by Hugo Huesca
He had that in common with them.
“Fine. I’ll call you Eddie, then. Eddie, I’d hoped I’d never see you again.”
“I could say to you the same thing, Robbie.”
The waiter turned back with John’s burger and displayed the menu for Seitaro. The man took a look, grunted, and chose a soda. John took a tentative bite of his burger and when the drone turned back, he tossed the meal in the trash.
“Can’t believe these things still taste like plastic.”
“They grow them in plastic containers,” explained Seitaro. “Metal reacts with the DNA soup and glass is too fragile.”
“At least the toys are nice.”
“Eddie. I gather you heard the news?” asked Seitaro.
John grunted and then nodded. “I set up a search-engine Alert for the poor little bugger. So far, only hits from his school graduation and the likes.”
“Until yesterday.”
The waiter turned back with Seitaro’s soda. The man took it from the drone’s tray without looking and the poor little thing left looking dejected.
“Yes. Honestly, we should be surprised he lasted so long. But I guess you’re in the clear, he was eighteen before he died, so you technically didn’t murder a child,” said John. Sarcasm dripped from his tone.
At that, Seitaro had the presence of mind to recoil. “That was an accident. I didn’t know…”
“’I didn’t know’ isn’t an acceptable defense in a court of law, Robbie,” spat John.
Seitaro looked away, a sign of weakness he would never allow himself in front of his fellow businessmen. “Whatever. It was a long time ago.”
“And we did what we had to do.” John wasn’t ready to let this go so easily. “Just don’t go around thinking that since what we did was justified it makes it okay.”
“Are you here to lecture me?” whispered Seitaro. “For that, I could go to a priest. The Church of the Intangible Lord has less blood on their hands than you do.”
“All in the service of my country, Robbie,” growled John, “in the service of something bigger than me. Never for personal gain. I have my sins. But to me, they have weight.”
“You get your satisfaction from being a martyr, I get it from my bank account. Don’t think you are better than me.”
“Really? It’s not so hard to think so.”
Seitaro smiled in a way that showed only a glimpse of a line of perfect white teeth. “Your country didn’t ask you to cover up for me. That’s why the group you lead isn’t aware of this meeting. This is personal, is it not? You want to cover your ass as much as I do.”
John’s face was a mask, but his eyes blistered with rage. He lowered his hand and gripped a transparent little device. He pointed it under the table at Seitaro’s torso. One shot from the thing and Mister Ogawa would be injected with a lethal toxin which left no trace. The needle was made of ice.
“I die and all goes public,” Seitaro said calmly, reading the other man’s face perfectly. “I have the necessary software in place. So, I recommend you stop acting like a child. Control yourself.”
John stood immobile for a moment and looked at the other man without blinking. Seitaro held his gaze. The Director lowered the device and pocketed it.
“Don’t presume to know my reasons.”
“I don’t care about your reasons. What are we going to do about the Patels’ kid?”
John sighed and relaxed his shoulders. “He’s dead, is he not? We should be in the clear.”
“We still haven’t found the Keygen,” Seitaro reminded him.
“So you say.”
“I think you’d know if I had betrayed you —or is it the country?”
This was true. Even with Stefania Caputi’s interference, the Director still had his fangs. John nodded.
“You knew the Patels better than me. If they had a plan, do you think it’s still in motion?”
Seitaro had thought of this question during years of sleepless nights. He still took a while to answer John.
“I doubt it,” he said. “They kicked a bigger beast than them, and they paid the price. Whatever they had time to plan probably ended with their kid’s death. I very much doubt they foresaw that.”
John agreed with him. But he hadn’t become the Director of the third most powerful Intelligence and Surveillance Agency in the States by being careless. He was the kind of man who understood the value of being thoroughly methodical, thoroughly careful.
“We should still monitor the situation,” he said, “in case something shows up. I can’t have my organization operatives do the dirty work; it would attract unwanted attention. But I have enough personal resources to do the job myself.”
“Very well,” Seitaro said, “I will do the same on my own turf.” Even after a decade of failed searching, he still thought the Patels had hidden the Keygen right under his nose. He was a proud man, after all, and Eleanore Patel had been the smartest of them all. A proud man’s worst fear was to be made to look like an idiot.
But so far, his constant monitoring of the kid’s activities had yielded no tangible results.
“Then we are in agreement. Here’s to hoping we don’t ever see each other again.” John stood up. He looked very old all of a sudden, even after a couple medical procedures to keep his body young. He pocketed the little plastic toy which came with his burger. Maybe he could find his ex-wife in a good mood and she’d agree to get the little gift to his girl. The child was turning nine next week.
“Gods, I hope so,” said Seitaro, with surprising honesty. For an instant, his cold walls faltered and John caught a glimpse of the man underneath: a tired, scared, cowardly man. The Director realized he was always so eager to kill the fucker because Ogawa did have much in common with himself.
“Have a nice day, Robbie.”
“Goodbye, Eddie.”
Payment to the restaurant was made automatically from the nanochip in their hands. They could simply get up and leave at any moment, and so they did, each of them going in a different direction.
The two hobos stared at the two weirdos who came to a restaurant and didn’t eat. Then one of them got up, walked towards the trashcan and rummaged through it until he found John’s burger. He showed it to his friend with a triumphant smile. Score!
While they shared the burger, the ghetto girl took a last discrete glance towards the door. She confirmed she was alone now, got her phone out, and called a number she wasn’t allowed to store anywhere but her own brain.
A red phone in a heavily guarded room, almost a world away from San Mabrada, started to ring. A woman answered.
CHAPTER SIX
Rune
The mindjack was too tight at first since it was tailored to Kipp’s head. But after I turned it on, a couple servos detected the change in proportions and automatically adjusted.
Neat trick, but I’m not impressed, I thought. I could’ve adjusted it myself. With my hands. The two hands that I have for these specific situations.
I was annoyed even before the visor came online. I didn’t understand why Kipp’s gift got to me in that way, but it did. With only darkness to see in every direction, I felt really stupid sitting on my bed with my eyes covered. It made me feel vulnerable.
Just when I was thinking of taking the mindjack off, the visor came online.
The black was replaced by an intense, high-definition, white. The kind of white that has depth, that expands infinitely in every direction. Disorientation hit me immediately. I gasped and pawed at the visor, feeling as if I was about to fall a colossal height. A window appeared in a corner of my vision, mirroring my movements. I could see my curtain and my sofa from there as if the visor had suddenly grown a hole. Trying to look at both the white nothingness and the window made me dizzy at first. Seconds later, I was already used to it.
As I said, this mindjack was the bleeding edge of hardware. A robotic voice which seemed to come from nowhere said, right by my ear:
“Calibration of the dep
th of vision has finished. Welcome to your Visage Engine Mindjack, version 3.00.2.2.”
A marble floor materialized at my feet, extending in every direction. A ceiling did the same, gold chandeliers hung from it bathing the place with a yellow light. Walls came next, painted peach and covered with famous paintings and velvet drapes. It was like standing in the art collection of a millionaire. I guess Visage took seriously their “top-of-the-line” image.
I found it all very distasteful. My apartment had a dusty carpet and old halogen lights. This only made me uncomfortable.
Some icons appeared in front of me, on top of podiums which imitated Greek columns. First was Settings. Next one was Store. Downloads. Not very different from what you’d find on your tablet or your phone. There was only one icon of non-proprietary software in the mindjack. A bulky-looking spaceship with a planet looming on its back, with a purple nebula surrounding the black space. Green, modern letters proclaimed under it: RUNE UNIVERSE.
My heart raced when I saw it, and I instantly felt furious over it. I would not feel excited over some videogame. To make a point —who knew to whom— I avoided that icon and fooled around towards Settings.
The simulated place seemed to react more to my will than my hands, but I still swatted around in the physical world trying to click on the gray icon. It opened instantly and a transparent screen unraveled itself in front of me. It had a list of settings.
“There goes that idea,” I muttered. I could barely understand what most of the list meant. What was a Z-Axis slider? An FOV? Somewhere near the bottom I saw an odor density slide. I swatted the Settings away like an unwanted fly and they disappeared.
No use wasting more time. I owed it to Kipp to at least check his favorite hobby out, I thought. The Rune icon flew towards me even before I realized I had made a decision.
“Here goes nothing,” I thought. I clicked. A confirmation screen appeared.
Begin Deep Dive Immersion?
Sure. That’s why I’m here.
Your Visage Engine’s settings have been reset to presets. Do you wish to run the basic tutorial on Deep Dive Immersion?
I rolled my eyes at the suggestion. Did this thing think I was some old man trying to figure out a new computer? I didn’t have all day, so no, no tutorial. No tutorial of any kind —just get me to the game, please.
Welcome to Rune Universe. Connecting to the game servers…
The messages continued like that for a moment. In my entire life, I had never come across a single application that took more than one second to load. But when I was just beginning to think of something sarcastic to say to the unthinking software, the world dissolved around me in a single instant. I was ripped from my body and thrown into a dark abyss at a mind-blowing speed.
It was over before I had time to figure out how to scream. It was very different from the visor’s experience. For all I knew, I was physically transported into a different place. I arrived at a brightly lit white room with a glass capsule in the middle, just in front of me. It was covered by machines taken straight from a science fiction nerd’s wet dream.
The air carried a surgical smell of bactericide, plastic, and chemicals. I was in a hospital room.
Now my head was pounding. Where am I? What happened to my body?
The same window which appeared on the Visage’s desktop materialized in a corner. I realized that, if I focused, I could feel my real body right behind this… digital one. It was faded like it lay a long way from here, and its signal was weak.
It was the most disturbing sensation I ever had. I could move around in the real world and feel the texture of the sofa in which I was still sitting. Imagine you suddenly grow another pair of arms. Now do that with a whole new body. That’s how it felt.
I walked around the room, wondering if I could puke in this place. As I moved, the feeling of duality lessened. I realized it went away when I wasn’t paying any attention to it.
“A feature, not a bug,” I said. My mouth didn’t move in the far-away realm of Reality. It did so in-game.
I realized skipping the basic Deep Dive instructions hadn’t been a wise move. How much had I missed?
“I guess I can always find it later,” I said. I wandered near the capsule and another screen appeared in front of me.
Character Creation Process.
Inside the capsule, suspended in liquid, was an imitation of my body. It had white underwear and lacked some details, like birthmarks or a mole here and there. But it was so close it could be my twin.
I realized the screens of the computers nearby showed me some customization options.
This gained my attention. I had toyed with character generation in normal, non Virtual Reality games before, and I’d always enjoyed the process. Sometimes more than the game itself. I had never created a character based on my real body.
It was different. Rune Universe seemed to insist that my avatar should look as much as myself as possible, so basic physical changes were locked. I could make it lose weight or add muscle, but I refused those options. I added some full-body tattoos (skulls and dragons. Why not?) and changed my eyes to be a bright blue, like a superhero’s. I added one or two inches to my height and made my voice deeper and manly. Finally, I added a beard stubble. I stepped back to contemplate the result.
My avatar looked like a grizzled captain or an adventurer. Someone who knew trouble on a first-name basis. He had grit. Floating on that capsule, he was definitely waiting to get out and go kick some ass.
Some unknown game designer should get a prize over this character creator system.
What would a psychologist think of this? I wondered. I had to laugh. If Van ever caught a glimpse of this avatar-guy, she would never let me hear the end of it.
Since I was head-deep in this escapist fantasy, I gave the avatar some badass scars all over his body. Maybe he was the veteran of some brutal war.
“You don’t look like a guy who slept with a lantern until he was twelve,” I told him, “you aren’t afraid of anything, are you?. No, I don’t think you are.”
The computer asked me if I was finished with my avatar. Then it asked what my name was going to be. The screen suggested real-sounding names for immersion purposes, things like “James T. Kirk” or “Algernon Jarvis.”
It rejected my first suggestion, “ButtMonkey.” Fine, let’s try something more conservative. One of the suggestions mentioned some Picard guy. The name sounded familiar, probably from some old show of the pre-Internet era. I typed my new name and pressed start. It registered.
Cole Picard, your Rune Universe adventure is about to begin.
My vision narrowed and an invisible force carried me towards the capsule, a strong current I could not avoid. For a single second, I saw nothing but black. Then my eyes opened. I was floating in the capsule in the place my avatar occupied. Except now it was my new body.
Neat.
Underneath me, the floor of the capsule opened, but the glass container did not lift. I realized I was about to be flushed down a split-second before I was suctioned down into the depths.
You can’t drown inside a Virtual Reality System. Programming the feeling would be trivial, but it’s also illegal, as it’d be considered torture. Instead, most games simply showed you a depleting bar of oxygen, followed by the game over screen after it ran out.
On Rune, your vision dimmed and gained a red tint that became more and more pronounced the more time you went without air. Your avatar had some spasms to simulate choking. Eventually the game over screen appeared.
As I traveled down the futuristic sewers of a digital world, my vision tinted red more and more.
Rune Universe has a tutorial even before the tutorial, see. The developers found a way to show you, at the very same time, two important concepts of the game. First one was, “Hey, this isn’t real. You aren’t in any real danger, so go have fun. If an alien T-Rex eats you alive, you won’t feel the pain of being dissolved in acid.” The second one was, “But all in all, fu
nny how it feels terrifying anyway, right? That’s where the excitement comes from!”
I screamed all the way through the sewers. The cold water that ate my screams was very real to my brain. It tasted like ammonia.
Before I began to convulse, the trip suddenly ended and I smashed against the floor. I gasped for air, shivering and wet and absolutely terrified. My heart felt as if it was going to jump out of my chest. I had to summon the real-world window to remind myself I hadn’t been about to drown. “Outside,” I was still sitting on my sofa, very dry and very safe. I realized my back had begun to ache from its uncomfortable position, so I laid back. Then I closed the window and dismissed my real body.
The tubes had brought me into a birthing hall. It was the first thing I thought to describe it: a great chamber with a series of tubes emerging from the ceiling. White walls and an antiseptic smell permeated everywhere, even my own body. Every few seconds, players like me fell from one of the tubes and down into a metal cradle which slowed their fall midair using some kind of blue light. The downpour of liquid was absorbed by the drainage system on the floor.
My own metal cradle dressed me in a pair of gray overalls, similar to the ones a plumber would wear two hundred years into the past. The others did the same thing to the seven or so other players in the room.
It wasn’t a very dignified way of starting a new adventure. At least everyone seemed as disoriented as I was.
“On your feet, cadets!” a man ordered. He was standing in the middle of the room, dressed in a black and yellow suit. By the way he commanded authority, I guessed he was military. I got out of my anti-gravity fuselage and walked warily towards him. A couple of the other new arrivals did the same, but most simply ignored him.
“Welcome to the Terran Federation, cadets!” the man blared, watching me and the other three players who had come forward to meet him. “You are the product of the genetic manipulation of our best technology. We expect great things from you, to bring glory to the name of humanity in the vast, dangerous space. But until you finish your basic training, you are nothing but grunts!”