by Julian Gough
I guess my subconscious wants me to have a good time in New York . . .
Naomi had started taking them a couple of years after Ryan left. By then, the ache of desire, with no outlet, was making her cry two or three nights a week. She didn’t want to bring men home to Colt. She didn’t want to stay out. She didn’t want to date. Her work was so interesting, and her son was so exhausting (and, yes, rewarding, but mostly exhausting), that there was no energy left.
And yet, and yet, this desire . . .
So she took the pills, for years, till she’d almost forgotten what she was taking them for.
She tried to ignore fierce debate in the media, over whether what she’d chosen was freedom, or oppression. The backlash from men. The attempts, from left and right, to ban it.
Well, I got a lot more work done . . .
She crosses and uncrosses her legs. Glances around at the men and women in the cabin, most of them staring at screens. Hmmm. Is she . . . does she feel . . . no, it’s purely psychological, there can’t be any noticeable effect yet.
The plane hits the wet runway, and skids a little sideways in the crosswind, and everyone moans, but Naomi feels curiously unafraid. The momentary illusion of danger takes her mind off her real worries; her conference paper, Colt, money, pills; and calms her.
And if she is going to die, she is pretty sure it will not be on a plane. It would be statistically absurd.
She might be scared. She might be broke. She might be anxious. But she’s still a scientist.
16
Colt logs in through the security screens. Spends a few minutes trying to work out the outgame identity of that girl who touched him, ingame; the girl he touched . . . But the game supports anonymity, and she’s covered her tracks well.
He gives up, and checks the to-do list.
The new servers, in Rio and Iceland, seem to be bedding in fine. No problems.
But the game’s automatic debugger has flagged something in the weather systems of the test range; a shared realm that Colt designed.
The test range is a playful, gameworld version of the Nevada nuclear test site. It’s not as grittily realistic as the local desert realm Colt’s built for his own use; but the test range is popular, and problems there affect a lot of people.
Besides, the test range was where he learned to code. He took on the challenge of filling that part of the American map because it was hard. Because there was almost no data. A top-secret site, so he had no detailed, ground-level images to work with; just a few old declassified photos and some Russian and Chinese satellite images. He had to solve a lot of problems himself, with raw code. It’s where he made his reputation. It’s a kind of home for him.
And for millions of others. The gameworld, in all its many versions and flavours, with its public and private servers and realms, its cool, calm creative mode and brutal survival mode, has always been essentially a sandbox, where people come to create and destroy, to act out their fantasies, a lawless, open-source West-world; but the test range is a realm where you can create and destroy on the grandest scale.
Colt has a quick chat with the debugger AI. The debugger says it’s done a temporary fix but, as there are issues of aesthetics involved, it wants a human to make the final decisions.
Fair enough. The last time the automatic debugger had been allowed solve a problem involving clouds, the big thunder-heads it generated looked like giant buttocks. (There was still a jokey, ingame sub-religion that studied the sky on the Sabbath, awaiting the miraculous second coming of God’s Ass, and a faecal apocalypse.)
Better deal with it.
So what exactly is the new problem . . .
He skims through the change logs for the past twenty-four hours.
Hmm. Lots of new work, from different contributors.
Something’s clashing . . .
Colt reads the bug reports.
17
Weather in the game has always been divisive, for historical reasons.
There was a philosophical discussion among the first coders, which got wildly out of hand. The New Atheist faction wanted realistic weather, obeying the laws of physics as encoded in the Game.
The other side wanted the weather to be more metaphorical; driven by something a little like God. Something outside the laws of physics. These were the hackers who had done magic mushrooms; or (the hardcore) ayahuasca: who had broken open their minds with psychedelics and come back to their bodies hours later shivering, with new information about the universe, information they didn’t understand. And they wanted to do justice to that information.
They didn’t exactly believe in God; but they believed in unseen forces; in connections we cannot perceive. They believed in something meaningful, that was bigger than themselves. They didn’t know this, because they didn’t have a name for it, but they believed in me.
So the New Atheists wouldn’t tolerate the hand of God inside the game. And the psychedelic voyagers wouldn’t tolerate a strictly mechanical universe. Stalemate.
They finally came up with a solution: map the weather onto the activity of a shadowy, mysterious entity that was everywhere and nowhere, but that actually existed in the physical world. Both sides accepted the compromise.
And so the gameworld used the NSA, and later the National Domestic Security Agency, as a proxy for God.
The NDSA moved the weather.
The hackers were tracking the NDSA anyway, because the NDSA was tracking them; so they had the data. NDSA activity was mapped to the weather in the game. A big hack, and a big NDSA reaction, created storms.
Their battles with the NDSA, with the huge, distant father, who knows everything, who pushes His way into their minds, who reads their thoughts; their battles with the Old Testament God of the NDSA, with Yahweh, were written in the sky.
18
Ah. Colt breathes out a satisfied hmmmm, as he sees the problem. Clouds close to the ground are freezing in place when they hit the mesas.
He calls up the code and starts to troubleshoot.
OK, that smart new coder, the Snow Queen, has added a nice, nuanced piece of code. More realistic cloud movement, better ice formation. Good. But that’s not it . . .
These . . . Oh, it’s the Brothers Karamazov, again.
Colt sighs.
In real life, the Brothers are teenage Ukrainian twins, going crazy with boredom in some Saharan state, where their dad works for a solar infrastructure company. They like to rewrite code, with more enthusiasm than skill, even if it doesn’t need rewriting.
They must have rebuilt the algorithms for generating desert landscapes last night; but in doing so they’d broken the Snow Queen’s code, which depended on data generated by the old algorithm.
Not a big deal right now, when there are hardly any clouds, but there has been a massive security breach at a US bank overnight; probably Chinese government proxy hackers; and the NDSA are going nuts.
The game will be throwing up a storm soon. This needs to be fixed tonight.
He solves the problem in a few minutes. Then he writes fresh code for a few hours, till his brain gets tired.
Then he walks outside, with mapping on, and runs the new code.
The game has always taken the things in crapworld, and incorporated them into the gameworld – a truck becomes a wagon, a distant plane becomes a bird – but the new code blends them better. He wants to explore his local, private, desert realm ingame, with mapping on: but every time he gets out of sight of the house, it goes glitchy.
And there’s no reception at all beyond the ridge at the back of the house.
The FCC keep pushing down the output of wireless devices, in response to bullpoop health scares about bullpoop, bullpoop.
He gets angry thinking about it. The sun and the earth pour far more unstructured data through everyone, all the time, on all these frequencies. OK, he’ll have to build a booster. He orders some more parts on his mother’s credit.
The day just drifts away, until it’s too late t
o go to his mother’s lab. To do what he has planned to do for over a year.
Months of working on the problem casually, just to see if it could be done. Sharing some breakthroughs with his mother. Then, as he realized it could be done, working harder, in secret.
He sent his mother away specifically to do this one big thing. But now that he’s free to do it . . . He’s scared.
He goes to bed, and lies there, angry.
OK, tomorrow. Tomorrow you boost yourself.
Upgrade your brain. Better working memory. Faster processing, at every level.
No, it’s not just that. If it works . . . you might understand people.
They might understand you.
But if it doesn’t work . . . if it goes wrong . . .
He falls asleep, still arguing with himself.
2
Red Blood Cells
‘Perhaps the most curious fact about the Chinese Pantheon is that it is arranged in imitation of earthly organisation. It appears as a vast government administration, or, still more precisely, as a series of government departments, each one with its Minister and its personnel. The different gods are positive bureaucrats with a strict hierarchy of rank and with clearly defined powers. They keep registers, make reports, issue directives, with a regard for formalities and a superabundance of papers which the most pedantic administration on earth might well envy.’
— Chinese Mythology entry from The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology
‘We produce nothing comparable to the great Oriental carpets, Persian glass, tiles and illuminated books, Arabian leatherwork, Spanish marquetry, Hindu textiles, Chinese porcelain and embroidery, Japanese lacquer and brocade, French tapestries, or Inca jewellery. (Though, incidentally, there are certain rather small electronic devices that come unwittingly close to fine jewels.)
— Alan Watts, The Book
‘The concept of surveillance is ingrained in our beings. God was the original surveillance camera.’
— Hasan M. Elahi
19
She gets from Arrivals to the AirTrain just fine.
The driverless electric train pulls smoothly away from the platform, swings out above the airport on its high rail. Sunlight glitters off the wet concrete below. Yes, the sun is kinder here. It isn’t trying to kill her.
By the time they make the last pickup, from Terminal 8, there are way too many people in her part of the train and her heart is pounding, but she stands with her back to them, facing out the big glass windows, leaning on the metal handle of her old wheeled case, and looks at the bright wet colourful planes. As she watches the tiny maintenance vehicles dancing around the big jets, like remoras cleaning sharks, she is almost calm.
Just got to get to the hotel.
The train starts up again, sways round a bend, and she studies the reflections of the people behind her. Marvels at how many wear retro gaming gear. Not discreet, induction-powered earbuds and contact lenses, but aggressively old-school helmets, and thick micromesh gloves. It’s funny, the younger they are, the more old-fashioned they seem to want to look. She wonders how many of them are playing Colt’s game. A lot . . . Normal thoughts. A normal journey. Yes, she’s almost calm.
But at Howard Beach station, her case gets caught in the barrier.
She hauls it through, sideways, and discovers the down escalator to the subway is broken.
Her eyes still sundazzled, she stands at the head of the frozen metal steps, and peers down into the underworld. To her right, a torrent of faces pours up into the light, out of the darkness.
She’d forgotten; they buried this section of the A, after the last couple of hurricanes washed away the old tracks. It runs through a sealed, waterproof, storm-proof, everything-proof tunnel now, deep under Queens.
Underground. Oh God, no.
The people walking down the frozen steps ahead of her keep going, and vanish into darkness, until all the steps below her, with their little metal teeth, are empty.
She feels a hand on her shoulder. ‘Lady, shit or get off the pot.’
She turns, startled, and sees a short, very wide Latino man with a shaved head, frowning.
‘But,’ she says, ‘. . . it used to be on the surface . . .’
He stares at her, through enhanced contact lenses, in the new season’s colours. Acid green, with a textured gold rim.
Behind him, dozens, no, hundreds of people, with their suitcases, tense faces, sad kids, backpacks. Peering to see what is wrong, what is blocking them.
The man glances down, and his expression changes abruptly, like he’s been distracted. Is he even seeing her? Ugh, did he just switch on a porn filter, to see her simulated, naked?
Forget it, forget it, nothing you can do. Just get to the hotel.
Naomi turns back, to the steep metal steps; reaches out a hand, in reflex, for Colt’s hand, oh, he won’t like this either . . .
But of course, he’s not there. Her heart speeds up, far faster now than Colt’s pulse against her wrist. She takes a numb step down, another, hauling her case behind her, thump, thump. Down into the darkness. Into the noise. Into the smell. Into the people.
The faces floating up past her on the right are so vivid. They stare, unsmiling, at her as they pass. Some frown, like she’s woken them against their will from a dream. A wrinkled, leathery old woman in a white anti-virus mask gone yellow with dirt catches Naomi’s eye, and glares at her. Some noisy kids, wearing full-face privacy masks to block facial-recognition systems, abruptly stop talking as they draw level, and all turn to face Naomi, expressionless. They’re Colt’s age, all wearing T-shirts that protest something; government tracking, police profiling, avatar sexism, targeted ads . . . She stops, stares back, her eyes darting between their blank, identical, silent faces, until they rise past her and, just as abruptly, start talking and laughing again as they vanish up into the light.
Naomi keeps going. Five steps down. Six, and she wants to go back, this isn’t going to work, and she turns; but the pressure of the people, the anger in their faces, they jam the stairs above her, it’s impossible.
‘Hey, lady!’
‘C’mon! Haul it . . .’
She has to go on.
She can’t; but she has to.
She takes a step, hauls her case after her, thump. Takes another step, another, faster, and now she’s running down the steps, her suitcase bouncing after her, its small wheels spinning, until it hops too high – leaping three steps in one go – and slams back down hard, twisting the handle out of her hand, and she almost falls.
Her case brushes her hip as it tumbles past her. She runs after it, and it bounces gracefully ahead of her until they both arrive at the bottom.
From around the next corner, she can hear the scream of a train approaching along some dark tunnel.
I don’t want to be underground. I can’t . . .
She grabs the case, pulls it upright. The cheap metal of the handle is bent. She leans it against the metal side of the frozen escalator, and puts the full weight of her body on it until it’s nearly straight again.
Then she forces her way, sideways, hard, into the dense crowd at the bottom of the up escalator.
She should have got one of those powered wheelie cases that follow you around. Like old people have. No tugging, no pulling. Too late now.
She gets one foot on the up escalator, and it pulls her foot forward, up; she slides her other foot on, drags her case through the packed people and up, onto her step.
‘Glupa kurva,’ says a young male tourist she has pushed past, and his wearable helpfully translates, in a bright, cheerful, clear voice, ‘Stupid whore.’
Nothing you can do. Head down. Ignore him. Ignore them all.
The escalator brings her up up up and back into the light, and she gets off at the top, drags her suitcase sideways, away from the people.
One wheel is sticking, damaged by the fall.
She finds a quiet space in the station, an eddy point, behind a steel roof support. A
place to think. Fast-food wrappers and, somehow, from somewhere, dead leaves have drifted in here too, they crunch under her feet. She concentrates on feeling Colt’s slow pulse against her wrist, to slow her own, to calm herself. He’s fine . . .
I can’t go underground.
A bus? No, God no.
She’s not in a car-sharing plan. They don’t make financial sense when you live out in the desert.
One of the instant rental services?
But she doesn’t want to drive, not here. And she doesn’t trust self-driving cars, not since that spate of hacking incidents and robberies in Brooklyn.
The social options, share a ride . . . No, she doesn’t want to have to talk to someone at random. Last time she shared a ride, the guy was an enthusiastic Jehovah’s Witness . . .
Outside, the Chinese and Indian tourists stand around, waiting for their instant rentals and self-drives to pull up. It’s too many people; the noise, the crush, is pushing her right to the edge of a full-on panic attack. She starts to walk. When she finally gets to the edge of the crowd, she stands for a while with her face to the sun. Oh God, what shall I do?
A taxi pulls up alongside her. A nice, old-fashioned, unfriendly, human-driven, New York taxi.
The driver winds down the window. ‘Hey, lady. Cab?’
Like when she was a kid. Comforting . . . ‘How much to the Marriot Marquis?’ she says. Just get to the hotel. A bed. A door you can lock.
He shrugs. ‘Depends on traffic.’ He points at a complicated price menu on the door. Time of day, distance, number of passengers, bags, Manhattan surcharge . . .
She tries to run the figures. Can her budget survive this? But there are too many variables, so her mind just worries in a circle. Besides which, human-driven taxis are basically a gullible tourist thing, which means the advertised charges are highly unreliable . . . But she thinks she can do it. Eat from the buffets, there will be buffets . . .
A fresh wave of noise and tourists surges out of the station, pushing the existing crowd further along the pavement.