Realms Unreel

by Audrey Auden

  The first was alternet domain. A domain was a collection of alternet content, often contained in a three-dimensional representation of some kind of physical environment.

  Fast upon the heels of alternet domain was immersion. Immersion was accessing alternet content that provided a convincing multi-sensory experience.

  To the delight of the Lab, their own team coined the word immerger, which gained traction in the tech community. An immerger was anything that aided immersion, including most of the products the Lab designed.

  And finally there was Tomo. Tomo Yoshimoto was the Japanese alternet domain designer whose alternet domain Kaisei epitomized immersion. Kaisei and its creator had become an international sensation.

  Comparison to Tomo became the highest praise Travis could bestow upon his own designers. Frank’s engineers engaged in an ongoing battle of one-upmanship to improve the experience of Tomo’s Kaisei through ever more subtle refinements to their sensory augmentation gear. The Lab’s entire mission might have been understood as the enablement of Tomo-quality immersion experiences.

  Dom followed Emmie for days after the launch of Kaisei as she explored the domain in full head-to-toe immergers. He was as awestruck as she by the acres of Japanese gardens through which users entered the domain. The expansive content beyond grew only more ethereal and wonderful. Dom might have wandered the subdomains of Kaisei at Emmie’s side indefinitely had not the first day of kindergarten arrived.

  ∞

  “Everybody hates me,” six-year-old Emmie wailed, bursting into her sister’s bedroom one day after school. Twelve-year-old Ollie stood staring into space, probably immersed in alternet research for school.

  Ollie blinked, refocusing her eyes from the visual overlay rendered by her retinal-projection glasses. She quickly took in Emmie’s running nose, red with rubbing, and puffy eyes, wet with tears. She pushed back her glasses, peeled off her immerger gloves, and hauled Emmie up onto her bed. They flopped back onto the squishy, sky-blue comforter, Emmie’s dark curls entangling with Ollie’s long blonde hair.

  “What happened?”

  Emmie recounted between sobs how a mean group of girls had, just before recess, stolen everything out of her school desk. They had even taken the set of perfectly-sharpened colored pencils Uncle Frank had given her for her birthday. Realizing too late what those girls had done, Emmie had rushed out onto the playground just in time to watch through the chain link fence as a stack of her drawings blew away. Almost all of her pencils had rolled down the sidewalk into the storm drain, too.

  “Wow,” Ollie said seriously, “That was really mean.”

  Ollie knew all about mean girls. The girls in her class teased her because she was so smart, and because she didn’t care much about clothes or boys or sleepover parties. Ollie only cared about grown-up things.

  “And now my pictures —” Emmie sniffed, “I made them for Mama’s birthday, and now they’re all lost! I don’t think I can ever make such good drawings, not ever again.”

  Ollie looped one of Emmie’s curls around her finger and pulled it back like a spring,

  “Well, if you put something on paper, you’re bound to lose it eventually. And then, poof —” she let go of the curl, which bounced against Emmie’s face, “it’s gone.”

  Emmie began to sob again, but Ollie hushed her.

  “Listen. If you want to make a drawing that you can’t lose, one that will last forever, you need to make lots and lots of copies and hide them everywhere.”

  Emmie stopped mid-sob,

  “But how? I can’t even make two copies look the same.”

  “You don’t draw with paper and pencil, then,” said Ollie, indicating the pair of immerger gloves she had placed on her desk. Emmie frowned. She didn’t understand.

  Ollie sighed and said in her teacher-voice,

  “Emmie, do you think that when the designers at the Lab make — I don’t know — a table, a shoe, a flower — that, when they need another one, they build it again from scratch? Do you think Tomo designs every single leaf on every single tree separately?”

  Emmie shrugged. Tomo could do anything.

  “Well,” said Ollie, “He doesn’t. He designs something once, and then he stores it in a content library on the alternet. When he needs to put it in one of his domains, he takes a copy, and then when he needs another, he takes another. The alternet servers do all the hard work, making the copies. And not only that, but the alternet servers are constantly making new copies and sending them to other servers, so the only way to lose your content is if you lost the entire alternet too.”

  Emmie stared at her sister, mouthing the words the entire alternet.

  “So,” Ollie said decisively, “You should just make your drawings for the alternet. You’ll be like Tomo. Now,” she shooed Emmie off the bed, “Get out of here. I’ve got work to do.”

  Emmie stuck out her tongue at her sister, then dried her eyes and trotted off to her room, all the while repeating under her breath,

  “The entire alternet. The entire alternet.”

  ∞

  Emmie didn’t forget Ollie’s advice. She spent the next several days learning to use some of the alternet design software at the Lab. She found out that it was very easy to forget about silly girls when she could build a whole world of her own.

  The night of Mama’s birthday dinner, Emmie had just finished making her present for her mother — a big three-dimensional portrait of her entire family — when she heard the loud laughter of Uncle Frank. He was the first guest to arrive. Emmie dropped her drawing stylus, threw her immergers on the bed, and raced up to the kitchen.

  “Uncle Frank!” she cried happily.

  “Hey, little girl,” he said, reaching down to tickle her and mess up her hair.

  “Where’s my tree?” she said, giggling and pulling at his long sleeve.

  “Emmie,” Mama warned, “Don’t be rude.”

  “Oh, let her, Ana,” said Daddy, “Frank likes showing off his arms to the girls.” Uncle Frank’s girlfriend Nora seemed to think this was very funny. Emmie didn’t like Nora very much. Whenever she was around, it was hard to get Uncle Frank’s attention. But now, Uncle Frank was paying attention to Emmie, and he rolled up his sleeve for her. Underneath, stretched out across his muscley arm, there was a great big tree that covered the skin from his shoulder all the way down to his elbow.

  “You added more branches,” said Emmie, delighted, tracing the fresh lines worked into the skin.

  “Well, you just keep growing,” said Uncle Frank.

  “Does it hurt?” she said, looking up in concern.

  “Yes,” said Mama, with the voice that meant someone was about to get into trouble. Uncle Frank said seriously,

  “Yes. Tattoos hurt very much. That’s why you will never, ever, get one. You’ll just have to be happy with your one tree.”

  “It’s not really her tree, though,” Ollie said, “You started that tattoo before she was even born, didn’t you, Uncle Frank?”

  Emmie looked up at Uncle Frank expectantly.

  “We-e-ell,” Uncle Frank said, “That’s true, but it wouldn’t be the same without the drawing Emmie made for me.”

  “You still have it, don’t you?” Emmie said. She was proud that Uncle Frank had used her own drawing for his tattoo.

  “Sure do,” said Uncle Frank. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He took out a worn piece of paper folded many times over. He handed it to Emmie, and she spread out the paper on the countertop for Mama to see.

  “Yes, sweetheart. I see it. It’s very well done.”

  “I did it all by myself.”

  “Emmie,” Mama said gently, “Don’t exaggerate.”

  Emmie rolled her eyes.

  “Oh, all right. I traced it from a photo of a tree in Mama’s office.”

  Emmie saw that Mama looked a little sad about this. Mama didn’t like to talk about those photographs, even though she kept them in lots of different rooms in the
house. Emmie didn’t understand it.

  “Ah!” Uncle Frank laughed, “So our little artist is a plagiarist?”

  “What’s a plagiarist?” asked Emmie.

  “It’s someone who steals someone else’s work and takes credit for it,” said Ollie.

  “It’s stealing?” said Emmie. She pulled her drawing quickly from the countertop, embarrassed. She could feel her face turning red.

  “Hey,” Uncle Frank whispered, crouching down beside Emmie and putting his hand on her shoulder, “I was just teasing. Every artist steals things sometimes. Sometimes, stealing is just another word for inspiration.”

  ∞

  On the weekday afternoons over the next few years, while Ollie focused on her schoolwork in a quiet back office in the Lab, Dom followed Emmie as she roamed the floors, procrastinating. She developed a knack for slipping into the background as the Lab engineers and designers carried on their work. In this way, she managed to sneak peeks and demos of nearly every interesting gadget in development at the Lab.

  The year that Emmie turned twelve, Dom watched her tireless campaign to convince her parents to install a spliner in her bedroom. Having had privileged access to the Lab spliner since infancy, Emmie had not considered that having another for her personal use might be a bit of an extravagance. Travis tried to break the news gently.

  “Could I have my own identity credentials, then, instead?” Emmie said, falling back on a request that posed no great financial burden but had been frequently denied nonetheless. From where she sat curled up beside her father on the sofa, she looked pleadingly across the coffee table at her mother.

  “Why do you need your own credentials?” said Anatolia, “You already have anonymous read access to every domain that could possibly be appropriate for someone your age.”

  “But I want to be a domain designer like Tomo,” said Emmie, sitting up straight on the sofa and tucking behind her ear a strand of flat-ironed chestnut hair streaked with cobalt blue. Imitating her older sister’s reasonable voice, she explained, “I can’t publish my work in any of the good artist domains without my own creds, my own identity.”

  “Those public forums are full of unauthenticated identities, Emmie,” Anatolia said patiently, “They’re not safe for someone your age. There will be plenty of time for you to use those forums when you’re older.”

  “How old?” said Emmie, not quite keeping the whine out of her voice, “Ollie already had her own credentials when she was my age!”

  “Ollie needed credentials to take classes in some of her educational domains. We didn’t just let her wander around any public domain she chose.”

  “I know how to take care of myself on the alternet, Mom! Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “I think you’re twelve years old, Emerald,” snapped Anatolia, “You know plenty about the alternet, but I know a lot more about people than you do. You have to think carefully about what you do on the alternet. Even when you think you’re doing something anonymously, securely, even when you think you’re being very clever, you can leave clues. You can’t even imagine what some people …”

  “What?” Emmie demanded, crossing her arms, “What some people what?”

  Travis and Anatolia exchanged a long look.

  “Emmie,” Travis said, his voice uncharacteristically stern, “Mom is just looking out for you.”

  “What is she afraid I’m going to do?” Emmie demanded shrilly, turning to her father.

  “It’s not what I’m afraid you’ll do,” Anatolia said, more quietly now, “It’s what I’m afraid other people might do.”

  “You think everyone is out to get me! I don’t get it. You’re not this way with Ollie. She can do whatever she wants.”

  “Not true!” Ollie hollered up from her room downstairs.

  “Ana,” Travis said, reaching out to put a hand on Anatolia’s knee, “I agree that we can’t just give Emmie credentials and free rein to do anything she wants with them. But unless we’re going to cut her off completely from the alternet —”

  “OMG, Dad,” Emmie groaned, covering her face with her hands, “Don’t give her ideas!”

  Travis sighed, then said,

  “Ana, we can’t protect her from everything forever.”

  Ollie appeared at the top of the stairs, arriving just in time to see her mother’s eyes welling up with tears. She came over to sit beside her mother.

  “I have an idea,” Ollie said brightly, as if addressing a class of kindergarteners, “What if you give Emmie her own credentials but only let her use them when Mom is supervising?”

  “Ollie!” Emmie cried indignantly, in a voice indistinguishable from her mother’s.

  Anatolia cocked her head to the side, considering.

  “It’s an idea. I’m at the office so much that I don’t get to spend half as much time with Emmie as Dad does. I just —” she looked worriedly at Emmie, “Honey, I don’t want to make you hate me more than you already do.”

  Emmie’s indignant expression melted.

  “OMG, Mom! I don’t hate you.”

  ∞

  So Anatolia registered an identity credential for Emmie, and Emmie resigned herself to her mother’s supervision. After obsessing for days over the design of an avatar for her new alternet identity, which she named Bealsio, Emmie refocused her energy on crafting the perfect debut submission to Emergency, a domain where millions of aspiring alternet designers published their work in hopes of being noticed by recruiters from some of the prestigious commercial domains.

  After school the next day, Emmie changed out of her school uniform into full-body immersion gear and made her way to the quiet Lab back office that Ollie had vacated weeks ago after receiving her acceptance letter from Princeton University. Emmie pushed the desk against the wall, dimmed the lights, and locked the door.

  The intensity of her desire to create something magnificent woke Dom from sleep, as had happened occasionally over the years. But this time, Dom felt something different in the call, an urgency that had not been there before. The connection between them grew taut, and Dom found it impossible to resist. He cast a parting glance at the position of the stars outside the window of his sleeping quarters. He had barely four hours until sunrise. Hoping he would be able to return to his duties in time to escape the notice of the Mohirai, Dom yielded to Emmie and followed the pull through the void until he stood beside her.

  She sat in a swiveling chair in the midst of the locked office, twisting a lock of her hair between the immerger-ring-encrusted fingers of one hand as she spun the chair round and round. The silver threads of her skin-tight tactile immergers glistened in the low light. Her brilliant green eyes, ringed with thick eyeliner and smoky powder, focused inward. Though the outer trappings had changed, the expression recalled to Dom a hundred thousand memories and a thousand thousand regrets.

  After a while, Emmie withdrew a pair of immerger glasses from the front pocket of her loose tunic, which she wore as a concession to Anatolia’s complaint that her immerger clothes were “too revealing,” notwithstanding Emmie’s boyish figure. A quick tap to the band on her wrist switched on the three-dimensional retinal projection functionality of the glasses and engaged the tactile feedback of her shirt, and with another few swipes of her fingers she immersed herself in Kaisei, Tomo’s flagship domain.

  Because Kaisei had become the final alternet testing ground for all Lab hardware prototypes, the domain was almost as familiar to Emmie as the Lab itself. Dom followed her as she chose an avatar, this time an old woman with a tranquil smile and a richly-embroidered blue silk kimono, and stepped through the red torii archway into the main Kaisei subdomain: Minu ga hana, a sprawling Japanese tea garden. In the physical world, Emmie reached into another pocket of her tunic to pull out an olfactory augmentation patch, which she pressed to her collar. As she moved through the simulated garden, she breathed deeply the scents of sweet grass, fresh water, rosy cherry blossoms, spicy evergreens; ran the fingers of her tactile immerger gloves
over mossy stones and smooth wooden bridge railings; listened to the rustle of leaves, the splashes of frogs into the pond.

  When Emmie emerged from Kaisei an hour later, Dom saw a chaotic flood of ideas flash before her mind’s eye, vivid but fleeting. She growled at the seeming emptiness where Dom stood beside her in the office. She withdrew a grey stylus from yet another pocket and opened the two-dimensional interface of an environmental modeling toolkit. She began painting in broad, confident strokes upon the air, colors gathering into a bright but indefinite form. Minutes later, with an exasperated sigh, she let the colors fade to nothing and switched to another tool, this time a terrain modeler, with which she had slightly better success, but still unsatisfactory results.

  As Emmie’s frustration grew, the pull on their connection faded somewhat, to Dom’s relief. Had the pull been much stronger, he might have found it impossible to maintain the distance that had for so many years allowed him to remain hidden from her sight. The intensity of Emmie’s imagination in early childhood had occasionally caused him to slip, leading to moments of contact between them. He had tried to minimize such encounters. Intruding on her awareness was a dangerous game, one that could lead quickly to madness. He had made that mistake before. As long as he could, he would keep her unaware of his presence. It was one of the few gifts he could give to her.

  In the weeks that followed, Emmie established a routine of slipping into Kaisei after school, emerging in a burst of inspiration, scrambling to capture an idea in shape or color or sound or texture, and finally regarding the result with despair. Ava’s spirit was as self-critical as ever, but still as tenacious. Some things never changed.

  In her preoccupation with transforming the wild tangle of ideas in her mind into one clear form, Emmie withdrew from her unofficial responsibilities and social obligations at the Lab.