21st Century Science Fiction (57 page)

Veen leaned over to scroll the paragraphs past. “This one,” she said, “two weeks later.”

Gennady read. “
It 2.0
is this overlay that remaps everything in real-time into Oversatch terms. It’s pretty amazing when you learn what’s
really
happening in the world! How the sanotica is causing all these pressures on Europe. Sanotica manifests in all sorts of ways—just imagine what a self-organizing catastrophe would look like! And Oversatch turns out to be just a gateway into the remappings that oppose sanotica. There’s others: Trapton, Allegor, and Cilenia.”

“Cilenia,” said Gennady.

Fraction sat up to look at the book. He nodded and said, “Oversatch is a gateway to Cilenia.”

“And you?” Gennady asked him. “You’ve been there?”

Fraction smiled. “I live there.”

Gennady was bewildered. Some of the words were familiar. He was vaguely familiar with the concept of geographical overlays, for instance. But the rest of it made no sense at all. “What’s sanotica?” he asked Fraction.

Fraction’s smile was maddeningly smug. “You have no language for it,” he said. “You’d have to speak
it 2.0
. But Sanotica is what’s really going on here.”

Gennady sent an appealing look to Lane Hitchens. Hitchens grunted. “Sanotica may be the organization behind the plutonium thefts,” he said.

“Sanotica is not an organization,” said Fraction, “anymore than
it 2.0
is just a word.”

“Whatever,” said Lane. “Gennady, you need to find them. Miranda will help, because she wants to find her son.”

Gennady struggled to keep up. “And sanotica,” he said, “is in . . . far Cilenia?”

Fraction laughed contemptuously. Veen darted him an annoyed look, and said to Gennady, “It’s not that simple. Here, read the last message.” She dragged it up from the bottom of the page.

“Mom: Cilenia is a new kind of ‘it.’ But so is sanotica; a terrifying thought. Without that
it,
without the word and the act of pointing that it represents, you cannot speak of these things, you can’t even see them! I watch them now, day by day—the walking cities, the countries that appear like cicadas to walk their one day in the sun, only to vanish again at dusk . . . I can’t be an observer anymore. I can’t be
me
anymore, or sanotica will win. I’m sorry, Mom, I have to become something that can be pointed at by 2.0. Cilenia needs me, or as many me’s as I can spare.

“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.

• • • •

Rivet Couture
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 candle-light. 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, star-like 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 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 candle-lit 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 fobwatch 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 on-line 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
.