ONE

Satisfied with the distance he had gained from the pack, Mort let go of the throttle and shifted up into sixth gear. The engine’s deafening whine receded, allowing a down-tempo electronic beat to come into the foreground. In response, the car’s interior went from intensely red to soothing blue, but looking ahead at the approaching bend, Mort knew better than to relax now. He knew he was going into the bend too fast and so instead floored the throttle, hoping the downforce of the spoilers would keep him on the road.

The car entered the turn as if on rails. Displacing gravity, the centrifugal force tugged Mort’s body towards the side window. His knuckles whitened as he gripped down on the steering wheel. Peeking behind the bend, the checkered posts of the finish line came into the view. He had to hold on for just two more seconds.

A metallic clank of something snapping came from the car’s front. With sparks flying, the car slid forward on its snapped front-right axle, till it found purchase and, like a pole vaulter, sent the car flying.

Trapped in projectile-like motion, Mort grabbed the seat belt straps and busied himself with keeping account of which way was down. After a barrell roll and a half, and a double somersault upon hitting the ground, the car finally came to a halt.

Mort clipped the seat belt open and crawled out, grunting. A stream of blood flowed down his forehead as he took off his helmet, his brow diverting it around the eye. He removed his gloves and poked the gash carefully — it did not go deep. He sighed and climbed on top of the wreck to enjoy the view.

Where are you, Mort? The message was still awaiting acknowledgment.

Home, he thought into the interface, intent translating into words.

Meet me in 20. A reply with an address came after a short delay.

Right now!?

20 minutes. The second reply came almost before his.

He took a final look at the landscape, and blinked out of the game.

Leaning back in his chair, Mort ordered a cab. Looking up, he wondered if maybe, considering how often he saw the ceiling, he should put a message up there. Or maybe, just to confuse himself, have a scaled view from the game projected there. He wouldn't be able to trick the mindstate, though: the tiny biological computer in his head knew the difference between real and fake all too well, and through it, so did Mort. Right now, it also knew that the cab would arrive in three minutes. He gave a long, loud yawn followed by a lazy stretch and rolled out of the chair.

The milky afternoon sky lit up the room, a soft drizzle gently brushing at the window from outside. Marking the chaotic movements of the zipping hovercars, glinting red and white lines etched the otherwise monochromatic view on the city. Each moving car unknowingly participating in the creation of the pattern, they exposed the city's arteries and veins. In a few hours, the sky would darken and the oversaturated adverts would light up the sky, each sign brighter than the last. They would call out the names of the neighborhood cafes, the pubs, the ubiquitous gaming arenas and the beat-pushing clubs. But for now the city was still in the sober lull of a Saturday evening.

The mindstate announced the arrival of the elevator. Mort grabbed his hoodie and proceeded to the buttonless cabin. As it ascended to the parking floor, he winked at his reflection, and the tall skinny figure with dark circles of fatigue under its eyes returned the gesture.

Mort called up the chat as he stepped into the cab and forwarded the address to the navigation software. It was a voiceless dialog, relaying subject and location — I and here, and the vehicle went off, leaving the hatch on the 42nd floor and heading north, merging with the traffic.

The hovercar toyed with Mort’s perception of momentum, moving so fluidly that he couldn’t tell speeding up from slowing down. The only real measure was the speed at which the outside world flew by. Mort's mind wandered back to the wheeled car of the game. The imperfection that gave meaning to the drive. It belonged to the world of fuzzy compromises, gut feel and reflexes, that had now been rendered useless, with networked chips manning cars at speeds no human could possibly manage. The art of driving was gone forever, maybe for the better.

The streets narrowed as the car traveled further north. The view gradually changed from colorful neon of polished storefronts to the complete absence of any labeling. There were barely any hovercars now and Mort suddenly realized how long it had been since he was last in this neck of the woods, and that he had missed the low buildings, the narrow streets, and the tech minimalists that the place was packed with. A pang of melancholy hit him. The car turned onto an abandoned road and after a few more minutes of driving, spun down next to a grey 3-story abandoned factory. It was raining heavily now.

The car zoomed away as he stepped out. He put his hood on and rushed towards the door. Mindstate didn’t detect a virtual buzzer, nor had the door a physical one.

I’m here, he thought into the chat interface.

“I can see that!” The voice came from behind, startling him. It was Vanessa. She jumped off her bike right at the door. “Who’d have thought I’d see the day the great Mortimer is on time!”

“Psh, yeah right.”

Abandoning her bike, she gave Mort a tight hug. The bike fell into a puddle with a splash and Mort squealed—Vanessa was soaking wet—before giving in and hugging back.

“Long time no see,” Vanessa said after a moment, gently pushing Mort away to take a better look. “Come!” She let them into the staircase and, after locking the door behind, they climbed to the top floor, where a fine, very out-of-place for an abandoned factory, wooden door greeted them. Vanessa unlocked the door and let them into the flat. It was massive.

“Is there something I should know, Vanessa?”, he asked.

“Like what?”

“Did you kill a family of Transformers to get this place?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “So you like it?”

“It’s all right,” he said, giving an approving nod.

“Well, make yourself at home,” Vanessa said and motioned towards the far end of the room, where a sofa backed into a wall-sized window. “I’ll be right back.”

The apartment was not just big, but also, somehow, full - the very opposite of Mort’s spartan flat. His flat had just the bare essentials, while Vanessa’s place seemed to be a museum of the impractical. There was too much of everything. Too many chairs and too many tables. Too many bookshelves, and innumerable laser-cut, hand-painted PVC figurines. They were everywhere. There were sculptures that Mort couldn’t imagine getting through the door not to mention lifting. The space didn’t feel crowded though. Aesthetics and function were perfectly married, giving an impression of warmth, calm and safety.

Mort rambled through the room appreciatively and finally sat down on the sofa. The window overlooked rooftops, and was largely filled with the now raining sky.

Vanessa returned with two cups of tea. She handed one to Mort and sat down on the couch next to him. From her pocket she took out her phone and one of those early sim crystal adapters.

“First, I need your consent. Say yes!” She plugged the adapter into the phone and keyed in a command. Mort’s mindstate prompted him with a request to join a simulation.

“Where are we going?”

“Nowhere. Just say yes.” Vanessa smirked. He accepted the invitation.

“So. I won an auction today and got a load of memory crystals,” she said. “From a house clearance, you know, where they sell out abandoned stuff.”

Mort nodded.

“I was sorting through them in a cafe. I figured the chances any of them actually work were pretty slim. But sometimes you can find really cool stuff going way back to 21st century. Anyway, then I popped the one I’m running right now.”

“You are running it right now?” Mort asked. Nothing seemed to indicate that the simulation was running. His mindstate confirmed they were not in a simulation.

“Yup! And nothing was happening at first, either. The phone kept claiming it was connecting to something. And then I saw a car going by… But we won’t even need cars this time.” She fell silent.

“Go on,” Mort said after a short while of waiting.

“Just wait,” she said and sipped her tea. Vanessa leaned back on the couch, lazily resting her head on the support. “So how have you been?”

“Uh, fine, I guess.”

“I heard you liberated yourself from work?”

“That might have happened.”

“By hacking the research and development unit of your company?”

“I couldn’t have possibly been fired from my own company, could I?”

“Well, the company you worked for… You know what they say, right?”

“Please, enlighten me,” Mort said in a mock-condescending tone.

“That it’s not befitting of the janitor to hack the research and development unit for purposes of personal amusement.”

“You know what they really say?” Mort asked.

“They say—ah, the wait is over,” Vanessa said and pointed through the window. Mort looked outside.

The rain had gone wrong. The streaks from quickly falling droplets had narrowed down to single globules sliding in almost a controlled motion, and the rain’s whispering susurration had become a calm hiss. But, of course, it was not the rain that had gone wrong, it was the world outside - it seemed to have significantly slowed down.

“Curious,” he said and got up from the sofa. He walked over to the window and as the raindrops went on decelerating, his mind put the visual input into patterns. It seemed as if he was staring on layers upon layers of transparent sheets on which at regular intervals the raindrops were glued to. Like a dotted three dimensional matrix, the raindrops made it impossible not to see the parallax nature of the perspective, as he tilted the head one way and the other, the drops closer to him moving faster and the further ones seemingly not moving at all. But that was just a side-effect. Time alterations - what was going on here?

His mindstate was still confident that they were not in a simulation. That was silly, he thought to himself, simulations couldn’t breach their virtual constraints.

“It went like this until it came to a full halt,” Vanessa said, joining him at the window, “and then the sim quits with a connection error and things go back to normal.”

“How many times did you try to run it?” Mort asked after a contemplative pause.

“Just once, and then I messaged you.”

Mort nodded.

“So,” she turned to him, “sir-expert-in-hacking-all-things, could you please tell me what is going on? Is it messing with our heads or is it hacking the immersion?”

“Well, no,” Mort replied hurriedly. “Messing with our heads and hacking the immersion would be one and the same. And either one wouldn’t make any sense.”

The little cogs in his brain started turning as he tried to think up an explanation. “Immersion is zero level simulation, the whole of humanity is enveloped in it.” He remembered the line from his primary school textbook. The topic was covered in the first four grades and then quickly forgotten, as for all intents and purposes, immersion was reality. It was simulating life on the molecular level and so rigidly followed the same set of rules as reality. There was no abstraction of concepts, like in normal sims - it was the closest thing to the reality and virtually indistinguishable from it. Hacking at that level would be infeasible. Besides, he would have heard if anything like immersion hacking had ever happened.

“This is big,” he said, “like, really really big.”

“Well, duh. That much I did figure out myself,” Vanessa said.

Vanessa's reply made Mort smile. He asked her permission to run the sim on her terminal. Vanessa nodded and he went over to the matter projector table behind the sofa and, after calling up the interface, selected terminal from the menu.

A matte, graphite-like mass spread across the table. The vibrant green outline of console windows appeared, and were filled with the same substance a moment later. A stalk rose from the middle of the wide edge of the table and from it, like the petals of a tulip meeting the morning sun, the screen’s sides spread in arcs, spanning well beyond the boundaries of the table. Mort sipped his tea. The projector finally chimed, upon finishing its work, and the cursors in the consoles started to blink invitingly.

Vanessa threw the sim adapter to Mort, who plugged it into the terminal, and ran the simulation again, this time in a sandboxed trace mode.

‘Accessing server’ appeared on the console.

Mort waited patiently, keeping his eyes on the apartment window.

He hummed. “This shouldn’t be happening at all.” The raindrops were already starting to slow down, going from dropping to sliding. “I’m running the sim in a sandbox,” he said.

“You will have to try harder,” Vanessa said, “sandbox?”

“It’s like a layer around the sim. The code is wrapped up in it and doesn’t even reach us.”

“And it still does this whole time travely slowmo thing despite it?”

“Well, not travely,” said Mort.

“Fine, not travely. But what?”

“I have a better question!”

“Go on.”

“What is it connecting to?”

“Uh...”

“Exactly. And I suggest we start there,” Mort said with confidence.

“All right!” Vanessa said and made a motion, “hack away!”

Mort laughed out loud. “I’m afraid we will need a machine slightly bigger than yours for that.”

TWO

The air in the dead-end street was a pungent mix of sour smelling garbage and ammonia from stale cat pee. There was nothing the unrelenting rain could possibly do to the layers of dirt etched into the walls and tarmac. Vanessa gagged before shutting off her nose.

Mort seemed unaffected by the stench, as was the man in a leather trenchcoat waiting for them at the far end. The man impatiently shuffled from one foot to the other, holding an awkwardly bent umbrella carcass in his hand, the canopy missing entirely. Not being able to stay still any longer, he broke into a stride and rushed up to meet them.

“I can’t believe you have one of those,” Mort said shaking man’s hand and looking at the umbrella. The clothless carcass repelled the raindrops with a fizzing noise. Maybe it was boiling them. “Have you seen these?” Mort asked, turning to Vanessa.

The man flashed an insecure smile. “Gotta have style!” His eyes were darting between Mort, Vanessa and the ground. He pressed a button on the umbrella handle and, with an zooming sound, its ribs extended to cover all three of them. The device was making quite a racket.

“Is it hand-cranked?” Mort teased over the noise.

“As a matter of fact, it’s powered by the very rain,” the man replied. “Where are your manners, Mort?”

“Of course, of course! Vanessa, meet Xeno. Xeno, this is my friend Vanessa.”

“Very nice to meet you,” Xeno shook Vanessa’s hand and bowed theatrically, mindful to keep the umbrella level. She smiled and nodded in reply. “Shall we?” he said turning back towards the far end of the alley.

Contrasting with the red brick buildings leading to it, the street ended with a painted dark-grey wall. A sign - “Paradox Lab”, in neon pink-blue cursive - stood on the wall, and a plain door under the sign led them to an elevator that, after Xeno had finished struggling with his zapping umbrella and waved a sort of ID at the panel, took them to the 4th floor. Instead of going up, however, the elevator started a slow and rattling descent, taking them underground.

“I’ll make you a new key-card and generate codes,” Xeno told Mort, who nodded a thanks.

When the elevator finally stopped and the door opened, Vanessa exhaled loudly, her breath echoing in the silence like an insult. Mort chuckled. “In Xeno’s defence, I hear it has never broken down.”

The elevator door opened to a rusty platform giving way to a view over a long and wide hall about three stories tall, with an arched ceiling. In the middle of the hall was a metallic, windowless cubic structure with two flights of staircase leading to a single door on the second floor. It almost spanned wall to wall and up to where the ceiling arched in.

“This is what a house wearing a tinfoil hat inside of another house looks like,” Mort told Vanessa.

“And for a good reason,” Xeno added.

“For a very good reason,” Mort agreed, smiling.

They took the ladder going down from the platform and then up to the cube’s door. Xeno punched in a password at the wall console and the door opened to reveal a narrow hallway ending with yet another door, and another console, which shone green as they approached.

Vanessa found herself standing in a spacious lounge, with a corridor halving the room and an array of wall-facing sofas arranged on the left and right. Xeno gestured them to follow to the kitchen in the middle the room and, after grabbing an apple for himself and tossing Vanessa a bottle of water, with a be-right-back disappeared with Mort behind yet another door on the far end.

Vanessa opened the bottle, took a sip of water, and sat down on one of the couches. A subtle visualisation was playing on the wall, a triple helix weaving and unweaving. Xeno joined her shortly after.

“You seemed to be keen on doors,” Vanessa said.

“For a good reason,” Xeno said, nodding. “So, what are you guys up to? Not that you have to tell me.”

Vanessa smiled. “What kind of stuff do people bring to you?”

“Oh well, anything really,” Xeno said, “anything you could throw at a farm without the whistles going off.”

“A server farm, you mean?”

A spark glimmered in Xeno’s eyes. “We are fifteen meters underground, well out of the reach of radio waves. The cube is essentially a vault and a suspended Faraday cage. No signals come in or go out. The in-house nano-reactor provides us enough processing power to run an immersion of our own. And we are connected to the outer world with a secured optical relay. Only photons get in and out, and only in a controlled fashion. And within that, we have another Faraday cage - that’s where Mort and I just were. A room in a room in a room, if you will, so that the lounge can stay connected and the lab is safe at the same time.” He fell silent and his eyes bolted down to his boots. “I’m not bragging.”

“I know.” Vanessa said, her voice reassuring. “It seems you have thought it all out.”

“We have a little club going on here. I’m just holding the fort, really.”

A thought occurred to Vanessa. “How much will this cost us?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he replied, “none of this is for sale.”

“So, how does this work?”

Xeno grinned. “How much do you know about Mort?”

“Plenty,” she said and winked just as Mort returned.

* * *

“So, what now?” Vanessa asked, waving after Xeno who uttered a bunch of quick good-bye’s and rushed away, his umbrella stick fizzing.

“We wait,” said Mort and motioned to start walking. “Come, i know a place not too far from here.”

“How long do we wait?”

“Until it dings,” he said, jumping over a puddle.

“Dings?”

“Like a microwave.”

She considered Mort’s reply. “And how will we hear it ding?”

“I will get a notification.”

“I thought it was a fully isolated 15-meters-underground processing-power-reinforced-Faraday-cage-nothing-comes-goes-out, thing.”

“You’re a fast learner,” said Mort, grinning. “But it dings. Knowing Xeno, I’m guessing it involves a dozen mechanical squirrels in a wheel, a carrier pigeon, two semaphores and a miracle.”

“You don’t believe in miracles,” she said.

“Neither does he,” Mort replied, and pointed to an entrance to a cafe.

“All right,” said Vanessa, somewhat satisfied with the explanation. She pushed the door open and the next instant pulled it shut. She looked at Mort, “Are you serious?”

Mort laughed. “Come!”

He stepped in front of Vanessa and pushed the door open, electronic music blasting at deafening levels. Mort dove into the crowd and Vanessa followed closely in the narrow slipstream behind him. “Sorry! Excuse me!” he apologized, pushing through and sidestepping bigger groups. Every now and then he looked behind to make sure he hadn’t lost Vanessa. He had a wide smile on his face. Finally, they got to the cafe end of the place where the noise was at a level fit for a conversation. Vanessa liked it. They sat down at one of the diner tables as an overly enthusiastic waiter came to greet them. Vanessa quickly got rid of him, ordering two no frills beers, stressing the no frills part.

“I’m buying,” she told Mort, “and I presume we have time. So, tell me everything… How are you?”

Mort nodded and started talking. He told her about his recent adventures in the world of simulations and that he was contemplating trying his hand at crafting realities himself. He told her about his short-lived career in the Panopticorp and how the irony was lost on the surveillance software manufacturer, when Mort was caught wiretapping the communications of his superiors. And when the second round of beers arrived, they were deep in discussion about the social implications of surviving solely on takeaway food.

Eventually Mort received the notification they’d been waiting for. Vanessa told him that she wouldn’t be taking a single step in the alley of the smells, nor had she any intention of getting stuck in that elevator trap. Mort agreed to retrieve the decoded sim himself.

THREE

Back at Vanessa’s place Mort fired up the terminals while Vanessa went to make tea. She found Mort deep in code when she came back with the cups.

A stream of characters flowed across the screen in longer and shorter lines, reminding of a sideways tilted, magnified image of a forested horizon passing by. The flow abruptly stopped - the command output had reached its end. Mort’s gaze left the screen and he sunk into the chair. There was determination in his eyes.

“This will take some time,” he said. Vanessa wasn’t sure what decoding a sim entails, but she knew that when somebody says something will take some time, it usually means it will take more than they think.”

“You’ll sort it out,” she said, sitting down on the couch, smiling. She had decided to turn to her own mysteries. The strange chip had come up quite fast and there were many others to sift through. Unlikely to be as strange as the time slowing one, but nothing seemed particularly unlikely anymore. Vanessa emptied the box of sims next to her on the couch.

Worn down, rugged and dirty, they smelled of dust and storage houses. Some had stickers and others seemed to be color-coded. There was the vanilla kind, with the name of the hardware manufacturer, and there were the ones that claimed their contents with a permanent pen. But most had no markings at all. Mystery meat of digital fantasies dreamt up by enthusiasts decades if not centuries ago.

Vanessa had always wondered how it would have been to live in the renaissance of the home brewn, when sims were so big and required so much bandwidth that running them over the network was impossible. When hacker clubs reemerged out of necessity and proper socializing once again had become central to thought exchange. When people carried around these self-manufactured realities in their pockets, desperate to show them off. The time of utopias.

The room lights zoomed out and the apartment disappeared, as Vanessa connected a crystal to her phone and started the sim.

She found herself sitting in a beach chair, under a parasol on a sandy coast. Cloudless, the blue sky dropped to the horizon, where it met the ocean. A calming hush came from the waves rhythmically breaking at the shore. She had a tan and a swimsuit. She exclaimed in surprise when she found that even her nails had been polished.

“Your drink, ma’am,” a butler announced in a balanced and clear voice. He had an aura of class, wearing black trousers and a suit jacket. He took a cocktail glass from the plate he was holding perfectly level and put it on the table next to her. “Would you like anything else?”

“That will be all, thank you,” Vanessa said. She took a sip of the cocktail and recognized hints of the sweet-sour taste of Daiquiri. She smiled and decided to stay in this sim for just a bit longer.

An instant holiday on the beach was a very common theme in the old-day sims. While impressive at the time, the imperfections were now obvious to all senses. The lack of detail in texture, the unrefined synthesis of smell and taste and the uniform heat touching her skin that could just as well have come from an oven. Vanessa loved it. It was the very reason she kept hunting for these sims. The synthetic feel of it all had its own appeal. Fantasy filled in where technology failed. And the divide between reality and sim was still detectable without checking the mindstate. The divide that would urge one to return from the sim to have the experience first-hand — the postcard “Wish you were here” feel of it.

Without its usual holiday makers the virtual world was just half of what it had been, though. Vanessa tried to imagine how it must have felt with people all around. Chatter and laughter and beach volleyball. Kids, in their first sim, right after the mindstate wake-up. Their eyes wide in wonder one second, and shoveling sand the next. Vanessa took a last whiff of the synthetic ocean breeze, smiled, and blinked out of the sim.

Mort seemed to be deep in thought, his forehead a thick array of wrinkles. With both feet on the seat, he perched on the chair, squatting like an owl. Rocking the chair, he swung back and forth, his lips moving as he silently read out the lines of code.

He had made room for a little whiteboard on the console screen that he reached out to every now and then to add another scribble or an arrow.

Vanessa took a pen from her pocket and wrote “beach / 22” on the sim chip, guessing the century it had come from. There was no point talking to Mort right now, she thought, and started the next sim.

A ski slope, the snowboard already strapped to her feet. She was ready to go downhill, which she did.

Next she found herself controlling a spaceship, and the one after that was a movie, just as it would have been in a theatre, an action flick about robots taking over the world. The collection of sims was forming a pattern. No games, all pure simulations, some recordings. She decided to check up on Mort, but let the movie run in the background, if only for the devastatingly bad puns.

How is it going? She messaged Mort via mindstate.

“Quite well, actually!” he said out loud.

“Oh!” she said, blinking out of the sim. She hadn’t expected a reply straight away. Mort was still typing on the console. He finished by slamming the Enter key and then went silent in anticipation. The lines in the console started to scroll and his face turned smug.

“I just sent a message to every single person in the world,” he said. “Except nobody can read it.”

“Excellent,” Vanessa said. They exchanged a few smug-faced nods.

Stretching his back out, Mort hopped off the chair and walked to the window. For a moment he looked at the sky that had darkened while he was reading the code. “The sim appears to be using comm’s service layer to send out shouts to the whole net at once. As far as I can see the messages are delivered, but instantly discarded as noise… It is not noise, however. It’s information.”

“So is it some kind of a chat program?” Vanessa asked, not certain what to do with the information.

“Not exactly. It’s the transport, but not the goal,” he said, “It’s like you are inviting someone to a birthday, but instead of sending out the invitation, you leave a special microscopic sign on every rock in a forest. For others to see the sign, not only do they have to know where to look, but also what to look for.”

“Sounds like a skilfully planned birthday,” Vanessa said. “What did you write on your invitation?”

“Hello, World,” Mort said and smiled, “It’s not like anyone will read it anyway.”

Vanessa hummed. “And what now?”

“The message that the sim itself sends out is a combination of several variables, but since the code is all scrambled, there is little telling as to what they do. I’ll write a little program that will try out different values for those variables. But first I have to figure out how to know if we get a response, because there is no point in shouting if we can’t hear the reply.”

“Shouting parameters and hearing values, gotcha,” Vanessa teased.

“It will take some time,” Mort said, smiling. “Is there any food around?”

Vanessa hadn’t realized how quickly the day had flown by. It was now past ten, and in response to Mort’s question or maybe from the thought alone, her stomach growled. They moved to the kitchen and she fixed them a quick dinner. Basic as it was, Mort couldn’t stop praising her cooking skills.

Later on, Mort returned to the consoles and with practiced ease lost himself in the code. Vanessa could see that he was having tremendous fun. She went back to the chips, hoping to stumble on more relics of nostalgia, a starry night on a boat somewhere in the middle of the ocean, maybe. People just didn’t dream like that anymore.

FOUR

Triggering a jerky push, the static jolted Mort’s elbow and sent him flying from the chair. He gave a startled cry and landed on the floor. After an idle pause, he pushed himself up and looked around, regaining awareness of his surroundings. What was it - what were people supposed to say in these cases?

“Good morning,” the thought finally came and vocalized itself.

“Morning!” Vanessa said cheerfully, coming from the kitchen with a cup of coffee. She gave Mort the cup and sat down at the desk.

“It says O.K.” she said, looking at the consoles.

Mort rubbed his eyes. His mind was still buzzing. “Once?”

“No,” she said, “a few dozen times.”

He took a long yawn. “What’s the time?”

“A bit past seven”

That meant he had slept just one hour. Though it felt much longer.

“Time resumed while I was making coffee,” Vanessa said.

“Resumed?”

“Wasn’t that what you were doing?”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. That shouldn’t have happened, but at least explained the time. He stood up and pulled another chair to the desk. Sipping coffee, he looked at the listing. There were more O.K.’s than he had been expecting.

“Ready?” he asked.

Vanessa shrugged, smiling. “I guess!”

“No no no,” Mort said, shaking his head. “Are. You. Ready?!”

Vanessa laughed. “Yes!”

“Here we go!” Mort yelled, shaking his brain into full awakeness.

He copied the first line that had O.K. next to it and pasted it into another terminal. After typing a few lines of what looked remotely like English, he hit Enter and turned towards the window.

The motion outside started to slow down a few seconds later.

A sparrow was just about to take off from one of the rooftops. The bird’s neck craned forward, its tiny feet slowly pushing up and the wings expanding to full span and then pushing down. Its flight seemed more like a butterfly style swim, the wing beats becoming slower and slower till the bird was frozen. A new line scrolled onto the terminal. Connected. And the world zoomed out.

Trapped like an insect in amber, Mort found himself suspended in bright light, hanging in the middle of nowhere. The light pierced his eyelids, filling his vision with cold blue. It pressed heavily on his chest and at the same time both burned and froze his skin. He felt like he was drowning in snow. A low frequency hum resonated in his bones, but then it started to split out across the full spectrum, each added frequency pressing on his body heavier and heavier. Mort’s brain tried to find patterns in the disintegrating cacophony. It appeared as a single sound one moment and as many the next. An electric tingle was chewing at his nerve endings, slowly working its way up from his feet to the top of his head, increasing in intensity as it went. It jolted his muscles and twisted his body, forcing his back into an exaggerated arc. His mouth snapped shut when the electricity got to his jaw, locking his tongue inside. His eyeballs rattled erratically in the sockets as under the strain of the screaming, pressing, and burning, electric snow he strained for the mindstate. For the big red immaterial Off button. He felt his consciousness slip away and in the sudden realisation that this could be it, he tried to fight for control even harder, but one by one, black speckles blotted out his vision. Hissing white noise replaced the dense humm and he passed out.

With a heavy ringing in his ears and a throbbing headache Mort came back to his senses. He was in the chair again and could taste the metallic of blood on his tongue. Vanessa was lying on the ground, bleeding from her nose. He dropped down and gently shook her shoulder, but Vanessa wouldn’t move. His heart went pounding in his ears.

With trembling fingers he grabbed Vanessa’s hand and felt for her pulse. He whimpered and then checked her neck. It wasn’t there. He brought his ear to Vanessa’s mouth. His ears were burning, his heart was racing and the headache hammered at his thoughts. He exhaled deeply and listened. He couldn’t hear a thing.

FIVE

Mort stood up and paced around the room. Help. Right, of course! He reached for the mindstate to make an emergency call, but it wasn’t there. Like a rabbit in the headlights, he automatically tried to reach mindstate another 3 times. He kept pacing, lost, trying to examine his options, trying to remember anything CPR related, but only thing that came to his mind was the acronym itself. Then something groaned. He shot a look back and saw Vanessa getting up.

“Ouch,” she groaned, “that was quite a trip.”

Mort let out a relieved cry, and rushed to her. His eyes went misty as he hugged her.

“Oh… hey” Vanessa grunted, her ribs being crushed. “What’s with all the hugging?”

“Are you crying?” she asked. She could feel Mort’s body shaking. He responded with a broken, trembling laugh. He held her for a moment longer before letting go.

“I’ll get you a napkin,” Mort offered, pointing to Vanessa’s nose. Vanessa told him where to find some.

“I think we need a change in scenery,” she said, wiping blood from her nose. Still shaken up, Mort gave her a relieved smile and a nod.

They went for the door behind kitchen that Mort had noticed the day before. Vanessa tried to push it open, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Huh,” puzzled she said, after another attempt. “Wanna give it a try?”

Mort's attempts were as futile as Vanessa’s. “Is it locked?” he asked.

“No, nothing like that,” she said.

Mort looked at the door, and then he looked outside and spotted the sparrow still hanging in the air where they had left it.

“I believe this has to do with that,” he said, pointing to the windows.

“With what?”

“Time’s still frozen… See that sparrow?” He said, pointing to the bird.

“Oh… Time’s still frozen, of course,” Vanessa said with a chuckle, putting on her best Mort. He smiled.

“Shall we wait?” Mort asked. “I can’t think of anything else we could do right now.”

Vanessa nodded and then suggested they maybe eat breakfast while they wait. Mort was all for eating, and Vanessa threw together a light breakfast and tea and with that they moved to the window-facing couch

“Do you ever use the other couches?” Mort asked, still not fully used to the idea of how big Vanessa’s apartment was.

“When I read,” Vanessa said, smiling. “This one’s for gazing… I wonder, are we stuck here for good?” she said, biting an apple.

“That would be marvelous,” Mort said. “I guess this also explains the mindstate.”

“What about it— ah, yes, I see now. It’s disconnected… Don’t think I’ve ever seen that message before.”

“Neither have I,” Mort said, looking at the sparrow. “Do you like sparrows?”

Vanessa gave it a thought. “Sparrows are fun,” she said after a pause, “but i like pelicans more.”

“Pelicans? When was last time you saw a pelican?”

“On the coast and, hmm, a while ago, indeed.”

“Why pelicans?”

“They look content. And a little fat.”

Mort laughed. “I like seagulls.”

“Those screeching dumpster monsters?” Vanessa asked.

“Not that different from you,” Mort said with a smirk.

“Oi!”

“Kidding,” he said with a wide grin. He was very glad to see his friend alive and well.

It took forever, but time finally resumed. A loud ticking noise came from the kitchen, and slowly transformed into a groan. It sounded like it was coming from the door they had tried to pry open. The door was rattling when they reached it, and then, with a violent jerk, it burst into pieces.

Vanessa gasped. “Oh well, I didn’t like it anyway,” she said after a moment. “At least we’re free now. Let’s go!”

The exit led upstairs to a beautiful roof terrace. Cosy outdoor lanterns running across the length of the terrace and there were plenty of recliners to choose from. Vanessa dropped down on one and Mort took the one next to her.

“Isn’t this great?” she asked after a while of idle laying and Mort nodded with his eyes closed. “So, when are we going again?”

“I need some time to figure out what’s going on.”

“Excellent,” Vanessa said, “There’s something I want to check out in the meantime.”

They went silent again. The sky was dust grey, the wind chasing low flying clouds, their shade dark, their bellies full. It looked busy and a little bit dramatic – exactly how Mort felt. A cold breeze swept the terrace, ruffling their clothes. Vanessa rubbed her shoulders, shivering.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll be off now.”

Mort nodded.

“Promise not to go without me,” she said.

He nodded again and smiled. “I promise.”

Mort tried to think of the next steps but his head was a mess. It all made very little sense. Distraction, he thought, distraction is what I need, and accessed the mindstate and commanded it to start a very special sim. The world zoomed out.

SIX

He was standing on a beach on a grey day - all one big cloud. He was wearing shorts that fell just an inch over his knees, a colourful wind jacket, and a pair of skate shoes that went over his ankles. The waves broke, and the familiar crying of seagulls fighting for scraps of something - bread, or chips, or battered fish - came from somewhere far away. About ten steps from him, a robot sat in the sand.

Sturdy iron mixed with copper plate, it was a fine example of steampunk robotics as inconceivable as they were impractical. Somehow, it was sculpting a sandcastle without touching the sand. The grains levitated between his metallic hands, joining to the castle at robot’s command. The process looked slow and laborious. A force field held back the hungry waves that threatened to swallow the castle. The whole thing was held up by nothing but suspension of disbelief.

“Haven’t seen you in ages,” the robot said. A name tag reading “X1” glowed over its head for a brief moment and then faded out.

“Hey,” Mort said, “how have you been?”

“Same old,” the robot replied, standing up and leaving the castle behind . The robot broke into parts that went flying towards Mort, enclosing him. “Same old.” The voice came from all fragments at once in staggered echoes, magnifying Mort’s encirclement.

Mort smiled, melted himself into a puddle and dispersed into the air, shrouding the robot’s mechanical parts in a thick fog.

“I need a break,” Mort said, his isolate voice coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.

“That’s what we’re here for,” the robot parts said and merged together, forming a wind turbine. It spun up and forced the Mort-fog away. The fog became drops became a single watery blob of Mort which morphed into a rock and fell down with a heavy thunk, shaking the ground. The turbine turned back into X1.

“Where’s the rest of the gang?” Mort asked, morphing into himself.

“It’s too early for the rest.”

“But not you.”

“Not me.”

“Because you never sleep.”

“Because I always sleep.”

With a wave of his hand, Mort raised a charcoal-black chair out of the ground and sat down. He waved his hand again, in the opposite direction, and a transparent dome formed around them. With a snap, he flicked it on, and the inside glowed milky white. The dome closed them off from the ocean, the waves now barely audible.

X1 raised a couch in bold red. It whined under the robot’s weight as he sat down.

“Sim hacking...” Mort suggested.

“Oh? Does it have anything to do with yesterday then?”

“You’ve talked to Xeno.”

“We talk. You had a girl with you.”

“She’s a friend. “

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“I shall let Xeno know.”

“Oh?”

“He was interested.”

Mort smiled. “Should you be telling me this?”

“Our judgement says it’s fine.”

X1 was an experiment. Xeno had a chip embedded in his brain that would stream half his consciousness to the sim. It could access Xeno’s memory, but wasn’t able to commit anything to it. This sim lead a life independent from his body, but could at any time “merge” back. At that point, the independent consciousness was gone, and a new one – a fresh slate – was sent out precisely 60 minutes later.

The memoryless Xeno was very different from Xeno-Xeno. It was bolder, more daring, and more playful.

“How long have you been up?” Mort asked.

“Three months,” X1 said and grinned.

Mort whistled in surprise.

“Going for a record,” X1 added.

“Can we keep this between us two, though?” Mort asked.

“Of course,” the robot nodded. “One second. Let me turn on the recorder. Please, speak into this thing.” He pointed to a conjured microphone now standing in front of Mort and morphed himself into a top-hat-and-a-monocle-wearing-T-rex.

Mort transformed into a pterodactyl.

“So you see,” he said, shaking his webbed wing-hand. “I was connecting to a sim I had, so to speak, liberated.”

“Go on.” X1 had produced a notepad out of thin air and started making notes. He cocked his head awkwardly, straining to look at both what he was scribbling and back at the pterodactyl Mort.

“And—”

“—kay-ee-dee,” the T-rex interjected, finishing his scribble. “Hacked,” he read from the notepad, satisfied. He gave Mort a wide grin and tossed the notepad away.

“I’m listening!”

“And in the end, I ended up in the middle of nowhere,” Mort said, waving his wings. “It was bright, loud, and rather unpleasant.”

“Ah,” exclaimed the T-rex. “We have seen this before.”

“You have?” Mort changed back into his human avatar.

“Ever try listening to a photo?”

“You’re saying I am trying to access the data the wrong way?”

“Or you might be listening to the static,” X1 said, changing back into his robot avatar.

“Wouldn’t there be safeguards for such things?”

X1 thought for a moment and then seemed to have an idea. “Depends on how old a sim we are talking… Or maybe you are missing a filter,” he suggested after a pause.

“So you have seen this before?”

“We have.”

“Did you find the filter?”

“We did.”

“And in the end?”

“Just an old game.”

“I see.”

Mort checked the mindstate and flicked the dome off. He looked up and with a second flick changed the sky so it was now projecting the view from the rooftop terrace.

“It’s about to rain where I am,” he said, pointing up.

The robot followed his hand. “So it is.”

“You were helpful.”

“Come and see us more often, will you?” The robot had procured a handkerchief and was waving it passionately.

“I will try,” said Mort, and blinked out with a smile

SEVEN

Smothered by the thick blanket of a fallen cloud that couldn’t decide between being drizzle and fog, Vanessa rode the bicycle towards the waking city. It was wet and early and fresh, and the humid air brushed her cheeks and dampened her already frizzy hair. Lulled by the hiss of wet tires on tarmac, her mind ventured back to that awfully noisy simulation. An experience the like of which she hadn’t seen before, but what bothered her the most, was that she had passed out and not the wiry Mort who barely ever remembered to eat, and when he did, barely ate.

The engine whines of the low-flying hovercars thickened as she neared the city centre, until there was no room left for her solitary thoughts. She jumped off her bike as she turned onto a bustling street and proceeded to push through the noise-hypnotized crowd. Passing out the occasional apology for the wide handlebars, Vanessa reached the corner cafe where she needed to turn and found she could breathe again. The noise dimmed, and her thoughts came rambling back to her. What a strange sim! She wasn’t sure how to even think about it just yet.

She left the bike leaning on the shop window, and pushed the door open. The door squeaked a trashy ping-ping in greeting and the scent of dust and machine oil rushed into her nose. She took a breath and entered a maze of shelves littered with knick-knacks. Defunct hardware, waiting to be fixed or just being exhibited, toys ranging from plain wooden blocks, to robots with biometric scanners that uncannily recognized their owners as well as devised appropriate salutes when handled, primitive see-through holo’s that would induce a migraine in minutes, and a wide selection of balancing toys sitting awkwardly on their edges, using counterforce from internally spinning motors to maintain equilibrium. There was no seeming order to what went where.

“Welcome back, Vanessa,” a flat voice came from somewhere behind the piles.

“Hey-hey,” she said, returning a porcelain dog figurine to a faux antigravity display without hurry. She waited to see it settle down. Resuming the slow rotation, the figurine wobbled to and fro as if sea-borne, the undulations slowly evening out. Vanessa peeked her head around the corner of the shelf and smiled at the android.

“Back so soon!” the robot said, a polite smile decorating his crude facial features. His human likeness barely escaped the uncanny valley. More doll than awkwardly almost-human-yet-not-exactly, unlike the ones that had followed his generation for a whole very creepy decade.

“I am, indeed.”

“You must have liked what you got?” The robot cocked his head slightly to the side, giving his best emoting of wonder.

“I did.”

“A bucket of chips,” he said, half as a statement and half as an instruction to the till to project the items. The till materialized an image of the bucket on the counter.

“They always look more impressive in holo.”

“They do indeed.” The robot smiled. “I hope the contents were satisfying.”

“They were,” Vanessa said, nodding. “Is Ryan—”

“—right away,” the android replied with a smile. He gave a bow and disappeared into the back of the shop.

Vanessa turned around and, leaning on the counter, let her eyes return to the little wonders on the shelves, looking for that next thing she would know she needed, as soon as her eyes fell on it. Awakened by a heightened sense of responsibility, a coo-coo clock rudely interrupted her awe by throwing a shouting fit. It gave a shriek for each passed hour, and at the fourth cry it had become quite clear to Vanessa that a coo-coo clock was not something she could ever want.

Ryan stumbled out to the counter at the eighth and final cry of the mechanical bird. He was in his mid-forties, wearing pyjamas and had long hair in a fashionable just-out-of-bed mess. A week’s worth of stubble covered his face, and his pale grey eyes were heavy from sleeping. He gave one wave to the clock and then a second to Vanessa.

“If—” he started, but a yawn got in the way.

“Vanessa,” the android suggested.

Still in the yawn, Ryan nodded.

“From yesterday,” the android went on.

The yawn peaking, Ryan nodded again.

“Good morning,” Vanessa said with a smile.

Having exploited the yawn to the full, he closed his mouth and stopped nodding. He froze for a second, his gaze jumping around the ceiling.

“Right,” he exclaimed after a moment. “Coffee!” With his index finger he wove an intricate pattern of whirls and ups and downs that made little sense to Vanessa, but the android nodded in response. He raised the counter for Vanessa and motioned her in. “And close the shop, you crazy monkey,” Ryan called, without turning around, “it’s not even noon yet!”

“Sit,” he commanded, pointing to the chair as they entered the kitchen. “Black, no sugar, unfiltered, pour-over — take it or leave it,” he added.

Vanessa quickly considered the offer. “I’ll take it.”

“Good.”

“So are you living in your shop?” she asked. This was the first time Vanessa had been behind the counter.

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like you are living in your shop.”

“Buzz, get us something to eat!” Ryan called, searching for the android.

“Right away,” Buzz, who had just entered the kitchen, replied and a moment later a lusciously seeded italian bread was brought the table. It looked homemade.

“Who’s the cook here?” Vanessa asked.

“Who do you think?” Ryan asked.

“Not you.”

“You are quite observant, then.”

“I’m the cook here,” the android said, smiling, “the cook, the shop manager, the dishwasher the—”

“—oh enough!—”

“—and childminder.”

“Do you see what I have to deal with?” Ryan asked in mock disappointment.

“A blessing and a curse,” Vanessa said, nodding. She took a careful sip of the bitter black coffee and bit down on the slice of the bread. Both were excellent.

“Oh, right,” Ryan said after a moment. “Why are you here? I mean, not that I mind.”

“Of course,” said Vanessa and nodded. “The chips from yesterday.”

“The chips…”

“...from yesterday.”

“Ah yes.”

“The bucket of—”

“—chips, yes, yes,” he said and yawned.

“I’m curious about one of the bundles.”

“Mhm,” Ryan hummed. “Of course.”

He took a moment of thoughtful silence. “If you are curious, then my bet is you won’t even want to tell me what you are curious about.”

Vanessa gave a thankful nod.

“We don’t do the collecting ourselves,” he explained. “That would be madness.”

“Of course,” Vanessa said. Ryan seemed to be still in half slumber, so Vanessa patiently waited for him to fully wake up. He seemed to be considering something.

“What do we get in return?” the android suggested.

“Back off, Buzz, we have a loyal customer here,” Ryan said. “Aren’t you, Vanessa?”

“Most loyal,” Vanessa said, smiling.

Buzz winked. “Why don’t we make a list then,” he suggested and produced a very material pen and paper from one of the cabinets.

“Flying low-tech, are we?”

“Oh,” the android said, having recognised the surprise in Vanessa’s voice. “You see, I don’t have one of your fancy mindstates.”

“A security concern?”

“Unhackability is certainly a bonus,” Ryan said, smiling. “No, no. Good old Buzz here is doing just great without knowing what time it is.”

“I do know what time it is.”

“It was merely a figure of—”

“—but it’s true, I don’t know if this is simulation or not.”

“But then again, what would you do in a sim?” Ryan said.

“I could adjust my directives if I knew that this was a sim. Say, get rid of the first three to simplify my circuitry.”

“I will just take a wild guess that the first directive is about not harming humans?” Ryan said. It was a lovely sight, the two going back and forth like an old couple.

The android waved the banter away.

“Full list,” Ryan said, nodding.

“Full list,” the android confirmed and started scribbling. He finished a few minutes later and handed the sheet of paper to Vanessa. It was exceptionally beautiful and legible handwriting.

“Now I think of it, I could have sent you an instant message. But this is better, wouldn’t you agree?” the android said and winked. “Here, let me sign it for you,” he said and etched his signature under the list, with Vanessa still holding the sheet. It was perfectly legible, despite the fact that Buzz had been writing upside down. It spelled R.R.Buzz, the final z venturing off into a wild underline under the name.

“Perfect,” Vanessa said, inspecting the list. It contained a good dozen names and addresses. “What does the R.R. stand for?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” the android said and winked.

“Now, how about another coffee?” Ryan asked.

Vanessa nodded a yes to that. And she nodded a further yes to the tea that followed, and to the full breakfast that Buzz insisted she just had to try. And a very good while later she was back out on the street again.

After the few seconds it took her to soak up the list into her mindstate, Vanessa hopped on her bicycle and started pedaling towards the first address. The other left, she thought to herself upon realizing she was going the wrong way, and did a painstakingly slow full turn, mindful to not run into the walls of the narrow street.

Her route was leading her away from the city centre but the destination turned out to be much closer than she had expected. Wedged between two bustling high street fashion stores, a little door with a buzzer greeted her at the address. She buzzed. The answer came almost instantly, and Vanessa sighed, as the door opened into what seemed very much like an elevator cabin. Warily pushing her bike inside, she looked in vain for some kind of number pad, but apparently it wasn’t needed. The door shut behind her and the elevator started its descent.

It had very little resemblance to Xeno’s trap, however, with the cabin well lit and the walls a soothing and very light grey. She felt a tickling lurch as the cabin accelerated and faint animated streaks with fading tails blazed up the wall, matching the movement. Vanessa’s mindstate duly reported her proximity to the surface and at the 120 metre mark the cabin eased to a halt.

“You are Vanessa,” a KR greeted her as the doors opened. “If you don’t mind,” he said, extending his hydraulic limbs towards the bike. She didn’t, and the robot took the bike and started pushing it away at a brisk pace. “Follow me.”

The matter-of-factness of KR’s black magic circuitry never got old for her. KR simply stood for “kind robot” and in the AI spectrum lay between an appliance and a sentient being. The robots had a good balance of the human needs they mirrored - they followed the nuances of moral code, but they also got things done. For a bit of spark, the KR’s possessed suppressed personality traits, which found expression in little painted markings on their sturdy, metallic bodies and, at times, clothing. Each one had a seemingly random set of mannerisms and a unique accent, but that—and their bipedal nature and height—was where their similarity with humans ended. They eagerly took menial tasks, never tired due to the endless supply of free electricity and, because of their blissful programming, were never bogged down with existential crises or whimsical moods. With the calculating middleman cut out of the equation, the machine behind the progress of humanity had never been more exposed. Vanessa followed the android without much thought but as they took some turns—and therefore, not others—she started to wonder if she‘d be able to find her way out of the maze without a guide.

“I did a scan of the records,” the KR said, after taking yet another turn leading down a corridor identical to the previous one and all the ones before.

“Records of what?” Vanessa interjected.

“Buzz sent me the instructions.”

“I see. Please, go on.”

“While we don’t track too closely, I think I did manage to identify the rough scope of the batch, parts of which we sold to your friends, and I’ve taken the liberty of gathering them for you.” He poured the words out in polite haste with a voice brimming with helpfulness and professionalism. He suddenly stopped at a door that had slid open as they approached, and gestured Vanessa inside, pushing the bike in after her.

It was a plain room, lit with artificial daylight. The temperature and the nano-flickering of the light simulated true daylight, making it easy to forget how deep underground they were or that they were underground at all. Apart from the stacks of boxes against the wall, a well-sized desk and a terminal in one corner, the room was bare.

“Happy hunting,” the KR said, “ping me if you need me.”

After he left the door slid shut and merged with the wall. Vanessa’s stare lingered on where the door had been, and after shaking off the claustrophobic voice in her head, she lifted the first box on the table and started rummaging.

She went through the boxes, scouring for anything that could identify their owners, and fifteen boxes, a single identity, and three hours later, she was ready for a break. At this pace, she now realised, it would take at least a month to go through the rest of the stack. And this was only the first of the warehouses. She lay down on the floor with her eyes closed and let her mind roam. When she awoke from her unintentional nap, she got back on her feet and went through another batch.

As she finally left the fake daylight of the warehouse behind, and ventured out into the evening light, it felt like she had just entered a cinema theatre. Somewhere through that thick blanket of clouds the sun was about to set and, she thought, the rain would resume any moment now. Her mindstate told that it wouldn’t rain another twenty minutes but the rolling thunder that boomed as she hopped on the bike suggested otherwise. She smiled to herself and hastened home.

EIGHT

Vanessa found Mort lying on the couch and staring out of the window. The consoles were littered with gibberish of various degrees and there were notes in Mort’s chicken-scratched handwriting all over the place. Mort had taped a freshly printed dark matte plank to where the door had collapsed in the morning. She made them tea.

“Looks like you’ve been busy,” she said, nodding her head towards the door and handing Mort his cup. She sat down next to him on the couch.

“Oh,” he said, nodding, and took a slow sip. “That. It was getting windy here.”

“Was that all it was getting?” she asked with a smirk. “How’s the sim doing?”

Mort laughed. “Ah, yes.” He took another sip. “I’m afraid I’m stuck. What about you?”

“I had a moderate success, but tell me about your stuckness.”

“You will have to put your programming hat on.”

“No, no,” Vanessa said, shaking her head. “I don’t have that one in my collection and you know it. You will have to use your explaining hat. And then we eat.”

“Food!” Mort exclaimed, hearing the magical word. “I’ll start from the top,” he said after a contemplative pause. “I didn’t expect much and didn’t find much when I looked first at the sim yesterday. The files pointed to a somewhat archaic structure.”

Vanessa nodded eagerly. She shuffled into a more convenient pose, folding her legs in front of her. She was all attention now.

“Roughly speaking, sims have a dual mode of operation. You can either ask it to perform a task. For example—” Mort stretched his hand out for Vanessa to see—”say, I’m the sim and you’d ask me to calculate the area of my palm. I’d tell you it’s 147 square centimetres…”

“Or,” he went on, “you could ask me how I would go about finding the area of my palm. Then I might tell you about triangulation, or how I could check the statistics database and approximate, or that I’d dip my palm in ink, press it on a sheet of paper, and then scan it in and count the pixels—”

“—is that your palm area?”

“147? - Yes.”

“Is that much?”

“In practical terms?” Mort asked with a smirk.

“For example, yes”

“It’s roughly 1.2 sheets of toilet paper.”

“So my hand—”

“I imagine your hand would take up little less than one sheet.”

“Interesting,” Vanessa said approvingly. “How did you go about figuring it out?”

“I scanned my palm and broke the shape down into simpler ones, like rectangles and triangles.”

“Not the ink path?”

“Too messy… but you see,” he went on, “now that you know how to go about it, you could repeat the process. And that’s the second mode of inquiry. But sometimes, and especially in commercial sims, you might want to keep the methods secret. Otherwise people might rip your sim off and then you wouldn’t be able to make any money. And that’s where encryption comes in. To decrypt the code you need the sim’s key, or you need to guess the key, and guessing takes forever, unless you know a guy who knows a guy.”

“And that’s why we went to Xeno,” Vanessa said, nodding.

“Correct.”

“And now you have the code and you still don’t know anything.”

“Are you sure you don’t have the programming hat in your arsenal?”

“Tell me—” she brushed his question away, “what’s not working?”

“The second method of inquiry—and this has been around since pretty much beginnings of sims—is there to make sure that the sim is not trying to run malicious code—like some stuff that could make you go crazy, or steal all your belongings, or whatever. Before the sim hits you, the machine does heuristic checks on the code to make sure it’s safe. But that doesn’t mean it has to be legible. Sometimes, just like in our case, the author really wants to keep everyone out, and so they obfuscate the code.”

“Isn’t all of the code obfuscated just so people need programming hats to understand it?” Vanessa asked proudly.

“Nice try, Sherlock.”

“Who’s Sherlock?”

“Do you want to find out what’s not working or not?” Mort asked with a smile.

“Fine,” Vanessa said and, her face half way between a grimace and a pout.

“Say I told you that tomatoes are A and apples are B, that shop is C and bread is D. And then I’d ask you to go to C and buy A. That would be the first level of obfuscation.” Mort watched Vanessa’s eyes roll up as she mapped the letters to objects.

“But say, instead of asking you to go to C, I’d ask you to go to place that is not A, B, or D, or the place that has E’s where E would mean beer, but not F’s where F would mean chair—”

“Where am I going, again?”

“And that’s a more advanced method of obfuscation.”

“How do machines understand that?”

“Human concepts are just symbols to machines anyway and, while they don’t understand the nature of the instructions, they have no problem following them.” Mort allowed himself another contemplative pause. “In other words - some code ends up being more like riddles.”

“And how do you solve it?”

“Maybe riddles isn’t quite right. Some code ends up being more like riddles in a maze. You follow the maze and solve the riddles and then you die of old age, in the middle of the maze.”

“Which is where we are at.”

“We haven’t even entered the maze yet.”

“It sounds like a big maze,” Vanessa said enthusiastically. “But wait. What was the whole thing this morning then?”

“Mhm,” Mort hummed, nodding. “The maze has many exits and entrances—” he started but then stopped and grunted. “I guess this is where the comparison with the maze breaks down. It’s more like—just as in all complicated things—there are many parts. Say, a car would have repulsors, lights, wheely bits, I don’t know much about cars, but, you know, parts. And I partially figured out how the comms work. And that’s what we tried to ride.”

“So it’s a riddle car in a maze and we know how the radio works,” Vanessa summarized, getting up. From the looks, Mort needed more time. “And now we’ll make some food,” she said. “Empty stomachs beget empty heads.”

Mort laughed. “And what did you do the whole day?” he asked after the dinner, a bottle of beer in hand.

“I’ve got a bit of stuckness myself,” Vanessa said, “but I think it is of the sortout-able kind.”

“Give me the nitty gritty”

“Just the nitty gritty?”

“And the rest.”

“Very well,” Vanessa said and slouched back down on the couch. It had gone dark outside while they were cooking, and now the city lights lit up the sky. Mort had been so deep in the code that he hadn’t noticed it the previous night, but the change in vantage point gave the city a very different vibe. Not the serene grey-white-red view from his condo, but the active, yellow sparks of a living city. In fact, it looked like an entirely different city. The cloud blanket that had kept out the sun earlier, now kept in the glow from the city lights, brightening the city.

“Here’s the nitty gritty,” Vanessa went on. “I thought I’d look into the owner of the sim.”

Mort cooed approvingly.

“I went back to the shop and the owner was friendly enough to give me further pointers. Now I have a list of dozens of warehouses and contacts and tons of stuff to go through in each one.”

“And you haven’t found anything yet, or it wouldn’t be stuckness.”

“Not yet.”

“And how will you know when you find the owner?”

“Believe or not, I’ve a knack for these things,” she said, smirking. “At one point it will just… make sense…”

Mort hummed. “So what’s the process?”

“It’s actually straightforward,” Vanessa’s eyes showed a spark of excitement. “I go through stuff and look for clues and sooner or later somewhere a name pops up. And then I do it again, and again, and so on. And if the name pops up often enough - that’s the person whose stuff you are looking at. Then you dig the web on them and then you start piecing it all together, and at some point you just know what belongs to who, like I could tell my stuff apart from your stuff any time.”

“What my stuff do you mean?” Mort wondered.

“My point exactly,” Vanessa said with a smirk.

They fell into a comfortable silence.

“I have an idea about your warehouse,” Mort said after a pause. “But I need to talk to someone first.”

“Will that involve letting that someone in on the secret?”

“In a way. But not really.”

“I have a suggestion about your stuckness,” Vanessa said after a pause.

“Oh yes?”

“Indeed.”

“What is it?”

“Sort it out,” she said, smiling.

It was a little past midnight when Mort finally got home. The ambient greeting lights faded out as he commanded them off with a handwave. The gesture itself had little function and the intent of the action was what mindstate registered, translating into action.

He kicked off his shoes and socks, and tugged off all his clothes but the final layer, and went to sit by the full-wall window. He enjoyed the liberating sensation of uncovered skin. Leaning his back on the sturdy structural beam, he looked down at the familiar sight of the city, his busy mind involuntarily tracing patterns. It had been long two days and he was ready for a full night’s sleep, but even with the dying buzz of the beer, he knew that he was too wired to attempt sleeping just yet. Tomorrow he will march into the foreign lands of reverse engineering, the terrain will be treacherous, but for now—he exhaled a happy sigh—for now he would not think about it.

NINE

The next morning Mort rolled out of the bed little past ten in the morning, and commanded mindstate to build him a desk in the living room. With the matter projector buzzing along, he proceeded to make a cup of coffee in the crudest manner known to man, simply pouring boiling water over the coffee grains. Coffee was second of his habitual pleasures, the first being beer, and preparing it in such crude fashion was his way of differentiating between the stoic functionality of his home, and the epicurean world outside, where he lounged in cafes and the coffee was made with much more care.

The wide, arching screen of the console was ready when he returned, the terminal cursor blinking invitingly. He parked his hot mug on the desk, sat down and, enveloped in the coffee aroma, picked up the console pen that had been formed in an aesthetically pleasing 36 degree tilt from the keyboard.

WHAT’S FIRST,

he wrote in big letters on the off-white scribbling area of the desk, and started to adorn it invasively with loops and hoops as his brain churned. As always, eventually he over-egged the decorations to the point where the letters became illegible.

MONITORING,

he wrote next to what used to be “what’s first” and connected the two with a bold arrow.

He knew he was being a little paranoid, but the big brother was still worth consideration. From his previous encounters, Mort had learned a thing or two about the world of cybersecurity and the ever-watching eye. The balance between privacy and security in immersion wasn’t perfect, but it was functional enough for the common populace. The interests of the masses revolved around the basic vices of humanity, vanity above all, and researching blackhat hacking and reverse engineering would be equivalent to searching for “how to assemble a bomb in your basement”, and would pin a big red flag to his online identity. He needed to find more neutral terminology, an approach hidden in the shroud of statistical insignificance that would let him fall through the filters unnoticed.

VALIDATION,

he etched in and a thought occurred to him.

Up for a chat? He sent via mindstate to Xeno.

How about this evening? I’ll be in the lab.

What about right now?

Some people have jobs, you know…

Yes.

Real jobs…

Oh, really?

Where they do work, Mort.

Like what, Xeno, what is it that you are doing right now?

Xeno’s silence broke the rhythm of the back-and-forth.

Please tell me you are not eating icecream.

No.

That came all too quickly.

I’m not!

I read you like an open book, sir.

Mort filled the lack-of-response-gap by imaging Xeno grumble.

I’ll see you tonight! He added.

Yes yes.

And…

Yes?

Thank you.

You’re most welcome.

With that now sorted, he returned to his pad, and scribbled down TOOLING and drew another arrow. The scale of the sim code was dauntingly large and if he was going to do this properly, he had to write code around code, programs to analyze programs. This trail of thought brought him the first—much more innocuous than how to hack a sim—search phrase. He searched “Code analysis” through the mindstate and redirected the output to the display. “Statistical program analysis,” the search engine suggested and Mort accepted the change. He took a sip of coffee, and started sifting through the results. There were heavily-linked articles, online discussions, recorded tutorials and sim course offerings, and he made sure he stayed with the ones that seemed to be within the scientific-curiosity, asking-for-a-friend, analyzing-my-own-code boundaries. There were ample examples and explanations and, as he followed the various knowledge-forks, the window count on Mort’s displays ballooned.

He let out a satisfied growl as he felt the cogs spin the right way. He was the lion king of the code jungle, the shark of the code ocean, the soaring eagle of the code sky and the deep burrowing animal that burrows really good, of the code earth. “Burrowing animals,” he demanded through mindstate and, after briefly perusing the search results, updated his social status to “prairie dog of the code earth” and satisfied returned to the code.

Hours flew by unaccounted as Mort gained grasp on both the process of reconstruction and assembly and the inner workings of the sim itself. The code he had had plastered together from pieces of advice on the web, various examples and his own proud ingenuity, was slowly taking over the simplest decoding. Following his instructions, the automation could apply solutions to the whole sim’s codebase.

But still, every knot in the logic had to be untied at least once, and there was plenty of code that couldn’t go without—in Mort’s opinion highly overrated—human intervention, at all.

A thought occurred to him in the interlude between two sessions of heavily annotating a subroutine. He exclaimed an embarrassed “oh right” and arched his back in a slow stretch. His muscles were unhappy with the sedentary position he had been occupying for the last few hours.

He got up and strolled around his flat, stretching in all the awkward ways he could think of. Finally, he sat down on the floor and after a brief conversation with mindstate, the world zoomed out.

He found himself standing on the familiar beach and facing the sea again. The cries of seagulls surrounded him and the cold, salty breeze rustled his hair and gave him goosebumps. Turning around, he saw that X1 had moved on from building sandcastles to building pyramids. There were a good dozen of them going inland, the first poking the sky just about a click away. He jumped in a quickly conjured buggy and drove towards them. Peaks of new ones sprouted on the horizon as he approached the cluster. Seeing the scale, he abandoned the vehicle and lifted himself into the sky. It seemed to be more of a geometrical forest of pyramids thing than a row, as he had first thought. Mort noticed X1’s name tag hovering at the far end of the forest and flash-hopped towards it, teleporting ten metres a jump. As he approached, he saw X1 in all his steampunk glory supervising the build from a platform of a zeppelin. Mort glided next to X1 and took in the view.

Pyramids building themselves, massive boulders assembling grain by thickly packed grain in air, and then arranging themselves into shape.

“It’s the same principle as before,” said X1, keeping his eyes on the building process. “And welcome back! So soon - I knew you’d miss me.”

“I see you’ve taken liking to the steam thing.”

X1 nodded. “Just a moment,” he said, turning away from Mort, and raised his hands up like an orchestra conductor. Within seconds the remaining blocks assembled and fell in their places as if in an accelerated video playback, and another pyramid was finished. X1 turned to Mort. “Hello again.”

“Why don’t you build them all that way?”

“Because of the trade-off between speed and having to make decisions, which, effectively, is my bottleneck,” said X1.

Mort nodded. “I have a project for you, if you’re game.”

“A project?” X1 exclaimed and slanted his copper eyebrows in surprise. “Can’t remember the last time I had a project!”

“Not that you would remember.”

“Not that I would remember,” he agreed.

“This one involves analyzing and deducing.”

“Does it also involve programming?”

“No progr—”

“If it does I’m not interested—”

“amming at all,” Mort said, rendering a magnifying glass in his hand, and handing it to X1. “It’s a real detective type of thing.”

“Psh, please,” X1 said, rejecting the glass. His bionic charcoal-black pupils shrunk into two tiny dots as they receded into his skull. “Built-in,” he said, pointing to his eyes.

“Of course…So what do you say?”

“I say bring it on.”

“Excellent. It shall be brought on.”

“I’m looking forward to it very much,” X1 said and, still staring at Mort, cocked his head sideways. “I can see your pixels.”

“You will hear from me soon!”

Mort bowed, patted his mechanical friend on the back, blinked out of the sim, and found himself back in the flat.

Two irreconcilable values - needing to put things away quickly and needing to find them later - had been operating in conflict in Mort’s storage room ever since he had moved in. While initially Mort had tried to control the opposing forces, he had quickly realised the futility of his actions, and changed his mode of operation in favour to pure storage (meaning, in effect, putting things away quickly), which made every retrieval a feat of its own heroic kind.

Tripping on the wires, and letting out curses between hums, he scoured the piles of gadgetry in the room, looking for a very specific device that he knew, was in there, somewhere. Somewhere in there. In there somewhere. (There was no difference, in fact, between somewhere and in there). A stubbed toe, a toppling landslide of gadgets, and good half an hour later, he finally emerged from the room victorious, with a pen-like device in hand.

It looked like a hybrid of pen and a flashlight bore on its side a laconic 5µm label that could be mistaken for branding but was, in fact, pointing to its 5 micrometre resolution. It was a scanner, detailed enough for matter replication, but too coarse to reproduce functional electronic devices but of the crudest of systems.

Mort hailed a courier via mindstate and then pointed the pen at his coffee mug and pressed the snapshot button. The device beeped once, indicating that it had started the scan, and once again when it was done. Mort pinched at the produced interactive holo of the mug and then spun it around. Satisfied, he turned the device off.

Right as he was finishing scribbling instructions for Vanessa, the drone announced itself at the elevator and, having received the package, happily went on its way.

What is this? Mindstate chimed a message from Vanessa soon after.

Read the note.

I know what a scanner is - I am talking about the note. What’s “Snout..oil..we wall tak letter”?

Scan it all and we will talk later.

That’s most certainly not what it says.

I wrote snout oil, hoping it will come out as what I said it says. I call it the ‘2 steps ahead of myself’ strategy.

Remind me to send you a typewriter… Do you mean the warehouse stuff?

Yes.

Perfect. Let’s tak letter then.

Hmm… Snout out!

Mort checked the clock and went back to hacking. He was gaining some understanding, but at the current stage the logic of the code could be as much for the circuitboard of a tomato soup maker, as it could be for operating a power plant.

TEN

The rattling of the elevator stopped, the doors hesitantly slid away, and Mort stepped onto the platform overlooking Xeno’s underground lab. He ran down the stairs, negotiated his passage through the two doors with the codes Xeno had provided for him, and found himself in the lounge once again.

Unlike the morning before, the lounge was alive now, the ceiling lights dimmed and the couches glowed red, the colour indicating the availability of the ‘net in the room, and that the space was not safe for venturous hacking.

Mort’s eyes slowly drifted across the room, scanning for Xeno. He walked forward, processing faces, old and new. Familiar engine revs reached his ears from right, and he saw the twins in a head-to-head race of Burst. He stopped to see how it would turn out. Fox—the eldest of the two—eventually totalled her car into a road divisor after thinking too much about which side of the road to take. Rabbit cackled at his sister’s misery and, driven by distraction, followed her suit a moment later by missing a turn and embedding his vehicle into a wall. Mort waved a commiseratory hello, and resumed his walk.

He found Xeno sitting with Seiji, another veteran of the lab, in a secluded corner at the far end of the lounge. They were looking at the full-wall screen at what seemed to be a piece of art. Seiji had a healty interest in encryption so the timing couldn’t have been more convenient. Mort dropped down on the couch and, after giving them a greeting nod, listened to the discussion. The project was Seiji’s and she wasn’t happy with the results.

“What are we looking at, Mort?” Xeno asked after a longer silence.

“A generative pattern,” Mort said, “and a fairly nice one, I have to say.”

“And what makes you think it’s generative instead of, say, not?”

Mort hummed. “For a natural pattern the distribution of the elements is all too neat,” he said, pointing out a couple of symmetries, “but it could also, of course, be the bias of this place.”

“No - you’re right,” Seiji said and grumbled. She turned to the screen, and, interacting with the render by moving her hands, twisted and tore the pattern projected on the wall, rendering a very different, much more chaotic, image. “Here,” she said, laughing. “Bit of mash after every render.”

“No cheating!” Xeno said, in mock sternness. “Get your procedures straight.”

“I’ll get the beers,” Mort suggested, getting up and receiving thumbs-up from the two other. He went over to the fridge and, unable to make his mind up between the various options, grabbed three bottles at random. “To the power of mash after every render,” he toasted after handing out the beer, and they clinked their bottles.

Xeno sighed, satisfied. “Centuries of progress and still nothing beats a beer in the evening.”

“You got it all wrong,” Seiji said. “Nothing beats a bottle of beer, because of the centuries of progress.”

“And hangover pills,” Mort added.

“For the weak,” Seiji smirked.

They went silent for a moment, the faint, gurgling hubbub of people and music coming from projected speakers filling the lounge with social homeliness.

“Speak, o traveller,” Seiji addressed Mort, after flicking off the projection of her code. “What offerings have you brought? Surely, you haven’t dared to come here empty handed after being away for so many moons.”

“He’s been cracking code,” Xeno said.

Rubbing her hands, Seiji cooed. “I hadn’t thought you the cracking type.”

“Cracking would be bit too dramatic,” said Mort. “I’d prefer - exploring.”

“He’s been exploring things,” Xeno corrected himself. “Come, come - show us!”

Mort nodded and, after gaining access to the screens via mindstate, connected to the wall and dumped the listing of the sim contents onto it.

Xeno stood up and approached the wall. He took the whole picture in and then started his browse. Navigating the file tree both via mindstate and using one-handed gestures, with the beer in the other, he rummaged through the annotated code like a starving raccoon would a garbage can, leaving nothing unturned.

“I’m not really sure if I approached the problem from the right end,” Mort said, shyly.

Keeping an eye on Xeno’s exploration, Seiji shook her head. “There are no right ends in this,” she said and sipped from her bottle. “And I can already see that you’ve done well.”

Mort could feel his cheeks flush, and was glad for the dim lighting. “Maybe we should swap projects,” he suggested.

“Where’d the fun be in that?” Xeno asked amused and winked, momentarily turning to Mort. While Mort couldn’t focus on more than one thing at once, Xeno’s attention seemed to have no limit. He continued his perusal in silence, the full-wall screen growing with neatly side-by-side aligned windows.

“So what happens when you try running it?” he finally asked. His voice had a teacherly tone he sometimes acquired when he knew the solution but wanted to see if you could find it too. Mort allowed it.

“Provided it’s not a torture sim, what happens is not what I think is supposed to be happening,” he said. “You get suspended in nothingness, surrounded by blinding light, and painful full-spectrum audio waves fill your head. Then you pass out. It could be a protection mechanism, the code for that is not there though.” Mort paused briefly. “From what I saw, it seems that, whoever they are, they have rewritten from scratch most of sim’s interfaces instead of using the code libraries, and then forgotten to write the sim itself.”

“I wonder,” Seiji said, “if that from-scratch part, judging by how it’s done, was written so by necessity, not choice. For example—” she scanned the wall screen and then ran a search via her mindstate. The results exploded into another set of windows. “The patterns here,” she highlighted a fragment, “are quite atypical. Nobody writes code like that anymore. It was probably written before there were any standards, and that’s why it’s doing everything by itself.”

Mort stared at the code fragments that Seiji had now made so obvious through her quick scan. He had noticed the single cases but had missed the bigger picture.

“Maybe it’s an arch-sim.” Xeno suggested, nodding. “Now, why don’t you try putting it all together.”

“Me-me-me!” waving her hand above her head, Seiji eagerly called.

“No no - let’s let Mort do it,” Xeno said, channeling his inner teacher.

“Fine,” Mort said and fell silent, collecting his thoughts.

“One,” he said after a moment, “it must have been written by a very curious person—”

“And paranoid as well,” Xeno agreed. “Might as well have been me.”

“Two, the sim was possibly publicly available, but intentionally scrambled so nobody could look inside.”

Seiji nodded approvingly.

“Three - even if someone tried to look inside, like I did, they wouldn’t find much, as the sim itself isn’t there.”

“Quite paranoid, indeed,” Xeno said.

“And four - I am missing something, without which the sim won’t work.”

“What if you aren’t missing anything and the failure is in the network layer?” Seiji suggested. “What if there just isn’t any remote sim?”

Mort gave that a thought. “But then the whole thing just wouldn’t work.”

“Hm you’re right. And how did you manage to make it work, exactly?” Seiji asked.

“Well… In retrospect, maybe it wasn’t very smart of me.” Mort said, smiling. “I bypassed everything but the network layer. The function that makes the call—” he said, pulling up the relevant part of the code via mindstate and pushing it onto the screen. “is asking for a port. So I went pinging all of them, starting from zero, till I got a response, and then plugged that in.”

“You were generously awarded for your courage,” Seiji said, grinning.

“Indeed,” Mort agreed. “So what am I missing?”

“What is he missing, Seiji?” Xeno asked.

“I’d guess you are missing another sim,” Seiji said. “A decoder that you would connect this sim into, and that would connect you to the actual sim. Turtles all the way down.”

“Turtles and elephants,” Xeno said. “Turtles and elephants.”

“And there really isn’t any other way, is there.” Mort said, more to himself than to his friends, and smiling, flicked off the projection.

ELEVEN

The next days went by uneventfully, and before Mort knew it, they had compiled themselves into weeks. Progress on the sim was slow and while Mort now knew the function of the sim—a piece between two other pieces—he was dealing with a three variable equation where only one of the values was known.

With one avenue already a dead end, Mort started looking into the matter of the master sim, to which his sim was apparently connecting to, and experimenting with the time slowing. Running the sim in a loop, he managed to drag out a single day into a week, and at some point he realized that the mindstate connection did not go offline but just slowed down like everything else, and the system mistook it for offline. The difference between the two states was nominal but the implications might be of use, he noted to himself.

At the end of the third week of his focused research, Vanessa showed up at his step without warning.

“I think I’ve found something,” she said, entering the flat. Not having found anywhere to sit, as the leaning chair was the only piece of furniture, she sat down on the floor by the window. “Behold—Echo Sticks,” she added and sent pages of text and a few photos to the full-wall windows. The windows darkened, cutting off light coming from outside and made the information legible.

Mort skimmed the text. The style was unmistakably Xeno’s, information mixing with humble detours of self-praise, boasting of the ingenuity it had taken to find and verify the information. Mort took a glance at the mugshot. The piercing stare of a very smart woman, perhaps just past her forties, looked back at Mort from the picture. Her understanding gaze hinted her age more than the slight wrinkles on the corners of her weakly smiling mouth. Her gaze seemed relaxed and clear-minded. As though an initial spark of curiosity had been nurtured into a solid, strong flame. It was as if all of her face was saying I know.

“A first/second-genner, not much footprint on parents,” Vanessa said. “University drop-out, interned at a bunch of tech companies till she hit 27 and started consulting for SEA from one ‘Immersive Ltd.’”

“I checked her blog, and it is as X1 says,” Vanessa said, pointing to the paragraph, “sim-programming musings, experimental art projects, and old-school ‘path ahead’ pondering.”

“All records end three months before her 100th birthday, with no death certificate to be found.”

“An off-gridder,” Mort said and nodded.

With life spans easily stretching into the three-hundreds, clean-slating had become a norm. Ditching a few decades, or a century, and starting afresh in a new city, unencumbered by social constraints and the stagnated reflections of acquaintances was only natural. With the population in the tens of billions, getting lost was simple. The only obstacle, and a mild one at that, was a new identity which, after initial hesitation, even the state agreed to start providing for.

The SEA, or Space Exploration Agency was huge and consulting for the company could mean many things. Paired with Sticks’ professional interests in sims put indeed made here a good candidate for being the owner of the sim.

“An off-gridder,” Vanessa confirmed, “with yet another unstartable sim among her belongings…”

Hearing of another sim, Mort cooed and quickly waved for Vanessa to surrender it. Grinning, she tossed Mort the chip. It was a nondescript mass-produced storage chip with nothing peculiar about it at all, and after quick inspection, Mort connected it to his console.

“There is more stuff to go through, of course,” Vanessa said. “But I thought - what are the chances of bumping into another sim that doesn’t do anything, eh?”

File listings started to crop up - it indeed seemed to be yet another sim.

“She fits,” Mort agreed. “I think I have an idea. It will either not take too long, or it will take too long. We will find out shortly. Tea?”

Vanessa nodded and after Mort brought her the cup, turned her attention to skygazing. Mort disappeared behind the console, occasionally letting out a puzzled hmm or something as nonsensical as “A is the seventh”, all of which, being deep in thought, he was perfectly unaware of saying out loud.

An hour went by under the vague light of the perpetually overcast sky, when Vanessa was pulled out of her own thoughts by a tap on the shoulder.

“Are you ready to die again?” he asked with a smirk.

“Do you think it will work this time?” Vanessa asked.

“Just one way to find out!”

“Sign me up, then.”

Mort let out a shaky exhale, returned to the console, and with a here goes nothing started the sim.

Just like all of the previous times, nothing happened at first, and then, second by second, the world eased into full stop. Cars and birds alike floating in the air, moving imperceptibly, the crowds of ant-humans frozen in their steps. The world zoomed out.

Mort found himself suspended in light, again.

In quick sequence he experienced momentous panic, instant regret and fear of anticipated pain. The noise started to build up, but thankfully faded and, as the lights dimmed, he found himself standing in a darkly lit room, about two by four meters wide with a broad, ambient neon-purple lines tracing grid on obsidian black tiles of the walls, and spilling out on the floor and ceiling. A solitary burgundy chesterfield stood invitingly at the wall opposite to him that Mort slumped down on.

Shortly a sign lit up, spelling Connecting in block letters.

TWELVE

Mort realized the change in his surroundings with a startle. A transition between two states, a tripping tumble of thought from what-is-this-place to how-long-have-I-been-standing. “Weird,” he mumbled out loud and found his voice strange, metallic, tinny. He repeated the words, drawing the vowels out, listening to himself. It seemed as if he was hearing artifacts of audio compression.

“Vanessa?” he said out loud and heard his voice slowly gaining body, solidifying. His vision seemed to have come together as well and, as it did, it gave him a nasty tickle, as though he were wearing glasses of the wrong prescription. He closed his eyes. And there it was - his ears popped, as though he was emerging from a tunnel, and he could feel that his vision behind his closed lids had steadied too. He opened his eyes and finally saw the surroundings in full fidelity.

The room was in warm shade of off-white and about five by ten meters, with the ceiling good four meters up. A dozen of sturdy humanoid robot racks stood at the wall opposite to him, their occupants present but not functioning, with their heads bowed down, awaiting activation.

He noticed an active android to his right as he turned.

“Oh hey,” the android said and from the manner of address Mort instantly realized that it was Vanessa, and that he was in an android body as well.

“Oh hey,” he said and smiled. “Quite a setting we have.”

Vanessa nodded and they fell silent.

Their robot forms matched those in the racks: light-frame bodies sitting on top of slightly bent legs. Their hands featured refined, lithe fingers fit for precision operation and their heads, supported on their shoulders with sturdy-looking hydraulics, were decidedly functional, with chiseled jaws and two lenses for eyes. Apart from the scratches and dents of wear that peppered the metal, the androids were indistinguishable from each other.

Now that he looked, Mort noticed the tag on Vanessa’s chest, stating her name. He guessed the same would have to be true for himself, too.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Vanessa said gesturing him towards the door that opened for them with a politely muted double-beep as they approached it, and opened into a corridor going left and right. Without giving it much thought, Vanessa pointed to the right and they headed out.

After walking around for a good few hours, trying different passageways, and checking the more promising rooms labeled “Engineering” and “Communications”, they had deduced two things: first, it was a space-faring sim and second, it was not a very exciting one, for nobody was home to give them missions or tell what this all was about. The ship was at least a kilometer long and had several decks. Following the schematics on the walls they finally found themselves on the observations deck that was at first, excitingly starry, but quickly lost its novelty - the stars weren’t moving fast enough. In fact, it seemed like they weren’t moving at all. Just hanging in the simulated vacuum.

“I think we deserve a break,” Mort suggested, earning a robotic thumbs up from Vanessa.

He reached into his mindstate to cancel the sim and exit the program, but the execution handle was missing. His heart dropped into his belly and twisted into a knot. No sims could change the mindstate. Just like someone who had found their bicycle gone after grabbing a cup of coffee, Mort skipped through the sections of the interfaceless interface in self-assured denial. There must, obviously, be some sort of mistake. But there was no mistake, and he had not missed anything. The thought handle to close the mindstate was simply not there.

“I can’t find the exit,” Vanessa said.

“Nor can I,” Mort said with a nod, and sat down on the floor, the ambient light reflecting off the dents on his metallic body.

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve