3

AFTER REMEMBERING THAT I need to go for a run and doing some stretches, I receive a notification from my APA just as I’m about to leave my cabin. My user privileges have been changed, giving me access to a new set of data. There’s an e-mail from someone called Carolina Johnson, introducing herself in the briefest of terms as a former entertainment executive of Knifepoint, a high-profile subsidiary of the US gov-corp that produced some of the most successful media franchises of the past twenty years. She’s sketchy on what her role is here, simply explaining that she wants me to take a look at the consumption data she’s linked to and give my first impressions.

It’s so broad a request I suspect this is actually just a test of my ability. I wouldn’t put it past her to seed some rogue data in there just to see how I respond to it. She says I can take a couple of days if I need to. I decide I’ll get it to her in half the time.

I’m not concerned about whether I’ll be able to do it; this was one of the core skills in my previous position on Earth. AIs are great for crunching data, for giving pointers at where trends are. Any crappy machine intelligence can generate pretty graphs, after all. Where the skill comes in, and critically where the need for a human being comes into play, is the interpretation of all that data. AIs can do it in lots of industries, but when it comes to entertainment, to predicting what people in their millions will want to consume, there haven’t been any reliable AI results. Not that there have been many reliable human ones either; we all accept that we can only make educated guesses. But there are a couple of things that AIs fundamentally don’t have that we do: instinct and empathy, and both are needed in my old line of work. If you’re incapable of understanding how it feels to have an emotional reaction to something someone else has created, you’re screwed. If you can understand it well enough to not only commission great entertainment but also get what you want in meatspace, life is so much easier.

It makes me wonder whether Johnson is planning to commission some new material from people on board the ship. There must be creatives among the thousands of passengers. Of course, there will be limitations on what can be produced. No hugely expensive director-vision pieces here, filmed with actual real-world sets, unless there’s someone who wants to make something set on the ship. Those pieces appealed only to a small audience anyway, relegated to catering to a wealthy niche of people who swore you can tell the difference between a real tree and a genned one. But I’m thinking too far ahead. I’ll get the report done first and then see what she really has planned for me.

I go out into the corridor and walk briskly to the end so I can start jogging along the main passageway that runs around the central accommodation blocks. There the corridor is only wide enough for two people to walk side by side—and still close to each other even then—but back where my cabin is, the corridor is even narrower. This route is better for running and has the added advantage of forming a circuit that is just under half a kilometer in length. While my APA keeps track of my time, it still gives me a sense of satisfaction to mentally tick the distance off in the old-fashioned way.

I stretch out my hamstrings one last time, my APA detecting the cue to start up my physx program. My heart rate appears as a small green number in the top right of my vision, along with a timer. Then there’s the bark from the end of the wide corridor.

I can’t help but smile; I always do when I hear Dragon’s Ghost. I look over my shoulder as I finish the stretch and the husky is there, tail wagging, front paws bouncing up and down off the floor in his excitement. He barks at me again, as if to say, “Come on! Let’s go already!” His eyes are the color of a clear sky on a cold winter’s day and the fur of his muzzle is a brilliant white, darkening into grays and charcoal black over the rest of his body. His paws are white, and a little patch of fur on his chest too. He tips his head to the left as I look at him, the sharp excited bark from before now turning into a low meandering note, closer to a quiet howl that sounds like he’s trying to talk to me.

I know he’s just an Augmented Reality construct, generated by my neural chip, which is tricking my brain into thinking I can see and hear him. But it still makes me happy. And it makes these tedious daily runs bearable. I set off and he yelps with delight, dashing off round the corner, leaving only the sound of his claws on the hard floor echoing back to me.

It’s impossible to catch him, but I try anyway, the AR running in concert with the physx program, ensuring that Dragon’s Ghost behaves in exactly the right way to keep me motivated and my pacing optimal. He’s always just ahead, close enough to trick some part of my brain into thinking that I can catch him if I just pick up the pace a little. When he disappears around a corner, I want to keep running to keep sight of him. If I slow down too much, he’ll poke his head back round to bark at me. If I stop, he’ll whine and stare at me judgmentally. That husky is a better personal trainer for me than any human could ever be.

Three kilometers into the run I’ve only seen one person, Geena, heading back to her cabin. We’ve said hello to each other a couple of times but nothing more. She’s also from Norope, despite being a member of the Circle, but she doesn’t seem very interested in getting to know me. It looked like she was coming back from the lab on the other side of the accommodation blocks, one of the many rooms I don’t have access to as a peripheral member of this group. I have no interest in labs, so it doesn’t bother me, but it does make me wonder what it would be like to have another place to go to in meatspace.

My APA flashes up a notification of a new message. I usually ignore them until I’ve finished a run, but it’s another message from Carolina, so I ask Ada to read it to me.

Hi Dee,

I noticed from your profile that you were a serious gamer back on Earth. If you’re interested in a challenge, there’s a locked server for leets who don’t need in-game enhancements to win. I’ve given you access if you’re feeling brave.

CJ

I stop, too distracted by the prospect of finding an actual leet gaming space to keep my legs working at the same time. Dragon’s Ghost peers back round the corner he’s just whipped round at full pelt, giving an uncertain whine. I raise a hand, patting the air to tell him I’ll be with him in a moment without really thinking about what I’m doing. With a tiny groaning growl deep in his throat he lies down, head on front paws, watching me.

I’d heard about elite servers before, back on Earth, but could never find anyone who’d give me an in. They’d had an almost mythical status, dropped into online conversations in passing with the same mixture of reverence and disbelief in their existence as an ethical gov-corp policy maker. Just like them, whenever anyone asked the person mentioning it for a concrete example, a link to a specific place to find one, it was all hand waving and “Oh, I heard about it from a friend of a friend.”

All the rumors coalesced around a central idea: that of playing a game in which the difficulty level was determined not by the game’s AI but by the player’s own real-world ability.

When I first heard about it, I scoffed at the idea. Surely the whole point of gaming was to experience being better than we are in meatspace? What would be the fun in surviving a zombie apocalypse if my avatar had to stop and catch her breath all the time? How could I play my favorite ultraviolent shooters when my body and brain didn’t really have the ability to pull off a decent long-range head shot?

But then the more I thought about it, the more I could see the appeal. It was the ultimate ableist velvet rope, for one thing, the sort of space that fitness freaks could go to and show off in. But more than that, it was the ultimate rejection of the idea that meatspace and gamespace were separate things. Turning the appeal of immersive gaming on its head, it combined the desire to be physically fit with the need to be seen to be the very best in a gaming space as well as in some tedious real-world gym. And it had to be for the purpose of being seen by other players; there are countless games designed to increase fitness, after all. AR has been around for bloody ages. But there’s a world of difference between being able to jump over obstacles projected onto one’s vision—or chasing an imaginary dog—and being able to keep up in a mersive where everyone knows that you are able to outrun slavering mooks because you are that fast for real.

I’m fitter than I’ve ever been, desperate to find joy in gaming again, and keen to meet other people on this ship so I can find my targets. Damn, I am tempted. After months of metaphorically banging my head against data barriers, I suddenly have new data access privileges and an invitation to a leet space. This is turning into a good day.

“Show me the leet server entry requirements,” I tell my APA. A list of criteria appears, floating over the corridor in my vision. They’re not the usual fare; no mention of pay grades or subscription model options. Instead there are blood pressure ranges, a requirement to be able to run a kilometer in less than six minutes, optimum VO₂ max measurements and a string of other measurement units I don’t even understand. There’s even stuff about reaction times and links to AR training games that can be used to measure them.

“Do I meet these?” I ask Ada.

“You have a ninety-one percent match with the required criteria.” A dialog box from MyPhys appears, listing the supporting evidence for the statement.

“Can you design me a training program to get to the standard required to meet them?”

“I can. Would you like me to replace your current daily training schedule?”

“Yes. How long will it take to reach the standard required?”

“Based on current fitness levels, I estimate you will reach the required standard in fourteen days with a two-day margin of error, if the new training program is followed every day.”

“Two weeks? Bloody hell, that’s far too long. I’m not that unfit!”

“Your cardiovascular fitness already meets the required level. These are the criteria that are not currently met.”

Ada highlights the relevant entries in the list and brings them forward, fading the MyPhys evidence and dropping it behind.

“I have no idea what these refer to. Summarize for me.”

“Reaction times, core strength and calorie consumption rate.”

“Bollocks,” I mutter. No shortcuts there, at least not that I’m aware of. I review the new training program and see that it still includes a daily five-kilometer run, so I start moving again, much to the husky’s delight.

Carolina’s invitation seems to fly in the face of the strict boundaries between the different groups on board. But then maybe I’ve simply been stuck in a status no-man’s-land and things will start to change now. Gabriel said something about social contact between groups being deprioritized. Was that an order from the command crew or the way this ship has always been planned?

At least I know that there is actually a command crew, rather than a corporate structure, which is something. It makes me wonder whether the military have always run the project and simply exported their model to the ship, or whether the US gov-corp decided it would suit the mission better. Either way, I need to think of a way to find out more about Commander Brace without leaving a massive bread-crumb trail of searches. If he does turn out to be one of the people who gave the order to fire the nukes, he will be security conscious and I don’t want him to know I’ve been snooping. I must not give away that we know what happened. When someone is willing to murder billions, making three people who aren’t critical crew disappear would be as easy as chucking a food tray in the recycler.

Then it occurs to me that Carolina must have checked out my profile and seen my gamer scores; otherwise she wouldn’t have invited me to the leet server. I open the message from her again and laugh out loud at my stupidity. Just like all messages, hers has her name at the top, which is also a link to her profile. We’ve made contact, she’s sent an invitation . . . it would be totally legit to check hers out too.

I finish the run in record time, Dragon’s Ghost yelping with delight at the speed he has to go to keep ahead of me. I end the program and he runs off down the corridor, the sound of his paws fading as the program does all it can to make the transition to plain reality as seamless as possible.

Post shower and changed into fresh clothes, I sit on my bed and open the message again, scanning the words that appear to float in front of the cupboard door. Then I tap my finger on Carolina’s name and her profile loads.

A lot of it is private, the settings retained from a former high pay grade by the look of it. As far as I know, I don’t have an actual pay grade or any sort of corporate position here. Absurdly, I haven’t even considered it, despite the fact that if we were on Earth, I would be officially classed as a nonperson again. I guess I just assumed that all of that bullshit was behind us now, but judging by how much of her profile is locked out, maybe some of it has come with us. Maybe she is just old-school private.

There’s a bare-bones curriculum vitae detailing not only an impressive career but also evidence that she was born into a wealthy family with good connections. I push away the bitterness that rises. It won’t serve me here.

The gaming subsection of her hobbies and interests is far more interesting anyway. She is obviously pretty hard-core, some of her scores making me feel horribly inadequate. But then I look at how young she started playing those games and the insecurity eases. If I’d been playing WorldAR at the age of fourteen instead of fighting to survive, I’d be just as good at it as her. Fucking privilege.

I’ve looked at this long enough for it to be of interest to the ship AI, so I reply to her message.

Hi Carolina,

Thanks for the data and the opportunity to do some interesting work again. I’ll start working on that report right after this message. It won’t surprise you to know that I am excited about the invite to the leet server and I’ve already started training to bring up the couple of stats that need improvement to meet the entry requirements.

Looking forward to working with you (and fighting off mooks with you!),

Dee

I send it, ignoring the mild disgust that writing such false cheeriness gives me. All part of the game, sweetie, I remind myself.

Now that it’s been sent off, I can go back to her profile and look at the friends she has linked to it. This is where the gold could be.

A lot of the names, and the little circles above them containing the profile pictures, are grayed out. People from back on Earth? Presumably so, now out of contact. Of course, she’ll think they’re grayed out because of the distances involved, not because those poor bastards are probably dead, or even worse, slowly dying. I deleted everyone on my Earth-bound friend list the moment we left Earth and I’m glad I did. Otherwise I would have had to look at their faces when I knew what had happened to them, each deletion feeling more like a declaration of actual death, rather than merely a severing of an obsolete connection.

Carolina looks like the kind of person who friends people readily and doesn’t delete for fear of hurting feelings. There are so many grayed-out people on the list that I’m sure they could populate a few floors of this ship.

I filter them out, confident that this won’t be flagged as suspicious activity, given that there has been correspondence between us and that most people find others to connect to through friend lists. Over two hundred people remain, all on this ship right now.

The faces are varied. Male, female, nonbinary. Most are white faces. The names mean nothing to me. She doesn’t seem to be connected to anyone in the Circle. Not even Gabriel. There must be some common link between them, but maybe that’s within the ship’s hierarchy, not necessarily the same as people she hangs out and games with.

Then I see it: William Brace, a man in his late forties, early fifties, wearing a US naval uniform.

Is he the Commander Brace that Gabriel mentioned, who signed off on giving me this opportunity?

I’m desperate to click on the profile but don’t, thanks to the same fear of that digital trail coming back to bite me in the future. Perhaps there’s another way around this.

I go back to Carolina’s core profile and navigate to the list of games she plays. None of that is behind any sort of privacy line; she’s obviously proud of her scores. I click on the one she’s played recently, a colonization game with the standard combinations of resource management and military encounters. In seconds I find the list of people she regularly plays with, the smart profile connecting their gaming data and cross-referencing it with hers. It’s designed to make it easy for her to contact those players outside of the game but it has also made it easy for me to see that Commander Brace plays this game with her. On the leet server, no less.

I punch the air in triumph. Finally, I have a lead. This Brace guy may have had nothing to do with nuking Earth, of course, but at least I can see a way to find out more about him. I’ll improve my stats, join the leet server, make sure I play a game with him, giving a legit reason for me to check out his profile and then boom! Access to not only his information, but also to that of the rest of the command crew he’ll be connected to.

I close the profile and lie down on the bed, tucking my hands behind my head to take stock. In a minute I’ll start working on that data. It will take a matter of seconds to instruct the AI, giving it a variety of different ways to crunch the data and give me something I can work with. It will be the interpretation that will take the time. That and trying to work out the angle. Usually these reports are commissioned for a very specific purpose, like “Can we justify spending a crap ton of money on a new season of this mersive to support a new gaming module designed to increase the audience of the previous seasons?” and “Are citizen-employees in the lowest three pay grades consuming more violent mersives than those in the top three pay grades, and, if so, why?” That sort of thing.

I guess not giving me a specific purpose for the report is part of the test. Carolina will want to see what catches my eye and how I interpret it. The only thing that bothers me is whether all the years of experience I have will be of any use here. This is a strange sample group after all. The only ones I know anything about are the members of the Circle, and they are hardly average people.

“Sod it,” I say to the ceiling. “I’ll do my best.”

It takes less than a minute to instruct Ada to carry out the first batch of data crunching. I pop out to the communal food printer before the lunchtime rush, print myself a goulash with pasta, Croatian style, and eat it alone. A glass of water later, I’m ready to dive in.

It’s much easier to play with data in a virtual space, so I go in for full immersion. After the usual checks from my APA that I’m not about to try to do this while standing up, driving machinery or any of the other dumb things it already knows I’m not doing, I’m in my office.

I say office; it’s more a blank slate. Literally. I’ve made myself a giant slab of dark gray slate that stretches in all directions as far as I can see. Above me is a night sky filled with stars. Nice and spacious, a comfortable twenty degrees Celsius and no wind.

“Okay, give it to me,” I say, and Ada drops in three-dimensional graphs and Venn diagrams around me. Each one is as tall as I am and lands with a thud that I find very satisfying. I can walk up to them, pull out data points and examine outliers, all by grabbing them with my hands or simply pointing to them.

There’s demographic data, a variety of graphs on consumption behavior including level of immersion, duration and other standard criteria, and on categories of mersives. There are at least ten of those and that’s just for starters. Being such complex things, mersive categories can span factors as diverse as age suitability, level of realism (the definition of which is constantly argued over), whether they are recorded and replayed by the consumer or created by a third party, and level of neurophysiological integration. The latter can be a very telling metric, as it indicates the sort of experience people are looking for. In the simplest terms, it shows if they want to watch something passively or feel like they are inside the story, with different levels of immersion between the two.

Back on Earth I worked with creators of all types of mersive. Some were purely focused on the story, aiming to give the audience as much freedom to explore it in as many different ways as possible. For them, the variety of routes that people can take through a story was far more important than anything else. If there was a scene in a forest, they didn’t care what species of trees were there, or even what season it was, necessarily. What mattered was what was happening there, who was saying what and how the plot was being advanced—be it through conversation with NPCs or through finding key objects or other types of information, if it was more interactive. That meant they could build the mersive using instructions to neural chips with greatly reduced cost, the chips being instructed to create the experience of a forest by triggering whatever had been encoded in the consumer’s brain already. Depending on where someone had grown up, or the media they’d consumed the most, they could experience a chase through a Nordic pine forest or a dense jungle. To the creators it didn’t matter, as long as the story was cohesive.

Other creatives found this approach abhorrent; for them, it was just as important to control the aesthetics of the experience. They argued that relying on a person’s prior experiences to create art was elitist; what about those who’d never experienced a forest, or those for whom such environments were encoded so differently that they would negatively impact the story? Their critics in turn said that the cost of the mersives created using real locations was prohibitive to those in lower pay grades. I don’t know how many hours of my life I wasted listening to advocates of each approach arguing it out in bland virtual conference rooms.

I wonder if any of those creatives are on board. It’s impossible to tell without knowing the selection criteria for the other people outside of the Circle. If there’s a military-style command structure, they may also have been in charge of passenger selection. JeeMuh, am I on a ship filled with thousands of soldiers? But thousands of soldiers would mean invasion . . . was the US gov-corp planning to invade the Pathfinder’s colony? No, surely not. Why would—

A “new message” ping interrupts my thoughts. I accept the invitation to read it.

I groan at the cheesy sales tone and am just about to delete it when I remember that I haven’t had any sort of spam like this for months. Somehow Carolina’s message has put me on the radar. Haven’t I been craving information about the people outside the Circle?

There’s no signature, but there is the option to reply. I look for the profile of the sender and the lack of it confuses me. Online anonymity is illegal. Then I realize it’s not a standard e-mail, but some sort of live chat that looks . . . weird.

“What the hell is this person using to talk to me?” I say aloud to Ada.

“A person-to-person chatbox.”

“But how?”

“A person-to-person chatbox is—”

“No, I mean . . . is this new software?”

“This has never been used to contact you before. Would you like me to block its use?”

“No. Is it legal?”

“I cannot determine that.”

“What?”

“I cannot—”

“Oh, shut up.” I frown at the message. If I can’t determine the sender, surely it must be illegal. I grin and rub my hands together. Brilliant.

I tap my finger on the reply option and have my APA turn my speech into text. <I’m listening.>

<K. I’ll send you a key. Eat and drink first. It’ll be intense and you won’t want to stop in the middle of the story.>

Whoever this is, they are one cocky bastard. Intense? I’ll be the judge of that. <Who are you?>

I actually laugh out loud. They’ve played too many spy mersives; that’s for certain. <So it’s like that then? Okay.>

<Maybe. Would help if I knew who you are and more about the game.>

<Yeah. You in?>

<K. Send me the key.>

“You are fucking joking,” I whisper to myself, but still turn around. On the floor behind me there’s a box made from solid black glass. It’s only the size of my fist, but it freaks me out.

“Ada, did you give anyone access to my mersive?”

“No access has been requested.”

I point at the box. “Then what the cocking hell is that?”

“A box.”

“Jesus fucking wept,” I mutter beneath my breath. <How did you do that?>

<I’m leet, baby.>

Must be a bloke, and a young one at that. Do I really want to play in a mersive created by someone who clearly has dodgy opinions about boundaries?

Of course I do. He can’t do anything to me in a mersive. And who knows? It might break me out of my gaming slump. <You show-off. Okay, I’m in.>