Metatropolis

by John Scalzi

  I’ll call you.

  Gennady read the message again, then once more. “It makes no sense,” he said. “It’s a jumble, but…” He looked to Hitchens. “It two-point-oh. It’s not a code, is it?”

  Hitchens shook his head. He handed Gennady a pair of heavy-framed glasses like Veen’s. Gennady recognized the brand name on the arms: Ariadne AR, the Swiss augmented reality firm that had recently bought out Google. Veen also wore Ariadnes, but there was no logo at all on Fraction’s glasses.

  Gennady gingerly put them on and pressed the frames to activate them. Instantly, a cool blue, transparent sphere appeared in the air about two feet in front of him. The glasses were projecting the globe straight onto his retinas, of course; orbiting around it were various icons and command words that only he could see. Gennady was familiar with this sort of interface. All he had to do was focus his gaze on a particular command and it would change color. Then he could blink to activate it, or dismiss it by looking somewhere else.

  “Standard software,” he mumbled as he scanned through the icons. “Geographical services, Wikis, social nets…What’s this?”

  Hitchens and Veen had put on their own glasses, so Gennady made the unfamiliar icon visible to all of them, and picked it out of the air with his fingers. He couldn’t feel it, of course, but was able to set the little stylized R in the center of the table where they could all look at it.

  Danail Gavrilov nodded, mimicking a satisfied smile for whoever was riding him. “That’s your first stop,” he said. “A little place called Rivet Couture.”

  HITCHENS excused himself and left. Gennady barely noticed; he’d activated the icon for Rivet Couture and was listening to a lecture given by a bodacious young woman who didn’t really exist. He’d moved her so she appeared to be standing in the middle of the room, but Miranda Veen kept walking through her.

  The pretty woman was known as a serling—she was a kind of narrator, and right now she was bringing Gennady up to speed on the details of an Alternate Reality Game called Rivet Couture.

  While she talked, the cameras and positional sensors in Gennady’s classes had been working overtime to figure out where he was and what objects were around him. So while the serling explained that Rivet Couture was set in a faux gaslight era—an 1880 that never existed—all the stuff in the room mutated. The walls adopted a translucent, glowing layer of floral wallpaper; the lamp sconces faded behind ghostly brass gas fixtures.

  Miranda Veen walked through the serling again and, for a second, Gennady thought the game had done an overlay on her as well. In fact, her high-necked blouse and long skirt suddenly seemed appropriate. With a start he saw that her earrings were actually little gears.

  “Steampunk’s out of style, isn’t it?” he said. Veen turned, reaching up to touch her earlobes. She smiled at him, and it was the first genuine smile he’d seen from her.

  “My parents were into New Age stuff,” she said. “I rebelled by joining a steam gang. We wore crinoline and tight waistcoats, and I used to do my hair up in an elaborate bun with long pins. The boys wore pince-nez and paisley vests, that sort of thing. I drifted away from the culture a long time ago, but I still love the style.”

  Gennady found himself grinning at her. He understood that—the urge to step just slightly out from the rest of society. The pocket watch Veen wore like a necklace was a talisman of sorts, a constant reminder of who she was, and how she was unique.

  But while Miranda Veen’s talisman might be a thing of gears and armatures, Gennady’s were places: instead of an icon of brass and gears, he wore memories of dripping concrete halls and the shadowed calandria of ruined reactors, of blue-glowing pools packed with spent fuel rods…of an unlit commercial freezer where an entire herd of irradiated reindeer lay jumbled like toys.

  Rivet Couture was not so strange. Many women wore lingerie under their conservative work clothes to achieve the same effect. For those people without such an outlet, overlays like Rivet Couture gave them much the same sense of owning a secret uniqueness. Kids walked alone in the ordinary streets of Berlin or Minneapolis, yet at the same moment they walked side by side through the misty cobblestoned streets of a Victorian Atlantis. Many of them spent their spare time filling in the details of the places, designing the clothes and working out the history of Rivet Couture. It was much more than a game, and it was worldwide.

  Miranda Veen rolled her bags to the door and Fraction opened it for her. They turned to Gennady, who was still sitting at the devastation of the breakfast table. “Are you ready?” asked Miranda.

  “I’m coming,” he said; he stood up, and stepped from Stockholm into Atlantis.

  RIVETCouture had a charmingly light hand: it usually added just a touch or two to what you were seeing or hearing, enough to provide a whiff of strangeness to otherwise normal places. In the elevator, Gennady’s glasses filtered the glare of the fluorescents until it resembled candlelight. At the front desk an ornate scroll-worked cash register wavered into visibility, over the terminal the clerk was using. Outside in the street, Gennady heard the nicker of nearby horses and saw black-maned heads toss somewhere out in the fast-moving stream of electric cars.

  Stockholm was already a mix of classical grandeur and high modernism. These places had really been gaslit once, and many streets were still cobbled, particularly outside such romantic landmarks as the King’s Palace. Rivet Couture didn’t have to work very hard to achieve its effects, especially when the brilliant, starlike shapes of other players began appearing. You could see them kilometers away, even through buildings and hills, which made it easy to rendezvous with them. RC forbade certain kinds of contact—there were no telephones in this game—but it wasn’t long before Gennady, Miranda and Fraction were sitting in a cafe with two other long-time players.

  Gennady let Miranda lead, and she enthusiastically plunged into a discussion of RC politics and history. She’d clearly been here before, and it couldn’t have just been her need to find her son that propelled her to learn all this detail. He watched her wave her hands while she talked, and her Lussebullar and coffee grew cold.

  Agata and Per warmed quickly to Miranda, but were a bit more reserved with Gennady. That was fine by him, since he was experiencing his usual tongue-tanglement around strangers. So, listening, he learned a few things:

  Rivet Couture’s Atlantis was a global city. Parts of it were everywhere, but their location shifted and moved depending on the actions of the players. You could change your overlay to that of another neighborhood, but in so doing you lost the one you were in. This was generally no problem, although it meant that other players might blink in and out of existence as you moved.

  The game was free. This was a bit of a surprise, but not a huge one. There were plenty of open-source games out there, but few had the detail and beautiful sophistication of this one. Gennady had assumed there was a lot of money behind it, but in fact there was something just as good: the attention of a very large number of fans.

  The object of the game was power and influence within Atlantean society. RC was a game of politics and most of its moves happened in conversation. As games went, its most ancient ancestor was probably a twentieth-century board game called Diplomacy. Gennady mentioned this idea, and Per smiled.

  “The board game, yes,” said Per, “but more like play-by-mail versions like Slobovia, where you had to write a short story for every move you made in the game. Like the characters in Slobovian stories, we are diplomats, courtesans, pickpockets and cabinet ministers. All corrupt, of course,” he added with another smile.

  “And we often prey on newbies,” Agata added with a leer.

  “Ah, yes,” said Per, as if reminded of something. “We will proceed to do that now. As disgraced interior minister Puddleglum Phudthucker, I have many enemies and most of my compatriots are being watched. You must take this diplomatic pouch to one of my co-conspirators. If you get waylaid and killed on the way, it’s not my problem—but make sure you discard the pouch at the first sign
of trouble.”

  “Mm,” said Gennady as Per handed him a felt-wrapped package about the size of a file folder. “What would the first sign of trouble look like?”

  Per glanced at Agata, who pursed her lips and frowned at the ceiling. “Oh, say, strangers converging on you or moving to block your path.”

  Per leaned forward. “If you do this,” he whispered, “the rewards could be great down the line. I have powerful friends, and when I am back in my rightful portfolio I will be in a position to advance your own career.”

  Per had to go to work (in the real world) so they parted ways and Gennady’s group took the Blue Line metro to Radhuset Station, which was already a subterranean fantasy and, in Rivet Couture, became a candlelit cavern full of shadowy strangers in cowled robes. Up on the surface they quickly located a stuffy-looking brokerage on a narrow side street, where the receptionist happily took the package from Gennady. She was dressed in a Chanel suit, but a tall feather was poking up from behind her desk, and at Gennady’s curious glance she reached down to show him her ornate Victorian tea hat.

  Out in the street he said, “Cosplay seems to be an important part of the game. I’m not dressed for it.”

  Miranda laughed. “In that suit? You’re nearly there. You just need a fob watch and a vest. You’ll be fine. As to you…” She turned to Fraction.

  “I have many costumes,” said the cyranoid. “I shall retrieve one and meet you back at the hotel.” He started to walk away.

  “But—? Wait.” Gennady started after him but Miranda put a hand on his arm. She shook her head.

  “He comes and goes,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do about it, though I assume Hitchens’ people have him under surveillance. It probably does them no good. I’m sure the places Fraction goes are all virtual.”

  Gennady watched the cyranoid vanish into the mouth of the metro station. He’d also disappeared from Rivet Couture. Unhappily, Gennady said, “Let’s disappear ourselves for a while. I’d like to check on my reindeer.”

  “You may,” said Miranda coolly, “but I am staying here. I am looking for my son, Mr. Malianov. This is not just a game to me.”

  “Neither were the reindeer.”

  As it turned out, he didn’t have to leave RC to surf for today’s headlines. There was indeed plenty of news about a crackpot terrorist ring being busted, but nothing about the individual agents who’d done the field work. This was fine by Gennady, who’d been briefly famous after stopping an attempt to blow up the Chernobyl sarcophagus some years before. He’d taken that assignment in the first place because in the abandoned streets of Pripyat he could be utterly alone. Being interviewed for TV and then recognized on the street had been intensely painful for him.

  They shopped for some appropriately steampunk styles for Gennady to wear. He hated shopping with a passion and was self-conscious with the result, but Miranda seemed to like it. They met a few more denizens of Atlantis through the afternoon, but he still hung back, and at dinner she asked him whether he’d ever done any role-playing.

  Gennady barked a laugh. “I do it all the time.” He rattled off half a dozen of the more popular online worlds. He had multiple avatars in each and in one of them he’d been cultivating his character for over a decade. Miranda was puzzled at his awkwardness, so finally Gennady explained that those games allowed him to stay at home and let a virtual avatar do the roving. He had many different bodies, and played as both genders. But an avatar-to-avatar conversation was nothing like a face-to-face conversation in reality—even an alternate reality like Rivet Couture’s.

  “Nowadays they call it social phobia,” he said with reluctance. “But really, I’m just shy.”

  Miranda’s response was a surprised, “Oh.” There was a long silence after that, while she thought and he squirmed in his seat. “Would you be more comfortable doubling up?” she asked at last.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Riding me cyranoid-wise, the way that Fraction rides Danail. Except,” she added wryly, “it would only be during game interactions.”

  “I’m fine,” he said irritably. “I’ll get into it, you’ll see. It’s just…I expected to be home in my own apartment right now, I wasn’t expecting a new job away from home with an indefinite duration and no idea where I’ll be going. I’m not even sure how to investigate; what am I investigating? Who? None of this is normal to me; it’s going to take a bit of an adjustment.”

  He resented that she thought of him as some kind of social cripple who had to be accommodated. He had a job to do and, better than almost anybody, he knew what was at stake.

  For the vast majority of people, ‘plutonium’ was just a word, no more real than the word ‘vampire.’ Few had held it; few had seen its effects. Gennady knew it—its color, its heft, and the uses you could put it to.

  Gennady wasn’t going to let his own frailties keep him from finding the stuff, because the mere fact that somebody wanted it was a catastrophe. If he didn’t find the plutonium, Gennady would spend his days waiting, expecting every morning to turn on the news and hear about which city—and how many millions of lives—had finally met it.

  That night he lay in bed for hours, mind restless, trying to relate the terms of this stylish game to the very hard-nosed smuggling operation he had to crack.

  Rivet Couture functioned a bit like a secret society, he decided. That first interaction, when he’d carried a pretend diplomatic pouch between two other players, suggested a physical mechanism for the transfer of the plutonium. When he’d talked to Hitchens about it after supper, the Interpol agent had confirmed it: “We’re pretty sure that organized crime has started using games like yours to move stuff. Drugs, for instance. You can use two completely unrelated strangers as mules for pickups and hand-offs, even establish long chains of them. Each hop can be a few kilometers, by foot even, avoiding all our detection gear. One player can throw a package over his country’s border and another find it by its GPS coordinates later. It’s a nightmare.”

  Yet Rivet Couture was itself just a gateway, a milestone on the way to “far Cilenia.” Between Rivet Couture and Cilenia was the place from where Miranda’s son had sent most of his emails: Oversatch, he’d called it.

  If Rivet Couture was like a secret society operating within normal culture, then Oversatch was like a second-order secret society, one that existed only within the culture of Rivet Couture. A conspiracy inside a conspiracy.

  Hitchens had admitted that he hated Alternate Reality Games. “They destroy all the security structures we’ve put in place so carefully since 9/11. Just destroy ’em. It’s ’cause you’re not you anymore—hell, you can have multiple people playing one character in these games, handing them off to one another in shifts. Geography doesn’t matter, identity is a joke…everybody on the planet is like Fraction. How can you find a conspiracy in that?”

  Gennady explained this insight to Miranda the next morning, and she nodded soberly.

  “You’re half right,” she said.

  “Only half?”

  “There’s so much more going on here,” she said. “If you’re game for the game today, maybe we can see some of it.”

  He was. Dressed as he was, Gennady could hide inside the interface his glasses gave him. He’d decided to use these factors as a wall between him and the other avatars. He’d pretend out in the open, as he so often did from the safety of his room. Anyway, he’d try.

  AND they did well that day. Miranda had been playing the game for some weeks, with a fanatical single-mindedness borne of her need to find her son. Gennady found that if he thought in terms of striking up conversations with strangers on the street, then he’d be paralyzed and couldn’t play; but if he pretended it was his character, Sir Arthur Tole, who was doing the talking, then his years of gaming experience quickly took over. Between the two of them, he and Miranda quickly developed a network of contacts and responsibilities. They saw Fraction every day or two, and what was interesting was that Gennady found himself quic
kly falling into the same pattern with the cyranoid that he had with Lane Hitchens: they would meet, Gennady would give a report, and the other would nod in satisfaction.

  Hitchens’ people had caught Fraction carrying one of the plutonium pieces. That was almost everything that Gennady knew about the cyranoid, and nearly all that Hitchens claimed to know as well. “There’s one thing we have figured out,” Hitchens had added when Gennady pressed. “It’s his accent. Danail Gavrilov doesn’t speak English, he’s Bulgarian. But he’s parroting English perfectly, right down to the accent. And it’s an American accent. Specifically, west coast. Washington State or thereabouts.”

  “Well, that’s something to go on,” said Gennady.

  “Yes,” Hitchens said unhappily. “But not much.”

  Gennady knew what Hitchens had hired him to do and he was working at it. But increasingly, he wondered whether in some way he didn’t understand, he had also been hired by Fraction—or maybe the whole of the IAEA had? The thought was disturbing, but he didn’t voice it to Hitchens. It seemed too crazy to talk about.

  The insight Miranda was promising didn’t come that first day, or the next. It took nearly a week of hard work before Puddleglum Phudthucker met them for afternoon tea and gave a handwritten note to Miranda. “This is today’s location of the Griffin Rampant,” he said. “The food is excellent, and the conversation particularly…profitable.”

  When Puddleglum disappeared around the corner, Miranda hoisted the note and yelled in triumph. Gennady watched her, bemused.

  “I’m so good,” she told him. “Hitchens’ boys never got near this place.”

  “What is it?” He thought of bomb-maker’s warehouses, drug ops, maybe, but she said, “It’s a restaurant.

  “Oh, but it’s an Atlantean restaurant,” she added when she saw the look on his face. “The food comes from Atlantis. It’s cooked there. Only Atlanteans eat it. Sociologically, this is a big break.” She explained that any human society had membership costs, and the currency was commitment. To demonstrate commitment to some religions, for instance, people had to undergo ordeals, or renounce all their worldly goods, or leave their families. They had to live according to strict rules—and the stricter the rules and the more of them there were, the more stable the society.