Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Fifteen - Surfing

“You’d think that in a purely digital world, where the constraints of the real world don’t matter, the power of someone like a Samurai would be diminished.

We need to put a stop to the tendency of these people to overload our servers, and shut down all of our ad-revenue.”

--A. Pai, CFO of Adcorp on Dec 14th 2039, six minutes before his Mesh connection malfunctioned leading to his untimely demise.

***

I rode atop my giant metal squid monster and enjoyed being carried. Not that I would admit it, but it was kind of neat to be so far above everyone else.

Daniel, that is, 404_Legs_Not_Found, swam around a gathering of rather plain avatars--that all still managed to be gorgeous people--and I waved a paw at them when they tracked us with their eyes.

“They’re not actually looking at you,” Daniel said as he moved towards the hotel’s doors. “Those are Barbies.”

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“They’re standard avatars? You can get them in a cash shop for fairly cheap. They come with some customization and all that, like a character creator, but their programing’s shit. Their eyes will follow anyone looking at them, but their user doesn’t need to be looking that way.” He flicked out a metallic tentacle towards the side where a few other avatars were walking by, some with their own entourage of very plain people following them. “You can tell the fully-custom jobs apart. Shit costs an arm and a leg though.”

“Neat,” I said. “So what, it’s a status thing?”

“Yeah,” he said. “A real Meshizen wouldn’t be caught dead in a prefab.”

“Isn’t your avatar a prefab?”

He wiggled from side to side. “Sorta? It’s based on an actual squid model from like, ten years back? I got a friend who does modelling to set this model over the original squid skeleton.”

I nodded. I almost understood that.

The entrance had a set of sliding doors, not too dissimilar to the actual doors of the actual hotel we were still in. I was having a bit of trouble remembering that I wasn’t where I was in the real world. It was just a bit too immersive, feeling wind against my skin... fur, and hearing things from all around. I had to remind myself that I was laying back on a couch in real life.

The doors opened, and we slid through a thin blue transparent screen and out onto a huge balcony overlooking a city, of sorts.

The problem with the Mesh--or one of them--was that it was such a surreal environment that it made my eyes want to cross. There were skyscrapers as far as I could see, some of them raising up, others dropping down from the ceiling. Some, the largest and most intimidating, connected the two.

There were walls off to the sides, solid barriers with images and words scrolling by them just barely fast enough for someone to read them in passing.

“Have you been out in the Mobius a lot?”

“The what?” I asked.

“You know, outside of a structure?” Daniel said. “If you keep travelling down the tunnel, you’ll eventually flip back over to the other side. It’s a mobius strip.”

“Yeah, I’ve been out here before. Never spent much time in the open though,” I said. A glance around showed car-like things shooting by. Half of them were plain, boring cubes or spheres, sometimes with scrolling ads on their sides, but a good chunk were shaped like spaceships and modern cars.

I held myself back from flinching when a pair of X-wings cut around the corner.

“We’re in the NA phase and it’s mid-day, so it’ll be busy as fuck,” Daniel said. “We’re taking the tube to, uh, lemme check...”

I vaguely remember phases being a sort of unsynced copy of the world we were in, so that the millions of people around could all be in the same space without having to render or interact with each other.

A glance over at the YouTube building a block or two down showed a sea of people slipping in and out of the thousand-odd entrances all around the stark-white building. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if everyone everywhere was in the same instance.

“Right,” Daniel said. “They’re on the... nice, the ISS phase.”

“The what?”

“The ISS phase, from when they converted that old space station into an oversized server rack? It’s real classy,” Daniel said. “Right, hang on.”

Daniel started moving ahead, his dozens of reddish eyes clicking and moving around to stare around us. The hotel’s balcony wasn’t empty. There were a couple of kiosks to the side, and a bunch of people just kind of... standing around. The weird part was how quiet everyone was being. I guessed that we weren’t sharing the same audio, because I saw some lips moving with no noise coming from them.

Daniel juked around a person that tried to smack him with a rectangular screen. “Fucking ad bots,” he said.

And then we were off the edge of the balcony and I felt something almost like gravity tugging us down. I held back a scream. This wasn’t real, and even if we hit the ground, we were in a Non-PVP zone, we couldn’t be hurt or anything.

Daniel’s tentacles wiggled and he aimed us towards the streets below. We shot past bridges and connections that were slung out between some of the smaller skyscrapers at speeds that turned them into little more than passing blurs.

And then the ground reached out and met us with a dull thump.

I braced, expecting to bounce, or maybe get flattened, but all that happened was the ends of Daniel’s tentacles pressing harmlessly against the ground for a moment before we started to float up again.

“Was that a short cut?” I asked.

“Yeah, but it only works one way,” he said as we took off again.

The lower streets, surprisingly, had a lot more people moving by. Most were moving at a steady jog, sometimes clipping through others as they passed.

Strange people with vacant looks in their eyes were flicking out fliers that some people batted away and others just allowed to smack them a moment before they disappeared.

Two of Daniel’s tentacles moved out ahead of his main body, and soon a pair of semi-transparent shields were floating ahead of us. “Adblocks,” he explained.

Daniel’s avatar could float a decent ways off the road, so I had a good view of all the people we were moving past. There were a lot of the Barbies Daniel mentioned. In fact, it felt like three-quarters of the avatars we were passing were female, which was saying something when a good number of them weren’t in any way biological. From robots, to weird geometric shapes, to monsters from different shows and games. I even saw a few Antithesis models moving about. The models didn’t quite match up to the real thing.

The sides of the street were lined with nothing but shops. Some were tiny, others much larger, and all of them were fake. Not fake in the sense that they were fake stores, but the entrances, I knew, would just lead into a fresh instance that belonged to that store. They didn’t need to take up any actual space on the street.

The bigger the storefront, the more the owners were spending for ad-space.

“There,” Daniel said as he beelined across the foot traffic and towards a large, stately building done up in a gothic style. It was surprisingly clean for what turned out to be a subway station. Maybe that was owing to the gargoyles on the roof that occasionally took off to tackle avatars away.

I eyed the screen floating before me for a moment, then pressed a paw to the ‘X’ in its corner. “What’s that?” I asked.

Unlike every other ad I’ve been blocking, this one was sent by a fellow AI. This area is under the control of a Class III AI which is, in turn, owned by a Vanguard. There was no spyware or any other malicious content, just a greeting.

“Huh,” I said. “Are we supposed to... reply?”

That would be polite.

I nodded. “Send something nice back?” I said before turning my focus back onto the world around me.

The Portal Palace lived up to its name. It was a huge open area, like the ballroom of some fantastical castle. There were huge mirror-like surfaces against every wall, and through them I could see shifting scenes from different places, all of them moving as we moved as if those places were just one room over. None of that made any real sense though, the rooms I saw would all be overlapping and some seemed to be operating on different scales.

There were lines of avatars waiting before the mirrors, each one waiting their turn to interact with a panel that changed the image in the mirror. Once someone pressed on their panel a few times, they’d jump into the mirror and be off to who-knows-where.

The number of rooms I saw that had vaguely pornographic images in them said lots.

“Let’s find a place to port from, and then we’ll be real close to your Samurai buddies,” Daniel said.

***