Chapter Two
Dex finally finished his service call and after completing the millions of required forms for B&B, he opened the video record of his conversation with the client. They had met online in the seedy bar that Dex was known to frequent. Three Card Monte’s Bar, a common spot for Cubicle Men to get together and talk shop, was off the map. Literally. There was a public map of Marionette City, much like a directory or an index. Of course, the vast majority of places an avatar could go were not on the map — you could search for them if you knew what you were looking for, but mostly it was word of mouth. A friend of a friend gave you a link, or someone on a board posted directions.
It was obviously by following directions that she had found the place. Her avatar was wary as she entered the bar, but she showed no sign of turning back. He hadn’t seen it at the time, but watching the video Dex figured she was one of those people who was fully aware of the reality that the interface was a simulation. The realistic feel of the three-dimensional virtual reality interface to the everywherenet, popularly known as Marionette City, was both the reason for its popularity and also its major flaw. People often forgot that the rules were a little different there.
But she seemed to be holding her own. She walked into the place and after scanning the crowd, made a bee-line for Dex. Her avatar was probably patterned after her physical world looks, since it was a popular female body shape that season, with green hair falling just past the bottom of her ears. Since it was almost as easy to change the shape of physical bodies as it was to change an avatar, many people matched their real world and online looks. The avatar’s face was pretty, in the pale shade that was currently fashionable and had a number of silver studs dotting its surface. On a physical face they would be the implants conferring some kind of upgrade to the built in computer system everyone wore inside their heads. Dex’s own face was covered, almost all of them disk upgrades.
But she looked fairly average, as she walked toward Dex, green hair sparkling in the false light. She stopped at his table, opened her mouth to start to say something then stopped. “You lost?” Dex asked.
“I don’t think so, Mr. Dexter,” she answered.
He smiled without warmth and asked, “You’re in trouble, then?”
The female avatar frowned slightly, then said, “I have a... situation. I was told that I could get it solved here.”
“You got a job?” Dex asked, bluntly, his avatar sipping a short rum and ginger beer from a cut glass tumbler while his physical body was slurping dishwater coffee from a B&B mug.
“Yes,” she said, “but this doesn’t have to do with that.”
“Still,” Dex said, putting the drink on the table, “cops are usually one of the benefits of employment. You can’t just go to your Security for this... situation?”
She sighed and her avatar started to look a little angry. Watching the video Dex could see the signs of a user who was quite familiar with the technology at work in rendering an avatar in Marionette City. Her avatar had complex facial expressions that were not part of the default package. Maybe she was a programmer or a UI designer. He didn’t ask, because she made it clear that talking about her job was something she wasn’t planning to do a lot of and it didn’t matter to Dex anyway.
“Look,” she said, planting her hands on the table and leaning over it toward Dex. “This is not the kind of situation I can take to Security. Not only would they not help me, I could maybe even get fired for it. So, no. I can’t go to Security.” She leaned back and seemed to take a deep breath. “Can you help me,” she asked, “or am I wasting both of our time here?”
Dex picked up his empty glass and watched as it filled itself. He took a sip and gestured with the glass to the other chair at the table. “Have a seat.”
• • •
She said her name was Ivy Velasquez and Dex wasn’t sure whether that was her real name or a name she invented for his benefit. It didn’t really matter; the funds she transferred to the organization’s escrow account were real enough. She sat at the table in silence for a moment and Dex just let her sit. He had found over the years that getting people to talk was as easy as creating a void for them to fill. It worked for irate customers who swore at you, too. It was amazing how powerful shutting up for a moment could be.
As usual, the silence finally got to her and she started to explain. “It happened about a week ago. I was at home, it was my weekend. I went to log in to Marionette City and I couldn’t. I wasn’t getting errors or lag, it was as if the login process was wrong somehow. I checked everything to make sure I was using the right schematic...”
Dex stopped her. “What do you mean, the right schematic? You just log in automatically — it’s the same authentication no matter how you get into the ’nets — hell, there shouldn’t be a login sequence at all.”
“Yeah,” Ivy sighed. “I know. But,” she looked around, even though they were talking on a private channel, “I was logging in as a multi. I have another identity. Well... had, I guess.”
Dex took a sip of his drink and sat back. “Okay,” he said. “That explains a lot.”
Even though Dex didn’t say anything else, she was already on the defensive. “There’s nothing wrong with it, you know,” Ivy said, her voice taking on a strident quality. “Sometimes people just change, or want to try something new, it’s no big deal.” Her hands made a smoothing motion over her iridescent white dress that looked like a nervous habit. Watching the video, Dex paused and reran the sequence. He wondered, not for the first time, if Ivy’s avatar was hooked directly into her physical responses. It was fairly trivial to do and made for a much more realistic experience. It just wasn’t that common, since it was an undocumented feature of the three-dimensional interface. And it made Ivy’s avatar look like she was lying, like she had something to hide. Not the smartest move, Dex thought.
“Okay, it’s no big deal,” he said, holding her gaze. “But I know that most employers have a no multis clause in their contracts — they don’t want other identities sneaking around on company property, so to speak. So, I can see why you wouldn’t want to go to Security with this.” Dex swirled the ice cubes in his drink then put it on the table. “What makes you think this is a problem for me,” he asked. “I’m not a programmer — I can’t debug your system.”
Ivy’s avatar’s eyes closed and opened again slowly. “I don’t need a programmer,” she said. “It wasn’t user error. When I couldn’t get in, I logged in as...” She looked a bit sheepish as she gestured at her avatar body, “this and I...” Her voice choked slightly. She regained her composure and finished, “I found the... ah... the body.”
“Really?” He knew his response was not as compassionate as it could have been, but Dex was curious. “There were remains?”
“Yes,” Ivy said, sounding a bit surprised that Dex would ask. “I finally figured out that reason I couldn’t log in was that Reuben — that’s Reuben Cobalt, my multi — was already logged in. I pinged him and tracked him down to an empty area not far from here.” The bar was in a less developed part of the topography of Marionette City, the better to avoid unnecessary walk-in traffic. “I found him there... it was...” Her voice choked again and Dex waited for her to get herself together. “It was horrible.”
She started to describe what she found, but eventually gave up and just sent Dex an image of the scene. He paged away from the video and brought up the high res image. He had to give her credit, she’d had the presence of mind to capture the image before leaving the scene. The image showed an avatar, or what was left of one, lying prone and limp — it reminded Dex more of a deflated sex doll than a human corpse. Even so, Dex could tell that the avatar would have been striking — a tall, thin, male form, with almost silver hair short against his scalp. In this state the hair looked a bit like dull wire, but Dex guessed that it would have shone with luminescence when animated.
But it wasn’t just the lack of movement or “life” that made it clear
that the avatar was fundamentally broken. It was the cuts. Dex didn’t know what else to call them. It wasn’t just the clothes, it was the whole form of the avatar’s body that looked like it had been ripped apart. Dex magnified the image and could see lines of code at the edge of the tears, as if the very essence of the avatar had been destroyed. He paged back to the video and skipped ahead to Ivy’s explanation of what she’d found after taking the remains offline.
“He was recoded,” she said, obviously fighting to keep the emotion from her voice now. “Whoever did this broke into the coding of the avatar, wiped the memory and recoded him. They put him into a loop and I...” Her voice cracked. “He tore himself apart.” She put her head in her hands and her avatar’s body shook slightly. Dex put a hand on her shoulder and she jumped at his touch. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m just not ready...”
“It’s fine,” Dex said, pulling his hand away and reaching for his drink. He silently finished it off and when it was done he didn’t refill the glass. “We’ll need to talk more about this,” he finally said to her. “Here’s a direct link to this place and my messenger address.” He sent her the links and stood up. “I know they wiped the memory, but I’ll need anything you have left from Reuben. Did you ever communicate between, ah, this identity and that one?”
“No,” she said. “I was... I wanted to leave this one behind.” She looked at Dex and he thought he could see tears in the avatar’s eyes. “I hardly even answer to Ivy anymore. In my heart... when I think of myself... It’s Reuben.”
The video ended. Dex had left her there when he linked out of the bar. There was no point in him hanging around; there wasn’t anything he could do for her there. Besides, that place had seen its share of people alone, crying into their virtual drinks.
• • •
When Dex’s shift at B&B ended, he left the building and walked the block or so to the train stop. He used the time to check some messages and sign in to the organization’s network. His messenger popped up a text alert reminding him that his stock of nutrient bricks was getting dangerously low, so he got off the train a stop early and headed into the neighbourhood grocery. He picked up a bulk carton of Econoline, the cheapest brand on sale and as he walked to the door, his eye fell on the booze display.
His messenger hadn’t alerted him to a drop in the rum supply, but Dex had never gotten around to recalibrating the notification to his particular specifications. He didn’t want to have to worry, so he picked up a litre bottle of Jamaica’s Best. It was synthesized in a factory near Shanghai and wasn’t even in the top ten out of that shop, but it got the job done. As he walked out the door, an alert flashed in his vision noting the charge for the provisions and informing him that his account had been debited accordingly. He walked the couple of blocks to his apartment and shouldered his way through the beaten steel door. His room was on the 48th floor and he stepped into the lift to let the spiral carry him up to his floor. After about half a minute he stepped off at his floor and after a few steps down the concrete and steel hall he heard the lock of his door responding to the chip embedded under the skin of his hand.
The door shushed open and Dex stepped in. The room was small, but he didn’t need a lot. He stowed the fresh box of Econoline bricks on the floor below the water tap and zapper. He shook the last few bricks out of the previous box, opening one and taking a bite of the chewy, brown mass. He stuffed the old box in the recyclatron and left the remaining bars on top of the new box. He put the new bottle of Jamaica’s Best into the cupboard, taking out the open, quarter full bottle and a tumbler. With the food brick wedged in his teeth, Dex opened the rum and poured a generous portion into the tumbler. He opened the cooler and pulled out a can of Gingapop. It wasn’t as good as real ginger beer, but that was expensive and hard to come by, so Dex made do. He popped open the can and splashed a bit of the soda into the glass and stirred it with his index finger. He took a long drink, then sat at his small table.
Before he forgot, Dex paged over to the Cubicle Men’s system and logged the time he’d spent reviewing the record of his meeting with Ivy. He wasn’t paid by the hour and it really didn’t matter, but the organization liked to keep track of the both the time each member spent on a case, but also how much of their regular job time they were using for the organization’s work. They didn’t just fill a niche that the firms left blank; the Cubicle Men were philosophically opposed to the prevailing social system, so they encouraged their members to use their employer’s time and resources as much as possible. Getting caught and subsequently fired would be going too far, though. It would certainly be possible to survive without a mainstream job, but it would be unnecessarily difficult.
Dex read over a few internal memos, logged his time and paged out of the system. He knew that he ought to review the information about the Ivy/Reuben case, but he just didn’t feel like it. He didn’t have any information other than what was on the video and the image and he’d gone over that at B&B already. Instead, he paged over to another video. It was also a recording from his own system, only it had been made years ago, long before he had even heard of the Cubicle Men. He’d often thought that it was a good thing that video was all software now, because otherwise he’d have watched this footage until it fell apart. He spent the night slugging from his bottle of Best and watching it again. By the time he took a hit of SleepingJuice and fell into his narrow bed, he was glad that he’d picked up another bottle of rum.