of Nora and Uncle Frank’s two little boys, six-year-old Luke and eight-year-old Nick. Despite all this, Owen successfully conducted two cars, ten Bridges, and all the attendant camping gear from the hills of Oakland into the heart of Yosemite Valley, whose awesome beauty instantly rewarded all the trouble taken to witness it.

  Understandably exhausted by the trip, Owen gladly deferred to Mom’s expertise pitching camp. To Emmie and Ollie’s surprise, their mother managed in short order to identify the driest sites on the still-snowy campground, demonstrate to Luke and Nick how to raise tents, teach Uncle Frank and Emmie how to build a campfire, and set Ollie, Nora, and Nanna to work prepping dinner. Dad and Uncle Frank eventually reconciled themselves to their isolation from civilization by setting to work recording sights, sounds, and smells from the campground to upload later into the Lab content database.

  “It’s unending with those two,” grumbled Grandpa as he loaded food into the bear locker, “They can’t experience anything without the aid of their damn recording devices.”

  “Oh, hush, Patrick,” said Nanna, chopping vegetables at the cook station, “When did you get to be such a cranky old man?”

  “Was he ever not a cranky old man?” Emmie whispered to Uncle Frank.

  “So where did you learn to be so handy around a campsite?” Owen asked her mother, as they wrapped up spare tent pegs and rope.

  Mom smiled wistfully.

  “My sister and I practically grew up in a tent. I spent many, many summers with my parents at their archeological digs when I was growing up.”

  “That sounds exciting! Where was this?”

  “Oh, so many places. I’m not even sure I could remember them all, now. My parents studied the ancient history of the near East, so it was mostly places around the eastern Mediterranean. Beautiful country. Some of my favorite memories are of the Greek Isles, Turkey, Lebanon. Just wonderful.”

  “I didn’t know you have a sister,” said Owen, “Where is she now?”

  “Yes. Nazanin,” Mom said softly, “She passed away.”

  There was a sudden lull in the campground chatter as many of the adult Bridges glanced toward Mom. Emmie widened her eyes at Owen in warning before looking back down at the vegetables she was slicing for kebabs. The moment passed, and conversations resumed, a bit more loudly than before.

  “Oh,” Owen said awkwardly, “I’m sorry.”

  Mom shook her head, stuffing the last of the gear into a tent bag.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Do you mind if I ask what happened?”

  Emmie set down her knife and looked up again. She had never actually heard the story of Nazanin’s death firsthand. Ollie had long ago warned her not to ask their mother questions about it. Emmie knew only the general outline: there had been an accident, a fall, and Nazanin had been badly injured.

  “I can’t believe it still seems so hard to talk about it,” said Mom, “Even though it was — goodness — could it have been thirty-seven years ago now? I spent so long feeling like it was my fault. I was the only one with her when it happened. I should have …” she trailed off, shaking her head.

  “Well. I was fifteen. Nazanin had just turned fourteen. Our parents were working on a dig near the Euphrates River, and we took a day trip up to Lake Van.”

  Mom’s eyes grew distant, and she smiled.

  “Nazanin loved taking photographs, and she spent the whole drive up there begging our parents to take us on the ferry, out to a little island called Akdamar, so she could take pictures. There’s an ancient Armenian church there, and some of the most beautiful views of the mountains.

  “My mom and dad had a day hike already planned with the graduate students, and they wanted us to come with them. But Naz kept nagging and nagging until at last our dad said she could go, as l
ong as I went with her. I didn’t mind, so they dropped us off at the boat launch, and we left with a little group of tourists.

  “We spent all morning walking around the island. I was glad we had come. I remember how wonderful everything smelled. Flowers everywhere — on the bushes, in the trees. Nazanin must have taken a thousand photos.” Mom smiled over at Emmie. “You’ve seen them, remember? All those black-and-white photographs in my office that you used to trace when you were little? Well, anyway, it started to get quite warm, and I told Nazanin I wanted to go rest in the shade beside the church. She said she just wanted to take a few more pictures of the stonework on the other side.

  “So I sat down in the shade, and the next thing I knew, the ferry boat captain was waking me up, telling me that it was time to go back to shore. I got up and started looking for Nazanin, but I couldn’t find her anywhere.

  “I told the boat captain, and he started looking for her with me. Soon everyone was looking — the tourists, the tour guides, the priests.”

  Mom swallowed, and she closed her eyes.

  “I remember one of the priests told me not to worry, that we were going to find her. He was so kind, and I really believed him, right up until the end. We searched up and down the island for an hour. I was heading up toward the cliffs on one side of the island when I heard shouting down below, near the church.

  “They had found Nazanin’s camera sitting on a rock on the east side of the island. We all started looking around there, and soon a couple of the other tourists spotted the hole in the ground, almost concealed between the roots of an old almond tree.”

  Her voice grew quiet, and her eyes welled up as she said,

  “Later, the priests said the underground spring on that side of the island must have washed out the earth beneath the tree. It looked like the ground had given way when Nazanin walked across it. There was a long drop, more than twenty feet. They were able to pull her out, but …”

  There was a long silence. Everyone had stopped what they were doing, listening to the sad story.

  “I’m sorry,” Owen said at last, leaning down to give her mother a hug. Emmie felt a surge of affection for Owen, and of pity for her mother. Mom dabbed her eyes and smiled, looking from Owen to Emmie to the rest of her family around the campsite.

  “Life’s strange, isn’t it?” she said, “The terrible and the beautiful all mixed up together.”

  ∞

  They had only just finished eating dinner, and they had not yet begun the marshmallow roast that Owen had repeatedly promised to Luke and Nick, when the rain started to fall. Over the protests of the little boys, everyone retired to their tents. Emmie fell asleep before Ollie had even settled in to the sleeping bag beside her.

  In the middle of the night, Emmie woke when the white noise of the rain stopped suddenly. Hearing a soft scrabbling at the tent flap, she sat up with a start. Emmie reached for Ollie’s shoulder to wake her but stopped when she heard Owen whisper,

  “It’s me. You’ve got to see this.”

  Emmie relaxed and unzipped the tent, poking her head out to find Owen’s excited face in the vestibule.

  “Where are my shoes?” Emmie whispered.

  Owen looked around.

  “You forgot to pull them into the vestibule,” he chuckled, lifting up one of her boots and pouring a stream of rainwater out of it.

  “Ugh. Well, I’m not putting those on, for sure,” she said, withdrawing into the tent and starting to zip it up again.

  “Hey, wait!” Owen reached in to stop her, “Come on. I’ll keep your feet dry. Here —” he crouched down beneath the vestibule, “I can carry you. It’s not far.”

  “No way. You’ll drop me in the mud!”

  “Come on. You’re tiny.”

  “I may be small, but I am fierce!” she scowled in mock indignation.

  “It’ll be worth it,” he coaxed, “I swear.”

  Emmie looked doubtfully from the cold, wet campground outside back to the inside of her warm, dry tent, but, seeing the eagerness in Owen’s eyes, decided to risk it.

  “Oh, fine.”

  She climbed out of the tent and zipped it closed behind her. Owen crouched under the vestibule and looped her arm around his neck, lifting her easily.

  He carried her down a short path leading out of the grove of redwoods surrounding the campground. In a meadow beyond the trees, Owen found a rocky outcropping that, if not exactly dry, was at least free of standing water. He set Emmie on her feet atop the rock and climbed up beside her. The stone felt like ice through her thick woollen socks, and she could see the pale wisps of her breath and Owen’s mingling in the darkness.

  “Look,” he said. Emmie felt the slightest pressure of his hand on her shoulder.

  Above them, the massive stone walls enclosing Yosemite Valley held up a glittering vault of stars, stars that put to shame the artificially obscured night sky of the city.

  “They look so close,” she breathed.

  Owen nodded. After a while, she turned to Owen and said, her voice full of awe,

  “I guess immersion still has a long way to go.”

  Owen smiled down at her, and the air around them seemed to grow warm. Emmie felt his fingertips brush her cheek ever so softly as he leaned down and kissed her.

  Four days later, the caravan of Bridges, begrimed with earth and smelling of woodsmoke, returned to the Oakland hills. Emmie spent the long drive smiling vaguely out the window. Amidst the grandeur of Yosemite Valley, she had found the inspiration for her next project.

  ∞

  Emmie’s longing to recreate the sense of awe she had experienced in that moment beneath the stars pulled on Dom day and night, so insistent that he found himself dodging into alleyways and empty rooms in the Temple City, unable to resist her call long enough to hide himself in safer quarters. He knew the time of Emmie’s obscurity was fast drawing to a close, and he prepared himself for the dangers to come.

  She flipped through the portfolio of work she had created over the last few years, searching for a starting point from which to build something of true significance. As she sketched and modeled and discarded, Emmie frequently called up the great tree from her private content library, contemplating it for hours on end. In all her years displaying her work to the public, Emmie had never been able to bring herself to publish this work. She had shared it only once, with her father, in the momentary euphoria that had followed her first collaboration with Dom.

  The tree became the axis around which all Emmie’s creative work revolved, and with the focus born of their years-long collaboration, she now grasped Dom’s every hint, every vision, weaving a landscape around that tree drawn from a memory that was more real to Dom than either of the worlds through which he now drifted. She utilized her experience with every technology she had ever used in the Lab, every technique she had ever learned for immersive design, to create a domain that pushed the limits of multi-sensory immersion. She worked with Owen to perfect the physics of atmospheres and oceans, the movement of stars, the change of light from morning to evening. This was Eden, and even endlessly self-critical Emmie saw that it was good.

  When Emmie finally launched Eden, she attracted enthusiastic reviews and design accolades from many influential alternet cognoscenti. Reviewers described their experience of Eden as transformative, comparable to, perhaps even transcending, the experience of Tomo’s Kaisei.

  It was mere days after Eden’s public launch that Emmie received an email from Tomo Yoshimoto asking if he might take her out to dinner. Emmie stared in shock at the message for several minutes, as did Dom, before she fired off a projection to Owen to break the news.

  “WHAT!?!” he bellowed, “You’re joking!”

  “One hundred percent serious.”

  As Emmie and Owen stared dumbstruck at one another through their projections, Dom withdrew to Dulai, where, in the dark of his sleeping quarters, he let the enormity of what was to come sink in. At last, he realized what the place and time of Emmie�
��s birth might mean.

  ∞

  For a few days, the anticipation of her dinner with Tomo injected an ecstatic mood into Emmie’s visits to the Lab, her weekly dinner with her parents, and every moment with Owen, but as the appointed time for the dinner approached, terror set in. Having regarded Tomo with an almost idolatrous awe since childhood, having considered him her single greatest artistic inspiration, and having judged all of her work against his, Emmie found herself petrified by the thought of standing in his presence.

  Emmie practiced what she would say and speculated about why Tomo wanted to meet her, what Tomo might ask her. Faced with the prospect of a real-world meeting, she fretted with uncharacteristic angst over her choice of clothes and shoes, handbag and hairstyle. She was so accustomed to complete control over the appearance of her avatars that the prospect of being limited to her own un-augmented features and neglected wardrobe deeply distressed her. Finding Owen an unbearable tease when she sought his advice, she called her older sister instead.

  “But you look gorgeous!” Ollie insisted over the loud background noise of her flatmates at the graduate school housing in London where she was now on a postdoctoral fellowship studying the emergence and evolution of alternet subcultures.

  “Don’t lie,” Emmie moaned, looking longingly at Ollie’s perfect blonde hair and stylish clothes, “I look terrible. Can I just steal your face for a night? You could fly over here and sit in for me. I’ll tell you what to say.”