by G M Steenrod
Cassie drew the image into her, and broke it into a series of small details. Powerful scene creation wasn't about reality. Otherwise scenes would be composed of panoramic scans. Panoramic scans were usually financial losers. Building a scene was about selecting the correct details for impact.
Across the river, the other bank was heavy with trees. The branches layered over one another and created an undulating carpet in the breeze. From the tree cover, there rose an ancient brick building. It was a mill or a textile plant. Cassie was uncertain. She had briefly chatted with a historian doing a screen tour of the area about it. It may have been a mill at first and then became a textile plant. She glanced upstream and could see a bump pass along the breadth of the river. The last remainder of the dam that had brought energy and economy to this area.
The brick building was remarkably intact for a building of almost 2 centuries age. Most of the windows were still present. The walls appeared upright and the roof seemed whole.
It was probably a deathtrap of pitfalls and feces inside. Cassie shuddered. She fantasized about tramping around in the interior. The risk of it pulled her toward it.
“I will do that someday,” she said. Samuel tugged her away from the rise down the trail. Based on his course, It seemed he was on “ritual” day. At times, according to a schedule that was the best of reason to him, but a puzzle to Cassie, Samuel insisted on visiting certain stations in sequence to pay them appropriate revere. It was the bench. On a branch of the trail that moved away from the river, beneath the arms of a great willow.
The willow tree was in full bud. Its bark was damp from the prior rain. The bench was directly underneath a large bough. Cassie sat and Samuel anointed the bench leg with his urine. He popped up on the bench next to her.
A short distance away, the trail became paved. The traffic there, compared to the earlier trail, rose dramatically. Far fewer people cared for the wilder spaces.
After a few minutes, a svelte woman in her late 50s strolled down the trail, and off of the pavement. She was dressed in responsive wear. The first responsive wear emerged from one of Cassie's mother, Ada's, patents. Responsive wear had been far more garish at that time. Twenty years ago, though, it was a far more garish era.
The woman had her clothing tuned to a subtle color profile, likely to her mood.
As she approached the bench, she noticed first Cassie and then Samuel. Cassie knew that people first saw him by his pink, dangling tongue.
“Is that a pug?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“I've never seen one before! Well, on the screens, of course, but never in person,” she continued.
Samuel panted to her, and turned his head slightly to expose his neck for a scratch. He was the lord on the pedestal, and he absorbed adoration like plants drew minerals from the soil.
“You can pet him if you'd like,” said Cassie. Cassie knew his rituals well. He would be in a foul mood if he went without this affection.
The woman squealed slightly under her breath, and scratched his exposed neck. Her clothing subtly pulsed purple.
“Is he an heirloom? He's definitely an heirloom.”
“Yes, he's an heirloom,” responded Cassie.
“An old breed! They are so rare. Where did you find him?”
Cassie had come across Samuel with great effort. She was developing a scene for the lobby of a residential tower in New Hong Kong, and had mentioned her loneliness to the buyer's agent. The agent, out of appreciation, had left her with a name, and a picture of a collection of old breeds.
Following that name had led her under the sea dome of old Hong Kong, deep into the back allies. Her journey stopped at a black door constructed from black basalt. Her mind had raced with the possible adventures that could await her on the other side. A strange man with an ancient's beard? Exotic silks? Forbidden plants? Her distant Asian ancestry beckoned to her.
She had opened the door—to a sterile, white room with a human receptionist.
“I found him in old Hong Kong,” Cassie answered.
The woman's outfit flared purple green. “Amazing! Old Hong Kong.”
She gave him one last scratch and bade them farewell.
***
Cassie relaxed on the bench and took in the scene of the park. In her mind, she constantly tabulated the differences between a natural scene and the scenes she created. Each difference was weighed according for its value in her scene. That information became part of her creative process in determining what made it into a design.
Kumar was right, she knew. The project was behind schedule. He was looking out for her, she also knew. There was something wrong with the project.
“What was wrong?” was the question.
Cassie watched a maintenance bot lumber across the pavement in the distance. It was a three legged pendulum type. The middle leg would swing out, and then outside legs would swing past it. It reminded her of a kitschy antique that her mother had had of a dunking bird. It would swing and bob its head into a shot glass to take a drink. It had a hat too. A top hat? It had been so long that she couldn't quite remember.
The robot paused briefly. Something in the pavement had triggered its sensor array. Cassie could see the glint of a small metal tube descending to the pavement. More than likely it was filling a crack. She had followed one around the park to watch what it did, and the bot was usually either clearing trash or repairing cracks in the pavement.
Cassie stood up and brushed off her pants. “Come on, Samuel. Time to go.” Samuel rose from his pedestal, satisfied that he had at least one supplicant.
CHAPTER THREE
Shadows
“Alfie, screens on.”
Cassie stood in her development lab. The silent battery terminal put out a pulsing hum.
“Great,” she thought, “not the start that I wanted.”
Cassie had had a pleasant day, and had let herself “have some space” with her project, as her mother had taught her. New possibilities for the scene bubbled in her.
A lush trail head rose up around her. She could almost feel the breeze moving through the trees. By her feet, the brown, compacted clay showed a slight imprint of a shoe.
She knelt down by the shoe print and tapped the ground twice. The image of a small control screen opened in the fashion of an antique, hard bound book. She slid it over the top of the imprint and pulled the imprint up using a finger gesture. It grew darker. With a series a small gestures she pulled other shoe prints from the border of the screen over the top of the first imprint.
The stack was complete. The software would pull a match for a person based on his or her profile. In crowds of hundreds, the screen could assess who was looking at the spot occupied by the shoe print at any given moment, and provide a desired match. In the unlikely event that more than one person viewed the exact same location at the same time, the software would create an interpolation of the desired shoe prints for every viewer. It was not the best of results, and changed the impact marginally, but it was a solution that could get the viewer by and keep them from mentally exiting the scene.
Cassie dropped flat to the ground and looked along the path. Screen performance at such an angle had some restrictions. It was a “break point” for the illusion of most scenes, since the screen could only simulate 3 dimensions. For her it was a way of testing the limit of her design.
She crept forward along the path and stopped near a small rock embedded in the clay. In response to a raking gesture of her hand, 3 small blades of grass rose from the dirt.
She stood and paused briefly to survey the view.
The hum of the battery terminal floated through the scene, filling the air around her.
“That is annoying today.“ It continued to climb, and she clutched her head.
“Alfie, turn off the terminal!”
The hum pulsed.
“Alfie, respond!”
The image on the screens around her shook violently, creating the illusion of an earthquake. She stumbled in re
sponse to the shaking horizon, struggling to keep her balance in the illusion.
“Alfie!” Maybe it was a real earthquake.
“Alfie! Power off all systems.”
The shaking stopped instantly and became stable. The power, however, remained on.
Cassie was puzzled. Alfie's systems and software had been designed to respond even during the emergencies of space travel. Cassie's inclusion of the system into her house had been costly, an outgrowth of the childhood conditioning from her mother to have extreme safety systems in place.
“Alfie?”
“Yes, Mistress?” Alfie responded. Alfie defaulted to formal address when first installed. Cassie found she enjoyed it and so had left the default setting.
“Why did you ignore my commands?” Cassie asked.
“I've not ignored any commands, Mistress.”
“Huh, I just gave you commands to shut down the screens, and to power off all systems.”
“I received no such commands, Mistress. Would you like me to perform those actions now?”
Cassie was alarmed. There were reports of space ships torn apart by meteor showers with the monitoring systems still fully responsive in the wreckage. There was no situation where Alfie should have not heard and responded to her commands other than a full catastrophic failure.
Cassie went to her hard terminal along the wall, and browsed the event log. Nothing.
“That can't be,” she muttered to herself.
She dug deeper into the diagnostics, and looked for a record of her voice commands. There were no verbal inputs.
“It's lying. There is something wrong.” The voice log flashed briefly to indicate that it had stored her statement, and provided an almost mocking repudiation of her statement.
She poured through the coordinate log, a record of her physical position relative to all the screens in the room. It showed her working on the path, and even continuing to do so until she questioned Alfie's actions. All throughout the shaking event.
“There is no way that can be true. No way at all!”
Light jazz music started playing in the background. Cassie had balled her hands into fists and her teeth were clenched.
“Mistress, you need to relax,” Alfie advised.
“Alfie! You're part of the problem.”
“Mistress, should I start your relaxation program?”
“No. Do not do that, Alfie!”
Alfie was following the protocol that Cassie had written and placed into a diagnostic file for her.
Her heart rate and blood pressure were elevated. Her breath had become shallow. Cassie smashed a fist into the console.
Her consoles were immune to damage. Part of the safety precautions she had learned as a child, and that she periodically regarded as being “ridiculous.” She smashed the console again.
The rage she felt was starting to eclipse her mind. The leaves on the trees around her moved very slowly. The birds in flight slowed too.
She looked down at her hand, and watched it, balled into a fist, continuing to smash the console.
“Mistress?”
It was a voice, Alfie's, very distant now.
Cassie inspected the scene she had created, her fist continuing to pound out an automatic drum beat. She saw it. Something out of place. The edge of the silhouette of a man overlapping a set of shadows among a group of trees.
The color values differed just enough for Cassie's expert eye to detect it.
“Mistress?”
It was Alfie again. He would contact emergency services soon. It was part of the protocol. With her history, they would hospitalize her overnight.
She focused, and pushed words out of her mouth, through her anger and frustration. They were stilted, but sensible.
“Alfie, power down all screens in the household. Start a full diagnostic. Include a full report of comms through the firewall.”
Her blood pressure and pulse rate showed an immediate decline. The walls went to a neutral white.
Deep in Alfie's code, the protocol shifted away from an immediate medical emergency.
Cassie left the room and went to her living room. She collapsed onto an antique couch, with elaborate, padded-wood arms. She was exhausted.
Her episodes always fatigued her and were often accompanied by migraines.
She rested for a moment, prostrate on the couch. It was a well-studied look, and conveyed a deep sense of being without energy, drive, or momentum.
Something had to be done about that shadow, however. It was some sort error in the buffer—a hold over from another image. It wasn't in the logs, so likely a hardware failure was responsible.
A few possibilities, ticked away in her head. She had a familiarity with the hardware, but engineering had never been her strong suite.
“Alfie, call Merrick at Acme Screen Repair. Tell him it's for a screen diagnostic and repair.”
Cassie always smirked a little at the name of Acme Screen Repair. It reminded her of the classic cartoons her mother would watch when Cassie was a young girl. To her mother, there were clues to the future represented in those cartoons. The cartoons were part of the stimulus for her mother's breakthrough in glyph technology.
To a young Cassie, they were funny.
“Today was Kumar's fault,” she said to no one in particular, now that the screens were off.
“I am always more high strung when I haven't had a sexual release.”
It had been a long day for Cassie. She rose from the couch and left to get Samuel ready for bed.
CHAPTER FOUR
New Port
Kumar left his bathroom, freshly showered after an intense, almost punitive, masturbation session.
“Those straps,” he muttered admiringly.
Kumar had a large flat in the cosmopolitan region near the port. He had purchased it cheaply, when the neighborhood was still seedy, but pending redevelopment. Shortly after purchase, it had exploded in value. It was his first financial victory, and it had earned him grudging admiration from his father.
Nude, he walked to his screens' corner.
“Geppetto, put up outfits for tonight.”
Kumar had had a long day managing clients, in particular Cassie, and needed to blow off some steam.
4 suits came up on the screens, automatically superimposed over the image of his nude body.
The suits varied through a range of bright hues. With a gesture, he selected a bright, blue suit.
The suit shifted to the front of his wardrobe. The wardrobe was a retrofitted, antique job. It had been shipped in at great expense, but retrofitted locally. Space was a premium in the port city. His flat was exorbitantly large for a single person, but not so large that he could waste space on multiple closets and wardrobes. He'd leave such sprawling wastes to people like his beloved, Cassie.
He pulled the suit from the closet and took a few minutes to slide into it. As space travel had become common place, clothing changed dramatically. It had become lightweight, tightly fitted, and highly durable. The tight fit drove the development of rapid, robotic stitching machines that could unerringly cut and stitch to a body scan. An enterprising software designer quickly realized that a completely honest fit didn't meet the desire of the common population. He innovated cut modification software to accentuate or mask features of the body according to the whim of the wearers.
Kumar's physique was highly toned—a feature that Cassie had commented on quite frequently. His suits accentuated his natural physique with some additional bulk added to his laterals. This particular suit also had a set of diamond shape cutouts on the chest and abdomen to reveal that his body was not simply a product of calculated stitching. It was a dominance display, as very few other men were as toned as Kumar.
Kumar gestured in the air, and the screens shifted to a selection of accouterments chosen by Geppetto to fit Kumar's current choice. Kumar pointed at a large pendant. “Pull it, please, Geppetto.”
Kumar was a risk taker. He didn't always pre-tes
t his outfits, and was secretly titillated when he made a bad selection. It made him standout in a world where it seemed people were overly cautious. Some risks needed to be taken, and he took risks. A large pedestal detached from the wall and rolled to him. The pendant was on the top. It was hand-sized and constructed from titanium and gold. At its center was a screen that proudly displayed his name, “Kumar,” in a mix a graphic transitions.