Chapter 1
Tuesday, June 22, 2060
Raymond Quan awakened feeling alert and self-satisfied, well before his alarm was due to go off. He lay on his back, his bare arms resting atop the recycled-plastic quilt. He opened his eyes to the familiar darkness of his bedcell and immediately broke into a smile. The sweet taste of victory lingered from his brief but momentous fight the day before with another boy at the Home. With his right hand, he formed the leopard's paw fist, the tips of his fingers pressing into the meat across the top of his palm. He rolled to his left and threw a punch across his chest, certain it would end just shy of the bedcell's back wall. The brief ruffle of cheap papery sheets accentuated the crispness of his movement. He held the punch, reached a quarter-inch further, and felt his knuckles graze the hard plastic.
"That's your Adam's apple, Willm," he whispered in a drawn out, dramatically threatening tone. He kept his voice very low, knowing that Greg, his state-assigned younger brother, could easily hear him from the bedcell above.
Raymond had lived in room 212 of the Canal Street Home for Children of the State of Illinois for over two years now. When he was reassigned to Canal Street from the Joliet Home, he was fifteen. He hated the move. Home administrators told him he was being moved so he could be closer to his biological mother. She had supposedly complained that Joliet was too far away to visit—too far from the Hyde Park Recovery Center, where she had been busy recovering for nearly ten years now. By gridcab, it took about an hour to get from Hyde Park to his old Joliet Home. Now that he was at Canal Street, he was only ten minutes' ride away. In his six years in Joliet, she visited him once. She had yet to visit him at the new Home.
In truth, he didn't mind that his mother never visited. Her absence from his life provided a convenient source of suffering when he wanted to feel sorry for himself, but he really preferred to forget her. The one time she visited him in Joliet, it was plain that she didn't want to be there. It was probably some sign-of-progress hoop she had to jump through to stay at the recovery center, to continue whatever drug-laden therapy she was on. She had fidgeted constantly, throwing out random observations and rash judgements about the Home and its staff; the only direct words she could muster were empty apologies, by way of blaming his misfortune—and hers—on his father's having run off with another woman. "An Asian woman," she had said, practically spitting out the word in front of her half-Vietnamese son. "I always knew he would end up leaving me for an Asian woman. I'm just glad I've healed."
Not seeing her was fine. What he did mind was that—in order to fulfill her apparent ambitions of living out the remainder of her life in a state of self-deceived recovery—she had caused him to be moved. For this profoundly selfish act, he doubted he would ever forgive her.
In the first weeks, it had seemed that every aspect of the move was bound to be awful. Arriving at a new Home at the age of fifteen landed him among an age group of intense, often vicious competition. The state transferred him in late April of 2058, just a few weeks before the end of the school year—at a time when the children in the new home were bored and restless. And the Canal Street boys were tougher and more cruel by far than any he had known before. They spent most of their waking hours fighting for position or reinforcing dominance within their pecking order—which Raymond entered at the bottom. New kids always started out at the bottom, but Raymond had more or less remained there. His computer skills won him some respect among the outcast nerds and—more importantly—the adult caregivers. He gained rank among the bottom feeders and was left alone by the adults. But those same skills made him stand out. At Joliet, standing out because of his computer talent had been a source of pride. Here, it stirred hateful jealousy and made him a target. The birthmark on his cheek and being half-Vietnamese just made it worse. He arrived weak and afraid to fight, and the clique boys preyed on him.
Early on, he had tried to make friends with some of the kids in the lower cliques, only to make the sad discovery that these boys, who were kind to him one-on-one, turned mean in a group. He decided to operate alone, as best he could, and to keep a low profile. But his new Home offered little privacy. Conflict proved inevitable.
And last night, for the first time, he had stood his ground in the face of conflict.
o-------------------------------o
One of the tough-boy cliques—known as the Face Clan for reasons unknown to Raymond—had talked him into gaming with them in the virtual chambers, during the pre-curfew free period. Raymond, typically excluded from the gaming sessions, reluctantly decided to give it a try. It was a medieval death-match game, in which everyone runs around a castle with swords and shields trying to kill everyone else. Except, in this case, they all started each round by pinning down Raymond, ripping his shield away from him, calling him Gooksy and Face Whore, then killing him. Raymond hoped at first that if he took his punishment like a man, they would relent and let him play for real. But after four rounds of this, he left his v-chamber and started to wander off toward the boys' dorm.
"Jesus, you suck, Gooksy." It was Willm, the cruelest of the clique, out of his v-chamber to further pursue his quarry. Raymond continued to walk away. "I'm not absolutely positive," persisted Willm, "correct me if I'm wrong—but I think you were the first one dead every single bleeding round."
It occurred to Raymond to point out that he had participated in only four rounds, but he had learned the painful irrelevance of reason. He kept walking, and was only ten feet or so from the stairs up to the boys' dorm when he heard Willm start running after him.
"Come on, Gooksy! You think I'm done with you?"
The familiar nauseating fear of what might come next arose within him. Should he run, or stand and take it? Would he be knocked down, kicked, elbowed, put in a headlock? Kneed in the kidneys? Or would he receive Willm's signature taunt, the slobbery wet finger shoved in his ear?
Then it occurred to him that Willm was alone. The rest of his clique were all still playing, their yowls and laughter audible even from this distance. This chance of catching Willm alone, combined with his recent karate training, sparked a fierce courage Raymond had never before felt. He turned, at what proved to be precisely the right moment; Willm's foot grazed Raymond's backside and angled off.
Raymond immediately recognized the opportunity. Willm was off-balance from his missed kick. He saw a clear shot at Willm's lean, jagged throat. His hand formed the leopard's-paw fist he had learned from his virtual karate instructor, and he stepped into his punch. The hard edge of his knuckles met the soft, vulnerable skin of Willm's neck, just below the Adam's apple, and drove the boy backward. Willm twisted to the side, stumbled, scrambled to his feet, and rammed shoulder-first against the wall, clutching his neck.
Panic shot through Raymond. He had just attacked a member of a six-boy clique. It was just a matter of time before they jumped him. They might even kill him.
Then he saw the way Willm looked at him. Willm's eyes were wide-open, shocked, even afraid, as he wheezed and gasped for air. The tall blond boy, with his tough-kid mohawk, leaned against the wall, looking at Raymond with a mix of anguish, surprise, and uncertainty. With a single punch, Raymond's cruel tormentor had been reduced to just another fearful boy.
Raymond felt sorry—he had really hurt Willm. But this regret vanished as a sense of power welled within him. He had really hurt Willm. He sensed Willm's uncertainty, and he knew it couldn't last long. He had to do or say something to seal the moment. He stood his ground and spoke as definitively as he could.
"My name is Raymond. Stop calling me Gooksy and I won't tell anyone I kicked your ass."
Without waiting for an answer, he walked down the hall and turned up the stairs.
o-------------------------------o
His exultant energy still b
urned within him. He turned in bed and looked to the clock in his headboard. It was 6:03. His work shuttle didn't come until 7:30. Plenty of time to train.
He reached up and tapped the face of his clock, and "Alarm off for today" scrolled across the display, followed by a low-tech 2-D animation of a boy drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola.
Raymond slid open the opaque blue curtain of his bedcell. The small dorm room's single east-facing window permitted the faint light of early morning, revealing the room's usual landscape of dirty clothes, empty MegaBlast bottles and Choco-Chompos bags, spongy yellow toy-gun ammunition, glide shoes, and musty towels. The endless mess was strewn about the floor, sitting precariously on the table's edge, draped over the rim of the aluminum sink, piled deep on the chair beneath the window. And every bit of it was Greg's. Raymond despised his ersatz brother. Greg was a loud, unthinking, graceless, overweight, pathetic, foul-smelling slob. At the Joliet home, Raymond had been lucky enough to have a room to himself. Here, privacy came only in the hours when Greg was away or asleep.
Raymond swung his legs out and sat up, kicking aside a pair of bright orange billow-pants to reveal a bit of floor on which to place his feet. He looked around the room, running his tongue across his morning-scuzzed teeth, and shook his head. He decided he wasn't going to put up with Greg's crap anymore. If he could take Willm, he could certainly put thirteen-year-old Greg in his place.
He flexed his right arm and patted his bicep.
Discipline, thought Raymond. Self-control yields discipline, and the disciplined accumulation of power leads to freedom.
He had composed this in his head the night before, as he lay awake, and repeated it over and over until committed to memory. This, he had resolved, would be his mantra. Self-control would give him the edge he needed to stand up against other boys in the Home, against fear and mediocrity. While others sought the low rewards of immediate pleasure, he would rise above.
He stood up, and the motion triggered the overhead lights to flicker on. He looked to the mirror over the sink, where he had long ago discovered a pinhole camera. He imagined someone sitting in a surveillance room—a guard or caregiver—seeing a monitor light up with activity in room 212.
"The lights don't come on so we can see," he muttered.
They come on so we can be seen.
He turned and quietly closed the curtain of his bedcell, conscious that he was under constant observation. He looked forward to his workday at Mr. Tate's house, where he controlled the cameras—where he could point all the cameras away from him and be alone.
This same desire to be alone had led to Raymond's karate training. There was an old, disused v-chamber in the second-floor study lounge that Raymond had decided to try out during his first Christmas break, when—in a State Home—it was especially hard to find time alone. It was this old v-chamber that really made him see a good side to his new Home. It was an old model, configured for educational use only, and was ignored by the other boys on the floor. Raymond had first tried it simply to escape, but he was intrigued when he discovered it had a karate training program, hidden within a catalogue of boring subjects like algebra and pottery. He was even more intrigued when he discovered he could hack it, bypassing the restrictions put in place for schools and children's homes.
He crossed the tile floor of his room with a skating motion, clearing a path through the mess to his closet, where his black exercise robe hung from its hook. It was a recent purchase, using money from the account Mr. Tate created for Raymond's robot-repair expenses. He slipped it on, relishing the silky feel of its absorptive lining, and checked its concealed interior breast pocket—he confirmed by feel that his Crown Series LX6 override, a magnetic device the size of a dime, was in its spot, hidden away.
Quietly, he exited his dorm room and walked down the hall, past the closed doors of other boys' rooms, to the study lounge at the end. Through the glass door he saw there was nobody in the room. He entered, weaved through the cramped tables and chairs—which were bolted to the floor—to the wood-paneled v-chamber in the corner. It was a fairly large unit, about six feet square, that felt oversized in this small room. To the best of his knowledge, he was the only person who actually used it anymore. Using the unlimited Net access at Mr. Tate's, Raymond had learned that it was an old British model, made by a now-bankrupt company called Crown Nanotronics—a company famous among hackers for weak security measures.
With a touch of the green "Unoccupied" button, the v-chamber door rattled sideways, jamming as usual. Raymond pushed it the rest of the way. He entered, pleased by the familiar lofty bounce of the floor, and closed the door behind him. A soft, low amber light turned on. There was no need for the light to be at all bright—there was nothing to see in a v-chamber while it was off. The interior was very plain. No buttons or screens or levers. Just black walls, floor, and ceiling, all cushioned for safety, in case of system failure while the user was being tossed about. Closer inspection revealed tiny holes on all of the interior surfaces—barely visible pinholes, in an extremely dense grid. Raymond had read that there were billions of even smaller holes, invisible to the human eye. He had also read about the mix of holography, electronet, and nanomist technologies used to create the virtual experience, but the details were beyond him. He knew that a powerful network of computers throughout the walls manipulated photons, electrons, and an unfathomable number of nanobots to create a virtual environment that looked, sounded, and felt very much like reality—so much so that the pedantic were always arguing whether it should be called virtual reality or temporary reality.
For Raymond, the term "virtual" still rang true. There was an obvious element of illusion in a contraption the size of a walk-in closet that allowed the user to see and navigate sprawling worlds. Most of the people and other creatures in virtual space were computer-generated, and conversations with them usually revealed their less-than-authentic personalities. Attempts at replicating smell were ill-advised, and Raymond was always noticing small details of physical reality that had been overlooked. He was profoundly aware that v-space was a hoax. It was a temporary escape to a world more pure, more fantastic, more desirable than plain old reality—temporary because one ultimately could not ignore the real world. One was inescapably bound to reality and all of its niggling maintenance problems—eating, bathing, defecating, looking after one's home—all of the work that a biological life-form must contend with.
The basic falseness of virtual reality was abundantly and painfully evident to Raymond. It had driven his family apart, as it had so many families. Addicts neglected their spouses, their children, and all of the implicit responsibilities that come with basic interpersonal commitment. Raymond had concluded at a young age that, for him, virtual reality would be a tool. A means of improving his life, not escaping it. Only if he could depart reality and move entirely into virtual reality would he ever release himself to it.
Raymond took the Crown Series LX6 override device from his pocket, crouched down, and allowed it to snap magnetically to the wall, to the right of the door. "Begin session," he said. "Admin mode."
The v-chamber made a faint humming sound as its ventilation system kicked in. The chamber filled with a haze of cool nanomist, and Raymond felt his body lift several inches. The space around him transformed into a long, old-fashioned carpentry workshop—the default space when in administrator mode.
"Monitoring override x-l-9-r-f-x," said Raymond. "Broadcast demo session."
"Acknowledged," responded the refined voice of an elderly British male.
With this command—an undocumented feature that the developers of this particular model never removed—Raymond effectively turned off the external monitoring of the v-chamber. The computer network at the Home monitored activity in the v-chambers, to prevent children of the State from breaking the no-sex/no-drugs rules. With the "broadcast demo session" command, Raymond was able to switch the outgoing monitor feed to a pre-recorded demo session, in which a pleasant little English boy goes for a plea
sant bicycle ride through the Yorkshire Dales. Raymond could then do whatever the hell he wanted within the v-chamber, and only he would know.
"Give me the tropical dojo."
The space transformed instantly into an airy, wood-floored pavilion, covered with a high thatched roof and surrounded by palm trees. He stood at one end of the room, facing the center. Sunlight streamed in from his right. Finches chirped and warbled in the tropical forest outside.
"Give me Andrea." Those three words, and all of the anticipation that came with them, gave him a hard-on. Every time.
A young Caucasian woman appeared at the opposite end of the dojo, wearing a white gi. She was slender, about 5' 6", and had short dark-brown hair that hung in a clean angular line just above her full eyebrows. She looked to Raymond to be about twenty years old. He had chosen her first for her looks, while experimenting with the admin privileges. But he found that he also liked her fighting style. She moved swiftly, gracefully, focused on balance and use of space. She also hit with less force than the other instructors. Even with the v-chamber's impact dampeners, a sharp punch could smart.
She bowed to Raymond. He didn't respond. He knew it was a mindless bow, an animation detached from personality—her persona wouldn't kick in until he exited admin mode.
"Confirm monitoring broadcast," he requested. He wanted to be sure, before issuing his next command, that he was not being watched.
"Broadcasting demo session," responded the computer's admin response voice.
"Modify Andrea's outfit—no clothing."
Her gi vanished. Her skin was uniformly tanned, her body toned. Her breasts were small and firm, her thighs muscular. Raymond had touched her, and he loved the way she felt. But he had never had sex with her, or made her touch him. He had explored this v-chamber's capabilities with other women, curious whether it was possible—and it was. Even though the Home had ordered this v-chamber with educational programming only, the underlying anatomical models and personas were the same used in other Crown Nanotronics v-chambers. With admin privileges, one could make the simulated people do whatever one wanted. And Raymond had. But not anymore, and never Andrea. He preferred to tempt himself, to flirt with self-indulgence but stop just short. It was an exercise in discipline, part of the mastery of self that he felt would make him superior.
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