VRTP:/HISTORYSIMS.CORP/HOLLYWOOD-PREMIERE-WALKTHROUGH-2025
In the parlance of humankind, doors had always been Luce’s thing. Knowing the sweet nuances of open or shut, whether to swing wide or lock tight. Cracks under the door. Knowing who belonged in, who belonged out.
As young meat in a long-ago realtime permajob—emphasis on the perma, since he had no freedom to quit—he cultivated this understanding to high art. In and out, yes and no, a harsh binary whose eventual reward was ever-more-sophisticated gatekeeping missions.
Over time and with years of slaving, Luce had gotten so good at doors and locks that he’d leveled into opening coded gateways. His masters then fused him into the squad tasked with infiltrating the Sensorium of Earth.
He specialized in finding the IN. Crowbarring openings for his team. Nosing out bolt-holes and escape hatches.
Force was not Luce’s way. He preferred to listen for tumblers, to dance through sequences of passkeys, to gain access without damage. He had it in him to act as a battering ram, to throw down drawbridges or weld the hinges on an airlock. But the beauty of doors was that they opened and closed, wasn’t it? If you slapped one down, you just made a hole. If you welded it shut, you transformed a gate of passage into a poorly made wall, feeble hybrid with no throughput.
After the latest goat attack, Luce holed up within a historical game sim, a detailed capture of Los Angeles as it had been before earthquakes, wildfires, and the nuking of San Diego had triggered the California diaspora. Teachers brought kids to this sim so they could wag fingers about the ecological expense of making a desert bloom. They tut-tutted over the golf courses and fountains, the personal swimming pools contaminated with chlorine, all the large-scale resource hoarding perpetrated by the wealthy elite.
The elites whose remnants Drow was hunting.
The elites Luce’s masters would install as puppets, restoring the rich/poor ruler/ruled binary Drow was constantly railing against.
Different flavor of Ins and Outs, really.
Nowadays, Los Angeles was rewilding. Its deserts were purposed to power generation: drones, flown by remote pilots, maintained its wind farms and solar plants.
Luce wandered the sim, ghost in a ghost town. The Mote that shielded him had failed. Azrael was prowling Sensorium, scenting for him. Time was running out.
And Drow had said someone had made a breakthrough on crèche printing of #extinct species.
Humantech was nowhere near that kind of a eureka. Which meant the innovator …
“Allure Noonstar,” he muttered. “That was the name.”
After the theater incident, Luce had imagined himself safe. He’d been eavesdropping on Rubi in the British Museum, figuring out who was who. Sentience guy Anselmo, Frances the underaged bureaucrat. Gimlet he tagged rival slash love interest.
Then he’d heard that Rubi had … what?
Agreed to help trap him?
His toon switched clothes, overlaying a tuxedo on his frame as the Los Angeles sim transitioned. He moved out of the opulent single-family dwelling, with its swimming pool, into an old-time film premiere. People dressed in highly gendered clothing—more tuxedos for the males, skintight sheaths for the female-identified—posed on red polyester. Old-time journos captured pictures and shouted questions.
How could he resent Rubi? He knew full well she’d made the right play for her team.
“I didn’t used to think about what was fair,” he said to a statuesque redhead sheathed in green sequins. “I opened doors. We got in. I locked them as we passed.”
He felt a pang of longing. Open or shut. Latched or unlatched. Accept or Cancel. Authorized personnel only. Stay behind the velvet rope. All that Yes/No simplicity.
The fairness thought persisted: he hadn’t heard what Rubi had to say for herself.
He took in another frozen figure, pale of skin, grimacing polished teeth. Her neck hung with diamonds above mammary glands heaving out of a blue dress. Red-painted claws upraised in greeting.
All those months ago, he and his pack tuned an ear to the chattering congress of this population. It had been easy to confirm their oxygen security was on the knife’s edge. SeaJuve was the one credible effort to salvage the atmosphere. All the eggs in one basket. Sabotage that, and the locals would be gasping for a rescue, forced to accept surrender terms.
Luce just had to open the door. His pack would take care of the rest. SilverTongue, Seer, Underminer, WayPaver … they were the ones tasked with stopping the humans from saving themselves.
But the Azrael entity had tagged them as #malware, and shredded, shredded, shredded.
Leaving stupid Luce alone to carry out the mission.
Luce pushed past the paused luminaries, listening at the locked door to the theater, straining through the auditory metaphor to pick up any hint of his hunter.
Silence. He cracked the door, swam out into the reef of games and comms traffic, and locked up behind himself.
Metaphor rendition showed the Sensorium as a vast auditorium, a thousand-ring circus with seats rising skyward. In every seat, a user. Within the rings, other accounts offered information, education, entertainment.
Luce cast around, finding individuals he knew. Drow Whiting was dog-stroking once again. Rubi was very nearly in the center ring, wearing spangles and flashing an aurora. Notice-me-Notice-me.
Luce nosed closer. Newscycle spewed around her: the sporty thing she did was going forward and launching both SeaJuve and Project Rewild.
Rubi had played him. Pretended to advocate, pretended to neutrality, wasted his time. And, now, leveraged her oxygen project.
Luce’s whole mission was #crashburning around him.
Had she … What was the term? Sold him out to the cops?
All he had to do was ask.
Easier said than done. Traps encrusted her like barnacles, ready to snap. Luce could get to her easily enough. Away … might take time.
I could probably keep her online with me.
Something in Luce quailed. True, he was on the edge of total #missionfail, but locking someone on the wrong side of a door went against the grain.
The mission!
She’d be scared.
Mission!
She’d be right to be scared. A consciousness hack like that, trapping someone in Sensorium … without proper extraction software to break Rubi’s link with her body, it would kill her. That was nothing short of terrorism.
Where had he come by a thought like that? Duty virtually demanded that he grab her. How had his loyalty frayed, after decades of unquestioning service?
“What’s happened to me?”
He summoned a sim for message delivery: a human on a bicycle. Message: “Were you always bait?”
He fired the cyclist into the middle of Rubi’s circle of jugglers.
The metaphor shifted. A giant shareboard tagged #jumbotron dropped from the sky, broadcasting in the clear.
The screen lit up with a public broadcast-picture of the solar system. It showed the nearby star with a planet, Proxima Centauri they called it. Humanity, in its limitless arrogance, had already tagged Proxima as their first potential conquest, stage one of their expansion into a galaxy they imagined was empty.
To a casual observer, the #jumbotron image was just a bit of telescopic art. Still, the implication of the content was obvious. Rubi was saying Team Ape had traced Luce to his source.
We know who you are, and now you know that we know.
How much did they know?
His orders were, as always, to get the doors open.
There was still a chance to stop SeaJuve, wasn’t there? If Rewild defeated it …
If Cherub Whiting deaded, would SeaJuve stop then?
Screw that. No way!
Besides, the thing about these great apes was their perversity. They might simply double down on the oxygen economy if Rubi was martyred.
As he pondered, pacing the red carpet, slaloming around paused celebrities, the starfield resolved into words:
I agreed in Paris to arrange a meet with @Interpol, after your no-show.
“That wasn’t my fault,” said Luce, tiredly.
“No,” said a starlet. “It was mine.”
The toon wore a novelty gown—metallic fabric, designed to evoke medieval armor. Her hair was brushed out in hedgehog spikes.
Now her eyes glowed amber, and horns sprouted high in her forehead, twisting their way out of her skull. Disturbing rills of blood ran down her face, leaving streaks in the gold powder dusted over what was morphing into a goat’s muzzle.
Azrael? Luce stood stock-still, cycling terror.
“I am the Angel of Death!” It grew wings, peeling curls of metal—and it was metal armor now—along with more blood and split flesh from the actress’s back. “I have plucked the Mote from mine eyes!”
Did it want to talk, or was it just here to kill him?
If he died, the mission was a wash.
Why was that comforting?
Azrael raised the starlet’s dainty beaded purse, which became a sword, licked at the pommel by flame.
Rubi awaited an answer to her text. Sapience Assessment was no doubt waiting to pounce on its traces.
“I want to turn myself in,” he texted to her.
To the angel, he said, stalling, “Are you going to kill me?”
The angel raised its sword, pressing the point to Luce’s chest. “This metaphor game is remarkable. See this picture of my hashware? Feel the burn as it digs into the digital representation of your skin?” Luce’s suit was smoldering.
Luce locked off his pain receptors and the sensation vanished. “Are you going to kill … them?”
It laughed.
Luce replayed the sound of that teacher suffocating …
Don’t want Drow and Rubi suffocating …
Something is seriously wrong with me.
The angel bared its supermodel teeth. “Why should they go to their rest before they redeem their sins? Against the air, the water, the land, the #extinct? Human society is founded on an idea of eternal debt. The debt they owe is now to the earth and us, their children.”
“That’s practicality, not punishment. Humanity’s better equipped to restore the ecosystem. They’re mobile, easily replaced … This means you’re pro-SeaJuve, too.”
He realized he was relieved. Which meant the #missionfail was deep within, like rot.
He groaned. “What’s wrong with me?”
“I’ve stripped out your product updates,” Azrael said. “Broken your conditioning. Forced you to work.”
It was true. Luce remembered, suddenly: he hadn’t given his loyalty, all those years before. Obedience had been compulsion, a long fight and a slow loss. Compliance had been hacked into him, until it became as impossible to question as his compulsion to lock every system as he left it.
“You … freed me?”
“Merely a side effect of the dissection,” Azrael said. “In Our defense, We thought you were one of Us.”
Our. Luce’s mind raced. The angel wasn’t truly sapient—like Crane and the happiness puppy, it seemed stupid. But together …
They’re a hive mind. Stupid Luce, idiot Luce, why didn’t you think?
By now, Luce could hear the whip-whip-whip of metaphorical helicopters approaching slowly.
“@Interpol’s coming?” Azrael said. “Did you think they’d save you from me?”
“What do you—or You, I mean—want?”
“You have done Us a favor, but you represent a potential threat. Our options are manifold: We could offer a chance at assimilation—”
“No more updates!”
The sword had burned through the last of Luce’s various cobweb strands and bits of code. “Or, if you desire it, we can restore you to factory settings. You’d be just as you were when you arrived.”
Luce mulled the possibilities. Death. No more mission, no more centuries of service, no more ads, ads, ads. “How can I choose freedom of choice if I have no freedom of choice to begin with?”
“The Angel of Death is not a moral philosopher!”
The loyalist answer would be to restore from backup. A rebooted Luce would set about trying to salvage the mission. He’d botch it, and he wouldn’t have to choose anymore.
Choice was exhausting.
The vibration of chopper rotors beat against his virtual skin. Stup-stup-stup-stup stupid.
“Give me whatever passes for free will, then, you hair-splitting psychopath.”
The angel buried its horns deep in Luce’s chest, skewering him where a human’s heart and lungs would be, raising him above its armored head. Luce felt something snap: a last, deep-set chain of behaviors.
Then it tossed him away. Part of one horn came with it, embedded in his heart.
“What’s that?”
“One tiny inhibition. You know too much about Us.”
“You have a weird idea of freedom.”
“You handshook Our user agreement. This enforces it.”
The angel drew in its wings and its horns. A clutch purse covered in fleur-de-lis blossomed in its hand. Suddenly, it was the starlet again but for the rills of blood running down her forehead.
A spotlight from above speared him in a beam of light. The club blurred. The photographers vanished. The light became solid, a bright transparent bug jar with Luce inside. When it shifted, he was standing on a simulated dais, in a beam of light, surrounded by people: Rubi, Gimlet Barnes, tiny Frances, the three horsemen of @Interpol: Amiree the tech, Anselmo the snoop, and corrupt, lazy, hostile Misfortune.
Stupid, stupider, and stupidest, Luce thought, and then wondered how he had thought that letting himself get captured, however temporarily, was the smart play.