Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  ~

  In the early evening, Kurt, Lisa, Ty and Anthony tried to fill their Mary-shaped void with some of the new Lens apps. Minter was there, too. One app had caught Kurt’s eye in particular during the installation process, but he hadn’t yet tried it out.

  The app, called Decorate XL, had been created by an English developer known only as Burf. According to the description on Trikk_Stikk’s forum, Decorate XL started life two years ago as Decorate, an AR home decoration app which ran on the XK6 in conjunction with some of the bulky headsets that preceded the UltraLenses.

  As soon as the Lenses were successfully hacked, Burf began updating his old app to take advantage of the new possibilities. The reviews Kurt had read were resoundingly positive, and Trikk_Stikk himself had awarded Burf with a Star of Excellence for his work.

  Looking forward to showing Ty, Lisa and Anthony what the UltraLenses were capable of, Kurt took them into a totally empty store halfway around the mall’s northwest path.

  When Kurt clicked into the app, it asked him to confirm that he was inside a private residence. He said yes. Next, it asked him to invite others around him to participate in his display. An invite popped up in each of their vistas and they all accepted. This meant that they would see whatever virtual objects Kurt decorated the room with, optimised precisely for the angle they were viewing from.

  On a scale of one to ten, with one being cluttered and ten being empty, Kurt told Decorate XL that the room was a ten. The app explained that this enabled the full range of options, including dynamic displays. No one else knew anything about the app beyond its name, which was exactly how Kurt wanted it. The fun was in the surprise.

  Kurt navigated to the app’s advanced options. He asked Ty to step into the middle of the store so he could put a decoration on the back wall. Kurt pretended to be struggling and asked Ty to face the side wall since this first decoration was for him and Kurt didn’t want the surprise to be spoiled. Kurt winked at the others and urged them to wait outside the door. They quietly stepped out and watched through the front windows.

  After a few seconds, Kurt walked towards Ty and let out the most convincing shriek of horror he could muster. “Ty!” he yelled, pointing to the back wall. “Watch out!”

  Ty turned around and saw a phenomenally realistic mountain lion bounding towards him from the wall of the otherwise empty store. Using 3D footage of a mountain lion running towards an ultra high-definition camera, Decorate XL and the UltraLenses combined to give a frightening illusion of depth that made it almost impossible to visually discern this virtual cat from a real one. Even Kurt flinched when the cat started bounding. The others covered their eyes and cowered, too, despite knowing it was fake and being safely on the other side of the door.

  With none of their knowledge of the prank, Ty screamed like he was already being mauled and ran for his life towards the store’s exit. Kurt pretended that the door out to the mall was jammed, which led to Ty trying desperately to climb up the corner of the walls like a spider in a bathtub, shouting all the time for someone to please do something.

  Kurt pressed stop at the point when he felt that funny was turning to cruel. The prank had been far more effective than Kurt had hoped or even wanted, and it was never intended to be mean-spirited. He was truly relieved that Ty saw the funny side.

  “Were any of you recording me?” Ty asked.

  They all said no, and he was disappointed.

  Kurt ended his Decorate XL session, in awe of how well the app worked.

  After the others played around with virtual fires and neon signs, Minter and Anthony decided to call it a night. Anthony reminded them to be quiet when they were walking back to Home later on.

  Ty, still hyper from his fright, didn’t want the night to end yet. “Let’s go to the cinema,” he suggested.

  Kurt naturally asked what Ty was talking about, which surprised Ty given that La Plethora’s multiplex featured in the documentary he had given Kurt to watch. Kurt explained that he hadn’t seen the end but said he was more than keen to check out the cinema.

  The cinema was near the bottom of the northwest path, tucked oddly among designer stores like a panda in the desert, so it didn’t take them long to get there.

  Inside, it was exactly as Kurt expected: totally unfinished and empty but for the one small area which had been used for promotional footage. As they walked through the foyer with its exposed concrete walls and total lack of lighting, Ty told Kurt that the opposite side of the mall had a huge theatre with a stage but no seats. Such was life in La Plethora.

  Kurt had seen very little of the mall, moving almost exclusively between Home and the workstation via the food court. His first reaction to hearing there was a theatre as well as a cinema was “how can they both fit in here?”, until he remembered how long it took to walk or even run from one end of the mall to the other.

  In some ways it was more helpful to think of La Plethora Mall & Resort as exactly that; a resort. If the monorail had been functioning and the hotel had been constructed as planned in the north area of the parking lot, it would certainly have been more resort than mall.

  When they left the foyer and entered Screen 1, Kurt was surprised to see that there actually was a screen. He had imagined that the promotional footage would have focused on the viewers, which would have been a whole lot cheaper. It was easy to forget that money had been no object during La Plethora’s development, at least until the watershed day when the mall’s army of construction workers objected to getting no money for the second month in a row.

  There were hundreds of empty chairs in the vast, eerie room, which at least had power and a functioning light switch. The three of them sat in the back row and collectively wished that they had some movies on their phones.

  The giant blank screen looming eerily down on them reminded Lisa of the Funscreen on her parents’ wall in Durham. Lisa told Kurt that both of her parents were unemployed and dependent on their Funscreen, which Kurt already knew was a smart TV that used eye-tracking cameras to monitor its viewers’ vision and financially reward them for attentively watching the right kind of ads. Kurt also knew that “reward” wasn’t the best word given that families like Lisa’s had been explicitly coerced into watching ads all day ever since the austerity-loving UK government had privatised welfare and partnered with Funscreen in several local trials.

  If Funscreen families wanted to eat, they had to make sure they watched enough ads. It was as simple and as tragic as that.

  Consumer rights groups raised other concerns about Funscreen — chiefly that the screens’ cameras and microphones couldn’t be turned off — but the scheme had been hailed as a triumph by advertisers and politicians alike, so it looked likely that Lisa’s family’s experience would become common across the UK and perhaps beyond.

  Lisa said that she had felt guilty leaving her parents to live like that when she came to the US to study costume design, but the scholarship opportunity had been too good to turn down. Kurt was amazed to hear that she had only been in the country for ten months; she and Ty seemed like they had been together for years. In any case, Lisa’s studies and her life in general were unceremoniously put on hold when Amos threatened her in his communications with Ty, who she met almost immediately after arriving.

  Kurt was glad to know something about Lisa’s background having never really spent enough time alone with her to ask, and he certainly agreed that her tales of living with a Funscreen painted a depressing picture. Still, though, he didn’t think it quite compared to the barrage of invasive advertising faced by even the poorest of American families living in the Sycamore era, much less to the horrors of CrimePrev and the Movement Tax.

  After a brief silence, which was very unusual in any group that included Ty or Lisa, Kurt tried to lighten the mood with the suggestion of some Four In A Row. They both perked up.

  But this time there was a twist, as they were each able to lock their display to the gargantuan cinema screen while they played. Kurt ha
d always liked this type of screen-locking more than watching things in full immersion, and being in a cinema made it all the better.

  After ten or eleven games, the unthinkable happened: Ty won.

  Inevitably, his defeated opponent was Kurt. Ty ran down the aisle and stood in front of the screen with his arms aloft. After the mountain lion prank had gotten so out of hand, Kurt was willing to let Ty have this one. Not that he let him win, he just didn’t begrudge him a moment of glory.

  All the way back from the cinema to Home, Ty talked and talked about how his victory was a sea change and how he was going to crush every opponent from now on.

  Lisa asked Kurt if there was any way she could get Star’s Eye View on her UltraLenses. He explained that there was one convoluted option: he could record a few hours on one of the internet-connected computers, transfer the video to his safely offline laptop, then stream it to Lisa’s phone from which she could watch the recorded footage in full immersion.

  Kurt thought Lisa would say that this sounded like too much hassle, but instead she asked when he could set it all up for her.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” he said, already regretting his previous explanation.

  “Thanks,” Lisa said. “You’re an angel.”

  ~

  Kurt slept on Mary’s bottom bunk, as he had the previous night, and didn’t set an alarm.

  He was awakened in pitch darkness by a voice at the side of his bed. At first he thought it was a dream, but the voice got closer and was joined by two hands on his shoulders.

  “Get up,” the voice said. It was a hushed whisper, so he couldn’t make out who it was. There was no malice in the tone, though; only urgency.

  Kurt sat up quickly and reached for his phone’s light. The screen said 5:25. He held it outwards and saw Val.

  “Come on,” she said.

  “Where are we going?” Kurt asked.

  Val pulled him up and hurried him along. “To see Mary.”

  19

  “To see Mary?” Kurt echoed. “Are you joking?”

  Val held a finger to her lips and ushered Kurt out of his bedroom and through Tasmart Home. They soon emerged onto an utterly lightless main walkway. When Kurt had previously been up early, he had been able to convince himself that it was dawn rather than night. But even he couldn’t stretch the definition of dawn to include this. When Kurt pointed his phone’s flashlight towards the food court and the workstation, there was no sign of Anthony or anyone else.

  “This way,” Val said, willing to speak now that they were on the deserted walkway, but still insistent on whispering. They turned left outside Home, going north towards a fire exit that Kurt had never seen anyone use. Val opened it.

  The fresh pre-morning air hit Kurt like a bucket of water. He saw Harry’s truck, which had been moved round from the main entrance, and also a white car he didn’t recognise. Val said it was Michael’s. There were faint signs of the sunrise on the horizon, so the outside world didn’t seem quite as dark as the mall.

  “Are you going to tell me anything yet?” Kurt asked.

  “Mary knows the time and place, but we have to leave now.”

  “I feel like you’re skipping the main part here,” Kurt said. “Why am I coming?”

  “It’s just better this way.”

  “How?”

  “It’s safer,” Val said. “If you didn’t come, I would have to go back to Mary tomorrow with your reply to whatever she says today, and then I’d have to go back again with your next reply. And if Mary keeps walking somewhere quiet and taking her Lenses out every day, that’s going to look suspicious. That’s more of a risk than bringing you once. And it’s not like you’ll be driving in an open car with your hood up like last time; we have the truck.”

  There was a degree of sense in Val’s words, Kurt thought. One conclusive meeting between Mary and Kurt would be better than a drawn-out back and forth via Val.

  Val continued: “Mary was going to try to have a video chat with your nephew yesterday, so you can go over what was said and tell her what to say next time. After today, we shouldn’t need to talk to her again until we really need to. And if we leave now, we’ll be back before anyone else is awake.”

  Kurt knew there was a good chance that Anthony would be up in the next hour, possibly with Ty or Lisa, but he had a feeling that they weren’t who Val was worried about. And though he didn’t like keeping secrets when the stakes were so high, he saw the logic of Val’s idea for him to meet Mary and agreed that it was probably better if no one else knew.

  Kurt’s final decision came when he realised that the Two-Way would enable him to watch a replay of Mary’s chat with Julian as long as she was able to publicly display the footage on a physical surface. He told Val that he absolutely had to run inside to get something, and she reluctantly told him to hurry up and get it. Hurry he did, and they were ready to go.

  Since there was no one around to see him, and since anyone spotting the truck leaving the mall would have been a disaster in itself, Val let Kurt ride in the front until they reached the end of Verdant Heights, the luxury housing development that never was.

  Kurt liked Val. At first he hadn’t, but then he recognised that her suspicion of outsiders and her willingness to protect the group at all costs were strengths rather than weaknesses. Since then he had barely spoken to her in the mall, such was his closeness with Ty and Lisa and Val’s closeness with Ernesto and Michael. Ernesto and Kurt were now courteous partners if not friends, but Michael remained unflinching in his hatred of Minter and his anger at Kurt for bringing him.

  This stretch of the drive allowed Kurt to ask some of the questions he had.

  “Where are we meeting her?” Kurt asked.

  “Near the guest house,” Val said. “Two streets away. She’s going to come into the truck.”

  Kurt was glad to hear that the plan didn’t involve him going outside. “How long will it take to get there?” he asked.

  “In this thing, maybe 45 minutes.”

  Kurt did some quick counting. They had enough time to spend an hour with Mary — which would be more than enough — and still be back at around eight. He climbed out of the front of the truck and got into the back when they reached the far side of Verdant Heights. Val closed him in and kept driving.

  Kurt turned on the Two-Way, hoping to catch a SycaNews broadcast that would keep him updated with whatever Amos wanted the world to believe today. All that came was an early morning SycaLotto draw. Consumers wouldn’t be punished if they were sleeping with their Lenses in while this draw was made, the host explained; their 30-second claim window would begin only when they opened their eyes.

  Kurt tried to make a game of the draw, guessing which number would come next. He got none right.

  Fortunately, Kurt also had his phone and his Lenses. He played some games from his phone in full immersion, which strained his eyes a lot less than staring at a bright screen in a dark environment.

  The truck ground to a halt midway through a game of speed chess against the AI, which Kurt could have sworn was cheating. He heard the door being raised and scurried to the back of the truck to hide under some pillows on the off chance that it was someone hostile.

  It wasn’t.

  Climbing into the truck with a smile on her face, it was Mary.

  ~

  Mary hugged Kurt like she had known him forever and hadn’t seen him for a year. She still looked different from before, what with the dark hair and thin eyebrows, but her freckles had been liberated from the swathes of special-effects level makeup that Lisa had applied for the seeding.

  Kurt congratulated Mary on doing so well at Tasmart, as did Val, and told her that everyone got their Lenses and they were all having fun with them. He didn’t tell her about the thing with Adeline Lemarchand, the French journalist asking the right questions, because he still didn’t quite know what they could do with it.

  Val closed the door on the back of the truck and drove; to somewhere more secluded, Kurt as
sumed.

  Mary told Kurt all about the guest house she was staying in, which was nice and private and run by a friendly old man named Michel, and then about the amazing number of ads she had been seeing. Kurt liked talking to Mary, and he was interested in her post-seeding experiences, but he was here for a reason.

  “And did you manage to talk to Julian yet?” he asked.

  Mary smiled. “He’s funny.”

  “So you did?”

  “Yeah. Wasn’t that the whole point? Randy spoke for a second, too, and Sabrina.”

  Glad to hear that it had indeed been a video chat and elated to hear that Sabrina featured, Kurt gave Mary instructions on how to display the footage so that he would be able to see it.

  This could be done quite easily through Sycamore’s Video app. In a public area, such as a busy street, no consumers could publicly display footage or images for anyone but themselves. But in a private area, such as a home or a vehicle, consumers could do whatever they wanted. Kurt had grown used to throwing TV shows at his wall, for example, and Amos had often liked to make Kurt watch things on the floor. The beauty of these hard overlays, which were visible to everyone whose UltraLenses looked at them, was that they could also be seen through Two-Ways.

  Mary had concerns about the idea. “Won’t there be a database file on me or something that says I shared footage of Julian?” she asked. “Because then if someone from Sycamore searched for Julian Jacobs, would they not see that I’ve been sharing footage of him?”

  It was a good question, but Kurt knew from talking to Minter about general surveillance that Sycamore would be able to see that Mary had replayed this particular footage at this particular time only if they already happened to be combing through her vista. Since sharing content within a private area was free, the action wouldn’t appear in any transaction logs or in Mary’s searchable consumer history. In short, there would be no visible mark on Mary’s record saying that she had shared recorded footage of Julian Jacobs with anyone else.