Chapter Fifteen – Surfing

Chapter Fifteen – Surfing

“You’d think that in a purely digital world, where the constraints of the real world don’t matter, the power of someone like a Samurai would be diminished.

We need to put a stop to the tendency of these people to overload our servers, and shut down all of our ad-revenue.”

–A. Pai, CFO of Adcorp on Dec 14th 2039, six minutes before his Mesh connection malfunctioned leading to his untimely demise.

***

I rode atop my giant metal squid monster and enjoyed being carried. Not that I would admit it, but it was kind of neat to be so far above everyone else.

Daniel, that is, 404_Legs_Not_Found, swam around a gathering of rather plain avatars–that all still managed to be gorgeous people–and I waved a paw at them when they tracked us with their eyes.

“They’re not actually looking at you,” Daniel said as he moved towards the hotel’s doors. “Those are Barbies.”

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“They’re standard avatars? You can get them in a cash shop for fairly cheap. They come with some customization and all that, like a character creator, but their programing’s shit. Their eyes will follow anyone looking at them, but their user doesn’t need to be looking that way.” He flicked out a metallic tentacle towards the side where a few other avatars were walking by, some with their own entourage of very plain people following them. “You can tell the fully-custom jobs apart. Shit costs an arm and a leg though.”

“Neat,” I said. “So what, it’s a status thing?”

“Yeah,” he said. “A real Meshizen wouldn’t be caught dead in a prefab.”

“Isn’t your avatar a prefab?”

He wiggled from side to side. “Sorta? It’s based on an actual squid model from like, ten years back? I got a friend who does modelling to set this model over the original squid skeleton.”

I nodded. I almost understood that.

The entrance had a set of sliding doors, not too dissimilar to the actual doors of the actual hotel we were still in. I was having a bit of trouble remembering that I wasn’t where I was in the real world. It was just a bit too immersive, feeling wind against my skin… fur, and hearing things from all around. I had to remind myself that I was laying back on a couch in real life.

The doors opened, and we slid through a thin blue transparent screen and out onto a huge balcony overlooking a city, of sorts.

The problem with the Mesh–or one of them–was that it was such a surreal environment that it made my eyes want to cross. There were skyscrapers as far as I could see, some of them raising up, others dropping down from the ceiling. Some, the largest and most intimidating, connected the two.

There were walls off to the sides, solid barriers with images and words scrolling by them just barely fast enough for someone to read them in passing.

“Have you been out in the Mobius a lot?”

“The what?” I asked.

“You know, outside of a structure?” Daniel said. “If you keep travelling down the tunnel, you’ll eventually flip back over to the other side. It’s a mobius strip.”

“Yeah, I’ve been out here before. Never spent much time in the open though,” I said. A glance around showed car-like things shooting by. Half of them were plain, boring cubes or spheres, sometimes with scrolling ads on their sides, but a good chunk were shaped like spaceships and modern cars.

I held myself back from flinching when a pair of X-wings cut around the corner.

“We’re in the NA phase and it’s mid-day, so it’ll be busy as fuck,” Daniel said. “We’re taking the tube to, uh, lemme check…”

I vaguely remember phases being a sort of unsynced copy of the world we were in, so that the millions of people around could all be in the same space without having to render or interact with each other.

A glance over at the YouTube building a block or two down showed a sea of people slipping in and out of the thousand-odd entrances all around the stark-white building. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if everyone everywhere was in the same instance.