Metatropolis

by John Scalzi

  “That’s crazy,” said Gennady. “You mean the less freedom people have, the happier they are?”

  Miranda shrugged. “You trade some sources of happiness that you value less for one big one that you value more. Anyway, the point is, leveling up in a game like Rivet Couture represents commitment. We’ve leveled up to the point where the Griffin is open to us.”

  He squinted at her. “And that is important because…?”

  “Because Fraction told me that the Griffin is a gateway to Oversatch.”

  THEY retired to the hotel to change. Formal clothing was required for a visit to the Griffin, and so for the first time Gennady found himself donning the complete Rivet Couture regalia. It was pure steampunk. Miranda had bought him a tight pin-striped suit whose black silk vest had a subtle dragon pattern sewn into it. He wore two belts, an ordinary one and a leather utility belt that hung down over one hip and had numerous loops and pouches on it. She’d found a bowler hat and had ordered him to slick back his hair when he wore it.

  When he emerged, hugely self-conscious, he found Miranda waiting in what appeared to be a cast-iron corset and long black skirt. Heavy black boots peeked out from under the skirt. She twirled an antique-looking parasol and grinned at him. “Every inch the Russian gentleman,” she said.

  “Ukrainian,” he reminded her, and they set off for the Griffin Rampant.

  Gennady’s glasses had tuned themselves to filter out all characteristic frequencies of electric light. His earbuds likewise eliminated the growl and jangle of normal city noises, replacing them with Atlantean equivalents. He and Miranda sauntered through a city transformed, and there seemed no hurry tonight as the gentle amber glow of the streetlights, distant nicker of horses and pervasive sound of crickets were quite relaxing.

  They turned a corner and found themselves outside the Griffin, which was an outdoor cafe that filled a side street. Lifting his glasses for a second, Gennady saw that the place was actually an alley between two glass-and-steel skyscrapers, but in Rivet Couture the buildings were shadowy stone monstrosities festooned with gargoyles, and there were plenty of virtual trees to hide the sky. In ordinary reality, the cafe was hidden from the street by tall fabric screens; in the game, these were stone walls and there was an ornately carved griffin over the entrance.

  Paper lanterns lit the tables; a dapper waiter with a sly expression led Gennady and Miranda to a table, where—to the surprise of neither—Fraction was lounging. The cyranoid was drinking mineral water, swirling it in his glass in imitation of the couple at the next table.

  “Welcome to Atlantis,” said Fraction as Gennady unfolded his napkin. Gennady nodded; he did feel transported somehow, as though this really was some parallel world and not a downtown alley.

  The waiter came by and recited the evening’s specials. He left menus, and when Gennady opened his he discovered that the prices were all in the game’s pretend currency, Atlantean deynars.

  He leaned over to Miranda. “The game’s free,” he murmured, “so who pays for all this?”

  Fraction had overheard, and barked a laugh. “I said, welcome to Atlantis. We have our own economy, just like Sweden.”

  Gennady shook his head. He’d been studying the game, and knew that there was no exchange that translated deynars into any real-world currency. “I mean who pays for the meat, the vegetables—the wine?”

  “It’s all Atlantean,” said Fraction. “If you want to earn some real social capital here, I can introduce you to some of the people who raise it.”

  Miranda shook her head. “We want to get to the next level. To Oversatch,” she said. “You know that. Why haven’t you taken us straight there?”

  Fraction shrugged. “Tried that with Hitchens’ men. They weren’t able to get there.”

  “Oversatch is like an ARG inside Rivet Couture,” Gennady guessed. “So you have to know the rules and people and settings of RC before you can play the meta-game.”

  “That’s part of it,” admitted Fraction. “But Rivet Couture is just an overlay—a map drawn on a map. Oversatch is a whole new map.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ll show you.” The waiter came by and they ordered. Then Fraction stood up. “Come. There’s a little store at the back of the restaurant.”

  GENNADY followed him. Behind a screen of plants were several market-stall type tables, piled with various merchandise. There was a lot of clothing in Atlantean styles, which all appeared to be handmade. There were also various trinkets, such as fob watches and earrings similar to Miranda’s. “Ah, here,” said Fraction, drawing Gennady to a table at the very back.

  He held up a pair of round, antique-looking glasses. “Try them on.” Gennady did, and as his eyes adjusted he saw the familiar glow of an augmented reality interface booting up.

  “These are—”

  “Like the ones you were wearing,” nodded Fraction, “but with some additions. They’re made entirely in 3-D printers and by hand, by and for the people of Oversatch and some of their Atlantean friends. The data link piggybacks on ordinary internet protocols: that’s called tunneling.”

  Fraction bought two pair of the glasses from the smiling elderly woman behind the counter, and they returned to the table. Miranda was chatting with some of the other Atlanteans. When she returned, Fraction handed her one pair of glasses. Wordlessly, she put them on.

  Dinner was uneventful, though a few of Rivet Couture’s players stopped by to network. Everybody was here for the atmosphere and good food, of course, but also to build connections that could advance their characters’ fortunes in the game.

  When they were finished, Fraction dropped some virtual money on the table, and as the waiter came by he said, “My compliments to the chef.”

  “Why thank you.” The waiter bowed.

  “The lady here was highly impressed, and she and her companion would like to know more about how their meal came about.” Fraction turned his lapel inside out, revealing a tiny, ornate pin carved in a gear pattern. The waiter’s eyes widened.

  “Of course, sir, of course. Come this way.” He led them past the stalls at the back of the restaurant, to where the kitchen staff were laboring over some ordinary-looking, portable camp stoves. Several cars and unadorned white panel vans were parked in the alley behind them. The vans’ back doors were rolled up revealing stacks of plastic skids, all piled with food.

  The waiter conferred with a man who was unloading one of the vans. He grunted. “Help me out, then,” he said to Gennady. As Gennady slid a tray of buns out of the back of the van, the man said, “We grow our own produce. They’re all fancy with their names nowadays, they call them vertical farms. Back when I got started, they were called grow-ops and they all produced marijuana. Ha!” He punched Gennady on the shoulder. “It took organized crime to fund an agricultural revolution. They perfect the art of the grow-op, we use what they learn to grow tomatoes, green beans and pretty much anything else you can imagine.”

  Gennady hoisted another skid. “So you—what?—have houses around the city where you grow stuff?”

  The man shrugged. “A couple of basements. Mostly we grow it in the open, on public boulevards, in parks, roofs, ledges of high-rise buildings…there’s hectares of unused space in any city. Might as well do something with it.”

  When they were done unloading the skids, Gennady saw Fraction waving to them from one of the other vans. He and Miranda walked over to find that this vehicle didn’t contain food; rather, the back was packed with equipment. “What’s all this?” Miranda asked.

  Gennady whistled. “It’s a factory.” They were looking at an industrial-strength 3-D printer, one sophisticated enough to create electronic components as well as screws, wires, and any shape that could be fed into it as a 3-D image file. There was also a 3-D scanner with laser, terahertz and x-ray scanning heads; Gennady had used similar units to look for isotopes in smuggled contraband. It could digitize almost anything, from Miranda’s jewelry to consumer electronic device
s, and the printer could print out an almost perfect copy from the digital file. From a scan alone the printer could only copy electrical devices at about the level of a toaster, but with the addition of open-source integrated circuit plans it could duplicate anything from cell phones to wireless routers—and, clearly, working pairs of augmented reality glasses.

  Fraction beamed at the unit. “This baby can even reproduce itself, by building its own components. The whole design is open source.”

  Miranda was obviously puzzled. “Rivet Couture has no need for something like this,” she said.

  Fraction nodded. “But Oversatch—now that’s another matter entirely.” He sauntered back in the direction of the restaurant and they followed, frowning.

  “Did you know,” Fraction said suddenly, “that when Roman provinces wanted to rebel, the first thing they did was print their own money?” Gennady raised an eyebrow; after a moment Fraction grinned and went on. “Oversatch has its own money, but more importantly it has its own agriculture and its own industries. Rivet Couture is one of its trading partners, of course—it makes clothes and trinkets for the game players, who supply expensive feedstock for the printers and labor for the farms. For the players, it’s all part of the adventure.”

  Miranda shook her head. “But I still don’t understand why. Why does Oversatch exist in the first place? Are you saying it’s a rebellion of some kind?”

  They left the restaurant and began to make their way back to the hotel. Fraction was silent for a long while. Normally he affected one pose or another, jamming his hands in his pockets or swinging his arms as he walked. His walk just now was robotically stiff, and it came to Gennady that Danail Gavrilov’s rider was missing at the moment, or at least, wasn’t paying attention to his driving.

  After a few minutes the cyranoid’s head came up again and he said, “Imagine if there was only one language. You’d think only in it, and so you’d think that the names for things were the only possible names for them. You’d think there was only one way to organize the world—only one kind of ‘it.’ Or…take a city.” He swept his arm in a broad gesture to encompass the cool evening, the patterns of lit windows on the black building facades. “In the Internet, we have these huge, dynamic webs of relationships that are always shifting. Meta-corporations are formed and dissolved in a day; people become stars overnight and fade away in a week. But within all that chaos, there’s whirlpools and eddies where stability forms. These are called attractors. They’re nodes of power, but our language doesn’t have a word to point to them. We need a new word, a new kind of ‘that’ or ‘it.’

  “If you shot a time-lapse movie of a whole city at, say, a year-per-second, you’d see it evolving the same way. A city is a whirlpool of relationships but it changes so slowly that we humans have no control over how its currents and eddies funnel us through it.

  “And if a city is like this, how much more so a country? A civilization? Cities and countries are frozen sets of relationships, as if the connection maps in a social networking site were drawn in steel and stone. These maps look so huge and immovable from our point of view that they channel our lives; we’re carried along by them like motes in a hurricane. But they don’t have to be that way.”

  Gennady was a bit lost, but Miranda was nodding. “Internet nations break down traditional barriers,” she said. “You can live in Outer Mongolia but your nearest net-neighbor might live in Los Angeles. The old geographic constraints don’t apply anymore.”

  “Just like Cascadia is its own city,” said Fraction, “even though it’s supposedly Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, and they supposedly exist in two countries.”

  “Okay,” said Gennady irritably, “so Oversatch is another online nation. So why?”

  Fraction pointed above the skyline. In reality, there was only black sky there, but in Rivet Couture, the vast upthrusting spires of a cathedral split the clouds. “The existing online nations copy the slowness of the real world,” he said. “They create new maps, true, but those maps are as static as the old ones. That cathedral’s been there since the game began. Nobody’s going to move it; that would violate the rules of the alternate world.

  “The buildings and avenues of Oversatch are built and move second by second. They’re not a new, hand-drawn map of the world. They’re a dynamically updated map of the internet. They reflect the way the world really is, moment-by-moment. They leave these,” he slapped the side of the skyscraper they were passing, “in the dust.”

  They had arrived at the mouth of another alleyway, this one dark in all worlds. Fraction stopped. “So we come to it,” he said. “Hitchens and his boys couldn’t get past this point. They got lost in the maze. I know you’re ready,” he said to Miranda. “You have been for quite a while. As to you, Gennady…” He rubbed his chin, another creepy affectation that had nothing of Danail Gavrilov in it. “All I can tell you is you have to enter Oversatch together. One of you alone cannot do it.”

  He stood aside, like a sideshow barker waving a group of yokels into a tent. “This way, then, to Oversatch,” he said.

  There was nothing but darkness down the alley. Gennady and Miranda glanced at one another. Then, not exactly hand in hand but close beside one another, they stepped forward.

  GENNADY lay with his eyes closed, feeling the slow rise and fall of the ship around him. Distant engine noise rumbled through the decking, a sound so constant that he rarely noticed it now. He wasn’t sleeping, but trying, with some desperation, to remind himself of where he was—and what he was supposed to be doing.

  It had taken him quite a while to figure out that only six weeks had passed since he’d taken the Interpol contract. All his normal reference points were gone, even the usual ticking of his financial clocks which normally drove him from paycheck to paycheck, bill to bill. He hadn’t thought about money at all in weeks, because here in Oversatch, he didn’t need it.

  Here in Oversatch…Even the ‘here’ part of things was getting hard to pin down. That should have been clear from the first night, when he and Miranda walked down a blacked-out alleyway and gradually began to make out a faint, virtual road leading on. They could both see the road so they followed it. Fraction had remained behind, so they talked about him as they walked. And then, when the road finally emerged into Stockholm’s lit streets, Gennady had found that Miranda was not beside him. Or rather, virtually she was, but not physically. The path they had followed had really been two paths, leading in separate directions.

  When he realized what had happened Gennady whirled, meaning to retrace his steps, but it was too late. The virtual pathway was a pale translucent blue stripe on the sidewalk ahead of him—but it vanished to the rear.

  “We have to keep going forward,” Miranda had said. “I have to, for my son.”

  All Gennady had to do was take off the glasses and he would be back in normal reality, so why did he feel so afraid, suddenly? “Your son,” he said with some resentment. “You only bring him up at times like this, you know. You never talk about him as if you were his mother.”

  SHE was silent for a long time, then finally said, “I don’t know him very well. It’s terrible, but…he was raised by his father. Gennady, I’ve tried to have a relationship with him. It’s mostly been by email. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care for him…”

  “All right,” he said with a sigh. “I’m sorry. So what do we do? Keep walking, I suppose.”

  They did, and after half an hour Gennady found himself in an area of old warehouses and run-down, walled houses. The blue line led up to the door of a stout, windowless brick building, and then just stopped.

  “Gennady,” said Miranda, “my line just ended at a brick wall.”

  Gennady pulled on the handle but the metal door didn’t budge. Above the handle was a number pad, but there was no doorbell button. He pounded on the door, but nobody answered.

  “What do you see?” he asked her. “Anything?” They both cast about for some clue and after a while, reluctantly, she said
, “Well, there is some graffiti…”

  “What kind?” He felt foolish and exposed standing here.

  “Numbers,” she said. “Sprayed on the wall.”

  “Tell them to me,” he said. She relayed the numbers, and he punched them into the keypad on the door.

  There was a click, and the door to Oversatch opened.

  When the door opened a new path had appeared for Miranda. She took it, and it had been over a week before he again met her face to face. In that time they both met dozens of Oversatch’s citizens—from a former high school teacher to a whole crew of stubbled and profane fishermen, to disenchanted computer programmers and university drop-outs—and had toured the farms and factories of a parallel reality as far removed from Rivet Couture as that ARG had been from Stockholm.

  The citizens of Oversatch had opted out. They hadn’t just left their putative nationalities behind, as Miranda Veen had when she married a mechanical engineer from Cascadia. Her husband had built wind farms along the city’s ridges and mountaintops, helping wean the city off any reliance it had once had on the national grid. Miranda worked at one of the vertical farms at the edge of the city. A single block-wide skyscraper given over to intense hydroponic production could feed 50,000 people, and Cascadia had dozens of the vast towers. Cascadia had opted out of any dependence on the North American economy, and Miranda had opted out of American citizenship. All very logical, in its own way—but nothing compared to Oversatch.

  Where before Gennady and Miranda had couriered packages to and fro for the grand dukes of Rivet Couture, now they played far more intricate games of international finance for nations and with currencies that had no existence in the “real” world. Oversatch had its own economy, its own organizations and internal rules; but the world they operated in was an ephemeral place, where nodes of importance could appear overnight. Organizations, companies, cities and nations: Oversatch called these things “attractors.” The complex network of human activities tended to relax back into them, but at any given moment, the elastic action of seven billion people acting semi-independently deformed many of the network’s nodes all out of recognition. At the end of a day IBM might exist as a single corporate entity, but during the day, its global boundaries blurred; the same was true for nearly every other political and economic actor.