Idempotency (22 page)

As the ripples reached the horizon, something else seemed to spring to life. From the farthest reaches of Dylan’s mind, eight voluminous panels of infinite color made their way from the horizon, gaining speed, then halting suddenly just out of arm’s reach. He now stood in the middle of an octagonal space that played tricks on his mind. The panels were logically too large considering how close they were to him; they should have overlapped one another. And yet when Dylan focused on the paradox, it would appear that the panels clearly had more than enough space to reside within. The panels were also translucent, showing the ocean of still water beyond, and yet, when Dylan focused on them, vibrant images of exotic destinations could be seen within each window. He had entered the SOP multiVirt, and these were the various darkVirts he could choose to enter.

Basking in the awe of the digital playground he now stood within, Dylan realized he had to choose a path. He looked at the panel in front of him and beyond its translucent facade he saw a shantytown of low-income living units (commonly referred to as LILUs) that extended beyond his own horizon—another paradox. As far as the eye could see, government-provided LILUs poked out of barren, rolling hills. Dylan sighed and shook his head. Then he gestured with his hand, and the panels spun in front of him, a full 360 degrees. He flinched as he stared at the shantytown again. Spinning on his heel, he saw the same panel yet again. He had turned—he was certain of it—and yet it appeared the panels had turned with him. He turned to the right, and again the shanty panel followed him to the right. He jumped catlike, 180 degrees to the opposite direction, and still the enormous panels effortlessly rotated in perfect unison with him.

Shrugging at what he assumed was an obvious hint, Dylan took a few steps forward and walked directly to the panel with the LILUs. He raised his hand outward, and it passed through the panel without any feeling.

Dylan stepped through the panel and into yet another world.

The first sense he took note of was the smell: the putrid, rotting, sulfuric stench. It hovered like an invisible fog that the sun had refused to touch out of fear it might rub off. Dylan decided he’d even need a bath once he left the darkVirt and got back to the realWorld.

The second sense that struck Dylan was sound, or lack thereof. For such a densely populated environment, where ten people often crammed into a LILU meant for four, one would expect more bustle. As it were, the place seemed like a ghost town. Wind rustled through the government shacks, circulating the stench. Shouts could be heard off in the distance, what Dylan guessed to be south, though it was difficult to discern due to the smog that occluded the sun, making its light seem almost entirely ambient when, in fact, it was nearly midday.

Dylan began a brisk walk south in the direction of the noise, veering slightly to the west and then up a slight hill with the hope of gaining a better vantage of the commotion. As he walked, he took note of the fact that the many inhabitants who lived in this vicinity previously had apparently left in a hurry. Precious food was still lying on makeshift tables in front of shacks. Various belongings—clothes and toys, mostly—seemed to be strewn in a pattern, stretching from inside the shacks, out to the corridor, all leading in a particular direction; the same that Dylan was heading.

Dylan crested the hill and immediately noticed movement. He crouched. Below him, maybe one hundred meters to the south, a regiment of security officers were herding slum dwellers into single-file lines heading outward. Dylan realized, from this higher vantage point, that he had actually been walking deeper into the slum. The crowd he now looked upon was the last remnant of the entire community: the middle, deepest, densest portion of the slum.

The group appeared disgruntled, some more than others. There was obvious dissension among the group, with some of the younger-looking members quarreling stridently with elder statesmen. At the same time, a sizable group of security personnel were overseeing the exodus—a mostly peaceful affair. Dylan noticed at worst a few moderate shoving matches, but the security detail was heavily armed, leaving little question as to who was in charge. To the right of the security detail, a few corridors over, standing atop a makeshift platform on a slight hill, a dozen important-looking people observed the operation.

One man perched upon the platform stood out; both in appearance and owing to the reverence being silently paid to him by those surrounding him. He was standing with his back to Dylan, and when he turned, Dylan gasped. There stood Korak Searle, sweating in the sweltering heat, wearing his customary white suit, matched today with a thin green tie. Somehow, Dylan’s eyesight became magnified as he focused in on Searle; he could see beads of sweat formed around the man’s polystyrene forehead. His hair was still shaved short, and his widow’s peak appeared even more widowed; any more exaggerated and it might have been a Mohawk. The group surrounding Searle were all trying to get a word in, each fighting for the man’s attention. Dylan’s sense of sound suddenly increased, and he heard their inanities. Several members spoke at once—mostly nonsense to Dylan—about efficiency gains, incubation, and progressive faith. Searle rarely graced these comments with a response, instead focusing his substantial glare on the proceedings below him. There was one man to whom he did patiently give direction: a short, uniformed man who was clearly a leader of the security team. The short man was sweating more than anyone else on the platform; he looked uncomfortable and angry.

Crouching instinctively, Dylan was moderately shocked and entirely confused. He had no idea what he was looking at, but he was certain that he needed to get a closer look. He stood back up and just as he did, a powerful shout sounded from a security officer below him. Nearly every security officer, including those on the platform, looked in Dylan’s direction. Slack-jawed, he couldn’t believe they’d spotted him already; he had barely made a sound. He turned to run back in the direction he had come, and already a dozen security guards were arriving in gravity-defying, cube-shaped, single-person transports. There were over a dozen transports, and immediately they broke off and began to flank Dylan from each direction.

In a split decision, Dylan made a gutsy call: He exercised the notion of surprise by sprinting toward Searle and the platform; perhaps if he could reach Searle, he could reason with him . . . although he had absolutely no idea about what he would be reasoning.

Two steps into his sprint, Dylan distinctly heard the cry of
“Fire!”
ring forth from the short, sweaty man on the platform. He ducked as a spattering of explosive shells began to rain down all. Smoke, dust, mortar, stench, and trash blended around him. He was certain something must have nicked him, but he continued running, fueling himself on the adrenaline now coursing through him. Another round of impact explosive shells erupted mostly behind Dylan. He felt heat on his back and he pushed himself to run harder. The smell of rotting had increased somehow, and Dylan gagged, nearly vomiting.

Running west now, sideways to his target, Dylan decided to take the next corridor south toward Searle and his companions. The explosive rounds had subsided moments before, and he figured that would buy him at least a few more steps; maybe enough time to catch Searle’s eye—though at this point his hope was dwindling.

When Dylan jumped around the corner of a metallic LILU, he was immediately crestfallen. At least ten security guards were kneeling in front of him with various weapons at the ready: from stasis inducers, to traditional automatic bullet-based weapons, to the high-impact explosives that Dylan had been witnessing. Dylan stumbled to a halt, and he could hear the crumbling of clutter still raining down from the previous rounds. He placed his hands in the air and wore an oafish grin.

“Whoa, whoa! Hey now, don’t shoot!” he said quickly, then shouted toward the platform some twenty meters away now. “Searle! You know me. We met—”

“Sir, you must leave the premises. We will not give you another warning,” Searle warned with a hint of humanity. He then leaned toward the stout, uniformed man next to him and said softly, “I don’t want more casualties, Kane, this is messy enough. I want your men to scour the rest of the properties and forcibly remove the stragglers. No more guns.”

The man squirmed uncomfortably in his sweaty boots. “Sir, you know we don’t have time for that. Coglin gave very clear orders for us to be as—how did he put it?—as brutally efficient as possible.”

There was no way Dylan should have been able to hear the conversation between Searle and Kane—he was still a good twenty meters away from Searle—and yet it was as if the pair had whispered directly to Dylan.

“You don’t have the authority, Kane. Have your men stand down. You’ve already done enough damage—”

“Actually, sir, I do have the authority. Coglin gave me explicit instructions. You can check the official project task in your BOI, appendix four-B, I think it was . . .” Kane waffled, but his confidence was welling. “In fact, he said you might hesitate just like this, and that if you did, I was to be even more direct. I’m sorry, Searle, it’s not personal.”

Mouth agape, Searle was visibly stunned. He began to speak, but Kane ignored him entirely as he shouted new commands to his security detail. The security team raised their weapons, and Dylan suddenly felt what was for him a foreign feeling: panic.

“Wait!
No
—”

They fired. Rapid, automatic, thousands of rounds per second, high-impact and heat-seeking explosives—all ripping directly through Dylan. He double-clutched, hunched over in a fetal position. All around him, cheaply made buildings evaporated from sight. Sewage was strewn into the air, sending depraved rain down upon the entire town. Clothing, dishes, bits of furnishings, dirt, dust, stench—chaos—everything swirled and danced around him. After an eternity, it settled.

Dylan remained frozen, unsure of his state. Was this death? A guard was walking toward him, his booted footsteps upon the dirt corridor the only sound now left in the entire compound. Dylan stared at the guard, fixating on him as the uniformed man walked toward him. Closer still, and Dylan could see microscopic pebbles kicking off the boots that scraped the ground around him. Closer now—heel to toe—and, without slowing down, the guard passed directly through Dylan’s body.

Dylan gasped for air. He looked down at his feet, expecting to see his dead body below him. He turned around and saw it lying behind him, charred, crumpled like a piece of trash, the guard standing above a body. Dylan hobbled the few paces toward the body and knelt down. The man was horribly disfigured, but Dylan knew immediately it was not his own body. He stood back up and stared at the guard. The guard gave the carcass below him a swift kick. A crunching sound echoed back at them as if the guard had just kicked a piece of burned French bread.

“You . . . can’t see me . . . or hear me, can you, big fella?” Dylan asked, still staring at the guard who towered over Dylan’s stocky frame.

“He’s dead,” the guard shouted matter-of-factly over his shoulder.

“Well, I’ll be handcuffed and hog-tied! You can’t see me! I’m a damned virtual ghost!” Dylan smiled broadly, face beaming. “Oh man, oh man—”

“Let this serve as a warning.” Kane spoke to the crowd of dwellers as they vacated the town. His voice reverberated across the land with such a force that Dylan wasn’t the only person who jumped, startled at the sound of the nasally tenor. “We value our contracts. You are beholden to expectations for which you have previously agreed to; namely, your indentured servitude to pay off future debts. And in return, we will provide you with all we have promised: above-adequate living, above-adequate pay, fulfilling work, sanitation, and, of course, spiritual guidance. But perhaps most important: hope. We will provide you with hope.” Kane paused. Smiling softly now, he continued: “And what has this world come to, if we were to no longer honor our contracts? Carry on, all.”

Dylan then heard Searle, clear as day, whisper through gritted teeth to his short, uniformed confidant, “I will not forget this atrocity, Kane. Get to work doing something useful for a change, you short, fat man. We have an investment to cultivate.”

Kane just smiled with dumb pride.

After spending some time meandering around the slum, Dylan began to wonder where he was supposed to go and how he was to get there. Initially, he had planned to follow Searle, but that plan was quickly thwarted when a transport picked up the leadership team soon after the shooting. Dylan then fruitlessly snooped around the platform. He moved onto observing the security forces wrangle the straggling slum residents away out to industrial, large-capacity transports waiting on the outskirts of the area. This, too, proved fruitless. At last he started searching some of the temporary offices that were erected recently for the explicit purpose of managing the slum extraction. However, when Dylan attempted to open the sliding doors, his hand was unable to grip the handle. Both of his hands and the vertical handle erupted in digital chaos as his hand moved through the door.

“It’s not accessible; we don’t have cameras in there,” a ubiquitous voice called out to him.

Dylan whirled around, but saw no one. An instant passed. He listened intently as he heard a crackling from far off. The noise became suffocatingly loud, and was followed by flames. A conflagration of digitized color quickly erupted and encircled Dylan; yet it produced no heat. The fire and noise suddenly dissipated, and he was left standing once again atop the blue water where he had begun his journey: He had exited the slum darkVirt and was now back in the multiVirt’s home menu, though the panels were no longer present.

A single flame lit up directly in front of Dylan. It floated horizontally in front of him, twitching and teetering, outstretched, as if reaching toward some hidden fuel located within his stomach. A moment passed, and Simeon suddenly materialized in front of the flame, which now wrapped recognizably around a muscular arm that he held out toward Dylan in a greeting.