Year’s Best SF 16

by Hartwell, David G. ; Cramer, Kathryn

  Per had to go to work (in the real world) so they parted ways and Gennady’s group took the Blue Line metro to Radhuset Station, which was already a subterranean fantasy and in Rivet Couture became a candlelit cavern full of shadowy strangers in cowled robes. Up on the surface they quickly located a stuffy-looking brokerage on a narrow side street, where the receptionist happily took the package from Gennady. She was dressed in a Chanel suit, but a tall feather was poking up from behind her desk, and at Gennady’s curious glance she reached down to show him her ornate Victorian tea hat.

  Out in the street he said, “Cosplay seems to be an important part of the game. I’m not dressed for it.”

  Miranda laughed. “In that suit? You’re nearly there. You just need a fob watch and a vest. You’ll be fine. As to you . . .” She turned to Fraction.

  “I have many costumes,” said the cyranoid. “I shall retrieve one and meet you back at the hotel.” He started to walk away.

  “But—? Wait.” Gennady started after him but Miranda put a hand on his arm. She shook her head.

  “He comes and goes,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do about it, though I assume Hitchens’ people have him under surveillance. It probably does them no good. I’m sure the places Fraction goes are all virtual.”

  Gennady watched the cyranoid vanish into the mouth of the metro station. He’d also disappeared from Rivet Couture. Unhappily, Gennady said, “Let’s disappear ourselves for a while. I’d like to check on my reindeer.”

  “You may,” said Miranda coolly, “but I am staying here. I am looking for my son, Mr. Malianov. This is not just a game to me.”

  “Neither were the reindeer.”

  As it turned out, he didn’t have to leave RC to surf for today’s headlines. There was indeed plenty of news about a crackpot terrorist ring being busted, but nothing about the individual agents who’d done the field work. This was fine by Gennady, who’d been briefly famous after stopping an attempt to blow up the Chernobyl sarcophagus some years before. He’d taken that assignment in the first place because in the abandoned streets of Pripyat he could be utterly alone. Being interviewed for TV and then recognized on the street had been intensely painful for him.

  They shopped for some appropriately steampunk styles for Gennady to wear. He hated shopping with a passion and was self-conscious with the result, but Miranda seemed to like it. They met a few more denizens of Atlantis through the afternoon, but he still hung back, and at dinner she asked him whether he’d ever done any role-playing.

  Gennady barked a laugh. “I do it all the time.” He rattled off half a dozen of the more popular online worlds. He had multiple avatars in each and in one of them he’d been cultivating his character for over a decade. Miranda was puzzled at his awkwardness, so finally Gennady explained that those games allowed him to stay at home and let a virtual avatar do the roving. He had many different bodies, and played as both genders. But an avatar-to-avatar conversation was nothing like a face-to-face conversation in reality—even an alternate reality like Rivet Couture’s.

  “Nowadays they call it social phobia,” he said with reluctance. “But really, I’m just shy.”

  Miranda’s response was a surprised, “Oh.” There was a long silence after that, while she thought and he squirmed in his seat. “Would you be more comfortable doubling up?” she asked at last.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Riding me cyranoid-wise, the way that Fraction rides Danail. Except,” she added wryly, “it would only be during game interactions.”

  “I’m fine,” he said irritably. “I’ll get into it, you’ll see. It’s just . . . I expected to be home in my own apartment right now, I wasn’t expecting a new job away from home with an indefinite duration and no idea where I’ll be going. I’m not even sure how to investigate; what am I investigating? Who? None of this is normal to me; it’s going to take a bit of an adjustment.”

  He resented that she thought of him as some kind of social cripple who had to be accommodated. He had a job to do and, better than almost anybody, he knew what was at stake.

  For the vast majority of people, “plutonium” was just a word, no more real than the word “vampire.” Few had held it; few had seen its effects. Gennady knew it—its color, its heft, and the uses you could put it to.

  Gennady wasn’t going to let his own frailties keep him from finding the stuff, because the mere fact that somebody wanted it was a catastrophe. If he didn’t find the plutonium, Gennady would spend his days waiting, expecting every morning to turn on the news and hear about which city—and how many millions of lives—had finally met it.

  That night he lay in bed for hours, mind restless, trying to relate the terms of this stylish game to the very hard-nosed smuggling operation he had to crack.

  Rivet Couture functioned a bit like a secret society, he decided. That first interaction, when he’d carried a pretend diplomatic pouch between two other players, suggested a physical mechanism for the transfer of the plutonium. When he’d talked to Hitchens about it after supper, the Interpol agent had confirmed it: “We’re pretty sure that organized crime has started using games like yours to move stuff. Drugs, for instance. You can use two completely unrelated strangers as mules for pickups and hand-offs, even establish long chains of them. Each hop can be a few kilometers, by foot even, avoiding all our detection gear. One player can throw a package over his country’s border and another find it by its GPS coordinates later. It’s a nightmare.”

  Yet Rivet Couture was itself just a gateway, a milestone on the way to “far Cilenia.” Between Rivet Couture and Cilenia was the place from where Miranda’s son had sent most of his emails: Oversatch, he’d called it.

  If Rivet Couture was like a secret society operating within normal culture, then Oversatch was like a second-order secret society, one that existed only within the culture of Rivet Couture. A conspiracy inside a conspiracy.

  Hitchens had admitted that he hated Alternate Reality Games. “They destroy all the security structures we’ve put in place so carefully since 9/11. Just destroy ’em. It’s ’cause you’re not you anymore—hell, you can have multiple people playing one character in these games, handing them off to one another in shifts. Geography doesn’t matter, identity is a joke . . . everybody on the planet is like Fraction. How can you find a conspiracy in that?”

  Gennady explained this insight to Miranda the next morning, and she nodded soberly.

  “You’re half right,” she said.

  “Only half?”

  “There’s so much more going on here,” she said. “If you’re game for the game, today, maybe we can see some of it.”

  He was. Dressed as he was, Gennady could hide inside the interface his glasses gave him. He’d decided to use these factors as a wall between him and the other avatars. He’d pretend out in the open, as he so often did from the safety of his room. Anyway, he’d try.

  And they did well that day. Miranda had been playing the game for some weeks, with a fanatical single-mindedness borne of her need to find her son. Gennady found that if he thought in terms of striking up conversations with strangers on the street, then he’d be paralyzed and couldn’t play; but if he pretended it was his character, Sir Arthur Tole, who was doing the talking, then his years of gaming experience quickly took over. Between the two of them, he and Miranda quickly developed a network of contacts and responsibilities. They saw Fraction every day or two, and what was interesting was that Gennady found himself quickly falling into the same pattern with the cyranoid that he had with Lane Hitchens: they would meet, Gennady would give a report, and the other would nod in satisfaction.

  Hitchens’ people had caught Fraction carrying one of the plutonium pieces. That was almost everything that Gennady knew about the cyranoid, and nearly all that Hitchens claimed to know as well. “There’s one thing we have figured out,” Hitchens had added when Gennady pressed. “It’s his accent. Danail Gavrilov doesn’t speak English, he’s Bulgarian. But he’s parroting Engli
sh perfectly, right down to the accent. And it’s an American accent. Specifically, west coast. Washington State or thereabouts.”

  “Well, that’s something to go on,” said Gennady.

  “Yes,” Hitchens said unhappily. “But not much.”

  Gennady knew what Hitchens had hired him to do and he was working at it. But increasingly, he wondered whether in some way he didn’t understand, he had also been hired by Fraction—or maybe the whole of the IAEA had? The thought was disturbing, but he didn’t voice it to Hitchens. It seemed too crazy to talk about.

  The insight Miranda was promising didn’t come that first day, or the next. It took nearly a week of hard work before Puddleglum Phudthucker met them for afternoon tea and gave a handwritten note to Miranda. “This is today’s location of the Griffin Rampant,” he said. “The food is excellent, and the conversation particularly . . . profitable.”

  When Puddleglum disappeared around the corner, Miranda hoisted the note and yelled in triumph. Gennady watched her, bemused.

  “I’m so good,” she told him. “Hitchens’ boys never got near this place.”

  “What is it?” He thought of bomb-maker’s warehouses, drug ops, maybe, but she said, “It’s a restaurant.

  “Oh, but it’s an Atlantean restaurant,” she added when she saw the look on his face. “The food comes from Atlantis. It’s cooked there. Only Atlanteans eat it. Sociologically, this is a big break.” She explained that any human society had membership costs, and the currency was commitment. To demonstrate commitment to some religions, for instance, people had to undergo ordeals, or renounce all their worldly goods, or leave their families. They had to live according to strict rules—and the stricter the rules and the more of them there were, the more stable the society.

  “That’s crazy,” said Gennady. “You mean the less freedom people have, the happier they are?”

  Miranda shrugged. “You trade some sources of happiness that you value less for one big one that you value more. Anyway, the point is, leveling up in a game like Rivet Couture represents commitment. We’ve leveled up to the point where the Griffin is open to us.”

  He squinted at her. “And that is important because . . . ?”

  “Because Fraction told me that the Griffin is a gateway to Oversatch.”

  They retired to the hotel to change. Formal clothing was required for a visit to the Griffin, and so for the first time Gennady found himself donning the complete Rivet Couture regalia. It was pure steampunk. Miranda had bought him a tight pinstriped suit whose black silk vest had a subtle dragon pattern sewn into it. He wore two belts, an ordinary one and a leather utility belt that hung down over one hip and had numerous loops and pouches on it. She’d found a bowler hat and had ordered him to slick back his hair when he wore it.

  When he emerged, hugely self-conscious, he found Miranda waiting in what appeared to be a cast-iron corset and long black skirt. Heavy black boots peeked out from under the skirt. She twirled an antique-looking parasol and grinned at him. “Every inch the Russian gentleman,” she said.

  “Ukrainian,” he reminded her; and they set off for the Griffin Rampant.

  Gennady’s glasses had tuned themselves to filter out all characteristic frequencies of electric light. His earbuds likewise eliminated the growl and jangle of normal city noises, replacing them with Atlantean equivalents. He and Miranda sauntered through a city transformed, and there seemed no hurry tonight as the gentle amber glow of the streetlights, distant nicker of horses and pervasive sound of crickets were quite relaxing.

  They turned a corner and found themselves outside the Griffin, which was an outdoor cafe that filled a side street. Lifting his glasses for a second, Gennady saw that the place was actually an alley between two glass-and-steel sky-scrapers, but in Rivet Couture the buildings were shadowy stone monstrosities festooned with gargoyles, and there were plenty of virtual trees to hide the sky. In ordinary reality, the cafe was hidden from the street by tall fabric screens; in the game, these were stone walls and there was an ornately carved griffin over the entrance.

  Paper lanterns lit the tables; a dapper waiter with a sly expression led Gennady and Miranda to a table, where—to the surprise of neither—Fraction was lounging. The cyranoid was drinking mineral water, swirling it in his glass in imitation of the couple at the next table.

  “Welcome to Atlantis,” said Fraction as Gennady unfolded his napkin. Gennady nodded; he did feel transported somehow, as though this really was some parallel world and not a downtown alley.

  The waiter came by and recited the evening’s specials. He left menus, and when Gennady opened his he discovered that the prices were all in the game’s pretend currency, Atlantean deynars.

  He leaned over to Miranda. “The game’s free,” he murmured, “so who pays for all this?”

  Fraction had overheard, and barked a laugh. “I said, welcome to Atlantis. We have our own economy, just like Sweden.”

  Gennady shook his head. He’d been studying the game, and knew that there was no exchange that translated deynars into any real-world currency. “I mean who pays for the meat, the vegetables—the wine?”

  “It’s all Atlantean,” said Fraction. “If you want to earn some real social capital here, I can introduce you to some of the people who raise it.”

  Miranda shook her head. “We want to get to the next level. To Oversatch,” she said. “You know that. Why haven’t you taken us straight there?”

  Fraction shrugged. “Tried that with Hitchens’ men. They weren’t able to get there.”

  “Oversatch is like an ARG inside Rivet Couture,” Gennady guessed. “So you have to know the rules and people and settings of RC before you can play the meta-game.”

  “That’s part of it,” admitted Fraction. “But Rivet Couture is just an overlay—a map drawn on a map. Oversatch is a whole new map.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ll show you.” The waiter came by and they ordered. Then Fraction stood up. “Come. There’s a little store at the back of the restaurant.”

  Gennady followed him. Behind a screen of plants were several market-stall type tables, piled with various merchandise. There was a lot of clothing in Atlantean styles, which all appeared to be handmade. There were also various trinkets, such as fob watches and earrings similar to Miranda’s. “Ah, here,” said Fraction, drawing Gennady to a table at the very back.

  He held up a pair of round, antique-looking glasses. “Try them on.” Gennady did, and as his eyes adjusted he saw the familiar glow of an augmented reality interface booting up.

  “These are—”

  “Like the ones you were wearing,” nodded Fraction, “but with some additions. They’re made entirely in 3-D printers and by hand, by and for the people of Oversatch and some of their Atlantean friends. The data link piggybacks on ordinary internet protocols: that’s called tunneling.”

  Fraction bought two pair of the glasses from the smiling elderly woman behind the counter, and they returned to the table. Miranda was chatting with some of the other Atlanteans. When she returned, Fraction handed her one pair of glasses. Wordlessly, she put them on.

  Dinner was uneventful, though a few of Rivet Couture’s players stopped by to network. Everybody was here for the atmosphere and good food, of course, but also to build connections that could advance their characters’ fortunes in the game.

  When they were finished, Fraction dropped some virtual money on the table, and as the waiter came by he said, “My compliments to the chef.”

  “Why thank you.” The waiter bowed.

  “The lady here was highly impressed, and she and her companion would like to know more about how their meal came about.” Fraction turned his lapel inside out, revealing an tiny, ornate pin carved in a gear pattern. The waiter’s eyes widened.

  “Of course, sir, of course. Come this way.” He led them past the stalls at the back of the restaurant, to where the kitchen staff were laboring over some ordinary-looking, portable camp stoves. Se
veral cars and unadorned white panel vans were parked in the alley behind them. The vans’ back doors were rolled up revealing stacks of plastic skids, all piled with food.

  The waiter conferred with a man who was unloading one of the vans. He grunted. “Help me out, then,” he said to Gennady. As Gennady slid a tray of buns out of the back of the van, the man said, “We grow our own produce. They’re all fancy with their names nowadays, they call them vertical farms. Back when I got started, they were called grow-ops and they all produced marijuana. Ha!” He punched Gennady on the shoulder. “It took organized crime to fund an agricultural revolution. They perfect the art of the grow-op, we use what they learn to grow tomatoes, green beans and pretty much anything else you can imagine.”

  Gennady hoisted another skid. “So you—what?—have houses around the city where you grow stuff?”

  The man shrugged. “A couple of basements. Mostly we grow it in the open, on public boulevards, in parks, roofs, ledges of high-rise buildings . . . there’s hectares of unused space in any city. Might as well do something with it.”

  When they were done unloading the skids, Gennady saw Fraction waving to them from one of the other vans. He and Miranda walked over to find that this vehicle didn’t contain food; rather, the back was packed with equipment. “What’s all this?” Miranda asked.

  Gennady whistled. “It’s a factory.” They were looking at an industrial-strength 3-D printer, one sophisticated enough to create electronic components as well as screws, wires, and any shape that could be fed into it as a 3-D image file. There was also a 3-D scanner with laser, terahertz and x-ray scanning heads; Gennady had used similar units to look for isotopes in smuggled contraband. It could digitize almost anything, from Miranda’s jewelery to consumer electronic devices, and the printer could print out an almost perfect copy from the digital file. From a scan alone the printer could only copy electrical devices at about the level of a toaster, but with the addition of open-source integrated circuit plans it could duplicate anything from cell phones to wireless routers—and, clearly, working pairs of augmented reality glasses.