Manifestations (7 page)

‘Musashi? Is that your boffy name?’ she snorted.

‘Fine, I’ll leave you here.’ He turned to go and began fading from her vision, which was just a trick of making his avatar transparent.

‘No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ she said hurriedly.

‘No, you’re not. You’re just a silly girl and you don’t understand anything.’

‘Zach, wait. Don’t leave me here. I don’t know what to do.’ Her amusement turned to panic as he disappeared.

‘Press the eject button. I don’t care.’ He made his voice thin and echoey.

‘Please, Zach. I’m sorry. I won’t laugh any more.’ He stayed silent. ‘I’ll call you Musashi.’

He appeared behind her and made her jump when he spoke.

‘On the Weave people represent the selves they want to be. You have to respect that.’

‘I will. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.’

‘You didn’t. You’re just a silly girl.’

‘Zach, please — Musashi. I’m sorry. I’ll be good.’

He looked at her and said it was okay.

‘I didn’t mean to laugh.’ She began looking around at the endless grey. ‘Where are we?’ Bron asked. ‘Is this it? Is this the Weave?’

‘This is the load space, or dressing room. Here we get you ready for going in. You can’t go on the visual Weave until we’ve sorted your avatar out.’

‘What should I wear?’

‘Didn’t you want to become a princess?’

‘How?’

‘Think of something. Form the words in your mind and then picture what you want them to look like.’

‘Nothing is happening.’

‘This is hard the first time, but once you’ve got it you’ve got it.’ He made a rack of dresses appear next to her, as well as a tall mirror. ‘Look in the mirror. Then look at one of the dresses.’

‘Oh!’ Her mirror image was wearing a long green dress with sparkly bits. She looked down and saw that she really was wearing it.

‘It’s that easy. The helmet can connect to what you think. You just have to be able to link those thoughts to how you look. In your mind.’

He explained to her about the load space they were in, while she went through dress after dress, intoxicated with awe. ‘Here you can preview changes to your avatar and search for new things and information. When we go into the visual space you can also add things as you go along. And you can always pull back to the dressing room if you want to change up.’

‘Can I be older?’

‘As you wish. What age do you want to be?’

‘Eighteen.’

He saw her body grow tall and form curves. Inside the sateen gown she had chosen she was beautiful. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

‘Okay, I’m ready. Let’s go to the Weave.’

‘Bron, you’ve been on the Weave this whole time.’

‘I have?’

‘Yes. You are connected to the data network. That’s all the Weave is.’ The Weave was everything it drew information from. All connection was part of the Weave.

‘Oh, sure, but I meant the real Weave. Let’s go to the palace.’

Zach found the castle she was after, the one from the show that was so popular with girls her age.

He bowed before her and held out his arm. ‘May I have this dance?’

Princess Bronwyn laid her gloved fingers on his arm and nodded.

He loaded some dance steps into his stream and pulled her into the first position as they crossed to the location and the walls and floor faded into their vision. It was a fantasy castle, nothing that could ever have been built in the real world, on top of an impossibly thin mountain spire with stars bright and the moon gentle. In the ballroom, which was the only room constructed in the program, a standing orchestra played while couples in masquerade twirled on the polished marble floor.

Bronwyn gasped and nearly stumbled as she twisted around to view it all at once.

‘Oh, I can feel the floor.’ She tapped her foot harder on the floor. ‘And when we spin, I can feel the wind in my hair. It’s so lovely. Is it real?’

‘Does it need to be?’

‘Oh, I don’t know and I don’t care. What about these people? Are they real?’

‘Some of them,’ he said. Most were just programs dancing to fill the space, but there was no need to tell Bron that. ‘This is how most people join the Weave, so they can just act like normal without having to think.’ He explained how there were parallel representations of everything in the real world, how even now they could go to the study room in the home and be able to see themselves lying in the couches.

‘Everyone who is connected, or is in the WU, is part of the Weave. Their data is always being added to their stream.’

‘So we’re in two places at once?’

He laughed. He remembered thinking that. ‘No. We are only where our bodies are, but our streams represent us. How we act in the physical world, what we are looking at on the Weave
and
what our avatars are doing.’

‘That is so odd,’ she said.

‘You get used to it. Everything has to be represented, to keep the data pure.’

‘But this castle isn’t real. It’s made up.’

‘That’s true. This is the fabula.’

‘Fabula?’

‘The fictional worlds that have been created. The fantasy places that don’t, or can’t, exist anywhere but here. Here you can just act and you don’t need to know anything about how the Weave works. In real life, would I be able to do this?’ Zach jumped into the air, spinning higher and higher until he was touching the ceiling, and then he dove suddenly down and landed comfortably on the balls of his feet. ‘This is better than the real world.’

His avatar turned and pivoted, automatically. The older Bronwyn was laughing and clutching his shoulder.

‘Where did you learn to dance like this?’

‘I told you, Bron, here we can be whatever we want to be and do whatever we want to do.’

They spun and turned and became dizzy in each other’s arms.

As the half-hour mark passed, Zach received an automated message that he could end the session and receive his merit badge, but he let the dance continue. He still had to make his scouting quota though, so he left his avatar dancing while his stream flicked to code mode to check the background data of the palace.

He found fifteen live streams, actual people, who had come to experience the ballroom scene of ‘Amazing Princess’. Two were from the Dome, five from Seaboard, one from Lima and seven who were accessing from outside the WU. These he found interesting. Non-Citizens didn’t have permanent access like real Citizens, and yet they had chosen to come to this girlish fantasy realm. The Weave was made by all kinds, Zach reflected.

There was something odd in the room though. In the code level he could see a slow drift of data, tiny amounts from each stream, flowing towards an empty corner of the room. In visual mode there was nothing there, but something was connecting to the visitors ... nothing of importance but information nonetheless.

He watched it draw out details of where he lived and his life and then he sent a ping along with it, asking who it was. Zach didn’t even know why he did it. He shouldn’t have. He should have flagged it as a curiosity and left it for the trained scouts to look into.

He was just curious where the data was going, and had no idea that he’d broken a tripwire, but in the empty corner a thing appeared. A dark, non-reflective blob of an undefined visual profile, no avatar, and no record of its existence.

‘Oh, kutz,’ Zach cursed softly.

‘What is it?’ Bronwyn looked around. ‘Eww. What’s it doing?’

‘Syphon,’ he whispered.

The blob shivered and the room gasped. Some of the dancers flashed out immediately, leaving the rest to watch it bloat and distort. On the code level, Zach could see it was still sucking in data from those around it, but it was also starting to harden into an avatar.
Something this way comes.

‘Come on, Bron. We’d better get you out of here,’ Zach said.

‘Why? What is happening?’ The rest of the crowd were fading out, each of them dropping danger flags on the site to draw the attention of the weavers.

‘It’s a hakka trap. I don’t know how long it has been here, but it’s illegally collecting data from people’s streams.’

‘Is that bad?’ she asked.

‘Yes. And now its master is on the way. We have to go. Hit your eject button.’

‘How do I do that?’

She was hyperventilating. She couldn’t take her eyes off the monster growing in the corner as it changed colour to red and began twisting in ugly circles.

‘Concentrate, Bron. Go to the dressing room if it helps.’

‘It’s not working,’ she cried.

Musashi gritted his teeth and loaded an eject button that he handed to her. All she had to do was imagine her own, but this would be faster. ‘Now press it. It will trigger your demersion.’

She pushed the red button and her avatar was gone instantly. Gone and safe. Zach turned around to see what the syphon was doing before he ordered his own evacuation. The thing had firmed into a segmented flea-like creature with spikes all over its body. The syphon saw him and opened dozens of orifices ringed with spittle and showing wet teeth. The mouths roared and its spit sprayed onto him, burning through his armour.

Zach hit eject ... Nothing happened. The syphon swelled and gawped and shot grappling teeth into him, dragging him towards it.

‘Oh, kutz.’

It was an angry red now, body panting and pumping with the enthusiasm of killing. Through its front mouth an eroding voice boiled through the teeth. ‘You’re not going anywhere, squirt. It’s time you learnt not to touch other people’s things.’

Musashi pushed at his ejector to no avail; he was dragged closer until the teeth could reach him and began tearing into his avatar. He took his katana from his belt and stabbed at it, but the blade bounced off the hard skin, jarring out of his hold.

He swore again and again, reminding himself it wasn’t real and the pain was surrogate only, but he was so mentally connected to his avatar that he felt it happening as if to his real body. He was screaming as if it was real. The syphon creature chomped into Musashi, slicing through his armour and pulping the flesh beneath.

With the last of his control Zach threw every flag and tag at the thing that he could, but they dissolved. No one was coming to help him. He heard a soft laugh as his head was engulfed in the main maw.

‘Now you will feel the wrath of Dungeon.’

Zach watched as his stream was dissected, his past and connections severed, his recorded life macerated before his eyes. The damage clawed up to his head. He saw a smile of fangs in the dark, then another set and another until the blackness was nearly defeated by bloodstained teeth. All at once the smiles took bites at him and his visual stream went haywire. He no longer saw what was there. He saw what the hakka wanted him to see.

It was a nightmare of black and red; subliminal flashes of horror, death, torture, rape, the distinct degradation of distortion on flesh; and the screams, the shouts, the dark voices that moaned, cawed and crazed over the top of the graphic horror. The nightmare changed, human bodies exploding, the pains of horses and animals being slaughtered; high-pitched ear-splitting whistles as emaciated and diseased faces lost their flesh and were defiled before his eyes.

Even when he went catatonic, the assault didn’t stop.

~ * ~

He woke on a street. A pattern of tiles was under his face. His avatar had been reconstituted into a chewed-up mess whose only possible movement was to ooze. The rear end of the beast pushed foul excrement upon him before flying up into the sky.

Zach pulled his viewpoint away from his avatar, now floating a few feet above his body. He looked at himself. Musashi, dead. He’d died in games before, but not like this. His mind could still see the sensory torture; recalling the visions made him want to vomit. His avatar bubbled. He couldn’t think and lay as a pile of blood and filth.

His stream was gone. All his memories, his recordings and history were twisted or deleted. He didn’t recognise himself or where he was.

The eject still wasn’t working. Maybe the hakka had put a scramble into his helmet somehow. Something that interfered with his control. He focused on the load space: if he could just imagine the endless grey and start a reset...

In a blink, Musashi was standing again. His helmet had reset and his last backup was restored. Everything was in place as it should be. As he had been before he took Bron in. Where was she? How long had he been immersed? Surely she should have alerted somebody by now. He should have been pulled out ages ago.

He felt sick. That was his first experience with a real hakka. As much as he had heard there were dangers on the Weave, he’d never thought of them seriously. He had always thought he could just eject from trouble, but Dungeon had held onto him, taken his sensory input and ...

Zach looked over Musashi, his proud petulant stance, his sword that outshone all lights. He didn’t deserve that sword, or that armour. He was just a pathetic boy who had been chewed up and spat out by the first hakka he had come across.