Beautiful Wreck (4 page)

The Civs have roots in 1960s centennial reenactments of the American Civil War, when living history was a hobby practiced by few.

Now in the 22nd century, everyone lived—to some degree—in a world that had happened before. We studied and debated and reanimated the words and fashions of a hundred yesterdays and adopted them as though we’d run out of original things to be. In the aughts and teens, being part of an anachronistic culture had been unusual. Now it was the norm. Everyone had a place and time they loved, and they lived in it every moment they could.

I threaded my way through a crowd that had stuffed itself into a park for a picnic. The ones who were standing cast a canopy of parasols over my head. This little spot of green surrounded one of the few intact structures in the city, a charming, arched stone bridge maintained by those who wanted to pretend at riverside picnics. But water no longer flowed underneath it. Crows—the only birds we knew—lined its arching walls, waiting for bread and meat.

Strewn with baskets and blankets, only a few square feet of grass poked through, muddied and weak. I sank to my knees, and combed my fingers through the blades, helping them to stand up straight. I petted the grass, like people used to do with dogs.

A sharp heel came down on my hand and a woman stumbled and fell over my back.

“What the fuck?” she barked at me. She sported the little white puff sleeves of Jane Austen’s summertime Bath. A man in a long-tailed jacket stood her upright and straightened her tiny umbrella. They huffed off.

As I stood, words swam in my eyes.
This stone bridge was built in 1928.
I shook my head. Somehow I was stuck in tourist mode. An impatient flick of my eyelids turned off the contacts.

I wiped dirt from my nose.

In a world where fragile, intangible threads connected us, we should have been able to find each other in the physical mess of the past. Painful, joyful, disgusting, romantic. People spent their days and nights, to varying degrees of fanaticism, in authenticized settings. They were in lust for their worlds. They shared them with a fervor.

But the truth always comforted them—that they were playing. They wanted ale feasts and spears and Valkyries, not the messy beauty of a real farm, the stink of animals and work of many hands. They wanted to sacrifice a barrel of mead, not a horse, and they wanted someone to clean up after.

Into this reality, the company I worked for was going to drop “the tank.” An immersive environment that felt absolutely real.

People would be insane for it. The chance to dive into a fully realized world, interacting with people who didn’t know they weren’t really Vikings—or Ninjas, lairds, courtesans and knights—would be a revelation. All they had to do was pay dearly and endure the sensation of entering the tank. Their feasts and fights would all disappear conveniently behind them when they were through. They could be home for dinner.

The company had a team of us designing and testing it. Our expertise reflected the presumed mass desires of the world, especially those people who would pay dearly when the tank went public. Costume and linguistic artists, period smiths, fiber artists, leather workers. We specialized in the gallant armor and chivalrous utterings of Medieval knights, the long plaids of men who romantically roamed the Scottish highlands, the drapery and curlicued speech of Roman aristocrats, the rags and weapons of gladiators. Elegant Gatsby suits and the gloom of the eighties punk scene in London.

I’d created the accents and dialect for the Viking heartstone scenario, a scene inside an authentic tenth century longhouse. I loved the sounds, the words and voices, but I didn’t want to immerse today. I would miss this air, this day, when I went into the scene, a house lit only by flames and a tiny square of sky. I wandered slower as I approached the company.

A nondescript door said nothing, and the building itself seemed only two stories high. Most of the company’s vast corridors, its glinting clean offices and labs and spas were carved inside the stabilized glacier. They’d delved further into the ice than anyone knew—stories and stories below. When I entered, I would step through another set of glass doors, those three times my height, and into a sparkling blue cathedral.

I felt especially reluctant.

I said goodbye to the chaotic buildingscape around me. Goodbye to the puffy clouds endlessly reflected in planes and angles of glass. The buildings showed an airplane, its many selves moving in a hundred directions at once. It droned, and I felt a consuming laziness. For years, I hadn’t known they were singular machines. Not until I took the subterranean train out to the airport myself and flew to Norway to study.

I’d looked down eagerly to find the fanatic realists, to find their houses in the open interior of Iceland, where they could feast and rage and breathe life into the kinds of festivals and battles real Vikings knew. Out beyond the glaciers, where the realists lived, my airplane would appear to fly by alone. I imagined it made a sound like a bee.

But I didn’t see any farms, only the city stretching from the coast all the way up to where it met the glacier. I’d seen my own building, the very last one before the natural boundary, a frozen ocean lapping its walls.

I dreaded the first moments in the tank. Jeff said the sensation of water was one of the first complex virtual triumphs made by long-ago pioneers in programming. Even now, the sensation of moving water was the best tool they had to jolt the senses and blank the mind. After what he called the “impression of a brief shower,” the mind was ready to enter anywhere, anytime. And so, I had to drown in order to emerge in Viking times.

The company’s plain-looking door slid a soft, shushing welcome.

Morgan’s auburn hair burned against a sea of gray. Her studio contained every expression of metal, from the whitish gleam of silver on her workbench to the iron smudge of smoke that ballooned in the air just before it got sucked into the filtration system. The only color as vivid as her hair was the flame of the real wood fire that jumped and burned in the corner. A massive hood loomed over it to take and process the smoke, but remnants of the smell lingered and mixed with the metallic bite of tools, filings, pewter, copper. All together, the scent of Morgan herself.

The little necklace I made for her was nothing at all, just a few pretty beads I’d found. I wasn’t very good with my hands, and I bumbled with the little metal clasp, but I thought she might like it.

She didn’t see me standing here yet. She made soft popping sounds with her lips, along with music in her earset. She was tapping a few hundred tiny dents in a mighty arm ring.

The clarified air came back into the room cold, like I thought a woodland stream might feel. I held my fingers up to the vent and the air moved them like riffles of water. I imagined my hand submerged, shiny and distorted.
Make me a stream, Jeff.

I sent him my request, gently, as if he really could hear it. I could fall for a man who gave me a stream and a horse.

Jeff couldn’t, I knew. No far-ranging outdoor scenes in the tank. Not yet.

Morgan stopped her percussive humming, and I turned to find her watching me with her head cocked. I drew my hand out of the stream of clear air and said hello. She blinked off her music and said, “Look at you, Lady.”

I picked up the skirts of my new, gorgeous dress and curtsied. “I spilled coffee on the other one.”

“You did not.” She was horrified, and then bust out laughing. “Gods, I wish I could’ve seen Vera’s face.” Morgan puffed up her cheeks like the costume historian.

“It wasn’t my fault,” I told her. “It was a man. At the cafe.”

“The Linux Club?” Morgan asked about the coffee shop. It’s what we called Jeff’s period hang-out. Jeff was mid technical revolution, turn of the 21st century. He and his friends played at doing programming and design using only the old tools. They also spent a lot of time with the baristas.

“Já. He was a raven feeder,” I sighed. “Done up in mail.” The man had been a warrior, yes, or at least a raider. “His ax knocked into me.”

There was a kind of gauziness to my mood, leftover from looking into the big Viking’s eyes in that moment before they’d glazed over. “Mmmm. There was dirt too, from the park,” I told her.

I lifted my arm and studied the lovely curve of my belled sleeves. The hand-dyed, cherry colored wool somehow glowed with an amber undertone. It was the only available replacement. Thanks to the big Viking and my sniffing in the park, I was no longer a farm maid but a Norse princess. I’d be the richest girl in tenth century Iceland. Not really authentic for the “heartstone” scenario I was testing, but it would have to do for today. And it made me feel pretty.

“I’m late and not ready,” I continued. “And everyone’s going to kill me, but I wanted to talk to you.”

“Já, I want you to wear a couple new things.” She came over and knelt in front of me, taking off my knife and replacing the sheath with a new one. I raised my hands up out of the way. The bones in my fingers looked stark in the artificial light. I flexed them, still dreaming of a cool brook. A bit of ecru linen showed at each wrist, peeking out from under the red wool.

“No, I wanted to talk to you,” I told her. “I have something to give you.” I drew the necklace out of my purse.

Morgan stopped messing with my belt and looked briefly at the beads.

“I see,” she said, “The attachments are wrong here and here.” She pointed at the metal parts, then set it aside. “I can work on it for you later.”

Oh.

I closed my eyes tight against a sudden sting.

She told me to sit so she could do my hair. She had a newly-etched hair comb. While she brushed and twisted and yanked on my scalp, I kept my eyes closed against any tears that might come. I opened them once, to blink into a reading state. The irises closed, and I muttered “Steeplechase, Atlantic City.”

Words came wafting by.
New Jersey, United States, turn of 20th century. Steeplechase was one of several wooden piers that reached out over the Atlantic Ocean and housed entertainment venues and amusement rides. Opened August 1899. Destroyed three times …

I flicked my eyes to make the history go by faster, to get to the early 2000s. But the dates ended.
In 1932, a fire started by a 26,000-light advertising sign—

“You can’t do it, you know.” Morgan’s cold finger on my spine startled me, and the words dropped away. “Right here.”

She touched the nape of my neck.

“Já, I know,” I said. “The raven.”