by Olga Werby
A small group of ravers turned down my dingy alley. And stopped. So fast that the guys in front almost fell over as the ones in the rear ran smack into them. But they didn’t go any farther down the alley. I made myself go “transparent” by sucking up the background, leaving only a slight outline of mercurial grayness. That did it—they stumbled away, pushing and screaming for their buddies to “move it, go go go.” I just kept doing my ghosting trick. A few more ravers looked into the alley, but quickly decided to look for me elsewhere. I listened to the noise receding—the screaming and calling for Lizard Princess—farther and farther away from me. I noticed that I was trembling—here and back home in my bathroom. My shivering probably helped sell my wraith illusion. I decided to keep ghosting all the way to The Edge.
Keeping to buildings’ shades and shadows, I maneuvered into the dark monochrome streets of The Edge. I had to move slowly, running would have given me away—ghosts never seemed to be in a hurry. Soon, the streets were sucking up light and color, and I found that it was actually easier to stay ghost-like than to keep up the green lizard color scheme. I didn’t realize how much energy my avatar took when I was here last, just a few short hours ago.
I floated down the narrow streets. Come on, Doc, show me where you are, I thought loudly. But the kid wouldn’t highlight the map with his position. So I kept going, farther and deeper into The Edge.
I saw several real ghosts a few streets away from me, visible only for a moment or two as they passed through an intersection. And that was just fine by me. I’d had enough ghosts for one night. For a lifetime, really.
“Cat eyes.” I barely heard Doc’s voice. Cat eyes? What did he mean? Was he asking me to draw something? Should I pattern my skin with cat eyes? I was too tired for riddles. And just as I was losing to frustration, I got it—make my eyes into cat eyes. Of course! I squinted and triggered the eye software Doc gave me. A quick scroll through options and I found the CatEyes feature. Nice.
I didn’t have a mirror, but my eyes should have looked like big yellow fluorescent plates with vertical slits—not the right look for a ghost. I almost changed them back to a dull gray. I glanced around—the streets were still empty—so I chanced keeping the cat eyes. I focused inward then noticed a small red smudge on the map app. Doc!
He was beyond The Edge, not far from the Enhancements Try-n-Buy Emporium he pointed out earlier. In fact, it might have been the same building. I thought of my shape-shifting eyes and Doc’s panther avatar—it made sense that he would moonlight for an avatar-enhancements monger.
I noted my own location and a path that would take me to Doc. I also made myself memorize the local area on the map. Then I restored my eyes to dull gray, wanting to keep my ghostly disguise for as long as possible.
I floated slowly in Doc’s direction. Street after street, and I wasn’t getting closer. I had to stop and check Doc’s location several times. Each time, his hiding place was just as far away as when I started. It didn’t make any Euclidian sense. What did Dude say? There was something keeping us…me from crossing over The Edge. What? Nothing was asking me for a password. There were no obvious checkpoints. No sentries. No login daemons. Aside from a few ghosts, there was no one out here but me.
Doc never mentioned a barrier. He seemed to be able to move back and forth through The Edge into The Far Cinct. He was hiding out there now, beyond whatever was stopping me from entering. Did Doc have an explicit permission and I didn’t? I couldn’t figure it out. And it was getting late. Or early. It felt like hours had passed. I even stopped seeing ghosts. They must have retired for the night…or was it morning? I was going to be late for school.
“Doc?” I tried to call him a few times. But my calls were barely above a whisper and he never answered. Either he was too scared to respond or he was unable to. Both were bad. I had a strong feeling of waldeinsamkeit—being alone in a dark wood— except these weren’t woods and I wasn’t as alone as I would have liked.
While it was difficult to maintain hue in The Edge, it was also hard to suck up patterns off the pavement. I’d been doing my transparent camo thing, chameleoning for a long time, and I could sense that I was about to lose it. I edged into a dark corner when I felt my legs and torso breaking the pattern. I became solid…well, I was solid all along, and now I looked it too. But I didn’t get my color back, I was mostly shades of gray with maybe a hint of green and a touch of orange in my hair. My hair also lost the snaky upgrade and just hung loosely on my shoulders. It was like all of my enhancements drained out of me and my avatar turned a drab, factory gray. At any other time, I would have been disappointed—I’d invested so much into my avatar—but I simply didn’t have the energy to care just then.
I looked around. The alley was still empty. I no longer looked like a ghost, but I also didn’t look interesting, just a drab gray scarecrow. I moved along the walls, blending in more or less, pretending to belong. I certainly wasn’t looking for attention. I kept telling myself to keep cool and to keep walking towards Doc. And the amazing thing was that I started to make progress. The drab me was getting somewhere, where the exotic me couldn’t move an inch. It was like I found a current that carried me forward, but I could only float if the weight of my enhancements was off. It seemed easy now.
6. The Far Cinct
I was swept into The Far Cinct before I realized I was there. My color returned, but it took on a spiky quality. There was a touch of edginess to me now, like all that gray energy rubbed off on my avatar. My avatar hair bundles, which had a slight orange snake motif going for them before, were now really made of finger-thick snakes looking every bit poisonous—very Medusa-like. Mind you, I wasn’t experiencing age-otori or anything. I just wondered if this bad girl mystique would go away once I traversed The Edge backward. I hoped not. I kinda liked the def me.
I noticed that I had a touch of euphoria. I had to suppress a giggle. Age-otori indeed. The last time I had a haircut was five years ago and I had no regrets then or now. Silly thoughts were flooding my brain, making it difficult to concentrate. Was my head really full of snakes? How would that enhancement rub off onto the real me? I visualized my strawberry blond hair as full of dreadlocks in real life. Dad would hate that! I stopped. Why was I here anyway? Doc! It was like a face slap. Euphoria gone.
I felt disoriented. I cateyed and looked for the spot on the map. But my map app laughed at me and my ignorance. I was almost sure apps were not supposed to make fun of their users. I was indignant at such bad software behavior: the map app simply shifted away from Doc’s location mark and scrolled away from where I was walking in a very smug, unhelpful way. I was so flummoxed that I didn’t even get angry—cheeky app!
I must have said/thought it out loud, for I heard a cackling behind me. I twisted so fast that my legs were still facing forward. My cyber body was very flexible. A scrunched old woman avatar was staring at me and laughing.
“What?” I asked, bringing my lower torso in line with my upper body.
“Nice trick,” she said approvingly. Or was it sarcastically? The old woman was very amused by my loss of app control. I watched as my map app floated over to the old woman and tried to snuggle. What? “There there, you poor thing,” the hag cooed.
“Give that back,” I said. “I need it.”
“Of course you do, Lizard Girl,” she said. “You have no idea where you are.”
“I have some idea,” I protested, but my voice betrayed me.
Other apps were floating in from every direction toward the old crone. She gathered them all up and caressed them and fed them something—crumbs of energy? Data? I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. Cyberspace converted many abstract actions into metaphorical ones, sometimes with comical side effects. To me the old woman looked like she was feeding stray cats. But these were no cats and she wasn’t really feeding them or stroking them. Or whatever.
The apps were all distinct. My map app took the shape of a small origami mammal, perhaps a cat, made out of sheet
s of atlas pages. Other apps were different. There were little semi-transparent dust bunnies that frolicked at the old woman’s feet. Once in a while, I could see a sentence or a set of numbers flashing inside these hairy nebulae—I figured these were data clouds. There were a lot of those, big and small. The old woman brushed them with her fingers, and I was sure I could see the transfer of information from the cloud bunnies to her fingertips. Among the old crone’s entourage were actual cat avatars, too. I wasn’t sure if they were apps, daemons, or people. I heard that some humans liked to do the whole submissive animals thing in cyberspace, but I’d never seen it before. The cats and hairy apps, and there were many of them, climbed all over the old woman, got underneath her long skirts, sat on her shoulders, and even hung off her head.
“Can I have my map app back?” I asked. “Please?” I added, pathetically.
“I’m not keeping it,” she said, just as my map app tried to tangle itself into her long gray hair.
“Come back, app,” I ordered. But my map didn’t even acknowledge me. “It’s not working!” I stomped my feet and my hair twined into a nest of hissing snakes.
“You’re scaring it,” the old woman said gently. “Here,” she picked up my map app and tickled it between the folds. I swear it purred! “It just wants to be appreciated,” she said and gave it back to me.
I took my map app and tried to show it some love. “Good, map. Useful map.” I felt like a fool doing it. It was an app!
“Better,” the hag said.
My map app slipped back into my avatar and presented Doc’s location into my inner eye. He was close! I spun around, trying to figure out which way to go.
“What do you want? What are you looking for?” the old woman sang in syrupy sweet voice, a complete turnaround from the evil cackling with which she greeted me.
“A friend,” I said quickly. “We were just getting together, you know? Just hanging out…”
“Most kids hang out at the cyber arcade, on the other side of The Edge,” the old woman said.
“We just wanted to do something different. Something fun,” I said. “So, thank you very much for your help with managing my wayward app. I have to be going now.”
“Name is Gattara,” the old crone called after me. “Remember that, Lizard Girl. Gattara.”
“Gattara, right!” I ran down the street. I could see dozens of cuddly apps streaming towards the strange woman. She was feeding them and mumbling, and they gave her love in return. It was way weird, even for The Far Cinct, I thought.
The map app dutifully informed me that Doc’s location, according to his mark, was inside a building on my right. I looked. It was a structure made from upside down black waterfalls. The Far Cinct was colorful, but it still held on to the dark tones for its backgrounds. Black water was rushing into the roof to get sucked up into a cloud of black steam above the building. While the waters seemed black, they were really translucent, not color-dense like Indian ink black. Just below the fast-moving water were ads for custom-made enhancements:
“Come on in! The water is fine—we do you the way you want to be done.”
The flickering animations showed liquid body shape transformations—arms growing into wings, skin getting covered by scaly protrusions, horns exploding from heads and shoulders. There were also demonstrations of whales morphing into mice, pterodactyls shifting into hummingbirds, elephants transforming their trunks into boa constrictors. Every metamorphosis had remarkably appropriate sound effects attending it—the whales to mice transmutation was a whale song that turned into a mouse squeak with a charming little pop at the end. It was mesmerizing.
After moments of pure wonder, I noticed an ad for light-sucking—the same ability Doc gave his own avatar. He must have sold his code to this place. Or perhaps he saw the feature and just hacked it into his own avatar. He was a talented little boy.
The longer I watched, the more transparent the up-waterfall wall became, oozing with more ads. If I stared at a particular ad for too long, it zoomed closer, took up more space, and ran longer, enticing me with more and more features. I could have stayed there for a long time. I didn’t know half the things it showed me were possible or even desirable. Most of the school kids stuck with human avatars with just a few alterations—more muscles, bigger boobs, larger eyes—going for Ken and Barbie looks as opposed to freaks. Occasionally, boys would sport a horn or two. I knew a senior girl with tiny little wings on her avatar’s shoulders. But these were exceptions, not the rule—for all our teenage exuberance, high school kids are a rather conservative bunch. We are too eager to fit in, too scared to take a chance. Not one among my friends had anything as exotic as my green lizard avatar. But among the options shown to me beneath the black water, mine was just an ordinary nothing. I might as well have been the drab gray of The Edge. That gave me some perspective on the world of The Far Cinct.
I walked all the way around the Enhancements Try-n-Buy Emporium, which occupied most of The Far Cinct city block, but there was no obvious entrance to the place. How could they expect to sell any of that stuff if people couldn’t get in? I finally got brave enough to stick my hand into the up-falling waters. Doc had warned me to be careful of what I touched in cyberspace, so I was wary of any interaction. But I needed to get inside. I briefly considered asking Gattara for help. Briefly. I pushed my hand into the black liquid instead. Or I tried to—it was as solid as a stone wall. What looked like rushing water wasn’t.
Now what? I wished I’d had more time to study how all of this worked. But I am more of an intuitive learner—meaning I avoid reading manuals on principle. But intuition in a place like The Far Cinct was just not very helpful. I was angry at Doc for not teaching me better, not telling me what to do and what to expect.
A small hairball rolled to my feet then proceeded to climb my leg, leaving a trail of schmutz. I tried to flick it off, but it adroitly avoided my fingers and managed to get as high as my chest before exploding into a mesh screen with code embedded into it. I’m sure I yelled, but, in The Far Cinct, who listens? I swallowed my scream and read the message. It was instructions to get into the Emporium—a digital handshake, if you will. Gattara must have sent it—the fuzzball delivery method. I looked to see if she was watching me, but she wasn’t anywhere obvious. Which didn’t really mean anything since she had all those dust code daemons doing her errands and being her eyes and ears. She was probably spying on me, and I had no way of stopping it.
After spending a few moments being miffed at the old woman—if she was even old or a woman or a real person, for that matter—I focused on the instructions again. They were simple—meaning the whole difficult-to-enter thing was only meant to keep out stupid tourists. Quite successfully. Per directions, I made myself levitate and flip upside down. The waterfall and I now shared the same up-down orientation. The fuzz ball blew away and I stepped right through the wall, which moments ago was as solid as rock. Well, now it wasn’t. I didn’t even get wet.
The interior lobby was a cross between a car dealership and a doctor’s office waiting room—a very professional, high sales, sterile environment. A nice nurse lady receptionist smiled at me and indicated a seat in customer reception. I tried to explain why I was there, but she shushed me and pointed at a chair. I opened my mouth to complain, but something pulled me back and pinned me into the seat. A terminal with a large screen materialized in front of my face, displaying a catalog of various body enhancement options for sale at this place. I was pissed.
I was tired. It was late. And I wasn’t in the mood. I cateyed and pulled up the map app. It was cooperating now. But Doc’s spot was gone again. Where was that kid? I was tired of chasing after him.
While I fumed and fretted and freaked, the catalog in front of me dissolved into the disembodied head of the receptionist. She was staring at me, waiting for me to acknowledge her. I looked past the screen at the actual receptionist (or as actual as one gets in this reality). She was still busy at her desk. The versio
n of her in the screen waited patiently. Damn.
“What do you want?” I snapped.
“Good morning, miss,” she said in a perfectly polished professional why-are-you-bothering-me tone. As if.
“I’m looking for a large black panther,” I started to explain. “Doc?”
She just stared politely from the screen, sending a silent “you are an idiot” message, loud and clear. I hate people like that. I was a customer! Well, I wasn’t really, but she didn’t know that. I could have been. She was supposed to help me—that was her job. I pouted, pursing my emerald green lips and narrowing my verdant eyes in displeasure.
“Well, if you can’t help me,” I said, standing up and pushing the screen away from me, “I would like to speak with your manager.” That always worked for my dad when he dealt with annoying salespeople.
“I see here,” said the woman from behind the desk, “that you were looking for your side of the mirror?”
I sat back down. How did she know? I wanted to run and hide, but where? Even the screen with the enhancements catalog was gone. I felt very exposed. My hair snakes hissed at the woman, showing their displeasure.
“Problems controlling your avatar add-ons?” she simpered.
“No,” I said. “I like them this way.”
“Of course.”
I didn’t need her to believe me; my hair snakies appreciated that I was sticking up for them. “Well, as I was saying, I do have a problem. My little brother is in here somewhere. He’s a hacker. I believe he works for you? Freelances? Sells his code?”
