[The City that Never Wakes] Wageslave

"Sixth," he says, with a growing smile and audible enthusiasm. "It's a BFST paradrop helmet from 2022. See? It has the integrated retractable face visor for air operations. Don't try to pull it down though—it's jammed." Carefully, he reaches out and turns the helmet over, showing the sliding transparent face shield that, in theory, hooks into the base.


"I picked it up cheap at a yard sale in Tir na Nog from the original wearer," he says, clicking the strap release with a finger. "It didn't fit anymore after he awoke as an elf. We ended up talking for hours about his old deployments. He was in Egypt when Goblinization hit and half his unit turned into orcs and trolls. It was a fantastic talk." He carefully takes the helmet back, putting it on the little stand on his desk. "So yeah, any interest?"
 
"Artifacts never did much for me," Ash shrugs, almost apologetically.


Load > Agent "Mr. Pink"


Agent Pink > Compile Biography > Victoria Wolfe


Agent Pink > Compile Biography > Laura Farris


"I was always more interested in the zoomed out picture. What drives a group of people to self-identify as 'European' or 'American?' Or 'NeoNates,' for that matter. How do these, on the face of it fairly arbitrary, distinctions gain such weight as to become nearly tangible reality?"
 
"That's fair," he agrees, but while his tone is positive, it lacks the passion of a moment ago. "For me though? It's all about the moment. What was it like to be there? What were the practical and cultural realities that drove how people think? That's why I collect. It's not about the junk, but... well. Take this."


He reaches into his bag and pulls out a heavy bundle, straining as he tosses it to Ash. It doesn't actually make it to her, hitting the ground with a deep thud. Victoria jumps slightly, and Ash is left with the distinct impression that if it had hit her, it would have bowled her clear over.


"That's an exact replica of an infantryman's full kit from the third Iraqi war," he says, with obvious energy. "Pick it up. Really, try," he says, waiting for Ash to give it a heft. "It's a hundred and five pounds. Try jogging ten miles in that on a hundred degree day and you'll really appreciate what it was like to be there."


In the corner of Ash's AR glasses, a blue alert tells her that Mr. Pink has loaded Victoria and the so-far silent Laura's basic social media profiles, and is currently digging for more.
 
"Hard to believe anyone could do that without power-assist servos. Most references I've seen claim that full line infantry kit weighed in around a remarkably constant twenty kilo [44 lbs] from Roman times until personal power-assist armor started showing up around the mid-2020s. Of course, Goblinization would've increased that number even without power-assists."
 
"No no, that's a human's kit," Allen says, gesturing. "See?" Victoria easily picks it up as he talks, turning it over in her hands and considering the many fittings and buckles. Just to test, she unrolls the sleeve and holds it up to her arm, clearly showing it wasn't made for so stocky a metahuman.


"Why don't you just use sim for that?" Lisa asks curiously, looking the kit over with her ghostly AR presence. Nearby, her body remains slumped against the wall, unmoving.


"I do, usually," Allen nods to her. "There's just not enough room to collect all this stuff, and besides, sim means I can share it with the world. But having the actual physical thing is important to me for understanding what the sim needs to represent. Sure, I can tell the sim the kit is heavy, but there's a unique feeling to wearing that thing that goes beyond the weight. Sim can capture it, but it's a programming challenge."
 
Ash nods. "I never really got the point of the hyper-realistic sim environments. I mean, I can see how they enable people to get together for things like historical re-enactment events. But generally, I prefer to think of sim as its own medium, with its own unique capabilities and limitations. Trying to replicate the physical world in the Matrix always struck me as... I dunno," she shrugs, "kind of like looking up a map on GridGuide and then driving manually."
 
"Oh," Lisa pauses. Allen looks moderately surprised as well, if not unpleasantly so. "Wow, that's unanticipated, Ash. I'd really figured you for..."


Two more purple, augmented reality outlines appear in the room as the discussion goes on. One, a dragon made of twisting scales that defy perspective, is labeled as Mark. The other is labeled as Nora, though Ash would have recognized her anyway. She's some sort of centuar-deer creature, with the body of a fawn from the waist down, and her own naked torso from the waist up, sans cyberware.


"Well, sorry," Lisa laughs. "You just wrote some really nasty things about high-data environment adaptation in the past. We all assumed that talking about hot sim would make you uncomfortable. I didn't mean to misjudge."
 
Ash's eyebrows shoot up to somewhere around where her hairline would have been if she didn't shave her scalp for her trodes. "You're piping hot sim at a meet-and-greet? Do you people have a death wish or something?"
 
"'You people'?" Nora asks, her virtual presence leaning forward to look Ash in the eye, her hands on her hips. Though her virtual avatar is quite naked—and from the waist up, true to life—she doesn't seem at all embarrassed by the proximity, and her expression is peevish. "Oh girl. You in trouble now." Victoria's expression is neutral, but concerned, while Lisa looks actively angry, her face twisting down into a frown.


"Oh, stop it," Allen insists, though if he's annoyed at Nora or Ash isn't immediately clear. "I'm using AR and so is Victoria. Everyone else is using cold sim, except Lisa because she's fully adapted."


"I'd be using it too," Nora adds cheerfully. "If I weren't so attached to my body. Ha ha ha." Her smile instantly falls away. "But seriously, you need to apologize."
 
"Oh. Sorry. I just thought, since you didn't appear until just after hot sim was mentioned, that you'd be... Yeah, that was an unjustified leap of logic on my part. Sorry." Ash makes a contrite face.
 
"Oh, you're apologizing because you assumed I was hot simming?" Nora asks, lifting a hand beside her head in a gesture of feigned confusion. "That's what you're... oh. Alright. I suppose that's certainly a way to play it."


"Ahem?" coughs the projected dragon. A moment later, it vanishes, and Mark rubs at his eyes as he sits up. "I will remind you all about the discussion we had prior to Ash's arrival? The one where we all agreed we'd try to be understanding of her cultural differences?" There's some grumbled acknowledgement. "I will remind you all about it louder if the first time didn't stick," he repeats moderately annoyed. Nora frowns, but this time mutters a clear apology to Ash.


"Thank you," Mark says, but a moment later, he turns to Ash. "Ash, Nora is offended because Lisa is fully adapted to hot sim to the point that she has trouble without it. Calling her an addict is mocking her unfortunate circumstances, and it's insulting." He gestures up to Lisa's virtual form, which is still frowning. "Apologize, please."
 
A look of complete confusion crosses Ash's face for a moment, before she collects her thoughts. "Uh... Sorry. I wasn't trying to say any of you were addicts. I'm sorry that I gave that impression." She frowns. "All the same, though, if you're having trouble coping without hot sim, you really should get that looked at. Piping hot sim long-term will fuck you up something fierce, not to mention the risk of dumpshocking your way to an early grave."
 
"Uh..." Victoria says, raising a hand. A moment later she adds, "Yeah." Lisa gives Ash a dirty look and then vanishes, while none of the others exactly look placated either. The impression Ash gets is that she didn't say the right thing, but she didn't say the wrong thing enough to start the argument over. At least not with Mark very pointedly looking at Nora.


Nora, for her part, still seems angry, but to her credit, she doesn't just stand there and passively-aggressivly stare. Instead, she visibly swallows her frustration, her virtual presence stepping over to Ash and letting out a sigh. "Okay, that um... that still wasn't right. But I can see you're trying, and uh..." She gestures vaguely.


"How about I give you the cultural tour after work tonight?" a voice offers, Ash only then realizing Glen has come out of sim. He's propped up in the corner, his long blonde hair loose over his shoulders. He has no piercings, no markings, and no visible cyberware but his skillwires, presenting a feminine and unbroken appearance. "Help you settle in."
 
Ash calls up her schedule for tomorrow to her AR HUD, mulling over the suggestion. "Sorry, tonight won't work. I have a couple of calls I need to make, let some people outside know I'm alive, and out of the med bay. That sort of thing." She shakes her head slowly. "I really appreciate the offer, but this schedule is going to run me ragged even with a sleep regulator. And I haven't had it long enough to have a good idea of how much I can push my rest cycle before I stop being functional the next day."
 
"I am not certain that is wise," Glen continues, after a moment. "You wouldn't want to offend your future boss or the evaluator, after all. I do think a cultural orientation would be very beneficial to you." In the resulting awkward silence, Nora vanishes. "But, I suppose that's up to you."


"Yeah," Mark says. "Hey," he adds quickly. "It's 4:13. We better get down there."
 
Ash kills the book AR window that she wasn't actually reading anyway, and gets to her feet, then straightens out a kink in her lower back with an audible popping sound.


"I'm sure it can wait a day or two," she says as she falls in to the right and a half-step behind Laura on the way down. "Everyone knows I'm new here, and anyone who's paying attention will realize that the kind of schedule they're running us on doesn't exactly leave a lot of time for casual acclimatization."
 
Ash rises, popping out her back and stepping towards the door. When she turns to wait for Laura though, she finds that she's the only one whose gotten up. Everyone else has either stayed where they are, or moved to lie down in one of the rooms, sim-wires coming back out of holders and reels. There's a brief awkward pause, when Allen and the others who are up notice Ash staring.


Then, Glen rises. "I would be happy to walk with you," he says, politely gesturing her to the door. "We should hurry."
 
Ash smiles and inclines her head at him, as she picks up the pace. "I've heard of telecommuting, of course, but telecommuting from within the building? I guess it makes sense, but..." she shrugs.


> Let's walk and talk. What's the deal with refusing to confront uncomfortable topics going on here?


> First glossing over Victoria's obvious aversion to cyberware, then all of you backing Lisa up in refusing to confront the fact that she's on a trajectory that will kill her, possibly before her thirtieth birthday?


Ash's pace slows visibly for a moment, before she remembers that she's on the clock and picks up again.


> Is she really so far gone that the only option left is to keep up a good cheer and not be a drag on the quality of her few remaining months? She didn't seem like it to me, but it can be hard to tell.
 
Glen walks in silence for a time, his hands crossed in front of him—his right fingers occasionally drumming on his left right. He seems to be considering his words carefully, and when he speaks, the awkwardness is audible. Since he speaks through AR—subvocalizing, She would guess—she isn't sure if he intentionally picked audio so that she could hear his tone, or if he's simply more comfortable with it.


"There are many things here that you do not understand," he says, the sound emerging from Ash's ear buds. "But I know you aren't trying to be offensive, so I'll do my best to explain it. You have an implanted commlink. This makes you vulnerable to things you would not otherwise be vulnerable to—microdrone hacking, electromagnetic pulse, cyberware failure, etc. This is a disability, and one that may kill you." He speaks slowly, and with careful consideration, but walks quickly.The clock is running down, and it looks like they will both be late.


"Imagine," he continues, "that someone walked up to you, and upon hearing that you had an implanted comm, took your hand and, with the utmost sincerity, said they were so sorry, and asked if there wasn't anything that could be done to help you." He glances briefly at Ash as they round a corner. "That is how Lisa feels right now. Hot sim has many possible downsides, but it also offers many advantages, and she had made a rational decision that the trade-off is beneficial. I understand you do not agree with that decision, and I would recommend you—"


>It is now 4:15. Event starting: Orientation. You are late. +5 Aggro


He briefly loses his train of thought, as a red frowny face appears over his head, but then he presses on. "And... you should speak to her about it. But if you agree with her or not, nobody likes being treated like a cripple. And as her friend, who agrees with her decision, I don't like it when you treat her that way either."


The two of them round a corner, coming face to face with a large, glass-walled conference room, with perhaps 100 chairs in it. Of those chairs, 98 are currently empty, and the instructor—a middle aged woman with a stern look—paces back and forth at the front of the room. It's clear from the look she gives them that she knows they're late and is waiting for them to start, but Glen still ignores her a moment longer, looking at Ash to see her response.
 
Ash walks briskly, but carefully remains impassive when the late penalty hits. The sum total of her experience with meetings and agenda-items called "orientation" place them firmly in the "no-business" box, and, there being no great likelihood that business will be transacted, she values walking there under her own power more than she does being punctual to the second.


> The comparison is prima facie ridiculous. On several levels, starting with the magnitude and probability of the 'potential downsides.'


> With adequate access to modern medicine, there is no reason someone Lisa's or my age couldn't live to see the sun rise over the 23rd century. But on the trajectory she appears to be on, it will require a miracle that falls only barely short of direct divine intervention for her to see the sun set on the 21st.


> Hot sim is a military-grade combat stim. It's not up there with Kamikaze or Saharan Spice or anything, but it's still pretty fucking serious business. Imagine I told you I'd made the rational, carefully considered decision to take a hit of Cram because I was feeling a little slow this morning. And then my friends told you that oh, you needn't worry, because that's perfectly normal, and something I'm odds-on to do at any given day. If you knew nothing else about me, would you just shrug and move on? With or without the disclaimer that it really is my choice to make - as after all, you are not your sister's keeper?
 
"We're late," he says, brusquely now. "And this is important. But, if I can be direct? You don't like telecommuting. You think hot sim is a dangerous drug. You think the company is plotting against you. And it's perfectly obvious that skillwires disgust you and so do the people who use them." His tone picks up slightly as he continues, and a frown appears on his face, but he pauses at the end. He seems to regret letting his anger show, and it's in a more calm tone that he asks: "Why are you even here?"


Then, quickly, he steps inside and finds a seat. That makes him the third person in the room—the other two are a couple near the front, looking around at the empty room with distinctly unnerved expressions.
 
Ash's face is impassive, betraying nothing of wireless exchange, as she steps into the room and places herself to the right of the door in an at-ease posture while she waits for permission to take a seat.


> I have nothing against telecommuting, I have something against schedules packed so tight with obvious no-business meetings that you can't walk from one to the other and remain punctual.


> As for why I'm here, if you haven't been told then you probably don't need to know. Suffice it to say that sufficient negotiable currency changed hands as to lend some credibility to the claim that my perspective and experiences were considered an asset.


> One of those experiences includes watching colleagues - good people, very dear to me - clock out of this mortal coil from stimmie burnout, or drift off into hot sim and never resurface.


> Bad way to go, man. Bad way to go.
 
"Thank you ladies for finally joining us," the instructor says, in a clipped and irritated tone. Glen takes his seat quickly, and when Ash steps into the room, floating text appears over the instructors head, Gale Mulligan. A moment later, the room fills with more purple AR ghosts, a collection of people, robots, geometric shapes, and fantastic creatures sitting, standing, or hovering about the space.


"Since you apparently have better things to do and better places to be, I will be brief," she continues, sharply. "Welcome to the Advanced Recruitment and Training program, or Arat. You are here because NeoNET has projects that demand the very best, and it thinks you might be in that category. And the key word in that sentence ladies and gentlemen, is might." She lets the words hang in the air for a moment before she proceeds.


"I'm sure all of you feel you're pretty hot stuff," she presses on, in the same rapid cadence. "You were all top of your class, blew the grade curve, rising star in the company. You've got tweaked genes and the latest headware and the company paid you all quite a bit to be here. Well that's all well and good but it doesn't mean a thing here, because, ladies and gentlemen, I am here to weed out those of you who do not have what it takes. We are the hub the world revolves around, and living up to that responsibility requires more than just being smart. Over the next three months, I will eliminate 60% of you from this class. Six in ten." Again she pauses, letting that sink in.


"Elimination will be strictly merit based. I do not care what your father is vice-president of, nor do I care how much the company paid to have you. To me, those are both sunk costs," her head swings over the room and the gathered AR presence, her hands still behind her back.


"You will be weighed on a number of metrics, including technical proficiency, ability to work in teams, creative thinking, diligence, learning ability, and informational discretion. That started this morning." She lets out a breath, and looks pointedly at the two in the front row. "If you want any more information about how the program is administered, it's on the company servers, somewhere. You may consider finding it one of your first tests. If you fail to attend an event because you did not know it existed, you will receive an automatic failure. You are responsible for orienting yourself."


She pauses, and continues in a softer tone. "Finally, as you may already have noticed, this program incorporates recruits from Renraku, Evo, and Ares Macrotechnology. The culture of those firms is very different from NeoNET, and there will be a period of adjustment. Since your scores are, in large part, based on your ability to work in groups, I suggest you all do your best to help them adjust quickly. There will be no consideration given to cultural differences in assigning performance metrics."


"That was your orientation," she concludes. "Your next even is in eight minutes. You may go."
 
Ash doesn't let the door hit her on the way out, walking at a brisk pace toward her first actual order of business on today's agenda. She's already rummaging around in her AR feed for node maps, schedules, physical layouts, indications of what sorts of privileges she might have in this insane cloud architecture, or any other icon that happens to look interesting. Data identification and retrieval has always been her best discipline, so the fact that parts of the program is deliberately obfuscated, while on its merits both ridiculous and unprofessional, should actually work in her favor.
 
Moving at a quick pace, Ash quickly leaves Glen behind. She has no difficulty finding the next event for the day, a quick data search for "'Practical Qualification Exam: Hardware'+'Room Assignment'" yielding a table of rooms with names by each one. The programs that come with her rootkit include a mapsoft of the arcology, and soon, she's hurrying down a bright red line on the floor showing the way to her destination.


She has to hurry. The hardware labs are on the southern side of the building—three city blocks and two flights of stairs away from Ash's current location. It is to her probable irritation that her AR program beeps: >Hey! I see you're walking faster now. Great job! Keep it up, but there's no sense in making herself late to spite an AR program. A bit of walking and two quick lift rides later, she arrives at her destination with a good 40 seconds to spare.


Stepping in through another sliding glass door, Ash finds herself standing in a spacious and sterile hardware rapid prototyping lab. Long, empty work benches cover every wall, and a number of simple fabrication machines rest in the corners: a laser cutter, a 3D printer, general purpose circuit boards, die casters and the like. Not her area of specialization. Under the benches are a few large plastic bins full of what looks like circuits and hardware, along with a collection of general purpose technical drones.


She seems to be the only person here, and several long seconds pass before the silence around her is broken. A beep sounds in her ear.


>Laura: We're here. Just chatting before things start. You want in?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 3 (members: 0, guests: 3)
Back
Top