by David Hosp
Yvette is sitting across from me behind two huge plates. One has a stack of pancakes so tall it looks like a television-commercial prop, with bacon, eggs and toast on the side. The other has a burger with onions, pickles and jalapeños and a bucketful of fries. It’s hard to believe that all that food could possibly fit into her thin frame. Then again, my guess is that this is the first time in a couple of days she’s bothered to eat anything of substance. That’s the way she operates. Binge and starve. Not just with food: work, men, booze, et cetera. I have to hand it to her, when she turns her attention to something, she gives it all she’s got.
She’s leaning over her food, attacking it. In defense against the late June heatwave, she’s wearing a pink tank-top with the words ‘Man’s Best Friends’ plastered across the front. It’s a loose top, and it hangs down as she leans over, exposing her cleavage and the black bra she’s wearing. My eyes are drawn with unintentional lechery. I don’t realize I’m staring, mainly because I’m not seeing Yvette at all; I’m back in the white room.
‘See anything you like?’ she asks without looking up.
‘What?’ My tone is defensive.
She looks at me. ‘What’s the big deal, Slick? You’ve seen ’em before.’
I laugh. ‘When we were fourteen.’
‘I was an early bloomer; they haven’t gotten any bigger.’ She leans and glances over at me. ‘I hope, for your sake, the same isn’t true on your side of the table.’
‘Nice.’
‘Just sayin’.’
‘You get anything interesting tonight?’
She shakes her head. ‘It was God-awful. I spent about an hour with this middle-aged woman who’s managed to find an old high-school boyfriend. They meet in the same shared LifeScene over and over and over. They stand there in this Eighties disco – not a very nice one, either – and trade stories about their kids and tell each other how unhappy they are in their marriages. They won’t touch each other, though. Not even In-World. I’m like: Jesus Christ, get it over with!’
‘Maybe they don’t want to.’
‘Oh, they want to. Her heartrate peaks at around one-fifty, and I can see the look he’s got in his eyes. For whatever reason, though, they can’t seem to get past it all. Don’t they realize it’s not real? I mean, it’s not actually cheating.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘Don’t get all philosophical on me – it’s a fantasy.’ She pauses long enough to fit half her burger in her mouth. ‘It’s harmless,’ she muffles through the food.
I take a sip of my coffee. It’s all I’ve ordered; turns out I wasn’t hungry after all. ‘Maybe it’s not harmless to them. I mean, what made them look for each other after all this time? Both of them are married, right? They’re middle-aged, they’ve got kids, they’ve got lives that are flying around them faster than they can deal with, and yet they found the time to make this connection?’
‘That’s my point. Why not just dive into the full fantasy? That’s what they’re there for.’
‘If they do that, it becomes real, doesn’t it? At that point, they have fully admitted – to themselves and to each other – how unhappy they really are. And if they can take that step in NextLife, what’s to stop them from taking that step outside in reality?’
‘Well, first of all, she lives in Atlanta and he lives in Spokane.’
‘Distance can be overcome.’
‘It’s totally different, though, Nick. Just because you do something online doesn’t mean you’re gonna do it in the real world.’
‘No, I suppose it doesn’t,’ I agree. I’m playing devil’s advocate, I realize, and I’m getting tired. If I keep it up, we’ll still be here two hours from now, and I’ve got an important day tomorrow, so I can’t let that happen. I have to cut things short. ‘You going back to the office?’ I ask.
She nods. ‘I’ve got to. I’ve got another twenty hours I’ve got to make up before Friday or I’m gonna be short on my time sheets. You’d know that, if you were even a half-assed boss.’
‘I’ve never worried about your ability to get the work done,’ I say. ‘You have better stamina than anyone I’ve ever met for crawling around in other people’s fucked-up fantasies.’
‘Hey, it beats working for a living. You going back?’
I shake my head. ‘I’ve got a management meeting at ten, and I’d like to get a little sleep before then.’
‘Management meeting, huh? We talkin’ IPO?’
I smile at her. Some secrets I can still keep to myself. ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘I’ll walk you back.’
‘Why? You think I can’t take care of myself?’
She is a rare specimen. ‘I’m not worried about you,’ I say. ‘I’m trying to protect the muggers.’
CHAPTER TWO
The drive home feels apocalyptic. It’s nearing two in the morning, and the streets are deserted. The traffic lights blink from green to yellow to red without purpose, like lonely reminders of a civilization long passed. The people are gone, but the machines we have created to manage our lives move sadly along. I cross the threshold from the liberal college enclave of Cambridge into the working-class neighborhood of Charlestown, where generations have lived in proximity to the wealth of Boston, feeding off it, making their living as hard-working painters and plumbers and handymen to the elite on Beacon Hill and in the Back Bay. It’s a town that’s proud of its heritage and of its gruff, blue-collar ways; proud even of the strain of local criminal gangs that filters through the projects. It’s a place where the hard are revered and the soft are swallowed.
No one is prouder of Charlestown and all it stands for than my mother. She’s lived here her entire life, and has made it clear that she will never leave. Not while she’s breathing, and not thereafter. She purchased her cemetery plot down by the O’Brien Highway in cash to make sure there are no issues with her being planted here for good.
I love Ma. I know it seems unnecessary to verbalize that; I mean, every boy loves his mother, right? And yet for me, it’s not always as easy as that. Ma’s a hard woman. Hard and demanding. Always has been. Her father was in the rackets back in the days when the gangs had real muscle. She grew up in that world, and it’s where she’s always felt most comfortable. My father was part of that world, too, until he was killed in an accident when I was seven. I was told he fell off a ladder on a construction job. I stopped believing that when I was ten.
Funny thing is, I think Ma was always disappointed that I never went that way. I could have. I started hanging out with a pretty tough crowd when I was younger, and I was respected. I could have ended up being a leader in what’s left of that world, but discovered I was different. It wasn’t fear; I think I was bred to disregard fear. It’s just that I always liked school. I liked learning, and I loved computers. That’s how Yvette and I first became friends. I actually think Ma was ashamed when I got the scholarship to MIT.
Truth be told, I didn’t fit in much in college, either. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the most prestigious universities in America – a mecca for the offspring of the rich elite and wonder-geek geniuses alike. I fell into neither camp. I was a tough working-class kid dropping my ‘r’s and scratching my head at all the bullshit I’d never encountered before. I think my hard exterior made it a little difficult to make friends, and my hard interior made it tough for me to care. As a result, I dove into the work, and loved having the facilities to learn how computers really operate. In that sense, it was one of the best times of my life.
That’s where I was four years ago, doing a joint program with split concentrations in computer science and business when the recession hit. The market crashed, and the savings Ma had from the insurance settlement she got after my father’s ‘accident’ disappeared. Two months later she was diagnosed with cancer and, without any health insurance, it was clear that she wasn’t going to survive alone. I quit school and moved back in to help out. Some mothers would have told their only child to stay in school and would have
suffered through, in the quiet hope of a better life for the next generation. I would have been the first in my family to graduate from college. My mother, though, is a realist, and a firm believer in the debt children owe their parents. Like I say, I love Ma, in part because she is as hard as the town I call home.
I don’t know what we would have done if it hadn’t been for NextLife. The company literally saved us. I was the fifteenth employee hired. When I joined, I never haggled over my salary. The only thing I cared about was making sure that Ma would be on my insurance. They threw in the stock because that’s what they assumed everyone wanted. And they were right for the most part; pretty much everyone else getting into the start-up was looking for the big score. Not me. I was looking for enough work to feed me and Ma. I took the stock because it was given, but I never thought about it. Sometimes you get lucky.
Soon we’ll be able to move anywhere we want. If things work out the way everything is lining up, I’ll be able to buy Ma the biggest townhouse on the top of Beacon Hill. A place so high up, we can look down on everyone around us. I’d like to do that for her – show her what her boy has accomplished. Ma, of course, won’t even talk about it. Like I said, she was born in Charlestown, and she’ll die here; that’s her view and she’s sticking to it. As for me . . . well, we’ll just have to wait and see. Sometimes I think it would be nice to go back and get my degree. It’s something that still nags at me. I hate leaving things unfinished.
I pull into the driveway of the house I grew up in. It’s a little clapboard two-bedroom set flush to the street about two blocks from the projects. The neighborhood is solid but gritty – a lower-middle-class Irish faux-ghetto wedged in between the projects and the posh townhouses up on Monument Square. When politicians talk about ‘The Real America’, this is the place they’re talking about, and Ma is the person they’re talking to. These days there seem to be fewer places like this, and fewer people like Ma.
I pull open the screen door and reach into my pocket for my keys, but I can see that the main wooden door is slightly ajar. I shake my head and push it in.
The television is on in the parlor. I can hear the chattering of some twenty-four-hour news channel, and around the corner I can see Ma’s feet sticking out from the couch, resting on the ancient fraying ottoman. I grab a beer from the refrigerator and walk to the parlor entryway.
‘They don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about!’ Ma barks at me. She waves an angry hand at the screen. ‘These people just don’t fuckin’ know!’
‘Ma,’ I say. ‘It’s two-thirty in the morning.’
‘That makes it alright to talk shit on television?’
‘What are you doing up?’
‘I couldn’t sleep. It’s all the goddamned pills they’ve got me on. I swear, sometimes I think they don’t know what they’re talkin’ about either, these doctors. They’re children. They don’t understand what it is to be old.’
‘Fifty-four ain’t old, Ma.’ I slip into street dialect around my mother. It’s weird, but I think it makes her feel more comfortable.
‘It is if it’s the fifty-four years I’ve lived.’ She stirs in her chair, her hand going to her lips, forgetfully. Her fingers linger there for a moment, as though there’s something they are supposed to be doing. I wonder: if I wasn’t there, would she still be smoking? Even with the oxygen tank strapped to her face, the tubes running to her nose, the rumble in her chest like the approach of a loaded eighteen-wheeler, would she still be pouring the fire into her lungs? I think she probably would.
‘Help me carry this thing up,’ she says gesturing toward the oxygen tank. ‘I can’t watch this shit anymore.’ I give her my arm and pull her to her feet. ‘How’s work?’
‘It’s okay.’
‘Strange business.’ She shakes her head. ‘I’ll never understand it. How do you people make any money doing what you do?’ She gives me a sharp look. ‘You make sure they ain’t running a scam on you, you hear?’
‘They’re gonna make me rich, Ma. You’ll see.’ I smile at her. ‘I’ll be able to get you whatever you want.’
‘What would I want?’
‘I don’t know. A better house?’
‘You think there’s something wrong with this house?’ she demands. ‘I love this house.’
‘Then I’ll buy you another one, just for fun. Maybe I’ll buy you Mabel Mullarkey’s house? You never liked her, right? So, I’ll buy her house and we can tear it down, just for spite. That’d cheer you up, wouldn’t it, Ma?’
She laughs at that. ‘It just might. That bitch, always makin’ eyes at your father.’ I follow her up the narrow staircase and into her bedroom. ‘I’ll read,’ she says. It takes a moment for her to get situated, getting the oxygen tanks and tubes set just so.
‘You want anything else, Ma?’ I ask. ‘Something to drink?’
‘I’m fine,’ she says. She looks up at me from her bed. ‘You’re a good boy, you know that, Nick? I had my doubts for a while, but you turned out okay.’
‘Thanks, Ma. I love you, too.’I close the door to her room and pad down the hallway. I have an important meeting in just a few hours and I’d like to get a little sleep before then.
As I’m walking to my bedroom, my cellphone buzzes and I look at it. It’s an automatic notification from the NextLife system, letting me know that De Sade is online again. One of the things we’ve learned in our research is that our users often go back to their favorite fantasies again and again to relive the scene – to make modifications and elaborate on them. I’m hoping that De Sade likes the LifeScene I was in today enough to go back to it, so before I left work I adjusted my administrator’s settings to buzz me whenever he goes on the site. I’m desperate to see if he’s with my girl. That’s how I think of her now – my girl. It’s a bad sign, and I know it, but I can’t help myself; I have to see her again if I can. There’s a part of me, even now, when it’s nearly three in the morning and I’m fifteen minutes from the office, nagging me to go in; torturing me with the possibility that I might be missing a chance to see her.
I dismiss the thought and climb into bed. It’s too late, and he’d probably be offline before I could even get to the office. I need sleep, so I turn off the light. I know, though, that I will spend the hours lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about my girl from De Sade’s LifeScene, unable to get her out of my head.
I realize, to my chagrin, that I’ve become obsessed.
CHAPTER THREE
My meeting the next morning is at NextLife headquarters out in Brighton. It’s just across the Charles, a couple miles down the river, but a world away. Because of the sensitive nature of what my research division does, we’re kept separate, in the dark isolated basement of a nondescript building. By contrast, the company’s headquarters is in a gleaming new, twenty-story structure out by the New Balance building. It towers over the highway with spectacular views of downtown Boston to the east. A green neon sign on the top of the building screams the company’s logo. It’s not very subtle, but that’s the way it’s always been with overnight online successes. It’s all about branding. It’s all about getting your name out there and making it ‘top-of-mind’ for every single human being when they log onto the Internet. Building the brand is paramount. Revenue comes later . . . hopefully.
To be fair, NextLife wasn’t initially built solely on its brand. It actually has real technology behind it. It’s an online portal that allows people to interact in ways they never dreamed of before. It’s essentially Facebook, Second Life and Google all rolled into one. People can chat, talk, email and buzz each other. They can share interests and have video conferences at the touch of a button. But that’s not the real draw. The real draw is the ability to create LifeScenes. In LifeScenes, people can essentially do whatever they want – be whomever they want. They can go diving off the Great Barrier Reef, or attend a Rolling Stones concert from the 1970s, or take batting practice against Babe Ruth – either by themselves or with others online �
� all while sitting on their couch. They can create other people to interact with using our templates, and they can explore their deepest dreams and their darkest fantasies in safety.
It’s not like we invented the concepts – online communities using avatars that enable people to interact in real time with each other have been popular since the turn of the millennium. World of Warcraft had millions of users long before NextLife wrote its first line of code. NextLife, though, has come pretty close to perfecting the implementation. Our avatar technology and sensory units represent a quantum leap forward in development. They make the user-experience so realistic it can be difficult to tell the difference between a NextLife LifeScene and reality. Sometimes it’s disconcerting how lifelike it all seems. That is the key to the company’s success.
And the success has been astounding. The company was started five years ago; within two years the company’s estimated value rivaled Yahoo. When we added social networking as a component of the NextLife experience, the company grew even faster. We passed AOL in estimated stock value last year, and we’re expecting to rival companies like Google and Facebook within the next two years. It’s all been very exciting. On paper, even with my paltry holdings, I’m already worth somewhere between fifteen and twenty million dollars, depending on fluctuations in the daily market.
Of course, the phrase ‘on paper’ is the rub. I can’t convert that to real money until the people who run the company figure out the long-term capitalization strategy. At one point we were considering a private sale to a combination of private equity funds. We’ve grown too large for that now, though, and it’s likely that the only rational way out is an initial public offering. It makes sense, but it has everyone at the company anxious. It’s a complicated process that involves the corporate equivalent of a proctological exam. As with all overnight Internet successes, there’s a nagging question as to whether our valuation is rational. While we’re rapidly becoming one of the most visited websites in the world, we’re still figuring out how to translate that into actual revenue. The founders initially had the view that any revenue model – whether it was a pay-as-you-go subscription or the clutter of advertising – would kill the concept in its infancy. I’m not sure the word ‘profit’ was even uttered at the company for the first three years. Now that we are considering going public, it seems that it’s all anyone can focus on.