Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (24 page)

The wall at the front of the theatre no longer boasted a screen, just a huge mural of a lone sycamore sapling in a grassy field. It looked nice, whatever it represented.

Kurt’s viewing capsule was no larger than it had to be. Legs were secured first, then arms. There were manual overrides on the inside for controlling liquid dispersal as well as temperature, smell, vibration and anti-gravity. The other six dials were blank so Kurt didn’t know what else to expect. All he knew was that Amos hadn’t been kidding with his “
as many dimensions as there can ever be
” quip.

The movie chosen for the Sycaplex opening was an action flick called Blind Luck. The trailers before the screening included a preview for the upcoming Happy Pigs adaptation. This involved the audience being shaken around in their viewing capsules and made to feel cold and wet as the characters gleefully rolled their way through various pungent farmyard substances. All Kurt wanted to do was die.

The fully-immersive video and audio arrived in Kurt’s ears and Lenses via local transfer technology with which he was unfamiliar. Within minutes of the main feature starting he realised that it was a shameless piece of propaganda masquerading as entertainment. Blind Luck hammered home the necessity of surveillance by lamenting the authorities’ reliance on luck in finding a child kidnapped from a small southern town where Sycamore had been rejected.

The audience assumed the first-person role of a CrimePrev agent tasked with re-uniting the kidnapped child and his mother. The missing 5-year-old didn’t wear UltraLenses and wasn’t seeded, so the kidnapper’s identity was a mystery and neither could be tracked.

It was forcefully clarified that only criminals had any reason to go unseeded and that parents had an absolute moral duty to let Sycamore protect their children. The CrimePrev agent wasn’t used to dealing with rescues because in the cities of the film’s immediate future everyone was seeded and crimes were stopped before they occurred. He educated the religious townspeople on the benefits of being seeded and explained that the kidnapper would have been caught by now if even one of them had been wearing Lenses to capture his identity.

With a few minutes remaining the boy’s body was found mutilated by the side of the main road north. The CrimePrev agent through whose eyes the action was seen then carried the corpse into town and dumped it in front of everyone.

“There ain’t no such thing as luck,” he said heartlessly, “only consequences. This is what happens when you don’t give your children the protection they deserve.”

One of his colleagues then spoke to hammer home the importance of universal seeding. “But even if y’all good folks have your little ‘uns seeded, the success of our CrimePrev program depends on everyone else being seeded, too. We need criminals to be seeded and wear UltraLenses so we know what they’re planning.”

A passionate mother stepped forward to air her opinion. “So why don’t the government get off their asses and make seeding compulsory before another innocent child dies?“

“You’ll have to ask them, ma’am,” the agent replied.

That was the final line. The entire film was an 85-minute set-up for that one closing line and it was delivered with all the tact of a kick in the jaw. Kurt knew all about Hollywood’s historic role in shaping consumer opinion to suit powered interests but this was ridiculous. It was so overt that no one could fail to see through it, he thought. Surely they couldn’t?

The crushing irony, of course, was that Amos’s friends in Washington already wanted compulsory seeding; they would end up gaining a huge popularity boost for doing what they were always going to do anyway.

Kurt left the Sycaplex feeling violated, like his mind had just been raped by whoever produced the film. He didn’t know who was in charge of creative output but they meant business and Amos was giving them serious funding. Most members of Blind Luck’s cast were recognisable from real films Kurt had seen in the past and, until the end, the dialogue had been fairly well-written. The whole production could have taken no more than the two weeks since launch. He wondered what kind of masterful viewer-manipulation they would come up with given more time.

~

A text notification appeared in Kurt’s vista as soon as he stepped out of the Sycaplex. It was from Amos: BeThere was ready.

Kurt clicked into the SycaStore but couldn’t see anything about BeThere. Another message came through. “Sorry, hotshot, I forgot the link. Click this. And keep it quiet until tomorrow.”

The link took Kurt straight into the app. He dismissed a warning about proceeding at his own risk, remembering Amos’s promise that the environment, though not fully functional, was “still safe.” The familiar street outside the Sycaplex transformed into a Championship Stadium environment that utterly defied Kurt’s limited expectations. The track wasn’t round but rather a fairly straight line which promised to keep him away from busy areas. He input eight miles as his desired distance and was told that he would be instructed to turn around after four.

Running was one of Kurt’s favourite things to do. He felt free like at no other time, and the virtual spectators cheering him on made this run his best yet. Motivational music blared through his in-earphones and the track rolled under his feet like he was a bullet train powered by fresh air.

40 minutes passed in an instant and Kurt forgot the world until his music stopped, abruptly replaced by the high-pitched tone that indicated an incoming call. He reduced his pace, wondering who would be making a voice-call. Amos had only done so earlier to wake him up; at this time of day a text was superior for all purposes. If it had been a regular message notification Kurt would have waited, but really... who the hell still made voice-calls? He stopped dead and rotated two fingers clockwise to answer. It was Randy.

“Hey. Listen, I need a big favour.”

“Yeah?”

“I need you to put my lottery numbers on. I’m flat out broke until tomorrow. I could play on credit but we both know it’s really debt.”

“Sure,” said Kurt. “As long as you know that the lottery is a tax on stupidity. Send me the numbers and I’ll put them on.”

“Thanks. God, could you imagine if my numbers came up and they weren’t on?”

“Why would you think like that?”

“Listen, bro, just
please
get the numbers on before the draw. You know them — everyone’s birthdays. Speak soon.”

Kurt decided to enter the draw immediately, before he had a chance to forget. His bottomless wallet wouldn’t miss the $3 and it seemed important to Randy. There was no way of telling what would happen if the numbers came up — Kurt expected that the money would go into his bank account rather than his already infinite (and untransferable) Sycamore balance, but things were rarely that straightforward. He double five-tapped to close BeThere and return to his real vision so he could bring up the dashboard and click into the SycaLotto app.

Kurt jumped back in existential horror when he saw the real world before him. He was standing at the edge of a cliff, and not proverbially. BeThere had taken him six miles in a straight line and, had Randy not called, would have taken him to his death. The rocky valley below was the kind where coyotes howled in the moonlight, ready to pick the bones of the corpses provided by the fall.

“Still safe, though,” he remembered Amos promising. That relentless asshole.

Too shaken to think about calling a cab, let alone put on Randy’s lottery numbers or even remonstrate with Amos, Kurt started running back towards the city surrounded by the real world. When the initial vomit-is-imminent feeling faded from his gut he began to think about how stupid he must have looked sprinting towards the precipice. After that he wondered what it would be like to walk or run in BeThere with one Lens in and the other out. He would have to try that sometime.

A mile or so from the Quartermile his ears were filled by the SycaLotto jingle: “S… Y… C… A… MORE MORE MORE!!!”

He scrambled to try and play Randy’s numbers but it was too late. The draw commenced and Kurt looked to the sky in prayer that he wouldn’t see them. What if they came up and Randy phoned saying “I won, I won!” and Kurt had to let him down?

A lamentable series of events had left Kurt in a position he hated more than any other: as a slave to money’s power, fearful of the right numbers coming up at the wrong time. It was better than being dead at the bottom of a cliff, he convinced himself, but barely.

Randy’s numbers never came, of course, and Kurt ran until he reached the Quartermile. Each laboured stride represented an effort to forget the helplessness he had just felt — the equal but opposite helplessness that so many others experienced every time they prayed for their numbers to appear in the sky. He wouldn’t judge them so quickly next time.

~

On arrival at Sycamore HQ Kurt asked the valet to bring his car around. By chance, Amos was in the lobby with the rarely-spotted Terrance Minion. Amos caught sight of Kurt and sent Minion away.

“Well? BeThere? Dynamite, no?”

“No is right,” said Kurt. “Between this and the pop-up when I was driving last week, I’m starting to think that you’re trying to kill me.”

Amos displayed concern that struck Kurt as unusually genuine. “Did it lead you onto a road?”

“Off a cliff, almost. If I hadn’t gotten a voice-call exactly when I did…”

“I’m truly sorry, hotshot. The monkeys downstairs told me it was safe. Heads will roll, I can promise you that, but first of all we’ll have to put alarm activators near sharp declines.”

“You can’t be serious. The whole idea has just proven itself patently unsafe and you’re still going ahead with it? Why is it that someone
almost
dying is never enough for you? Anyway, it’s stupid. VR is for children and idiots. Sycamore was built on AR and stuff like this dilutes that. We were supposed to make people’s lives easier and richer, not put them into a matrix.”

Kurt’s words were blunt but so were his feelings. He knew that he had thoroughly enjoyed his time in the Championship Stadium environment and that his complaints were driven purely by how close he had come to dying, but that seemed like a good enough reason to be upset.

“I know you liked it,” said Amos, reading between Kurt’s words, “and you know I can fix it. I’ll have them iron out the safety issues and delay the public launch until further testing of each environment if that’s what you want.”

“No. No to the whole thing. You’re changing how people see the actual world. What’s to stop you laying more subtle modifications over everyone’s vistas? Once you start doing it in BeThere environments it won’t be long until you start tinkering with things you don’t like everywhere else. No one will know what is and isn’t real.”

“Sycamore remains committed to enhancing the physical world. Anyway... when a blind man is cured, does the world really change?” Amos raised his eyebrows and tilted his head to the side to emphasise the profundity of his words.

“Stop being so abstract. This is real life! It’s not like people are sitting down at home and hooking themselves up to computers to control their avatars, they’re walking around the real world
as
their avatars and seeing whatever you decide is real. You’re overwriting an existing reality with a baseless spectacle. How is this progress?”

“Progress comes in various guises, hotshot, not just the ones you like. If you just gave BeThere one more chance you’d see that it’s not what you think but rather an enclosed app designed to make mundane journeys more enjoyable. I better get back to Terrance — he’s been working on some bits and pieces for CrimePrev — but I’ll link you to the pre-release build of The Land of Chocolate just now. It’s been extensively tested but there might still be a few bugs, so don’t go running around like a hungry cheetah. And remember that chocolate rivers are real rivers, so no Augustus Glooping.”

Kurt ignored Amos’s attempt at humour. “Why would I go back into BeThere after what just happened?”

“Because you know you want to,” Amos called back on his way to the elevator. He turned to face Kurt as a thought entered his head. “Oh, and don’t forget to see if your little friend Monica wants to come for a look around. Euro publicity is a rare treat.”

Kurt took care not to react to any talk about Stacy/Monica because even the slightest slip-up could land her in all sorts of trouble. He stepped outside without replying and took a trip into The Land of Chocolate.

Viewing the environment through far more critical and analytical eyes than regular consumers would, he quickly noticed the odd glitch where paths stopped without fences and couldn’t miss the unseeded baby floating in thin air where the pavement used to be.

It made no sense to Kurt that BeThere could hide the pram but not the baby. And how could technology capable of turning buildings and cars into chocolate monuments and giant rolling coins not hide the unseeded? Tranquility hid everyone, so he knew it could be done. He considered that the decision to leave the unseeded inconveniently visible in BeThere might have been taken to give the Sycamore-loving majority extra incentive to support universal seeding. That seemed like the kind of thing Amos would do.

Other than the floating baby there were only a few other people visible on the busy street. Kurt knew the street well and was reluctantly impressed by how convincingly the Sycaplex had been turned into a chocolate windmill and the skyscrapers of the Quartermile into towering red lollipops. Even on close inspection it was by far the most immersive VR he had ever seen. Sycamore HQ was untouched, of course.

An odd sight near the restaurant caught Kurt’s eye — a flashing red arrow pointing down at nothing in particular. He swiped out of BeThere and saw a man with his hands in the air being hassled by a policeman. Kurt ran over to see what was going on.

“Jacobs! This is all
your
damn fault,” the man yelled. Kurt moved closer and saw that his name was Rocco Miller. 21. Married. Unemployed. Account Suspended.

Kurt was used to being blamed for things that weren’t his fault but he recognised Rocco’s face. “No way,” he said as it came to him. “You’re the waiter from last night.”