Realms Unreel

by Audrey Auden

  “My daughter would love this,” said a brawny man in a leather jerkin to another buxom strawberry-blonde in a peasant dress. He pointed at a cat-sized, white winged horse with turquoise eyes and a coral mane. As he pointed, the price of the creature appeared in an overlay on the bubble.

  “Ninety-nine temens?” the man exclaimed. He gave a low whistle, considering for a moment, then shrugged and initiated a purchase transaction. The bubble disappeared, releasing the horse and a complimentary jeweled saddle into his custody. He laughed as the horse kicked off the ground, flew to shoulder height, and hovered before him.

  “Oh, well. How often does your daughter turn six, right?” he said.

  Emmie pulled up a search interface on her visual overlay to locate the vendor’s contact information. The search interface flattened the entire three-dimensional scene into a single structured document that concisely described every object she could see from her current point of view. The contact information she wanted turned out to be embedded in the markup of virtually every object in the pavilion, an inelegant but common technique used by designers without much coding experience. She swiped her hand over her visual overlay to copy the vendor’s email and smartcom number to her to-do list, along with a screen capture of the winged horse. Every once in a while, she picked up a talented addition to the creative team this way.

  She walked on until the sandy ground of the open-air market gave way to the paved streets of the commercial district, which she followed for several blocks until she reached the central park at the heart of the city’s downtown. Just over a year ago, the city kernel was a mere three blocks square. Before the very first launch, she and Tomo had seeded the original content. They had decided to arrange the storefronts of Temenos’s first launch sponsors around the park, with the Augur-managed community center at the east edge. There, the users would be able to socialize, speak face-to-face with the Temenos support team, and explore domain maps and wikis in immersive multidimensional renderings. They had placed the buildings for Temenos commercial transaction services and subdomain zoning in the three blocks behind the community center.

  To Emmie’s great dismay, Ty had forced them to fill the remainder of the original city kernel with a random patchwork of empty lots for lease and nondescript buildings where users could rent private meeting rooms and anonymous storage lockers to conduct business transactions of any kind in a completely secure environment. Emmie lost a shouting match with Ty about this, furious that the slipshod amalgam of buildings at the city perimeter would be users’ first impression of the domain she had worked so hard with Tomo to perfect. Ty insisted that the ugly patches would stimulate user investment in city improvement and thus solidify the user base. Tomo spent days convincing Emmie not to quit Augur after the argument.

  Emmie begrudgingly admitted to herself that Ty had been right. Early users completely made over the city kernel in a matter of weeks and proceeded to push the city limits out across the plain toward the surrounding hills. Now all that remained of the original heart of the city was the central park and the community center. Within six months of Temenos’s initial launch, Athenai had expanded to the outer reaches of the subdomain real estate permitted for development by the Augur zoning committee, and users were clamoring for more space.

  Emmie headed across the park toward a genteel grey stone façade with a green awning that read, “The Founders Club.” The building gave an overwhelming impression of exclusivity, although the building’s architect had so meticulously designed the exterior to blend in with the surrounding neighborhood that most passersby never noticed an unusual feature of the building: the rows of large mullioned windows on the building exterior were completely opaque.

  Everyone who was anyone of consequence in alternet circles knew that only the Temenos elite could walk through the mahogany doors of this building. The Founders Club’s invitation-only membership extended primarily to politically or commercially influential individuals, most of whom possessed in-domain assets worth over one hundred million Temenos dollars, called temens, or annual net incomes from in-domain business activity of over ten million temens. Emmie had been invited to the club in its early days because of Bealsio’s minor celebrity status, as well as her reputed influence with Tomo.

  Emmie sent an entry request to the door. A second later, she received an identity verification request, which she promptly authorized. The door swung open, and she stepped into an elegant reception room with shining dark wood floors covered by an expanse of Persian rug. A uniformed receptionist behind a gleaming desk smiled brightly.

  “How may I help you today, Anonymous Member?”

  “Just the salon, thanks,” Emmie replied.

  The receptionist nodded. Emmie quickly switched into another avatar, this one a slim, sleek-haired thirty-something in an expensive business suit and dark glasses. A second pair of mahogany doors behind the receptionist swung open to admit Emmie into the salon. A cylinder of floor-to-ceiling glass in the center of the salon surrounded a large interior courtyard, channeling into the room the golden light of Temenos’s late afternoon sun.

  It was about seven o’clock pm Eastern Standard Time, a popular hour to socialize for club members doing business in this time zone. Emmie browsed the discussions on the public channel. In the courtyard, a man and woman examined an exquisitely detailed miniature rendering of the entire Temenos domain that hovered at waist height and filled most of the courtyard. They turned on a heat map visualization of user traffic patterns through Temenos’s public areas and commenced an animated discussion about the best locations for several new clothing retail storefronts, gesticulating at various hot spots on the map. A backlit cluster of zoning committee members debated the relative merits of two competing lease applications for a city block whose former tenant had gone bankrupt. A trio of open standards wonks griped about the incompatibility between a recently-released content development widget and an older suite of widely-used tools. A couple wearing flight suits gushed to a small audience about a new space shooter game that had just been released for the Astral Plane subdomain.

  Emmie made her way toward a pair of avatars deep in conversation: a broad-shouldered, silver-haired man in a whimsical space cowboy outfit seated in a leather armchair, and a skinny adolescent in a trucker hat sprawled across a chaise. These were Gygax and Didactix, two influential domain users. Gygax operated a popular fantasy roleplaying game in the venerable tradition of Dungeons and Dragons. He had been an early adopter of Augur’s game development framework and had maintained a substantial first-mover advantage in Temenos’s games market ever since. He was a frequent and thoughtful voice on the Temenos developer forums. Didactix was a freelance alternet developer who often worked on projects for Gygax but also earned a substantial stream of income from sales of easy-to-use domain navigation and transaction reporting tools. He was an avid gamer and an outspoken alternet commentator on gaming. Their public chat log showed that they had been discussing the upcoming Temenos release for the past half hour.

  They turned to Emmie as she approached.

  “Hello,” she said, “May I speak with you on a private channel?” The three of them exchanged perfunctory identity verification requests. Emmie used a partial profile to reveal her status as an official Augur representative without her name or title.

  Gygax and Didactix would have recognized Emmie had she been using her usual avatar, but for her purpose today it was better that she remain anonymous. It was somewhat impolite for a user to enter a private channel without providing the same level of profile information as everyone else on the channel, but Gygax and Didactix made allowances because of her official Augur status.

  “Greetings, Anonymous Member,” said Didactix on the new channel.

  “Hello, Didactix, Gygax. Would you mind if I picked your brains about the upcoming expansion?”

  “Any chance you’re going to tell us just how upcoming we’re talking about?” Gygax asked. Didactix perked up from the chaise.

&n
bsp; “Sorry, guys,” she said. Anything she said here was almost certain to end up on Didactix’s blog. She would have to watch what she said.

  Gygax smiled and shrugged.

  “That’s okay. Gotta ask. So, what do you want to know?”

  “How do you think Augur’s been doing supporting the content developer community in the past few releases? Is there anything that we could focus on in the next release to keep us ahead of our competitors’ platforms?”

  Gygax considered for a moment. He tended to be more deliberate than the typical user during feedback requests like this. But Didactix jumped right in, speaking rapidly,

  “Look, the price point of high-end immersion gear is coming down, like incredibly fast, and user expectations for content quality are just going to keep going up. We have to expect ultra-high-resolution full-sensory immersion is gonna be the standard in twelve, eighteen months tops. I mean, spliner technology still isn’t going to be widely available any time soon, but you’re definitely seeing a larger proportion of users, even, like, casual users and kids, with super sophisticated tactile immergers, olfactory, motion-simulation-capable audiovisual.”

  Emmie nodded. She knew better than anyone how quickly the price of immergers was coming down. The Lab was constantly struggling to add new features to their immergers to maintain a quality premium over the copycat immergers now flooding the market.

  Didactix went on, hardly pausing for breath,

  “Temenos’s tools for visual content creation are fantastic, audio less so but still better than you get elsewhere, but the tactile tools in your public toolset are, like, primitive, and lagging your competition. I mean, you guys must be using better tools yourselves, because the Temenos-authored games are still like the highest quality immersive experiences out there. Tomo was such an artist on that front, wow.”

  Emmie smiled to herself. Didactix was as much of a Tomo-worshipper as she had been.

  “Thanks,” she said, “I’ll talk to our tools team about that. And I’d be happy to put you directly in touch with the team lead if you ever want to quit the freelance scene. Your reputation precedes you.”

  “Tempting, but I only do business over the alternet. If I had to come into an office, I’d lose at least an hour a day commuting that I could be gaming.”

  Emmie had had this conversation with him and many other talented developers before. The creative and technical talent of her generation was becoming increasingly unemployable, as the ease of entrepreneurship and the perception of face-to-face interactions as onerous made them hard to lure into a real-world work environment.

  Gygax resurfaced from his thoughts and said slowly,

  “I agree with Didactix. A year ago, you might have gotten away with an inferior developer toolkit versus your competition, because Ty Monaghan made the decision that the core of Temenos’s development platform would be secure transactions, identity verification, reputation tracking, and dispute adjudication. The quality of those platform features is the reason I built my content here, and doing business in temens is the best decision I ever made. But the commercial exchange ideas you guys pioneered are being used by everyone now. The name of the game today is quality content creation. If users start wanting more immersion than I can easily develop in the Temenos framework, I’ll have to choose between losing market share to other gaming domains or moving my business to a new platform.”

  “I hear you,” said Emmie, copying the automated transcription of their comments onto a scratchpad with a few notes of her own, “Other pain points?”

  “Platform security,” said Gygax, “I know I’m not the only domain content owner spooked by these ongoing server attacks. You haven’t been hit as hard as some of your competitors, but, still, I lost a week of game revenue in my West Coast region this quarter when all your local server farms went offline. And my user base might not recover from it — you know how short attention spans are with these kids. I had whole guilds switch to games on other platforms in protest when they lost rank data.”

  Emmie nodded sympathetically. Augur’s security department had barely managed to contain the data corruption virus Gygax was referring to, and she herself had lost several days’ worth of work when her local sever wiped out before its automated backup to a redundant site occurred. Considering the sophistication of the attack, it was remarkable more damage had not been done.

  “I’m using this private security consultant to try to keep ahead of it with some custom-designed defensive strategy,” said Gygax, “But rolling your own system security is expensive. Augur could do its whole developer community a favor by offering some additional server redundancies or data backup services or something.”

  “I’ll pass that on,” said Emmie, scribbling more notes on the transcription of Gygax’s comment and firing off an email to the systems engineering and developer support team leads, “Anything else?”

  “Hey, do you mind if I ask you something?” Didactix interjected.

  “Sure. Anything that won’t get me blacklisted by Augur legal,” Emmie said pointedly.

  “Well, I guess you probably won’t be able to answer this, then, but anyway …” Didactix sounded a little reluctant now, “It kills me to ask, since I am like a complete Augur fanatic, but there’s a rumor going around that there are big problems with the latest expansion. I’m hearing that the current creative lead has just completely dropped the ball since Tomo died. I guess I’m maybe just the tiniest bit concerned about Augur’s prospects now that he’s gone. I’m not giving up on Temenos anytime soon, but — well, you know. I own like a lot of Augur stock, not to mention all my business here. Do you think it’s time for me to diversify my risk? Sell some stock, get some stuff going in other domains, maybe?”

  In the greyroom where Emmie was immersed in Temenos, she flicked an override patch near her hip to decouple her facial and auditory input from her avatar. Then she swore, loudly.

  On the design team public channel, Owen’s voice said,

  “Everything okay in there, Emmie?”

  Emmie bit her lip. She had forgotten that she was automatically logged on to the public audio channel when she logged off her immersion audio channel. Her entire team must have heard her.

  “Yep,” she said, trying to keep her voice level, “Sorry, guys. Just tripped on the treadwheel.”

  Recovering her composure, she refocused on Didactix.

  “Sorry. I definitely can’t comment on anything related to unannounced releases.”

  ∞

  Ten hours later, Emmie decided that she had entirely exhausted all sources of possible inspiration for the following day’s work, so she logged off of Temenos. She pushed back her headset and massaged her eyes before palming the door of the greyroom and making her way back down to the third floor. In the lounge, she switched on the coffee machine, and a moment later she stood enjoying the gurgle and hiss of the boiling water.

  As she waited, she withdrew from her pocket the small wooden box that Ayame had given to her yesterday afternoon. She considered it thoughtfully, wondering what Tomo could possibly have expected her to do with a manuscript about ancient religious texts. She would have to find some time tomorrow to take a look.

  A last bit of boiling water chortled up from the reservoir, and the machine clicked off. The sudden silence startled her. She looked out at the office floor, struggling to bring into focus anything father than three feet away, hopping a bit on the balls of her feet to peek over partitions and scanning the floor for cots or sleeping mats beneath the desks. It was late, and she should not have been surprised to find the place empty. The next review was weeks away. She stuck one of her earbuds back in and spoke on the public channel,

  “Shiva?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he drawled.

  She slipped on her headset again and sent him a chat request. A second later, his projection grinned and waved at her.

  “What are you up to?” she asked.

  “QA,” he said with a wink.

  “
Right. Can I see?”

  He switched to a streaming video of the active workspace inside his projection cylinder, and she saw a low-resolution, two-dimensional mage avatar, assisted by a raging water elemental, battling zombies in the midst of a forty-man dungeon raid.

  “Old school,” she laughed, “Don’t let Ty know you’d rather spend time in an internet RPG than Temenos.”

  “Lots to learn from the classics, boss.”

  “Well, don’t stay up too late.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said. Then, in a stage whisper, “Hypocrite.”

  She glanced at the clock on her visual overlay. It was nearly half past one o’clock in the morning.

  “‘Even God couldn’t create a world in one night,’” she said to herself, quoting Tomo. She glanced across the floor toward Tomo’s old office. The privacy that its four walls afforded made this space prime real estate, but in the six months since Tomo’s death no one had suggested clearing out his things. His office remained untouched, a tidy memorial to their fallen leader. The custodians still watered his plants.

  An insistent buzz, followed by three more buzzes in quick succession, sounded softly across the room. She patted the slot on her immerger belt where she usually kept her smartcom. Finding it missing, she hurried off toward her desk. Halfway there, she stopped and returned to the lounge coffee machine. She reached up to the shelf for an oversized mug that proclaimed “GEEK” in large letters, poured about three cups of coffee into it, and proceeded to her workspace with the hot liquid balanced between her hands.