House of the Galactic Elevator

by Gerhard Gehrke

  Of the five possible bathroom entrances, she took a guess and headed into one of the three not marked as “Male” or “Female.” A helpful electronic voice said, “Perhaps you would find the women’s room more suitable.” Jordan waited for the voice to stop talking.

  “Hello?” she called. “Park caretaker here.”

  Her voice echoed in the bathroom. For some reason, the lights didn’t come on. She waved a hand for a sensor to detect her presence, but the room stayed dark. Enough natural ambient illumination reflected in from outside to discern several stalls, sinks, and a wide trough set into the floor with a hand railing. Whether the rail was to assist one’s balance or to help one get into the trough was beyond her. This could be a bidet for a walrus.

  The stalls were well within the darker part of the restroom.

  “Hey. Anyone in here?” she said in a stage whisper.

  She paused for an answer that didn’t come. She found an out-of-order sign on a post, pulled it from the ground, and tested the heft. It was made from flimsy fabricated material of some sort, but it would have to do.

  She went to the first stall. Pushed open the door. Nothing but shadow. Checked the second one. Deeper shadow. And from the gloom of the last corner of the bathroom poured a trace of mist. The mist thickened and started to move out towards Jordan like a fog bank. The fog had tentacles, and they reached out for her. She backed up, stumbled, the impromptu weapon dropping from her hand as she grabbed a wall to keep from falling. A bright red eye stared at her from the center of the mist and a top row of dagger-like teeth hung down from the bottom of the cloud.

  “Chirr, click, chirrrrr,” the cloud sang as it rolled forward and grabbed her arm. The clammy tentacle felt cool to the skin, like a rope of wet seaweed. The single eye hovered close to her face.

  “Get off,” Jordan said. “Fang, let go.”

  She peeled the tentacle from her arm. Fang resisted at first, and here Jordan detected an incredible strength that hadn’t been there when she had started taking care of the little creature.

  Fang belonged to Jordan in the same sense an adopted child bequeathed to an unsuspecting stranger would be considered her kin. During the pre-invasion exodus, a Commons citizen that treated its spawn like a hot potato had promised its next-born to Jordan on some flimsy pretext and had later delivered it before vanishing into the city. Jordan, after a fruitless search for the father or any other member of its race, took it upon herself to take care of the infant, in spite of Jeff Abel’s strongest arguments against such course.

  “You have no idea what you’re doing,” Jeff had said. “You can’t possibly. And don’t tell me there’s an app for raising that thing.”

  “It’s not a thing; it’s a child,” Jordan had said. “Meet Fang.”

  And it turned out there was an app. Later, Jordan had researched the app’s author. It had a small bio and a thumbnail hologram that looked like a cloud of gas with tentacles, a single eye, and an overbite of massive proportions. Further reading turned up the fact that the species had a penchant for pawning off its children like a cuckoo dropping her eggs off into an unsuspecting bird’s nest so her young would be cared for, to the detriment of the host mother’s own brood.

  Jeff hadn’t dropped it, kept insisting that Jordan give up Fang, as if there were some orphanage waiting for just such a thing. Social services in the Galactic Commons were limited. Most species took care of themselves. Under normal circumstances for the city, if anyone needed help they would simply take an elevator back to their homeworld. It was less grief to stop taking Jeff’s calls as he would invariably bring up Fang.

  “Fang, what are you doing here?” Jordan asked.

  Fang chirped and only stared at her with its lidless mono-eye. The app said it wouldn’t speak for another year and thus she wore no translator.

  Fang slid its other tentacle around Jordan’s arm and gave a squeeze. She patted the tentacle. Strong enough to destroy a robot and a fruit machine. She called up the app and couldn't find any mention as to how strong the infant could become. Fang chirped again. Jordan sighed. This served her right for not taking Fang with her as she made her circuit of the park.

  “Well, you certainly ate your fill. You better not get sick. No dinner for you.”

  Fang made a vague gurgle and puttered along behind her like a reluctant dog on a leash as she walked towards her cabin.

  ***

  Outside the window of her caretaker cabin’s kitchen, the sun was setting. The fading silvery light refracted through one particularly large orange crystal that leaned precariously over the back deck, creating a sparkling light show that played across the surrounding forest of coral and rock. A stack of interactive brochures sat on the table in front of her, which boasted that Spice Valley was one of the thirty-two must-see attractions when visiting the Galactic Commons. Sunsets were the park’s specialty.

  Jordan touched the window and it darkened to full opacity. She pushed the brochures aside to make space on the table. From a pouch she pulled out a visor that reminded her of old eighties sunglasses and put it over her eyes. An app inside her brain opened and calibrated her eye movements to correspond to highlighted selections on an array of graphic menus and user options. Jordan also put a malleable trackball on the table and positioned it so her right palm rested perfectly on its center. The slightest twitch corresponded to a response on her HUD. She got comfortable.

  Fang had finally settled down and was in one of the bedrooms for the night. Her adopted ward would stay put now that the sun was going down.

  Time for fun.

  Any thoughts of sleep were cast aside as she logged in. She relinquished all permissions so the game could load. All of her senses were now engaged by the program. Her vision went dark, and the kitchen table before her was replaced by a stony arched portal sporting a menu with flaming letters. A stiff, hot wind tickled her face. She smelled virtual smoke. Her finger movements coincided with a highlight that played across several available selections. She entered the game.

  She felt a giddy rush as she examined her next set of options.

  She had three factions to choose from: Ectomorph, Mesomorph, and Endomorph. Each had an in-game advantage and disadvantage. She had tried the other two, but as always she went Ecto. The portal swung open with a rusty creak, and she was sucked inside, her free hand involuntarily gripping the arm of her chair.

  On reflection, the online survival contest of the fittest somatotype wasn’t too different from her PC games back on Earth, with PVE, PVP, crafting, exploration, and a badly behaving community. And the simulation, while not very expensive, was a hard sell on the extras, which gave no real game advantage. What could be purchased were distinctive gestures, postures, and emotes, skin colors, hats, glasses, suits, skirts, ties, stockings, pants, gloves, jackets, balloons, pets, and vocalizations that could make the in-game character shriek like an eagle, meow like a cat, or bellow like a horny moose.

  The biggest difference from anything Jordan had ever played before, besides complete sensory immersion, was that each avatar was an actual intelligent being living within the Galactic Commons that carried out live, real-time actions as ordered by the players. These creatures lived, fought, and breathed within the game manufacturer’s sovereign building, where spectators could go and watch for a price.

  Jordan dressed her skinny, high-foreheaded, ass-kicking Ecto avatar in blued-steel shoulder pads, leather biker jacket with chrome zippers, ruby piercings dangling from the left ear, thigh-length skirt, stockings, combat boots, and foamy soccer kneepads. Her avatar was a scrounger, and Jordan didn’t want to have skinned knees while gathering herbs and metals in the game world.

  Why anyone would watch other people play while they could actually be curb-stomping their opponents while looking fabulous was beyond her.

  There was a reason Jordan didn’t have two credits to rub together, and the soul-sucking, crack-like game helped her part with her caretaker pay at a startling speed. She could have crafte
d a few simple fashion items without paying for them, but making these took time away from the meat of the game.

  Her HUD became crowded as newsfeeds, weather reports, and a message from Jeff filled sidebars to either side of her view. She closed them as soon as they popped up. She would call Jeff back later. Honestly.

  Her Ecto avatar entered the world. The level 3,408 ass-kicker began to bend left and right and to crack her knuckles. She did a few squats, limbering up. She bent each arm back for a triceps stretch. She pulled the two-handed katana from her back scabbard and struck a pose. This elfin-thin DPS assassin goddess of some unnamed post-apocalypse was ready for battle.

  Almost.

  Two things caught Jordan’s attention.

  First, a new series of hairbands and ribbons were now available, as indicated by a drop-down advert that offered her a dizzying array of colors. Her avatar’s head displayed each new accessory as Jordan looked over the choices. To make the purchase, Jordan just had to click “Buy,” which was as easy as blinking. Her in-game credits: Zero. Available credits for transfer from out-of-game savings: Twenty. She might want to eat something in the next week. She thought of her actual expenses, thought of Fang, thought of how cool it would be to have a neon thermochromatic ribbon swirling around her head as she pirouetted about the environs with her silver blade.

  Purchase acknowledged, the game told her. Wait, what? She hadn’t actually just hit the “Buy” button, had she?

  “Crap,” she said in the real world and her avatar echoed her.

  She felt guilty as she looked in her virtual shopping cart and saw the ribbon. It also appeared in her avatar’s bag as if by magic. She took out the ribbon and tried to put it on.

  Hairstyle Level Incompatible, the game said.

  How could she be so stupid? Her hairstyle was level 388. She had neglected to keep it in line with her fighting level, gathering level, shoe level, and emotes level. What level was the new ribbon? 526. She would have to grind out hairstyle drops and recipes to get her hair level up so she’d be able to wear the thing. Unless she could make more money. Then with a single purchase her hairstyle could be automatically leveled, and presto! Hairvana.

  The second thing that caught her attention was that her limber, well-armed, chopping beauty needed to eat. This was the big leap forward in Galactic Commons gaming. The game required the avatars be cared for in every respect. It was like having a baby. Or a dog. Or some kind of pet that could be dressed up as just about anything imaginable and taken for a test drive into an alien fantasy world to crack skulls. The pink bonnet she used to affix to her mom’s miniature pinscher seemed so quaint now.

  If things like sleep, potty time, and food were neglected, the avatar’s performance would suffer. Of course, there were game store purchasables that circumvented all of these needs. All it would take were credits. At least the game was kind enough to send you a message every three hours to take care of your own biological needs, if you had the credits. That helped, as Jordan remembered a ten-hour Counter-strike binge back in college when she had almost passed out from dehydration and lack of sleep.

  Jordan also used a separate alarm app to give her a ring every two hours. She would reset the alarm more often than not, but at least she could keep tabs on how much time was passing in the real world.

  Of course some gamers had their avatars sleep while they logged out or logged into an alt avatar while their main took care of necessary business. Jordan took a break from the game when her avatar needed rest. After all, there were real-world things she had to care for. But her avatar’s meals didn’t take long, and if you ate the right thing, it provided the avatar with buffs (temporary performance advantages) that could last anywhere between a few minutes and a few days.

  Jordan checked her avatar’s food supply. She had enough of the free gruel to last a week. She could get that at any spawn point. But out in the open zones she could hunt a variety of edibles, including mushrooms that would buff both her reflexes and her stealth abilities. Her plant and herbing skills provided her with a tracker on her HUD. No useful plants appeared close to her spawn point. Of course, her tracker range could be increased with a small purchase.

  She would have to go forth and explore to find her avatar’s favorite mushrooms.

  “Ready, darling?” she asked.

  The avatar didn’t answer, just waited for Jordan to execute orders. She ventured forth.

  CHAPTER 4

  Oliop paced the three short strides from one wall of the cell to the next. If he took baby steps, it would take four strides, but three was a more interesting number, a number with history, the first number thought of as a number in his species’ prehistoric days. The number evolved from “There’s someone swinging towards us” and “There’s a pair of someones swinging towards us” to “Hey, how many someones are swinging towards us?” “More than a pair, so we need to call it something,” and the something it was called was three. A prime number. The first numeral of pi. The most basic head-calculation for arcs and circles for the early builders and engineers among his ancestors.

  He drummed his fingers together behind his back. His tail trailed behind him, wagging in a lazy, curving pattern. He stopped pacing, sat down on the bench. His second-to-second count he had begun when entering the cell reached four thousand. He stopped counting. He sighed and looked through the mesh wall of the cell, an energized lattice that, with the touch of a button on the outer wall, could be retracted to release the prisoner. If Oliop touched the wall it would be like stroking a low-volt battery. He looked across at the other cells. Peering through two mesh screens made seeing anything difficult. It appeared that he was alone.

  Oliop began to hum to himself. The squeaky tune soon petered out. He blew air through his closed lips. He absently placed a hand to where his favorite null-space pouch usually rested on his belt. It wasn’t there, having been taken by Detective Ceph upon his detainment. All his tools were gone. He drummed his fingers on the wall. Tried a variety of rhythms.

  “You’ve been up to no good, technician,” a pinched voice said.

  Something moved in the opposite cell.

  Oliop squinted to see who was there. A diminutive shape got close to the lattice screen of the cell across the hall. Irving the Grey stood there, arms folded. Its blank, featureless eyes stared at him under a furrowed and hairless brow ridge. “It was only a matter of time.”

  Oliop’s ears drooped and folded back. His tail froze in place. He shrank. He hadn’t seen his former boss since the end of the invasion and Irving the Grey’s arrest as the crisis’s mastermind.

  “I’ve been doing some thinking,” the Grey said. “There’s little to do but think in here. I’ve been doing nothing but. I realize that I was wrong about you. I admit that. It turns out that you’re quite intelligent.”

  Oliop tried to see the Grey’s face and looked for its telltale ironic smirk, but it wore no such expression.

  “In fact, you may be the one of the brightest creatures in the Commons. Somehow you got caught doing something illegal, but trust me: they need you too much to let you rot away in this cell. Unlike me. My own kind doesn’t even know what to do with me. They can’t take me back home until the elevators are fixed. How’s the progress going on that?”

  After a brief hesitation, Oliop said, “I’d rather not tell you.”

  “Oh, why not? I’m merely curious. Maybe as a way of making some gesture of amends, there might be something I could do to help. From here, of course. I’m not asking you to get me out of jail or anything. But just maybe I could give you a push in the right direction.”

  “Elevators still stuck,” Oliop said.

  “Did you try slaving the dominant matrix to the auxiliary? That would bypass the faulty AI.”

  “Tried that.”

  “How about pairing the system with another limited AI air-gapped from any other within the Commons? Like the one my species has running its sovereign building.”

  Oliop shook his head. �
��Found too many encrypted packets with your corruption on it even in the oldest systems separated from any network. Everything is suspect.”

  “Oh dear. Are you starting from scratch?”

  Oliop began to nod, stopped himself. “I’d rather not say.”

  “Of course not. But that’s quite the undertaking. The system could be down for years. But I could help you.”

  A door in the hallway opened. Captain Flemming walked into the detention center with Detective Ceph close behind. Flemming thumbed the button on the wall and the mesh in front of Oliop’s cell snapped open.

  “Are the charges dropped on my fellow felon?” the Grey asked.

  Flemming ignored it and said, “Come on, Oliop.”

  Oliop stepped tentatively out of the cell. “Did the shopkeep forgive me?”

  “Alas, no,” Flemming said. “But Detective Ceph here realized you had taken his security fob from him and that you could probably get out anytime you wanted to. May I have it back?”

  Oliop reached back to the hidden pouch behind his head, the pocket he wore with his translator tucked inside. There, next to the nut-sized translation device, was Ceph’s door fob. He handed it over.

  “Sticky fingers,” Ceph grumbled as he snatched the fob.

  The two cops took him upstairs. There his human sidekick Jeff Abel waited, leaning on a wall. Oliop smiled but it faded quickly once he saw Jeff’s face looking quite glum.

  “Your brief stay here should underscore the seriousness of the matter,” Flemming said. “But we need you working, so I’m releasing you under Jeff’s recognizance. He’s going to keep an eye on you, and you’re going to behave yourself.”

  Captain Flemming turned to Jeff. “The Jinong won’t be happy he’s out. They’ll be inconsolable if he is ever seen without a supervising officer.”

  “Let’s go,” Jeff said. Oliop went.

  ***