Heaven is a Place on Earth

by Graham Storrs

  There was a display beside the door, offering a menu of units and occupants. Cal's name was there against unit 4. She told it who she was and that she wanted Cal Copplin. Instead of buzzing her in, the display showed Cal's face. Another recorded message.

  “Ginny,” Cal said. “I was hoping you'd come to find me. If you are alone, please say so now.”

  “I'm alone,” she said, frowning. What on earth was going on?

  “Great. Now listen. In a moment, the door will open. Come inside and go to my flat. That door will be open too. I've just sent you an address. When you're inside my flat, call the address and there will be further instructions.” Cal didn't look like he was playing about, but Ginny couldn't think what else might be going on.

  She checked her messages and there was a fresh one from Cal containing a QNet address.

  The door buzzed and clicked open. She went inside, looking about the smart entrance hall as if a boxing glove on a spring might pop out of the wall. Cal's unit was on the ground floor at the front. When she pushed the door, it swung inwards. No tin of paint fell from the ceiling. She went in and closed the door behind her.

  Cal's unit was enormous. She passed two bedrooms before she reached a lounge room as big as her entire apartment. Beyond that was a separate kitchen. She hadn't realised Cal was rich. She called out to him but there was no answer. She peered in at the kitchen. It had two microwaves plus one of those fancy new food printers she'd seen advertised. Back in the lounge room, she called again. Then she went to check the bedrooms, deciding Cal must be in his tank. But the first bedroom she found had no tank in it and neither did the second, larger bedroom. Now that was weird. And why would a man who lived on his own need two bedrooms? What possible use could anyone have for a spare bedroom?

  She went back to the lounge room and flopped into a sofa, glad to be off her feet. Whatever stupid game Cal was playing, she was beginning to grow irritated with it. And what did he mean, “I was hoping you'd come to find me.” In what sense was he lost?

  She popped up a phone and dialled the QNet address. There was a short delay and messages flashed by. She caught the word “routing” and then “encrypting” in a stream of numbers and meaningless words. Almost before she had registered this new strangeness, Cal's face appeared on the display.

  “Cal! What the hell are you – ”

  But it was another recording. “Hello, Ginny,” her friend said and her stomach clenched just a little. There was something in his expression that she didn't like, a sadness, as if he were about to say something he knew she wouldn't want to hear. “Thank you for putting up with all this nonsense, Gin, but I'm in a bit of trouble and I need you to do something for me. Now, go to the sitting room and you'll see a glass coffee table. Say 'OK' when you've found it.”

  She didn't need to look far. It was right in front of her. “OK,” she said.

  “Right, now I want you to switch off your augmentation – just for a moment – then put it back on again. You'll need to switch it right down to zero, Gin. Not even minimal aug. Go completely native, OK? When you come back online, just say 'continue' and I'll explain what you saw.”

  She looked at the table. It looked smart, but perfectly ordinary. Being glass, she could see right through it. There seemed to be nothing under it. She pushed down the anxiety that was rising in her and told herself not to be such an idiot. It was just some game Cal was playing. A trick of some sort, maybe.

  She turned down her augmentation from latched to basic but her systems stopped her going any farther. She had to shoo away warning messages, give her system password and repeat her command before her implants would allow her to switch them off. Even then they didn't quite go away. A message pulsed continually in her peripheral vision to tell her they were waiting for her to restart them. Having finally achieved something like zero augmentation, she looked again at the coffee table. The shock of seeing something lying there on the glass almost made her cry out.

  She reached out and touched it, poked it, as if it might bite her. Why hadn't she seen it before? If it had been there on the table all that time, why hadn't she seen it? She knew very little about the technologies that made augmented reality work. Her cognitive implants tapped into her senses, as well as into whatever sensors the local environment provided, and then they computed overlays and adjustments. Depending on how much augmentation you wanted, they would arrange for different degrees of transformation. If you had minimal augmentation, you would get information and images – like hazard warnings and street names – overlaid on top of what you could see. If you were latched to the local environment, you could have the whole scene modified beyond recognition, the way the botanical gardens had been, or her own apartment. Most people went around latched all the time. If you wanted to get away from sensory input altogether, you could unlatch from reality and move into full immersive virtual reality. And for the best VR experience, you needed the tanks.

  But, even when you were latched and nothing was the way it really looked, you still expected that everything in the world had some kind of representation in augmented reality. If not, then you might trip over something you couldn't see and break your neck. If Cal had put something on his table, she should have seen it, even when latched to his apartment.

  She looked around, trying to find other objects that had been invisible, and had another surprise. Cal's unit looked just the same with augmentation as it did without. The furniture looked the same, the pictures on the wall were real, not virtual, even the floors were just as clean. She stood up and took a few steps into the middle of the room. Through the kitchen door she could see the same appliances, in the hallway, the same umbrella stand. She found her heart was beating faster. It was so creepy it was scaring her. Cal had made the fully augmented view of his home an exact match to its real appearance. What kind of person would do that, and why?

  She looked back at the small package on the table. Not an exact match. That one detail was different. Something real, cloaked by the illusions they all shared. She went to it and picked it up. It was small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, light enough to carry in a shirt pocket. The packaging was plain paper – old-fashioned paper, that is, not proper paper, this was inert, unresponsive stuff, made of plant fibres or whatever. She thought about opening it, tearing the paper to reveal what was inside, but she dare not. The invisible package was at the heart of the mystery Cal had created here. Whatever was inside might be even more disturbing that anything she had seen yet.

  She switched on her augmentation again and latched to the apartment. The package in her hand disappeared but she could still feel its weight. When she closed her fingers on it she could feel its solidity.

  “Continue,” she said, almost in a whisper, and Cal's face popped up on the phone display.

  “Thanks, Ginny. I hope you found the package – and that it didn't give you too much of a fright. It's not that hard, really, to program your flat to make things disappear. Not as hard as you might think.” His light grey eyes looked into hers with an intensity that suggested he was trying to make some kind of point. Half an hour ago, she might have found his unwavering gaze attractive, evidence of his deep and intense nature. Now it looked fanatical and weird. Like everything else that was happening, it made her uneasy. “I want you to do me a favour, Gin,” the recording went on. “I wouldn't ask except there is no-one else I trust as much as you.” He hesitated. “You know, I thought... I thought we had some kind of connection. I thought, if there had been more time, you and I might... But things have got out of hand and I've got to go, right now.” He actually looked over his shoulder, as if there might be someone coming for him. “I know you'll wonder where I am and you'll come looking for me. The flat will recognise you when you come and – ” He stopped and shook his head. “What am I saying? Of course, you're already here or you wouldn't be listening to me prattling on like an idiot. Look, the favour is this. Don't open the package. Take it to the address I'm sending you now. Take it by hand. Gi
ve it to Gavin. No-one else. Do that and then forget all about it. I'm sorry to be all cloak and dagger, but it's best you don't know what this is all about. The flat will erase all record of you having been here. No-one will ever know unless you tell them. Anyway, I've got to go. I just want to say goodbye and that I regret that we couldn't have... Yeah, well. Cheers.”

  The recording stopped.

  Ginny put the package in her pocket and left the unit. She felt the need to be out and moving. This was all too strange. If she were home, she would unlatch and visit Della. Della was the most level-headed and sensible friend she had. Something about what had just happened seemed dangerous and the unease Ginny felt was slowly turning to fear. She didn't want to get on the wrong side of the law. Her life was difficult enough without that, but it looked like Cal was on the run, and there was that little package, sitting in her pocket like a lead brick.

  The sun was high and the day was hot. Sweat beaded on her face as she made her way back through the suburbs. The package was probably drugs, she thought. Or smuggled diamonds or something. She should go to the river and throw it in. But what if this Gavin bloke knew she had it? What if Cal was mixed up with gangsters who would come looking for it? If she told them she'd thrown their drugs in the river, what might they do to her? Maybe they were following her right now.

  She stopped walking and looked around. The streets were empty. A few cars and robot delivery trucks went by now and then, and there was a woman out mowing a lawn up ahead. She could see no sign of a tail. Then she remembered the package, invisible on the table until she switched off her aug. Frantically, she shut it all down again. The street really was empty now except for the robot trucks. No cars, no woman mowing. Nobody anywhere. She breathed a sigh of relief, scanning the dilapidated garden fences just in case someone was hiding behind the peeling paint and rotten wood. For a long while she stared at the shabby street before latching again and walking on.

  Chapter 2

  Ginny was hot and exhausted when she reached her unit. She had not walked so far in years. Just as exhausting were the questions that had hung around her like flies all the way home. She knew she should take the package to the police, but she felt an irrational loyalty to Cal – a man she hardly knew. Not really. Yet he had trusted her. He had landed himself in some kind of trouble and he had turned to her for help. It was like something from a vid, romantic, in an odd kind of way. And the things he'd said, or rather, left unsaid. If he had been at home when she called, if they had finally met face-to-face, maybe something would have happened.

  He wasn't really her type. The kind of men she usually ended up with were the little-boy-lost types who needed a mummy to look after them. She could never resist the puppy-dog eyes and the little, helpless shrugs. But Cal was different. He had always been so self-assured and confident. He had never seemed to need anything from her, not even her company, although he'd always been happy to spend time with her.

  And now this. A big scary favour, out of the blue. But didn't that mean he must really need her help though? Someone like Cal wouldn't ask if it wasn't incredibly important, would he?

  She was so lost in thought that she didn't see the man standing in the hallway until she had her door open and had taken a step inside.

  “Virginia Galton?”

  Ginny jumped like a cartoon cat and whirled to face the speaker, stumbling backwards into her apartment. The man shot out a hand and caught her upper arm.

  “Steady now. I didn't mean to scare you.”

  She pulled herself free and took two paces back, her heart thumping. “Well you did. Who are you?”

  He was tall and broad shouldered. His face was square cut and clean-shaven. But none of that meant anything, except that his real appearance was within twenty per cent of hot. Of much more interest was the blue and white checked strip that hovered beside him with his police credentials listed below it. For a second she'd thought Cal's dope-dealer friends had found her. Seeing it was the police was a relief, but not a big one.

  “I'm Detective Sergeant Richards, Ms Galton. May I come in?”

  She actually thought about refusing for a moment but managed to clamp down on her rising panic enough to nod and step back another pace.

  “What is it?” she asked. Even the querulous tone of her voice made her sound guilty, she thought. If the cop didn't suspect her of something, he soon would if she didn't get a grip of herself. She waved a hand at the sofa. “Please, sit down. Would you like a drink? I'm going to get some water. It's hot out there.”

  “Nothing for me, thanks,” he said and watched her as she went to the kitchenette and ran water into a plastic beaker. She took a long swallow, put the beaker down and went back to join him. He sat on the sofa and she took the armchair.

  “People are usually at home when I call on them,” he said and left it hanging, as if waiting for her to explain herself.

  She felt the urge to babble out some reason for why she had been out, but fought it. It was unusual behaviour, it needed an explanation, but a lick of irritation came to her rescue.

  “Why are you here, Detective?”

  He gave her a charming smile. “I'm sorry, I should have said that straight off. It's Detective Sergeant, but you can call me Dover.”

  “Dover?”

  “As in the white cliffs of. May I call you Virginia?”

  “Ginny. Can we hurry this up? I have a lot of work to do. I'm on a deadline.”

  “You're a composer I see.” He must be looking at her file as they spoke, she realised.

  “Soundscape artist. Composers write serious music. I write ambient sounds for worldlets.” She couldn't help but notice the bitterness in her own voice.

  He nodded, as if that made sense of something. “When was the last time you saw your friend Calvin Copplin, Ginny?”

  The question took her by surprise and she found herself tongue tied, not wanting to say she'd just been listening to a recording of him, not wanting to tell a lie to the police.

  “I haven't spoken to him for a couple of days,” she said cautiously. “I called him today but all I got was a recorded message.” That was true, and they might check, anyway. “Why do you want to know? Is he all right?”

  “Would you say you were close?”

  “I don't know. Sort of. We're not dating or anything. Not really. What's happened to Cal?”

  “Have you met many of Mr. Copplin's friends? Has he introduced you to anyone?”

  She didn't like these questions. She didn't like the way the detective wouldn't answer her own questions. She didn't like being interrogated in her own home. “What's this all about?”

  “How did you meet Mr. Copplin, Ginny?”

  She shook her head. “No, I'm not answering any more questions until you tell me why you're here.”

  His gaze held hers for several seconds. He smiled again but he continued to watch her. “Of course, how rude of me. Your friend seems to have disappeared, Ginny.”

  She tried to sound surprised. “What do you mean 'disappeared'? Has somebody reported him missing?”

  “Something like that. Do you have any idea where he is?”

  “No I don't.” At least that was true. “But this isn't right. I spoke to him a couple of days ago. He's a grown up. Maybe he just went for a holiday or he's visiting friends, or something. You're not telling me something. Why do you think he's missing?”

  “Because he is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because his tag has stopped responding.”

  Ginny didn't have to feign surprise or shock this time. “That's impossible,” she said. Everybody knew that.

  The detective studied her intently, clearly trying to judge her every reaction. It occurred to her that he might be unaugmented, seeing her real face. She hadn't considered it before but it would make sense for the cops to interview suspects with their augmentation turned right down.

  “How could he do that?” she asked.

  “There are ways.” />
  She blinked at him, adjusting to this new information. The government line was that tags were infallible. That was one of the selling points. Everybody had to be tagged so that the augmented reality sensors could find them and identify them. If you didn't have a tag, you could just disappear. If people were not tagged, they could easily impersonate someone else. It guaranteed that the people you met were who they said they were – even in full VR. It also prevented criminals from walking around undetected. The tags were embedded into people's skulls, distributed right across the cranium, grown from implanted nanotech that was put there at birth. They couldn't be removed, they said, and tampering would have life-threatening side-effects. And people accepted tagging because, without tags, augmented reality – especially virtual reality – would become a playground for scammers and thieves, terrorists and worse.

  “I still don't see how I can help you, Detective Sergeant.”

  “Dover, please. Forgive me for saying, Ginny, but you seem pretty nervous.”

  She didn't like the man's insinuations, however true they might be. In fact, she didn't like the man at all, with his smooth manner and his stupid name and his suspicions. “I've had a crappy day,” she said. “And this is just making it worse. I'm on a deadline and I need to get stuff done.” Nevertheless, she couldn't help herself asking, “Why would anybody remove their tag – or whatever Cal's supposed to have done? Surely you can't live without it these days. You can't even buy stuff without an identity check. You couldn't get through a door or take a cab. How could you live?”

  The detective shrugged. “I suppose there are other things you can do that outweigh the inconveniences. You'd be surprised how many people we lose each year.” He stood up, ready to go and she stood up with him. “Here's my card,” he said, passing her a virtual ID. “In case Mr. Copplin makes contact.” He walked the few paces to the door. As he stepped outside, he said, “Of course, he might not have turned his tag off deliberately. Sometimes they malfunction – especially in cases of severe head trauma.” Again, he watched her carefully, looking for any reaction. Whatever he saw, he seemed finished. “Thanks for your time,” he said, and left.