by Tad Williams
CHAPTER 3
Empty Signal Gray
NETFEED/NEWS: Asia's Leaders Declare "Prosperity Zone"
(visual: Empress Palace, Singapore City)
VO: Asian politicians and business leaders meeting in Singapore, led by aging and reclusive Chinese financier Jiun Bhao and Singapore's Prime Minister Low—
(visual: Low Wee Kuo and Jiun Bhao shaking hands)
—agreed on a historical trade agreement which Jiun calls a "Prosperity Zone" that would give Asia an unprecedented economic unity.
(visual: Jiun Bhao, supported by aides, at press lectern)
JIUN: "The time has come. The future belongs to a united Asia. We are full of hope, but we know there is hard work ahead. . . ."
It stretched before them from horizon to horizon, its millions of byways like scratches on glass under extreme magnification—but in every one of those scratches, lights flickered and minute objects moved.
"There cannot be any place so big!"
"But it's not a place, remember—not a real place. The whole thing is just electronic impulses on a chain of very powerful computers. It can be as big as the programmers can imagine."
!Xabbu was silent for a long moment. They hung side by side, twin stars floating in an empty black sky, two angels gazing down from heaven at the immensity of humankind's commercial imagination.
"The girl arose," !Xabbu said at last. "She put her hands into the wood ashes. . . ."
"What?"
"It is a poem—or a story—made by one of my people:
"The girl arose; she put her hands into the wood ashes; she threw the ashes up into the sky. She said to them: 'The wood ashes which are here, they must together become the Milky Way. They must lie white along the sky. . . .' "
He stopped as if embarrassed. "It is something of my childhood. It is called 'The Girl of the Early Race Who Made the Stars.' Being here, what you have done—they brought it back to me."
Now Renie was embarrassed, too, although she was not quite sure why. She flexed her fingers to take them instantly down to ground level. Lambda Mall, the main tradeground of the entire net, surrounded them completely. The Mall was a nation-sized warren of simulated shopping districts, a continent of information with no shore. Millions of commercial nodes blinked, shimmied, rainbowed, and sang, doing their best to separate customers from credits. The intricate web of virtual thoroughfares surged with sims of every visual type, every level of complexity. "It is a huge place," she said, "but remember that most people never bother with high-level overviews like the one we just had—they just travel directly to wherever it is they want to go. If you tried to visit every node on the net, or even just every node in this Mall . . . well, it would be like trying to call every single address in the Greater Beijing Directory. Even all these—" she indicated the crush of sims moving around them in endless parade, "—are just a tiny fraction of the people who are using the Mall right now. These are just the folk who want to have the visual experience of browsing and people-watching."
"The visual experience?" !Xabbu's gray simuloid swiveled to watch a flock of Fumes push through the crowd, cartoon-voluptuous females with animal heads.
"Like you're doing now. There's plenty to see. But it's much faster just to go directly to what you want. When you're using the regular computer interface, do you read the name of every file in storage?"
!Xabbu was slow to respond. The Putties had met a pair of snake-headed men and were going through an elaborate ritual greeting which featured a great deal of sniffing. "Go to what I want?"
"I'll show you. Let's say we want to . . . I don't know, buy a new data pad. Well, if you know where the electronics district is, you could go there directly and then physically move around—people spend a lot of money trying to make their commercial nodes attractive, just like in the real world. But let's say you don't even know where the district is."
He had turned to face her. His gray face with its vestigial features caused her a moment of anxiety. She missed his animation, his smile: this was like traveling with a scarecrow. Of course, she herself must not look any more pleasant. "But it's true," he said. "I do not know where the electronics district is."
"Right. Look, you've spent a lot of time in the past few weeks learning to find your way around the basic computer setup. The only difference here is that you're inside the computer—or apparently so."
"It is hard to remember that I have a real body, and that it is back at the Polytechnic—that I am still in the Polytechnic."
"That's the magic." She made her voice smile since she couldn't do much with her face. "Now, do a search."
!Xabbu moved his fingers slowly. A glowing blue orb appeared in front of him.
"Good." Renie took a step closer. "No one can see that but you and me—that's part of our interaction with our own computer at the Poly. But we're going to use our computer to access the Mall's service directory." She showed him the procedure. "Go ahead and bring up the list. You can do voice commands, too, either offline, where no one will hear them but you, or online. If you keep an eye open here to the Mall, you'll see lots of people talking to themselves. They might just be crazy—there are more than a few—but they may also be talking to their own systems and not bothering to keep it private."
The orb spat out a list of services, which hovered in midair as lines of fiery blue letters. Renie adjusted the list to sunset red, more readable against the background, then pointed at those listed under Electronics. "There you go. 'Personal access devices.' Click it"
The world immediately changed. The open spaces of the Mall's public area were replaced by a long wide street. The simulated buildings on either side loomed high into the false sky, each one a riot of color and movement, the outside displays as colorful and competitive as tropical flowers. And we're the bees, she thought to herself, with pollen credits to spread around. Welcome to the information jungle. She rather liked the metaphor. Maybe she would use it in one of her lectures.
"Now," she said aloud, "if you had found a particular store in the services directory, we could have beamed straight there."
"Beamed?" !Xabbu's head was tipped back on his simulated neck. It reminded her of how amazed she'd been by the displays when she had first traveled on the net.
"It used to be an old science fiction term, I think. Kind of a net joke. It just means to travel directly instead of going the long way 'round, RL-style. RL means 'real life,' remember?"
"Mmmmm." !Xabbu seemed very quiet and withdrawn. Renie wondered if she'd shown him enough for a first visit—it was hard to know what an adult mind would make of all this. Everyone she knew had started net-riding in childhood.
"Do you want to go on with our simulated shopping trip?"
!Xabbu turned. "Of course. Please. This is all so . . . astonishing."
She smiled to herself. "Good. Well, as I said, if we wanted a particular store, we could have beamed directly to it. But let's browse."
Renie had been a professional for so long that the thrill of what was possible had worn off. Like her little brother, she had discovered the net at much the same time as she discovered the real world, and learned her way around both long before adolescence. Stephen was still interested in net for net's sake, but Renie was well past the sense-of-wonder stage. She didn't even like shopping, and whenever possible just reordered from an existing account.
!Xabbu, however, was a child in these virtual realms—but a manchild, she reminded herself, with a sophisticated and adult sensibility, however primitive her city-dweller prejudices made his background seem—so it was both refreshing and a little horrifying to accompany him on this maiden voyage. No, more than just a little horrifying: seeing it through his eyes, Lambda Mall seemed so huge and loud, so vulgar. . . .
!Xabbu stopped in front of one store's outside displays and gestured to see the full advertisement. Renie didn't bother. Although his sim was standing motionless before the shop's coruscating facade, she knew that he was currently in the middle of a fa
mily melodrama in which the crusty but benign father was slowly being brought around to the joys of purchasing a Krittapong Home Entertainment Unit with multiple access features. She watched the Bushman's small sim speaking and reacting to invisible presences and again felt a slightly shamed responsibility. After a few minutes, !Xabbu shook himself all over like a wet dog and stepped away.
"Did tight-fisted-but-basically-kindly Dad see the error of his ways?" she asked.
"Who were those people?"
"Not people. On the net, real people are called 'Citizens.' Those were Puppets—constructs which look like people. Invented things, just like the stores here and even the Mall itself."
"Not real? But they talked to me—answered questions."
"Just a slightly more expensive form of advertising. And they aren't as smart as they act. Go back and ask Mom about the Soweto Uprising or the second Ngosane Administration. She'll just tell you all over again about the joys of Retinal Display."
!Xabbu thought this over. "They are . . . like ghosts, then. Things with no souls."
Renie shook her head. "No souls, that's true. But 'Ghost' means something else on the net. I'll tell you about it one day."
They continued along the street, floating forward at walking speed, a comfortable pace for browsing.
"How can you tell the difference?" !Xabbu asked. "Between Citizens and Puppets?"
"You can't always. If you want to know, you ask. By law, we all have to respond—constructs, too. And we all have to tell the truth, although I'm sure that law gets broken often enough."
"I find that thought . . . upsetting."
"It takes some getting used to. Well, we're pretending to shop, so let's go on in—unless something in the advertising offended you."
"No. It was interesting. I think Dad should get more exercise. He has an unhealthy face."
Renie laughed as they stepped through into the store.
!Xabbu gaped. "But it is just a tiny space seen from outside! Is this more visual magic?"
"You must remember, none of this is real in the normal sense. Frontage space on the Mall is expensive so the exterior displays tend to be small, but the commercial node itself isn't behind it as it would be in a real market We've just moved into another location on the information network, which could be right next to the Polytechnic's janitorial services, or a children's adventure game, or the banking records for an insurance company." They looked across the large and expensive-looking shop. Quiet music was playing, which Renie promptly blocked—some of the subliminals were getting very sophisticated and she didn't want to discover when she went offline that she'd bought herself some expensive gadget. The walls and floor space of the simulated store were covered with tasteful abstract sculptures; the products themselves, displayed atop low pillars, seemed to glow with their own soft inner light like holy relics.
"Do you notice there are no windows?"
!Xabbu turned to look behind him. "But there were several on either side of the door where we came in."
"Only on the outside. Those were showing us the equivalent of a page in a printed catalog—easy to do. Far more difficult and expensive, not to mention distracting to potential customers, would be to show what was going on in Lambda Mall outside the facade. So, on the inside, no windows."
"And no people, either. Is this store, then, an unpopular place?"
"It is all a matter of choice. I didn't change the default setting when I came in. If you remember your computer terminology from last week, 'default'. . . ."
". . . Is the setting you get unless you specify otherwise."
"Exactly. And the default in this kind of store is usually 'alone with the merchandise.' If we want we can see any other customers who themselves choose to be seen." She made a gesture; for a brief moment a half-dozen sims flashed into sight, bending over one or another of the pillars. "And if we want we could be visited by a shop assistant immediately. Or, if we hover around long enough, one will eventually appear anyway, just to help us toward a decision."
!Xabbu moved across the floor to the nearest gently gleaming device. "And these are representations of what this company sells?"
"Some of what they sell. We can change the display, too, or see only the things we're interested in, hovering in front of us. We can even eliminate the showroom and view them only as text, with descriptions and prices. I'm afraid that's what I tend to do."
!Xabbu chuckled. "The man who lives beside the water hole does not dream of thirst."
"Another of your people's sayings?"
"One of my father's." He reached his blunt-fingered hand toward one of the pads, a thin rectangle small enough to fit in a simulated palm. "Can I pick this up?"
"Yes, but it will only feel as realistic as your own equipment allows it to feel. I'm afraid the sims we're wearing are pretty basic."
!Xabbu turned it in his hands. "I can feel the weight of it. Quite impressive. And look at this reflection across its screen! But I suppose this is no more real than that water you created my first day in simulation."
"Well, somebody spent more time working on that than I did on my puddle."
"Good afternoon, Citizens." An attractive black woman a few years younger than Renie appeared beside them. !Xabbu started guiltily and she smiled. "Are you interested in personal access devices?"
"We are merely looking today, thank you." Renie examined the perfect, just-ironed crease of the woman's pants and her flawless white teeth. "My friend. . . ."
"Are you a Citizen or a Puppet?" !Xabbu asked.
The woman turned toward him. "I am a type-E construct," she said, her voice still as warm and soothing as when she had greeted them, "respondent to all UN codes for retail display. If you wish to deal with a Citizen, I will be happy to summon one now. If you have a complaint about my performance, please indicate and you will be connected with. . . ."
"No, no," Renie said. "There's no need. My friend is on his first trip to Lambda Mall and was just curious."
The smile was still in place, although Renie fancied it was a bit stiffer than before. But that was silly—why should a Puppet be programmed with hurt feelings? "I am glad I could answer your question. Is there anything else I can tell you about this or any of Krittapong Electronics' other fine products?"
Out of an obscure sense of guilt, she asked the saleswoman—the Puppet saleswoman, she reminded herself, a mere piece of code—to demonstrate the pad for them.
"The Freehand is the latest in portable access data units," the Puppet began, "with the most sophisticated voice recognition of any pad in its price range. It also allows the preprogramming of hundreds of different daily tasks, a smart phone-filtering service, and a wealth of other extras that have made Krittapong Asia's leader in consumer data-manipulation products. . . ."
As the Puppet described the voice recognition features for !Xabbu, Renie wondered whether it was a coincidence that this particular salesperson appeared as a black woman, or whether it had been summoned up tailor-made to match her own net index and address.
A few minutes later they were outside again, standing in the simulated street.
"Just for your information," she said, "it isn't really polite to ask if people are Citizens or not. But unless you specifically request a live human being, most of the salespeople in stores will be Puppets."
"But I thought you said that it was the law. . . ."
"It is the law. But it's a social thing—a little delicate. If you're talking to a Citizen and you ask them that question, then you're implying that they're . . . well, boring enough or mechanical enough to be artificial."
"Ah. So one should only ask if one is reasonably certain that the person in question is a Puppet."
"Or unless you really, really need to know."
"And what might cause such a need?"
Renie grinned. "Well, if you were falling in love with someone you met here, for instance. Come on, let's find a place to sit down."
!Xabbu sighed and straightened up. His gray
sim had been sagging in its chair.
"There is still so much I do not understand. We are still in . . . on . . . the Mall, are we not?"
"We are. This is one of its main public squares."
"So what can we hope to do at this place? We cannot eat, we cannot drink."
"Rest, to begin with. VR can be like long-distance driving. You don't do much, but you still get tired."
As blood was red and wet in whichever artery it flowed, so, too, the crowd in the teeming streets seemed identical in its sheer variety to any other in Lambda Mall. The fraction of the Mall's visitors that floated, walked, or crawled past Café Boulle seemed no different from what Renie and !Xabbu had seen upon first entering the commercial sector, or in the streets of the electronics district. The most basic sims, which usually represented the most infrequent visitors, stopped frequently to rubberneck. Other, more detailed sims were covered in bright colors and traveling in groups, dressed up as though for a party. And some wore sophisticated rigs which would have been right at home in the poshest sectors of the Inner District, sims like handsome young gods which turned virtual heads everywhere they passed.
"But why is it a café? Why not a resting-house, or some such?"
Renie turned back to !Xabbu. The slope of his shoulders indicated fatigue. She would have to take him offline soon. It was easy to forget what a staggering sensory experience a first visit to the net could be. "Because 'Café' sounds nicer. No, I'm teasing. For one thing, if we had the equipment for it, we could eat and drink here—or at least feel like we were doing so. If we had the implants some rich people have, we could taste things we've never tasted in the real world. But even a real café serves more than just food and drink." She made a gesture and they were surrounded by the gentle sounds of a Poulenc string quartet; the noise of the street dropped to a low murmur in the background. "We are essentially renting a place where we can be—somewhere we can stop and think and talk and admire the parade without obstructing a public thoroughfare. And unlike a real restaurant, once you've paid for your table your waiter is always available, but only when you want him."