Stray Cat Strut [Stubbing in 10⁷⁸ years!]

Chapter Sixteen – It

Chapter Sixteen – It

“You would be right to think that the Mesh is a full-immersion world, that being in the Mesh can trigger every human sense, from smell to balance and even the sense and perception of time.

The Mesh can do all of these things.

If you have the right gear.

The issue comes with the steep price of that kind of gear. Most normal Mesh users are simple people, usually in first-world countries, and at middling incomes. That is to say, that even the middle-tier Mesh gear is above their standard paygrade, and most need to purchase their equipment on credit or with payments.

Higher-end gear, the kind of equipment really needed to fully experience the Mesh? That can run for prices in the tens of millions of credits. More than a low-class person would make in a lifetime.

Unfortunately, despite improvements in manufacturing and processing power, these set-ups are still beyond the average person’s means. Mostly because the few companies making them want to keep the prices artificially inflated.

That must end!”

–Meshizen for a Better Tomorrow, public address 2050

***

“That’s it,” Daniel said as he floated down a dimly lit street.

There was no reason for the street to be poorly lit. It had just as many ‘lights’ along its sides as any of the other streets we passed.

That had to be deliberate. It certainly gave a sinister cast to all the people walking along the sidewalks. I had to keep reminding myself that in one sense, none of this was real. Being a cat certainly helped with the unreality of it all.

At the end of the street was the thing Daniel was talking about, the ‘it.’

It was a huge bulky building. Or maybe calling it a building was off, I wasn’t all that knowledgeable about architecture, but a huge black cube without so much as a window on it didn’t ping me as a building.

The closer we came, the bigger it felt like the building was. It certainly towered above the street, just kind of there. The strangest thing was the absolute blackness of it. None of the buildings around it, all of them festooned in ads and neon highlights, reflected the building. It was just not showing up in any glass or anything, and its surface was pitch black, without so much as a hint of light splashing against it.

It certainly left a mark. And yet it was smaller than a lot of the skyscrapers around it.

Glancing up, I could see its opposite in the cityscape way above, just hanging off the ceiling like so many other buildings.

“So, is there an entrance?” I asked.

“Not really,” Daniel said. He started to slow down, and the reason was obvious. The road leading up to the building (because it was right in the middle of an intersection) veered off to the left and right, but never reached out to the building proper. Instead, there was a railing at about waist height and then a half-dozen meters of pavement before a sheer drop.

From my vantage above Daniel’s head, I could make out the lack of a bottom to the building. It was just floating there, without even the common courtesy of throwing a shadow.

“Freaky,” I said.

Daniel stopped right next to the rails, and I realized that we had something of a berth around us. The other avatars were keeping their distances. “Right past this,” he said while bringing a tentacle around to smack the rail. “Is a PVP zone.”

“I thought you couldn’t have those out in the open like this. I mean, outside of like, game areas.”

“You can’t,” he said.

I looked down, then smacked his head with a paw. “And? How come there’s one here?”

“Because the people in that said so?” he said while pointing to the building. “This is, like, the place for all the cool hackers and crackers to hang out. Breaking the Mesh’s code to have an illegal PVP zone on their doorstep was probably child’s play for them.”

I eyed the building up and down, then bunched my legs up under me. “Right, give me a minute.”

“Serious?” Daniel asked.

I answered by jumping off of him, over the rail, and landing on the pavement beyond with a bit of a bounce. I shook a little, setting the scarf around my neck to ruffling. With a wag of my new tail, I set off towards the building until a prompt appeared in the corner of my vision.

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YOU HAVE ENTERED A PVP AREA.

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