11. Tapeworld
Tapeworld
Dylan
Evening. Tapeworld. Beach. Isaak.
“Why does everything look so… shiny here? Grander, more real than IRL?” Dylan asked.
“Real life is dull, monochrome,” Isaak said, “all the glass buildings, concrete, the suits, the overcast skies. The Tapeworld frees you of all that boring shit. It’s always sunny here, or cool night-time, depending on what you fancy.”
“Hmm. Reminds me of a philosopher, who wrote that just because a reality is virtual, digital, it doesn’t mean it’s worthless or fake. It still exists, and you still experience it. It has a physicality even if you can’t touch it.”
Isaak smiled. “The map is not the territory.”
“Is that also Jean Baudrillard?” she asked.
“Korzybski… Who was a huge influence on Baudrillard, so not far off.”
“Of course.” She huffed in feigned annoyance, a half-smile on her lips. “I didn’t know you were into general semantics?”
“I got into it when I started striding the Tapeworld.” He looked out to the beach.
“It was inevitable I’d want to know the words to define my everyday, how to think about it.
” He stretched an arm out in front of him, palm down, and raised it slowly.
Sand gathered beneath it, responding to his command gesture.
“Did you ever see VR that looked and felt this good?”
He gestured down the beach, inviting her to walk with him. She moved to his side, leaving a only small gap between them as they set off together.
“I haven’t really used VR much before, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said, watching as he raised more tiny mounds of sand along their path. “I only use it at the gym, and it’s fairly basic.”
He looked at her, his expression asking her to elaborate.
“My parents didn’t let me, growing up,” she explained. “They hate everything tech. Especially VR. All part of some nefarious plot by the Kings to enslave people, they say. So I never really got into it…”
He laughed. “They might be right… But I love it.”
It’s why I was a fan of you for years, she thought. Living vicariously through you, experiencing all of your excitement, watching your match vids.
“You were telling me about the Tapeworld,” she said aloud. “Show me.”
His face relaxed into a smile. “Sure. Try it. Hold out your hand and picture something.” Something about explaining this place to her lit a fire in his eyes, and they gleamed like the infinite stars in the sky.
It excited her too. The idea of manipulating the sand like him felt unreal. She had to keep telling herself this wasn’t real life. Alright. Let’s try this…
Her fingers outstretched, she became aware of how bare they looked. The assortment of rings she wore in the real world… They were gone here.
After a stare from Isaak, she focused on the tiny hill of sand between them.
Nothing happened.
“Am I doing something wrong?”
“Here.” He closed the distance between them and placed his palm over the back of her hand, spreading the gaps between her fingers wider with his.
The sensation of his skin on hers threatened to tip her over the edge of normality and calm she pretty much had to fight to maintain at all times here in the Tapeworld.
This isn’t real?
“Focus on the sand and where you want it to go,” Isaak said. “Don’t just think it. Visualise it.”
She took a deep breath, holding it as she saw the motions in her mind’s eye.
Slowly sand sprouted from the golden pile, accumulating into a small mound. She felt every grain of sand touch her fingers, a light caress, despite her hand being a metre away.
“Nice!”
The swelling in her chest was cut short when Isaak moved his hand away, putting the small distance between them again.
They continued their walk, and she kept practising. She experimented with directing the sand in different ways, creating hills of sand in all kinds of shapes, adding ramps and even making walled castles.
“This feels incredible. Creating like this.”
Isaak beamed. “VR doesn’t work like this at all, you know?
I could do a similar thing in a VR world but it wouldn’t look nearly as realistic, or feel as incredible, like you say.
It must be the way the tape communicates with the brain.
It’s not just a screen in front of your eyes.
” He sighed. “At least, that’s my theory.
” He turned to look back down the beach.
Dylan glanced back too. Around the line they’d created along the shore, she counted some forty tiny little hills, forts, and castles.
Suddenly filled with an urge to try something else, she stretched both her arms outward towards the row of hills. “Whoosh!”
All of the sand structures were impacted by an invisible wave of energy flying from her hands, derezzing into particles of light, exploding out in all directions, each grain becoming nothing.
“Oh my goddess!” Isaak said. “What the hell have you done?”
Her cheeks instantly warmed in embarrassment, concerned that she’d broken some rule she didn’t even know about, but when she glanced at Isaak he was smiling.
“You’re teasing me?” she asked, letting out a breath of relief.
He chuckled. “Yeah. Sorry.”
Seeing him so playful, rather than his more usual serious self, Dylan suddenly felt brave – she summoned a chunk of sand off the floor with her outstretched fingers, conjured it into a snowball shape, and tossed towards him, aiming roughly at his torso.
“And this? Am I allowed to do this?” But she missed and the sandball hit him in the face. Oops.
“Ow. Hey, come here, you!”
She ran away up the beach as Isaak started chasing her, trying and failing to conjure another sandball because she was laughing too much.
The rest of the evening was spent in idyllic play. As the night progressed, Isaak got quieter.
“How many people know about the Tapeworld?” she asked, trying to break his thousand-mile stare.
He jolted awake from his pensive trance. “Oh, uh… not many at all. They tend to gather in the Boulevard. I’ve mostly kept to myself, really.”
“What? Don't you want to talk to these folks, try to figure out the tech? Are… Are you shy, Isaak?” She felt her cheeks blush even asking him.
He looked away. “I don’t know. I didn’t come here to chat people up.”
“You chatted me up.” Not that she minded.
He smiled and looked at the ground. “That was IRL. Here, I don’t know who to trust.” The night-time lit him up beautifully, shadows and the light of the bright moon enhancing his every feature.
“And you trusted a random woman drinking at Aftershock?”
“I…” He was clamming up. “I don’t usually do that…”
“It’s fine, I’m joking.”
He smiled and looked at the horizon again.
“The world is defined by the structures we create,” he said.
“We derive meaning from symbols, where there might be none. An influx of people wouldn’t do the Tapeworld much good.
Especially when we don’t really know much about this place. I just don’t want the attention.”
“Awfully introspective…”
“I have been told my head is in the clouds. Not in a positive way.”
“There’s nothing wrong with thinking about things.” She liked that he was thoughtful, a thinker. It was upsetting to see him put himself down. “Especially mind-blowing things like this,” she added, gesturing to the scintillating beach around them.
He smiled and shrugged, like he wasn’t convinced.
I wish he’d see himself like I see him. She kicked the sand, grains spreading in the air, each of them shining impossibly brightly as they caught the moonlight. “You must have spent a long time doing that.”
“What, thinking?” he asked with an awkward swallow.
“Yeah. It’s not all philosophy, you know?”
He started laughing. “You’re the one who brought up Baudrillard like you were trying to trip me up!”
She joined in the laughter. It felt like a release of tension, loosening her chest and letting out the air she’d been inadvertently holding in.
But she noticed Isaak was still fidgety, encircling his wrists with his hands. Nervous tick, it looked like. At least he was laughing and smiling again. She worried the introspection would make him retreat further into himself and away from her.
Maybe spending more time with her would help him find some confidence… “Take me to the Boulevard.”
“What?”
“You’ve been talking about this Boulevard place, and I haven’t seen it yet. Take me there.”
It was like he’d frozen.
“Are you beachballing or what?” she joked, waving a hand in front of his face.
He shook his head. “No, sorry, I’m just… I’m happy that you’re interested! Let’s go. You’ll like this!”
Isaak got up off the sand and drew a circle in the air.
Bright blue-hued particles rushed into existence in front of him, roughly following the shape he’d drawn, and enlarged to a circle bigger than he was tall.
A matrix of dots filled the space inside, and then she couldn’t see through the circle anymore, but instead into a tunnel of a blue effervescent material that looked like neon mixed with artificial fireflies.
Were they meant to walk through that?
“Come on, then.” He took a step into the tunnel, answering the question she hadn’t spoken out loud.
“A portal!” Dylan took a hand to the wall as she stepped inside, fingers crossing streams of multi-bright luminescent blue particles.
“Eh,” Isaak replied, shrugging as they walked through it. “It’s more like a tube.”
“Lemme guess,” Dylan said, “a tape-tube?”
He laughed. “Yep.”
She was going to make another joke, but they were already at the other end. “A hop and we’re there.”
Ahead of them was the Boulevard of Broken Dreams – or the BBD, as Isaak had sometimes called it. The blue glow of the tape-tube’s circular exit gave way to pink clouds and purple lighting, the ground paved in continuous dark slabs, the road lined with one and two-storey buildings.
They stepped out of the tape-tube and it disappeared behind them like her castles in the sand.
“This looks…”
Isaak grinned. “Amazing?”
“I was going to say insane, but that works! How long have you been coming here?”
“About a year. It still feels just as cool as my first time.” His face went red when he realised his phrasing. “Uh, my first time here. I mean, my first time in here. The first time I came here. Fuck—”
She let out a hearty laugh. “You’re funny. I had no idea.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I mean, from when you approached me at Aftershock. You seemed so serious.” She laughed weakly.
Silly Dylan. She’d been thinking about the stoic captain version of him she knew from his ReSports days.
But for some reason she still wasn’t ready to admit that she’d been a fan.
It was cute to see that he was also just a shy boy adorably stumbling over his words.
It was also a surprise that he’d been jacking into this place for a year.
“Right…” he said, clearly not quite sure what to think. “Thanks, I think. Anyway, these are all places you can go in.” He pointed at the fronts of all different kinds of establishments. There were pubs, restaurants, oxygen bars, clubs, all with extravagant, flashing signs.
“How can the Tapeworld still be a secret with all these places?”
“Most of them are empty,” Isaak explained.
“Which shows people can keep a secret, especially if it means hiding something from the Kings and Queens. I don’t think this place was made by them, or it would have been looted already, made mass-scale.
” He looked like he was about to say something else, but stopped.
She nodded, taking his explanation at face value.
It was strange and hard to believe. But secrecy was, after all, the only reason the Dark Year had happened.
The Apocalypse Revolt kept their plans secret, and distributed them worldwide simultaneously.
Only total belief and dedication to a cause could keep that kind of secret.
She and him were more alike than she’d thought.
She changed the subject, not wanting to get lost in her thoughts right now. “So, what’s the coolest club here?” Just enjoy your evening in the black-market virtual reality the tall, attractive ex-ReSports player invited you to. It’s all good.
His mouth twisted into a wicked smile. “I know just the place.”
The club pulsed with life. The other striders were wearing outrageous fashion.
The style dripping from everyone else’s clothes flustered her.
Lots of what she could only call neon goth, night fiends taking on flashy hardware as accessories.
People wearing sunglasses indoors, and long black raincoats, straight out of action movies.
Clothes that looked like they came from whole other periods of history – short corseted dresses covered in pearls, velvet hose, and ruffs.
There were people with bared jacked-up muscles, and prop robots worn as clothing.
She took in as much as she could, her mouth open. She got it almost immediately. This place was a festival for the living, a celebration of the vibrancy of life. Here, they were free from the surveillance of the First Kingdom, and it showed. Here, they felt free.
Isaak clearly felt it too. In fact, she could have sworn he was staring straight at the chest of a heavily made-up woman wearing a Gunne Sax dress and a top hat.
They were just friends, but she couldn’t help feeling jealous.
She must have made a noise, because he looked at her then.
“It’s a bit overwhelming, huh? Do you want to dance?”
She smiled, letting him take her hand as they headed to the dance floor.
A few of the striders they walked by were holding beverages. “You can drink in here?” she asked.
“It’s placebo,” he explained. “It doesn’t fill you up, doesn’t make you drunk or anything.”
“Old habits, eh?”
He nodded.
The music wasn’t anything she recognised from the StreetSocial feeds or Aftershock’s DJs. They danced to the tune amidst the crowd, the hubbub of chatter low under the volume of the EDM beat.
He danced better here than IRL. No knee pain to bother him, bless him.
Perhaps that was partly why he didn’t like to talk to anyone here.
This was a private experience for him, a special place.
Anyone else giving their thoughts about it, whether positive or negative, might corrupt his pure view of it.
She empathised with that. At the Vegan Outreach Centre, she’d realised how many of her colleagues were completely uninvested in the work.
Sure, it was a crappy job. Do your hours, clock out.
But while they all had to obey the vegan laws, they didn’t buy into the ideology like she did.
Sometimes she felt like the only real vegan there.
After an hour or so, she’d had enough, and he could clearly see her fatigue. She wasn’t sure if it was the noise, or being inside the Tapeworld, but the visit to the BBD left her knocked out. She was ready to tape out.
“Let’s go back to my tape-space,” Isaak said. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
He was beaming, and she didn’t resist him.