7. Fancy Tech
Fancy Tech
Dylan
Carl Sagan’s beach.
The tide was on the ebb. Her panic from earlier had receded into her mind’s horizon as she reassured herself this was simply a kind of virtual reality, some cutting-edge technology she didn’t yet have the words to describe.
She sat down on her bed, which was still there. She assumed that bringing her closest piece of furniture into this place with her was a way for the system to keep her calm. But even as her hands rested on the soft duvet, her brain processed the feeling of sand under her bare feet.
Hyperreal.
It was like she could feel each individual grain, with greater fidelity than in real life.
Now she’d been able to ground herself, her thoughts turned to Isaak.
He said she needed to think of him. But what did she really know about him?
A retired sports player, gorgeous brown eyes, tall, has a beard, vegan – but would still eat meat?
! Stop that, brain, she scolded herself.
He’d bought her a drink after he’d kept her from hitting the floor.
They’d spoken for a bit, they’d danced, and then…
Isaak. Ex-captain of the London Lazarus. Retired because of his limp.
Dylan filled her mind with everything she knew about him, pictured his face, then spoke his name out loud.
“Isaak.”
A few slow seconds passed. Seagull cries and the waves punctured the quiet.
“Hello?”
There he was, just out of reach, walking towards her across the sand.
He looked like the guy she’d met in the club, but at the same time, different.
Like a high-definition version of him, every pore visible and clear, light and shadow playing over him in just the right places, as if he was being filmed for a movie.
The black jeans she’d seen him in last night had been replaced with dark shorts.
This version of him walked confidently towards her.
Everything about it made him incredibly attractive.
She caught herself staring, then she checked herself, course-corrected.
“Hi,” she said with a demure little wave of her hand. “So… it’s a virtual world?”
Sand freckled his legs, drops of water shining like precious gems as he walked towards her. This is just what the simulation is telling my brain. This isn’t really happening.
She forced her eyes shut and reopened them a couple of times, hoping to grab a screenshot of this sight, a blossoming natural landscape more vibrant than real life, with Isaak right in the middle.
“It’s not VR,” Isaak said. Now that he was beside her, she could see that his face was sombre, tone ominous. “I don’t know how it works.” He scratched the back of his head. “I’m not sure anyone knows just yet. Someone gave me a roll of tape, and it landed me here.”
“And now you’ve given me one… When did you first try it?”
“Probably more than a year ago now… Do you like it here, the beach?” he asked, clearly wanting to change the subject.
“Sure, it’s cool.” She didn’t know why exactly, but she felt the need to downplay her excitement. Keep the boy guessing. “Does it a have name?”
“Laguna Beach. You landed here ’cause I—”
“No, I mean this whole thing,” she said, waving her arms around. “Not just the beach. You keep saying it’s not VR, but it certainly looks like VR to me, just with a fancier way to get in.” She smiled and gestured at the side of her head.
“Well, back when I started striding, I checked for wireless traffic or any sort of radio wave signal.”
“Striding?” she asked. Then something clicked. “Oh…”
He looked at her blankly. “What?”
“That’s why you said you were a strider, in the club.”
“Oh, right. Yeah. Honestly, it just came out.”
“Oh…” Nerves taunted her resolve. “You didn’t mean to tell me?”
His face flushed and he paced around. This place was incredible – the level of detail, how real everything looked.
“And?” she asked.
“Well, I… And what?” Isaak turned back to her, confused.
She chuckled. “You checked for wireless traffic, and…?”
“Oh, that! There’s nothing. Not a single packet.”
“Maybe it uses a different frequency?” She had heard of nanocomputers. That tech always seemed to be just around the corner, but never quite there. Maybe someone had somehow fitted them into the roll of tape, some gadget hidden in the cardboard roll. She felt like it was probably a stretch.
“I’m telling you, it’s not VR. It doesn’t connect to the net. There’s zero lag, no connection drops, no beachball, no loading screens!” He smiled. “So, welcome… to the Tapeworld.”
Dylan chuckled. “That’s the best you could come up with? It sounds a bit too much like ‘tapeworm’ for me, eugh.”
He chuckled, hand on the back of his head. “No, no, it’s the Tapeworld, as in a world of tape – a world you get to through the duct tape.” He looked flustered. “And I didn’t coin it, someone else did.”
“Who?” she asked. “Who else is using this?”
“A few people. I see them sometimes at this hangout. It’s like… a lobby? The Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”
She cringed. “That’s such a—”
“Cheesy name,” he completed. “I know. I didn’t name that either. The Tapeworld brings out the romantic in people, I guess.” He shrugged with a sly smile, and winked at her.
That’s when night became day. The tide magicked itself around them, water flooding everywhere, and Dylan had to paddle to keep herself afloat. Isaak was standing on a surfboard that came out of nowhere, his grin almost outshining the sun behind him.
“What the—” she yelled, mouth half full of seawater.
“Changing the time of day is easy. Just got to be careful with your surroundings!” he said, sounding so sure of himself and of his little prank.
Paddling over to his surfboard, Dylan hit it with a hand, flipping him off of it, and he splashed into the sea. Digital wizard my ass, she thought.
Gargling the water out of his mouth as he rose back up, he waved a hand and the sea around them slowly receded, like flushing down an ocean-sized toilet.
“You gotta make your mind up!” she pleaded with him, bent forward with her hands on her knees on the wet sand, out of breath. She was completely soaked. “It’s not like my brain is not blown already.”
The strider – she found she liked to think of him that way – looked at her and laughed, shaking the water out of his hair. “Sorry, Dylan. I admit it was maybe a bit much for your first time!”
She liked hearing him say her name, but… “Call me Dee. That’s what my friends call me.”
She definitely saw him blush. She wondered if he could feel himself blushing in here?
“Sure, of course.”
“What about you? Do you have a nickname? Can I call you Zak?” The diminutive sounded cute to her.
“Oh. Sure.” The exchange of cute nicknames seemed to paralyse him for a moment. He shook his head, shaking himself out of it. “You know, if someone had come into your bedroom while you’ve been in here, they would have seen you flail around like a fool on your bed.”
“Oh.” She realised she hadn’t even thought about how she came to be on that beach for the last few minutes. She just was. There was no telling this world apart from real life, bar the more vibrant colours, and the weird tricks Zak kept pulling off.
“So what do I do about it?” she asked. “Aren’t you flailing around, wherever you are?”
Isaak explained again about idle routines. How you could script your behaviour out there, while you were in here. It sounded mad: programming your own body to do things.
“What sort of idle routines can I use then?” she asked.
“If you’re lying in bed, you can mock sleep. Makes the whole thing feel like a dream when you come out. Or have it look like you’re reading your tablet. Anything you can think of.”
Wrapping her head around the concept of faking sleeping, it dawned on her to ask him, “Where did this Tapeworld come from? Who made it? Is this a new game thing? You must have tried to figure it out?”
He turned serious. “All I know is that this is some real tech – 2001, monolith and the monkeys kind of thing.” He hummed the movie’s soundtrack, reaching out to an unseen mysterious obsidian object.
He was cute.
“What about the cops, the government?” she asked. “Do they know about this place?”
“I hope not.” He narrowed his eyes. “Can you imagine what those fucks would do to something like this?”
Dylan fought back. “We’ve got a decent group of people in power right now. It could be—”
“Don’t even think about it. You can’t tell anyone about it. I’m serious!”
“Like Fight Club?” she asked, having seen the movie as part of a teenager’s mandatory school curriculum on incels and the MRA movement that was disbanded in the 2030s. “Wait a minute,” she said with a playful look. “If this tape is so secret, how come you gave some to me?”
Isaak went red. “I…” He looked like he was about to burst, his face looked so intense. “Well, I wanted to impress you…”
Damn. He really had no idea how impressive he already was to her.
“Shit,” she said. “Well, I’m happy you gave it to me. Thank you.” She cleared her throat. “Consider me impressed, I guess.”
Isaak looked startled. “Well… Great. I mean, everything happened a bit fast last night. I wanted to make sure we’d keep in touch somehow.” He looked at the sand, hands in his pockets.
Dylan’s insides buzzed with a warmth that felt hard to describe. It’d been a while since she’d felt like this…
She smiled. “You could have asked for my StreetSocial, you know.” She reached out to take the collar of his ultra-high-definition, black, faux-leather jacket in her hand, but something made her stop.
She let her arm go limp. This weird irreality felt very real right now.
She looked away, then quickly flashed her eyes back to him.
It seemed like he didn’t know what to say. He stammered some words she couldn’t make out before she decided to intervene.
“It’s cool, I get it. Wow women with your fancy tech…”
“It’s not like that at all,” he said. “I’ve never given tape to anyone else. I just didn’t want you to think I was some shy guy with a limp trying my luck.”
Only then did she realise it. He’d been walking this whole time without a trace of his limp. This was somewhere he could feel like he did before. This Tapeworld was important to him, and he’d invited her in.
Dylan raised her hands to stop his defensive explanation. “I get it, Zak. I like this place, it’s fucking cool.”
They shared a happy chuckle.
Isaak smiled and swallowed.
She noted her clothes were already dry. The sun began to set on the horizon. A pair of purple-and-blue beach towels appeared out of nowhere, laid perfectly on the sand.
Isaak sat down on one. “A rest after all the excitement?”
He was so sweet. Forget flowers and opening the door for you, this guy could make sunsets.
“Is that…? Did you…?” she started.
He must have realised what she meant.
“Yeah, I made the sun set. This place is mine, so it’s easy to control. It’s a tape-space.”
“As opposed to the Tapeworld?”
He smiled. “Right!”
“So you control everything in this space, but, outside of it, what happens? Other spaces? That boulevard place you mentioned?”
She fumbled her words. It felt like she was asking how to breathe.
Isaak sat forward and looked out over the water. “There’s rules. You can’t alter it as easily in a space you don’t own…”
Something popped into her mind from before. “You named this Laguna Beach. Have you ever been there? The real Laguna Beach?”
He looked at her, lips pursed. “In the Kingdom of America? Uh… I’ve never been there, but I’ve seen archive footage. From before the fall. My dad was from there.” His voice wavered and he kept looking out at the ocean. This was clearly an awkward subject.
“Sorry, we don’t have to talk about it. It was a beautiful country.”
“No, it’s okay. It still is, in parts. The wars and climate change didn’t wreck everything. At least, that’s what they say.” He swallowed hard. “My mum and dad moved here just before I was born.”
If he was around thirty years old… “That would have been right around the revolution. No wonder they came here. Must have been horrible. The disasters, and the…”
“The Dark Year.” The strider lay still, motionless. Was he replaying visions of the Apocalypse Revolt? Did he know the details of how his parents had evacuated the USA? What they’d had to sacrifice? “They lived there. Laguna Beach. My father saw it flood.”
Then it was Dylan’s turn to go quiet. Fighting all her life for something already won…
It was a strange feeling. While her parents had been on the front lines, they kept that part of their life away from her.
Didn’t tell stories, didn’t paint a picture.
They didn’t have to leave their country.
The United Kingdom survived the revolution, or – rather – learned from it, becoming the First Kingdom. Not so for Isaak’s parents.
“It’s getting late, Zak. We can stop.”
He turned and looked her in the eyes, his wet with held-back tears. He moved his hand towards the side of her head. “You ready?”
She nodded.
With a rip of tape, the bedroom walls came rushing back, putting themselves back together by some spell, geometric animal posters unfurled, desk and wardrobe sliding back into place, her neatly put away Dr. Martens plopping back into existence.
She was alone in her bedroom again, the beach only in her memory, the sound of the rolling waves leaving a faint echo.