Heaven is a Place on Earth

by Graham Storrs

  “Can you do it?” Ginny asked.

  “Of course, but can you afford me?”

  Della almost snarled, looking far more fierce than the two big cats. “Our friend, Rafe, said you'd do it as a favour. He said you owed him one.” She saw the giant quail, so she pressed on. “He told me he knew certain things, things you wouldn't like to be made public.” For a moment, she enjoyed watching the man's fear of whatever Rafe had over him wrestle with his desire to make them pay through the nose. “Was he wrong?”

  Sorenssen forced an unconvincing smile. “Of course, I'm always happy to help an old friend.” The smile dropped. “But then we're even, right? You tell him that.”

  “Tell him yourself. Now, can we dump all this crap and talk business?”

  -oOo-

  In the flesh, or, at least, within a twenty per cent approximation of it, Sorenssen was a short, overweight young man barely into his twenties, sporting a neatly-trimmed beard and a smart suit from a bygone age. Della and Ginny were back in their own bodies and their own clothes. The loss of her spectacular physique made Della feel small and dowdy. A fact that irritated her enormously.

  They were in a large sitting room with white walls and white furniture. A picture window ran the whole length of one wall revealing a wide balcony and a view across a mountainous, crenelated shoreline. The fjords, Della guessed. This might be another room in the young man's idiotic castle. The scale and elaborate detail of this worldlet suggested lots and lots of money.

  She felt Sorenssen watching her, waiting for her to be impressed. Instead, she eyed his choice of wardrobe. “Nice suit, fantasy boy. I thought we'd finished playing games.”

  “Fuck you. You want to talk business? This is my business suit.”

  “Maybe you don't quite understand what grown-ups mean when they say 'business'.”

  For the first time, Sorenssen looked angry instead of just petulant. “No, you don't understand. You think this is all a game, just play-acting.” He waved his arm to indicate the castle and perhaps the world beyond. “Well, that's because you're old. That's because, for your parents, augmented reality meant a geotagged app on their smartphone.” Della had no idea what that meant, but she did remember her gran talking fondly of smartphones and a time when computers were actual objects that sat on desks. “They filled your head with the idea that the world out there is somehow more real that the world in here. Well, I've got news for you, Methuselah, it's not. This is where we live and work. This is where the economy happens. This is where we meet people and fall in love and raise our kids. This is where our friends are, where our lives are. One day we'll work out how to move in here permanently and we can forget about our useless meat, and the stupid twenty per cent rule, and tags, and tanks, and topping up our drips. Then we'll spread our wings and fly. Your generation is the last one that will ever pine for the 'real thing', or look forward to a heaven beyond this life. For the rest of us, life is a beautiful, infinitely pliable thing, and heaven is a place right here on Earth.”

  Della was gobsmacked by the young man's outburst. She drew a deep breath and opened her mouth to tell him just what she thought of his solipsistic, transhumanist clap-trap, but Ginny took Della by the elbow in a firm grip and pulled at it. She smiled at Sorenssen and said, “Could you just give us a moment?” She led Della aside. She didn't speak, but shot Della an expression that said, “WTF?”

  “What?” Della asked, defensively, knowing full well what was bugging Ginny.

  “Can you stop baiting the guy, please? I know he's a jerk, but I need his help.”

  Della drew a long breath. “He really gets up my nose.”

  Ginny shook her head, amused. “You must be an absolute tartar at work.”

  Della bristled. She could be a bit tetchy, sometimes. “I don't tolerate fools wasting my time. That's all.”

  “But you'll tolerate this one, just for a while, yeah?”

  “All right, but if he tries any of that double-D tits stuff again, I'm going to take my fantasy sword and hack him to pieces with it.”

  Ginny smiled. “I thought it was fun. You looked amazing.”

  “So did you. I'll show you the recording when we get home.”

  “You're recording this?”

  “Of course. So is he, I'll bet. The pervert.”

  Ginny put up a hand as if to halt a resurgence of Della's anger. “Tolerance, remember?”

  “We'll see.”

  They went back to join Sorenssen.

  “OK, here's the deal,” Della said, settling into one of the white sofas. “We want you to break into the accounts department of Chastity Mining and to take a copy of a due diligence report on an entity called the Rice Consortium. Don't leave any traces, give the report to us, and that's the job finished.”

  “Can't do that.”

  Della's face froze. “You said you could.”

  “I can break in, find the report and get out without a trace, but if you want a copy of the report, they'll know. If it's important, there'll be a quantum watermark. Any copying will disturb it and they'll be able to tell. You know? Like quantum entangled transmissions. You intercept one single bit and they can tell. Same principle.”

  Ginny sounded dismayed. “So you can't get it for us?”

  Sorenssen sighed. “Here's the thing. If you don't want me to leave a trace, there are certain things I can't do. I can't take a copy. I can't remove it from the file system. I can't destroy it. I can't alter it in any way.”

  “So what can you do?” Della was struggling to keep herself from walking out.

  “Just one thing. I can read it. Even then, I have to use their own systems to display it to an authorised user.”

  “If you can read it, why can't you just record what you're seeing?” Ginny asked.

  “Because recording software is too easy to spot.” He looked meaningfully at Della. Then carried on explaining to Ginny. “Worldlets are intellectual property. Even the cheapest rubbish is designed to prevent itself from being recorded. Something like a big mining company's HQ would spot a recorder in an instant. Don't forget, when we're in here, we're just running programs within virtual environments. They've all got security layers that check out and veto any software they don't like. No-one wants a worldlet they've paid a fortune for being copied and sold as a cheap Nigerian knock-off.”

  “But you could get around that,” Della said. “You got around the twenty-percent rule, and, when we first arrived, your tag was saying 'Odin, Father of the Gods', not 'Peter Sorenssen, Loser,' as it does now. If you can do all that, why can't you run an invisible recorder?”

  Sorenssen opened his mouth, then closed it again. “It would take too long to explain. Trust me, it's hard.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  Sorenssen looked from one to the other, dragging it out. “Either you drop the whole thing... or you will have to come in with me and read it directly from the display.”

  Della stood up and walked away, too agitated to stay still. She heard Ginny ask, “But if the worldlet can detect recorders, won't it be able to detect us?”

  “Sure, but the system won't mind because it will think we're legitimate Chastity Mining employees.”

  “But our tags...”

  Della spoke up. “Obviously tag data isn't as secure as us old folk believe it is.”

  -oOo-

  “Do you know what the third biggest cause of death is for under-twenties?” Della asked as they chewed on printed steaks.

  Ginny shrugged. “Drugs?”

  “Nope. Thrombosis.”

  “Oh my God. Really? But they put additives in the drips to avoid that, don't they? And the tanks monitor you.”

  “Yeah. They feed tiny amounts of aspirin into your blood unless you stay in for more than twenty-four hours, then it switches to warfarin. But there's only so much the tanks can do. Some of these kids stay in their tanks for two or three days at a stretch. Sometimes longer. Top of the range models have good medical systems that alert
you if they detect blood clots, and parental overrides to limit their use, but we're talking lots of money. The kind of tanks poor kids use don't have medical monitoring at all, and the poorest families are the very ones that spend most time unlatched. It's a big problem.”

  Ginny looked a little queasy and Della supposed she was thinking about her own tank and its limitations. Della had never seen it, but she guessed the tank she had in her spare room was several grades better than Ginny's.

  “Sorry,” Della said. “Not really a topic for mealtime.” But she couldn't stop thinking about it. Kids in tanks, choosing to be there rather than in the world, unlatched and unchained, living their comic-book fantasies. Sorenssen's outburst had upset her. It had actually scared her. Was this the world they were building? A world where kids died in their tanks, immersed in pleasant deceptions, preferring to live and die as gods and heroes, than to step out into the real world even for as long as it took to stretch their legs?

  She recalled Ginny's story of visiting Cal's house, and Tonia's, of riding through the streets on a bicycle, riding in planes, staying in hotels. “Everything is so daggy out there!” Ginny had said, apparently amazed by the revelation. “It's all so scruffy and neglected when you turn your aug off. I suppose that's why we all stay latched.” Della tried to remember when the last time was that she had looked at the world – even her own apartment – with minimal aug. She couldn't. She remembered the last time she had left her apartment. It had been two years ago, when she got her last promotion and moved out of her old one-bedroom place and into this new one. She had made the whole trip latched. Why wouldn't she? She grunted with surprise to realise she had never seen what her unit actually looked like.

  “Maybe Sorenssen is right,” she said. “Maybe we're all, gradually disengaging from the world, slowly disappearing into our own minds.”

  Ginny looked at her for a long time then said, “Which way did you vote?”

  After meeting Odin, Father of the gods, they had taken a few minutes to vote in the plebiscite. Oddly enough, Sorenssen had reminded them before they left. “Vote 'No',” he'd said, earnestly. “Keep artificial reality real.” Della had treated his injunction with sneering contempt. As if she'd listen to a dickhead like that. But Ginny had questioned him closely about it, listening carefully to his reasons. Of course, she would, being so tangled up with September 10 and the cyberterror legislation. To Della's ears, the boy's maundering about trust and government sounded like he'd been reading too many S10 slogans and not actually thinking about the true purpose of the legislation, which was to keep people safe from lunatics like the ones that had nearly killed her friend.

  “I voted 'Yes', of course.”

  Ginny nodded, looking troubled. “Yeah, me too.”

  -oOo-

  Della met Inspector Chu at the usual pavement café the next day. The news feeds were full of the plebiscite: a sixty-eight per cent vote in favour of the new legislation, lower than the polls had suggested, but a decisive victory for the government. Talking heads from the Cabinet were already promising that the Government would press forward with all speed to fulfil the wishes of the people, to honour its new obligation, exercise its overwhelming mandate, and bring the legislation before the lower house in a matter of days. It gave Della a queasy feeling to think the terrorists would be watching these same feeds, perhaps saying to one another, “OK, the time has come to act.” It was some comfort to know the police were across it, keeping tabs on what was happening, but Chu had always seemed a little too relaxed about it, and he had lied to her about the Rice Consortium.

  Seeing him lounging in the café, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, blatantly checking out a curvy, long-legged waitress construct, did little for her confidence.

  The slogan on his shirt said, “Big Brother has better things to do than watch you.” She nodded towards it as she took her seat. “Cute. You undercover?”

  He grinned. “It's Sunday. Even cops get a day off.” There was something different about him. He seemed cheerful, more cocky.

  She ordered a coffee and the leggy waitress construct simpered at Chu, no doubt sensing his interest. “Two hundred years of the struggle for women's rights,” she said, “and we still get this shit everywhere we go.” It didn't usually bother her but her transformation into a comic-book goddess yesterday still rankled.

  Chu kept grinning. “Hey, if you like, we'll call over one of the waiters and he can flex his biceps at you. If you want equal treatment, nothing's stopping you from having it.”

  “Yeah, I know the argument. We all have the right to behave equally badly.”

  He shrugged. “Anyway, she's a construct. Where's the harm? Don't tell me you've never taken a construct to bed.”

  “I didn't come here to talk about my sex life, Detective.” Which begged the question of what she had gone there to talk about. Sorenssen had called that morning to say he'd reviewed the security set-up at Chastity and was ready to go when she gave the word. The imminence of the intended crime had panicked her. She'd called Chu without thinking and set up the meeting, intending to tell him everything. But, since then, she'd had time to rethink her intention. Did she really want the police to know she was about to commit a crime? That Ginny was? Surely the police would have no option but to stop them, or inform Chastity, or something? Did she even want Chu to know that she was helping Ginny dig into the Rice Consortium when it was clearly something he'd tried to steer her away from?

  “So?” Chu asked. Again there was that difference in his tone. Until now, he'd been ultra-polite. Now there was a kind of insolence in his tone. It was as if something had happened to change his whole attitude. It made her wary.

  “So, there isn't much to tell. We went to see that reporter, Rafe Morgan, yesterday, but it looks like he just wants to drop the whole thing and hide under a rock.” That much was true, and if the police had been tracking Ginny, they'd know where she'd been. “Then I took Ginny out – to take her mind of things.”

  “That's it? That's why you asked to see me?”

  “You said I should report regularly.”

  “Yeah. If something happens. Are you sure that's all?”

  Della couldn't blame him for being suspicious. She decided a sudden change of mood might provide a smokescreen. “Hey, I don't exactly enjoy spying on my friend, you know, even in a good cause. I'm not asking for thirty pieces of silver, but you could at least show a little gratitude. Or are you pissed off because I interrupted your day off? What's the matter with you today, anyway? Did you win the lotto last night? You sound like you couldn't give a stuff one way or the other.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, something like that. You're pretty sharp. I – ” He stopped talking and stared, wide-eyed over her shoulder. “Shit.” He jumped to his feet, knocking his chair over and pulled a gun out of the back of his jeans. Della watched him raise the weapon, open-mouthed before turning to see what he was so scared of.

  Standing in the doorway of the café was a tall, handsome man, square jawed and broad shouldered. He turned towards them at the sound of Chu's chair clattering across the polished wood floor. Immediately, he reached into his jacket, almost certainly for a gun. Explosions crashed overhead and Della had instinctively curled up and shut her eyes before she realised the sound had been Chu shooting at the newcomer. There were more shots, joined now by screams and smashing crockery. She forced herself to open her eyes.

  The café had become a disaster movie. Tables and chairs were thrown everywhere and people were screaming and yelling and running for their lives. The man at the door was standing like a statue in the chaos, firing back at Chu. She turned to the policeman but he had gone. She spotted him sprinting down the street, gun in hand and, even as she watched, the other man pushed past her, throwing furniture aside, and raced off in pursuit.

  Her heart was hammering and her breath came in ragged gasps. The two men disappeared around a corner and the panic around her slowly abated. People were talking loudly, excitedly. A woman was sob
bing. Someone shouted, “Call the cops.” People were looking at her. An anxious voice said, “She was with one of them.”

  Frightened and dazed, Della stumbled clear of the wrecked café and opened a portal. “Hey, you! Wait a minute!” a man shouted. Without hesitating, she stepped through and was gone.

  -oOo-

  She spent the next hour on the beach, a lonely stretch of broad white sand in the far north of Queensland, the ocean churning and roaring on one side and pandanus trees on the other, fringing the low hills and rain forest beyond. She walked barefoot through the surf, trudging for several kilometres along the gently-curving shoreline. Far ahead of her, everything was shrouded in spray. After a while, her heartbeat slowed and her thoughts began to unscramble themselves.

  Della knew who the stranger had been: Dover Richards, the man Tonia had said killed her brother, the man who had pretended to Ginny that he was a policeman, the man who had tailed Rafe. According to Ginny, Richards probably worked for the Consortium. And Della had just seen him walk into a crowded street café and try to shoot a federal police officer.

  Just reviewing the bare facts of it started Della's heart pounding again. She splashed on through the cold water until she was calmer.

  She couldn't tell Ginny. The fact that she was there in that café meeting Chu was a betrayal she couldn't admit to. So what could she do? Go to the police? Perhaps, but Chu was the police. One way or another, they'd know by now. And if Richards had shot the cop, there would be a dozen people from the café happy to point her out as having been involved. If Chu was injured or dead, the police would be coming to her soon enough. If not, then Chu could contact her if he liked, but she wouldn't be meeting him again. It was pretty obvious that Richards was hunting him down and the safest place for Della to be was as far away from the inspector as possible.

  And wasn't that weird? The criminal hunting down the cop? Is that how things worked these days. Had criminals become so powerful that they could attack cops on their day off in a public place, in broad daylight?