by Toby Weston
Its various stomachs were filled with bottles, cans, and shreds of plastic plankton. Over weeks, progressing through its alimentary canal towards its artificial anus, the millions of fragments of drifting debris slowly acquired a growing encrustation of coral, until, ultimately, within the rearmost sections of its synthetic bowel, a solid mass of calcium carbonate matrix packed its pseudo-rectum.
Niato pulled away, his POV quickly rising into the air and revealing the segmented back and translucent flank of the ScumWhale. Its pale, sinuous body and armoured head made it look like a wood-boring larva, flexing in a puddle after being evicted from the dark safety of its log.
Pulling back further, the curve of the Earth became apparent. Overlays and annotations cluttered his field of view. Hundreds of other ScumWhales were highlighted, some leaving, others returning from months at sea. These converged on Bäna Island, where they would wait until the tide was right, and then the gigantic artificial creatures would swim into the vast pens at the north of the island. Here, wallowing in the warm shallow waters, like metal-headed Ctenophores congregating to spawn, they would void their bowels, letting a chalky gravel settle into the millions of rectangular moulds that lined the floor of the pens. Then, as the tide began to turn, they would head back out to open waters to start their slow journey back to the infinite swirling garbage gyres.
Over several weeks, the plastic-speckled coral gravel would settle and harden as the polyps completed their work, pulling carbon from the water to build their skeletons. The loose bleached stool would eventually solidify into honeycomb blocks of limestone, lightweight and carbon negative. Dried and brushed smooth, the blocks would then be piled into towering walls and pyramids, ready to be taken to the construction projects that had turned much of the jungle paradise into something more reminiscent of an open cast mine.
From a sufficiently elevated perspective, the piles of limestone blocks looked like sugarcube sculptures. At the same scale, the black shapes perched upon them would be chunky tropical ants.
Niato’s guests were still a few minutes away, so he zoomed in his POV; the ants resolved into chimpanzees. Twenty or so lounged on blocky bulwarks, many eating oranges. One was jumping animatedly on the back of a trailer, which was empty, apart from a single block. Two other chimps close by, who seemed to be the target of the jumping screamer’s agitation, were pointedly ignoring her. A small group of elephants stood nearby, picking distractedly at a few blades of grass.
One of Niato’s guilty pleasures was his fascination with the soap opera politics that defined the simple lives of his simian subjects. Giving in to his voyeuristic urges, he decided to use his royal super-user privileges to eavesdrop on the little tableau.
The two chimpanzees, who were now licking the peel of their eviscerated oranges, started paying a modicum of attention to their irate, orange-less, colleague.
‘Work; exclamation’ YellowHat sent, simultaneous with another vocal scream, whose content was clear across the species divide without translation.
The lounging pair looked away nonchalantly, apparently interested in the horizon.
To an agent participating in the Mesh-mediated consensual hallucination, the lone physical block was accompanied by a trailer full of spectral white cubes. Together, the real and virtual blocks covered the base. Three hovering virtual oranges rotated slowly above the blocks. To further clarify the transaction, the virtual oranges and translucent virtual blocks would intermittently disappear, the blocks reappearing one at a time, until the trailer was virtually full again, at which point the oranges would also pop back into existence, looking juicier and more enticing than ever.
Several trucks were standing empty in the region. It was already late morning. Most of the chimps had already earned their breakfast.
The blocks disappeared again and, one by one, they began to re-materialise. This time, however, after the last block had manifested, instead of the usual orange icons, six oversized virtual cigarettes popped into existence. Instantly, the two orange eaters jumped up and raced towards the trailer. They immediately found blocks and, using their impressive strength, began piling limestone onto the bed of the trailer.
YellowHat looked on with shock and outrage. Clearly, she was more interested in her breakfast than a smoke break. Five other apes had now also raced up to join the fray. Motivated by the promise of nicotine, the apes worked in a frenzy while YellowHat deliberated.
Soon, the trailer was filled. Less than a minute after the last block was stacked, a drone whizzed down out of the air. The chimps went berserk as it distributed the pre-agreed six cigarettes. The share of loot was impeccably fair—two ciggies going to the chimp who had moved the most blocks, the others going to four more happy apes. That left three very pissed-off chimpanzees: two workers with nothing, and YellowHat, who clearly felt she had been betrayed by her drug-addicted colleagues and would now have to load a whole cart herself if she wanted any breakfast.
The empty-handed chimps began to circle their shrieking co-workers, who were holding their prizes high out of reach in anticipation of robbery.
‘Negative; stealing; exclamation’ the drone sent, flashing its red and blue lights and blaring its siren.
Early on, there had been a lot more violence; however, after running the experiment for several years, the chimps were familiar with the rules. They knew they would lose the right to work the block yard if they caused any trouble.
An elephant broke off from the small herd and used its trunk to pull the harness over its head. It set off, pulling the loaded cart towards Atlantis City, where its reward would be waiting.
Niato again delighted in the different temperaments of the two mammals. The elephants didn’t bicker or posture. A few bars of infrasound and the odd stamped foot and the decision of who was to go next was made.
Although they were capable, the elephants rarely used their neural Companions to communicate. They were happy with their own rich, sonorous language. Humans who wanted to join in their moots were expected to converse in the same low-frequency grumbles.
“Hey!” a voice exclaimed, while a hand grabbed his upper arm.
Niato started and instinctively lifted his Spex to see what was up.
A short, wiry man was holding his arm tightly. He was dressed somewhat unusually in a close-fitting white shirt buttoned up to the collar and a tight pair of black trousers with pointy shoes. He was smiling, but little else of his face could be discerned because of the translucent animated plastic mask he wore over his face.
“Spying?” he asked.
“I guess so,” Niato replied. “How long have you been there?”
“I just got here. It’s looking good!” said the man.
“You think so? I think it looks like a wound!”
“It looks like a bowl of broken eggs. Want to see the omelette?”
“Just one sec.” Niato let his Spex fall back down over his eyes. YellowHat was still alone, barely a third of the way through loading another trailer. He again invoked godlike powers and caused the three orange icons to appear prematurely, rewarding the stoic chimp for her persistence.
“You know the way you use your superior intellect to manipulate their primitive urges and trick them into working for you?” said the man. “It’s ironically similar to what the Forwards and their Sages are doing, don’t you think? And, if I remember, it’s one of the main reasons you persuaded us to build this city in the first place.”
“It’s not the same,” Niato replied defensively. “This is fair. The chimps are happy with the deal. And so are the high-IQ, highly paid, primate advocates we employ to make sure we are not pandering to any baser urges. This is the Golden Rule. We are treating them as we would want to be treated.”
“Want to be treated—if we were chimps and if our idea of a good time was a handful of oranges.”
“Exactly. But we do give them cigarettes, too.”
“How the hell is that better?”
“That’s what they want. And
the vets say one a day doesn’t do much statistically to their mortality.”
“I suppose they can always leave… oh wait, they can’t, can they?”
“True, but at the end of the day, can we?”
“Not yet, your Highness. Not yet!”
They both smiled at this. The shape of the conversation was familiar. Since first meeting many years ago, in dim back rooms amongst funky hippies and bearded eco-terrorists, they had beaten these same ideas back and forth. Things had changed since then. Inheriting economy destabilising amounts of wealth had shifted the game from frustrated impotent bewailing, to empire-building transformation; and, although their methods and principles might differ, the core vision remained locked onto a remote, glittering future they both saw clearly.
“So, you want to take a look at your finished omelette?” said the man.
“Absolutely,” replied Niato. “When is Atlantis On Line going live?”
“AOL is live. Golden master. You are our first user. When the others get here, we are going to give them the tour and then throw open the doors.”
Niato dropped his Spex back down over his eyes and entered the shared space his friend had conjured. The view out to sea and over the forest remained. The sugarcube stacks of stone and the muddy scars had vanished. It was, however, only when he turned his head towards the massive, opencast mine that was Bäna’s capital city that the divergence between the AOL’s virtual and solid reality became significant.
Atlantis City was a tropical Venice. They had taken liberties with Plato’s plans. Instead of concentric canals, they had chosen a single loose spiral, spanned with bridges and lined with delicate, narrow, four or five-storey villas. Tropical jungle infiltrated the city; ferns and palms growing from balconies and terraces, figs and climbers questing out of cracks and chinks between buildings. Lengths of canal bank were left raw with mangrove, or as sandy banks. No people thronged the streets or bridges. The only perceptible movement was from gigantic lizards positioning themselves in the sun, or birds and butterflies fluttering between plants and roofs.
Niato lifted his Spex again. The vision was still a long way from reality. The looping spiral of the Grand Canal was visible, like a tribal scar in the mud, as was the mouth of the colossal pipe, which would link the canal with the ocean and allow clever use of tides to drive a current out from the centre. The basements of the buildings were mostly dug and reinforced. In iceberg fashion, the quaint villas above were mere ornamentation for ten storeys of subterranean living and working space.
With the Spex down again, Niato projected himself into the city and walked some of its alleys and crossed its graceful sandstone bridges.
“Like we said,” said the man, “the underground floor-plans are fixed and going in now, but everything above ground can be altered. Once the founding backers are done choosing their pads, we will let in the other players. October is still the official launch, but we’ll let some beta-testers in before then.”
“I like it.”
“I hope so! You designed it!”
“The people are going to design it, and then we will build it.”
Like the Caliph’s city of Punt, cut into and conglomerated onto the rock of Ras Siyyan, Atlantis City would first live in the virtual before being birthed into atoms. Atlantis On Line, the game they were exploring, commissioned by Niato, was a massive multiplayer pirate-based trading and crafting game. At a nerdier level, it was also a distributed virtual polity. It intersected the real world at the island of Bäna, where the walls between the virtual and real dissolved. Economy, immigration, planning, and hundreds of other aspects of commerce and government would eventually function through the game.
The virtual Atlantis would start as a ghost, but real atoms and minds would gradually fill out its form.
Successful players, who could afford to buy in-game loot, would own real-world analogues. Of course, the founding backers would be given first dibs. That’s what today was about, a virtual real-estate viewing for the billionaire philanthropist early backers. Space and media moguls were fighting for properties along the Atlantis City Grand Canal—real estate, they had been told, which would one day be amongst the most desirable in the solar system.
The novelty of Atlantis, which hovered ambiguously in the media’s perceptions between tacky vanity project and ruthless cynical gaming of the world’s geo-political rule book, attracted silly amounts of money from across the demographic spectrum.
One night alone, listening to the wind and drowning in the smells of incense and wisteria, Niato had conceived the shape of this plan to honour his grandfather. He hadn’t known then how far he would get with this attempt to follow the man’s last request and right the family’s wrongs.
At first, he hadn’t appreciated just how rich his grandfather had made him. He had assumed that, eventually, the money would run out, but slowly he experienced that strange property of money: after reaching some sort of critical mass, it reproduced autonomously. The more he had spent on land and bribes, the more he had accumulated through donations and bequests. When he wanted to build a school or hospital, guilty oligarchs would trip over one another to sponsor museums or libraries.
The revelation he could sell an entire city off plan had kicked the enterprise into a new gear. And karma was rewarding him. His portfolio, especially his tier-one investment in Astrocosmos Near-Earth Mining-Company, continued to deliver torrents of new money. In fact, Niato’s wealth was now many times what it had been when he had inherited his grandfather’s controlling share in the world’s biggest restaurant chain.
Turning towards the dormant volcano, Niato flitted his perception towards the virtual Royal Palace. He let his eyes pierce the rock, tracing the tunnels and rooms driven into its interior, the pipes and heat engines sipping from deep volcanic thermal masses. The tower…
“What do you think?”
“I like it,” said Naito. “You’ve done a great job. There must be a lot of hackers out there that we owe.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that. Yeah, there are probably a couple of thousand little nerds typing away as we speak. Most of them would do it for the fun and challenge anyway, but the chance of having an Atlantis passport and a new start! You don’t have to worry about owing them. They are loyal to the idea, and to you for building the impossible… and, of course, to their leaders. We are Nebulous!”
Niato suppressed a shiver. He always thought it sounded a little too ominous.
“Don’t overdo that stuff. I don’t want thousands of your sleeper agents moving in, just to bide their time until you give the signal to overthrow me.”
“Ha! Consider it insurance against the temptations of power!”
“Great.”
“Oh, by the way, talking about Nebulous,” said the man. “We’ve been helping out a bit with those kidnapped girls you might have read about.”
“Oh yes, from my tuna farm?”
“It’s not yours. It was your grandfather’s. You sold it. But yes. We used some of our BugNet resources to track down the pirates and, funny coincidence, that guy Keith, who we took wingsuiting… Remember him?”
“Sure, the tortured corporate soul… nasty right jab.”
“Yeah, that’s him. Well, he’s just shown up on the radar again. It looks like, after his anti-authoritarian punching spree, he ended up in a UK battlesuit brigade. A few months ago, he got shot up over Zilistan, and something about his story must have been fishy, because he was sent to a high security psychiatric hospital.”
“Shit. Poor guy.”
“He leads an interesting life. So, then he gets busted out by two talented little hackers we already had our eyes on. They managed to recruit him as the spear for their rescue attempt. Apparently, one or both of them have a thing for one of the girls. We’re keeping eyes on it, but it looks like a nicely put together operation. If something goes wrong, we’ll send some assets when they get a bit closer.”
“Small world,” said Niato. “I’m glad he’s en
ded up on the right side. Keep me posted. Let me know how it goes. You know, I don’t believe in coincidences. Seems like the universe still has a role to play for Keith Wilson. Maybe we can find some work for him if it turns out okay.”
Landed, showered, and checked into another hotel, Keith almost felt like he was on holiday. The kids had given him a day off. The pirates wouldn’t be showing up for another couple of days. There had been a lot of briefings and training, but he had spent as much time as he could spare lying naked on the almost unbearably hot sand of a deserted beach, only a few minutes away from his hotel. He kept his new rubber foot on, even when he was naked. It was part of him now. He only took it off to empty sand out of the socket, or at night to let it charge.
The beach was empty, despite being separated from the swarms of tourists on the hotel side by a single tongue of volcanic rock. Keith hadn’t considered the possibility that the beach was only deserted because it had a bearded naked man, with a cybernetic foot, lying spreadeagled in the middle of it. He wouldn’t have cared, anyway. He was too busy being soothed by white noise from small waves and from the brisk wind rustling through the palms at the top of the beach. The coral sand was white and clean—and, best of all, not soaked in blood or prone to sloughing off clouds of throat-clenching dust. Keith liked to let it run through his fingers.
