Idempotency (21 page)

“Kristi, it’s important, it’s about . . .” he lowered his voice. “It’s about SOP.”

“I’m important, Dylan. What about S, O, me . . . Dylan?”

He laughed a little. “How much have you had to drink? And what’s up with bringing a date? Why the hell did you bring that guy with you?”

“I didn’t bring him, he asked me to come with him. And, Dylan, what do you care? You dumped me, remember?”

“Yeah, but he’s so—”

“He’s so what? Willing to date me?”

“Well, I just . . .” His mind went blank. “Dammit, Kristi, I want to be with you—badly! I dream about holding you again, feeling your skin against mine—but I’m a ball of mixed-up emotions right now: scared, confused, angry. I wake up sweating every night, wondering who I am. This isn’t about you—you’re being selfish. Is it too much to ask for you to wait until all this blows over?”

“Yes, it is!
I’m
being selfish? Me? That’s ridiculous. Why should I have to wait? If you want to be with me, then be with me. You’re a coward, Dylan.” This appeared to sting him, and his smile drooped to a frown.

“Well, at least I’m not a tool like your date.” He motioned to Lester, who was now being helped by several friends.

“At least that tool is in my toolbox.” She bit her lower lip. “Okay, so that sounded bad. Look, Dylan, I’m not going to wait on you. Seriously, I love—
loved
, or maybe I still love you, whatever—but if you can’t love me when you need me most, then why would you love me when things are good? I’ll do whatever I can to help you as a friend, but anything more than that, and I’m not giving guarantees.”

Dylan nodded. “I get it, I’m sorry. I just—”

She suddenly sobered up. “Stop apologizing. Jeez, I’m so sick of you apologizing all the time. Just tell me the news you have already.”

Dylan slowly led her down to the lawn, toward the water, and away from the dispersing crowd; they both forgot about their sick friend in an instant.

“They contacted me,” Dylan said. “They gave me a darkVirt location and a key, whatever that means. They want to meet. They said you’ve been working on getting SolipstiCorp headgear working for darkVirts. Is that true?”

“Wow! How do they know that? Yeah, I’ve been working on it.” Her face lit up.

“So SOP hasn’t been in contact with you then?”

“Nope; I was tinkering with it on my own time.”

“Well, I need it by Friday night. Can you make that happen?”

She exhaled loudly, then said, “Dylan, I don’t even know that it will work. We’ve never tested our gear for a darkVirt use case.” She paused, he smiled widely, and she continued, now talking more to herself than to him. “Friday? It’ll definitely take a little hacking on the code. I need to finish the unit tests . . . I’d need to get another pair of eyes on it, a code review. And I need someone who knows hardware.”

Both of them looked back at the engineer bent over on his knees, face firmly pointed at the ground. Lester groaned.

“How about that guy?” Dylan asked. “He’d obviously do anything to help you out. He’s been wagging his tail at you like a puppy all night.”

“I don’t want to use him like that.”

“C’mon, Kristi—I’m sure he’d enjoy it anyway.”

“Look, I don’t know, let me think about it.“

“Don’t tell him about SOP, though. I don’t trust anyone at this point. Just say we’re mucking around with alternative uses.” She nodded and he continued, “So Friday? You can do it?”

She looked back at him and smirked. “Yeah, it’s possible. But this is a potential security breach if they catch us—it’s been almost impossible to find time to write code when folks aren’t around, and the lab is on grade-one lockdown.”

“Can’t you just take the gear home?”

She rolled her eyes and Dylan realized she had eschewed her glasses. “Yes, I could do that. We’d have to use my home kit, and I’d have to clear my tracks; but yeah, if we’re careful, sure.”

Dylan slapped his hands together anxiously, “Ha-ha! All right! Now we’re talking.”

“Okay, Friday. It’s a date,” she said, then amended her statement: “Save the date.”

With a start, the sky exploded into a multifarious display of colors. Dylan and Kristina watched in awe as if they had never experienced anything more amazing.

Dylan leaned over, hesitated, then kissed Kristina gently on the mouth.  They began to hold each other tighter. He released. “I do love you, Kristi, I do, truly. If you can’t wait for me now, I’ll try to catch up with you later.”

She returned his smile but not his words.

On Wednesday of the following week, with only two days left until the week’s end, Kristina had secured use of the SolipstiCorp headgear for the entire weekend. Additionally, she had been coding fervently, making modifications to the headgear kit to ensure it would be able to connect to an open-source darkVirt. She had also enlisted the services of Lester, the eruptive engineer from the party. His embarrassment from the other night was richly deserved, but he was quick to help Kristina as soon as she batted her goggling eyes and mentioned the idea of using SolipstiCorp’s headgear to access darkVirts.

Both engineers had become fixated on the challenge of using the tech for this new purpose. The pair had been deeply involved in the tedium of bug-fixing the past several months during their day jobs, whereas Dylan’s ad hoc project had afforded them the opportunity to innovate again. Innovation begot a Pavlovian response from developers. They viscerally craved it; it could motivate an engineer to push moral or personal boundaries, or tempt them to leave one opportunity for another. The chance to create something unique, something new, something unprecedented: this was an engineer’s raison d'être.

Kristina and Lester couldn’t help themselves if they wanted to.

An energetic Wheaton terrier bounded with pure ecstasy across a damp lawn. A dozen riders clung onto the silky white hair of the dog with childlike wonder showing upon their faces, Sindhu included. Owning a dog had never been possible; as a child she had been horribly allergic. Once she had started working and was able to afford allergen antidotes she had simply become too busy to own a dog. So, upon learning of the dogVirt several weeks ago, Sindhu had made a point to visit it once daily at a minimum. She found it cathartic.

The dogVirt was simple: Choose your breed, choose a location, and hang on for the ride. Virt users were shrunk to about ten centimeters and placed in a simple harness atop the back of an excitable dog. Sindhu had lived next to a Wheaton terrier in her third year of grad school. While she had barely said hello to the dog’s owner, she had cooed over the dog aplenty. No matter what the weather, the time, the season, or its owner’s disposition, Wilhelmina the Wheaton was always happy to see Sindhu. Her owner had called it the Wheaton greetin’; Sindhu would arrive at her rented house, and Wilhelmina would jump up on the neighboring fence with reckless abandon, pure elation washing over her shaggy face; from somewhere behind that silky hair, two eyeballs somehow managed to find their way to Sindhu.

The dogVirt Wheaton was finally crashing now. It had been playing for a good ten minutes, herding invisible sheep around a rain-dampened yard somewhere in middle America. Sindhu’s laugh was melodic, and it melted into the laughter of the other twelve riders. The Wheaton decided to curl up under a picnic table on the back patio, its tail still wagging frantically, its body now at rest aside from the regular cadence of panting.

The riders began to blink away from the dogVirt, most of them offering heartfelt good-byes to the strangers they had shared the dog-riding experience with: A moment of youthful innocence tearing down anonymous walls that typically would have kept everyone quiet.

Sindhu was petting a few strands of hair, also about to log out herself. As she raised a hand to do so, a voice rose up from behind her and said, “The end of the ride always saddens me.”

Sindhu turned around and saw a gentle face staring back at her. The man’s avatar had a narrow smile and neatly trimmed brown hair. His skin was rough, and he hadn’t shaved in a day or so, Sindhu guessed. Then she wondered what he looked like in the realWorld. She posited he must look similar to his virt representation—otherwise, why choose mediocrity?

“Okay, I’ll bite: Why does the end sadden you?” Sindhu asked.

“Well, I guess I mean everyone should have the chance to be so close to something so purely happy.” The man spoke softly, then displayed a warm, simple smile. He exuded a peacefulness that put Sindhu at ease—not an easy task.

“I suppose you’re right,” Sindhu replied, then made a gesture to leave. Before she could, however, the man raised his hand, signaling her to stop.

“I want you to have something.” The man reached into his front shirt pocket and pulled out a small strip of paper. Sindhu reached up to take it with a confused look on her face.

Her eyes got wide as she asked, “SOP?”

“We’ve been watching you. We’ll contact you with next steps. Stay quiet. Be smart, not rash. Use caution.” He let go of the paper, smiled warmly, waved a hand in front of him, and then blinked away.

Sindhu opened the paper, and read the handwritten note. It read:

Look under your pillow.

Her big eyes widened further still, and she instinctively looked around for a pillow, finding only stalks of fur. She scoffed at herself, realizing that the man must have meant her pillow in the realWorld. SOP wouldn’t risk providing sensitive information digitally; she had to log out of the dogVirt immediately. A simple turn of her hand later and she was groggily opening her earth-blue ocImps. She awoke to the realWorld where she had fallen asleep: recumbent upon a narrow bed meant specifically for virtTripping. The bed was crafted of foam, which wrapped the majority of the virtTripper’s body into itself. The foam then acted as a stimulant against the body, providing further sensation to the experience. Sindhu had shelled out serious corpNet monetary credits for the bed and had been mostly underwhelmed. Further, she had found it required the use of a small pillow, or else she would drool all over the foam itself.

Upon logging out of her virtTrip, the foam hardened, unwrapping her and pushing her to the surface. She quickly rolled over and lifted her pillow, immediately spotting the folded-up piece of paper. She opened it and read the following scribbled note:

Loc — AE27::4FA2:0:0:11E4

Key — “I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”

—Abraham Lincoln

A jackrabbit erupted within her chest where her heart had been moments before. She glanced at the front door to her small apartment; there were no signs of entry. She was strangely okay with the fact that someone had been inside her house; under any other circumstance, she would have had a vehement reaction to such a violation.

The act of virtTripping left most people exhausted, and while Sindhu was in exemplary physical shape—exercising rigorously on a daily basis—virtTripping even got to her after a few hours; and she had recently been virtTripping nearly every waking hour she wasn’t at work. It was beginning to take a toll; a consistent lethargy had encompassed her the past month, her exercise regimen had hit a wall, and she was generally grumpy—though the source of her grumpiness was more debatable.

Ignoring her exhaustion, Sindhu immediately brought up the Buoyant interface within her ocImps. After quickly enacting a networking application to hide her traffic through several tunneled and encrypted servers, she typed in the hexadecimal location on the piece of paper into her virt. Seconds later the foam beneath her softened, her body sank into it, and her vision flashed, replaced with a simple azure color. In every direction save one, Sindhu saw only blue. In front of her, however, a list of binary numbers floated:

100011.00100101111101101111110100100001-01101110/1111000.10100101111010011110000110110000-01110111

Sindhu stared hard at the pattern. It took less than a minute for her to know these were realWorld coordinates: 35-point-something north, by 120-point-something west. Simple. Minutes later she had worked the rest out in her head:

35.1483 n

120.6481 w

Again, with a turn of her hand, she was back in realWorld being elevated by her hardening foam bed. A pursed smile rose on her lips, and she rubbed her aching temples. She’d done well and she knew it. Her heartbeat began to slow, her breath caught up with her mind, and she resolved to get a good night’s sleep tonight. And no more virtTripping for the rest of the week! She had a big weekend coming up and she needed to be ready for anything.

Friday rolled around painfully slow. Dylan had met up with Kristina and Lester just after five at her place; a small loft condo dating back to the turn of the millennium, located on the north end of town. It was a modest place, with wood floors and thick wood beams running along the ceiling. A green comforter atop a quirky antique Murphy bed that appeared as though it hadn’t been stowed away in decades. The loft had been hastily cleaned, with clothes sitting in clumps like anthills randomly strewn across the room.

“Okay. We’re ready. Are you?” Kristina’s glasses were low on her nose. She was wearing a simple pink-hued T-shirt, which, while small, still seemed overly large for her petite body.

“Yeah, let’s do this,” Dylan replied. He was laying down on her futon.

Hands flew in front of her. Lester stood behind, biting his lower lip, hands in his jean pockets. Kristina’s tongue began to waggle around in concentration.

She said, “I’m not getting a connection. It seems to be re-routing . . .”

“Try this—” Lester interrupted, his hands now flailing.

“The handshake is taking forever . . . wait . . . yep, okay, I got an ack, here we go . . . I think it’s work—”

Dylan blinked and the old wooden loft was gone, replaced momentarily by an expanse of black. The black faded to blue, and the blues became separated by a single nondescript color that rotated 360 degrees around Dylan, at eye level. The blue below him had turned into water—still as glass—that he stood gently atop. The blue above the horizon was some kind of digitally created sky, consistently azure and equally ambient in all directions. Dylan tapped his toe, and the frozen water leaped to life. However, instead of emanating out in circles from under his foot, the water formed an
S
that began to ripple away from him in all directions. The
S
slowly morphed into an
O
, then finally grew a tail and completed the
P
. Dylan smiled.