First quarter of the game.
An app on his smartphone allowed Eric to see a few hundred people were using his free connection. Not enough. He changed the plasmatron scroll to be continuous. “Free Wifi. Connect to Arena-Network to watch any camera in the stadium.” He then added the first splash-page. That page had little thumbnails which allowed people to watch the live feed from any of the two hundred cameras in and around the stadium. Ten thousand people began to play, bringing up and watching one after another of the raw feeds. He could see them nudging one another and getting a huge kick out of showing their friends one particular angle or another.
Eric nodded to himself. It was working.
Before halftime, thirty thousand people were huddled around one handheld device or another, laughing as they chose their own views and camera angles. He could see people grinning as they used the little tool-sets Eric had provided to digitally pan and zoom the cameras, or reverse and slow motion a particular image. He couldn’t help smiling to himself. Now only a few of the cameras were pointed at the game. Most were focused on the fans. Thousands of people in real time remixing the game and acting as their own control studio.
During halftime, Eric started his own endgame.
A new splash-page appeared on every single device. “Before continuing, please watch this five minute video. Arena-Network promises you will remember this for a long time.” Nothing else would work on their devices until people clicked on the video. Fast forwarding was disabled. The cheerleaders doing their halftime thing were, for the most part, ignored.
“Hello. My name is Eric. I can no longer see out of my right eye. I can no longer stand straight. Jack Lyttle is responsible.” That was how the clip started. The video was a masterpiece of editing. Step by step it explained what happened. Clips from the video showing the first beating, the second, the third. The lawsuits. The betrayals. The hospital stay. The bruises. The doctors explaining how much his life had to change.
While the video ran, documents appeared one after the other below the stream. They showed Jack’s record of brutality as a cop, the many complaints against him, transcripts, court records. A masterwork of video design. The entire stadium began to grow quiet as the clip played from so many devices simultaneously.
Jack and his friends never noticed. They were drinking and laughing, looking at the girls doing back flips, not paying attention to the crowd. Three minutes into the video, just as the teams were coming back onto the field, the lights dimmed except for a single spotlight focused on Jack Lyttle.
Jack watched his face on the Plasmatron. He looked up and then aped a silly look to the camera, then flexed his muscles and enjoyed himself. He nudged his friends. They laughed too, but nobody else in the stadium did. It was surprisingly quiet but Jack and his pals did not notice. Eric put the remainder of the beating video in a window below Jack’s live face.
Jack still was not aware of what was happening.
The crowd watched, silent and angry as slowly Jack noticed the other video. A split screen of his own face, live on the Plasmatron, above the tape of him beating the hell out of Eric, lying on the ground in the clip. They watched Jack grow horrified in real time, proving to fifty thousand people that the video was the truth.
The tape below Jack’s real-time face of horror, showed Jack laughing as he kicked Eric, over and over again. The live screen showed Jack aghast. The tape showed images of the judge and the agent sharing beers, recorded from game after game. Splice. Jack laughing. Splice. Eric bloody and in a hospital. Splice. Jack drinking a beer with the judge. Splice. The judge denying Eric’s appeal. Splice. Jack drinking and laughing with the agent. Splice. The agent saying to Eric that there was nothing he could do. And after each five second vignette, spliced with different footages of a kick to Eric’s ribs. All the while the live split showing Jack, and now his buddies, panic stricken.
“There ain’t nuthin’ you can do!” repeated from the loudspeakers continuously at the end, along with the sound of the pounding of a courtroom gavel. Jack’s sadistic taunt grew louder each time.
Twelve seconds were left on the video when the first bottle hit him. Jack tried to run. He didn’t make it to the stairs. Neither did the agent. The judge made it a little farther.
•
Mapping People
David sat beside Susan. People mapping.
They loved people mapping. It helped pass the time. Susan was smiling in her special way, following David’s line of sight. As soon as Susan spotted the same girl David was looking at, Susan reported with a grin. “She’s got her clothing set for Modest.”
David whispered back, “Put her in a bustle.”
Susan giggled and her hands chopped the air, accessing the controls on the app she was sharing with David. She accessed the correct files. And, instantly, the woman across the mall had her clothing transformed from a simple pantsuit to a proper 19th century outfit, complete with a parasol and straw hat. As the lady moved about, it was comical to watch the parasol try to maintain its correct position in her hand. The bustle bounced around with a rhythm all its own.
David was finding her new attire appealing. “This outfit was in the Modest file?”
Susan grinned. “Sure was! Midwest Pre-Megafauna Cowboy Collection, from Ayar Done Right.
As the suddenly school-marmed woman stopped and adjusted her own Ayar controls, it looked to the world as though she was battling an invisible opponent with the bumbershoot umbrella. She had realized she’d been tagged through a signal alert in her glasses and so she had called up a virtual mirror. As with David and Susan’s, her augmented reality glasses seamlessly merged networks with the thousands of cameras in the mall, to bitmap her image along with the shared virtual outfit that Susan had put her in. All of this displayed, of course, only on the insides of their own glasses.
The lady nodded, looking at herself and how she was mapped, it was clear she was amused and decided to keep Susan’s selection. She held her hand so that the parasol twirled over one shoulder and as she walked off she smiled in their direction.
A fun one!
David had been doing this with Susan for a good twenty minutes now. Not to everyone, of course. Some people set their profiles to No and Susan and David couldn’t play with their clothing or image at all. Some had specific Ayar designs, things they had paid for that, once set, could only be manipulated in predefined ways. But sometimes, sometimes people had their profiles turned all the way down to Anything Goes.
What David liked best were the people who weren’t wearing Ayar glasses and had no idea they were being mapped. But those were so rare now that he hadn’t seen any in months.
Susan let David dress her any way he wanted. She’d dance and spin in whatever he picked for her, showing off the mapped outfit no matter how revealing or risqué it was.
In the time they’d been there they had changed people into clowns, powdered-wig judges, dapper secret agents, stone Greek gods, Egyptian mummies, and, for David’s amusement, a massive number of sexy suits. So far today, Susan’s was the only map set low enough to model those.
David sighed, Susan was the only one he had seen today who was set to Anything Goes. He had seen a girl last week who had been set that low. She probably had forgotten to update her profile after a party.
He had put the party girl in a cat suit, complete with anamorphic tail, silk teddy and amazing cleavage. She had seen him watching her, however, and, after checking her glasses, was not amused. She had made quite a spectacle of jabbing the air as she selected from the menus in her own Ayar controls, then glared at David before leaving in a bit of a huff.
After the girl left, Susan began laughing so hard she fell to the ground and literally rolled around. When he checked his own profile’s history, he saw that the cat girl had not only set her own profile to a full No but had put him in a flasher’s overcoat, complete with oversized binoculars and no
pants. The Ayar had deliberate pixelation hiding what would have been his privates–and the program was not kind with the size. David was not amused.
Susan bought a whole bunch of Ayar outfits. Twenty creds apiece. David paid for them all. He had given her a budget of ten bucks which was ten sets at a hundred creds apiece. Susan had found and purchased dozens of virtual outfits on sale, giving them away to any passing shopper who would take one.
The outfits each had an encryption tag. They would only map themselves on to one image. If you wanted to put the Ayar map on someone else, you’d have to pay for it again. Or hack it. And for 20 creds? It wasn’t worth the time.
On the other hand, once you had applied it, it became a part of your profile. Those who were mapped could use them as much as they wanted, and anyone whose glasses could see your profile, would see whatever it had as its current map.
David did this all the time with Susan. It was their “thing.” It was harmless and fun. Ayar cost almost nothing. Ten bucks could barely buy a meal from a food dispenser! Besides, who could say no to Susan?
“Want me to change my dress again?”
“Sure,” said David.
“The creds you gave me are all used up,” Susan said.
“OK, then, tell you what, let’s just model a few of them on five-second-bursts and I’ll only buy the ones I really like.”
Susan smiled and clapped her hands five or six times and made the adjustments.
For just a few seconds she was wearing a tight white jumpsuit, made of something like nylon. David thought her baseline outfit had some appeal all by itself, but then it started cycling through all the things she had picked out from the demo stream.
“Let’s do red,” she said with a conspiratorial wink. Suddenly her dress was bathed in virtual flames, licking her body all over, then a pair of virtual horns and a thin tail that ended in a metal arrow head completed the look. The flames teased and danced around her curves. The tail snapped like a whip. Susan looked him straight in the eye and pretended she was about to pounce on him. David didn’t particularly like it when she did that.
Besides, he’d seen that sort of outfit many times, devil maps were last week’s fashion. Susan already had a dozen variations.
“No, it’s, like, too devil. Go with music. Or maybe . . . nature?”
“How about blue?” Susan spun around, her virtual dress flaring out around her, the color changing from a deep crimson to a powder blue before she had finished her twirl. Tiny shapes danced around the bottom of the dress, forming cartoonish musical notes that swelled into soap bubbles and popped in pure musical tones, just barely above conscious notice. It was a very pretty effect, although David found it distracting.
“It’s fine,” David said. Susan really looked as though she was enjoying all this and she had such a flair for this sort of thing.
“Maybe green, then, for nature?” Susan tapped out a command in the air around her, calling up another design. Her dress changed, in a top-down wipe, into a forest canopy of leaves, swaying in a non-existent wind. It also mapped her hair a bright green. Caressing her all over, small and clustered leaves at her waist and hips, larger with more space around her chest, showing just enough skin to make David crane a little with each simulated flutter. David caught himself. The illusion had gotten to him. Even though he knew the leaves weren’t real, he had felt his heart race a bit when he thought they would fall off or blow away.
“I vote for Nature!”
Susan looked up, her own glasses had screens on both the inside and outside, and so her eyes were enhanced a bit, slightly larger in the display than they really were. That was the style these days, almost everyone did the “Manga Look,” the big eyes, small mouth. It gave her a sheen of innocence that had gotten David’s attention in the first place.
“So you vote for this one?” she smiled in that flirty way she always used just before she asked him to buy her something.
David sighed. “How much is it?”
Susan held her hand in front of her. David knew she was projecting the catalog information onto the inside of her wrist. “It’s a hundred creds, because it has several sub-menus with a lot of extra features. It’s not a oneshot.” She looked up through her eyelashes at him.
“Oh, all right.”
David slashed his fingers through the air in his command gesture and tapped a couple of icons that appeared. His account was accessed and the item he framed between his thumb and forefinger was selected. And now? Nature was his. As long as Susan didn’t block him, he could put her in that dress any time he wanted. He was thinking about the cat-girl who had been so mad, and wondered if she would have been less annoyed at him if he had put her in this number.
The virtual leaves of Susan’s dress shivered in delightful ways.
“I’m not buying any more dresses today,” said David. “Let’s walk to the Ayar environment store.”
Susan gave a little pout, her hands held behind her back, the better to show off the bare spaces between the leaves.
The store was nearby. David stumbled a little as he was entering the shop and his glasses slipped a bit. For just a brief second he saw the place as it really was, white geometric shapes on top of white rubber pads, a little stained and dirty since it had apparently not been cleaned in a while. David quickly pushed his glasses back up, fumbling a little in his haste. When they were back in place, he noticed that Susan had come close, just a few inches away with her hands on her knees.
She asked him, “Are you OK?”
David had trouble paying attention to anything but her cleavage for a second. She saw where he was looking and gave him a slow smile. David began to smile back, then quickly turned to the display that was materializing in front of him.
And the longer he looked, he saw a forest glade, with trees that went up for miles, single shafts of light poking through the canopy, a willow tree in the center of a tiny island, which in turn was in a slightly larger crystal-clear pond with mossy banks. Rabbits, butterflies, and unicorns seemed to be really wandering around the scene. It was delightful.
David had not seen that particular design from the store before. He liked it a lot. Idly he gestured and pinched the air and a menu of options appeared, Captain Nemo’s Study, Dr. Seuss, Tarzan’s Jungle, Retro Utopia —Ah, here was its name, Enchanted Grove!
“Which one are you looking at, David?” asked Susan. “I’m looking at Wonderland myself.”
David had forgotten they might be looking at two different worlds.
“Oh, Wonderland’s nice,” replied David absentmindedly as he continued to fiddle with the settings, “But this Enchanted Grove is great with your new—”
—He interrupted himself, “Wow, the menu has a dragon!” David jabbed the air with his finger.
Susan had already dialed up the same overlay as well, and gave a little gasp as a fifty-foot dragon pushed aside a couple of the large trees to crane its neck at them. And was the dragon smiling?
David decided he didn’t care for the dragon, “Meh,” he said, and, with a flick, it was gone.
“You should get this!” Susan squealed, spinning in circles as she gestured at the entire scene. “It would look so great mapping your living room!”
“Naw,” answered David, still absorbed in the forest primeval and not really listening to Susan. “A full map skin is spendy, and I bought Captain Nemo’s Study already. I’m still loving the way all the fish in the window look, and how the water makes patterns on all my stuff.”
“Oh,” said Susan, looking a little disappointed. She started on something else, “Want to get a new game?”
“Actually, I’m going to go home. I have to get up early in the morning.”
“Are you sure? We haven’t gone into the entertainment store in a while. I heard some of your favorite movie productions have new endings!” At the end of the sentence her voic
e had gone all sing-song and her still vibrant leaves were shimmying.
“No. But thanks.”
The leaves shook a little more as though the wind were picking up. “We could go into the printshop? There’s a new exercise exoskeleton that uses isometric haptics for resistance training. They have one printed out already that could fit you. We could try it out. It would help you lose some weight.”
“No. I’ve spent enough money today, Susan. I might come back in a day or two.”
“Oh, all right. I’ll be waiting for you,” she said, and blew him a kiss that had the effect of a leaf blowing at him with dewdrops on it.
David sighed as he walked away from Susan, knowing that if he turned around she would still be there. She’d be waiting for him. Waiting in that exact spot even if he didn’t come back for a year. Just like she’d be waiting for him at whatever store he went to.
He liked Susan, he really did. But sometimes the sex kitten stuff was a little too strong. Maybe he should change his sales avatar to something else for a while? Maybe the English Butler or the Heavyset Grandmother?
But who was he kidding? He wouldn’t do that. He knew he’d never abandon Susan. Not until he met a real girl.
•
Open Road
The car pulled into the gas station. On Board Systems wirelessly connected its owner’s account to the convenience store. Transaction was approved, the pump autonomously lined its robot arm out to the pattern around the gas cap.
The cap irised open, the nozzle was inserted. Syngas permeated the fuel cells. The artificial hydrocarbons didn’t take long. A few minutes later the tank was finished. It would be three months before it needed to do that again.
No one paid much attention to the car. It was popular a while back, one of the first models of its type. A not particularly flashy shade of blue, coated with a layer of clear hydrophobic polymers. It never got dirty. The motors were ceramic, copper and molybdenum. One motor for each wheel. The frame was a titanium alloy. The panels were a resin made of spider silk and carbon fiber, so were the tires, but in a different mix. The windows were aluminum oxide, transparent sheets far stronger than steel.
Copy Me: & Other Science Fiction Stories Page 8