Realms Unreel (2011)

by Audrey Auden

“Nice to meet you, Owen,” said Emmie, shaking his hand. “I’m Emmie Bridges.”

  After a few minutes of awkward preliminaries, they latched on to the familiarity of some of their more recent in-game conversations: the latest expansion of Tomo’s Kaisei, the widely anticipated opening of the first-of-its-kind stadium spliner installation in San Francisco, the controversial attempts by various national governments to impose identity registration requirements on the alternet. The easy repartee of Bealsio and Otaku at last returning, Owen was emboldened to turn to new subjects.

  “So you’re in high school?”

  Emmie took a sip of her black coffee. She had ordered it mostly because Mom would never have allowed it, and, despite the bitterness, she could see the appeal of the flavor. She set down her mug carefully, unsure whether she wanted to get into this part of the conversation.

  “Does it really matter?” she asked.

  “Come on,” he cajoled, “What’s the point of meeting in person if we can’t talk about normal stuff?”

  “It’s just going to make you feel more weird about me.”

  “Okay,” Owen laughed, “I admit I wasn’t expecting you to be a teenage girl, but it’s not like you’re an extraterrestrial or something. Hopefully.”

  She rolled her eyes at the feeble humor but still had to suppress a giggle.

  “No. But I’m not in high school, either. I dropped out.”

  He frowned.

  “What do you do all day, then?”

  “You’ve seen it,” she shrugged, “I design alternet content. I play Eleusis. I surf the alternet. I design some more. I study on the side, but mainly I’m working on becoming a designer.”

  He considered her appraisingly.

  “Pretty ballsy,” he said, “Dropping out, pursuing your dream.”

  “There’s nothing else I want to be doing. Carpe diem, right?”

  Owen looked down at the table, rotating his espresso by the edge of its saucer, his eyes distant.

  “Yeah.”

  Emmie waited for him to go on, then prompted,

  “So how about you? You’re studying CS at Cal, right?”

  Owen’s eyes refocused on her.

  “Yep. Senior year.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “So you’re, what, twenty-two?”

  “In a couple of months.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Too old for me, then.”

  Emmie smirked as Owen said, with a slightly alarmed expression,

  “Way too old.”

  “Come on, I’m just kidding. So, what do you do all day?”

  “I’m supposed to be working on my senior project, but I’m procrastinating,” he smiled sheepishly, “So I surf the net, I play Eleusis, evade my TA duties to go on long weekend camping trips out of town. I … guess I’ve gotten a little side-tracked.”

  “By what?”

  He rubbed his chin ruefully,

  “Delusions of grandeur. I always dreamed of becoming some breakout alternet phenomenon, designing games or something. Like Tomo, you know? Rags-to-riches. But … I always knew that was a dream. My designs are primitive at best. When I managed to get into the CS program here, I realized I’d better do something practical. Accounting and software development are pretty much the only prospects in this crappy job market.”

  “Sounds practical. And boring.”

  Owen’s eyes twinkled, and they sat smiling at each other. Emmie felt a little flushed, then said quickly,

  “So … What did you want to show me?”

  “Damn,” said Owen, hanging his head in his hand, “This is even more embarrassing now that you turn out to be a little girl.”

  “Watch it,” she said, slipping on her immerger glasses and a pair of gloves, “So, what modalities are we talking about?”

  “Oh,” Owen looked surprised, “Sorry. I don’t actually own any immergers myself, other than a total crap pair of single-overlay glasses. I usually check out gear from the university library. I thought we could go over there.”

  “That’s okay,” Emmie said, reaching for her bag and rummaging around, “I’ve got some spares. The shirt’s probably — no, definitely too small. You could squeeze into the gloves, though. They’re an old pair of my dad’s.” She emptied the bag’s contents onto the table. “Anyway, you probably just need glasses and gloves to access whatever you want to show me, right? I’m wearing enough gear to do audio, visual, olfactory, and tactile. Everything but environmental.”

  Owen stared at the pile of expensive electronics on the table.

  “Wow.”

  “Go on,” said Emmie, “Suit up.”

  Owen pulled on the gloves, flexing his fingers to test the fit, then slipped on the glasses. Emmie tapped her smartcom to sync their gear.

  “Where’s your content?” she asked, “Remote? Storage tablet?”

  “It’s remote, hold on —” he tapped a short sequence on the table with his gloved hand to download his files to a local directory on Emmie’s smartcom.

  “Okay, don’t laugh,” he said, “I wasn’t kidding when I said my stuff’s primitive. Especially compared to yours.”

  “Look, you asked for my opinion. I’m not gonna sugar-coat anything, but I’m not going to laugh at you.”

  “Thanks,” he said wryly.

  He tapped out another sequence on the table, launching the content compiler on Emmie’s smartcom. As the compiler churned away, the log messages scrolled up the screen. Emmie let out a low whistle.

  “You’re working really low-level, huh? Hardcore.”

  “I wouldn’t, except I don’t have access to any decent high-end tools. The open source toolkits are okay, but all the effects in those are pretty run-of-the-mill. When I’ve got some basic presentation to do for a class, I can do something quick and dirty, but it’s hard to make anything that seems new or exciting.”

  Emmie nodded. She had a major advantage over Owen in this regard, having access through the Lab to software more sophisticated than anything available in the open source community or on the consumer market.

  “You’ve got an excuse to have primitive stuff, then. It would have taken me a hundred times as long to build anything in my portfolio if I had to work like this.”

  “Well, in any case, you still don’t have to sugar-coat anything. Go ahead.”

  Emmie turned her attention to the collection of items in the simulator. She reached first for a spiky, spherical object about the size of a softball. The spikes on the outside of the object brushed her palms, stiff but pliable, like feathers.

  “You can shape the stems,” said Owen, “Just touch your fingertips to them.”

  Emmie proceeded to draw out individual stems, elongating them. At intervals along the stem, she drew out new tendrils of material, twirling and kinking them around her fingers, flattening them out to form broad, leafy shapes, shaking the tips of the stems to soften them, or twisting them to make them stand up straight. Several café patrons looked up to stare at her. She tried for a moment to be less conspicuous, then decided to give it up. This was an amazing simulation, and she wanted to fully experience it.

  “Try setting it down,” Owen said, grinning.

  She did, and now the object began to grow, each frond she had shaped with her fingers stretching out into the room. As she watched, smaller fronds sprouted from the larger ones, each smaller frond a miniature image of its parent. The object grew ever more intricate as the original fronds grew larger and ever-smaller fronds unfurled. The object finally stopped growing when it had filled the height of the café. Emmie turned to Owen, impressed.

  “That was cool. Some sort of fractal algorithm?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your object physics are fantastic.” She brushed the fingertips of her immerger gloves over a fern-like plume stretching across the table between them, feeling its feathery texture on her palm and watching it spring back from her touch. “The tactile simulation, too. Is that from a texture library?”

&nb
sp; “I wrote it myself,” Owen said with a touch of pride.

  “It’s really good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The visuals are pretty simple, like you said,” she went on, “But your lighting is great. I’d love to play around with your source, if you’d let me. I bet I could add some visual polish.”

  Owen nodded,

  “Yeah. Absolutely. I’d love that.”

  She reached for the frond again, gripping it in her hand and shaking it, watching the effects of the movement ripple through the rest of the object.

  “No audio?” she said.

  “I hadn’t gotten to it yet.”

  Emmie moved on to the other items Owen had put on display.

  The first was a sort of semantic association game. A shape selected from a standard content library, when seeded with a single word she provided, crawled the alternet for a series of concepts to connect the starting shape to the final shape. It then rendered a slow animation of one object morphing smoothly into the next.

  A collection of flasks allowed her to pour and toss multicolored liquids against the walls, ceiling, and tabletops of the café, simulating the fluid dynamics in such slow motion that she could walk leisurely through a flock of colorful undulations and watch from different angles as they touched ground and languidly rebounded in arcs of jewel-like droplets.

  After half an hour of Emmie ooh-ing and aah-ing over Owen’s portfolio, the barista came over and asked them if they could make a little less of a scene. Only slightly abashed, Emmie took her seat. Owen leaned over and whispered.

  “Okay, this one’s a little experimental. You have full surround audio, right?”

  “Most definitely.”

  “Great. So, you might want to hold on to your seat. Literally. If it works right, you’ll be a little disoriented, but if something goes wrong, you’ll be extremely disoriented.”

  “Sounds exciting,” said Emmie, gripping the seat of her chair.

  “I’ll map the manual escape to your thumbs, so if you need the simulation to stop, just press either one or both of your thumbs onto your chair, okay?”

  “Got it. Fire away.”

  Owen swiped his fingertips over the tabletop a few times, and Emmie heard the noise cancellation in her earplugs wipe out the ambient noise of the café. Her visual overlay flickered, and she found herself in the empty cubic room that was the default starting point for most simple environmental physics testing. She looked around and found that her body had been replaced by something rather like a large blue beach ball.

  She began drifting upward in a compelling simulation of weightlessness. After she was several yards off the ground, gravity re-exerted itself, and she began to fall toward the floor, rather slower than she would have under the influence of Earth gravity. She bounced softly off the floor, and she inadvertently leaned forward in her seat, which sent her spinning slowly end over end through the room until she bounced against the far wall.

  “Ha!” she laughed, “That’s amazing.”

  She pressed her thumbs to her chair, and the simulation ended. The café flickered back into view. She pushed back her immerger glasses and said,

  “I’ve never felt anything like that done with just audiovisual feedback. Where did you learn how to do that?”

  Owen smiled, gratified.

  “That was my sophomore year final project, although I’ve tweaked it a bit since. I spent a fair amount of time on a trampoline doing physical therapy after a football injury in high school, and, thinking back on it, I thought that sensation could make a pretty cool immersion.”

  “It definitely does,” said Emmie, drumming her fingers against her lips. After a moment, she said,

  “Hey, listen. I’ve never really done any collaborative work before, but I think between your physics programming skills and my visual design concepts, we could put together a pretty killer domain.”

  Owen straightened up and leaned forward in his seat.

  “Really? You’d want to do that with me?”

  Emmie nodded.

  “I could show you some pretty cool tools, too. My dad runs the Emerging Media Lab in Oakland.”

  “O-o-o-oh!” Owen said, suddenly making the connection, “You’re one of those Bridges, huh?”

  Emmie nodded again.

  “Ha!” Owen scratched his head, “Well, I guess I lucked out when I met you, Bealsio. So, when can we start?”

  ∞

  Owen and Emmie soon found themselves meeting almost daily — in his computer science lab, in the downtown Berkeley cafés, in the Cal libraries. Their camaraderie on the Eleusis battlefield translated surprisingly well to their creative collaboration. Gradually, both of them began to withdraw from Amaranthian guild activities, until at last Otaku passed on guild leadership to his second-in-command.

  “You’re just going to quit, huh?” Zeke said angrily to Emmie the day she told him she was leaving the guild.

  “Hey, we’ll find another game,” Emmie soothed, surprised by the heat in Zeke’s voice, “I’ve just got a lot of other stuff going on right now.”

  “Yeah,” Zeke huffed, “Well, I’m pretty busy, too, anyway. I guess I’ll see you around.”

  Emmie was upset by the exchange, but her thoughts eventually turned to other things. She and Owen were working on a joint portfolio on Emergency, new work that showcased the best of both their skills.

  Not long after they began working on their joint portfolio, Owen insisted that Emmie introduce him to her parents.

  “As long as we’re going to be spending so much time together, I want them to know I’m a perfect gentleman. Also, based on what you’ve told me, I don’t think I can afford to get on the wrong side of your mother.”

  After much protest, Emmie nervously invited Owen to dinner at her parents’ house. Apart from asking several leading questions about how Owen and Emmie had met, Dad remained distant throughout the meal. From Mom, however, Owen received a warm reception, and Emmie gaped as her mother kept up a steady stream of friendly conversation with Owen throughout dinner.

  “So before you came out to California for college, where did you live?”

  “I grew up in Keller, Texas, ma’am. Outside Fort Worth.”

  “And does your family live there now?”

  “Yes, ma’am. My parents still live there. Most of my mother’s family, too.”

  “Do you come from a big family?”

  “Well, I have an older brother, Wendell, and my little sister, Marybeth. Loads of cousins. My mama has four sisters, and they all live in Keller.”

  “Is it hard for you, being so far away?”

  “It’s good to see them, but, to be honest, my father and I were never very close. He was a Navy officer, and I didn’t get to see him much while I was growing up.”

  “It sounds like that was difficult for you.”

  Owen shrugged, looking down at his plate for a moment before saying,

  “We were lucky in a lot of ways. We only had to relocate once, and just for a couple of years. Other than that, my mama’s family was always around to help her out. And my dad came home safe and sound, in the end.”

  Mom nodded slowly, and after a moment she asked,

  “So, what do you think of California?”

  “Love it,” Owen said promptly, his eyes lighting up, “I spent my whole life wanting to get out of Keller, to move out west. Once I got that acceptance letter,” he smacked his palms together, “I was out like that. I drove my car out, hit all the National Parks along the way. And when I came through the tunnel and saw the Bay, the Golden Gate,” he let out an appreciative whistle, “I knew I was home. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

  “You sound just like my husband,” Mom smiled, patting Dad’s knee. Dad cleared his throat, narrowing his eyes a bit at Owen as he said,

  “It may have its problems, but it beats any other place I’ve been.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Owen, shrinking back slightly in his chair. Emmie, indicating her
father with a slight jerk of the head, mouthed across the table to Owen, Sorry!

  “So,” Dad said brusquely, pushing back from the table, “Can I offer you some dessert before you go, Owen? We don’t want to keep you too late.”

  “Travis!” said Mom, “It’s only seven o’clock.”

  Half an hour later, after Dad had ushered Owen out the door and retired to his office, Mom turned to Emmie and said,

  “What a charming young man.”

  Emmie shook her head, amazed.

  “Seriously? You’re less worried about me hanging out with a college guy you’ve never met before than you are about letting me drive the car.”

  “Well,” Mom said, flushing slightly, “He seems perfectly nice. And it’s good for you to have a real-life friend besides your sister.”

  “I have other friends!” Emmie protested. Her mother cocked her head doubtfully.

  Despite her approval of Owen, Mom nonetheless insisted that his future visits be chaperoned. Emmie complained, but Owen was meticulously respectful of her mother’s wishes, so he and Emmie began to meet regularly at the Lab. The arrangement vexed Emmie almost as much as her father. Dad now had to see Owen and Emmie together constantly, and Emmie had to endure merciless ribbing by Uncle Frank whenever Owen was out of earshot.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” she insisted, “We’re just friends. Anyway, that would be practically illegal.”

  “Oh, come on,” Uncle Frank winked, “He seems perfectly nice.”

  “I wish everyone would stop saying that!”

  ∞

  Except for Uncle Frank, Emmie had never found anyone as enthusiastic as she was about immersion gear, but the first time she took Owen to visit the Lab, she saw mirrored in his eyes the same delight she felt whenever a new gadget came off the lab benches. Owen had never had access to such high-quality technology, and she realized how privileged she had been to grow up in a place with so much access to the tools she needed for her work.

  Uncle Frank was happy to give Owen the same privileged access that she had to the resources of the Lab, although Dad grumbled about it at first. Owen took full advantage of all the new tools at his disposal, and he soon impressed the engineers with his remarkable fluency in environment design. He rapidly prototyped a variety of domain physics, from the meticulously realistic to the fanciful. Emmie found in Owen’s foundational environment frameworks the perfect context for her own content, and their collaboration took both of their skills to a new level. Owen eventually earned even Dad’s begrudging admiration.