by MacGuffin, WJ; Hanrahan, Gareth; Varney, Allen; Ingber, Greg
When he held up his Personal Digital Companion, the glasses showed Jerome the manual, then flashed a directory showing all his saved files. He could access the data from his PDC just by looking!
People had data haloes too! Jerome-G grabbed a passing RED.
“You’re Ronald-R-OSR-2! Assignment: hygiene technician! You have 143 credits in your bank account! You’re assigned to corpse cleanup duty in corridor 193! You only scored 43% on your Tech Services aptitude exam and you’re allergic to soy-based products!”
“Uhh—yes, friend—”
“You’ve got three disciplinary notes on your personal record for illegal theft of personal effects, tardiness, and failure to dispose of a corpse in an approved hygienic manner!”
“I– I can explain the tardiness—”
“Hey! Here’s a note from Internal Security—you’re suspected of being an informant for the Frankenstein Destroyers!”
The technician yelped and bolted down the corridor.
Suddenly Jerome realized his behavior might appear suspicious. He took a deep breath. He needed to find out how to use these glasses properly.
A look at the grey glasses case brought up a single pop-window: “BLINDERs—Blended-Interface Data Expositors. Augmenting Reality To Make A Better You.” No user manual. Nothing else useful. “Expositors”—what an arcane word, like something Celeste would have used. And shouldn’t that make the acronym “blindors”?
Could he hold the glasses up to the glasses? No—the frame wasn’t that flexible. On the bright side, he’d proved they were really rugged. He saw no mirror around here, but he had one in his apartment. He started walking back home, overwhelmed by the flood of data. Every citizen who passed brought a halo of information: name, work assignment, personal finance details, managerial assessments, security records, demerits, IntSec report, all popping out and hovering around the citizen’s face. Some people even had huge tags floating overhead: SMELLS BAD. WORKS FOR EUNICE-V. UNDERCOVER INTSEC. UNREGISTERED MUTANT.
He happened to glance at a vend–
!!! BOUNCY BUBBLE BEVERAGE !!! IT’S THE MANDATORY THING !!! CONTAINS E493 E319 E922 RHYOCHORDRAZINE-4 MACROCEPHALINE-9 !!! NOW IN NEW PLUTONIUM FLAVOR !!!
–obot, aaah! Jerome flailed as a storm of neon pop-ups blinded him. B3, the most popular beverage in Alpha Complex, was, according to the glasses—his eyes darted crazily—caustic, poisonous, explosive when shaken, corrosive when heated, razor-sharp when frozen, prone to animate when stored for more than 20 days at room temperature, and contained engineered long-chain molecules that harmlessly targeted the taste centers of the customer’s brain and certainly weren’t mutagenic.
Averting his gaze from the vendobot, Jerome noticed a Tech Services technician named Marty-R maintaining the machine. A virtual tag above Marty’s head read MEDICATE FOR SECURITY REASONS. Intrigued, Jerome reached out and ‘touched’ the tag.
Suddenly a keyboard appeared before him. It was astonishingly realistic: other than the minor detail that it was floating unsupported, the keyboard looked perfectly solid. He wondered if they’d taken a hologram of a real keyboard to generate the virtual model. Typing on the virtual keys took a little practice, but he quickly got the hang of it. He typed TEST and hit Enter; Marty’s floating tag was replaced with TEST. Success!
“You there!”
An IntSec guard—Olive-Y-UIS-3, 4,200 credits in personal account, assigned to CruncheeTym Event Security, scored 93% accuracy on her last firing range test, merits for brutality and interrogation, demerits for excessive unwarranted terminations, medical record: addicted to asperquaint and visomorpain, subject of last C-mail: “FW: Fw: Top ten reasons to beat a suspect with a rubber hose”—broke from the crowd and leveled her laser pistol at Jerome. Her brown hair was so short it was almost a crewcut, and her blue eyes stared with piercing intensity. The glasses helpfully informed him the laser pistol was fully loaded and at this range had a 84% chance to kill instantly.
“Yes, officer?”
“That was twitchtalk, citizen! Admit it!”
Jerome paled. Olive-Y must have misinterpreted his typing on the virtual keyboard. Many conspirators in Alpha Complex used a code of subtle twitches and hand gestures, called twitchtalk. There were dozens of different dialects. Jerome had studied many of them, but new variants kept appearing and mutating to stay ahead of Internal Security.
“Twitchtalk, officer? I don’t know what that is.”
“You were communicating with your treasonous conspirators. Don’t try to deny it.” Her finger tightened on the trigger and her teeth clenched.
“I don’t need to deny anything, because I didn’t do anything. By the way, Olive-Y, accusing a higher-clearance citizen of treason without properly documented proof is an offense. Tell me, Olive-Y, is this the sort of unprofessional, ill-considered, and ultimately unwarranted accusation that got you all those demerits? Should we add spurious allegations to that list?”
“Uhh–” Olive backed off. “Then what was that strange gesture I saw you make?”
“This gesture?” Jerome pulled up the virtual keyboard again and spitefully added over Olive’s head the tag BAD ATTITUDE. She stared in confusion as her suspect waggled his fingers in the air.
“That gesture, yes.”
“Finger calisthenics. I have to do them regularly, or my fingers cramp up when I spend all day typing personnel assessment reports—often highly critical personnel assessment reports that get seen by influential citizens. Understand?”
Olive holstered her pistol and stalked off into the crowd.
Jerome felt a thrill of happiness purer and more real than any drug high. These glasses were a window into the secret world he’d always known existed. It felt like he’d lived in a flatscreen world all his life, and now reality had popped up into a third dimension of secret revelation. And only he, Jerome, could see it.
No wonder those traitors were after the glasses! No wonder Internal Security had fought and died to get them back! No wonder they’d be looking for them!
—No wonder they’d terminate him if they found he’d stolen them!
Well, he thought, that was a short-lived thrill of happiness.
These glasses could expose the Great Conspiracy and free Alpha Complex from its malevolent machinations—but he had to master the glasses before the conspirators tracked him down. Internal Security was probably already looking for a bespectacled interpretive dancer. The BLINDERs clearly had some sort of kinetic, gesture-driven interface; to figure it out, he needed privacy. His quarters were nearby.
He reached up to remove the glasses, but then he spotted a virtual object in the Multifunctional Public Space. A large green-blue-violet cube floated in the center of the hall, slowly rotating. Data pop-ups bubbled up from its green and blue facets, but the violet face was blank; Jerome deduced his glasses must be BLUE Clearance. The thought of higher-clearance glasses, with even more power, rocketed through his brain.
From here he couldn’t make out all the pop-ups, but a few words were readable. One, above the green facet, said CRUNCHEETYM LAUNCH EVENT PLAN. Beside it, another seemingly unfinished caption read NEW PRODUCT:— after the colon, the rest was blank. Interesting coincidence; he’d recently created a fictitious CruncheeTym product launch as a terrorist target.
The blue facet rotated into view, and the pop-up read BOMB THREAT. Well, that explained why the Multifunctional Public Space was crawling with IntSec sniffers. The CruncheeTym product launch, whatever it was, must be a terrorist target—
Deja vu is illegal in Alpha Complex. Experiencing deja vu is taken as proof you are a precognitive mutant, and mutants are genetic traitors. Jerome had always prided himself on being genetically pure and had never seen any mutant signs in his own DNA, but this deja vu was like a simultaneous double-punch to the brain and the groin.
Last week at Threat Obfuscation he’d invented the CruncheeTym event and the bomb threat in order to obfuscate a suspected anarchist cell. Neither the product launch nor the
bomb were real. They’d never been real. He’d made it all up!
Yet there they were, on the floating cube right in front of him.
Jerome pulled off the glasses, and reality snapped back to normal. No one had haloes of their innermost secrets, and no multicolored cube raised perplexing mysteries. Everything was once again concealed. He stuck the glasses back in their case. It was all too much; he needed time to think.
He stumbled through the crowd to the blissful solitude of his quarters. Distantly he knew he should get back at the office, but even Peter would accept “my confession booth got blown up with me inside it” as an excuse for a long lunch break.
Lunch. Kneecaps.
The doorbell rang.
—————
You’ve just read Chapters 1-4 (about the first one-sixth) of the PARANOIA novel Reality Optional by Gareth Hanrahan. In the full-length ebook—available for download where you bought this book—Jerome-G faces threats from Free Enterprise goons, his teammates in the Troubleshooters, visits to the Underplex, and the CruncheeTym Snack Revelation. While he uses the Augmented Reality glasses to understand why IntSec and the VIOLET executive are interested in him, the makers of those glasses are hunting him.
Who built the BLINDERs glasses, and for what purpose?
What happened to Celeste-B, and where is she now?
Why are the imagined threats Jerome invented for Threat Obfuscation becoming real?
The answers are all here:
Reality Optional
by Gareth Hanrahan
ultravioletbooks.com
FREE preview: Stay Alert
Chapter 1 from the full-length PARANOIA novel by Allen Varney
EVERYONE SHOULD BE HAPPY. IMMEDIATELY.
In the underground city of Alpha Complex, The Computer wants every citizen to have fun. If you’re not having fun, The Computer will turn you into reactor shielding.
ATTENTION, TROUBLESHOOTERS. PLEASE RETURN THIS STOLEN HELPBOT TO ITS OWNER. THIS MISSION INVOLVES NO DEADLY WARFARE BETWEEN RIVAL CRIMINAL GANGS AND WILL BE LOTS OF FUN.
The Computer’s elite service agents, the Troubleshooters, have fun delivering the helpbot to a sequence of murderous gangsters. It’s not annoying or repetitious at all, no siree. (“You look like you’re about to shoot your teammate! Would you like help?”)
IF YOU MEET DIFFICULTIES, SEEK HELP FROM YOUR FELLOW TROUBLESHOOTERS.
Team Leader Fletcher-R is about to have lots of fun learning about his teammates. He’ll learn they’re criminals themselves. Or they belong to traitorous secret societies. Or they’re betraying illegal mutant powers, usually while betraying illegal mutant teammates. Fun, fun, fun.
BEWARE! TRAITORS ARE EVERYWHERE!
High on an experimental alertness drug called Leery, Fletcher must complete his mission before the treacherous Troubleshooters discover his own mutation—or his ever-changing criminal affiliations—or his membership in the First Church of Christ Computer-Programmer—in short, before Fletcher’s teammates find out he’s a traitor. Fletcher is about to have more fun than anyone can stand.
STAY ALERT! TRUST NO ONE! KEEP YOUR LASER HANDY!
1: Briefing Room JSV-27-15
Year of the Computer 214, Month 03, Day 29 (Twosday), 08:00
The older, cannier, and more treasonous supervisors at JSV Troubleshooter Dispatch believed Briefing Room 27-15 held a curse. A Troubleshooter team would assemble in 27-15, just back from the latest mess hall riot, reactor leak repair, Food Vat guard hitch, or delivery of Research & Design’s new batch of high-performance industrial fusion-powered aerodynamic pencil sharpeners. The Team Leader would start to report, the Loyalty Officer piped up with a correction—as they do—the Recording Officer proved they were both wrong, and of course the Happiness Officer wouldn’t shut up.
Dispatch would try to forestall a firefight by confiscating their lasers and cone rifles beforehand—but some Troubleshooters hid knives or poison darts or sonics. And they were mandated to hold onto their assigned R&D experimental equipment, the spacetime grenades, personal steamrollers, flesh-eating bacterial swabs, lesnerizers, Nefandis Devices, and chromium antimatter-powered brass knuckles, which one of these days, by golly, they’ll finally get right. Somehow, in two minutes, the whole team wound up shot, burned, maimed, flattened, dismembered, crushed into a singularity, or outright vaporized, amalgamated into walls and ceiling as a penetrating pink spray.
Going by the Central Processing Unit service group’s latest actuarial figures, that kind of totally unexpected event was to be expected a certain percentage of the time. What percentage? Sorry, that information is not available at your security clearance.
It became a self-validating superstition. If a team checking in from a mission looked glum or furtive, said nothing, cast twitchy sidelong looks at the team multicorder, and smelled of flop sweat, dispatchers nodded judicious nods and popped them in 27-15. Sometimes they stationed a cleanup crew outside, to save time.
This morning, for the debriefing of Troubleshooter Team Rotisserie-459, Mission JSV874029 (Team Leader Fletcher-R-JSV-1), the cleanup crew was standing by. Also a hazmat team. Also six GREEN goons, beat cops from Internal Security.
Inside 27-15, the six members of Team Rotisserie stood alone in lethal silence. Lit by interrogation lamps, in view of six visible surveillance cameras and unknowable others hidden, they stared straight ahead, their expressions as blank as the “Secret society affiliation (if any)” space on a Treasonous Action Authorization Form 33A.
At the left end of the line, from the viewpoint of the (currently vacant) officer’s lectern, stood Fletcher-R-JSV-1. Short, stocky, bright-eyed, thin-haired, jut-jawed, broad-forehead-ed, and wearing loose-fitting red reflec-armor coveralls, Fletcher-R—the R meant Clearance RED—could, with a decent pair of elevator boots, answer a Catch That Traitor! casting call for “Second-Lead Heroic Troubleshooter Who Dies in Act 2.”
In the floor-to-ceiling mirror behind the lectern Fletcher saw his skin, usually the healthy pink of an NCR form’s second undercopy, had become sallow, jaundiced, close to buff (copy 4) if not actually gold (copy 7). That was the Leery, a side effect his supplier hadn’t thought to mention. He wondered what other effects might erupt and, given his luck, in what untimely hour.
He noticed his team watching his reflection: His Loyalty Officer, Yvonne-R-JSV-2, glanced at him and narrowed her eyes. He took this as a death threat, against him (mainly) and the whole team (a bonus).
With dismay Fletcher realized everyone on his team had reason to want him dead. That could well happen today. This was the mission’s debriefing, its culmination. A debriefing officer could censure, demote, brainscrub, terminate, and worse. Fletcher could walk out of here with commendations and a promotion, or he might not walk out at all. The next few hours would determine whether he could gull The Computer into overlooking his many treasons, whether he could pin discrepancies and problems on his teammates, and whether they would betray him as thoroughly as they doubtless wished. His life, all their lives, were like forms bundled for the recycler.
He sighed. As their leader, all he’d ever wanted was to eat better.
—————
48 hours earlier—214.03.27 (Sevenday), 08:00
FunFoods PLC Cold Fun Processing Plant JSV034 Access S014
If the INFRARED multitudes, enjoying in their tranquilized way their nightly Cold Fun dessert, understood the many processing steps in that frozen concoction’s synthesis—the parade of component chemical reactions—the immense stainless-steel machineries that funneled and mixed and stored organic precursors, reactants, and by-products in quantities that could float an aircraft carrier—well, they’d be terminated for knowledge above their clearance. But the point is, they’d understand why this refrigerated manufacturing hangar was filled with walkways and gantries, catwalks and cranes, struts and stanchions, all threading around and among endless rows of behemoth five-zillion-liter anodized aluminum storage tanks marked EXPLOSIVE.
Fle
tcher-JSV-1—INFRAREDs didn’t get clearance initials—shivered. He didn’t know or care anything about Cold Fun manufacturing. He only knew the ragged black coveralls of the INFRAREDs, the no-clearance scutworking proles of Alpha Complex, were no good for this freezing Funhole. Vapor rose like smoke from his frosted boots. He disliked smoking boots.
But to complain was to be unhappy. That would make The Computer unhappy. The Computer might ask its loyal servants in Internal Security to send Fletcher to a Bright Vision Re-education Center. There Attitude Adjusters would re-happify him with vigor and verve, at the cost of certain troublesome brain cells. Fletcher liked his higher motor functions, so he kept quiet. He shivered—but with a smile.
Stanton-JSV-1, his co-worker, looked cold too. Stanton was tall, rangy, black-haired (crewcut), weak-chinned, wide-mouthed, and currently turning blue. “Why would a docbot get stuck here? Is someone injured back there?”
Fletcher peered down the foggy concrete walkway between coolant tanks. “If there is, he won’t need an ice pack.”
Fletcher and Stanton worked as Patient Transport & Repair Personnel—haulers, that’s all—for the Technical Services firm Doc-in-a-Box TS, authorized therapist for medical bots. Tech Services—one of the eight sprawling service group bureaucracies that administered the living daylights out of every person, place, thing, and abstract entity in Alpha Complex—handled bots. Some bots were crazy.
They were after one of the worst: a bugbrain docbot.
Workers in the rival Power Services group said Techs lacked brains. In a way, it was true. Tech always lacked for bot brains—photonic diamond CPUs in titanium cartridges—and often repurposed them for new roles. Sometimes faulty re-coding produced bugbrains: scrubots that taught loyalty songs to passersby; transbots that tried to jump the rails and infiltrate the front lines of an imaginary enemy; guardbots that grabbed and disarmed a rioter but then, retracting their dum-dum slugthrowers and crowd-control gas canisters, asked m’sieu what he desired to drink, and might the bot recommend a pleasant Beaujolais?
