The Noise Revealed (7 page)

Regrets were pointless at this stage, but he couldn't help wondering just how costly his stubbornness back then had been.

"Few people of our generations have," Malcolm replied.

"Really?" So it wasn't just him.

"Think about it. How many times have you heard your friends, contemporaries, or even the media discuss Virtuality?"

"Never."

"Precisely. Oh, there are the geeks and the tech-heads, but they're the exceptions. It's the kids, the teens and those who were teens themselves a couple of years ago, who have embraced Virtuality. Their avatars are the ones you'll find walking the streets and packing out the clubs. The meek might have inherited the earth, but the emerging generation are claiming Virtuality all for themselves. They'll be the first to grow up with this place as a part of their culture. Your generation were born a little too early and mine missed the shuttle by a good few decades, but right here, right now, we're catching a glimpse of the future. You mark my words."

There was something infectious about Malcolm's enthusiasm - always had been; it was one of the man's greatest strengths while he was alive, so why shouldn't this virtual version be the same? Yet Philip suspected there might be an element of wish-fulfilment at work here as well, that his father was overstating the import of Virtuality because it was now very much his home. He
wanted
the virtual world to be as important as the real, because his own relevance would then be elevated accordingly.

Not that Malcolm hadn't given him plenty to think about. Philip savoured another mouthful of beer, wondering whether a human or an AI had written the program responsible for such an excellent brew. He watched a drip of condensation trickle slowly down the curves of his glass. Were beer glasses deliberately contoured to mimic the female form or was that merely his libido talking, courtesy of the bob-haired waitress?

He glanced across at his father. Malcolm looked much as Philip remembered from the days of his childhood; a face more rounded than his own but with the same dark eyes, though they lacked the laughter lines memory had etched at their corners. The hair was a little lighter than Philip's, though still a rich brown, showing just a touch of grey at the temples and above the ears. "Your father will never grow old, just more distinguished," he remembered his mother once saying. This wasn't Malcolm in his later years but a man still in his prime, when the vigour and enthusiasm of youth hadn't yet deserted him but was tempered with maturity and experience. It struck Philip as revealing in many ways that this was the face Malcolm had selected for his transcended self. Until Malcolm's death, the partial had reflected his actual age. Only when, against all etiquette and convention, that partial had been enhanced to contain as much of him as science allowed did Kaufman Senior tweak his outward appearance.

Philip wondered now why his father had done so. Vanity seemed too glib a response. Could it have been for his son's benefit? Had Malcolm chosen to live on in the virtual world wearing the face that he reasoned Philip would most associate with happy childhood memories? The explanation had never occurred to him before, but it felt right now that it had.

Philip hadn't even thought to tinker with his own partial when, on his deathbed, he'd been persuaded to enhance it in order to transcend to virtual life. Phil had always been a little younger and a little more handsome than reality, not to mention more confident. Vanity, it seemed, wasn't banished by transcendence but was merely granted greater scope.

Malcolm looked around, caught his son watching him. "What?"

"Nothing," said Philip, and he smiled. "Just glad you're here, that's all."

"Me too, son, me too."

She was being chased through a nightmare landscape of industrial equipment... she was led, stumbling through a dark and musty chamber of looming protrusions... was strapped to a chair, a needle embedded in each arm... floating in zero gravity in a featureless sphere that offered no point of reference... sitting in a field of wild flowers, laughing, Louis laughing with her... lying on her back with something cold and damp covering her eyes, water pummelling her face, unable to breathe... was lying on her back in a soft and divinely comfortable bed, her hands clutching black silk sheets while her lover's weight pressed against her, his manhood inside her. The woman on her right, who was supporting her, turned to offer words of encouragement, revealing the dispassionate face of her torturer, which swiftly morphed into her brother, Louis, and then again into Jim Leyton, who leered at her. She whimpered as the world shifted disconcertingly yet again, screamed as her veins burned with the searing invasion of some new agent, spluttered and gagged as the water entered her lungs, moaned in the throes of orgasm as her lover erupted inside her...

Throughout it all she could hear somewhere in the background a composed, detached voice delivering what she knew to be a monologue of advice, insight and instruction, although the individual words and their meaning slipped past, frustratingly just beyond her reach.

"Mya?" This voice was louder, closer, intrusive. It didn't belong. "Mya, can you hear me?"

A woman's voice. Why wouldn't it leave her alone?

Her eyes flickered open, smarting at the brightness around her. She screwed them shut again.

"Dim the lights," a perceptive soul instructed. "She's coming round."

This time the level was tolerable, and she was able to focus on a face, a stranger who was at the same time vaguely familiar. Porcelain skin, dark eyes and delicate features which held a fragile yet exquisite beauty.

"Up the stimulants. Gradually." The same voice - a woman's - and it belonged to this familiar stranger.

She was aware of others in the room now, faceless people moving in the background.

"Thank you everyone, good job." The woman then sat back and the faceless folk departed.

Memories began to converge, knitting together sufficiently to present some clue to the recent past. She remembered the woman now, recalled being met by her as she tried to escape, features indistinct but recognisable beneath the visor of a shimmer suit, and there had been someone else: Jim - unless that last was another aspect of her delusions.

Somehow she'd managed to hold everything together as they ghosted through the bowels of Sheol Station, and she could even recall being hurried onto a shuttle. After that, nothing. Until she woke up here.

If that really had been Jim Leyton helping to rescue her, where was he now?

Strength started to return, her thoughts grew clearer. She struggled to sit up.

"Take it easy," the woman said, her face coming into view once more.

Mya ignored the advice and continued until she'd wrestled her body into a semblance of sitting. The other woman made no effort to help, for which she was grateful.

"I... I want to thank you." It felt strange to speak, to utter any sounds that were born of her own will and offered to another freely rather than being forced from her lips. She looked at this woman, who had saved her sanity if not her life. "But I don't even know your name."

The woman smiled. "Then let me introduce myself. Hello, Mya, I'm Kethi."

That rang a bell, but a distant one, and Mya was struggling to recall
why
the name sounded so familiar. Then she had it. "Kethi?" She frowned, staring at her rescuer, trying to marry what memory told her with the reality of the slender, beautiful woman she saw before her.

"Yes. Why, is that a problem?"

"No, it's just that... I always thought K-E-T-H-I," she pronounced each letter individually, "was a project, not a person."

"Did you, now?" The girl's smile held more than a hint of bitterness. She seemed to consider the comment before saying, "Well, in a sense I suppose I am. To be honest, I'm a bit of both."

Chapter Five

Philip gazed out on a dark city dominated by towering skyscrapers that rose up far above him. Some, he knew, were shells, created merely to provide an aesthetic skyline, while others were genuine places with substance here in Virtuality. He had no idea which were which. This was like the city he knew but in miniature, with every notable building and landmark condensed into one small area. To his left stood the Skyhall hotel, its distinctive twin glass spires emphasised even more dramatically here than in the original. Spires seemed popular in Virtuality.

The tapering nature of the building opposite, for example, leant it an eerie, gothic feel, as if this were a tower displaced from some ancient cathedral of old Earth - an impression reinforced by the vaguely green tint to the section directly level with his line of sight, presumably caused by some trick of the lights focused upon it. A huge billboard occupied a square section of the next building, covering several storeys. Philip knew that in the physical world the people in the apartments behind that 'billboard' wouldn't even know it was there. They'd look out from their windows over an unobstructed cityscape - the view perhaps marginally dimmer, but not enough to notice. Such boards were virtual. What did that make this one, a virtual
virtual
billboard? He had no idea what it was intended to advertise. The young blonde it currently portrayed, tossing her hair in slow-mo and smiling, could have been promoting anything.

The sky above the cityscape was a deep pink or perhaps even mauve, too dark to be the harbinger of any natural dawn. A sky like that in the real world would tempt him to think 'pollution.' He wondered what constituted pollution here in Virtuality - inefficient programming?

Malcolm came over to join him. Philip's education was set to continue even into the evening, it seemed. He felt obliged to question the process. "Couldn't this information simply be uploaded into me?"

"It could," Malcolm acknowledged, "but where would the fun be in that?"

Philip tried to recall if Malcolm had been this capricious before he died, but didn't think so.

"Yes, information can be supplied that way, but cold facts taken out of context are no substitute for those learned by experience," Malcolm explained. "Trust me, I've tried both methods and my way's better."

"Fair enough." Not that Philip was entirely convinced by his father's argument. He suspected the real reason for the hands-on approach was that his old man was actually enjoying the role of teacher.

"There are basically two types of citizen in Virtuality," Malcolm explained, "avatars and partials. The avatars are ephemeral, only here for as long as the corporeals who generate them are plugged in, whereas the partials are permanent residents. The majority you'll encounter here will be avatars, since partials are limited in many ways and generally slaved to specific tasks, but it would be a mistake to assume you're always dealing with an avatar.

"And then there's us.

"The avatars are the ones you have to watch for, especially the kids. To them this is a playground, a wonderland where anything's possible and nothing really counts. They see Virtuality as a version of the 'real' world but with the safety catches removed, somewhere they can get as wild and reckless as they like without the responsibilities and consequences that would normally apply. There are areas here best avoided, dangerous places where the kids let loose, where they try the things they'd never dare to do on the outside."

"How do you tell the difference between an avatar and a partial?"

"Attitude, mainly. The partials don't want to be damaged, the avatars don't care. That's a sweeping generalisation, but you'll find it holds true more often than not. Besides, partials don't tend to have fully rounded personalities. More often they're two- or even one-dimensional, depending on how much money's been invested and how much care has gone into their making. After chatting to one for a while you'll soon realise this isn't a whole persona you're dealing with."

"Avatars can't be hurt, then?" Philip said.

"Oh, they can feel pain all right, or rather the corporeal animating them can. Remember when you were at the Death Wish, you picked up a beer? You could feel the glass, right?"

"Yes."

"Same thing with pain; sensations are transmitted, but an avatar has an easy cop-out. He or she can simply disappear any time they want, stepping out of Virtuality and returning to the real world. Shoot an avatar and it vanishes. You've kicked it out of Virtuality, forcing its corp to reboot in order to come back and even then there'll be limits as to
where
the avatar can resume. Shoot a partial and you'll damage it, maybe enough that it has to go off and repair itself, maybe to the point where it
can't
be repaired and a new partial has to be uploaded."

"Shoot either of us..." Philip said.

"Exactly. Nothing left to upload. We're it. Shoot us often enough and accurately enough and we're dead."

Now there was a sobering thought.

"Don't get me wrong, a partial is a lot more difficult to damage than an avatar. After all, an avatar is just a quick imprint, not as deeply embedded in the programming. By the time I've finished with you, you'll be a lot more resilient than your average partial. It's not all doom and gloom."

"So we're tougher than the avatars but at the same time more vulnerable, because we have a lot more to lose."

"Now you're getting the hang of it."

Philip was forced to continually revise his perception of this place, expanding it to encompass each new gem of information Malcolm chose to reveal. He was desperate to learn all there was to know about this new existence, to familiarise himself with its limits and potential. "I want to see," he said.

"See what?"

"Everything, starting with one of these dangerous places, the ones where the kids go wild."

Malcolm looked at him for a moment, as if assessing how serious he was, and then said, "All right, if that's what you want. A club, I think. I'll take you to Bubbles."

The thud of music struck him as soon as the doors parted. He expected pulsing lights but there weren't any, just a dim grey dinginess. They stood on a balcony - mesh flooring and metal rails which would have been more at home on a construction site than in a club.