Alternative Dimension (10 page)

16 coffee break

Joe’s teams were forever refining the technology of AD. In fact, for all his wealth, Joe was still more interested in the game as an experience than as the mechanism that kept adding more and more to his financial portfolio. One of the reasons he held out so long against introducing voice contacts was that he wanted to resist the synthesis between real and virtual. For him, in virtuality perfection was possible; that would never be true of normal living. It was as if he was trying to preserve AD from contamination.

In the end, though, all the other social networking sites had gone beyond using keyboards, not only for typing conversations but for moving avatars around. They were introducing hands-free cameras and infrared depth sensors which read players’ movements and replicated them on screen. While some residents preferred the delays which went with keyboards because of the time it gave them to formulate their thoughts, others were impatient. Words didn’t have that degree of importance in normal life, so why should they in their virtual worlds? It was a complaint that AD had eventually to address and, despite Joe’s reluctance, in its third year of operation, avatars were chatting away in real time and their manipulators were being absorbed even more comprehensively into the online world. For some people, the change was a revelation; for others a disaster. An incident one afternoon in April, just before voice activation was introduced, showed both these effects.

Aaaaaaaaaa treated Alternative Dimension as just a game – a harmless place where people can make their own or others’ heads explode or strap partners or even strangers to machines and slice pieces off them when they feel peckish or bored. But Aaaaaaaaaa preferred its ordinary social aspect, where people visit friends, have dinner parties, go to restaurants and eat vast meals containing absolutely no calories. That made it the perfect place for entrepreneurial activity. Right from the start, he was looking for profits. He chose his name to make sure that it would be first on every search list, only to find that others, even more sales conscious than he was, called themselves 000aaa and even !!**aaa. But he pressed on and it was he who had the brilliant idea of replicating the operational procedures of chains such as Starbucks and trying to get a coffee shop in every AD location. When the announcement came that voice activation would soon be phased in, he was confident that customers would flock to his shops as eagerly as they had to coffee houses in 18th century London.

He knew he couldn’t use the Starbucks name without permission, so he tried various anagrams, but that ‘k’ always got in the way and made everything sound hard, aggressive. In the end, he hit on the notion of simply turning Starbucks around and dropping the ‘k’. Which gave him Scubrats. OK, it didn’t sound all that attractive, and he knew that it wouldn’t draw in the upper classes – but then, the upper classes in AD live in private enclosures anyway, never listen to anyone, and have velvet linings in their handcuffs, so they weren’t really part of his target audience. So Scubrats it was. And, even before voice activation, it was a huge success, with franchises everywhere and the distinctive Scubrats logo on tee shirts and thongs from Budapest and Rio to Moscow and the depths of Minnesota.

For anyone who wanted to get the feel of just how intense the virtuality of AD could be, there was no better place to hang out. The branch on the Transitional Continent, where all the artists and writers gather, has been the inspiration for so many paintings, poems and short stories that it’s become a cliché.
Scubrats Rhapsody, The Scubrats Ultimatum, My Love is Like a Scubrats Cappuccino
– all are burned into the AD psyche, anthems to the coffee bean and the ultimate in cool.

Joe admired Aaaaaaaaaa’s enterprise and frequently, as Ross, stopped by in one of the outlets. And it was in one of the New York shops that he heard how traumatic the change to voice activation might be. It was a Saturday morning and, as usual, he was captivated by the energy and life of the flow of avatars. As he slipped into a corner seat with his newspaper and his double espresso, he noticed a pink pig making her way to the empty table beside his. And she was some pig – really classy. Her name tag identified her as Victoria Bacon-Ham, but it wasn’t just the double-barrelled tag that was special; the way she moved, the clothes she wore – everything about her said quality. Her dress was a white silk number, her stilettos flashed and blinged as she walked, and the diamonds around her neck and on her wrists winked galaxies of stars at Joe. She was carrying a white mocha chocolate breve in each trotter. She was a regular at Scubrats because she didn’t do drugs, didn’t drink alcohol but, being a pig, she needed something to get her wired. Coffee was the answer.

She sat at the table, arranged her dress, leaned forward and sipped at the first cup. She caught Ross’s eye and winked. Ross nodded in reply.

‘I figured you as an espresso guy even before I saw your cup,’ she said.

‘Really?’ said Ross. ‘Why’s that?’

She shrugged. The flashes from her necklace nearly blinded him.

‘The way you dress, move. You’re in a hurry. Need a fast hit.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Ross.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘How about this guy?’

Ross looked towards the door. An alligator had just walked in and looked around, grinning.

‘What’s he going to order?’ asked Victoria.

‘I don’t know. Swamp water?’ said Ross.

She smiled and shook her head. Then, with her gaze fixed on the alligator, she said ‘Macchiato’.

The alligator didn’t even look at the list of drinks. The server greeted him and asked his pleasure.

‘Macchiato,’ said the alligator.

‘Amazing,’ said Ross. ‘How did you know?’

‘He’s my husband,’ said Victoria. ‘He used to drink Espresso Con Pana but now he prefers foamed milk to cream.’

The alligator, whose name was Xylophone, carried his cup across to Victoria’s table and kissed her. At least, Joe assumed that’s what he was doing – it was difficult to tell because his lips stretched so far around his face.

Victoria took another sip and began ‘I was just telling Ross how …’

‘Espresso drinker,’ said Xylophone, giving Ross a quick glance.

Ross raised his cup to him. Alligators made Joe nervous. This one’s lips really did go a helluva long way back around his face. So did his teeth. But he, Ross and Victoria carried on typing lines of chat for a while and things seemed amiable enough.

The place was filling up but Ross was OK. There was only room for him at his corner table. Soon, though, all the seats had been taken except for the two beside Victoria and Xylophone. A fairy arrived. Her name was Misty Mist. She was a tiny thing, completely naked except for a gossamer thread hanging around her hips and obscuring her pubic area. Her wings were almost transparent, her hair was spun gold and she had huge, limpid eyes.

‘Strawberry smoothie,’ said Victoria, as she watched her.

‘Strawberry smoothie,’ said Misty to the server.

She picked up the big glass in her tiny hand, looked around and headed for Victoria’s table.

‘May I?’ she asked, pointing to one of the spare seats.

Victoria smiled. Xylophone grinned.

‘Nice tits,’ he said as she sat down.

‘Thank you,’ said Misty.

‘Bit small,’ he added.

‘Wait till she has a litter to feed,’ said Victoria. ‘That’ll fill them out.’

Misty blushed and lifted the smoothie to her lips.

The door opened again and in came a newcomer. His name was Syd Sod and he obviously hadn’t yet learned about avatar modelling. His head was topped by a solid block of unnaturally black hair and he wore dirty jeans and a tee shirt bearing the AD logo. He stood at the door, seemingly paralysed by what he saw, but the server called across to him, ‘What’s your pleasure, sir?’

‘Chocolate frappé,’ said Victoria.

‘Chocolate frappé,’ said Syd.

He picked up his mug, looked around and began to make his way to Victoria’s table. On the way, he picked up a magazine from the rack.

‘Is this seat free?’ he asked.

‘Help yourself,’ said Victoria.

Syd sat down and put the magazine face up on the table. On its cover there was a picture of a typically gorgeous avatar, her lips half-open and a speech bubble coming out of them with the words ‘God, you sound so sexy’ inside it. It was an old issue, heralding the proposed development of voice activation. As Misty sipped at her smoothie and Syd opened the magazine, Victoria looked anxiously at Xylophone. She’d heard the intake of breath as he’d seen the cover and she knew how he felt about the imminent implementation of the voice activation program. There was the same buzz of conversation around them but their table was strangely silent. Joe could feel the beginning of a tension there.

It broke when Misty said, ‘I’m not sure I like the idea of speech activation’.

It was Xylophone’s cue. His front legs went up to his face and his body began to heave as he was racked with sobs. Tears began to stream between his claws and Victoria reached over and stroked the scales of his neck.

‘Ssssh, baby,’ she said. ‘It’s OK. We won’t use it. We’ll stick to our keyboards.’

Xylophone pushed her hand away.

‘It’s no good,’ he typed. ‘I’ll lose all my credibility. They’ll expect me to roar and growl in a deep bass. It’s not fair.’

And he got up and stumbled out into the street.

‘Poor baby,’ said Victoria, starting on her second cup. ‘I’ve spoken to him on Skype and it’s true, he’ll be a laughing stock if he has to use speech.’

‘Why?’ asked Syd.

Victoria sighed.

‘An accident with a scythe when he was a boy,’ she said. ‘He’s impotent – but worse than that, he has a falsetto voice.’

‘God, I’m sorry,’ said Syd. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Of course you didn’t,’ said Victoria. ‘He’ll be OK.’

Misty sighed and adjusted the strip of gossamer over her slim little thighs.

‘I think this speech thing will cause difficulties for others, too,’ she said.

Victoria and Syd looked at her. She caught their gaze, took another sip of her strawberry smoothie, then lowered her pretty eyes.

‘Me, for example,’ she said.

‘You? Why?’ asked Victoria.

‘I’m an NFL quarterback,’ said Misty.

Joe looked at the fragile little creature and felt guilty. On the one hand he’d given this person the chance to leave his heavy, hulking body and float lazily through the AD air, enjoying the sensation of near transparency. But on the other, those delicate features would soon be articulating the sounds made by a 210 lb man from Trenton, New Jersey. The incongruity would be devastating for him and others alike. Joe needed to do some more thinking. He typed ‘Gotta go. Bye folks.’

His words tumbled amongst all the other lines of the dialogues going on in the shop as they all hurried their way across the screen. He made Ross get up and walk out into the street as he began to think about voice synthesiser technologies. Finding a way to change pitch and frequency was the easy bit, so maybe residents could choose their voices, altos could be baritones, men could be women. Technically, the problem wasn’t insoluble. The difficulty, as ever, lay with people and Joe wasn’t sure there was a way of reconciling the quarterback and Misty Mist.

17 unholy matrimony

One of the things that voice activation did when it was eventually rolled out was to remove the advantages that had been enjoyed by the more articulate residents. With people able to gabble whatever nonsense came into their heads, exchanges between them began to sound as dull as those of everyday reality. It was easy, when concealed behind a keyboard, to structure phrases, use words such as transcendental and euphoric but they didn’t trip easily off the tongue and could sound embarrassing or pretentious when spoken in earnest. The change had truly profound effects on many relationships. That of Siro and Octi, however, was transformed in a rather surprising way.

Siro’s creator, Dexter Malloy, sat in his bedroom in Arkansas, watching a big spider crawl up the wall near his pillow. A cricket was hopping about on the floor and there was so much crap lying about that it seemed like a cyclone had just passed through. Octi, and her creator Sarah, had brought an exotic dimension into his life. Sarah was English. Lived in a place near Oxford. They’d met at a newcomers’ BBQ when they both joined AD and their own worlds were so far apart that each had been fascinated by the other. The first time Octi had dragged him onto some action hooks in the Games Park Siro had been hesitant and Dexter had been unable to perform. Since then, he’d been swallowed up time and time again by her sexual enthusiasm and looked forward to driving home from his job at the store to spend his evening and her night indulging in the sort of gymnastics that would have crippled him if he tried them in reality.

When AD opened its speech activation programme, those gymnastics came close to kamikaze events. His accent reminded her of the men in her favourite movies and hers, with its long vowel sounds, gave him an instantaneous erection. To him, it was a miracle that he’d found her and, terrified that she’d go off with someone else in AD, he asked her to marry him.

‘I don’t mind,’ she’d said, and he immediately translocated to a place that sold jewellery and bought the most expensive engagement ring in the store.

When he’d given it to her and luxuriated in some of her inventive caresses for a while, they walked into the garden and stood by the ornamental pond with its fountain.

‘Well, where shall we go for the ceremony?’ he asked. ‘Medieval castle? Undersea cave? Empire State ‘Building? Great Barrier Reef?’

He stopped, looking nervously at Octi, waiting for an answer. Octi clucked into her ‘head on one side, hands behind back, sweetly submissive’ pose.

‘Fuck knows,’ she said. ‘You choose.’

He knew she’d say that. One of the attractions about her was the contrast between her sublime accent and the obscenity of so many of the words she uttered. She always made him choose, too. In one way it was flattering: she was indicating that he was the boss, that she’d follow and be happy with whatever choice he made. In another, it meant he always had to take responsibility if the place or the event turned out to be crap.

But this time it was serious, crucial even. Dexter was rough, from the wrong side of the tracks and, in order to keep her, he’d always suppressed his often abrasive manner and tried to convey an aura of patience and gentility (not that he could have identified it as such). Now, he had to get the location right. There was only the one chance. If he blew it, she’d smile and pretend to be understanding but he knew that, when the honeymoon started, instead of the usual frenzied sex, with biting, scratching and lumps of hair pulled out by the roots and screams of ‘You’re fucking sensational’, she’d lie back and let him crawl over her as she made comments about how pretty the bridesmaids had looked or how self-important the best man had seemed.

‘How about a Karaoke bar?’ he said.

She looked at him and gave him the finger.

There was a silence.

‘OK … er … Notre Dame in Paris.’

She shook her head.

‘No churches. We make our vows to one another, not to some bastard who causes floods and starves African kids.’

Siro laughed. ‘There you go agin,’ he said, ‘mixin up Our Saviour and Red Loth. Red don’t do none o’ that. Red’s cool.’

It was the closest Siro ever got to a theological utterance. It earned him a second finger from Octi.

‘OK, not Notre Dame then,’ said Siro, ‘but how about Paris?’

She thought for a moment.

‘The ceremony’s still in English, right?’ she said.

He nodded.

‘And we don’t have to drink that crap the French call wine. We can still have a good sweet Californian Chardonnay?’

‘Whatever you want, hun,’ he said.

‘How about the Louvre?’

She shrugged.

‘OK, baby,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and git it organised. See y’all tomorrow.’

‘Whatever,’ said Octi. ‘I’m mud wrestling tonight.’

She’d won several prizes already. Opponents were usually laughing so much at her refined accent that she could easily take them out with a quick hitch-kick to the groin or a double-footer in the breasts or throat.

Dexter didn’t know if people ever got married in the Louvre but, now that he’d heard that English accent, he was even more desperate to make her his own private property. He looked up the place, found a name and sent a personal message.

‘Kin folks git wed in the Louvre?’ he wrote.

To his surprise, the answer was immediate.

‘Qu’est-ce que vous désirez?’

Shit, the guy was French. There was no call for French in Kansas and Dexter had left school at fifteen anyways. But he’d heard French people speak. He tapped frantically at the keyboard.

‘Ze Louvre. Ze wedding. Possible?’

The next message brought despair.

‘Je ne comprends rien de ce que tu dis, espèce de con. Vas te faire foutre.’

He logged off. He’d have to risk it. The wedding would go ahead without asking anyone’s permission. Hell, they weren’t going to have French police patrolling the place in search of stray brides and grooms. Anyway, with Octi, it was unlikely that anyone would realise it was a wedding. It would depend on her mood. Most of the time she was her own dangerous, raven-haired avatar but sometimes she logged on as a turtle or a boa constrictor, and sex was either asphyxiating or very difficult. The snake was fine but he still hadn’t been able to find the location of a turtle’s genitalia.

He needn’t have worried. On the day, she dropped into the assembled guests in a cloud of dazzling white chiffon, looking more beautiful than he’d ever seen her. She was quiet, truly demure and stood with her eyes lowered, looking for all the world as if she was the virgin bride of every man’s fantasy. The official in charge called them forward to make their vows. They stood holding hands, facing one another, and everyone hushed.

Octi was the first to speak. Her voice was soft, her accent more English than ever, bell-like and singing with a child’s simplicity.

‘Siro, my darling Siro,’ she said. ‘I have loved, honoured and respected you since I first saw you. The days we have spent together have been bright with innocence and love and I can think of no better way to spend the rest of my life than being loved and protected by someone as strong and powerful as you. I love your body, your wit, your intelligence and everything about you. I give my maidenhead, my body, my soul and my whole self to you and promise to be a tender loving wife for as long as you want me by your side.’

The members of the congregation looked at one another. Who the hell was this speaking? They knew her. They’d seen her wrestle. They’d heard her describe how she’d tied Siro to a tree in their garden and fucked him until he cried.

Dexter listened to her words with his mouth gaping, bewitched by her beauty but confused by what she said. He’d spent hours with a dictionary, a thesaurus and a poetry book writing vows full of expressions such as ‘the gossamer bliss of ethereal passion’ and ‘accession to an infinite dimension of ineffable grace’ but he, too, had expected his bride to use her turtle voice, or spit out words like ‘forearm smash’ or ‘half-nelson’.

He pushed aside the print-out on the desk beside his keyboard and, obscurely aware that he had to surprise her too, he cleared his throat and Siro began to make his vows.

‘Fuck a duck,’ he said. ‘Ain’t that the bestest speechifyin’ y’all ever heard? Woohee. Ah gits me a chick that’s a combination o’ Dolly Parton and … well … Dolly Parton. Tits like melons, ass like Jennifer Lopez. Come on, baby. Fuck the reception, let’s go git our asses laid.’

Octi held out her hand meekly. Siro took it, and the two of them vanished as they clicked their ‘Translocate Home’ options. The crowd dispersed, wondering what the hell had happened and deciding that there were perhaps two names that might usefully be removed from their personal buddies’ lists.

At home, in their garden, Siro was taking off his clothes.

‘That was some speech,’ he said.

‘So was yours,’ said Octi.

Siro shrugged and flicked his hand at her to indicate that she should undress. Obediently, she did so and stood naked before him.

‘OK, get the ropes and stand by that tree,’ he said.

As Octi leaned back against the harsh bark and he began to bind her to it, Sarah and Dexter both knew that theirs was a true union. When they’d had to type their thoughts to one another, their hesitancy and their frequent typos had acted as filters which had obscured parts of themselves. The words on the screen had been passive, characterless, the same. They’d been unable to articulate who they really were. Using their voices had released them from those constraints; the combination of Sarah’s mellifluous accent and lyrical phrasing was as exciting to Dexter as his own drawled profanities were to her. They now felt the real magic of AD, which brought together backgrounds, cultures and people who would never have met in the real world. They’d come to their wedding as discrete individuals but, in that transcendent moment as they exchanged their vows, their beings had fused. They’d become part of a different, but single being.