“No, not right now, but I will come back again tomorrow and ask you all about it, okay?”
“Okay, daddy! Can’t wait. And don’t forget to bring me something, please? Pleasepleaseplease?”
He chuckled. “Yes, Kallipolis, I will get you something tomorrow. How about a…” He scanned the buttons. “A Teddy bear?”
“Oh, that’s great, daddy! Can’t wait.”
The mayor-to-be stepped away from the pedestal. He nodded and mouthed, ‘Can she hear us?’
“No, she cannot,” the mayor sighed, the worry pressing his shoulders down. “Only when you press the button.”
The mayor-to-be paced up and down, then snapped at him, “What the fuck, man?”
The mayor sat down on a creaky chair and his lips formed a little smile. “Get it out of your system, my reaction was worse.”
“What. The. Fuck? Why do we keep a little girl down here?”
“She’s two-hundred and fourteen years old. Not little.”
“Oh!” the mayor-to-be threw his arms in the air. “Oh! So, we’re keeping her imprisoned for like forever! That’s sooo much better, thank you!”
“It is not.”
“And why the hell is she calling us ‘daddy?’”
“I think you can work out the answer to that.”
The mayor-to-be froze. He felt a chill down his spine, and it wasn’t because of the air condition this time. He looked up, at the direction of the mayoral office, gazing through the concrete and the rebar. “It can’t be.”
The mayor breathed in deep, then checked his golden watch. “It is. The first mayor installed the system, the rest of us… We’re just inheriting it.”
“But she thinks we’re her father!”
“Yes. Maintaining that illusion seems to make the whole thing easier.”
“I can’t lie like that!”
“Sure you can. You’re a politician.”
“Okay, sure. But not like this!”
“How would it help the situation if you shattered her fragile mind? Can you even begin to comprehend the extent of her delusions, right now?” The mayor turned to the vat containing the person. “There’s some sort of dreamland for her, in Virtual Reality, fed right into her neurons. This is her reality now. And she acknowledges the controller as her father. What can we say that will make it better, hmm? Your daddy is dead, dear. You are a living mummy, dear. But don’t freak out, because we can’t get you free, the fate of the entire city depends on you.” He waved it all away. “I’ve made these arguments myself a hundred times, heck, a million. You can’t forget about her, son, it’s hard. You’ll have to keep coming down here. After every stupid meeting and every stupid argument, when there’s something to be decreed, you’ll have to come down here and make it happen. You’ll have to greet her like her father would, you’ll have to bring her a gift, talk nice to her, and then you’ll have to open the city’s screens and make the adjustments.”
The mayor pointed downwards with his finger, his sleeve lifted. “This is the job, son.”
The mayor-to-be had a feeling where this was going.
The mayor’s shoulders relaxed, as if the burden of an entire city had just been lifted. “…And as of this moment, the mayorship is yours.”
The End
The Whale on the Veil
Elliot Tuckerberg grew up admiring the promises and imagining the possibilities of Magic Leap. He knew from his uncle that the headset would be something expensive, so he saved up for three years so he could afford it. He didn’t get a bike, got lunch from home, didn’t waste cash on chocolates and snacks and music. He was mesmerised by that dreamy ad with a life-sized whale in front of a bunch of kids, staring in amazement.
He was only fifteen when the billion-dollar company unveiled their first product, and it was a huge disappointment.
He imagined everybody using Augmented Reality technology to interact on a sort of an overlay of the digital world over the physical one, a world where you could flip through the pictures on your digital gallery as easily as you could through a pocket dossier of printed photographs. He imagined AR pets, educational aids, people connected through wondrous technology.
All he got was some goofy glasses.
Sure, they were cutting-edge at the time. But the gap between the company’s promises and what it could actually do was bigger than the Grand Canyon.
He bought the beta pack, of course. It was more than he had squirrelled away, but his uncle chipped in for the rest. He was the only one who understood Elliot’s obsession with AR. He was an entrepreneur with plenty of failed startups and crazy ideas under his belt, until he settled on a winning micro-import company and finally achieved the success he needed. He’d say, ‘It took me fifteen years to succeed. I started at my mid-twenties, so now I’m forty years old. If someone had prodded me to start my businesses earlier on, it would still have taken me fifteen years. But I would have succeeded earlier, I’m sure.’
Elliot’s parents disagreed and didn’t want him spoiling the kid, but the uncle was adamant that they should shove their opinions up their behinds. It was easy to be heard when you were finally successful, Elliot noticed. Perhaps that lesson was the one he treasured the most. He kept watching them for years as his parents ignored his uncle’s crazy theories and aphorisms about life and success. ‘Keep reading your self-help books,’ they’d tease him. He was after all, a failed entrepreneur with crushing debt leftover from his silly startups.
But, once he got his first million, everybody’s attitude changed. Suddenly everyone shut their mouth when he spoke. They wanted to take selfies with him. They huddled up in family dinners to chat him up.
Success is what makes people listen to you, is what Elliot learnt from that.
He’d settle for just a girl, for now. “Mindy,” he said as she ignored him and kept walking while texting on her phone. He caught up with her, “Hey, I wanted to ask…”
“Mmm?” she said dreamily, her attention still on her phone. It glinged, then again, then made a bloop sound.
God, he hated technology sometimes. “Mindy, wanna go out with me sometime?” he blurted out before his brain would get in the way and made him think things.
Mindy froze for a second, staring at him. She opened her lovely mouth to speak. “What? Me and you?”
Then she laughed in his face.
Elliot played around with the Magic Leap goggles. They were quirky and round, made you look like Willy Wonka. They were well-made and again, truly a cutting edge of tech, but something was lacking. Elliot knew it.
He stayed up nights trying to figure it out. He had this vision of everything in the world being mapped in real-time. He knew that would require immense amounts of processing power, but that didn’t bother him for now. It was an engineering problem, and there were people who could figure it out. That was another one of his uncle’s aphorisms. Then he’d quote things from Ford or Musk, people who actually knew what they were talking about, but who ignored their engineers when they protested that what they were asking for was impossible, like the V engine or the reusable rocket.
Elliot toiled away for an entire year, stealing hours from his nights, taking naps whenever he could in the day classes, skipping going to cinemas and hanging out. It wasn’t like he didn’t wanna go do those fun things, but every time he actually did go out, he ended up writing down things on his notepad, or sketching AROs and coming up with various applications and experiences.
The cinema, for example. Imagine an experience, where each viewer customises his own overlay as he watches. A girl might want a layer where she gets information about the costumes and the clothes people are wearing, available with links and prices. A guy who is a cinephile might want tidbits on the movie, like trivia, comments, where that b role had played before, or even the Mr. Skin listings for that sexy actress.
The possibilities were endless, really. As he went through the world in his city of New York, the ideas kept coming at him.
All he n
eeded was a format for all this, some sort of a baseline so that others could build upon it.
“Oh, you need an API,” his friend Becker said when he explained the problem.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a programming thing, where you can build something that gets external commands from somewhere else, like another website. So, you build your own engine, and then make an API where others can use it to call data from your own, and make their own applications or adapt their current ones to support theirs.” Becker finished the rest of his ice cream.
“Really?” Elliot said, getting lost in thought again. Guess he needed to learn these things. He wasn’t very good at programming, but how hard could it be? There were books and courses to take. Oh, they were doing programming at school, but it was so basic that even Elliot knew those lessons were useless.
No, he needed to study by himself.
Another one of his uncle’s aphorisms, ‘An entrepreneur keeps on learning.’
He lugged those heavy programming books around. Then he started making room in his schoolbag for them by leaving the others back home. His teachers weren’t pleased, and neither were his parents when they got called about it.
“I guess we can’t really be mad at him, since he isn’t goofing off but rather learning new things. Just not the things he’s supposed to learn in school,” his mother said, resigned.
“Computer programming is not the lucrative profession it was in our day, honey. That was then. Nowadays, they’re little more than menial labour,” his father said, shaking his head.
“We’ll see. Let’s not force him to stop learning to program. He might get bored of it on his own.”
Elliot didn’t get bored of it. Sure, it wasn’t the breezy subject he wished it was, but it was interesting. Unlike the real world, it made sense. Basically, you needed to boil down real-world problems to a logical progression of commands. You broke down the problem to an algorithm that solved it. And if the problem was too complex to handle, then you broke it down further to smaller pieces.
It was a way of thinking that made sense to Elliot.
Unlike girls, for example. He stared at Mindy as she talked with her friends. Elliot knew from her social profile that she wanted to become a marine biologist, having suddenly grown an interest to it the past year. She’d visited an aquarium on a school trip and loved it. Of course, the idiot girls she hung around with thought it was lame. They thought everything was lame, if it didn’t came out the mouth of a celebrity. They liked inane things, popular stuff. If it didn’t have a hashtag, it didn’t matter.
That’s why Elliot liked Mindy. He knew she was clever, she just didn’t really show it all that much. Girls who were both pretty and clever always seemed to rely of the former quality, abandoning the latter.
Also, Elliot admitted, he liked Mindy because she had grown into a pair of amazing boobies.
There was that, too.
Elliot sighed and slammed the book shut. He also turned off his laptop, being gentle around it. He was frustrated, sure, but he wasn’t stupid enough to bang his most expensive property shut.
It so happened that his uncle was visiting. So his mother called him and he went downstairs.
“I’m giving up coding,” Elliot sighed, when his uncle took him in a corner to chat.
“Why? You love it.”
“No, I just love what it can help me do,” Elliot tsked.
“Same shit, kiddo. Look, let’s boil down the concept to its bare essentials. Why do you wanna make this AR thing. Really, imagine it, and tell me what you see when you make it happen. Say whatever comes to mind, I won’t judge,” his uncle said, slashing the air with his palm.
“Well…” Elliot hesitated and stared at his shoes. “There’s this girl, Mindy? I always imagined I’d figure this out and become rich or something, and then she’d be impressed and go out with me. It’s stupid, I know.”
“No, it’s not stupid. So, you kinda wanna do it in order to impress a girl.”
“Fine, yeah!” Elliot admitted, exasperated.
His uncle nodded. “Okay then. Do it to impress a girl,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Stop making fun of me.”
“I’m not! Half the things men do are so they can impress a girl. Or a woman. Or many women. It’s a valid application. Make your project capable of impressing a girl. It’s a common need. Your invention can fulfil that need.” Uncle slashed the air with his gestures.
“That’s where you make millions,” they both said in unison.
Elliot went back to his studies and opened his books, then fired up his laptop with a sense of determination. Coding was a way to solve problems. The problem was, ‘Impress a girl.’
How do you do that? Elliot had no clue.
But what he did have was the urge to figure it out. Break it down, like an algorithm, bit by bit. If it’s unsolvable, break it down even more, solve each piece separately.
He cracked his knuckles.
Yeah, he could do this.
Mindy dozed off during the class break. Oh, she was still standing up, but her mind had completely shut down. Cindy was droning on about some celebrity couple’s recent breakup, and she was pretty animated about it. Mindy cared not for such things. She had decided to go to college, and these matters seemed less important to her right now.
Alas, she couldn’t just tell Cindy she was boring her to her face, could she?
No.
She checked her phone. Just a couple of minutes left before Trigonometry. She could hold on for two minutes.
Walking towards the class, she thought she heard a whale song. The school was noisy and she couldn’t be sure, but she was sure she’d heard it.
Classes went on, and she heard it again as she was standing up.
Come on, that was a classic call of the humpback whale, or what she was properly called, the Megaptera novaeangliae. Why was she hearing it, in school of all places?
Uh! Was she going crazy?
Nah, it was probably some ringtone or something. She shook her head and tried to put her mind at ease.
Next class, she heard it again. It was definitely there.
“What are you looking for?” Cindy nagged as she craned her head around.
“Nothing. Just thought I heard something.”
“As I was saying, Jacinda then posted-”
Mindy tuned off after that. They walked to their lockers. Mindy opened hers absent minded as she had done a million times, and she saw something she didn’t expect. There was a weird device in it, something like a pair of goggles, round ones, attached to a smaller device. It had a note on it that said, ‘Wear Me.”
Nothing else, just that.
“What is this Alice-in-wonderland shit?” she muttered.
“What?” Cindy said, too focused on her phone to see anything.
“Nothing,” Mindy said and snatched her book from inside the locker, then shut it quickly.
They went through the last class of the day, and then Mindy went home. She kept trying to push it all away from her thoughts. But someone had definitely broken into her locker. Should she report it? And get tagged as a snitch? No way! Kids pranked each other all the time. She’d only report it to the principal if it was something yucky, like a dead rat or something.
No, this didn’t feel like something mean. It was elaborate, sure. That device thingy looked expensive. Gosh, where had she seen that before? She was certain she’d seen it somewhere.
She couldn’t sleep. She hugged her dolphin plushie tight and tried to calm herself, but she was way too curious at this point.
In the early light of dawn, she caught a few minutes of precious sleep before going back to school.
This time she had decided to do it. Yes, it was probably a prank and yes, they’d definitely record it on their phones and it’d be up on YouTube in no-time, but she couldn’t stand it any more. She needed to know.
After class was over, she ditched Cindy who wanted to hang out. The
n she opened her locker and faced the weird goggles. She looked left and right, made sure nobody was looking, and put it all in her bag.
In the football field, she was alone. She lifted the goggles in her hands, it was light. The main weight was on the processing thing which seemed to clip at her belt. The note said nothing more, and she tossed it away.
“Here it goes,” she muttered, and then put the goggles on.
Nothing happened. She just looked like a dork.
Oh, wait, there was an on switch.
There it was.
She looked around. And she heard the whale song. From the ground came a translucent whale, swimming in the air as if jumping up from the ocean.
“Wow!” she exclaimed. It was so pretty.
The whale was ghostly, then it impossibly swam in the air around her. As she turned her head, it stayed in the same place, as if she really was there floating about.
It was magnificent!
Then the whale swam towards the street.
“Hey, wait!” Mindy said raising her hand. The whale was getting away. So Mindy ran after her, still wearing the goggles.
She got a lot of stares on the street, and yes, she felt idiotic. But she couldn’t lose the whale, it was so damn interesting! Okay, for a second, she took off the goggles just to make sure. The whale vanished. She could see it only when looking through the goggles, like a magical lens that allowed you to see a 3D animation, but in real life. How cool was that?
Was this a marketing stunt or something?
She followed the whale down the streets. She kinda knew where she was going. “Heading home, huh?” she asked her, but expected no response. The experience felt real, it was like she was actually following a floating whale in the streets of New York.
She turned the corner to catch up.
And there it was. The aquarium.
Elliot felt hot. His neck was sweating, and his t-shirt was too tight. He waited on the bench. Would she be here? He had set up everything right, but she hadn’t taken the bait yesterday. His program pinged the activation code today, so here it was, take two.
MOAB � Mother Of All Boxsets Page 101
