[Original Novella] The Slow Reveal, Part 1

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I have the most beautiful dreams. That’s one of the perks of this job. The catch is I can’t tell anybody what they’re about. That would violate the NDA.

I got my interface put in at 18. A little later than most, but my family is poor. Even then I knew it was a spendy gift and wondered how dad managed it, but didn’t want to sour the occasion so I simply laughed and said I loved it.

It isn’t a “real” neuroprosthetic, the serious hardware’s on the outside. I have to carry my slab around or I get no benefit from it. The silver lining is that this method saves me fedcoin by avoiding the need for surgery when I want to upgrade.

Just to look at me you wouldn’t know I’d had any work done, since the interface talks to the slab wirelessly. I’m not superficial but I am conscious of appearances, and there’s no shortage of businesses that turn you away if you’ve got anything sticking out of your head. Security concerns.

The hidden cost of this gift became apparent when dad started forwarding me job applications for a render farm. The same one that did that popular recent kid’s film about the three toed sloth who steals a military exoskeleton. They also did most of the past decade’s films starring deceased, licensed historical celebrities until backlash on big name VR lobbies convinced them to go in a different direction.

It really came out of left field. I’m not a movie guy. But as I read it all the way through it turned out all I’d have to do is sleep. As soon as REM sleep begins, my brain is networked with the other employees’ in a distributed computing setup and the next set of frames begins rendering, timed according to our averaged sleep cycles. Easy money.

I did a word search on the fine print. Sure enough they reserve the right to keep me under for up to twenty unpaid minutes if necessary to complete a set of frames. But beggars can’t be choosers. And I am confronted every day with relentless reminders that we are beggars.

Residorms aren’t meant for whole families. They’re just one step up from a capsule hotel. Same manufacturer, slightly different market. Most of the people who live in these things just use them as a stepping stone to a real apartment after living on the streets. Then there are the NEETs. Some people don’t need anything more to be happy than an interface, a residorm and VR gaming. All their money goes into upgrading their slab.

I remember flipping through an old album and seeing my dad holding an old timey slab up to his face. There was a 2D display on it. He said they used them primarily for telephony and controlled the other functions by touch. This was before neural interfaces were legalized, offloading the display to your visual cortex and the controls to your motor cortex.

I jokingly asked if phones had knobs and dials before that. Turns out they did. I tried to picture people sitting complacently in their little pentagonal wooden shelters, wearing top hats and monocles, chatting over touch display phones with knobs and dials about foot-ball, petroleum taxes or whatever was important to people back then.

At some point I realized I would have to cave in and take the position. Dad’s income isn’t enough. Mom teleoperates a service drone aboard a cruise blimp. Her employer sets people up to work from home, renting out their “general intelligence” to control service bots at whatever the going rate is that day. Licensing high end AI is costly and the fines for pirating it are ruinous. Paying the desperately poor a few fractions of a fedcoin per hour and getting human level intelligence for your robots in return is not too shabby. For the business owner.

At least she can work from home. There just isn’t enough put away to fix the burst fluidic muscle column in her leg. I printed a bare bones substitute, it’s enough that she can hobble about to make dinner and whatnot but I wouldn’t want her trying to navigate the PRT network on that thing. I’ve seen enough candid video of strangers indifferently stepping over the wounded, too busy and too detached to help.

Not if I could help it. The interview was done in under a minute. I received a notice two minutes later confirming I’d gotten the job. Most of what the interview for is to distract you while they probe for mental illness or dark triad personality disorders. “By continuing to participate in this interview you consent to allow us access to your interface for screening purposes” blah blah yes I consent.

Privacy is another one of those old man words that dad won’t shut up about. As if he’s important enough for anybody to bother creeping on him. The over-abundance of microscopic cameras makes privacy a practical impossibility. They coat pretty much every surface outside of private dwellings. I’d be bothered if the footage weren’t public access.

Really helps reduce the police workload when victims track down footage of the crime they want to report, crop it and send it in for review. If that’s too much of a hassle, must not have been a serious offense. That’s the reasoning, I think.

My first night on the job was uneventful. Intro stuff mostly. I don’t know what I expected. When I woke up I remembered it dimly just like any other dream. It then rapidly faded over the next few minutes until I couldn’t recall any of it. I can make it stick if I try, but since I can’t talk about it anyway there’s little point.

Spent my free time the way most boys my age do. Well, one of a few ways. Some people just want to eat, believe it or not. They go hungry most of the time irl, so in-sim, they gorge themselves with a stomach that never fills and hunger that is always sufficient to maximize the food’s appeal but which never becomes uncomfortable.

Then there are people who want to kill and torture. That’ll put you on all kinds of Habsec watch lists, but they don’t care. No end of user content out there catering to those inclinations. Even I have one I use to blow off steam now and again. I think it’s just excessive use that’s unhealthy.

But of course, loads of people only want to fuck gorgeous women all the time. Or men. Or human/animal hybrids. Or neotenized cartoon ponies, aliens, Japanese teenagers with neon hair and gigantic eyeballs, you name it.

Videogame characters are popular. I’ve seen more meticulously rendered Pokemon genitalia than I ever wanted to. Then there’s dolphins, horses, and a variety of other animals. No actual animal, no crime although it’s still pretty fuckin’ weird in my book. I really wish I knew which sex sims people use so I could exercise some discrimination in who I associate with.

There’s ways to find out. If someone pisses you off badly enough. You and some buddies can dig through his posting history, hack into his sim catalogue and find out what embarrassing shit he gets off to. Then spread that around and watch him disappear from the VR lobbies entirely. Total scrub of his online presence. It’s great fun unless you’re on the receiving end.

I guess it’s somewhat hypocritical to shame the target for enjoying many of the exact same sims as the people doxxing him. But when you’re part of a mob, justifying yourself is the easiest thing in the world. VR Lobbies amount to a great teeming mass of novelty addicted maniacs, with an inexhaustible supply of brutal hostility.

Usually that hostility is directionless, and while that’s the case it’s safe and highly entertaining. Provided you’re a nobody and haven’t made any enemies. Every so often, all of that anger will suddenly be focused on a single person and it absolutely shreds their life to pieces.

The offense can be as minor as unpopular political opinions, contrarian views about a well liked television show or something similarly trivial. Dad says when he was my age, youthful follies were forgotten. Now, they are immortalized before a global audience.

It is now precariously easy to slip up in a way that forever destroys your employment prospects and social life. With so little work needing humans to do it, employers can afford to narrow their search to people with totally clean records. And who doesn’t Google their date?

The really surreal thing is to read the posts of the people doing the tormenting. While they’re the ones dishing it out, they see it as administering justice. The absolute worst is assumed of the target, every flaw is magnified, every good deed swept under the rug. His complaints about the suffering inflicted on him are roundly mocked as whining and exaggeration.

But often, it’s turned around. One or more of the attackers become targets themselves. Then they change their tune entirely. Wailing about how miserable it is to be the punching bag of dozens, or hundreds. Villainizing those people for doing the exact same thing they were doing themselves to somebody else not so long ago. It really shines a light on the nature of human beings as primates whose social politics have always been predicated on ruthless group antagonism, petty gossip and violence.

So I keep my head down. My opinion is always the same as that of the largest bully in the room. In that respect this job is perfect for me. Reduced exposure to humanity means reduced danger. I still leave the residorm from time to time. It’s part of a consolidated habitat, also zoned for shops, restaurants, hospitals, schools and just about everything else but electrical generation. So there’s loads to do, the air is always clean and there’s never any harsh weather as it’s all indoors.

Outside is a different story. I haven’t set foot out there since I was ten. I don’t think my old gas mask would even fit me now. The sky was blue at some point, allegedly. I’ve only ever known it to be green. Methane hydrate and hydrogen sulfide released from the sea, long before I was born.

The federally funded program to replace species wiped out by this has been going on for most of a century, rebuilding the ecosystem tier by tier with variants on those species modified for the new atmosphere. They’re up to small mammals now. Some of the new insects get really big. Creeps me the fuck out when they land on the windows.

My last excursion was a field trip. They shuttled us all out into the humid, stinking jungle wearing matching coldsuits and gas masks. I remember this huge flying insect with four wings relentlessly colliding with the faceplate of my mask as I swatted at it. Never was much of a nature lover, even then.

The movement I see is all inward now. Consolidation. Organization. Single structure cohabs outnumbered conventional cities as of about a decade ago. Way cheaper to heat and cool a single large structure than lots of small ones. Great for what’s left of the environment, too. The whole thing is easily walkable although there’s indoor PRT if you’re lazy, and no small number definitely are. That also accounts for the popularity of personal mobility devices.

I’ve got a little two wheeled PMD myself. You stand on two small platforms just big enough for your feet, there’s a vertically oriented block of battery between them which you grip with your knees, and a little self balancing wheel under each foot.

There’s nothing to indicate state of charge unless you ride it someplace out of range of the charging field, like anything else that runs on batteries. Come to think of it, I remember seeing a much larger, goofy looking version of this on the “retro media” VR lobby.

Knowing Dad, he probably had one. I pictured him whizzing about on it, wearing a top hat and monocle, dialing a telephone number with his finger by pressing it against the 2D display of whatever passed for a slab at the time. I smiled, and a prismaview billboard I happened to be passing mistook it for interest in their product.

I spent the next ten minutes emphatically arguing with the little sales agent that popped up in the center of my vision that I was not actually interested in trying speedfoam and did not know any friends or family who might be tragically unaware of the benefits of speedfoam. Clicking the box to opt out of any future ads just started a new argument.

As I approached the cafe on the observation deck I got a notice from Tindra. It still wasn’t clear to me how serious things were but I was content just to have somebody to spend time with in meatspace. She cared about as little as I did.

It’s implicit that we can both sleep with whoever/whatever we want in-sim, which clears away a lot of the ambiguity compared to how relationships used to work. This way, it’s a given that we spent time together simply because we’re remarkably congruent and enjoy each others’ company. That was before we traded interface permissions, too.

Sappy old people shit, like finishing each others’ sentences. Or when I’d recall only vague details of some article I’d read recently and from those scraps she would somehow remember exactly what it was and where I’d seen it. Her wetware’s not hard to look at either.

Not that I get to see it often. She’s big into AR fashion. I thought that was a huge red flag when we first met. She looked great on her “Fuck Or Fuck Off?” profile but girls are wizards with cgi and photo manip. You never really know if they’re a mutant or not until you meet.

Which is why I rolled my eyes nearly out of my skull when, as I approached the concert for our first date, a little window came up in front of me asking my permission to display her AR visual elements.

Appallingly, she’d found a way to bring the proverbial funhouse mirror of photo manipulation and cgi into meatspace. I assumed the worst. Some huge hairy porkmonster NEET with fingers like sausages and soylent stains down the front of his shirt. Had to be.

Imagine my surprise when I shut off my interface, briefly, and discovered she was in fact quite well put together. Everything where it should be, proportions verging on supernormal stimuli.

That got me wondering what on Earth she was doing meeting up with a generic like me but kept it to myself. “Never scan free hardware for viruses in front of the donor”. I was intensely nervous and knew I’d be a huge quivering spastic if I didn’t take something to calm down. Got myself one of those obscenely tall cans of THC infused strawberry milk with the animated 3D label.

She bought something alcoholic. I immediately felt like a kid by comparison. But banned if I’m not funny when I’m high. And if you make a girl laugh, you’re halfway into her skintite. The other half was dancing, also in my narrow portfolio of redeeming qualities.

Ever since then, I set auto perms for her AR elements. I already know that I like what’s under there and she always has something novel to ‘wear’. This time she was something resembling a flaming dragon but with the head of a frog. “If I kiss you will you turn into a hot girl?” I quipped. The avatar’s facial rig was mapped to her expressions, so I could see her annoyed scowl. “No, but I might report you to Habsec for gendercrime.”

I told her all about my new job. The frog face lit up. “Hey, maybe you can finally pay for my drinks.” She has her own job, the same one since we met. Tindra’s a UI designer for interface apps. Small time stuff mostly, like the tutorial apps that come with PMDs or micro drones, but she could at least say she does something challenging and useful. Although, her real dream is to become a renown AR fashion designer.

But that’s quite like saying “I’d like to test new designer hallucinogens”, or “I’d like to be a Mars colonist”, or “I want to be the guy who rubs the models with oil before VR capture.” Pretty high on that list of jobs absolutely everybody wants, anyway.

“I dunno if I like them poking around in your head, though. That’s where all my favorite stuff is.” She smiled. It was rare for her to show unqualified affection, and she could never maintain eye contact while doing it. I found it intensely charming.

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^{Stay tuned for Part 2!}