Solaris Rising 2

by Ian Whates

  “What’s going on?” The question is shaky, frightened.

  Claie peers at the speaker, a skinny youth, almost certainly still in high school. Probably the UNDERAGE swan maiden with the Gatling blaster.

  He smiles, trying to reassure. “Hey, don’t worry. It’s just a bad glitch. A gang of griefers most likely.”

  “Never heard of a glitch like this,” the youth says, voice cracking. He edges closer until Claie can see how wide his eyes are.

  “Used to happen all the time,” Claie says in his best not-a-problem, everything’s-fine voice. “The green space will re-rez as soon as the corrupted code gets cleaned out.”

  “It’s sure taking a while. Did it use to take this long?”

  “Don’t know.” Claie suppresses a prick of irritation. He’s not that old. “I only read it in a wiki about when LivIT was transitioning from device-based service to global release and the server infrastructure hadn’t fully propagated. Before my time.”

  “Not before mine.” A dusky woman with gun-metal hair wanders over. Close up, Claie sees lines beneath her eyes and around her mouth, mahogany creases in hickory. It makes him uncomfortable, unsure where to look, not wanting to stare.

  “They usually never lasted more than an hour,” the woman continues. “Always felt longer, though. There was one when I was around your age –” she nods to the ex-swan maiden, “seemed like it was never going to end. Made me late for a date. When I could finally log in, he’d already left the sim. Turned out okay, though. That’s where I met my wife.” The woman winks, an organic chiaroscuro of creasing and uncreasing across her face. “That one lasted fifty-seven minutes.”

  “Fifty-seven minutes?” the youth gasps.

  “I’m sure it won’t be anywhere near that long,” she says. “LivIT hasn’t had a regionwide outage in ages.”

  “Regionwide?” Claie asks, startled. “You think it’s more than this green space?”

  The woman studies Claie. “Nearsighted?”

  Claie shrugs. “Treading the verge of legally blind without my clear sight app.”

  “Ah. Sorry. Can you see Mu Shu’s?” She points.

  Claie strains, trying to make out the eatery that sits beyond the outskirts of the green space. After several moments of intense squinting, he realizes that the dragon bot that usually greets guests with bouts of fire at the entrance is gone.

  “Not well,” he admits. “Is the whole place down? Textures and all?”

  “Yep. It’s nothing but RL as far as I can see.”

  Claie resists the urge to rub his eyes. “Did I see you launching a local app after we lost the network?” he asks. “You wouldn’t happen to be a coder too?”

  “You’re perceptive for a shortsighted fellow. It wasn’t a local, though; I was triggering my lifeline status feed. I moderate Blip’s Facelight community. ’Fraid I wouldn’t know a line of code from a song.”

  Claie doesn’t approve of lay people jiggering with their 911 utilities. It’s possible to jam up a smartdev’s auto hail if folks don’t know what they’re doing. But he understands why a mod would want to piggyback her comm feed to her lifeline, and it means this woman has a network connection, albeit a constricted one.

  “Are your comm members saying the whole region is glitching?” he asks.

  “You’re a mod for Blip?” the youth chirps up, awed. “Do you know Kimiko Blaze?”

  The woman laughs. “Not personally, but I’ve moderated a couple of her chatviews.” She touches her wrist. “I’m not getting many incoming chirps. And I timed some major lag happening from outside the southeast region. I can’t think of anything that would do that except if the whole region’s borked.”

  Claie’s heart skips. She’s right. But a griefer script able to take out a whole region’s AVs, skins, bots, and textures? That would mean GPS satellites as well as integral LivIT source code being affected.

  His worrisome speculation is curtailed by the abrupt return of his visual acuity, his AV skin, and Devi and Buneh. The youth sprouts a good fifteen centimeters in height, a pair of white wings, and a buxom chest scrawled with tattoos. His – her now – Gatling blaster materializes in its thigh holster as the swan maiden skin completes its rebake.

  Devi and Buneh wave their arms, gesturing at Claie’s handheld. Puzzled, he looks down just in time to read Buneh’s “Toggle yr mute!” IM before an acoustic holocaust of voices, music, and tones crashes through his in-ears, heralding a flurry of alerts, chirps, and updates.

  Claie yelps and fumbles for the global mute, peripherally aware of the Blip mod and several others occupied in similarly frantic slaps and thumbings.

  Scowling, ears ringing, Claie gingerly restores the conference audio.

  “Gomen ne,” Buneh says, fox ears twitching sympathetically. “Tried to warn you. It took a messy restart to clear the glitch, and lots of folks on Badger had all their app settings reset.”

  “What you get for being a Badgerbrain,” Devi says.

  Devi is as rabid a Lynx devotee as Claie is a Badger one. Claie smiles and gives her the finger before launching a script to restore his customized settings.

  CLAIE’S STOPWATCH APP informs him that the glitch lasted for all of seven minutes 48 seconds and a decimal streak of milliseconds. The server tally is a little longer, accounting for the gap between the glitch’s true start and when it occurred to Claie to time it.

  Less than ten minutes, more than five. Yes, it felt much longer. And it was more widespread than even the Blip mod speculated, hitting Devi and Buneh too – in UTC-8 and UTC-6 time zones, respectively – with preliminary chirps suggesting it also affected UTC+ regions.

  The official word from LivIT’s network gurus attribute the glitch to an epic and unique confluence of misfortune: a malicious griefer script breaching a too hasty upgrade, dominoing GPS fail-safes clashing with network security protocols, extensive sunspot activity, and a spilled mug of tea. The restart – which by all accounts goes beyond Buneh’s understated “messy” and into Frankensteinian mosh pit – is cascading west to east: why Devi and Buneh knew about the Badger issue before him. Buneh also runs Badger, and she’d been treated to the same audio barrage.

  After all the excitement, none of them feels much like resuming their test session. Buneh confirms that their data is intact, and they exchange farewells. Devi promises to send out a timely reminder to reschedule as the mermaid and fox woman de-rez.

  The Blip moderator has also absented herself. Claie isn’t sure if she’s the red-skinned geisha in the smoldering kimono or the vampire in the Catholic schoolgirl uniform. The swan maiden is gleefully blowing away chunks of scenery with her Gatling.

  Claie verifies that his shield app is running and then hits the shortcut icon that will call Shelby’s smartdev. When she doesn’t pick up, he pings their home server. It answers promptly, and a quick query tells him that Shelby is indeed logged into the apartment. Frowning, Claie brings up their dedicated You OK? app, and it reassures him that all of Shelby’s vitals are a-ok and she hasn’t activated a 911 hail, auto or manual.

  Claie relaxes. Shelby is often neglectful of her smartdev. (Claie is the detail-oriented one.) She has probably only forgotten to set the ringer to audible. He smiles, indulgent. She might even be asleep. It’d be typical of Shelby to have napped through the whole glitch.

  Claie envisions Shelby curled up, sleepy and kittenish, in a nest of blankets. He imagines waking her and regaling her with his tale of the glitch and how her lilac eyes will round and her dove-wing hands flutter to her mouth, and also how she’ll fly into his arms.

  He sets out for home, his pace brisk.

  Along the way, he witnesses more evidence of the ragged restart. Mu Shu’s dragon is unwell, its normally kaleidoscopic scales a subdued peach. And it has rezed several feet from its normal post, lodging halfway in the eatery’s entrance. It opens its mouth as he passes, and disembodied flames gout from a half meter away.

  The local first responders are out in their opal
escent skins, HUDs blinking emergency clearances in high contrast letters. At the corner, one is tending an auto hail 911: a man bleeding from a head wound, and Claie goes over to see if they need assistance.

  “Can I help?” he asks.

  Medic and injured glance up.

  “No, but thanks,” the responder says. “Just a minor laceration.”

  “What happened?”

  “GPS wonked out,” the bleeding man says ruefully. He’s quite chipper despite his injury. “One second I’m scootering full speed down the sidewalk, the next I’m on a tundra, all permafrost, polar bears, and yeti. I probably would’ve been okay except the phantom-physicals screwed up.”

  “Ouch.” Claie winces sympathetically.

  “Tell me about it. Rolled into a snow curtain displaying as phantom and discovered it was a physical brick wall in RL. Bakayarou griefers.”

  Claie makes more sympathetic noises. He doesn’t want to get in the way so takes his leave. But the conversation has made him apprehensive. He doesn’t want to walk into any brick walls. Claie pauses to launch an app from his handheld. As it loads, he realizes that he has been a fool. He curses, furious that in the whole seven minutes, 48 seconds, and some decimal of milliseconds it never occurred to him to run this app.

  Claie’s job requires that he be able to drill down to raw code, reducing scripts, textures, bots, and animations to their basic syntax in order to mold LivIT’s landscape: the prims which are his livelihood. Every structure developer and sim architect, anyone who wishes to manipulate the fundament of LivIT has a view source app. But Claie’s isn’t a run-of-the-mill third-party app. He coded it himself, personalized to accommodate and correct his optical deficiencies. And, like the Blip mod with her status feed, Claie has lifelined it.

  Claie exhales. He is not in the habit of unduly beating himself up over his mistakes. The truth of the matter is that the glitch – being denuded of his skin, isolated among strangers, and unable to see – rattled him. Badly. Bad enough to affect his reason and to make him miss an obvious and elementary solution. He makes a mental note to do some brainstorming for an emergency scenarios app.

  Up and running, his view source app transforms his surroundings into strata of densely packed text, coursing letters, symbols, and numbers stacked one atop another, onionskin fashion. Each layer represents some aspect of the world – its appearance, textures, sounds, even smells — all the myriad information broadcast through LivIT’s network reduced to purest form.

  It is much more congested than Claie is accustomed to. He doesn’t develop his prims on public thoroughfares, and his office is much quieter.

  He brushes aside layers of code until he reaches LivIT’s bedrock. Now he knows for sure what is solid RL and what is phantom. But even after he locks onto the script he wants, a mishmash of overlays, animations, and other sensory snippets continue to rush in, defying his efforts to keep everything stacked into orderly piles. It is a bit like trying to stem a cascade of sand with his bare hands. Claie considers the problem, then wades in, sweeping aside only the code he needs to in order to take his next footstep. It’s fun, exhilarating even, and he’s breathless, a little dizzy too, by the time he gets home.

  Claie shuts down his view source app as he unlocks his apartment’s door. It was an enjoyable game, but he’s glad to end it.

  There is a longer interval between the switchover to the apartment’s server than usual. He is through the door and in the foyer before his apartment recognizes his login.

  Unlike most people’s domiciles, his home is a self-contained sim, loaded and running from its own server box. It’s another occupational necessity, like his view source app. But he also likes the added security against poorly wrought, malicious, or mischievous scripts.

  His home finally acknowledges him. However, where there should be familiar furnishings and visions of domestic coziness, there is only darkness.

  Claie isn’t troubled. The illumination app just needs to be prompted. He calls for lights.

  The darkness remains darkness.

  Claie’s heart quickens.

  “Lights!” he says again. Louder.

  “Claie? Is that you?”

  A coil of tension releases in Claie’s stomach. The voice is deeper than usual, husky instead of dulcet, but he recognizes Shelby’s china doll lisp.

  “Who else would it be?” His reply comes out sharper than he intended. He moderates his tone as he takes a tentative step, hands outstretched, in what he hopes is a Shelby-ward direction. “What happened to the lights?”

  “Don’t be mad, okay? I passworded them.”

  Claie trips over a shin-high object and lurches to a stop. He swears. “What possessed you to do that?” His groping hands identify the obstacle as their velvet ottoman.

  “Can you come back later? Please? I’ll call you, okay?”

  “Oh for the love of –” Claie rubs his bruised shin. “Lights! Override login Shelby, password Yusuke Ono.”

  “Nooo –”

  There is a tempestuous flurry and clatter. The override successful chime peals. “Yusuke Ono” is both Shelby’s favorite anime character and default password. The lights come up at their daytime settings: overhead, half illumination; standup lamp, white.

  Hands on hips, Claie storms over to the Shelby-shaped lump huddled on the chaise. Shelby is bundled and buried beneath a rose-pink afghan – hand crocheted by Claie’s grandmother – and the downed burgundy curtain that normally separates Claie’s office from the dining room, complete with unmoored curtain rod hardware.

  “What the hell is going on?” he demands.

  “G-go away.” The reply is a muffled sob.

  Claie has a weakness for tears, especially Shelby’s. He sighs, gathers his frayed composure, and plops down on the chaise next to the Shelby-lump.

  “Kitten, don’t cry. I’m not mad. Come out and tell me what’s wrong, okay?”

  “No. You can’t see me. Something h-happened. My skin went poof and I’m n-naked!” The last is a despairing wail.

  Claie rolls his eyes, exasperated, and also relieved that it’s only this. Shelby is a vain little thing.

  “LivIT experienced a major glitch today, kitten,” Claie explains. “It took out bots and overlays, all the commuters got knocked off, and everyone lost their skins. That’s why your skin went poof. But a restart’s restored everything. Have you tried rebaking?”

  “Of c-course I have.”

  Claie recalls that Shelby also uses Badger. “The restart set a lot of apps to their defaults. One of them might be interfering with your rebake. Come out so I can help you restore your settings.”

  “I don’t want you to see me naked.”

  Claie is about to force the issue with some ruthless tickling (Shelby is quite ticklish), but then he stops. His brow furrows.

  Claie often works from home, and he frequently doesn’t bother hibernating his view source app if he’s only popping to the bathroom or getting a snack from the kitchen. Third-party view source apps don’t reveal RL identities beneath privacy locked skins. But Claie’s viewer isn’t a third-party app. When Claie developed it, he set it to override all overlays at home. It is more convenient that way. But it means that every time he exchanged a quick kiss with Shelby in passing or a moment of chit-chat, Claie was kissing Shelby’s RL lips, seeing Shelby’s RL face, and feeling the RL shape of Shelby’s body.

  But Shelby doesn’t know that.

  Claie swallows against the sudden knot in his throat. He’s not sure what he feels worse about, that in four years of living together, waking in each others’ arms, sharing meals and jokes and laughter, having fights and making love, Shelby has never wanted Claie to see anything but an AV skin. Or that he has unintentionally violated Shelby’s trust.

  “Claie?” Shelby’s voice is petulant. Beneath the layers of cloth, Shelby interprets Claie’s silence as a rebuke.

  Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe it’s something else altogether. “Is it nakedness that bothers you, kit
ten?” Claie ventures. “I’m sorry if I’ve been insensitive. I can go skinned all the time if you want.”

  “Dummy. Why would I want that? Besides, your usual skin’s just you in RL with some highlights.”

  It’s actually more than that, but Claie is flattered that Shelby thinks so. Claie can be vain too.

  “Kitten –”

  “Can’t you just go away for a bit? I can ask Hammie to come over to help me rebake, and then you can come back.”

  “You don’t mind Hammie seeing you naked but not me?” That stings a little.

  “Well, duh. Why would I care if Hammie sees my RL?”

  It stings more than a little. “I think I’m jealous.”

  The Shelby-lump shifts impatiently. “Are you being dense on purpose? You’re special, of course.”

  “I am?” He’s fishing and he knows it, but Claie’s feelings are still hurt.

  “You bakayarou, why would I care about being beautiful for anyone but you? I don’t want you to see my ugly, stupid RL because you’re the only one that matters. I can’t bear the idea of you thinking my RL is me. It’s not me. It’s not!”

  Claie wraps his arms around the Shelby-lump and gives it a squeeze. “Silly thing. Of course it’s not. Your RL is only another skin, just a hardcoded one.”

  “I don’t like it.” The Shelby-lump crosses its arms.

  Claie shakes his head, amused, tender, contemplative. Shelby can be unreasonable sometimes, but he’s at fault too and needs to confess the truth. But he very much does not want to distress his lover.

  “You know I had a conference meeting today, right?” he says. “I was in the green space with Buneh and Devi testing our new prim design when the glitch happened. One second we’re evaluating structural integrity, the next they’re gone and it’s just RL folks in the green space, all of us completely naked.”