Realms Unreel

by Audrey Auden

  Dom looked up from the corner of the Lab where Emmie was giggling at a life-sized three-dimensional projection of her Papou, sitting behind his desk in Massachusetts. Grandfather and granddaughter were engrossed in a game of peek-a-boo, Papou having offered to watch Emmie for a few hours that afternoon when the usual Lab babysitter had needed to cancel at the last minute. Dom found Frank watching another three-dimensional projection across the room, beckoning to Travis.

  “What is it?” said Travis, descending the stairs. He stood next to his brother, and together they watched as Frank replayed a recording of a recent product test. The recording began with seven men and five women — product testers — standing in a row on the fenced-in lot outside the warehouse. Each wore a headset and form-fitting sensory augmentation clothing.

  Travis leaned in closer as the recording flickered. The product testers now appeared dressed in formal evening wear, standing on a crowded dance floor beneath a star-studded night sky. Twelve glowing green spheres pulsed slowly above the avatars of the product testers.

  The three-dimensional projection now split into two separate projections. The first showed the recording of the physical lot: twelve product testers in headsets and sensory augmentation clothing. The second showed the recording of the ballroom simulation: twelve product tester avatars surrounded by a simulated crowd.

  “Please wait for your dance instructor, who will take you through the steps of the waltz,” a woman’s voice instructed.

  In the ballroom, twelve new avatars stepped out from the simulated crowd and onto the dance floor. Six of these avatars had glowing red spheres pulsing above their heads. The other six were marked with glowing blue spheres.

  “The live instructors,” murmured Frank, pointing out the six red markers, “and the simulated instructors,” he said, pointing out the six blue markers. Travis nodded, his eyes never leaving the projection.

  The soft strains of a waltz began to play. In the recording of simulated reality, the six live and six simulated instructors demonstrated the steps of the dance, eventually taking hands with their partners and beginning to swirl around the dance floor, coattails and ballgowns fanning out behind them. In the recording of physical reality, Dom watched with interest as six live couples danced across the asphalt alongside six solo product testers dancing with unseen partners.

  When the music stopped, the six live and six simulated instructors bowed, said farewell to their partners, and departed the dance floor. In physical reality, six live instructors slipped out of the test lot through a back door and into the Lab.

  The woman behind the camera prompted the product testers to remove their headsets. Several of the testers, emerging from the simulation, nodded at one another, evidently impressed. A pair of Lab engineers set up a circle of metal folding chairs in the center of the lot, where the twelve testers sat for a follow-up interview.

  “Here we go,” said Frank, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

  A Lab intern scribbled notes while one of the hardware engineers asked questions about the fit and comfort of the sensory augmentation gear. One of the designers asked questions about the quality of the simulation content, trying to identify what aspects were particularly realistic versus particularly unconvincing. After discussing the product testers’ thoughts on these points, the designer said,

  “Before you go, we’d like you to fill out a brief survey to rate the quality of your dance instructor on several metrics. Six of you had our live instructors, while the other six danced with projected instructors from a studio in San Francisco. Just note which type of instructor you had using the checkboxes at the top of the survey. And, thanks, everyone!”

  The intern handed out a dozen paper surveys with clipboards and pencils, and Dom watched as the product testers scribbled down their answers and turned them in before thanking the woman behind the camera. The recording stopped.

  Travis turned to Frank, looking excited.

  “Well?” Travis said impatiently.

  Frank rustled the stack of surveys in his hand, grinning as he said,

  “Twelve for twelve.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  Frank grinned from ear to ear in answer, and Travis smacked his forehead in amazement.

  “We rocked it!” Travis hollered across the hall toward a group of engineers in the midst of a heated debate over the merits of a new heat-dissipating conductive fabric. Baby Emmie turned around, startled by the noise, a wire-seamed glove with blinking fingertips dangling from her hands.

  Travis called the rest of the team down to the first floor. Dom stood beside a young woman with square-rimmed glasses, pink hair, and a form-fitting sensory augmentation tunic over black leather pants. Frank sat on the edge of the bench just behind Travis.

  “Listen up, guys,” Travis said, pacing the concrete floor before the group of men and women looking up at him expectantly from the lab benches, “Today’s a big day for the Lab. A big day for the whole sensory augmentation community. These users —” he pointed to Frank, who waved the product tester surveys at the team, grinning, “These users just experienced a simulated human interaction so convincing that it was for them indistinguishable from physical reality.”

  This pronouncement was met with shouts and cheers and a great deal of applause. When the ruckus died down a bit, Travis continued,

  “This is a huge step forward. The holy grail is within our reach. High-fidelity simulated reality is coming. We’re going to erase the boundary between the real and the unreal.

  “I know there have been a lot of long days. And nights. And weekends. I thank you for that. Because of you, I’m finally going to be able to tell my dad that those long hours playing video games in the basement weren’t wholly wasted.”

  “Will you tell my dad, too?” someone called out amidst the general laughter. Travis smiled and said,

  “Tonight, we celebrate. Drinks on me. Then I want you to go home and get some rest, because we’ve still got a long way to go.”

  ∞

  Three-year-old Emmie sat under the bridge table that Daddy had set out on the deck. Daddy took out the table once a week when Nanna and Grandpa came over to play bridge. Emmie emptied a box of crayons onto the tile floor. She picked the red, blue, green, and purple. Next to the crayons, she placed the Jack of Spades and the Queen of Diamonds. These cards had fallen onto the floor when Daddy and Grandpa got up from the table to go to the kitchen. Emmie considered the crayons, thinking very hard about which color she should use first.

  She looked up expectantly and saw the dark-haired man in the funny dress and big leather belt, hiding under the table next to her. He always came when Emmie was trying to make hard choices like this. He reached out his hand and tapped the red crayon. She considered the red, then nodded in approval and began coloring over the long white hair of the Queen of Diamonds.

  Above her, Mama was talking while Nanna shuffled cards.

  “I wish I could get him to leave all these sensory augmentation devices back at the Lab,” Mama said to Nanna.

  “Good luck,” Nanna laughed, “We could never keep those boys apart from their toys.”

  “We don’t even know how any of this technology affects the adult brain, much less the brain of a developing child,” said Mama. She sounded angry.

  “We said the same thing about video games,” said Nanna, “But the boys turned out —” her phone rang, and she said, “Just a second. I need to take this.”

  Nanna’s office assistant called her all day long. Grandpa didn’t like that. Nanna said a few things to her phone, then said to Mama,

  “Sorry, Ana. What were you saying?”

  “I just worry that, with all this simulated reality, Emmie won’t get to have any real experiences,” said Mama.

  Emmie perked up at the mention of her name, but Mama didn’t say anything else about her. Emmie kept coloring the Jack and Queen, now using the green crayon. They would live in the dollhouse hovering before her, projected from the
smartcom. Daddy had given Emmie her very own smartcom. It could make a hundred different dollhouses, and dolls, too, but Emmie liked drawing dolls for herself.

  “There’s nothing less real about simulated reality, Ana,” said Daddy. Emmie saw his feet and Grandpa’s coming back up from the stairs that went down to the kitchen. Emmie heard the tinkle of some bottles and glasses above her on the table, then the beeping of Daddy doing something on his smartcom. “Look,” he said.

  “Hi, Dad,” said Ollie. Emmie looked up at Ollie’s voice and came out from under the table. Beside Daddy, she saw a projection of her sister, who was sitting behind a big table. Emmie waved happily at her sister. Ollie had been gone for almost two weeks, and Emmie missed her.

  “Ollie! Hi, Ollie!” she said.

  “Hi, Emmie!” her sister waved back.

  “How’s math camp, sweetheart?” asked Daddy.

  Ollie rolled her eyes and tugged the end of her long, blonde braid.

  “Are you going to make me do this every summer? I get A’s in math. Is it really that important for me to like it, too?”

  Daddy reached out toward the projection and put his hand under Ollie’s chin so that she looked up at him. Ollie wrinkled her nose and rubbed her chin. Daddy’s special headsets made your skin feel funny sometimes.

  “Someday,” Daddy said to Ollie, “when you learn about groups, rings, and fields, you’ll thank me.”

  Ollie sighed.

  “I’ve got to go. I’ve got loads of homework. Loads.” She sounded very grown-up and serious, but Emmie knew Ollie loved homework.

  “All right, babygirl. Give me a call if you need any help.”

  “Cheers, Dad.”

  Daddy switched off the projection and turned to Mama.

  “See?” he laughed, “It’s as good as having her right here.”

  Mama opened her mouth, but before she could say anything she looked down and saw the cards Emmie was coloring under the table.

  “Oh, Emmie!” she scolded. Emmie felt hot tears filling her eyes. Mama was upset with her again. Then Mama smiled and said, “It’s okay, sweetheart. Here, let’s get you some real paper.”

  She picked up Emmie and started carrying her toward the stairs that led down into the house. Emmie looked back and saw the man who had been sitting with her under the table disappear, and she giggled. That funny man could hide better than anyone else. Mama called back to Daddy,

  “You hear that, Travis? She needs real paper!”

  ∞

  Five-year-old Emmie lay on her belly atop an empty server rack in her father’s office, swinging her sensory augmentation headset over the edge like a metronome.

  “Are you almost done?” she whined. She had been waiting practically forever for Daddy to stop writing email and come play with her in the spliner. With his authorization code and a few pieces of sensory augmentation equipment, the spliner could become almost anything. The forest simulation was what she had in mind: the perfect place for a game of chase.

  “Just one more minute, sweetheart,” Daddy said distantly. Emmie grumbled and made a face, but he never looked up from his laptop.

  The office door swung open, and Uncle Frank burst in.

  “You’ve got to read this,” he said, waving a stapled printout in his hand.

  “Busy,” said Daddy, “Email it to me.”

  Uncle Frank dropped the printout on Daddy’s keyboard. Daddy pushed back angrily from his desk and threw up his hands.

  “I’m the goddamn CEO! What do I have to do to get a minute of peace around here?”

  Emmie stopped swinging her headset and stared at her father wide-eyed. He sounded like Grandpa. Uncle Frank looked like he wanted to step back out of the office.

  “Sorry, Travis,” he said, “You’re still sorting out those malfunction complaints?”

  Daddy nodded, closing his eyes for a moment, his mouth set in a straight line. He let out a deep breath and looked down at the paper on his keyboard.

  “It’s okay. Sorry for yelling at you. So, what’s so important?” He slipped on his reading glasses. “The Death of the Internet …” he read aloud, trailing off as his eyes traveled down the page.

  “So, what?” Daddy said, looking up at Uncle Frank, “She’s not the first grad student to complain about government surveillance of the internet. She also sounds pretty paranoid and misinformed.”

  “I think she made some good points. But anyway, it’s the response that’s interesting.”

  Daddy turned to the next page.

  “Alternet Protocol Specification, by The Anonymous Collective …” He read on silently, flipped to the next page, then the next. Emmie could see black and white drawings on the pages as he turned them. When he came to the last page, he took off his reading glasses and said,

  “I don’t know that much about complex adaptive systems, but — Yeah, I guess you could work around communication monitoring with a network like that. But who would bother? Most people don’t care about government snooping that much.”

  “It’s not just about government surveillance. The internet is becoming so heavily regulated now that, pretty soon, only the big guys will be able to play on the network. The startup economy is tanking already, and it’s only going to get worse.”

  “Da-a-ad,” Emmie whined softly, apprehensive that a long and boring conversation was about to take place.

  Uncle Frank looked down at her.

  “Ah. Waiting for spliner time?”

  Emmie nodded.

  “I’ve got a new African safari simulation that could use an expert opinion. Want to check it out?”

  Emmie grinned up at him. Uncle Frank was fun to play with. He even let her wear some of the prototype sensory augmentation gear, if she promised not to tell her mother. Uncle Frank glanced at her father, who said,

  “That’d be great. Chase another time, okay, Emmie?”

  She nodded and ran happily after Uncle Frank to go on safari.

  ∞

  Just a few weeks later, Emmie heard Uncle Frank talking excitedly about the Alternet Protocol Specification again. He said the people who made it, the Anonymous Collective, had written a manifesto. They said that the Alternet Age had arrived, and that they had set up eight places for people to connect to the alternet. Uncle Frank said that pretty soon there would be places to connect to the alternet everywhere in the entire world.

  One of the eight places turned out to be in the community garden toolshed just a few blocks away from the Lab. Uncle Frank took Emmie with him to see it.

  “You’ll be able to tell your grandkids that you were here the day the alternet was born,” he said, looking down at her as they walked along the uneven sidewalk toward the community garden.

  “But what is the alternet?” said Emmie.

  “It’s just a protocol now,” said Uncle Frank, “That means it’s a way for a lot of computers to talk to each other. A protocol is a language that a bunch of computers all understand. The internet started as a protocol, too. The internet is just millions and millions of computers, all talking to each other using the same protocol. Big computers, like the servers at the Lab, and little computers, like the ones you see on mobile phones and smartcoms, they can all talk to each other with the internet protocol.”

  “Why does there need to be another protocol, if the computers can all talk to each other already?”

  “That’s a very good question. It’s because, on the internet, there are these highways. Computers that want to talk to each other have to send their messages to other computers over the highways. Like how we use the freeway to travel from home to the Lab. And different people own the internet highways. The problem is that sometimes the people who own the highways don’t let everyone use them. Sometimes they even read messages that don’t belong to them.”

  “Why do they do that?”

  Uncle Frank smiled grimly.

  “Some people like to control information. But information wants to be free.”

  Emmie didn’
t understand that, but she didn’t have a chance to ask any more questions because just then they came to the chain link fence of the community garden. Uncle Frank opened the gate, and they followed the path between twelve well-tended raised beds that led to the toolshed. Uncle Frank pointed at the roof, where a black box topped by a palm-sized solar panel glinted in the sun.

  “That’s it?” said Emmie, disappointed.

  “Yep. That’s it,” said Uncle Frank, grinning.

  Uncle Frank was right. Pretty soon, Emmie saw little black boxes, and all sorts of other kinds of alternet connection points, everywhere.

  “That’s because the information routing application runs on pretty much every consumer electronic device,” Uncle Frank had explained. He seemed very excited about this. “It’s very well designed. Peer-to-peer, anonymous, and lightweight. It’s spreading like wildfire.”

  That sounded pretty worrisome to Emmie. A group of teenagers had started a wildfire last summer by one of the biggest houses in the Berkeley hills. Daddy said it was sad because it gave all the protestors a bad name. Mama said it was sad because they were so ignorant. Emmie thought it was sad because a lot of people had died. She had even been able to smell the smoke from her house.

  Later, though, Emmie decided the alternet wasn’t scary at all. In fact, the alternet turned out to be one of her very favorite things. People starting putting the most wonderful things on the alternet, and, with all the immergers Uncle Frank and Daddy let her use at the Lab, she suddenly became able to visit worlds she could never have imagined.

  ∞

  Over the next several months, Dom observed an escalation of activity at the Lab as retinal projection devices, sensory feedback garments, audiovisual motion simulators, and environment modeling tools poured from the shelves of the warehouse. The rapid growth of the alternet and the proliferation of the multi-sensory content that the new protocol supported drove sales of Lab sensory augmentation equipment through the roof. In the year that followed the appearance of the public alternet access point in the community garden toolshed, Dom noticed several new words enter the Lab lexicon.