World of Glass Page 4
He laid his head against the sturdy glass window, watching the absurd menagerie of colored buildings race past outside, a strange hopeful thought finding its way through his defenses. The Island might have been a fool's dream, but the Islander himself certainly existed. There still had to be a Somewhere Else… somewhere that wasn't here…
That realization electrified him for a few minutes, gripping him in a way he hadn't felt since reading those now half-remembered stories.
For a time, he tried to envision what such a place might be like, how daily life in Somewhere Else might go, but such baseless daydreams only made him feel worse. The constraints of time and resources always pulled his imagination back down into harsh reality; chains of logic tightened around his heart as he thought about other ways life could - or couldn't - work. Try as he might, he couldn't seem to imagine any happy way to live that didn't eventually run afoul of cold logic and limited resources… or of human nature.
He shook his head to dispel the entire train of thought, momentarily angry for some reason.
While the Rail car picked up speed, heading south toward the area that held the Main Hub, he let his bodily awareness tune out.
Logging into his old online haunt, he focused on the game’s sight-filling visuals.
Reviving atrophied memories and emotions with every passing moment, he found himself at the edge of a familiar virtual city. The skyscraping buildings towered stark and white overhead, subtly hinting at the immense world running maze-like between their bases. The distant horizon lay filled with slowly moving continents, each bearing a different kind of city - and their vastly different subgames. It was a visually impressive interface, he often thought, built mainly for visual use by the computer illiterate… but he allowed himself a few minutes of indulgence.
The crowds were no less relentless within the false streets, though the experience was thankfully lacking in smell and heat. He moved between the virtual press with returning ease, traversing the immense alley-canyons with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia.
He watched the passing individuals all around, scanning their lives by habit. Eight rowdy kids walked together while sitting in various crowded rooms of a ramshackle habitation in the north. A mother of four chatted about her stories with a friend in a virtual café while manually working in one of the lines in a southern chem-factory. Down a tremendous vaulted street rife with shouting game-item sellers, a familiar face turned, noticing his presence.
Quickly deciding he was tired of fake-walking through the familiar fake streets, he skipped away completely, accessing the chatlink he had in mind.
"Oh, hello," the old man within offered. Nearly sixty, his visual typing betrayed the slowness of age. "They finally have a Scientist free?"
"Yes," he answered, not going into further explanation. "Can you tell me more about the problem?"
"Well…" the old man wrote, pausing for several minutes to think and respond. "I just sort of inherited caretaking of this game when the last fan with real programming skill died. Do you know 4.3?"
Accessing the caretaker's data, he looked through his eyes for a moment. The man was a zombie, lying in an alley far to the south, in the Rain Belt - a hard place to survive long in that condition. "No. I knew this game was old code, but version 4.3?"
"Study me all you want," the old man responded, seeing the accesses. "But I'm the one who put in the request. I've nothing to hide."
"Hide? What?"
"Oh, I just thought -" he typed something out, but then deleted his words. "The checksums are off."
"Yeah, I see that in the request," Rolf replied, a little exasperated. "What does that mean?"
In his chilly, rain-soaked alley, the old man laughed. "I don't know. That's why I put in the request. We've been getting a 'failed checksum error' on random games for… I don't know, a year and a half now. The code isn't commented well enough for me to deduce the meaning. As with everything, it's a hodgepodge of additions and changes piled on willy-nilly by countless different contributors. This game is a century old, and it shows."
Leaning his head against the window again, swaying with the motion of the car, he sighed. "Alright. Maybe I'll take a look at the original programmers' lifelogs, see what they intended when they made the game."
"Thanks, kid." The old man scanned him in return. "You were once ranked eighty-second at this, huh? You going to play a few games?"
His reply came only after a hesitant moment of consideration. "I suppose I'll have to."
"Yes, I suppose so," the old man offered, frowning. It ran unspoken between them - given his condition, they would probably never speak again. "Thanks for your help, in any case. I hope you take care of this place… it's had a good run. It's seen many games. Many Ages, even."
"So it has."
He logged out - and spent the rest of the Rail ride struggling with memories and darkness.
Stepping down from the car, the sensory assault of civilization snapped him from the past. He blinked painfully through the shuffle of buying another half-loaf of cricket bread, again fighting the pain shot through his nerves by the higher price.
Bright colors and roaring conversations flooded his awareness, but he focused on the passing songs, plucking each note out of the sensory morass to construct a complete tune, enjoying the emotions and rhythms of each street's musical personality as they walked.
Each song ran with the spirit of the group that had decided to play it, and the cadences were as varied as the masses living in each building. As they had through much of his youth, the chained and overlapping notes - rhythms full of life and hope and emotion - gave him a solace that no mental castle could provide. All the hunger, heat, smell, and noise left him.
He floated for a time, putting one foot in front of the other blithely.
Faces passed by his partial awareness, their temperaments spinning vague tales of families and friends living out their lives. A frowning older woman watched two children tussle, her arms crossed at their horseplay. Two white-haired Anglan men talked on a grated walkway between buildings overhead, glaring down from above. Along one smaller street, a few girls clad in those certain colors watched the crowd for prospects, each looking away from him uncomfortably as he accidentally glanced their way.
He could see every fact about every person they passed, each moving around in their daily activities; socializing, sleeping, and living with persistent inexplicable momentum.
For him, despite the variety, it all ran flat and faded.
The endless series of slightly different dances had always kept him at a loss. How did they still care? How did it all matter so much? What was a family, anyway? Just some people that lived nearby, that was all, when it really came down to it.
It all came down to wanting, he thought sometimes. They wanted things.
Og stopped in place, breathing heavily. "I'm tired. Anyone else favor a rest?"
Red-faced from the walk, Elizabeth nodded.
They moved away from the main flow, finding shelter in a dead-end alley full of zombies. He followed absently, still half in another world.
Carefully picking his way between prostrate forms, Og slumped against a wall.
Some of the starving men and women stirred, begging with silent eyes.
"I'm sorry," the young man replied. "I gave all our extra food away at the Edge…"
The zombies rolled over and returned to their half-awake stupors, awaiting the next chance at a job opening - that, or death.
Elizabeth uncomfortably ignored them, instead focusing on her project's files.
Returning from his absent-minded wanderings, he found himself staring. One emaciated woman continued to gaze at him far longer than was polite. A sharp, sweet odor lingered over the alley, hauntingly familiar in all its pain and portent.
He looked away, unable to bear her gaze any longer.
"What is th
at?" Og asked, sniffing the air. "Smells like… alcohol… and… something strange, sweet…"
He felt something snap. Despite his best self-control, he turned his head sharply forward, his fist clenched.
"Oh," Og said a moment later, skimming a few biology articles. "It's starvation ketosis! Their bodies have run out of glucose, and they're now breaking down fatty acids into ketones for energy, and we're smelling that in their perspiration and breathing -" He stopped, finally noticing his companion's death glare. "What?"
He forced his expression neutral again, vainly trying to hide what he felt was a blazing trail of emotions he'd unthinkingly seared across the space between them. "Just surprised you've somehow never encountered that smell before…" He glanced over at Elizabeth, finding her in rare agreement.
She held one eye narrowed, her manner wary and unhappy.
Across from them, Og straightened his back, sitting high against the wall. His expression darkened with rare seriousness. "Rolf, what do you want?"
Caught off guard by the strange question, he struggled for an answer. "I, uh -"
"No," the unhappy Nord interrupted. "I don't mean about just now. I'm an unthinking idiot sometimes, saying things like that. I mean, in the larger sense, the life sense, what do you want?"
Trying to comprehend the question, he reached inside, touching upon that part of himself where memories and darkness lurked - but that particular door, locked and barred deep within his darkest dungeons, refused to yield.