Originally published in Plaza Protocol, 2021.
With an audible sigh, the autonaka deposited Kalsari Jones at the vast, dilapidated shopping mall. He supposed he deserved the snark. He had been rude to the code beast, but surely it knew his quirks by now. That was the problem with AI. They were slow to learn. The new dawn of machine intelligence was nothing like the hype. AI were dim-witted children, always grasping for attention.
He tumbled onto the pavement, ejected from the autonaka by its powerful air cannon.
‘We’re through!’ the code beast yelled, holowarns glowing red like burning sores. It drove off, lighting the air with its rage, but Kalsari knew he would never be free. It was the way of the world.
He braced himself for entry. The mall was the size of a small village, five multi-storey buildings linked by moss-covered walkways. Inside, there was an Exceller 8 clinic specialising in cheater repairs. The service was an anomaly. Glitches in new cheaters were rare, thanks to perpetual wireless charges from galvanic air parcels, and when they did fail most areas had mobile autonolabs that came to the rescue. But Exceller 8 didn’t extend the service to depressed socio-economic areas. Kalsari, like everyone else living in Spine Whip, was forced to piggyback the dregs of the network. That meant leaving his cube.
He entered the mall, filled with dread. His respirator rattled with deep breaths as he steeled himself for battle. To leave his cube and become exposed to the elements was one thing. To enter that place was an act of psychological warfare.
The mall was an obscene space, a travesty of the past. Once, malls were cathedrals. In the golden age of consumerism, they replaced the church as vectors of worship. They supplanted the city as hubs of community cohesion. They superseded the polling booth as mobilisers of social action. When the Vexworld was born, they became little more than shooting galleries for airsuckers and castle hunters.
He began to panic. The expanding space was such a contrast to his tiny cube. There were so many nooks and crannies, there had to be danger at every turn. He fell to his knees, crippled by agoraphobic fear. His chest was lacerated with stabbing pain, and each breath amplified the torment.
There were identical retail units as far as the eye could see. They faced one another, snaking around corners like mirrors in recursion. The units were in states of extreme disarray. Some looked like they’ve been blown apart, destroyed in some brutal consumer war. Glass and debris covered the floor and the smell of human shit and architectural decay was overpowering.
In almost every unit, two-percenters had set up home. Licebots patrolled the mall, but they were mainly concerned with protecting the light poles. Code-sucking was one of the few economic activities left in the complex.
Sometimes the crazies wandered from their holes and strayed too close to conspicuous consumption. That’s when the licebots showed a different side. The last time Kalsari visited, they were electrocuting bolshy two-percenters and desiccating their corpses for vacuum removal. He couldn’t see dead people this time around.
Half an hour earlier, his new-model cheaters had failed. He didn’t know why. The analytics refused to speak with him. Must be in cahoots with the autonaka, he thought. He always suspected a conspiracy of code beasts unionising behind his back.
With his cheaters dead, he had been forced to wear his spares and they were an embarrassing sight. Visible frames and lenses, the cardinal sin. New cheaters were so thin they could barely be detected, and that guaranteed status. With goggles on his face, he was the lowest of the low.
Old cheaters couldn’t handle inductive resonance, which meant the full-bleed Vexworld was out of reach. All he saw were vague blurs and glitched-out lightpaint. Occasionally, spectral glots tried to sell him cheap code-knives, but he batted them away in disgust. In the Vexworld, no one descended to the sub-levels unless they were spam or lost. As for Pipe Zones, forget it. There would no more zonal play for him as long as the goggles were strapped to his face.
He longed for the menagerie of recombinant animals he had assembled in his latest beta zone, self-generating codeswarms that communed telepathically with passing vexxers. His favourite was the beast that looked like a tiger from the front and a praying mantis from the back. Its skin turned translucent when telepathy was attempted.
He wanted it all back, which is why he had braved the mall. He had no choice in the matter. He was a castle hunter, pure and simple, a reflex mechanism driven by sheer need.
As he made his way into the guts of the place, he found the distraction he needed to stay alive. A cluster of light poles just beyond the main entrance. The poles sold apps, para-reality kits, junior ants, starter universes, elemental world-skins. Across the mall, there were thousands of poles planted in the floor, a forest of metal trees reaching almost to the ceiling.
Kalsari watched a cluster of rabid castle hunters buzzing around the poles. They hunkered under the nozzles, showering in codeswarm. Some were slumped on the floor, faces awash with idiot glee, smart colour staining their skin. Others were locked in tight embrace, data streams salmon-leaping from body to body. The full visual glory was lost to his ancient device. He saw only grainy waves of light penetrating the genuflecting freaks, but he remembered the full-bleed sensation because he’d been there himself.
The products they were sucking down couldn’t be bought in the Vexworld. You could only absorb them from the poles. That’s how Kalsari birthed Rimy, his virtant. He soaked up the code then vomited the ant from his mouth. The simulation of epidermal absorption and forced regurgitation was how you purchased and activated the product. Everything had to invade the body, that was the Exceller 8 shtick. ‘And once inside you,’ so the slogan went, ‘you can crack the universe like an egg.’
The poles were located in the mall as incentive for people to leave their cubes and explore the shell world, part of a Swarm ordinance to preserve public space, but it was as ineffectual as a band-aid on an amputated limb. The mall was sparsely populated, even accounting for the trogs in their caves and the sinners at the poles. Most hardcore vexxers found ways to pirate the stuff and inhale in their cubes, although for some the masochistic thrill of public debasement was the ultimate high.
Kalsari tore himself from the pole orgy and made his way to the Exceller 8 clinic. He found a junior mint in charge. Radiating bored insolence, the junior mint took one look at him and muttered in disgust, clicking away in inscrutable machine slang. It sounded like an army of cicadas.
A senior attendant, a woman of indeterminate age, appeared from the back of the clinic.
‘I’ll handle this.’
The junior mint scurried from sight.
The woman took one look at Kalsari’s goggles and laughed like a drain.
‘They’re my spares,’ he protested, but the hilarity continued.
The woman wore a wrap, a ‘Picasso’, the latest mania. The Picasso broke her face into pieces, rearranging it into mismatched segments. Even with denuded cheaters, he saw how it debased her physicality with her tacit consent.
She inspected his dead device.
‘Hard-reset stub. I can fix it, save you from that thing on your face.’ She chuckled, struggling to contain her contempt. ‘Give me thirty, okay?’
Her neck split apart into blocks, then the blocks reformed haphazardly like a Lego sculpture. Eyes on cheeks, mouth on forehead, that sort of thing. Horribly, really, but people seemed to like it. There was no accounting for taste.
The cycle changed and ten eyes grew on stalks. Each eye boasted unique micro-movements. Between changeovers, she blended into the background or appeared as a vague blur. Her face morphed so much, he couldn’t work out where it was. Forget about meeting her gaze. He didn’t even know which eye to look at.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Fix it, then.’
She disappeared around the back, returning a few minutes later.
‘Done,’ she announced. ‘Put them on and see. Hard-reset stub dead. Now, good as new.’
Closing his eyes to block out the shell world, he swapped the old cheaters for the new. He opened his eyes, pressed the stub and blinked down the entry sensel. It unwrapped and the world blitzed apart, stabbing his eyes with scintillas of light.
He examined the mall. It was a jumble of angles and planes. His cheaters recalibrated, cycling through endless variations of time and space until the tumbler arrived at one particular combination. The mall. The point where he stood.
He turned to Picasso. Now that he had regained his sight, he could see all the variance in her wrap, an unsettling patina more repulsive than ever. Wearing the antique cheaters was like looking up at the sky from the bottom of a muddy pond. With the new, he was floating in the stratosphere, surveying the world with unpolluted vision.
He paid and left. Picasso gave him the finger, while the junior mint rocked back and forth, heaving with laughter.
He shook down the autonaka.
—Meet me outside.
He crossed a walkway and entered the mall’s fifth compartment, passing a two-percenter shrine made from ancient tins of baked beans, scarred white goods and crushed circuit boards. Inside the heavy dark of the abandoned retail units, he saw trog eyes glowing, willing him to make a mistake.
The code beast was waiting.
—Didn’t think you’d make it, Kalsari plinked. You said we were through.
—We were, sir, but I don’t make the rules. Company orders.
The beast’s stairs descended and Kalsari climbed to the top level. As they chugged through the empty streets, he dimmed the holowarns. The windows were now clear. Not that there was much to see, except for a gaggle of small children running errands for their slave masters. They were bloodied from attacks by street crazies, and they carried homemade weapons packed with weird angles and sharp edges. They weren’t strapped into respirators, since the virus didn’t affect kids, but they wore plizzits and thermal skins daubed with conlang graffiti and inscrutable glyphs. They looked like battle droids from a far-future war.
The autonaka entered an area scarred by burnt-out cubes and gutted vehicles.
–Every day, the autonaka plinked, the Vexworld razes structures and systems and the transition is never easy. Vex-tech was in the pipeline for years, but no one listened to the naysayers. Then, when the social devastation hit, it was like War of the Worlds.
Kalsari quivered with ill-temper.
‘Yes, I know,’ he sighed. He couldn’t be bothered telepathing with the code beast. Neuromods didn’t work well on old bastards like him. Synth speech always sounded like rattling cans to the oldies. Something to do with ‘atrophied neurons’ and ‘reduced holosonic capacity’.
‘I’m a castle hunter. We study the Vexworld like it’s fine wine.’
–Sir, of course, however, most people don’t remember the past too well. They can’t conceive of a time before, of how things came to be. How are they supposed to remember when the Vexworld offers a billion alternate histories to explore?
Despite his righteous indignation, Kalsari tried not to laugh. Between the autonaka’s earnest tone and his paranoid-psychotic overreactions, they were like some demented version of Laurel and Hardy.
He couldn’t keep it in any longer. Overwhelmed by the absurdity of his squelchy life, he bellowed uncontrollably. The autonaka laughed, too, and for a moment Kalsari felt bonded to it. That soon passed and he wanted to murder it again.
‘Can it, code beast. Just get me home.’
For the rest of the journey, the autonaka glowed purple, its most insolent hue, but Kalsari was too far gone in the zones to care.