27. Haptics
Haptics
Dylan
Sweat dripped down her forehead. It was a crisp morning, and the journey to the gym had been a welcome distraction from thinking about him.
Isaak hadn’t replied to any of her texts yesterday.
Outside the window, the monorail tracks.
Every so often six-composite carriages passed by with a new wave of commuters.
Behind the tracks, the London cityscape.
Towering skyscrapers peppered with historical buildings.
Her stomach growled.
Fuck, I could eat a chicken right now. She shook her head and ran even faster.
Wait. What was that about meat?
She’d always loved animals. You couldn’t escape society’s fostering of a healthy relationship with every kind of living being.
Not once had she ever eaten anything from any animal, her parents being religiously vegan.
Going above and beyond the law imposed, they removed every trace of animal-sourced products from their lives.
That was the environment she grew up in.
The idea of eating a living being was a completely alien concept to her.
Yet here she was, running her socks off in the gym, and suddenly she wanted to eat a chicken?
Like with peri-peri, the way it was served in old social media vids?
The thought should have made her gag, but she only felt hungry.
She tensed her abs, arms and legs in racing motion. Her legs hurt. But she kept going.
Dylan tried to stop thinking about it by concentrating on her rhythmic breathing, fixing her gaze on the horizon. The cars, the monorail, the birds flying high in the blue sky, the towers in the distance, glass gleaming in sunlight.
Her breathing sped up and her legs felt wobbly and she started losing her foothold on the treadmill. On sudden instinct, she jumped off the rolling track and into the side wells of the treadmill, hands holding the front bars tight.
That was close.
In the commotion, one of her earbuds fell out and rolled onto the floor. Great.
She took a deep breath, pushed the large red STOP button, and dismounted the treadmill, its rubberised plastic components shining with her sweat.
She picked up the earbud and then, looking around nervously as if she might have committed a grave sin in the eyes of the other gym-goers, she went back to the treadmill to clean the machine off with her dark-green towel, muttering some made-up excuse to herself at the same time.
As if anyone was actually listening or gave a damn about her mishap with the earbud or forgetting to clean the treadmill before she walked away from it.
She went over to the VR pads. A few were in use by other fighters, their grunts varying in volume depending on the intensity of their moves, but she found an empty one and attached the belt around her waist. She slid the thin visor over her eyes, and the sim booted up.
She was in a white room, and a 3D model of a kickboxer, made up of four hundred thousand tris, appeared in front of her.
Shaved head, red handwraps, and matching shorts emblazoned with a name in black letters.
Bob. Bob would have looked impressive a couple of decades ago.
Now this guy was just the most basic tier of VR.
Bob immediately swung a low kick at her, aiming for her calves.
She raised her leg and blocked the kick with her shin.
The belt vibrated, giving her the only haptic feedback she’d get from this basic tech.
No localised pain receptors like in ReSports, no spherical treadmill.
She swung a hook at Bob’s chin, rotating the top half of her body, the knee following the motion.
The kinetic force of the hit pushed Bob to the side, simulated pixel blood splatter flying from his mouth.
It was nothing compared to how the Tapeworld looked and felt. Isaak was right. The Tapeworld wasn’t just virtual reality. It was more like an alternate world, or parallel dimension, when compared to this thing.
Bob sidestepped and threw a kick. Dylan raised her hands but not in time to stop his foot striking her in the face, blurring her vision in the VR.
Fuck!
She kept her hands raised and paced side to side, building her defensive posture.
Bob eyed her through his red wraps, coded bloodlust guiding his search for an opening, moving quickly around her.
He threw a few jabs, but she blocked them easily.
To her surprise, Bob smiled. Sim fighters didn’t usually show emotion.
Closing the distance, he deployed a one-two punch combination. Dylan blocked one but not the other, eating the hook to the face.
“Fucking bastard!” She wiped the sweat off her face, using the motion to mask her next move – she hit him with a powerful left hook followed by a side kick, slamming Bob backwards.
Her stomach growled again, and her first thought this time was a delicious, red, bloody slice of cow side, gently salted and cooked in butter churned that morning.
Fuck… What is wrong with me?
Bob moved closer again, his aggression matching hers. Keeping his arms raised, he tried a couple of kicks to her stomach, one blocked, one successful. It hit her in the waist, the belt’s haptics matching where she was hit for once. He leaned in, confident. Unreserved. Arms down.
She made a low fist and drove upwards into his head with an uppercut, knocking Bob straight to the floor.
As he prepared to get up, Dylan walked over to him and kicked his head.
“You like that?” She kept kicking. “You like that, motherfucker?!” And again, and again, each kick causing more blood splatter, Bob’s face more and more damaged.
She was about to kick him again when the whole VR simulation turned off.
The people in the other VR pads were staring at her.
How embarrassing. What was wrong with her? All this aggression, wanting to eat meat. This wasn’t her. Usually. Was it all because of that boy and his own pent-up aggressive tendencies?
After showering and changing, she thought of putting on a calming podcast on the way home, but those hardly ever worked on her.
Her brain wouldn’t shut up that easily. Isaak, his fucked-up boss, the Tapeworld, this meat craving thing all of a sudden…
No wonder she’d kicked that VR training dummy’s head in.
She snapped her flip phone open and rang Talia.
Talia answered almost immediately. “Babygirl, talk to me.”
She didn’t want to go into detail over the phone, but said enough to convince Talia that they needed to talk in person, and arranged to meet at Talia’s for lunch.
Getting there required a bus and two changes on the tube.
Not a bad journey, with the exception that she needed to use the Central Line.
For six decades the air down there had run hot, and today was no different.
A little taste of hell before speaking with Talia.
Goddess, what would she tell her? A few tears escaped her eyes as she leaned onto the tube door like she always used to, blocking out the loud roars outside the carriage as it sped on.
Talia lived in a flat in a high-rise, one of the last few in the area. Gentrification, investment, laundered money replacing dirty money. That block of flats resisted it all. Plus, it was cheap, so Talia could afford to live there on her own, without flatmates.
She buzzed her up. Her door was ajar, inviting her in. Dylan walked inside, anxious ripples beneath her skin.
“Tal?”
“Dylan, hey!” Talia wrapped her arms around her, and Dylan let herself feel the warmth and tenderness of her best friend. “Come on, sit down. The way you spoke on the phone… What’s wrong? Tell me everything.”
The telly was on, a news programme, covering the latest scandal for Betty Summers’s government. The Greens were no exception when it came to corruption. Talia lowered the volume to the bare minimum. She didn’t like silence at her place – the complete opposite of Dylan’s preferences.
Legs wobbling from the anxiety, Dylan flopped down next to Talia on her teal couch, the texture soft to the touch. It didn’t do much to soothe her. “We had a fight.”
Talia raised her eyebrows. “A fight? So, you’re dating… Your first lover’s tiff.” She smiled but quickly dropped it, noticing Dylan wasn’t joining in.
“We’re not dating. Not really! Every time I think he’s going to make a move, something interrupts us or he stops himself. I don’t know what’s going on in his head. I wish he’d just be honest and tell me…”
“What kind of interruptions are going to stop him from kissing you? I saw how you two looked at each other at Aftershock! And that was a week ago already. I can’t believe you haven’t even kissed yet?”
“We’ve been busy. There’s something I haven’t told you.”
Dylan explained it all as best she could. About the Tapeworld, about Isaak’s ReSports past, and how he made money nowadays. She felt guilty for sharing some of these things when she had been sworn to secrecy, but she didn’t know what else to do if Isaak now wouldn’t even talk to her…
She didn’t think Talia believed her at first, but she saw the truth of it settle in with a growing fear behind Talia’s eyes.
“A virtual reality?”
“No, it’s not VR,” Dylan told her. “At least, according to what he said.”
“And you’ve been going there—”
“Every day, or almost. It’s incredible, but I’m so frustrated. We – well, he – stole this weapon in there, a combination sword and revolver. The Gunkatana.”
Her friend rolled her eyes, yet another wacky concept coming out of Dylan’s mouth.
“I call it Gunky. Anyway, we think he stole it from the Third Kingdom… Which is kinda worrying.”
“What do you mean ‘kinda’? It’s hella fucking worrying, girl. Who are you messing with? Maybe you should be thankful he stopped texting you. Are you sure he’s worth all this?”
Dylan was expecting this reaction. But to her it made perfect sense.
Isaak was quiet kindness, the hope inside him shrouded in darkness.
Defence mechanisms, ways to cope with loss.
There was a tragic beauty to him that she found irresistible.
He’d chosen her to strike up a conversation with, out of all the women in Aftershock.
Her ReSports crush, walking up to her, buying her a drink, and talking with her for hours.
Watching him explain the Tapeworld to her, it made her heart full.
But she understood Talia’s worries. She made an awkward face. “Did I mention he also spied on me?”
Talia leaned back and looked at her like she was mad. “Girl. He’s a pervert!”
Dylan shook her head, feeling in her heart that that was completely wrong.
“No. There’s either something he’s not telling me, or something he doesn’t know.
His mother walked out on him and his dad when he was just a kid.
And now there’s a photo of her inside this sword he was sent to steal by this Astrid chick?
She’s fucked him up… Oh, yeah, I forgot to say. They also used to fuck.”
Talia raised her eyebrows and shook her head.
She pulled one leg over the other, arm outstretched over it, hand hanging, then looked up at Dylan.
“You said you didn’t know what to do with your life, that you were bored and aimless.
Now you’ve gone and found a whole TV show’s worth of chaos. Are you ready to binge?”
Dylan gave her a nervous smile. “I prefer an episode a week. But I don’t have much choice.”
Talia sighed. “Yes, you do. Don’t let this man dictate the course of your life. Get out while you can.”