Solaris Rising 2 (11 page)

T
HE SIGNS INSCRIBED
in paint and light at the perimeter read
green space
, although there is more magenta and turquoise foliage on display than green. In the not-green green space, a techno-fairy in a dress of chrome cobwebs dances beneath a fuchsia willow tree. She sways and pirouettes to a soundless melody among its candy floss tendrils. A cobalt-skinned demoness crowned by a fiery wreath admires herself in a mirror of air, flaring the skirt of her white lace pinafore around her thighs. The mirror obeys her like a well-trained dog, bounding to and fro to present whatever perspective she desires. An electric-eyed swan maiden with tribal tattoos coursing over her arms levels a Gatling blaster. A bright
UNDERAGE
display hovers over her head in oversized text.

Claie doesn’t glance up from his handheld when the percussive burst smashes into him. A shield deflects the Gatling’s discharge, erupting from the tactile contacts on his wrists and flaring to envelope his two companions – a mermaid with shimmering aquamarine scales and a fox woman with golden eyes. Neither of the women react either. But when the redirected blast strikes the cobalt-skinned demoness, bouncing her several meters back, Claie turns. He gestures, adjusting the gain slider on his audio setting.

“Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t realize the discharge had a ricochet animation.”

The demoness floats to her feet unhurt. “No worries. Can’t expect to spend any time in a sandbox without getting bounced a couple times.” The white lace pinafore disappears, and, for a moment, she wears only a lavender bra and matching panties. The moment passes, and the demoness, now in a black leather jumpsuit with gold spikes at shoulders and knees, bends to examine a knee-spike.

Another detonation from the Gatling throws a swath of hot pink turf into the air. This time, Claie winces at the explosion. He hurries to tap the public mute toggle on his smartdev before resuming his discussion with his companions.

“So anyway, Buneh, did you have a chance to replicate my results and see how our prim loses its phantom indicator when another phantom overlaps it?”

The fox woman nods, an orange tongue flicking over her muzzle. “Not sure why it’s doing that.”

“Doesn’t happen every time,” the mermaid says. “Why’s it going wonky on some phantoms but not others?”

Claie taps commands into his handheld. “Devi, I isolated the error sequence. Seems to have something to do with certain architectural structures used in older sims, mostly flying buttresses. I’m sending you my results now.”

While Claie waits for the mermaid to review his findings, the green space blanches, tinting everything from the magenta trees to the cobalt demoness (now in a high-necked evening gown) in shades of gray. The achromatic palette is short-lived. A concentric ripple of color overwrites it, spreading subdued greens, tans, and browns – flora in gauche earth tones – in its wake.

Claie notes the change with a raised eyebrow. “Someone needs to tweak their hue overlay,” he mutters.

Devi cocks her head, a waterfall of liquid-cyan curls spilling over her shoulders. “That’s loco –”

Mid-syllable, Devi vanishes, as does Buneh. Simultaneously, Claie’s vision blurs.

His head snaps up and he blinks several times, trying to recover crisp lines and hard shapes in a suddenly Monet-soft panorama. Half the people in the green space have disappeared: all the commuter avatars like Devi and Buneh. The remaining occupants mill, their surprise and confusion evident even to Claie’s watering eyes, as is the cause of their subsequent distress. They have all diminished, become less vivid, less fanciful, and, on the whole, less attractive.

Claie inhales sharply, breath hissing through his teeth, as he takes in his own appearance. His periwinkle zoot suit is gone, leaving only the bland, beige-on-beige unisex with its embedded tactiles, the same garment – with minor variations in cut and fit – that everyone wears beneath their skins. His flesh has lightened from gold-touched bronze to pasty white, complete with annoying freckles.

He is naked, stripped of his avatar skin, and it makes him self-conscious, embarrassed. His dismay is only marginally defused by the surety that everyone in the vicinity shares his predicament.

What happened? Green space or not, this type of prank is deplorable, not to mention alarming. What sort of script could override so many privacy protocols – a labyrinth of passcode encryptions and DNA biometrics?

He raises his handheld, the customary source of answers. With a grimace, he raises it higher to accommodate his uncustomarily myopic eyes.

Whatever banished the commuters and skins has also crashed most of his apps. His smartdev’s display is tidy, sans the clutter of icons and text that normally litter it. The zero bars indicator is conspicuously evident.

Claie gapes at the modest red icon. He’s only seen it in documentation wikis before. No signal means no way to rebake his skin or reestablish his conference with Buneh and Devi. It also means no way to call home. Or for anyone to call him.

What if Shelby tries to reach him and she can’t get through? What if she checks their You OK? app and his vitals don’t register?

Swearing, he wills the little bars to illuminate. Just one. One would be enough.

They don’t.

He wants to rush home, but without a connection to the network there’s no GPS to tell him where he is, no map app to get him home, no clear sight app to let him see. Without a connection to the network, his smartdev is about as useful as a pretty rock.

Claie forces himself to take deep breaths, to calm himself. Shelby knows he’s in a meeting, and she’s considerate of his work. There’s no reason for her to call. And also, he recalls, his smartdev is a pretty rock that can keep time and record data even disconnected from LivIT.

While the majority of his apps are remotely stored on LivIT’s servers, he has a few that can run without the network – simple ones that can function locally. He launches a stopwatch app and begins a data capture session. Ingrained coder principles. It is always easier to debug a glitch with reliable error logs.

A smattering of echoing movements dot the region, blurry figures tapping or thumbing controls at temple or wrist. Other coders probably. There are always at least one or two at any given time in a green space.

Letting his smartdev drop to his side, Claie presses fingertips to temples. His head aches from the unaccustomed eye strain. Still, there is an unexpected benefit to his nearsightedness. He can’t make out facial particulars beyond vague impressions of eyes, noses, and mouths. Admittedly, it feels a little head-in-sand, but not being privy to the raw details – and he knows they are raw – allows him to pretend that his own RL shortcomings and deficiencies aren’t being ogled at either. The unsavory intimacies that he
can
make out, the fleshy bulges and sags, the disturbing homogeneity of flesh tones, and the unsettling absence of individual aesthetics, are more than enough for his abused sensibilities to cope with.

“What’s going on?” The question is shaky, frightened.

Claie peers at the speaker, a skinny youth, almost certainly still in high school. Probably the
UNDERAGE
swan maiden with the Gatling blaster.

He smiles, trying to reassure. “Hey, don’t worry. It’s just a bad glitch. A gang of griefers most likely.”

“Never heard of a glitch like this,” the youth says, voice cracking. He edges closer until Claie can see how wide his eyes are.

“Used to happen all the time,” Claie says in his best not-a-problem, everything’s-fine voice. “The green space will re-rez as soon as the corrupted code gets cleaned out.”

“It’s sure taking a while. Did it use to take this long?”

“Don’t know.” Claie suppresses a prick of irritation. He’s not
that
old. “I only read it in a wiki about when LivIT was transitioning from device-based service to global release and the server infrastructure hadn’t fully propagated. Before my time.”

“Not before mine.” A dusky woman with gun-metal hair wanders over. Close up, Claie sees lines beneath her eyes and around her mouth, mahogany creases in hickory. It makes him uncomfortable, unsure where to look, not wanting to stare.

“They usually never lasted more than an hour,” the woman continues. “Always felt longer, though. There was one when I was around your age –” she nods to the ex-swan maiden, “seemed like it was never going to end. Made me late for a date. When I could finally log in, he’d already left the sim. Turned out okay, though. That’s where I met my wife.” The woman winks, an organic chiaroscuro of creasing and uncreasing across her face. “That one lasted fifty-seven minutes.”

“Fifty-seven minutes?” the youth gasps.

“I’m sure it won’t be anywhere near that long,” she says. “LivIT hasn’t had a regionwide outage in ages.”

“Regionwide?” Claie asks, startled. “You think it’s more than this green space?”

The woman studies Claie. “Nearsighted?”

Claie shrugs. “Treading the verge of legally blind without my clear sight app.”

“Ah. Sorry. Can you see Mu Shu’s?” She points.

Claie strains, trying to make out the eatery that sits beyond the outskirts of the green space. After several moments of intense squinting, he realizes that the dragon bot that usually greets guests with bouts of fire at the entrance is gone.

“Not well,” he admits. “Is the whole place down? Textures and all?”

“Yep. It’s nothing but RL as far as I can see.”

Claie resists the urge to rub his eyes. “Did I see you launching a local app after we lost the network?” he asks. “You wouldn’t happen to be a coder too?”

“You’re perceptive for a shortsighted fellow. It wasn’t a local, though; I was triggering my lifeline status feed. I moderate Blip’s Facelight community. ’Fraid I wouldn’t know a line of code from a song.”

Claie doesn’t approve of lay people jiggering with their 911 utilities. It’s possible to jam up a smartdev’s auto hail if folks don’t know what they’re doing. But he understands why a mod would want to piggyback her comm feed to her lifeline, and it means this woman has a network connection, albeit a constricted one.

“Are your comm members saying the whole region is glitching?” he asks.

“You’re a mod for Blip?” the youth chirps up, awed. “Do you know Kimiko Blaze?”

The woman laughs. “Not personally, but I’ve moderated a couple of her chatviews.” She touches her wrist. “I’m not getting many incoming chirps. And I timed some major lag happening from outside the southeast region. I can’t think of anything that would do that except if the whole region’s borked.”

Claie’s heart skips. She’s right. But a griefer script able to take out a whole region’s AVs, skins, bots, and textures? That would mean GPS satellites as well as integral LivIT source code being affected.

His worrisome speculation is curtailed by the abrupt return of his visual acuity, his AV skin, and Devi and Buneh. The youth sprouts a good fifteen centimeters in height, a pair of white wings, and a buxom chest scrawled with tattoos. His – her now – Gatling blaster materializes in its thigh holster as the swan maiden skin completes its rebake.

Devi and Buneh wave their arms, gesturing at Claie’s handheld. Puzzled, he looks down just in time to read Buneh’s “Toggle yr mute!” IM before an acoustic holocaust of voices, music, and tones crashes through his in-ears, heralding a flurry of alerts, chirps, and updates.

Claie yelps and fumbles for the global mute, peripherally aware of the Blip mod and several others occupied in similarly frantic slaps and thumbings.

Scowling, ears ringing, Claie gingerly restores the conference audio.

“Gomen ne,” Buneh says, fox ears twitching sympathetically. “Tried to warn you. It took a messy restart to clear the glitch, and lots of folks on Badger had all their app settings reset.”

“What you get for being a Badgerbrain,” Devi says.

Devi is as rabid a Lynx devotee as Claie is a Badger one. Claie smiles and gives her the finger before launching a script to restore his customized settings.

C
LAIE’S STOPWATCH APP
informs him that the glitch lasted for all of seven minutes 48 seconds and a decimal streak of milliseconds. The server tally is a little longer, accounting for the gap between the glitch’s true start and when it occurred to Claie to time it.

Less than ten minutes, more than five. Yes, it felt much longer. And it was more widespread than even the Blip mod speculated, hitting Devi and Buneh too – in UTC-8 and UTC-6 time zones, respectively – with preliminary chirps suggesting it also affected UTC+ regions.

The official word from LivIT’s network gurus attribute the glitch to an epic and unique confluence of misfortune: a malicious griefer script breaching a too hasty upgrade, dominoing GPS fail-safes clashing with network security protocols, extensive sunspot activity, and a spilled mug of tea. The restart – which by all accounts goes beyond Buneh’s understated “messy” and into Frankensteinian mosh pit – is cascading west to east: why Devi and Buneh knew about the Badger issue before him. Buneh also runs Badger, and she’d been treated to the same audio barrage.

After all the excitement, none of them feels much like resuming their test session. Buneh confirms that their data is intact, and they exchange farewells. Devi promises to send out a timely reminder to reschedule as the mermaid and fox woman de-rez.

The Blip moderator has also absented herself. Claie isn’t sure if she’s the red-skinned geisha in the smoldering kimono or the vampire in the Catholic schoolgirl uniform. The swan maiden is gleefully blowing away chunks of scenery with her Gatling.

Claie verifies that his shield app is running and then hits the shortcut icon that will call Shelby’s smartdev. When she doesn’t pick up, he pings their home server. It answers promptly, and a quick query tells him that Shelby is indeed logged into the apartment. Frowning, Claie brings up their dedicated You OK? app, and it reassures him that all of Shelby’s vitals are a-ok and she hasn’t activated a 911 hail, auto or manual.

Claie relaxes. Shelby is often neglectful of her smartdev. (Claie is the detail-oriented one.) She has probably only forgotten to set the ringer to audible. He smiles, indulgent. She might even be asleep. It’d be typical of Shelby to have napped through the whole glitch.