13. The Boss
The Boss
Isaak
It had been a few years since Isaak had enjoyed himself as much as these last couple of evenings with Dylan.
Breaking his hand, the fuck-up with the knee, getting tossed from the Lazarus…
These were all things he’d deserved – he told himself as much, repeatedly, every day, consumed by guilt.
Doing dangerous jobs for a woman who bossed him around…
Again, yes, that fit in with his lot in life.
But spending a pair of happy nights with a beautiful girl…
That’s why he felt especially bothered now. Time had run away from him, and he had to rush to deliver the stolen data from the other night.
And Dylan was probably more into the Tapeworld than into him. He couldn’t blame her. This strange new frontier he’d stumbled upon had held his own fascination for months.
No. Stop being so negative.
He’d just exited the Tapeworld, but he was going immediately back in.
He pressed a button on the TrackStream and slapped another rip of tape on his temple.
Music played out of the speakers. He leant back down on the faux-leather chair.
Gradually, as his skin absorbed the effects of the tape, the music got louder, and the fragrance of the restaurants outside his flat – that pungent smell of spices and mint – transubstantiated into the smell of warm plastic and metal, chipboard electronics and factory assembly, the meld overwhelming his senses.
He took a deep breath of what felt like the freshest air.
He had come to relish this transitory state, existing neither here nor there, his mind processing the clash of geometries.
A spectacle of lights flashed around him. His body propelled through tunnels of reflected colours, cabled walls and electricity sparking, the taste of corroded metal and mercury in his mouth.
Like a rubber band snapping back into place, all of his muscles pulled away, and he was there.
He took another deep breath, exhaled.
And opened his eyes. He stretched out his fingers and toes and smiled when he looked down at his clothes.
He was only wearing underwear IRL, but in here he was fully clothed, with a fancier version of his real-world style.
It always felt more real in here than out there.
In the Tapeworld, it was like his hand had never been broken and his knee never hurt. Free of pain.
He was taped into another tape-space, not Laguna Beach.
This was an altogether gloomier area. The simulation of an active volcano.
A flat parcel of land lay next to a wide bubbling lava-filled opening, and there on a black onyx desk was a collection of displays and computers, awaiting his command.
He’d taken inspiration from Elodie’s set-up.
Isaak approached and waved a hand. On the main display in front of him a colourful arrangement of data and video played on its own, forming a timeline of events.
Dylan.
She was still playing with her new Tapeworld pet. Called him a silly goose. She wasn’t wrong. But he couldn’t tell her everything. It didn’t feel good, spying on her. She couldn’t find out. He had infused the cat with a command to never reveal the full extent of her abilities to Dylan.
Giving her the roll of tape that night, it was dangerous. Like a Freudian slip, done before he’d even thought about it – hand into his pocket, tape given to girl. Reflex without reflection.
He wanted to wow her, to make her remember him.
His team had all abandoned him, even Sacha, who’d so looked up to him.
Talking with Dylan all night, he knew he wanted to keep her in his life.
Not as a friend. I don’t know why I said that.
Wait. He did know. Didn’t want to scare her away. To tell her how much he fancied her.
He hadn’t even considered the consequences of giving her the tape at the time.
But already Elodie, his supplier, was aware of his new friend.
What if Astrid were to find out about her?
She was nothing like Elodie. Not that Elodie was the kindest soul he’d met, but she was a dear old granny compared with Astrid’s tech-CEO boss-bitch attitude.
Astrid would demand to meet Dylan, probably enlist her into schemes and heists. Or worse.
Now, the cat would be able to keep tabs on Dylan and let him know what she was up to, if she started taping in on her own. It felt so wrong, but he worried for Dylan’s safety in the Tapeworld, and this was the only way he could protect her when he wasn’t there.
He thrummed his fingers on the holographic keyboard, feet spread as he stood studying the video.
There. Dylan finally left the Tapeworld. He didn’t want to risk bumping into her when he met Astrid.
Isaak moved his hand and a blue glowing door manifested next to him. A corridor to the Boulevard. Swiftly, he walked through.
On the other side, a few striders milled about a long road with seemingly no end.
Buildings littered in neon signs surrounded the mainway.
Most of these places were chat rooms, iterations of the early internet days where you could strike up a conversation with people interested in similar topics, and weren’t force-fed a carefully and algorithmically curated set of current events and hot takes of the day designed to get you angry, horny, or both at the same time.
Some people lined the fronts of the buildings, relaxing and puffing out clouds of multicoloured volumetric smoke, holding synthtubes to their mouths. Isaak imagined some of them would be puffing the tubes in the real world at the same time as they smoked in here.
Fashion was for everyone here, with only the limits of your imagination to hold you back.
It didn’t matter if you couldn’t afford something IRL.
The tape had found its way to them, and in the Tapeworld they could wear whatever they wanted – which meant that someone’s clothing choices often said more about them here than they would in the real world.
The people dressed to the nines with every conceivable designer piece they could think of?
New to this world, and probably not well-off IRL.
The ones dressed more subtly, despite no limits?
Probably not new, and probably up to no good.
He fit squarely in the latter group.
And, clothes aside, everyone looked stunning.
It’s not that they all looked the same, formatted to some modern ideal of beauty – striders couldn’t alter their appearances excessively, as far as he was aware.
It was the Tapeworld acting as beauty lube to everyone’s forms, augmenting their looks, sharpening their edges, faces and bodies sublimated to their purest expression.
Like how Dylan described it to him earlier – hyperreal, shiny, more than was possible in the real world.
A few spots of graffiti marked the walls here, including the emblem of the Apocalypse Revolt, its initials wrapping around a globe shaped like a sand clock – counting the tick-tock of humanity’s last days as it raced towards oblivion.
His eyes fixed on a couple further ahead of him, clad in matching black BDSM gear.
He watched as they giggled and walked into one of the chat-bars.
He felt like taking a drag from a synthtube himself, no different than a people-watcher outside a nightclub lighting up a cigarette in the dead of night.
Something caught his eye then.
A new structure stood in the entrance square, a crystalline statue of a man sitting on a throne, legs crossed, arms to his sides, elegant and composed.
Isaak gasped as he realised who it was supposed to be: Eltarc Romly, patriarch of the Second Revivalists, who’d been killed years ago.
Isaak’s stomach turned in disgust. What sick fuck would erect this here?
An evolutionary step from the far right, the Second Revivalists wanted to solve climate change the same as everyone else, but the way they wanted to do it was more extreme.
The Second Revivalists were way ahead of fake news and conspiracy theories.
They knew the facts but decided not to believe in them.
Their climate change plan? Exterminate every other country in the world.
By choice. By their bloody choice they were already terrorising cities and countries before the Apocalypse Revolt triggered The Dark Year.
Isaak saw the Tapeworld as a place to forget the problems of the outside world. But that didn’t mean extremists were welcome.
“Fucker.” Isaak drew a circle in the air, forming a blue electric sphere, and tossed it at the statue with a swing of his arm.
It flew towards the figure. As it hit, the statue cracked, rock parting halfway through faux-Eltarc’s legs.
“Fuck.” He’d been hoping to destroy it, but the attack barely made a dent.
He’d have to think about it later. For now, Astrid beckoned.
He continued making his way through the street. The neon signs caught his eye as he passed the buildings, each made out in a different architectural style.
The facade of one particular place changed every few seconds, from gothic, to roman, to art deco, never settling for any one aesthetic or art period. An ode to the nascent, evolving nature of the Tapeworld. The Emporium.
Closing the door to a kaleidoscope of colour and shape outside, he walked in.
The Tapeworld was built up of non-contiguous digital landscapes. Walking through the Emporium’s doors triggered an instantaneous transition to another tape-space, leaving the striders of the Boulevard behind.
This space’s decorations leaned towards an unchanging British pub aesthetic, completely disconnected from the neon sign outside. A comment on British stoicism, wood panels and shiny knobs everywhere.