Asimov's SF, January 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Tubeleader Aspect!” Del shouts, and Zep finds his board sliding gracefully around to fall in behind Zep; it's as if he's acquiring Del's procedural exit from the trap. Del knows a special gamer hole in the wave, a hollow tunnel of surf. He flashes in there, wearing a beatific goofy smile, all worries about Jen and Lex temporarily gone. Zep slides along in Del's wake, glad to see his friend happy.

  They end up on a sandy shingle beside a mother seal nursing a pup.

  Zep plops down on the floor beside Kaya. “So, Del,” he says. “Nobody from Surf City can ride Monster Mash but you and—what was her name?"

  “Lova Moore from Minnesota,” says Del. “Nobody but her and me and, well, now you."

  “Good going, Zep,” says Kaya. “You rule."

  “Aw, Del showed me the way. I was about to get us all hung up on barbed wire."

  “Actually, you can get a quad bonus for making it through the wire safely,” says Del. “But I didn't think we'd want to try that on your first run. Maybe later. I'll show you something else now."

  There's an alphanum toepad at the nose of each board. Del taps out a code with the big toe of his left foot.

  “Get ready to ride—people!"

  “That's better,” says Kaya, and mounts her board.

  Around them, the ocean shore shimmers and warps. They're a few hundred yards off a new coastline, facing out to the sea. The ocean seems to curve up forever, a bowl of blue mounting into the mists around a gleaming little sun directly overhead.

  “Where's the horizon?” says Kaya.

  “This is the Pellucidar break,” says Del, as if that's an explanation. “I love this place. It feels so safe and cozy to be living on the inside."

  “The Hollow Earth!” exclaims Zep, who's read the same low-brow books as Delbert. “How bitchin’ is that? Look at the whales!"

  In the distance, four huge whales have breached from the sea and are beating their great tails against the air, sweeping a path through the mists, their mouths agape, seining insects and floating orchids from the teeming inner sky of the Hollow Earth. With a final fillip of their flukes, they arc hugely toward a sky-high spot in the Hollow Earth's concave sea.

  Looking toward shore, Zep smiles at how the shorebreak rises on both sides. “This is like the ultimate tube,” he says. “Imagine being in here all the time."

  “The Hollow Earth is the best break of all,” enthuses Delbert. “I wish it were real. All the high-ranking players hang here."

  Bobbing all across the great blue dome are dots that resolve if you stare at them for more than a second. Each is a person on a board—an idealized representation of that person's surfer persona—dark sunbronzed figures, many of them covered with lurid tattoos and the occasional corporate logo. Most don't bother modeling wetsuits, since the water in the sim is always perfect. But more than a few have given themselves the features of sea creatures: seal-like snouts, shark fins, whiskery lionfish spines. Their names and other identifying marks circle their heads like translucent halos. Del's game name EL SURFIAO floats over him, while Zep and Kaya are labeled N00B1 and N00B2. Zep tries to tap out the first obvious commands on his toepad, but whatever he's done merely makes the world spin until it feels like they're hanging upside down.

  “Stop ... it ... before ... I ... hurl!” says Kaya.

  Del stabilizes the scene. “What're you trying to do, Zep?"

  “Zoom on one of those surfers. Or enter a name search."

  “You know someone in here?"

  “Only by repute. Your girlfriend Lova Moore."

  “Not a girlfriend,” says Del. “Not even a friend. She's very aggro. But, yeah, I've got her on my foe-list. Sec.” One toe-tap, and suddenly they're in deep water. No shoreline in sight, jus the boundless bowl of blue, with the immobile Inner Sun still shining down.

  Nearby is a surfer woman with the mandatory shock of sunbleached hair. She has pouty red lips, brilliant blue eyes, wide hips, and enormous naked boobs. And, surfer goddess that she's supposed to be, she sports a deep tan and a sand-scrape on her right cheek. Her name-halo says, “LOVA MOORE.” The name is accompanied by a constellation of award logos and content rankings. Spotting Del, she pulls up a flashing mermaid tail and coils it around herself, sitting poised on her board to watch him glide closer.

  “Nice butt-fin,” says Zep. “Must make it hard to work your keypad."

  “You're bringing newbies in here, Surfiao?” Lova asks Del. “That's a hella cheap way to get points.” Despite her beauty, she has an unpleasant, callow voice, made a bit shrill and distorted by sound processing.

  “N00B1 and N00B2 are pals of mine, Lova,” says Del. “I'm showing them the breaks."

  “I've unlocked everything in your cheesy Monster Mash, El Surfiao,” says Lova with a flip of her tail. “Got anything that's not totally stale?"

  “For sure my brah El Surfiao is twisting up a fresh joint,” volunteers Zep. “A gnarly break that'll blow you right outta the Surf City tournament tree, dip-twit."

  Del casts Zep a surprised look. “I—I—

  “As if,” says Lova, hefting her boobs like six-shooters. “Surfiao's my puppy dog."

  “Ah, but I'm gonna help Del program his new break,” brags Zep, tapping his skull. “Got math? I'm hatching the gnarliest wave ever seen. Let's close out this chitchat and actualize my vision, Del."

  But Lova doesn't want to let them go. “Oh, his name is Del now?” she says mockingly. “Not El Surfiao? Hard to say which handle is groovier. I've heard of a Del who—” She breaks into a chirping guffaw. And now her attention turns to Zep. “How about you, N00B1? I don't see that you've been in a single Perfect Wave competition."

  “He's an indigenous Surf City local!” says Kaya, coming to Zep's defense. “Not an invasive toxic slime Great Lake geoduck."

  “Gooey duck?” Lova narrows her eyes and glides close to Kaya. “You're trying to be N00B1's bitch, hmmm? I think you're a slumming yuppie larva."

  “Don't trip on me,” says Kaya. “You got no idea how rough I am."

  “Oooo,” says Lova. “Some surf-rats, they'd wreck a guy's car engine if he even looked at them wrong. But you'd never get that real, would you, N00B2?"

  “Oh yeah?” cries Kaya. “That's exactly what I did a half hour ago! I pulled loose a spark plug in some crackwipe's SPC and rigged his carb to spray an explosive mist of fuel! Thud, clank, meow-boom-boom! Game over."

  “Maybe I'll share that info,” says Lova. “Skeevy slushed stoners.” She speeds off, churning the water with her ample tail.

  The sim closes down and they're standing in the musty, carpeted dome of the Perfect Wave cave.

  “Man, Zep,” complains Del. “Why did you have to be so rude to her?"

  “Rude? Dude, you gotta learn to fight back."

  “But Lova is so—so stacked. I always lose my head."

  “She's a computer graphic run by a horrible person,” says Kaya. “Jen's the one you should be thinking about. An actual no-implants woman that you physically know. I'm gonna go by the Food Bin and get some betel-nut energy tea from my friend Becka. She's on the night shift. See you in a little while, kay, Zep?

  “KZEP: the call letters of the gods."

  Kaya puts her bong in her pocket and sashays out of the cave and through the empty restaurant. Zep follows her as far as the front door, harkening to the teeming summer beach night outside: the hiss of the cars with their headlights raking by, the music and laughter from down the block, the rattle and thrum of the Boardwalk rides, and always the calm oceanic pulse of the surf.

  “Come on back, Zep,” nags Del, peering out of the Perfect Wave dome. “I'll show you the programming interface now. All we have to do is get on our boards and say, ‘Design Mode.’”

  “Kind of sucks to be in a room inside a room, doesn't it?” says Zep, sullenly returning to his place on the fake surfboard. “How'd you get into something so dinky, man?"

  “Design Mode,” says Del insistently.

  The surfscape gives way to a
virtual laboratory. The dome is tessellated with maybe a thousand holographic surf-break animations. A fanciful virtual console encircles the lower part of the wall, all brass and mahogany, with heavy-duty Victorian dials, levers, and knobs.

  “To start with, you can point out some of the breaks that you like, and the design wizard spawns off variants,” says Del. “Blends and crossovers. Or you can just tweak the individual surf-breaks with your bare hands—” He reaches right into a point break and bends the rocky spit of land a bit further to the right. “And down by the floor we have the lab-type controls.” Del moves a slider, making the crests of the waves in the active breaks grow about 30 percent higher.

  “Can I input an equation?” asks Zep. “Is there, like, a programming language?"

  “There's, uh, some kind of display over there,” said Del, pointing out a round glassy screen filled with glowing green symbols. “I think there's a keyboard. I've never used it."

  Zep crouches over the round screen, watching its reactions to the twitches of his fingers on the virtual keyboard, a fanciful construct of copper and ivory.

  “No prob!” Zep soon exclaims. “The system uses this easy reverse Polish language called Whuffo. I'll just change your water's physics to use the boiling cubic wave equation—there. And now we pimp our ride. Lova Moore's gonna be sucking sea urchins."

  Sooner said than done. Two hours roll by before the boys get a crude first approximation working, a crufty break with staircase-shaped waves. Unlike in the Hollow Earth break, there's no sun in their design-mode world; the air simply glows. The waves hump out of the acid-green virtual water like wobbly escalator treads. The square blocks swell as they rise, ballooning into prickly-pear-cactus lop-lop shapes, and if one of those lop-lops bursts near your head, you're off your board for true.

  “We'll call this break Wobble Gobble,” exults Zep. “It's almost as gnarly as I dreamed.” He shows Del a virtual control that he's fashioned: a numerical read-out with a thumb-wheel. “To keep it interesting, I can dial up the gain as high as I like. I've got it set on eleven right now. But it can go way higher. I'm using a logarithmic scale."

  “Eleven is enough,” says Del. His board keeps pitching him onto the floor.

  “Here's the trick,” advises Zep. “After each wobble, there's a flat spot that you can slide across before that big cactus bulge grows out to gobble you.” He's wildly twitching his board, like a salmon climbing a fish-ladder. His face is sweaty and his damp hair lank. “Come on, Del, don't lie there like a noob. You gotta master this so you can shut down Lova Moore."

  In another half hour Del has the hang of it. “Wobble Gobble!” he says. “Nice work, Zep. I'll spiff up the break now.” He adds dolphin-shaped non-player-characters, steep-sided stone islands, tree ferns onshore and, just for the hell of it, a dinosaur-sized kiwi bird that wades around trying to eat stuff. And then Del flips back to play mode and messages Lova.

  “I've decided to call the cops on N00B2,” shrills Lova Moore, appearing almost right away. “Malicious automotive mischief. I know her true name, too."

  “Man, what kind of surfer are you?” cries Zep. “Goody-goody snitch. Back to the Heartland with you!"

  “Never been there,” says Lova, sitting next to them on her board, her giant boobs jiggling as she studies the kinky Wobble Gobble waves. “In reality, I'm a Surf City local."

  Even now the breast-besotted Del fails to reach the obvious conclusion. Mainly he's focused on showing off his break. And Zep is too busy grooving on the cubic waves to realize that Lova Moore has blown her cover.

  “Stairway to heaven!” shouts Del as he fish-twitches his board across a mound of ziggurat-like cubic waves, then slides down them with thuddy, smacking sounds, ducking the flying water-balloons overhead.

  Lova tries to follow him, but she's not doing well. Over and over she wipes out and then, how sweet, the monster kiwi eats her virtual surfboard and she's left paddling in the chop with ripple rings radiating out from her neck. The schools of dolphins flip their tails and leap for joy. Lova's ranking has dropped by about 10 percent, enough to put her well below Del's level.

  And then Lova notices the gain controller in Zep's hand.

  “Cheaters!” she screeches. “You'll pay for this!” She disappears.

  “The standard gain of eleven is pretty easy,” Zep tells Del, a smile playing across his lips. “That's why every time that it looked like Lova was settling in on a wave, I goosed the gain up to a hundred."

  “Zep, that's not—"

  “Hell, if she deserved to have the top ranking, she could have handled the higher-gain waves. I bet you can even surf a gain of a thousand, Del. Check it out.” Zep twiddles his control.

  Fat gouts of hyperactive water fly across the walls. The mounted surfboards are like bucking dragons. But the boys learn these rhythms too, and Zep keeps on inching the gain higher. It's fun.

  And now here comes Kaya, hurrying in from the intricate night, her flip-flops slapping the floor, her cheeks flushed. Somewhere during the evening's changes she's set aside her blonde wig, revealing cropped mousey brown hair with a tiny braided pigtail in back. “Wuxtry, wuxtry!” she cries, newsboy style. “Lova Moore is Lex Loach!"

  “Ga-hoink!” ape-screams Del, slapping his forehead and falling off his board.

  “I wasn't attracted to Lova Moore for one second,” Zep is quick to put in.

  “Blinded by boobs,” says Kaya, shaking her head. “Moronized by mammaries. Titillated by—grow up, boys. They're just glands. What it is, I was hanging with Becka at the Food Bin for a couple of hours, catching a betel buzz, and then Jen comes wandering in, bored out of her skull. She says Lex is pissing away the evening at that trashed Perfect Wave cave, the one on the Boardwalk. So I'm like, hmmm, and we jam over there and find Lex lying on the floor, he's just wiped out on your Wobble Gobble break. So of course I'm harshing on him about playing Lova Moore—but then he says if I don't stop, he'll call the cops on me for his shitbox car! So I act nice for about ten seconds, but then he puts his hands on me, so I say why try to be butch when you're such a queen, and he calls his dad and gets permission to take immediate possession of Cheezemore Ratt's and cut the power! What it is, he's gonna shut you down."

  Zep has a workaround. “If I crank up the gain to an insane level, I think the Wobble Gobble break can draw power from the ambient wireless radiation,” he says. “Thanks to the entropy gradient. That way Loach can't shut us down. Macho Lex with his triple-K cups.” Zep is pumping his thumb to move his virtual controller's wheel. “I'm setting it to ten thousand, Del."

  “Are you freaking nuts?” cries Del, as the virtual water begins rearing into frantic spouts.

  “Ten thousand degrees of weirdness is just where it starts gettin’ good,” says Zep, taking an unsteady stance on his rapidly twitching board. Del has no choice but to join in.

  They can hear Loach bellowing outside. He's unlocking the electrical cabinet, turning off the Cheezemore Ratt circuit-breakers one by one. The lights wink out across the room. But the Perfect Wave cave stays alive. Yes! The high-entropy simulation is drawing energy from the global funk of wireless info waves. If anything, the sim images are brighter than before.

  Loach pounds into the restaurant and snatches up the billy-club from behind the bar.

  “Oooo, Wova wikes to wub the wood,” whoops Kaya, standing by the Perfect Wave dome. With a shriek of laughter she nips inside.

  “And now get on your board,” Zep tells her. “We gotta jam!"

  “I'm too high to surf those humpty water eggs,” says Kaya. The bright shapes are coming loose from the walls, the air itself is dancing with globs. “I'll just sit on the back of your board, Zep. Oooo, here comes Wova Woach!"

  Hoarsely roaring, Loach is beating the club over and over against the dome of the Perfect Wave cave, breaking down the walls.

  “We're going all the way to a million now,” says Zep, sweating and bending over his virtual controller. “We'll be drawing in even more stuff
from the outside world."

  “The perfect wave,” raves Kaya. “You're gonna crank up the uncertainty of the planetary wave so high that we'll end up somewhere totally—” She breaks off, suddenly concerned, holding her hand to her throat. “My tiki string just snapped! I heard my little goddess bounce off your board.” Kaya lies on her stomach across Zep's chintzy wave cave board, peering at the floor.

  A piece of the dome breaks loose and—melts. The cubic wave simulation is absorbing material reality. The dome, the nearby tables and chairs and even the walls of the restaurant merge into the growing blue wave.

  Loach throws himself through the warped, glowing air, grabbing for the third board. And misses—just. But he's made it into the pudding intact; he's power-paddling like a merman.

  Del, Zep, and Kaya slide away, Del in the lead. The world is hanging sideways, like a wall whose floor is a million miles below. They're surfing across a washboard of shelf-like ripples on the face of the vertical wave—and they keep getting higher, climbing the wave like stripes on a barber pole.

  Del looks back past Zep and Kaya, wondering if his procedural kiwi bird is still in place. The kiwi is nowhere in sight—it's been replaced by a tiki goddess—armless, legless, with a blunt chiseled head that's been gazing out over this sea for a trillion years. The tiki is riding that empty third board, which has morphed into a kahuna's mahogany longboard. Far in the rear, Loach is doggedly paddling in the tiki's wake.

  For his part, Zep flashes that the Polynesian goddess is, yes, the very amulet that had once hung from Kaya's neck. Putting it another way, the amulet has been pulled into this more expansive version of reality, along with everything else. This perfect wave is drawing in the entire material substance of planet Earth.

  Zep, Kaya, and Del look down, watching the world melt into their mighty simulation. Rivers and lakes, pastures and mountains, baseball stadiums, ocean liners and suspension bridges—all are stretching, turning liquid, and surrendering to the pull of the perfect wave, dribbling into the flow like fresh wet paintings on a spinning platter, feeding their colorful blotches into the omnivorous mound of blue.