by Deck Davis
Before my Dad could answer, I remembered something I’d overheard Bill saying a few days earlier. I smiled, knowing I had the perfect response. “Who the hell cares? Calm your watch and chain, woman!”
Apparently, across the channel in England, there was a special language called cockney rhyming slang, where you rhymed words to mean something else. ‘Watch and chain,’ for example, rhymed with ‘brain.’ So, what I had said to my mom’s innocent observation about mayo was, ‘who the hell cares? Calm your brain, woman!’ Of course, I didn’t know that Bill and his friends used it ironically. They didn’t actually think it was cool. As soon as I’d said it to Mom, Bill burst out laughing, and I instinctively knew he was laughing at me, not with me.
Ah, the memories—memories of being grounded and sneaking into Bill’s room to talk, of him hanging halfway out of the window and finishing a cigarette, then spraying Stench-Be-Gone in an arc around him, filling the room suspiciously full of a flowery smell that no teenage boy would want unless he was up to no good.
Now, standing in the middle of his room, the embers of old memories were heating up. I felt a little nervous, like I was still ten and still didn’t have permission to be in here without Bill. Dylan was downstairs, thankfully. I decided I better get to work. I knelt by the bed and pried up the loose floorboard. There was a gap half a meter long in the floor, just like in my bedroom, and just like in the Bernli VBR. I set my holoface to full brightness and peered down. In the darkened little crook in the floor, beyond broken cobwebs and a film of dust, I saw exactly what Dylan had described: a knife, some cigarettes, and an oval pebble-like avatar disc.
I scooped up the disk and prepared to leave. As I did, the nostalgia began to well in me again. I saw the posters of the rock bands that Bill liked and that I’d listened to and pretended to enjoy, and rows and rows of horror books on his bookshelf, with little index cards slotted into each one to mark the especially scary parts, which Bill planned to use to help him write his own horror novel one day.
It was time to go. Just as I strode across the room, a series of thoughts hit me. It was a collection of images that I’d tried my damned best to never think about, images of me at home, wondering why I hadn’t heard from Mom, Dad and Bill in a while, of the police s-car driving down the dirt road and stopping at the gate, of the policemen’s faces as they approached, and how I was already reading in their expression what had happened. You know when something’s serious. When something really bad has happened, you don’t even need to hear the words. People wear it on their faces. Anyone but the best liar wears their emotions so plainly that you don’t need their lips to move.
I shook the thoughts away. Let to their own devices, they’d turn strong like metal, and they’d link together in a chain, and soon I’d be listening to the policemen tell me what happened again. I’d be imagining it, the way it went down, the screams, the blood. It was only when I left the room and went downstairs that the power started to wear off. Man, this was why I never went in his room.
“Find it?” asked Dylan. He had another bottle of Cool Blue in his hand. Where had he found that?
I nodded. “Time to plug it in.” Plug it in was an old phrase, and not really relevant anymore. The days of having a different plug socket and adapter—yeah, I’d seen the pictures in a textbook in school—were gone. Instead, the connection and the thing you were connecting into it would have a small patch of perma-gel, and when the gel touched, the two things were connected.
In that way, Bill’s avatar fit just fine. It was when the gel-screen changed into an unfamiliar green menu color and a progress bar appeared on it, that I realized just how old this piece of kit was.
Avatar 1.27 [firmware: oxyAlpha] detected
Updates needed: 40,167
Time to sync to mainnet: 2 years
Two years to sync up? I might as well have just waited for both my other damaged avatars to heal. What was it with software and hardware companies and their never-ending ream of updates?
Then, the progress bar began to fill much quicker. The sync time dropped to one year, then eight months, then four, then three weeks… Down and down it went. I shrugged. I guessed that download times always dropped eventually.
While the avatar synced, I was occupied by a single thought. “This isn’t Bill’s main avatar,” I said to Dylan, who was kneeling by Bennie’s bed and giving the beast a belly rub. “Definitely not the one he used for VBRs.”
“What makes ya say that?”
“The look of it, for one. The shape. Not as sleek or oval and anything from the last ten years. And the sync time… 40,000 updates? I never heard of an avatar taking that long.”
“So, what do you think it is?”
“I’ve got a feeling that this is Bill’s first ever avatar,” I said. “Let me check.”
The further back into your memories you go, the hazier they get. The colors are dimmer, the faces not as sharp. Even the events themselves that you store as ‘memories’ are questionable, because you were so young when you committed them to your mind. Did he really say that? Did she actually do that? Lucky for me, I didn’t need to rely on my memory. I scooped a few-fingers worth of gel from a tub on the desk and made a small, square display on the wall. I accessed my holo-menu and then went into my recorded feeds. I was looking for something that happened when I was eight. The night when Bill had first gotten his avatar.
I set my search parameters, filling in the dates and adding ‘Bill’ as a search item.
No results found
No results found? How could that be? My big brother hadn’t suddenly gone missing for a year of my life!
I rest and search again, trying to find it.
No results found
I did the same search, the same dates, but this time with ‘Dad’ instead of ‘Bill.’
No results found.
And then I tried ‘Mom.’
No results found.
The sickening realization hit me. A memory sprung from the dark corners of my mind and then punched me in the stomach. I remembered the first few weeks after the accident. I shut myself in my room, barely showered, keeping it together only to make sure Dylan was okay and to feed the animals. For those few weeks, I had drunk every drop of every bottle in Dad’s ‘special occasion’ spirit bar. Then, with all the whiskey, gin and vodka gone, I’d ordered more to be delivered by drone. I’d spent countless days in a haze, grasping at fleeting memories of the life that had been snatched away from me, and then I tried to rid myself of them. If I could forget about Dad, about Mom, Bill, then there’d be no pain.
That was when I’d deleted them from my feed. Our wrist connectors and holo-menus recorded every moment of our lives, save for certain pre-defined ‘private’ moments. I think you can guess what those were. I had years and years of footage of my family stored in a little chip inside my wrist. In those dark times, the idea of watching them only brought me pain, so I’d deleted them.
A tinging sound caught my attention.
“It’s ready!” said Dylan, straightening up and moving away from Bennie.
I joined him in front of the gel screen where, sure enough, the avatar progress bar was finished. “Let’s see what kind of class it is,” I said.
Before I could access the menu, a text box filled the screen.
Surprise, bro! You’re going to be twelve, old enough to fight in the junior VBR leagues. Course there’s no blood or anything in there, so it’s pretty fuckin boring (Don’t show this message to Mom and Dad!)… I figured you needed an avatar, so here it is. Congratulations, Harry. You’re an abermorph! Cool, huh?
An abermorph? What the hell was that? I racked my brain, but I couldn’t think of coming across an abermorph in any of my VBRs. Of course, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of different classes. Some rose in fashion, some fell. Some were found to be lacking balance or to have a fatal flaw, and they were quickly abandoned by fighters. Maybe the abermorph class was one of those. More importantly, why had Bill never giv
en this to me? His pre-programmed welcome message said it was a gift, but I was sure I’d never gotten it. He said it was for my twelfth birthday. What else did I get that year?
I remembered. I was downstairs unwrapping my gifts. Dad held one out to me. He had a wide grin on his face like he couldn’t wait for me to open it. I ripped the paper open to see a shiny new avatar. At the time, it was one of the latest models—a Storm Knight. Maybe that explained it. The avatar Bill had gotten me, the one he must have saved up for with his job at a gel-shop in Duisben, was decades old. Even back then, it would have been an antique. He must not have known that mom and dad were going to get me an avatar for my birthday. Then, when he saw me unwrap theirs, he decided not to give me the one he’d bought. Maybe he thought it was too old or something, and that it wouldn’t compare to the shiny, new one my parents had gotten me. Shit. He didn’t give me a present that year, and I’d been pissed at him. I’d given him hell. Now, I felt so damn bad about it.
Okay, I decided. Bill wanted to give this to me when I was twelve. It was thirteen years too late now, but I was going to use it. I’d play the abermorph, whatever the hell that was, and I’d get into New Eden. I’d do it for Bill, for Dad, and for Mom.
“You okay?” asked Dylan, shaking me from my thoughts.
“Never better, buddy,” I said. “Let’s see what this thing can do.”
Chapter Thirteen
“Go fetch your avatar,” I told Dylan, “and meet me in dad’s studio.”
He looked at me strangely. He wore a goofy expression as if the single bottle of Cool Blue had hit him. Dylan had never been able to handle his drink. One time, when he worked in the kitchen at the Red Duke when he was fourteen, he and another pot washer had taken a bottle of whiskey from the bar, poured some of the amber liquid into their own container, then topped it back up with apple juice so that nobody would know. After each of them rang their parents with an alibi to say they were staying at the other’s house, they camped out near Handrake quarry and got drunk.
Dylan had been rebellious back then, and, really, who could blame him? The poor kid had seen his family murdered in front of him. At least it hadn’t been recorded, though. Certain people didn’t like the way society was heading. They didn’t like the mainnet sockets carefully stamped onto baby’s arms. They didn’t like an ever-present mainnet link or an always-recording feed. They shunned avatars, gel, localnets, mainnets, s-bikes. You name it, they shunned it. Dylan’s family was like this, and thank God they were because it meant that Dylan didn’t have a live feed, so there was no way to record the slaughter of his parents.
When the state took Dylan in, they fitted him with a mainnet socket. They placed him with foster families, but Dylan didn’t play nice. He’d never lived with a live feed, with curfews, or with discipline before. His attempts to reconcile himself with it came out as rebellion, as getting drunk and staying out. One by one, he wore through his foster families until the state had no idea what to do with this floppy-haired, gangly kid who was pissed all the time. That’s when Mom and Dad stepped in. After having Bill and me, they’d used up their birth licenses and wouldn’t be able to have more natural children. Since my parents had big hearts, they still had a lot of love to give even after having me and Bill. So, they took in Dylan.
He was ten back then, and he was a little shit. He stole, he swore, he got into fights at school. One time, Mom had come home from rehearsal to find him lying in a puddle of blood, having taken a knife to his wrist in an attempt to remove his mainnet socket.
Dad was the one who broke his rebellious nature. Well, maybe ‘broke’ is the wrong word. It was more like he repaired Dylan. Dad talked to Dylan about his life on the road with his parents. This, the state had warned Mom and Dad, was a subject best left avoided, but Dad didn’t believe in avoiding things. ‘Avoid something and it’ll grow stronger, and it’ll come back and kick you in the balls,’ he always used to say. He encouraged Dylan to focus on the good memories he had of his parents and his life in the circus.
That’s when Dylan told him what his most favorite thing was. You see, Dylan’s family’s circus wasn’t always animal-free. They used to have tuskvarks that’d perform ball tricks. Dylan was in charge of looking after them, and it was his favorite thing. It was only after a viral epidemic had swept through them and wiped them out, rendering Dylan as upset that he couldn’t breathe, that his parents had changed their marketing strategy. They got rid of the animals. Hearing this, Dad put Dylan in charge of Oscar, Jack, and Torriero, who were our three Razta wolfhounds at the time.
“You get up at the crack of dawn and feed them, and you take them out at night,” Dad had told him. “You never miss a day, you never bunk off, ‘cos it isn’t fair to the animals. Think you’re up to that?”
Dylan had nodded eagerly, like a dog begging for a treat. From then on, every single day, come rain, snow, flu, and even a broken arm, Dylan looked after the hounds. Of course, his rebellious streak still flared up from time to time, as evidenced by his whiskey-fueled campout.
Today, after one beer, he was a little worse for wear, but he would have to do. I needed a training partner. We left the house and crossed over to Dad’s study. I placed my wrist against the door scanner while pressing my thumb into the bio-read. The door lock released with a click, and I turned the handle.
Dad’s study was twice the size of your average garden shed. As well the outside being made from eco-friendly insulative clay, the inside was designed to be completely airtight. This meant that, even after years of being left alone, there were no cobwebs, no dust, no musty smell. There were no windows in the study, but it didn’t need them. You didn’t come into the study to stay in this little room; here, you could go anywhere—that is, anywhere that had been pre-programmed and stored on Dad’s hard drives.
Against the left wall, under a desk, was a bank of processors. Four of them were lined up, the cables tied together and stuck in place as neatly as possible. Above the desk was a wide space on the wall which had been covered with special paint to give a better surface for gel displays. On the edge of the desk was a vat of gel. Across from it, on the opposite end, was a tray full or wires. Next to that was a mug with ‘World’s best dad*’ printed on it. The ‘*’ was important to the hilarity of this mug because when you turned the mug around, it said ‘*When I need something from you’ on the other side. That was Bill’s stupid sense of humor at work.
The desks took up one wall of the roof. Directly opposite them, on the other wall, were a row of mainnet connectors, as well as two capsules. These capsules were nothing like what you’d see in a professional VBR center. They were smaller, for one. Well, they had to be if they were going to fit in a home study. They were five feet tall so that when you stood in them your head poked out. They were slanted so that you could lean back. A slight lean, apparently, was the optimal position for VBR capsules and ensured the minimization of cramped muscles when you finished.
“Get hooked in,” I said.
Dylan looked at me wide-eyed. “Now?”
“I wanna see what an abermorph can do.”
Once I spread a gel screen above the desk and started the processors whirring, I loaded a VBR map. There were dozens in Dad’s drive. Some of them were ones he’d worked on for the Overseer’s commission, while others were ones that he’d made as a hobby. Dad had never been into the fighting side of VBR, despite spending his career making maps for it. Instead, he liked to design little maps for himself. Peaceful places where he could relax. Others were pixel-perfect copies of famous landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower in France, or Big Ben in London. Dad had an unconquerable fear of flying, and he knew he’d never see these places for real. VBR maps quenched his thirst for travel.
I selected a map called ‘Drift Dunes’ and set it loading. Dylan and I each connected our avatars and got into a capsule. From there, Dad’s study started to flake away, like ash floating from a fire.
My vision went black, and before long it burst into color a
gain. A gentle wind whirled in my ear. From somewhere overhead, I heard a dozen squawks, and I looked up to see a flock of jerboa birds passing under a cloud. To my left and right, bronze sand rose in a sweeping crescent, creating a dune that had ripples running along it. If I focused, I could see parts of the ripples lose their perfection when the scuttles of desert insects cut through them. I watched tarantula-like spiders hurry along, kicking up sand, while black beetles the size of my fist toiled in the sun. We were in Drift Dunes. Dad had started making this map for the Savarah Outpost, way out east beyond the boundaries of prot-protected society. I must have been eleven back then, and around that time I was still obsessed with the Expanse Charter and how they brought prot-technology to villages that had somehow gone centuries without it.
The Savannah Outpost didn’t need the Charter’s charity. The sheikhs of the Savannah were already trillionaires from exploiting the oil deposits under their land. Once the Paris agreement eventually banned the burning of fossil fuels, the sheikhs found something else. The wise ones among them saw the direction the world was heading. They spent some of their capital investing the best technology and the cleverest people to develop it, and they opened the first industrial-scale bit mines. Mines, of course, on computers that ran on solar power.
