Luminarium (9 page)

Sam was right where Fred had last seen him a week ago: crosslegged
in his Aeron chair, back hunched, head jutted, headset in place, black T-shirt rolled at the cuffs and tucked neatly into his black jeans. Closecropped hair, patchy shadow of a beard. The unvarying nature of Sam’s appearance wasn’t a matter of personal inattention, but of decisiveness—the whole fashion question, in his view, had been settled—and, as well, probably, a deep need for constancy. He ordered identical backups of those black jeans and black T-shirts online and sent them out to be laundered on a rotating basis. He electrically trimmed his hair down to three-eighths of an inch every few weeks, and his beard to one-eighth every morning. Several times a day, of late, to renew his energy, he’d drop to the floor and do twenty pushups, with the result that sinewy muscle squadrons had begun taking up positions on the ridgelines of his otherwise skinny arms and chest. For someone who sat in a chair twelve or more hours a day, he probably wasn’t in the worst possible shape. Though Fred wouldn’t have called it health, exactly. Sam’s eyes were too deeply ringed.

He was leaned into his dual-screen display as Fred approached, the left one crammed with microscopic lines of code, the right a window into the Urth environment—what appeared to be the hostage-extraction scenario. Sam’s avatar, dressed in desert fatigues and holding an M-16A2 rifle with a grenade-launcher attachment, stood against a wall to one side of a gateway leading out of a barren, moonlit courtyard. Another soldier, identifiable from his girth and sparse blond beard as their lead programmer Jesse’s avatar, stood to the other side, firing out into the street with a mammoth M-60E3, the jackhammer report of which rattled from Sam’s headset. Out of ingrained habit, Sam joggled the mouse more or less continually, swiveling the view back and forth and up and down through the courtyard, a fuzzy, green circle of night-vision visibility sliding over the broken windows, kicked-in doors, and a narrow alley between two low buildings where a third soldier stood facing the other way. Watching the lifelike kick of the guns, the near-photorealistic chinks and eruptions from the bullet-riddled walls, Fred felt what he did every time he came in here: a dizzy mixture of liberation and oppression, adventure and drear constriction.

“
Holomelancholia
,” he remembered George pronouncing late in the office one night. “The inevitable disappointment of virtual worlds.” Pleased at his invention, he’d allowed himself a rueful smile. “Mark my words. It’ll be in the
DSM
by 2021.”

“Fred,” Sam stated, by way of greeting. It spooked the newer employees, this ability of his to tell who was behind him without having to turn and check. The trick lay in the reflectivity of the aluminum head of his desk lamp, which he used as a kind of rearview mirror. “I’m
trying
to cover you,” he growled almost subvocally into his headset mic.

Fred heard Jesse curse from across the room as Little Jesse fell backward in the courtyard. Where the bridge of his nose had been was now a flattened well, out of which green-lit blood seeped over his face and onto the ground.

“What the hell …” A wave of unreality lifted Fred in his shoes. He couldn’t double-check what he thought he’d seen because Sam kept shifting the view around.

“Where’s it coming from?” Sam hissed into the mic, hunching closer to the screen.

“Was Jesse’s nose blown off?” Fred asked.

Sam joggled and clicked, too busy to answer. Interspersed with the popping gunfire, a pleading voice which might have been their lead animator Conrad’s emanated from Sam’s earpiece. Little Sam turned into the gateway and fired off a grenade into a second-story window across the street. Then came a flash, a thunderclap, a hail of stone and smoke. As Little Sam backed into the courtyard, the canned sounds of a woman screaming and a child crying.

“That wasn’t the one you said?” Sam called out. Bullets began chipping away the wall around him. He swiveled. The soldier by the alley was down. Something moved back into the darkness. Another explosion, this one making the whole screen flash, and then convert to black and white, the indicator-of-death feature they’d cribbed from Dungeons & Dragons Online. Little Sam was down, blackened, missing an arm. Definitely. Missing an arm. Blood oozing from the stump. For a while, neither Fred nor Sam could take their eyes off Little Sam, whose soot-caked face bore Sam’s own sunken cheeks, prominent nose, vacantly staring eyes.

“Yeah,” Sam said, eyeing Fred in the lamp hood. “Whole new level of avatar deformability. It’s like a real game now.”

Fred nodded, that underwater feeling coming on.

“Still a ways to go,” Sam went on, with minimal affect. “They want full, persistent human physiology now. Cumulative trauma, wounds that can slow you down, cripple and kill you over days. Hunger and thirst shriveling you up like a prune. Smallpox hives, neurotoxin tremors. Radiation. That’s the big one. Sores on the skin. Hair and teeth falling out …” On some level, Fred thought, Sam must have known the effect this singsong list was having on him. The increasingly deformable avatars had been getting steadily harder for Fred to stomach, a development he blamed less on the improving technology than on witnessing George’s increasingly deformable body over the last year—rashes and burns, sutures and scars, IV punctures, bloody gobs coughed into wads of tissues or pumped out of him through silicone tubes. At Sam’s mention of hair falling out, what flashed to mind was that first shock of going to George’s apartment and finding his head shaved smooth. George had begun losing his hair and so had decided to get it over with. Fred had stood with him before the bathroom mirror, marveling over the transformation. The proportions seemed off, less cranium up there than either of them had expected. Fred was spooked by the alienness of it, one more step in an ongoing metamorphosis of which the physiological changes were only a part. Yet the physical exposure seemed to bring George back to Fred a little, too. Since the trouble with the company had begun, Fred had felt George gradually walling him out of his life; but in that moment, his brother surprised him, taking his arm and guiding his hand up to feel the dome. Fred was surprised how silken and warm a bald head turned out to be. “Gives me a whole new insight into skinheads,” George remarked, the two of them still facing the mirror. “They try to look so hard and tough with those bald heads.” He grinned. “But they must be feeling so bare-ass naked.”

Still staring down at Little Sam’s corpse, Sam rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “Looks decent so far, huh?”

Decent
, said Inner George, with dark emphasis.

“Decent,” Fred repeated, unable to help himself.

“Real. I mean real.” Sam’s mouse hand darted and clicked the window shut. An angry gesture, though its main effect was to reveal his incongruously placid desktop wallpaper: palm trees on a beach, with ocean and sky beyond.

“Sounds like … work,” Fred said, a half-hearted attempt to repair the damage. But he’d worded it too ambiguously, and Sam decided to hear another slight.

“Work, yes. That’s what we tend to do here.” Sam brought his nonmouse hand down protectively over his stomach. He had irritable bowel syndrome, and made no effort to hide the fact from those whose presence exacerbated it.

“Right. I guess I wouldn’t know too much about that. I just loaf around in the hospital these days. Oh,” Fred held up a finger, “almost forgot. George says hi, by the way.”

Sam’s reflected, melted-together eyes in the lamp hood had looked up to meet Fred’s as he’d raised his finger, and Fred now had to watch them liquefy, and slink back off to gaze at the palm trees. He couldn’t quite bring himself to apologize.

“I hear I got canned,” he said instead.

Sam brought up another window on his monitor, this one containing a tactical overhead view of the Empire State Building surrounded by a flat, gray street map. He moved the terrain north, east, south, west, causing the building to churn in a slow circle.

“Word came this morning, Fred. You didn’t give them much choice.” It figured, Fred thought, Sam would take their side in this. “What choice did
I
have? It’s been one emergency after another.”

“Right. Dad told me about your crime spree.”

Now it was Fred’s turn to smart.

“And your magic shows. You still smell like flash powder, by the way.” Vartan had won out, dropping Fred off here directly, Fred changing out of the tux in the back of the van. He now regretted not stopping in the hall bathroom to wash up.

Sam opened another Urth window—a side view of the skyscraper. The level of realism didn’t yet approach that of the Iraq sims, but the building was recognizable. The structure was right, the windows all correctly placed.

“So now it’s off to the mother ship, eh?” Fred said, after a moment.

Sam took his time to scan the statement for explosive compounds.

“Off to the mother ship,” he allowed. “It’s going to be a busy three weeks. We’ve got a deadline to meet and can’t even stop working while we pack.”

“So they won’t even let you stay here, huh?”

“What makes you think we’d want to stay here?” He swung his head around at his dim little alcove, the still dimmer back area with all the other workstations, and by implication, the city beyond.

It shouldn’t have, but the conviction in Sam’s voice surprised and stung Fred. He thought of that single day six months back when Sam had come to the hospital. How he’d stood at the back of the room by the door while Fred and their parents had hovered over George, talking to him, holding his hands. Sam had remained for a few minutes, a halfhour at most, then, mumbling that he had to go, turned and slid away. Later, he’d explained himself by saying there wasn’t anything he could do there, and that someone needed to be minding the business. Which Fred couldn’t fully argue with; but then Sam had never returned, and the last time Vartan and Holly had gotten to see him was when they themselves had stopped by the office a couple months ago to say hello. Fred had the distinct impression Sam was counting the days, biding his time until he could put a thousand miles between himself and the rest of them. Sam’s recent advice to their dad about all of them moving down there, Fred viewed as nothing more than a halfhearted sop to his guilt. The absolute least he could do.

“I don’t know,” Fred said. “Maybe I just have trouble picturing you in Bermuda shorts.”

“I’ll get some black ones.”

They risked a look at each other, despite themselves, almost smiling. And suddenly it was happening again. The expansion. Enveloping the air between them, an unbounded region, more naked than skin. The distance from Sam was dropping away, and mentally Fred pulled back, wheeling some inner arms like he was about to fall from a plane. He didn’t want Sam to be a part of him. He’d sooner have gone out and trailed the next batty old woman on the street. A flicker of fear appeared in Sam’s eyes, perhaps mirroring Fred’s own. Sam turned away, fixing once more on the palm trees on his screen.

“It’s time to bug out of New York,” he said. “Cities are fucked, long term. We’re all agreed on that.”

By way of punctuation, he clicked an onscreen button and the Empire State Building began to collapse. At first it seemed to be happening in that all-too-familiar way, a few stories three-quarters of the way up pancaking together like an inchworm gathering itself up for a step. From there, though, the movement took an alien turn: the upper part of the building toppling off at an angle, shearing the lower as it fell, causing entire floors just below the split to slip from their girders and columns like overstewed meat from the bone; then the upper segment exploding on the ground, the mangled stalk still standing in a pile of wreckage.

“Looks weird, huh?” Sam said. “Empire State Building’s joints are riveted, not just seated, and its columns and beams are fireproofed with brick and cement. Twin Towers just used sheetrock. But the downside to the older construction is it’s way heavier, so when it destabilizes, look out. See, watch.”

Like a chopped tree, the remaining structure leaned and then came walloping down over the debris.

Fred felt his throat constricting to the diameter of a coffee stirrer. He fought down the shameful urge to flee the office for the open air.

“It’s all real physics,” Sam was saying. “Real structural data. The Army Corps of Engineers helped us plug it all in.”

Real physics was the trademark of the Urth environment, what had early on separated it from all others. Their company hadn’t settled for mere effects in the early days; they’d wanted a completely realistic array of action and reaction—real gravity, acceleration, wind factors, impact warpage, ricochet trajectories. Real physics had been something of an obsession for them, as they had quickly determined that making the experience of Urth more and more real was precisely what made it feel more and more magical. Arguably, it was more verisimilitude than their prototype Urth—an anime-style world of pastoral communes, treehouse villages, and underwater bubble towns among coral reefs—had really needed; and the quest had played a part in fatally delaying their never-to-be commercial launch. Yet subsequently, that same real physics code was the very property that made them valuable to Armation, back in the golden dawn of the war on terror.

Possibly fearing that the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq might somehow fail to go on forever, Armation had agreed to an inspiration of Sam’s (without raising his salary or granting him a new title) and was now courting a potential client—the City of New York. Just as the U.S. military was using Urth to train soldiers for a new kind of war, the hope was that American cities would begin using it to train emergency workers, and civilians, too, for a new kind of peace. The idea, Fred had to admit, made all too much sense. The cost of doing live emergency response-training exercises in urban areas was pretty much prohibitive, even with the new Homeland Security funds. But Urth would allow hundreds of firefighters, cops, city officials, agents from the various federal agencies, as well as civilian volunteers to log on all at once from any computer anywhere and play out scenarios over and over, perfecting their response strategies without disrupting city life. The demo project under development, the main thing Sam and the others here had been cranking away at over the last few months, was a 9/11-style attack on the Empire State Building. If the city officials liked it and signed on as paying customers, the next phase would be to simulate, over a ten-by-ten-square-block radius, the aftermath of a small nuclear bomb.