Realms Unreel

by Audrey Auden

  Forty minutes later, she pulled into a space in the Augur campus parking lot. Coworkers climbed out of cars around her, waving hello and chatting with one another. The majority followed the tree-lined walkway toward the main office, but a few peeled off toward the enormous studio warehouses at the campus periphery: the sound effects studio, the tactile and olfactory studio, the music studio. Beside the window-lined walls of the studio spaces, the mammoth, windowless spliner looked ominous, belying its status as the most sought-after workspace on campus.

  Emmie trudged wearily after the stream of people headed to the main offices. She flipped on her visual overlay to scan her work email, inadvertently pausing in the middle of the walkway. She nearly fell to the ground when someone rammed her from behind. She wheeled around and found herself glaring up at the tall, blonde figure of Zeke, who was flanked by two of the design team’s new hires. A pained look flickered across his pale, handsome features before disappearing behind a mask of dutiful apology.

  “Sorry, didn’t see you down there,” he said. Taking in Emmie’s mussed hair, still damp from her hasty shower; the rumpled tunic she had thrown over her immerger clothes before leaving the house; the dark circles beneath her eyes, Zeke added, “Been pulling some all-nighters?”

  Emmie was painfully aware of the barb inside Zeke’s ostensible apology. Zeke had a special talent for discerning other people’s personal hangups, and he knew Emmie hated being so short. She turned wordlessly from him. She had been so excited to tell Zeke that she had gotten him a job offer from Augur, but in the year and a half since then, she had often wondered if that had been a mistake. Zeke had been distant and cold to her since his first day here.

  Emmie still might have tried to maintain some semblance of a friendship with Zeke, but in the months since Tomo’s death, as Emmie had struggled to make progress on the next Temenos expansion, Zeke had started telling other people on the team that Emmie’s design reputation had been inflated by her close collaboration with Tomo. On her own, according to Zeke’s rumor, she was no longer capable of producing the quality of work she had done as Bealsio. After months of delays, even Emmie had started to wonder if there might be a kernel of truth to Zeke’s lies. She would not deny that she had worked more closely with Tomo than anyone else at Augur, and she recently wondered aloud to Owen whether perhaps she had come to be dependent on Tomo in her creative work.

  She pushed through the office doors, and as she was crossing the lobby toward the elevators, she saw Lydia Winner, the head Temenos project manager and the creative team’s liaison to Ty and Ahmet. Looking harried but cheerful, Lydia waved at Emmie, bobbing and weaving toward her through the morning foot traffic.

  “Good morning, Emmie. Got a minute?”

  “What’s up?”

  “I just wanted to check in about how the work’s going in the spliner.”

  Emmie came to a stop and sighed,

  “I’m not ready to schedule a showing, yet, Lydia. I thought we had talked about this?”

  “Yes, we did. A week ago,” Lydia said pointedly, then, more sympathetically, “I know you all are working hard. I’m not trying to put you on the spot. But I do need to give Ty and Ahmet some sort of update soon.”

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll get back to you. Soon. I promise.”

  “All right,” Lydia nodded, “Thanks, Emmie.”

  Emmie started again for the elevators, but, seeing Zeke waiting for the next one, she changed course and headed for the stairs instead. As she neared the creative team offices on the third floor, she pulled on her headset and joined the team’s public audio channel.

  “Go-o-od morning!” Shiva’s radio announcer voice blared as she stepped onto the floor. Emmie flinched and adjusted her headset volume with a few taps to her wrist. She scanned the open room, which was slowly filling with her teammates, until she found the projection cylinder displaying on its exterior status screen Shiva’s default avatar: an exquisitely-muscled, bare-chested brown man with eight flexed arms wielding lightning bolts, dressed in little else but chains of tiny skulls. She worked her way over to his cylinder and knocked loudly on the door. It slid open to reveal Shiva in full immersion gear, facing the blank grey curve of the main display area on the cylinder’s inner wall.

  “Hey, boss,” he said cheerfully, without turning around.

  “Hi,” she said hoarsely, clearing her throat.

  “Late night, eh?” he said, peering back at her with eyes far more bleary than her own.

  She yawned, nodding, and slipped on a pair of immerger glasses from her bag, tapping the edge of the frames to sync her visual display with the projection cylinder’s. When the image came into focus, she found herself looking around Shiva down the steep drop of a promontory. Below them churned the crashing grey and white waves of a hungry sea. A dark, slick, sinuous form arced smoothly above the water, revealing several yards of scaly back. Emmie shuddered, her face a mixture of revulsion and delight.

  “That’s new. Looks fantastic!”

  “Just in from the new guys on the creatures team. Want to see the whole thing?”

  “Yeah!”

  A display appeared before Shiva, hovering at shoulder height, showing a small line rendering of the serpentine creature now obscured by the waves. Shiva swiped his fingers over a few controls, and a more detailed, colorful rendering replaced the first. He rotated the creature for her to see, and Emmie pulled it closer to her, tapping another control to animate it. For a moment, they admired the creature undulating and snapping its toothy jaws.

  “Fantastic!” she repeated, “But I don’t remember ordering that.”

  Shiva turned toward her and pushed back his glasses. She did the same.

  “What?” she asked warily, “What’s that look?”

  Shiva glanced around outside the cylinder.

  “I thought you would have heard by now.”

  “Heard what, Shiva?” she said, trying to suppress her impatience.

  “Ty has Zeke working on a backup version of Atlantis,” he said sheepishly, “You know, in case … in case you can’t wrap yours before the next review deadline.”

  “What? When did this happen?”

  “Last month, maybe? I just heard about it a couple days ago. I guess Ty gave Zeke some of the creative department new hires and is letting him use the night shift on the spliner. We’re just hearing about it now because Zeke’s far enough along that he needs someone from the core creative team to start integrating the new expansion with the old domain. And since I’m being a bit … underutilized on your concept lately, Ty’s having me split time between you and Zeke.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me this until now?” Emmie said, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “Sorry, Emmie. I didn’t think it was my job to tell you.”

  She suppressed a few choice words. She knew he was right.

  “Yeah. Thanks, Shiva.”

  “Sorry, Emmie.”

  She stormed off toward the lounge and poured herself a huge mug of coffee, her head spinning. She walked back slowly to her desk and leaned heavily against it.

  “Good morning,” said Owen, coming up behind her with his morning brew of vegetable sludge and dropping a kiss on the top of her head.

  “Is it?” she said darkly, wrinkling her nose at Owen’s drink and impossibly chipper morning demeanor. Owen took in her exhausted face and sloppy appearance and shook his head.

  “Why do you do this to yourself? We’re still weeks away from the review deadline.”

  “You haven’t heard either,” she said flatly.

  “Haven’t heard what?” he said, taking a swig of his far-too-green juice.

  “That Ty authorized Zeke to start working on a backup release concept.”

  Owen gagged.

  “Are you serious?”

  “I just heard.”

  Owen looked over Emmie’s head toward Zeke’s workstation, where Zeke was in conversation with one of the new hires. Zeke looked back coldly, and Owen sai
d in an undertone,

  “You’d think Ty would have a little more faith.”

  They sipped their brews in silence a while.

  “I haven’t been at my best lately,” Emmie said softly, “Not since Tomo died.”

  Owen raised his eyebrows sympathetically.

  “Look, Emmie. It’s going to take time. No one expects you to just plunge back in like nothing happened.”

  “Yeah, but … what if I’m just no good without him?”

  Owen put his hand on her shoulder and looked straight into her eyes.

  “You and Tomo were a great team, but you were great before you ever met him. I was there.”

  “I remember,” Emmie smiled, stretching onto her toes to peck Owen on the cheek. Over Owen’s shoulder, she saw Zeke looking at them. When she caught his eye, he looked away.

  ∞

  Later that morning, Emmie sat hunched over a stack of erasable printouts of the Atlantis 42 map, reworking the contours of the island with a pencil and an eraser, taping on transparent overlays to sketch cities and forests and villages, tossing one sketch after another onto a discard pile beneath her desk. Atlantis was supposed to have been the company’s major product announcement this year, an expansion of the Temenos domain that had launched so successfully eighteen months ago, but Tomo’s death had left a void in the heart of the team. Since then, the design and development efforts on the new subdomain had been wandering at best.

  Now she was reduced to working on physical media to maintain any semblance of privacy from the prying eyes of a management team that was anxious for progress and increasingly inclined to monitor any work she performed using the company servers. As the weeks of delays had stretched into months, the speculation about who would be chosen to fill Tomo’s Creative Director position had intensified. Before Tomo’s death, Emmie would have been the obvious choice, but her erratic performance of late had eroded her credibility.

  Emmie removed her headset to tune out the cheerful banter on the shared office channel. The Friday atmosphere was doing nothing to brighten her mood. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Zeke pass by several times, sneaking glances at her desk. She looked down at her sketches sardonically. She should just invite him over. He couldn’t possibly find anything useful here.

  A few hours later, Emmie pushed back from her desk and flexed her hands painfully, scowling at her heaping stack of discards and her sketch in progress. She grabbed her coat and bag and made a beeline for the elevators. She avoided as many occupied desks as possible.

  The late lunch crowd was gathering in the first-floor cafeteria, and Emmie gave it a wide berth as she hurried toward the front door. Outside, she pulled on her immerger glasses, which tinted in response to the bright sunlight. She flipped on a visual overlay and called up a short list of the nearby lunch spots where she might bump into people she would rather avoid. She jogged off toward the parking lot, found her car, and slipped inside.

  She started the car and leaned her head back. The tinted windows and her glasses nicely dimmed the bright light outside. She was for the moment shielded from the view of everyone on campus.

  She tapped the smartcom clipped to her belt, pulled up Ollie’s number, and looked at the time. She was almost certain to interrupt her sister in the midst of some important doctoral-dissertation-related task, but Emmie decided to risk it. She needed to talk to someone.

  She was about to dial Ollie when her smartcom rang, an unrecognized number. She waited a couple of rings, then answered the call.

  Ayame Yoshimoto’s projection appeared before her.

  “Hello, Emmie.”

  “Oh, hi, Ayame,” said Emmie, surprised. She hadn’t thought of Ayame in months. “How are you?”

  “Fine, fine, I’m doing well, thank you. Is now a good time to talk?”

  “Yes, now’s fine.”

  “Well, I’m afraid it’s taken me much longer to call than I expected. Do you remember, when we met at my brother’s memorial service, I told you he left you something in his will?”

  “Yes, I do remember,” Emmie said. Well, at least, she remembered now. She couldn’t believe she had forgotten. She really had been out of it since Tomo’s funeral. “What exactly is it?” she asked curiously.

  “It took me a while to find that out, actually. I had to return to Japan to retrieve it, and I just arrived home this morning.”

  “Oh!” Emmie said, now intrigued, “Thank you for taking so much trouble to get it for me.”

  “No trouble, no trouble at all. It was very important to my brother. I would like to give it to you in person, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course. Could I take you to lunch? It’s the least I —”

  “That’s very sweet, very sweet. But I think it would be better if we met somewhere in private. Could we meet now, perhaps? I’ve asked the minister at the temple — you remember, where Tomo’s memorial took place — and he would be happy to lend us his office.”

  Emmie looked at the time again.

  “Sure. It should only take me a few minutes to get —”

  “Wonderful, wonderful. I will wait for you here.”

  ∞

  Although she passed through downtown Oakland often, Emmie had avoided the temple in the months since Tomo’s memorial service.

  Emmie pulled into a street parking space across from the building and climbed out of her car, tapping her smartcom to the parking meter to charge it up before crossing the street. Outside the locked gate, she peered up at the curtained front windows, unsure what to do next.

  The front door opened, and Ayame hurried down the steps. She glanced up and down the street before opening the gate. Emmie wondered if the angry demonstrators she had seen the day of Tomo’s memorial service frequently harassed people at the church.

  “Hello, my dear,” Ayame said, ushering her through the gate.

  “Hi,” Emmie said, “Thank you again. I hope you didn’t feel obligated to rush to meet me. You must be tired after such a long —”

  “No, no,” Ayame dismissed the suggestion with a wave, “Not at all. Let’s go upstairs.”

  Emmie followed her into the building and pulled the heavy red doors shut behind them. Ayame led her up the stairs to the second floor, down the hallway, and through the open door at the end of the hall. Inside, the robed priest with the shaved head whom she remembered from Tomo’s memorial service sat behind a tidy desk. He rose slowly and bowed to each of them in turn. Ayame bowed back, and Emmie tried awkwardly to imitate her.

  “It’s so nice to meet you, Emmie,” the priest said in his careful accent, “I’m Reverend Naoto Kimura.”

  “Yes!” Emmie said, “Nice to meet you, too.”

  “Please,” said Naoto, pulling a couple of chairs toward his desk, “Please, have a seat.”

  When they were all seated, Ayame turned to Emmie.

  “You must think it’s strange that I have asked to meet you like this,” she began, tucking a loose strand of short silver hair behind one ear, “And I’m afraid it’s a bit of a long story.

  “When I met you at Tomo’s memorial service, I had just learned from Tomo’s lawyer that my brother had designated me the executor of his estate. Not a small responsibility, it turns out! He left most of his money to endow a foundation that will invest in the startup companies of young people working in the emerging media fields. It took me nearly five months to make all the necessary arrangements, before I had a chance to turn my attention to the other items.

  “You were one of the few individual beneficiaries named in the will. The first part regarding your bequest was straightforward enough. Tomo wanted you to have his bonsai tree.”

  “His baby,” Emmie said, remembering how lovingly Tomo had tended the beautiful, twisting branches.

  “Yes,” Ayame said vaguely, momentarily lost in memory, “He started caring for it when he was still just a boy.”

  Her eyes refocused on Emmie, and she smiled briskly.

  “Yes, yes, well. He also lef
t a rather unusual set of instructions. The will said I was to visit the Enryaku-ji Temple, not far from where we grew up. There, I was to ask for a priestess named Amaterasu Nagato.

  “When I finished my work here, I left for Japan, and when I arrived at Enryaku-ji, I told the nuns there that I had come to visit Amaterasu Nagato. They told me she was ill, too weak to see any visitors. However, one of her attendants took my message to her, and that same day she brought back a reply. Amaterasu promised to see me as soon as she was able.

  “So I waited until she called for me some weeks later. I visited her in her quarters at the temple. She dismissed her attendant to speak with me privately. She seemed quite frail, and I could not imagine how ill she must have been before if she considered herself strong enough to see me now.

  “I sat at her bedside, and she was quiet for a very long time. She seemed to be examining me. And then, quite suddenly, she asked if I could tell her the place where I had met Midori Shimahashi.

  “Well, the question surprised me. I had not thought of Midori in decades. But it was easy for me to remember meeting her for the first time, and so I told her.

  “I had just turned twelve, and Tomo was thirteen. Our mother had decided to take us on a day trip from our town in the mountains to visit Kinkaku-ji Temple in Kyoto. It was autumn, and the leaves had just started to change.

  “We explored the temple complex together, until at last we came upon the Golden Pavilion and its reflection pond. It was very beautiful, and we sat down at the edge of the water for a while. Tomo pulled out his sketchpad — he was an aspiring manga artist at the time — and started to draw. I remember Tomo saying to me,

  “‘I wish I could live here forever.’

  “And then, behind us, a girl said,

  “‘It’s a bit like heaven, isn’t it? But I think I would get tired of it, after a while.’”

  “We turned around, and there stood Midori. I was annoyed by her comment. She sounded so superior! But when I looked at Tomo, I could see that he was quite taken with her. She was a little older than us, about seventeen, and quite beautiful. This annoyed me even more, and I said,