T'S APARTMENT
Thomas woke in his physical body at 9 a.m. when his agent Villain jumped on his face, as scheduled. T threw the chinchilla across the room and sat up on his bed in the main room of his apartment.
Complete list of every object in T's apartment:
1 bed with 2 sets of sheets and 2 cyber-enhanced pillows
1 folding chair and 1 folding coffee table
4 cyber-enhanced outfits, 2 pairs of tennis shoes, 5 pairs of socks and underwear
1 set of enhanced augmented reality gear with sensors
1 CyberFit exercise machine
1 computer with accessories
5 surveillance bugs, 2 cleaner bots
toiletries, minimum kitchen ware, consumables
a small box of nostalgic items which he had digitally duplicated and often thought about throwing away
His apartment complex catered to those who mostly lived Outside. His apartment was 250 square feet, composed of a main living area, a small kitchen, and a tiny bathroom. It was more than he needed. More important than space, the complex provided an excellent internet connection. T's computer served as a high speed wireless hub for connecting his plant to the internet from anywhere within the apartment. For the rare occasions when T physically ventured from his apartment, he had access to a decent wireless service to maintain his internet connection, but it wasn't as snappy.
His bed was high quality, which was good because he spent a good deal of time lying on it. His pillows, wired to his computer, provided a close range wireless connection with his plant for when he was lying down. Both his computer and his pillow featured easily accessed physical kill switches for disconnecting from Outside.
His walls were white, free of clutter, and smart. They had cameras and microphones and were capable of displaying video and sound, but T had never used them for that. T also owned no physical media of any kind, and so had no bookcases or media centers.
After breakfast, T ran using his CyberFit exercise machine, which had been provided with the apartment. Based off of designs originally developed to allow for natural movement and full body haptic feedback in virtual reality, CyberFit machines accommodated a wide variety of movements and provided resistance for the strengthening of all muscle groups. CyberFit machines were designed for plant users, who could strap themselves in and program their plants to take their physicals through a series of exercises while they were focused elsewhere. Removing the inconvenience and much of the unpleasantness of exercise made it much more appealing. Like eating right, exercising helped sustain and strengthen the infrastructure for what really mattered- the brain.
That morning, Thomas used one of the machine's games which involved running away from Draculas, which he found effective motivation.
After exercising, T was about to take a shower when he was alerted that groceries had been left at his front door. His apartment automatically ordered new supplies when he was running low on something. It timed groceries to be delivered when he was expected to be at the apartment, which was pretty much always. T didn't own a car, but cheap automated rentals were available on 15 minutes notice. He just didn't like to physically leave the apartment.
He put his groceries up and took a shower.
Megan woke up, got ready, and performed the synchronization and calibration exercises for her plant. This involved going through the plant's daily diagnostics, which only lasted a few minutes. She spent a few more minutes fine tuning plant and proxy settings before she was ready. She laid her physical body out on her bed, setting it to change position every once in a while to prevent bed sores. She created a proxy superimposed on and synchronized with her physical to ease the transition, and then switched over to inhabiting her proxy.
Switching to a proxy involved the user's plant routing the sensory signals from the virtual proxy body to the brain, and the motor signals from the brain to control the proxy body. The plant monitored the physical signals which were cut off for safety. Just about every part of a plant user's body which interacted with or experienced the outside world could be safely shut out entirely. A plant user's limbs, muscles, skin, genitalia, ears, eyes, mouth, back of the throat, vocal chords, and sinuses could be entirely diverted to a proxy body, cutting off their physical sensations to the brain.
The plant was designed such that signals to and from most internal organs- such as the heart, lungs, and stomach- couldn't be altered, except to lessen pain and discomfort. Proxy users' bowel and bladder sensation and control also remained intact. Unless something went wrong, the average proxy user was not usually aware of the faint trace of their internal organs anyway due to habituation to their steady signals, which were monitored for health.
The proxy Megan transitioned to mimicked her physical body in every way it could, so that Megan felt very little change as she switched over. For a moment she was receiving fading sensory information from her physical and her proxy at the same time as the plant faded in signals from the proxy. Mixed states like this, combinations of sensory and motor signals between proxies and physical bodies, were common and useful.
The sensations and control of the mouth and tongue, for example, could be entirely diverted to a proxy. However, to prevent choking, the sensation of most of the physical throat cannot be cut off. Instead, the usually minimal physical sensation of the throat could be mixed with the simulated sensations of a proxy throat. This allows proxy users to have a realistic simulated eating and drinking experience, though their stomach obviously wouldn't register virtual yummies. Users could also change the flavor and texture of physical food with a mixed state, although it was common sense to not augment the size and consistency of the food to avoid choking.
Likewise, the anus and rectum couldn't be entirely diverted to a proxy, but their signals could be made faint and mixed with proxy signals for the obvious desired simulated experiences. Stimulation of the prostate and the cervix and uterus was likewise possible with mixed states.
After Megan had eased herself into a proxy and jumped around a bit, she sent a message to T.
Thomas: Go ahead.
Megan appeared in T's apartment, next to his bed.
Thomas: [hugging her] Welcome to my place. This layer's not very interesting.
Megan looked around at T's few possessions and blank walls. T's bed and exercise machine filled most of the room. Thomas' unaugmented physical stood up next to his proxy, dressed only in underwear.
Megan: It's been a while since I've seen your physical body. It's two inches shorter than your proxy. And your head is shaven. Looks good.
Thomas: What? This old thing?
His proxy punched his natural body onto the bed. It sat there smiling idiotically.
Megan: You've gotten so muscular.
Thomas: When I'm running around Outside, I frequently have it doing isometric exercises or working out on the machine. Adrenaline and endorphins enhance the games, and its important to maintain your infrastructure.
Megan: A lot of people have those machines. Is it better than free weights and jogging?
Thomas: Oh yeah, you should get one. It's a lot safer for plants when they're Outside. You can't really jog anywhere physically without paying attention, it's too easy to fall down. Hard to hurt yourself with the machine.
Megan: But isn't it dangerous, leaving your body going while you're away? Couldn't you mess something up?
Thomas: The plant picks up on pain or soreness and gives warning, but I usually do a mixed state of my proxy senses and a faint sense from my physical so I know immediately if there's discomfort or pain. At a minimum. I leave it walking and doing basic exercises for a few hours a day, and that keeps it pretty fit and tone. I have to be careful or it tires me out by the end of the day. Even if you're in a proxy, the brain tires from physical exertion, you know.
T's proxy took out a handgun and shot his physical in the head. Megan jumped, mostly from the loud bang. T's head spurted blood and slumped over onto the bed.
Thomas: [putting on shades] You can have it.
Megan: [getting a hold of herself] That was really scary for a moment.
T's physical body popped back up, smiling. It was still leaking blood from the hole in its head. Megan, not wanting to encourage him, went over to the kitchen and looked at his consumables list. It was a little too healthy for her taste, except for his supply of cheap vodka and special brownies.
Megan: So much health food.
Thomas: You should totally only eat health food. You can manage its taste, so that doesn't matter. And maintaining your body is vital. It's the only support system for our brains we have just yet.
Megan: Yeah, yeah. These pot brownies, are they from the grocery store, or homemade?
Thomas: From the store. But they're pretty good. And potent.
Megan: How does being high mix with being Outside?
Thomas: It depends on what you're doing. For music and mindless fun it's great, but not so much for anything requiring precision. Pretty much what you'd expect, really.
Megan: This place is depressing.
Thomas: Oh, right. Here's my private layer.
Megan added T's layer. The walls and ceiling were suddenly covered with animated movie and concert posters. The carpets were pristine, and the space smelled of strawberries.
Thomas: Actually, this space is really boring too, and not what you came here for. To the secret layer!
THE SADDEST KEY IN THE WORLD
Thomas reached down his throat and pulled out a black marble. He dropped it and it exploded into a full sized door. It had a stone frame around a flowing mercury center. Thomas poked the center and drew a line of mercury through the air until it dropped back between the frame.
Thomas: Jump on in!
Thomas hopped into the mercury and disappeared. Megan hesitated a moment before following him. An instant later she was accelerating down a winding water slide. She fell through a hole at the bottom of the slide into a dirt room and managed to land on her feet. The hole above closed.
The dirt room contained Thomas, a few small roots hanging out of the walls, and a panda. The panda was sitting in a corner, facing the center of the room, chewing on a piece of bamboo.
Megan: OK, what's with the panda?
Thomas: Part of the key. If you don't perform the secret actions exactly right, the room fills with stinging millipedes.
Megan: Let's get it right then. What do I do?
Thomas pulled a .45 colt out of one of the roots in the wall and handed it to Megan.
Thomas: You must murder the panda.
Megan: Lovely.
Thomas: See that one discoloration on the left side of its neck? Shoot that spot, point blank, and then cradle the panda as it dies. Only then shall the way open.
Megan shot the panda and held it for the short while it took to die while its hot blood poured into her lap.
Megan: I'm sorry, panda.
Panda: [with its last breath] It's a living.
Megan: Do you have to do this every time you go in there?
Thomas: Oh, not me. I just go wherever. It's to keep strange people out.
Megan: Wouldn't they have to pull the entrance out of your throat?
Thomas: I already said they were strange. Besides, you're missing the spirit of fun.
Megan: The fun in murdering pandas?
Thomas: Moving on...
T'S LAIR
Megan walked with T through the door into a brightly lit dirt hall. The door closed behind them. There were numerous open doorways with frames of various hues lining the sides of the hall until it forked off in the distance. There was a hole in the ground halfway down the visible hall and further down there was another one on the ceiling.
Megan stepped in a shallow yellow puddle and noticed that her shoes had vanished at some point.
Megan: Is that, uh...
Thomas: Assign your sense of taste to your feet. Trust me.
Megan fumbled through her sensory allocation settings and her foot in the puddle tasted butterscotch. She noted puddles of assorted colors along every surface of the hall. She gave the sense of taste to her hand and slapped a puddle on the wall. It was pistachio.
Thomas: Every day is a different randomly selected goodie for the hall. Today is flavor puddles.
Megan: Yummy. So far it looks very snug. Like a Hobbit hole or the Batcave.
Thomas: It's a simple lair. You know what, I should go run some lines. But nothing from this point on will maul you too badly, so have a look around. Here, have a Villain. I trained him as a guide.
Thomas imploded away as he tossed Villain onto Megan's shoulder. Megan petted his soft fur.
Villain: I suggest you start with the media center. It's the first door on the right.
MEDIA CENTER
Best Library Ever
Stepping through the incorporeal glass, she found herself in a narrow hall. It extended to the horizon. The ground and the wall to her left were made of soft granite. The wall to her right was a staggeringly huge bookshelf, stretching from the entrance of the library into the far distance, and from the floor to the sky. There was no roof, just granite and books and more books.
Megan ran a finger along one of the shelves and appreciated its detail. She wiped a thin layer of dust off her finger onto her pants. The shelf at her eye level contained the complete works of Thomas Ligotti and some related existential horror fiction. She picked a book up and a recliner appeared behind her. She held the book and thumbed through it, feeling its weight and smelling its musty, yellowed pages. She had grown up with only a few paper books, but they still carried a mystique for her, as did the perfect simulation she was admiring. It was a convincing experience as only a plant could offer, to the extent that Megan would not have been able to differentiate the book she was holding from a physical book. Haptics could create a similar effect, but lacked a little something.
She put the book back and the recliner behind her disappeared.
Megan: Villain, how does this bookshelf work?
Villain: The standard way. Just ask it for something or apply force to the shelf to scroll it.
Megan shoved a shelf diagonally down and to the right. The bookshelf flew by in a blur, shelves disappearing seamlessly into the ground and the wall by the entrance. She put out a finger to stop it and was faced with science magazines. She made a less forceful downward motion with two fingers and the bookshelf slowed until she put her palm up, stopping it on collections of webcomics.
Megan: V, how were the items in this library selected?
Villain: The current filter shows everything Thomas has ever read some part of. It includes websites, comics, books, textbooks, and magazines.
Megan: Seriously? There's so much stuff here.
Villain: You can also filter to display T's favorites or to show everything in the standard comprehensive collection.
The standard comprehensive library collection lived up to its name, containing most titles below a certain data size. It mostly excluded more immersive works. An average computer hard drive could easily contain the collection, and so most people had much or all of the collection.
Megan: [to bookshelf] Show everything.
The library shifted, with countless new books expanding every section. She was still looking at webcomics starting with R, but there were a whole lot more of them. She flicked the shelves and when it stopped she was still looking at webcomics beginning with R. She flicked it harder and ended up looking at webcomics beginning with S. She picked up a book titled "The Complete Subnormality", and sat down in the recliner as it appeared behind her. It was remarkably comfy. She was perusing the book when she noticed an attractive middle-aged Japanese maid dusting the shelves nearby.
Megan: Why is there a maid?
Villain: Ambiance. And such.
Megan: Oh....
She remembered the granite wall. She turned and pointed at it purposely with her index finger and flicked it to the side. A beach appeared in place of the granite, sending a cool breeze over her. The floor was now sand. Clouds covered the sun, giving just the right amount of light and warmth for reading.
Megan turned back to the shelves and scrolled through them by flicking her fingers before realizing that she would never get anywhere that way.
Megan: Batman comics.
A book titled, "Batman Comics" appeared floating next to her. She tossed the webcomic collection into the shelves where it vanished, and opened up the Batman book. The table of contents was quite extensive, featuring thousands and thousands of comics and even old animated series which she could watch right on the page. She touched an issue in the index and the book became a pristine copy of that comic, complete to its dimensions and the feel of its paper. The comic was interesting enough, so she brought out a pencil and drew a mustache on Batman, her way of bookmarking it. The book, with any alterations she made to it, would be kept available via her SIS as a title of interest.
Megan: Change this book to a random skit based web series. Highly ranked.
The comic morphed into a book. She flipped to the middle and touched one of the paneled skits. It expanded to the whole page while it played. It was crude, but amusing.
Megan: Who would watch them so small like this?
She stretched the page out to make it larger, held it up a few feet away from her and let it go. It hung in the air while the video played and then returned to its regular size and fell into her lap when the video was done.
Turning back to the beach, she flicked a finger at it and it became the bridge of a starship, with a majestic starscape and an alien planet visible through its large viewport. The ground was aluminum. Another flick and she was in a dense jungle, complete with a dirt ground and jungle noise. Another flick and she was on a castle rampart, overlooking a large ongoing medieval battle. One final flick changed it to a skyscraper view of a city crawling with monsters, which were barely visible through a deep fog.
On impulse she threw the book she was holding through the skyscraper's window, with a satisfying crash. Having gotten a feel for the library space, Megan walked back to the semicircular entrance and then through the beads of the center door. On the other side, she walked down stairs into a basement.
Classic gaming rec room
The classic gaming room featured a pool table, a bar, and a couch facing a small screen on a cabinet. Megan turned the couch into the library's recliner and jumped onto it. A window popped up with a selection of game emulators that included a comprehensive listing of every video game console that ever existed. It had all the Segas, Playstations, Xboxes, Nintendos, etc. It also had an extensive list of PC gaming platforms. It was essentially able to emulate any game, contemporary or antique, built to be played primarily through a screen. It was a standard classic gaming set, but Megan hadn't interacted with one since her plant, so she was excited.
She selected Super Nintendo and that console appeared in the cabinet. The screen above it became a small, boxy television appropriate for the game's time, but Megan switched it to a larger screen. The system's controller appeared hovering in front of her, plugged into the console. She grabbed it and a window with more controller options popped up, alongside a complete list of SNES titles. T's favorites were highlighted.
Megan: Ooh, Super Mario World.
A Super Mario World cartridge appeared in her hand. She didn't feel like getting up so she threw it at the TV, and as expected, it flew into the system's cartridge slot and the game started. She found to her delight that she was receiving tactile feedback as if she were Mario. Her normal proxy senses were slightly faded out and she could feel herself running, jumping, falling, smashing blocks, and being hit by enemies.
Megan: Fun feedback. Does it work for all the games?
Villain: You can estimate proxy senses for most game characters, but its only been fine tuned for the more popular games.
Megan: [to the screen] Sonic the Hedgehog for the Genesis.
Megan was now holding a Sega Genesis controller and the game started up. Megan played the first level filled with the joy of Sonic speed.
Megan: Just wow. I'll bet that works perfectly for first person shooters. Do online games work?
Villain: Sporadically, mostly popular nostalgic titles like Mario Kart and Halo. There are also classical gaming clubs, where proxies get together in spaces like this and play old games while consuming snack foods contemporary to the era.
Megan: That is so nerdy. T have any other exciting enhancements?
Villain: There's T's challenge gaming mode, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Megan: [to the screen] T's challenge gaming mode! Original F-Zero.
She was happily zooming along halfway through the first lap of the futuristic racing game when a loud vacuuming noise started nearby. Then an increasing number of cats jumped on and off her lap, meowing obnoxiously. Blood dripped from the ceiling onto her head, although neither it nor the cats ever obscured her vision or interfered with her hands. Soon the room was filling rapidly with cold water. Before the end of the second lap, the water was above Megan's head. The cats began drowning, while the blood attracted sharks which swarmed around her.
Obnoxiously loud and large explosions, unmuted by the water, occurred in Megan's peripheral vision. They seemed to get closer and closer but never actually reached her. The now dead cats turned into zombies and began lightly chewing on her legs and scalp. The force of gravity affected Megan's upper body reversed, so it felt like she was about to fall into the sky. The water became crystal clear honey and rapidly drained from the room, leaving flopping sharks everywhere. The honey didn't affect her eyes or hands, but it did attract an army of ants that formed a thick layer covering her. They didn't bite her but they tickled and itched horribly.
Megan somehow got past the first stage of F-Zero and was starting the second when the zombie cats became more active. They were rapidly being consumed by the ants, but that barely slowed their chewing. The smell was truly horrible, and Megan considered turning it off, but didn't want to cheat.
The floor disappeared and the contents of the space fell with acceleration toward a violently active super volcano. The screen fell relative to Megan, so as not to interrupt her playing. The space got hotter and hotter. The ants screamed in terror. Mostly-eaten cats chewed on her legs and opened a hole in her cheek which gushed grape soda everywhere. Her seat started shocking her each time she passed a car, but Megan's final straw was when the dozen dying sharks falling all around her pulled out oversized vuvuzelas and bagpipes.
Megan: Quit! I quit! Gods! What the hell.
The space went back to normal and Megan finished the second stage before getting up to leave. She noticed a sliding glass door beside the exit. Above it said "Quarter Arcade".
Megan: What's that place?
Villain: That is a popular gaming space designed to appear and function as a classic arcade. It features exacting replicas of thousands of old arcade machines. They even take tokens. There are social areas, pizza and other snacks, tournaments, and special events. At the moment there are more than 3000 people inside playing games. The atmosphere is competitive, but friendly. And the joysticks are only greasy if you want them to be.
Megan saved Quarter Arcade's tag and returned to the entrance area, where she walked through the left door with the red curtain.
Universal Movie Theater
Megan found herself standing in the grand lobby of an old movie theater. There was a snack bar and advertisements for old and new movies in the forms of posters, cardboard cut-outs, holograms, and interactive projections.
There was only one theater so Megan entered it. She grabbed a seat in the middle of the small, empty theater. A window popped up showing a complete index of every film ever made up until the present. Almost all were available. There was also a filter available to display T's favorite films.
Megan: Anything interesting playing?
Villain: [grooming his fur] We have all movies and their fan mods and edits. They are as high definition as possible, though degradable for authenticity. There's an option to make any of them 3D, but further immersion such as smell or tactile is spotty for most old titles unless its been specially modded. I'm sure you know that it is customary to donate a small amount of money to a film's creator if you like it. Some films currently making the rounds have suggested donations.
The entire collection was easily streamed from the internet, but T kept more than two million movies on his hard drive, mostly because he just liked having them there. Once a week his computer downloaded all of the new movie titles so he could have an up to date collection.
Megan brought up the movie options in a window and scrolled through them. They included trailers, which could be contemporary for the film selected, modern, or some mix.
Megan: Pee-wee's Big Adventure. 2D. Start where he dances in the biker bar.
The theater morphed into a standard theater from 1985, the year it was first in theaters. The picture and sound were far from optimal, but seeing a movie in its original setting had some appeal. She selected some snacks, and a bag of popcorn and a soda appeared in the seat next to her. She munched popcorn and looked around at the empty theater.
Megan: Add an audience. Half full, but boisterous. No babies.
Random proxies wearing clothing typical of 1985 appeared, filling the theater, having great fun. Megan approved.
Megan: Now let's do Scott Pilgrim in 3D Imax. No glasses, they're annoying. Start right before the first fight. Simulate opening night, theater filled with fans.
A pop up informed her that there was a public showing of Scott Pilgrim set to begin in 6 minutes. Anyone with a virtual theater could host any movie they wanted simply by announcing the movie and its start time. This would result in most cases with a full theater of enthusiastic fans. This let anyone watch their favorite movies with a live audience whenever they wanted, recreating the full theater experience.
Participants could change their own subjective view of the theater to their liking, except for the number of seats, which the host set or let expand. Obnoxious individuals or groups were easy enough to filter, so you never had to deal too much with trolls unless you wanted to. Hosts could try nasty tricks, but the standard theater interface limited the annoyance they could cause, and they would get a bad reputation for things like splicing in porn to children's films.
Popular movies were constantly having public showings. Movie lovers rarely had to host their own screenings of any movie they were likely to want to see in a group, when they could just wait a minute for the someone else's screening. Even non-implant augmented reality, such as Mike's, could satisfactorily simulate the theatrical experience. Thus, physical movie theaters had become a rarity.
Crowds were fun, but Megan didn't have the time to watch an entire movie at that moment. She ignored the pop up and it disappeared. The space and screen expanded into an Imax theater circa 2010. The 3D effect was pretty good considering it wasn't native, but it was just a visual illusion as Megan discovered when she tried to open a portal to grab some coins from the screen. She noted that one of the movie's options was a more immersive fan mod, but didn't have time to find out what that meant. She left the theater and the media center and went back into the main hall of T's lair.
Megan: It had a few nice touches, but overall that was a pretty average media center. Am I missing anything?
Villain: You are missing the social component. T is a famous Outside personality, and his SIS has a few million followers, many of whom track his media consumption. When he favorites a book, game, or movie, many people check it out.
Megan: He's definitely a cultural disseminator, even if he is just a minor celebrity.
Villain: Right. When he hosts a movie in his theater, it frequently attracts thousands of people. He is known for supplying special treats related to the film, as well as having excellent after parties and discussions. His fan mods are popular too.
Megan: Hey, what about his favorite music and TV shows?
Villain: Available via SIS. Consumption of TV and music is less about context for Thomas, so he doesn't need a special setting for them.
Megan danced in a blueberry puddle for a few seconds before moving on. A force field across the next door prevented Megan from entering the room. Inside was a proxy of Thomas lying on a bed.
Megan: Is this for sex, or what?
Villain: The sex space is through the next door on the left. This is what's called a safe room. You should get one if you don't already have one. It's for sudden escape from unpleasant situations if you don't want to kill switch back to your physical. It can also simulate body parts if you lose them in a game so you don't get phantom limb symptoms.
Megan: And it's on a bed because he has bots have sex with this proxy so he can covertly get off whenever, right?
Villain: You'd have to ask T about that.
Megan petted a tabby cat that was walking by on the ceiling. She looked into the next room. It was light blue and contained two huge four poster beds, a jacuzzi, a sex swing, a bed shaped like a heart, and various implements hanging from the walls. The room was lit by candles, and the floor, walls and ceiling were softly cushioned and covered in satin sheets. The options presented for the room included mirrors, jello wrestling, low gravity, lighting schemes, and several romantic environments such as a flowery forest grove and the nighttime deck of a cruise ship.
Megan: Anything interesting here beyond the obvious?
Villain: Just that this room is a secured shared space. That makes it neutral territory for all parties who enter it. In other words, no one can spring nasty surprises. When T has visitors in this room, it is the only room in his lair he does not have complete control over.
Megan: Interesting. I guess that makes sense. So where are all the subservient nubile sexbots?
Villain: They are often brought here, of course, but the sexy room is primarily for human guests. T's sexbot gallery is through the next door.
Megan moved on and pulled aside the veil to the harem. The space inside was sunny, frilly, pink and covered the area of a warehouse. Its ground and walls were cushioned satin like the sexy room, but the ceiling was an ornate glass dome. It contained numerous beds and couches, upon which lounged T's immense collection of sexbots. Some posed, waved, or writhed. Some danced, alone or with other bots. But most were engaged in just about every imaginable erotic and sexual act.
The sexbots had a large set of costumes and props- chains, collars, leather, whips, lingerie, business suits, spandex, bunny ears, etc. Many were naked. They were male, female, and androgynous. There was every color and style of hair, including baldness. They had a wide variety of body shapes, piercings and body modifications. Every natural and unnatural skin tone and ethnicity was present.
Most were humanoid. For skin, most had soft, warm, human flesh. Others were made of ceramic, cloth, stone and metal. There were androids, cyborgs, robots, angels, demons, and catgirls. They were natural and animated. Tusks, visible brains, numerous kinds of tentacles, udders, and innumerable other oddities were present.
Megan hovered a few feet above the crowd and darted around the room, looking them over. Many made seductive eye contact and suggestively gestured to her. The attention was exhilarating, but creepy.
T's harem included musicians like Crain and Slain, actors and their characters, T's past lovers, other people he personally knew, and specially designed and trained sexbots from all over Outside. Megan spotted a sexy female hitler dancing with Death. There was a familiar anthropomorphic cross-dressing bunny going down on a spider girl. She recognized at least two Ataraxic pandemonium. She was having difficulty getting her mind around the scope of what she was witnessing.
Animal features were common: ears, tails, fur, scales, feathers, wings, and claws. There were also many straight up "furry" proxies representing a wide variety of anthropomorphized life forms: mammal, reptilian, avian, plant, and insectoid.
There was an amazing assortment of eroticized fantasy creatures: dragonborn, dwarves, elves, gargoyles, gnomes, harpies, lamia, mermen, nymphs, orcs, slime girls, succubi, vampires, water elementals, werewolves, yeti, a large set of yokai, and many more.
There were a few proxies much larger than the rest. There was a dragon with female sexbots climbing and lounging all over it. There was a giant woman being pleasured by numerous male sexbots. There was a giant wall of slime molesting anything it could get its tentacles on. There was a medium sized Sphinx which Megan recognized from the webcomic she was just reading. There was also a strangely alluring, 15 foot high silver metallic praying mantis with a rose for a head.
There were smaller proxies too: faeries, miniature women, and living dolls. There was a familiar cartoon mouse wearing goggles, fixing a robot with her tiny wrench.
There were a set of 6 small to medium sized clouds which Megan recognized as abstract sex interfaces. She'd always wondered how they worked.
In short, T's collection was a veritable who's who of attractive celebrities, characters, and monsters.
Megan: This is T's complete collection, right?
Villain: No, this filter just shows the bots T has had sex with. It contains 832 proxies. The complete collection contains 4,067 sexbots. T's favorites filter contains 87 bots.
Megan: That is insane. It must have taken him forever to get this many.
Villain: This is not at all a large collection. Lovebots are easy to accumulate. In fact, there are sites with millions of different bots and ghosts, of varying quantities, produced by the sizable and robust community of sexbot enthusiasts. To get some idea of what's out there, you might check out Saitou's collection. [link] It is almost legendary among your circle of friends, though it is likely the result of neurotic compulsion. There was a time when some collected hundreds of thousands of pornographic pictures and videos. Sexbots and their ghosts are now as easy to collect as images, though much more effective in their purpose. T's collection is of course available for download freely over his SIS.
Megan: Would they all fit on a regular hard drive?
Villain: Sure. T has them all on his, though he has backups elsewhere. Their proxies and ghosts do take up a large amount of room, but many trained sexbots are barely modified from the set of standard sexbots, so there's a good deal of redundancy.
Megan changed the room's filter to display T's entire collection of bots and turned up their sexual behavior, just for fun. The room greatly expanded and the bots went at it. Megan found herself completely overwhelmed at being surrounded by the largest orgy she had ever personally witnessed.
Megan: How can T's computer handle all of this?
Villain: Most of these sexbots are operating in demo mode since they're not interacting with a more complex person. T's computer certainly couldn't host a human orgy of this size.
Megan pulled up a window showing the complete set of sexbot proxies and their ghosts and sifted through it. There were two components to a sexbot. First was the proxy body, with its material dimensions and attributes. Second was the ghost, or the trained simulation of a person's sexual behavior. The ghosts and bodies were largely interchangeable, but not all worked terribly well together depending on how generic they were.
Most sexbot bodies had sliding scales to change their gender, ethnicity, skin hue, temperature, etc. Almost everything was changeable: clothing, hair, voices and vocalizations, strength, etc. It was easy to mix and match parts from different proxies, or multiply or subtract limbs. Some ghosts had variants to work without legs or to skillfully multiple arms or mouths.
There was, of course, a wide range of genitalia- male, female, and other. They were realistic, cartoony, or abstract. Most were designed to work naturally, but could be made controllable beyond their physical counterparts- such as prehensile penises and manipulable vaginas. Genitalia, like any body part, could be added to any part of a proxy, or to multiple parts.
Secondary sexual characteristics were easily changeable- such as body hair, breasts, and proportions. Sweating was optional. Proxy bodies could be flavored and scented naturally, or however the user wanted. Megan noted that their smell, taste and saliva could be made to be appealing to a user, by simulating that user's preferred "pheromones". She wondered how well that worked. Friction was not a problem for virtual sex, but there were natural and artificial lubricant feels available.
There was even a "necrophilia" mode which simulated various stages of death. Megan wondered if cold, stiff bodies were an essential part of the necrophiliac experience. Wouldn't necros have a better time with warm, pliant corpses? She did not know.
Many sexbot ghosts had been trained to possess multiple orientations and behaviors. For example, the sexbot ghosts trained from recordings of Thomas' sexual behavior were unusually diverse. They came in a dozen versions with various genders, bodies, and orientations. They could play slaves, dominatrices, and everything in between. Some liked pain while others avoided it. Some were nice, some were mean. Many of their components were mixable and could be finely adjusted. Several of them were characters he played in games, including three separate characters from Ataraxia.
Sexbots weren't exactly sentient, and couldn't hold unscripted conversations of any complexity. They could follow and give most relevant commands, within their own narrow sexual context. A good sexbot could respond convincingly to the sexual whims of a user, with a nuance and tactile sensitivity almost equal to human lovers. They kissed well, snuggled well, flowed well with the give and take of intercourse, begged and pleaded well, and even dominated submissive users well. In fact, good sexbots were better rated than the average human lover, at least in physical terms. This required sophisticated pattern recognition and a sort of intelligence. Within the right context, a good sexbot could seem to have a mind inhabiting it. Many distraught users had been consoled by the warm, seemingly caring embrace of a completely accepting lovebot.
Bots weren't conscious, but sometimes that didn't matter.
There were numerous sexy locations and scenarios associated with various bots. Characters often brought environments from their original worlds with them, as well as role playing situations that could be played through. For example, there was a popular game scenario where you rescued a princess from a castle and were then rewarded by her. The rescuing (and subsequent deflowering) of princesses from monster or evil stepmothers was a common theme.
There were many generic games and scenarios that could be played with a wide range of bots, such as the innumerable dating sim games. And then there was the single player "sex arena" where players could fight bots or force bots to fight each other in a variety of forms of combat. Many bots had masterful combat skills trained the same way their sexual skills were, so fights could be quite exciting. The winner of sex arena matches could do whatever they wanted to with the loser. This mostly involved S&M and sex.
Megan did find a few entries that seemed out of place. She began downloading T's entire collection from his SIS, if for not other reason than to investigate some of the anomalies on her own. But there was one she was compelled to ask about.
Megan: Patton Oswalt? I mean, he was awesome and all. Just doesn't seem T's type.
Villain: You'd have to ask T about that
Megan filtered for T's favorites. The room rapidly shrank and all but 87 disappeared. A few of them were glowing green. Megan didn't find every bot in the eclectic array attractive, but it was an interesting and dynamic mix.
As Megan looked around the room, bots continued their attempts to entice her. She waved at the room and a number of bots waved back. She knew that they were not conscious, or even intelligent, but they responded to her eye contact realistically enough for her to feel self-conscious.
Megan: The Crainbot worked pretty good for oral, but I wonder if sexbots work overall as well as they say.
Villain: There's a way to find out!
Megan: Maybe later. Why are some of the bots highlighted green?
Villain: You'd have to ask T about that.
Megan: In any case, tell T that I'm impressed with his collection.
Villain: Oh, anyone can put this sort of thing together. T's real collection is across the hall.
Megan lingered a few more moments before moving on.
THE KEYS TO A THOUSAND WORLDS
Megan entered the room across the hall. It was white, empty, and shaped like the inside of a hollowed out donut. On a hunch she walked up the wall and onto the ceiling. The gravity of the room changed automatically to allow her to walk on any surface. Megan could change gravity at will throughout most of T's lair, but this room was set up so that all orientations were equally valid.
Megan: Which is?
Villain: Sorry, dramatic pause. You are granted full mini-world and limited shortcut rights.
Domes completely covered every surface of the room, with diameters ranging from a few inches up to a foot. Each of the domes represented a different destination Outside. Many were game worlds like Hell Fray, Ataraxia, and Yoma. Others were social communities like Mars Colony, Friends and Lovers, and a set of perennial film festivals. Some were pure recreation worlds like Hot Pursuit, Mech Smash, and certain Spirals. T's priority worlds appeared to be clustered in the room's central column.
As Megan moved about the room, the domes on the ground below her rose and hovered about her waist, while the domes on the ceiling descended to just above her head, giving her ready access to them. As she looked at a world, it tilted to give her a better view. Megan found it easy, using standard controls, to change the camera views of each world and to zoom in and examine its happenings in detail. She picked one up and tilted it, observing the progress of some players building a moat in some strategy game.
Simply paying a little attention to a dome popped up a window of information including world details, relevant stats, and additional video feeds from the virtual space. Many had multiple compartments, showing the activity of different places within each globe.
Most of the worlds allowed full immersion, but didn’t necessarily require it for user participation. They had websites offering information, allowing users to check out the worlds, and providing feeds from around the world. Most characters could be played remotely through a screen with the player's preferred level of tactile feedback, including partial or none.
Megan: How many worlds are here?
Villain: The exact number is classified, but more than 1000.
Megan: Why classified?
Villain: Surely you know that Thomas has enemies?
Megan: I've never really thought about it. Why is the number a secret?
Villain: Certain dangerous people could deduce certain things based on such a number.
Megan saw something familiar on the other side of the room. She made a circular motion with her hand as if to rotate the room, and the entire set of world domes flowed around her like a stream. It was exhilarating. She felt like a god, swirling a huge multiverse with her slightest whim. She also felt a bit dizzy. She stopped the flow when the dome she wanted was a few feet away.
Megan: Happy Land.
The colorful dome floated up in front of her. Happy Land was a mixed simulation of numerous theme parks, including water parks, Universal Studios, Disney World, and Superhero Land. Their rides, shows, and structures were reconstructed from numerous uploaded experiences of parkgoers which were composited together to form the ultimate theme park. While the parks could, and sometimes did, ban external recording devices that could be used to record a person's environments, there was little they could do about planted individuals, who could record video straight from their optic nerves, auditory nerves, as well as the motions and feels of rides from their various tactile senses.
After the pirated theme park Happy Land became wildly successful and had withstood numerous attempts to shut it down, Disney World and others built virtual theme parks to attract customers, parts of which had also been incorporated into Happy Land. Happy Land now had many different instances for people of various demographics and interests. You could even start your own instance and be the sole visitor to the immense virtual theme park.
The instance of Happy Land Megan was looking at was one of the first. It was sometimes dubbed Anarchy Land, and anarchy was what Megan witnessed as she peered into the dome. The park reset itself every few days, but in the meantime park goers did their best to tear the rides apart and create giant heaps of broken bodies to immolate. It was great fun.
Megan filtered for similar worlds and found Destructo World, one of her favorites. It was a replica of the entire physical world (with some imaginative additions) that players could destroy. Players could lift cars, or almost anything else, and throw things into buildings or other players. They could tear through buildings with their bare hands, or earn super powers like the dreaded laser finger. The more you destroyed, the stronger you got. That is, until a stronger player tore your head off and used it as a projectile.
Megan created a character in the game and remotely controlled it via her Universal Remote Control. She chose not to inhabit the character due to the relative simplicity of the game and the psychological distance it afforded from the carnage. She had her character pull a road sign out of the ground and bludgeoned to pieces a few of the many child bots that ran around the world. She catapulted herself over to her old high school and was gleefully wrecking it when a giant ball of destroyed wreckage rolled over the building, crushing her to death. Her proxy joined the debris as some maniac rolled it into the distance.
Megan brushed the world aside and filtered for T's shortcuts across his entire set. Thousands of spots in the domes around the world lit up, displaying T's access points to Outside.
Villain: I definitely cannot tell you that. Most access points are publicly available, or are on record as having been attained by T. But many are top secret and are not displayed here. But T said you could have low level shortcut access, so try some worlds out. Here's a fun one.
A dome fell from the ceiling across the room and spun toward Megan, stopping right side up in front of her. At first it was hard to make out what she was looking at. The world was called Worldcraft. It was a "sandbox" construction game through which players, often in cooperative groups, could create any world they could imagine.
Megan had played around with a Worldcraft server before she had been planted, and she'd seen some pretty cool structures which had come out of Worldcraft and been integrated into Destructo World. But she couldn't get her head around the vast landscape of T's server. There were innumerable, often gargantuan edifices constructed of any number of materials, including metal, sand, wood, bone, and marble. The structures ranged from ugly and random to beautiful and elegant. Some seemed functional as living spaces, some appeared to be puzzles or arenas, and others appeared to be momentous landfills.
Megan spotted an interesting tower with a intricate etched design around its base. She created a cursor inside the 3D game environment in the dome. She moved the cursor beside the tower at ground level. This particular game didn't allow proxies to port inside matter, so clipping wasn't a concern.
When she had selected a spot to port to, she clenched her hand like she was holding a key and turned it clockwise. This was the motion she had chosen to port smoothly from one proxy to another. Instant teleportation was obviously fastest, but smooth transitions were more comfortable. Even if she turned her hand as fast as she could, there was still a half second transition as the temperature, lighting, and feel of the old environment shifted to the next. If something was wrong with the new environment, she could always reverse her hand motion to bring herself back to the original environment, or she could come back by relaxing her hand before the full key turning motion was complete.
Before she had accepted her proxy's position inside Worldcraft, her new perspective from the ground there allowed her to see a more interesting building off in the distance. She was pretty sure she could fly or teleport over there, but out of convenience she moved the cursor in the dome next to the more interesting building. As she moved it, she swiftly flew across the landscape to the new location, although she didn't feel the motion because she was still only previewing the world. Once there, she relaxed her hand, which signaled her acceptance into the game, making her newly formed Worldcraft proxy subject to its rules.
She had held her pinky out while she motioned turning the key, which was her signal to leave a shell proxy where she had just teleported from, if possible. In this case, the proxy left behind in T's lair was set to mimic her bodily position inside the game. This was so she could easily switch back to it at any time with minimal disruption. Experienced plants grew used to abrupt transitions between proxies, but Megan still found it jarring. For example, it could be a little rattling to change instantly from running to lying down. A smooth change of body positions and form (including the addition or subtraction of appendages or bodily distortions) was more pleasant and contiguous.
Megan looked over the building. It was too complicated to easily describe, but was decidedly steampunk. She flew up high and zipped over the land. It was a vast wilderness of desert and forest, with faint trails crisscrossing throughout. It was populated with diverse constructions, beautiful vistas, maidens waving in distress from the towers of immense fortresses, mountains formed around sleeping giants, and monuments covered with strange symbols. The largest structure was an insanely large pyramid made of sandalwood.
Some parts of the land seemed patterned after Hell Fray, but most of it had its own peculiar style. Megan flew over it for several minutes, but could find no end to it.
Megan: What is all this for?
Villain: This is a semi-secret project which T is working on with a few other people. It's his first attempt at a full game world, or at least the skeleton of one.
Megan: Besides being beautiful and having all this cool stuff, is there a point to this place?
Villain: Oh yes. Although part of the fun is discovering what that point is. Test players have spent days there without any inkling that the entire world is a puzzle. It contains many things that T likes which he feels haven't been well represented in gaming worlds. T is very proud of it.
Worldcraft enabled users with limited coding skills to easily build social or game worlds. With enough work, anyone with a vision could use it to create a compelling game world that could be further modified and added to by other players. Players could use it to integrate parts of other worlds with each other and with their own constructions. Worldcraft worked with spaces created by tools like Space Forge.
WC could be used to create not only buildings and proxies, but rules and restrictions for any given virtual space in order to craft an entire gaming or social environment. There were standard proxy interaction systems that could be used to create gaming rules. These had the physical model as a starting point, which gave a common point of reference to different gaming worlds, allowing some crossover among worlds. Swinging a sword with a certain force will do similar damage in most gaming worlds aside from augmentations within the game. It was also possible to take the gaming rules and physics from other game spaces and use them with your own created space, with various levels of success depending on how closely they mesh.
Megan flew straight up and bumped against the sky, which was a sold dome. From there she could see that all of the land she had flown over was a giant island floating in space. She teleported to the opposite side of the island and was astounded by complexity of the entire bottom half, which had been carved from rock into a sprawling structure of palaces, towers, fortifications, and tunnels.
Megan: Holy fuck. That is scary. How much of this is procedurally generated?
Villain: For the underside, a good deal. But the pruning of the randomly generated structure has taken up more than a continuous month of T's time, and it's not nearly finished. It is a labyrinth that links together the structures on the other side. There's more to it, of course.
Experiencing vertigo, Megan exited her character from the game and jumped back into her proxy in T's Lair by selecting that proxy and turning her "key" again.
Megan looked around the room, found the largest dome and summoned it over to her. It was "Sunshine City". It was a giant metropolis, filled with skyscrapers and sparkling streets. Thomas had more access points all over its map than Megan could count.
Megan: I've heard of this one. Why does T need so many access points?
Villain: Sunshine City is one of the many representations of Outside. Much of Outside's gaming and social space is mapped in the form of this incredibly large city. It provides a visual representation of the access to most major game and social worlds. It's actually similar to this room, except with buildings instead of domes. Also, it is one of the largest social spaces in existence. Millions have living spaces there and depend on Sunshine City for socializing and discovering new worlds and innovations. Many live there primarily. Not even counting gaming time, humans spend more conscious hours in Sunshine City every day than in a typical large physical city.
Megan noted that Villain had not exactly answered her question.
The part of Sunshine City Megan was looking at- street level in the mech gaming district- required the use of a particular portal protocol. She selected a spot on the street and a glowing circle appeared on the ground next to her. As she stepped into it, her environment shifted into the street of Sunshine City. Nearby proxies on the street saw a slab of liquid metal rise up out of the ground and form into Megan's shape as she stepped into the circle. This let Megan to preview her spot, and let users nearby see who was coming through. In some cases, this also allowed users in certain spaces to permit or deny entry to other players. Happy with her spot, Megan relaxed her fully turned hand to signal acceptance into Sunshine City, and began wandering the streets.
It had the sights, sounds and feel of a regular city, although from the overhead view it was far larger than even the biggest physical cities. The sky was filled with people flying in cars, with jetpacks, on carpets and hoverboards, or just by themselves. There was also an extensive series of transparent tubes inside which Megan saw numerous people gliding along on scenic tours through the city.
More than the strangely inefficient travel, Megan was dazzled by the advertisements lining the buildings all down the street. This section was filled mostly with ads and live video from numerous mech and flight sim games. There were other types of worlds, and a few physical products represented as well, but mostly it was massive amounts of mechanical carnage and maps showing strategic maneuvers.
As she walked to one of the tube transports, an ad on the building across the street screamed at her.
Automated cutesy ad mech: [pointing at her] Megan! We need your help!
Megan: [taken aback] What, me?
Ad mech: [scren displaying awesome mech action] Team blue is in trouble! Only you can save it! Your record shows you have the skills. Just port to this [tag]. There isn't much time!
Cute as the ad was, Megan tweaked her Sunshine ad preferences to stop similar intrusions in the future. She moved on and checked out the destinations around Sunshine City that the tube system provided. Each Sunshine district had a mix of social and gaming spaces, but had a predominant theme.
A FEW DISTRICTS OF SUNSHINE CITY:
The 9 Gaming Districts
The Arena
Arts and Entertainment
The Baths
Clubs and Cafes
Sunshine Park
The Religious District: For traditional (and untraditional) worship and discussion.
Residential areas: Too many all around the city to enumerate.
Sunshine's Shade
The Tunnels
Sitcom Central
The only district Megan specifically recognized was Sitcom Central, whose residents attempted to live as situation comedy or skit characters. Everything was recorded, and the right mix of people and environment occasionally created some pretty funny TV shows and movies. She was a fan of several skit comedy shows that had been edited together from events recorded there.
She was about to head to SC when a news report popped up warning that Sitcom Central was currently in the middle of an area wide guerrilla skit event featuring "Upturned Casket Bleeding". Unsure what that meant, Megan entered the tube and picked a four minute ride to the horror gaming district instead, which was fairly distant from her position. She could get a feel for the city on the way. She zoomed comfortably through a series of tubes, weaving through the streets and diving through the tunnels below, gawking at the amazing and enticing sights and sounds of Sunshine City.
There were the flashy ads and ridiculously beautiful architecture, which she mostly passed by too quickly to appreciate. There were also games being played everywhere throughout the city. Aerial battles with dozens of fighter jets and spaceships raged high above. Mechs and maniac swordsmen clashed in the street below. Most pedestrians automatically filtered them away when they got too close, and games usually occurred in a superimposed layer on the city, so anyone bothered by them could just turn them off. Or they could join the game's layer and participate.
Megan arrived in the horror district and stepped out of the tube. The street appeared the same as the others except for a vaguely creepy fog effect. Sunshine City required a certain continuity, so the streets and buildings couldn't be made too macabre. The ads on the buildings were something else entirely.
Megan stared up at the Still Space structure. It was less a building than a pitch black monolith, pulsing like a heart. Under her Sunshine preferences, she showed sufficient interest in the ad playing to allow Still Space to create a mixed state in her proxy. Still Space used this opportunity to give her goose bumps and hit her with expertly crafted infrasound as a forlorn woman covered in bile stared at Megan from the side of the buidling. A man walked up beside her and glanced up at the ad. He looked pretty sharp, even in a ridiculous yellow zoot suit. His tag said Olly.
Olly: Still Space is intensely effective. You ever been?
Megan: One time, but not for very long.
Olly: It's not for everyone. [bowing] I'm Olly. I'm one of T's friends. I see that you must be too, since you're his guest here.
Megan: Uh, yeah. [bowing back] I was just looking around. I'm Megan.
Olly: I wonder if you could help me. I have this surprise gift for T I was going to leave on his doorstep. It's for his new place in Sunshine Park, but T has yet to get back to me with the location. I'm sure you know how busy he is, what with the film and all. He's probably practicing at this very moment, right? So could you get me the address? I don't need a link inside or anything, just need to know where it is.
Megan: I'd really have to ask T about that. I could text him now, if you want.
Olly: Oh, right. Well never mind then. [bowing once more]
Olly turned into a statue which crumbled and vanished into the ground after a few seconds. Unsure of what had just happened, Megan left Sunshine and went back to her original proxy.
Megan: That was odd.
Shrugging the experience off, Megan opened up a window displaying T's collection of shortcuts. Only then did she notice that T had created walkthroughs for many of the worlds, some of which appeared quite extensive. T also provided publicly accessible notes for many other worlds. She realized she was missing something about T's collection.
She walked around the room, up and down the "walls" trying to get a feel for the place, and how T might use it. She could see how useful the room would be to keep track of everything that was going on in so many worlds, especially if you were familiar with the setup and had a grasp on how things were clustered.
She looked through the filters and found one that displayed T's shells. Shells were proxies, either dummies or controlled by ghosts, left in a virtual space to hold your place or perform some task. She filtered for his shells. Most of the world domes vanished, but a huge number remained, now with blinking spots indicating T's shell proxies. She wandered amongst the domes observing T's shells, completely awe struck.
Megan: This is... incredible.
Villain: What is?
Megan: He's got shells everywhere! In every major fantasy world! Hell Fray, Planescape, Kung Fu Continent, Tron, Yoma, Star Wars, Star Trek, Golden Martyr, Middle-earth, not to mention Ataraxia. It goes on and on.
Villain: He claims he has some kind of record.
Some of T's shells were just sitting around, waiting to be inhabited again. Many more were active. They were killing monsters, surveying the land, gold farming, weaving strings, building, defending positions, and training their capabilities. Megan knew that it was T's habit to train each ghost himself, and it showed. They moved just like Thomas. Good ghosts were like that, at least in physical respects. Megan wouldn't have been able to tell if many of them were ghosts or were being inhabited by T.
T had two dozen shells in Sunshine City alone. They had all sorts of different appearances. Most of them were just walking around, although some were doing machining, maintaining weapons, and doing other things that Megan couldn't wrap her head around. One was digging a hole with a shovel. Another was hitting himself with a hammer. Another appeared to be smoking some sort of drug.
Megan: Are T's shells in these games important?
Villain: That depends on what you mean by important. Many of them are important to Thomas.
Megan: What if they get in trouble?
Villain: Thomas would be alerted. He frequently intervenes.
Megan: Are these shells important to the games?
Villain: Many are important to other players, who may not know Thomas is not present. So don't go telling anyone what you've seen here.
Megan: I wouldn't. I don't know what I'm looking at anyway. He's got an army of replicants. He's got his fingers in everything. He's like an octopus or something. Or like a god.
Villain: Thomas discourages worship. It's embarrassing.
Megan pulled herself together and left the shortcut room to continue the tour and found herself upside down in the hall. She reversed gravity and dropped gracefully to the floor.
**************
*See "Reference C: List of Outside Worlds" for a partial listing of worlds and spaces found in T's collection.
**************
Megan noticed a picture on the wall as she went down the hall. It was of T with some woman standing in a giant hall. Then it changed to show T and three others people looking triumphant with smoke rising in the background. It was an immersive picture, so Megan took control of T's head in the photo and looked around the landscape. They were surrounded by the aftermath of a massive battle, with dead bodies and scorched mech parts everywhere.
The next door was closed, chrome, and was giving off a lens flare effect. Megan opened it and was exposed to an epic space battle being waged on the other side. A ship barreled toward the door and she slammed it shut.
Megan: Those looked like Babylon 5 ships. Is this door a joke?
Villain: You'd have to ask T about that.
As she stepped into the next section of the hall, music blared all around her and surrounded her with the music visualizer she had seen in Sam's place. T apparently liked strewing things randomly about. She stepped through it and next up was a hole in the floor, which Megan looked into warily.
Megan: What's down there?
Villain: Training grounds. Shooting range, dojo, dancing arena, race course, mech practice.
Megan stepped over it. The next door on the left was a Japanese grill restaurant. The one after that opened to a tropical island waterfall with a crystal clear pool, perfect for swimming or lounging. There were dark clouds and rumbling in the distance.
Megan: Why the storm coming in?
Villain: To create a sense of anticipation. You can change the weather if you like.
Megan moved on to the hole in the ceiling.
Megan: What's up there?
Villain: Zen room.
The next door looked incredibly familiar to Megan.
Megan: Is that ...?
Villain: Probably.
Megan: Holy crap!
The door automatically slid open as Megan approached it. As she hoped, it was a Star Trek: Next Generation holodeck. She ran inside and gawked.
Megan: Does this thing work?
Villain: Kind of. Here are some popular modules created by fans.
Megan looked over the long list of scenarios. They included murder mysteries, exploration of alien worlds, full immersion Star Trek episodes, period piece adventures, and Klingon combat training.
Megan: Computer, put Captain Picard there. And put Captain Kirk right next to him.
The two appeared, as real as they could be.
Megan: Computer, have them fight!
They began trading blows dramatically, in the fighting style of Star Trek.
Megan: That is totally badass! Computer, make the winner kiss me!
Holodeck Computer: I'm sorry Megan, but all fights between Picard and Kirk automatically end in draws, as per holodeck regulation 4.
Megan: I see. Well have them make out then.
And so they did.
Megan: I'm guessing they wouldn't be much to talk to, huh?
Villain: Holodeck characters are just bots. They copy looks, mannerisms, and even speech patterns of the characters they are patterned after. Unfortunately, bots are not currently able to provide convincing conversations. Artificial intelligence just isn't up to it yet. But there are several good Sherlock Holmes scenarios with guided speech options that usually flow pretty well if you're going for the holodeck experience.
Megan: As awesome as that sounds, I really shouldn't right now. I'm definitely trying this later though.
Megan grabbed the tag for the holodeck and reluctantly went back into the hall, leaving Picard and Kirk feeling each other up on the floor of the holodeck.
Megan saw a closed door with vines for its frame and skipped forward to it over a puddle of melted cheese.
Megan: What's in there?
Villain: A virtual world. I don't know anything about it except that T didn't build it.
Megan opened the door to reveal a beautiful, dense, and brambled wilderness with a crude beaten path which branched off into the distance. Intrigued, Megan walked down the path for several minutes before realizing that she was lost.
Megan: I think the wilderness changed. V, how do I get back?
Villain: I have no idea.
Megan: Give me a portal back to T's lair.
Villain: I'm sorry Megan, but you don't have porting privileges to the lair. You can ask T for help.
Megan: Dang, I should have left a proxy behind. I don't want to bother T while he's preparing.
Villain: He won't mind, I'm sure.
Megan: [text to T] I'm stuck in this wilderness place and can't get back. Could I get a port to your lair?
A second later, Thomas was leaning on a nearby tree.
Megan: I didn't mean to interrupt your practice.
Thomas: It's alright, Megs. I was tired of it anyway. I hope Villain behaved himself.
Megan: He's been a perfect gentleman.
Villain nibbled her ear before imploding away.
Megan: What is this place?
Thomas: It's a gateway to the lair of someone I know. Or knew. Except it doesn't work anymore.
Megan: How so?
Thomas: The paths are random, but there used to be clues based on movies at each branch. If you knew them well enough, you could follow their movie preference to their lair. Still took 15 minutes of walking, so you had to care enough about seeing them to walk a little.
Megan: But why doesn't it work now?
Thomas looked down one of the branching paths.
Thomas: They disappeared.
Megan: And you really can't find them?
Thomas: They were always secretive. Probably couldn't find them if I tried, even if I didn't respect their right to disappear. But really, I think... they're probably dead.
Megan: Oh.
Thomas: But this is depressing.
Thomas snapped his fingers and they were back in the dirt hall, outside of the vined door.
Megan: So you just keep this door to remember?
Thomas: And in case they come back. Anyway, have fun?
Megan: Oh yeah, I liked your harem. Very impressive selection. Why were some of them highlighted?
Thomas: Those are the ones I can have sex with this week.
Megan: Explain.
Thomas: Well, I play this game called 'Hero/Dragon'. It involves killing monsters and slaying dragons and such. When you kill a dragon, you then own its castle, along with its gold, food, and sexy princess slavegirls and boys. And then you either go and find a bigger castle to conquer or you play the part of the dragon and set up traps and fight off other player heroes. Hero and dragon are both fun parts. To motivate myself to attain bigger castles, I'm only using sexbots I currently possess in the game. I have nine right now.
Megan: This is beside the human inhabited proxies you might be sleeping with.
Thomas: Right. It encourages exploration with sexbots you normally wouldn't have tried. And it's better when you've earned it.
Megan: Incidentally, based on your favorite bots, I would say that you don't seem to have a sexual orientation.
Thomas: As far as sexbots go, I'm completely flexible. But I'm more selective with human partners. I actually have an orientation that would have been untenable before Outside.
Megan: Which is?
Thomas: I prefer heterosexual female bodies inhabited by male brains. Can't say entirely why, but it's always been that way.
Megan: Oh yeah, I basically already knew that.
Megan hopped into a puddle of liquefied chocolate chip cookies.
Megan: Well, it's a nice collection of bots.
Thomas: They're all freely available on my SIS along with everything else here, except for a few of those worlds and shortcuts that I don't broadcast for strategic reasons. You can start up your own instance of this place anytime and take what you want.
Megan: Wait a minute! If your lair is available on your SIS, why bother with the secret panda thing?
Thomas: That's just to get to my private instance, run on my computer. I don't care what people do to their own copies of my place, but I don't want to show up here with random wackos running around.
Megan: Right. So this is really all run off your computer?
Thomas: Yep. My SIS has a copy, but this instance you're in is run local to me. Your computer runs its own buffered copy of this current environment to reduce lag, but the lair data you're getting is streamed from my computer. If the internet somehow went down I could still come here and play with everything except the domes and the shortcuts to other worlds. You should get your own lair, it's easy to set up. You can just copy my media stuff.
Megan: [already downloading a copy from T's SIS] Sure, I'll take a copy. I really should build my own and this seems like a pretty good start. It's not crazy like some I've seen video of. Did it take any coding?
Thomas: Nah, I never learned how to code beyond the basics. I just use the regular tools. It was all super easy. Most ten year olds could probably beat me at it, honestly. I mean, you're a programmer, so you could do some of that crazy stuff I've seen put into places.
Megan: This isn't really the sort of thing I program. What did you use to build it?
Thomas: A program called 'Space Forge' that pretty much does everything for you. It comes with all sorts of sample spaces you can build on, or you can just do a search for existing spaces on the net and copy them. You can also replicate any place you've been in, at least so far as you've recorded it. I have a nice copy of Sam's house I made just by visiting there. Space Forge can automatically copy any space you're in as far as you have access to it, and can even make approximate models of real spaces based on whatever data it can compile. It's a great time to be lazy.
There weren't many doors left in the hall. Megan looked at the hall options and found other representations of the lair, including palace, horror, Flintstones, and starship themes. They weren't just superficial changes, but also reorganized the placement of the rooms.
Megan: I noticed there were different representations of your lair, besides this underground one. This space ship one looks neat. Which do you use?
Thomas: I actually just pop around to whatever space I need, so I don't use any halls or slides or anything. That's just a practical way to organize tours.
Megan: Ah. So where do you bring people to just talk?
Megan: Hmm... well, where does your hall fork to down there?
Thomas: The right way goes to my other places.
Megan: Like what?
Thomas: This place is built for function. My other places are for fun, or to maintain a sense of residence in other worlds. There are a few extravagant castles from Hero/Dragon, my candy villa in Happy Land, my place on Mars, my orbiting science station/death ray, my place in Cyrus, my Sunshine City penthouse--
Megan: Oh yeah! I went to Sunshine City and this guy named Olly asked for your address, and I didn't know what to think of it. I didn't give it to him, of course.
Thomas: Olly, huh? That one is... very tricky. Don't worry about it.
Megan: And what about the left fork down there?
Thomas: Go try it.
Megan ran down the left path of the fork and found herself standing beside T.
Thomas: Ha! I have to have some secrets.
Megan: Speaking of secrets, your shortcut room was quite the revelation.
Thomas: Most of that is available online too. This lair is kind of my public face to the world, especially the shortcuts and the harem. You may have noticed my walkthroughs and notes. I've worked hard on those, they're actually pretty valuable and popular.
Megan: Well that stuff, yeah. But I was referring to your shells. You're so active in the entire expanded multiverse of Outside even when you're asleep.
Thomas: You know, I feel present in many of those worlds even right now. Of all the omnis, I think I prefer omnipresence.
Thomas paused as if he had just noticed something.
Thomas: Want to see something cool?
He superimposed the primary public instance of his lair with his private instance. Numerous people were wandering the main hall and into and out of the different rooms.
Thomas: They can't see us. I really don't know why people turn my public SIS lair into a hangout. It's not nearly cool enough, and I can mess with them. Like this.
Thomas shared a window with Megan showing some guy in the shortcuts room. Suddenly, the Ataraxia dome blinked red, indicating an emergency. It indicated that the guy now had access rights to a powerful agent in Ataraxia. He got excited at the opportunity and ported into what he thought was a character.
Megan: Where did he go?
Thomas: Destructo Hell.
Megan: Ouch. That's mean.
Thomas: Oh yeah? Watch this.
Thomas shared another window, this one of several women wandering around the harem. Suddenly, all of the sexbots went crazy, attacked the women, and tore them into pieces.
Megan: You are a strange, strange man. Just how many people visit your SIS layer on a daily basis?
Thomas: I'm a celebrity, so even with a crappy lair I still draw up to a few hundred a day. It's run off my SIS page, of course, so it doesn't bog my computer down. Though people keep trying to get into my comp's private lair.
Megan: Why? And how? Isn't that only accessible through the door in your throat?
Thomas: Someone gave the address to the panda room out, so they can go there directly. As to why, it's mostly people who want to get in to get access to my shortcuts room.
Megan: Why not change the address or lock people out entirely?
Thomas: What fun would that be? Several hundred proxies a day drown in millipedes trying to break the code. Most of those are the same few people trying various actions. You saw the panda shooting part, but there's more to it. Trust me, it's impossible to happen upon accidentally.
Megan: Why do they bother? What could your personal instance have that the SIS wouldn't?
Thomas: They might think that they can access the left fork from here, or find some other secrets. I guess this place just looks too simple for my colorful public persona. The funny thing is that even if they got in, they'd only have the same rights available on my SIS layer.
Megan: You don't even use that lock to get in, you can just pop in whenever. So the panda room is just to torture people?
Thomas: Not just that. It builds a sense of mystery. You know how many urban legends there are about this place? People think I am so weird, you wouldn't even believe it.
Megan: Yeah, nothing weird about any of this.
Thomas: You want to see one of my favorite physical places?
Megan: Sure.
They stepped through a portal and were standing on a wooden roof overlooking a poverty stricken neighborhood in Laos. It was night, but there were still people walking around. Megan sat and watched them. It seemed like a strange place for the augmented reality sensors necessary for such immersive telepresence.
Thomas: Smell that? Smells like... I'm not sure what that is, actually. But it helps me sleep.
Megan: You sleep here? This roof isn't much of a bed.
Thomas: Oh, I keep the tactile sense from my physical. This is just for sight and sound until I fall asleep, at which point my plant switches off automatically.
Megan: Wouldn't it be more relaxing in the ocean, or on a cloud?
Thomas sat down next to her and looked up at the stars.
Thomas: This is one of the few virtualized places in this little city. I come here to remind myself that there's still so much to do, so many places that haven't benefited from cyberization. I trained a bunch of new plants here in Laos. Probably will again. It's important work, even if it's tedious. Augmented reality is so important for creating strong connections between places like this and the rest of the world. A strong online infrastructure helps broadcast poor conditions or crisis situations like gang warfare or genocide. Pictures are one thing, but telepresence, real time or recorded, makes the situation real.
Megan: Geographic distance doesn't mean the same thing it used to.
Thomas: Now you can meet people from all over the world, from countries you'd never physically visit. I started working in Laos after I met this guy Makani at a horror film festival. We became friends before I knew where he was located physically. We didn't speak each other's languages, but that's not so important with instant voice translation, even if it's still buggy. He was using crude, non-implant telepresence while I was an experienced plant user, but we could both see the movies and converse with each other just fine. None of the stuff that would at one time have separated us mattered. All that mattered was our love of horror cinema. And before I knew it, I had a friend who lived in Laos. After that, I paid attention to news about Laos. When there were problems there I wondered how it was affecting Makani. When I heard about a flood, I donated money and telepresenced in to see what was happening. And it impacted me. It wasn't just a strange place anymore, populated with faceless masses. It had a face.
Thomas: When you you get to know someone from a foreign country, you realize that country is full of people just like you. It's humans everywhere, you know. Then the next time you hear about trouble in Nigeria or Mozambique or North Korea, you think about the people you know there. And maybe you go check out what's going on. You can go anywhere, no matter how dangerous. You can observe or even participate in protests, for example. The more people that are connected, the harder it is to ignore them. Human connections. That's what it's about.
A kid with augmented glasses waved at them and they waved back.
Thomas: I know someone who lives in almost every country on the planet. I didn't go looking for them either. Run around Ataraxia for a month and you'll have interacted with people in a majority of the world's countries.
Megan: Speaking of Ataraxia, isn't it about time for the shoot?
Megan: Sure. Thanks for showing me all this.
Thomas: Any time.
T opened a portal and they both disappeared through it.
Next- Episode 06: Neo-Kyoto Is About To EXPLODE!
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