Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (23 page)

“People who do things like that turn up dead. Whatever came out, they’d know it was from me.”

“I just thought that—

“Think what you want, but don’t mention it again. Are we clear?” Kurt didn’t sound like himself, to either of them.

Suffocating tension circled the room.

“Maybe I should go home?” said Stacy, inflecting the words into an uncomfortable question.

“Maybe you should.”

“Okay.”

Kurt sent for a taxi, writing in the Special Instructions box that the driver was not to engage the passenger in conversation and that Kurt Jacobs would settle her fare with a generous tip for discretion.

He held the door open without saying a word and didn’t even look at Stacy as she gathered her things. She tried to kiss him on the cheek but he pulled his head away. “I’m not sorry I asked you to help,” she said, more in desperation than defiance. “We can’t do it without you.”

She was halfway down the driveway when Kurt called after her. “Wait. Who’s the we?”

The taxi driver stepped out from his seat to open Stacy’s door and tipped his hat towards Kurt. The driver’s presence meant that Stacy couldn’t answer his question so she smiled half-heartedly and stepped into the taxi.

Kurt rushed down from his doorstep and knocked on her window. “Who’s the we?” he asked again.

Stacy rolled down the window and opened her mouth to whisper a reply but the vehicle pulled away, leaving Kurt standing in the street, screaming into the night.

“Who’s the we?!”

12

Kurt was awakened by a deafening ring in his in-earphones. He pawed at his left palm to shut them up but accidentally instructed The Seed to answer. Amos’s voice filled his ears.

“Hello, Kurt. I need you to come in.”

“What? But it’s only…” Kurt rubbed his eyes open and looked at the time in the corner of his vision, “7.30! What new app can be so important that you can’t even wait until the day begins to start gloating about it?”

“This isn’t about an app,” said Amos, his tone morose. “It’s about you. Get here now.”

Kurt climbed down from his waterbed as the call ended. Loathe to defile himself with RealU, he took a few minutes to make himself presentable then hurried into his car. The drive took much longer than normal thanks to the citybound rush-hour traffic. When he arrived at 8.05 Sycamore HQ was still deserted. Regular business started at 9 — this was something altogether more serious.

No valet or doorman greeted Kurt at the entrance and the lobby’s lights were low. He had expected Amos to be there waiting for him. He wasn’t. He was sitting on one of his sofas, staring at nothing.

Kurt stepped out from the elevator and saw him. Amos raised a hand and used it to usher Kurt over. He then opened his left palm and swiped five fingers towards his floor to demonstrate The Seed’s useful new method of displaying video content for communal viewing. A celebrity news station appeared on the floor, paused on an intriguing headline: “The birthday boy and the mystery girl: So, who
is
this unseeded upstart on Mr Sycamore’s arm?”

Kurt sat next to Amos and watched silently. A 60-second non-story speculating over the nature of Kurt’s evening with Stacy ran on Amos’s floor. Commentary played over footage of Kurt snapping at the mob outside the restaurant and of the waiter dropping his glass. He wondered briefly how much Sycamore would have paid the two Lens-wearers who contributed their feeds, then remembered that Sycamore owned everyone’s memories.

Kurt was more mystified than annoyed by why he had been called in. “Why did I have to see that?” he asked.

Amos finally looked at him. “I’ll ask the questions, Kurt. What the hell do you think you’re doing cavorting around with an unseeded whore in the shadow of our building?”

“She’s not a whore.”

“So why isn’t she seeded? Why does no one know who she is? Why is a wealthy man who could have anyone in the world walking around with her in the dark on his birthday?”

“She’s a journalist,” Kurt explained. He was almost as poor a liar as Minion. “An Italian journalist. And I don’t care about birthdays.”

“What’s her name.”

Kurt hesitated just long enough to make something up without it being obvious. “Monica.”

“Monica what?”

“Monica Valentino.”

“Good name,” said Amos.

“She’s a good girl. And she’s writing a lot of good things about Sycamore. I could let you read them if you want.”

“Sure, send them over.”

“I’d have to ask her to print them,” said Kurt, already fully regretting having fallen so far into the lie. “You know The Seed isn’t out in Europe yet and only US citizens can get seeded here, so she still writes on an old computer.”

“Poor thing. Maybe we could have her in for a look around to show the Europeans how we do things.”

Kurt thought of what Stacy had said the previous night about getting into Sycamore HQ and wondered whether Amos holding the door open for her plan was fate’s way of giving him a push. But then Kurt remembered why it was out of the question: he alone would be held responsible once Stacy had what she needed, and Amos and his Unifield puppet-masters wouldn’t be for playing nice. “I don’t know how much longer she’s going to be in town,” he eventually said.

“Oh well. If you see her again let her know about the offer. By the way, is this Monica we’re talking about the same girl from the protest and the bus?”

Amos obviously already knew the answer so Kurt rolled with the lie. “Yeah. She was doing a story on how promising the scanning drones were and the police mistook her for a protestor. Then she couldn’t ride the bus because she doesn’t have Lenses and the driver was being wholly unreasonable. I acted to ensure her view of Sycamore stayed favourable.”

“That explains last week, but I still don’t understand why you told all those kids that you were together.”

“That was just so the crowd would leave me alone. There’s nothing between us. We sort of became friends after the protest thing but it’s always been about business for her. She wanted to ask me some more questions for her report so I agreed to meet.”

“What kind of questions?” asked Amos, his eyes narrowing.

“Specific things like when Europeans can look forward to The Seed being released internationally. Don’t worry, I painted Sycamore in a good light. You and I may not always see eye to eye but you know that I care about the success of my Seed. When I was with Monica I kept my disquiet, well, quiet. Anyway, I don’t expect to be seeing her again.”

“I’m sorry, hotshot. I should never have doubted you.”

“Forget about it,” said Kurt. He was pleased that the taxi driver seemed to have kept quiet and that no one in DC had noticed or flagged up the fact that he had removed his Lenses.

Amos patted him on the back and stood up. “I have some things to take care of but you look tired. Sleep here, no one will bother you.“

Kurt saw no reason to argue so settled down on the lushly-padded white sofa and fell into a dreamless slumber.

~

The sun had reached Amos’s southern window when he returned to find Kurt still sleeping. “I didn’t mean all day, hotshot.”

“Hmm?” Kurt was startled by the noise. “Yeah. How long was I out?”

“A while. The Sycaplex is opening soon and you were here before anyone else, so at least three hours. Come and see the queues. Actually, no. Wait. Download Tranquility first. It’s amazing.”

Kurt clicked into the SycaStore, confident that Amos’s approval meant Tranquility would be something abhorrent. He purchased the app and opened it. “What the hell?”

Amos laughed out loud. “I know, right?”

“Where are you?” Kurt asked, failing to see the funny side. He closed Tranquility and saw Amos standing no more than a few metres away.

“And that’s Tranquility. You can block out human noise, too.”

“You don’t see the irony in people spending a fortune making themselves look good for everyone else then spending even more making sure they don’t have to look at
anyone
else?”

“Now that you mention it... oh well. People have always ignored each other in the street, though, this just makes it easier. It used to be headphones and smartphones then it was full-immersion. Now it’s Tranquility. And yes: collision detection is built-in, before you ask.”

“But how does Tranquility know what the object behind the person being made invisible should look like? How could I see through you?”

Amos paused to think of a way to explain a process he didn’t fully understand himself. “You know how you get those little drones that can map an area by flying around it? Well, we've had millions of pairs of cameras mapping the country for the last two weeks. We know how everything should look without obstructions.”

“I don’t think many people will use it,” said Kurt, accepting the explanation and moving quickly on.

“Neither do I, to be honest. Tranquility came out of the development of something better: BeThere. We’ve been working on it for months. It was going to be the killer app for the Sycaphone launch we had planned for December but The Seed meant that we could do so much more, so much better. It’s launching tomorrow with a hard and fast media blitz. Tranquility is sort of an affordable taster.”

“Tranquility is $100. How much is BeThere?”

“The app is free but you have to pay for environments. Well,
you
don’t, but you know what I mean. With BeThere consumers can walk around in the real world while it looks like they’re somewhere else. We’re starting with The Land of Chocolate and Winter Village. More environments are coming soon based on real and imagined landscapes.”

“Virtual Reality environments? Sycamore is going full-on VR?”

Amos nodded. “Now that it’s ready to go, new environments shouldn’t take us more than a few weeks. There’s a dinosaur one but we’re saving it until people have played around with the other two.”

“Won’t people just walk into things?”

“They shouldn’t. Remember what I said about collision detection? It will be safer than them walking around in other full-immersion apps or looking down at phones like they used to. It works like a car’s GPS in that pedestrian pathways are recognised as such. If you’re walking down a street in Winter Village it will look like a lovely snowy path, and the road will be blocked off by snow drifts so you don’t wander into traffic. You can’t really explore much since you’re moving around in real space but it certainly makes walking more fun. Good, no?”

Kurt didn’t say anything. Against his better judgement he thought that the concept was sound and could have useful future applications. “Could you make a running track?” he asked. “Like a stadium, so I could run somewhere quiet with stands full of spectators but no danger of running into anything. Could you do that?”

Amos smiled, pleased to hear Kurt’s tone ascending with excitement. “It’s already done, hotshot. A running track was one of the test environments. It will be included at launch but it’s not as fully-featured as the others. Still safe, though. Now… the queues?”

Amos pulled Kurt up and led him to the window. A queue ran along the street between the Sycaplex and the restaurant Kurt and Stacy had visited the previous evening. Kurt zoomed in and saw the queue double back on itself around a temporary barrier like the ones he’d seen at theme parks. “How many people does the theatre hold?” he asked.

“4,000 per viewing zone,” Amos replied. “Three zones. It’s multi-level, like a car park. When consumers don’t have to look at a screen you can pack them in like sardines.”

“Why have a cinema with no screen?”

“At a Sycaplex you don’t
watch
movies, you feel them. Each consumer straps themselves into a capsule which moves and provides all sorts of feedback. We don’t like to use empty phrases like 4D or 5D, but this is basically as many dimensions as there can ever be.”

“What’s showing?”

“If I didn’t know better I’d say you almost sound interested, hotshot…”

“I want to see what it’s like. Can I get a ticket for today?”

“It’s been sold out until next week since the minute it was announced.”

“Surely they can make an exception for me?”

“Okay, rockstar. I’ll make a quick call.” Amos started playing with his hand then spoke to someone at the Sycaplex. “Save a seat at the front,” he said, “because Kurt Jacobs will be gracing your establishment with his presence for the opening screening. … Of course not, he has to sit at the front. … So move them!” Amos flicked his palm again and turned back to Kurt. “It’s so hard to get good help these days.”

“Thanks,” Kurt mumbled, experiencing an unusual feeling. A typical trip to HQ involved arriving in a good mood, learning about some terrible new app, arguing about it with Amos then going home upset. Today he had arrived worried by Amos’s tone — not to mention edgy on the back of Stacy’s invitation to help an apparently organised resistance — but was leaving with a sense of hesitant excitement about BeThere and the Sycaplex.

“Think nothing of it,” said Amos. He shadowed Kurt to the elevator and saw him off. “Enjoy the show.”

~

Kurt walked to the Sycaplex from HQ with his jacket’s collar over the side of his face to avoid being noticed. His location data was available through Forest but modern consumers tended to only see things that were right in front of them. A security guard let him in the front door and he walked through to a tastefully decorated VIP lounge. It was busy but eerily quiet.

As Stacy learned in the restaurant, text-based messaging had become the default method of human communication, even when people were face-to-face. The scene in the lounge was by now familiar: couples Glancing at each other across tables and laughing without words, silent orders being taken and placed, Kurt wondering how it had come to this.

A man entered the lounge and ushered its VIPs through to their floor-level capsules. Kurt was led to the centre of the front row, to the visible chagrin of an elderly woman with an upside-down face who had paid for that seat. She stormed off in a manner suggesting that she wasn’t used to being disappointed. Kurt entered his capsule, pleased to have given her a new experience.