New York City, 2085

New York City, 2085


Darek’s eyes flicked open. There was another helicopter flying outside his window today, its heavy thump, thump, thump rousing him from his dreams. Or were they dreams? He’d been spending so much time on the REMs lately that it was getting hard to tell reality from the nets. He heaved himself from his tiny bed and sat with his head bowed, trying to run doubles in his head. He used that as a way to wake up. One, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, one hundred twenty-eight, two hundred fifty-six... After sixteen thousand three hundred eighty-four he lost it, but he was fully awake. He leaned forward and blindly felt for his manual keyboard. Most people didn’t use antiques like that, but Darek had managed to get it hooked up to his REM so it connected straight to the nets, and it spared him the trouble of having to jack-in.


access {
...tel [‘Julio’]
...print tel number
...dial print [‘Julio’]}


The number 482-673-5231 flashed onto the screen and the dull beeping of a number being dialed started. The screen clicked on to reveal the hideous scarred face of what appeared to be a man of mixed African-Latino heritage. He glared at Darek.

“What now, ‘Rek?” he snarled. Darek yawned.

“Gimme a hardpack for today, Julio, that should hold me.”

“Transfer me the cash first. I can’t keep doing you favors, you’re thirty yen behind.”

Darek took a small card from his pocket and pressed his thumb into the small square in one corner. A green light glowed in the opposite corner and Darek slid the card in a receptacle perfectly shaped for the card. He wired it to Julio and tapped four yen into the holographic projection of the keyboard. Julio’s face briefly went away as he checked his screen, then came back on with less of a frown.

“One hardpack, comin’ up.” Several seconds later a small door opened next to Darek’s bed. Inside was a brown, square package. Darek snatched it and tossed it into his microwave. Its cooking took less than a second. He pulled it out and blew on it to cool the package then opened it, revealing a loaf of reddish-brown bread. He bit into it and the taste of nutty dullness hit his senses. He hated hardpacks, but it was all he could afford right now if he wanted to keep his REM up and running. Having it fall apart was not an option at this point, since he relied on it for his job.

Darek pulled on some drab clothes and considered putting on a tie. He decided it wasn’t worth it, grabbed his card and walked out the door to his apartment, sealing it behind him. He walked steadily through the hallway to the collage of elevators at the end. There was the free one, which broke down twice a day; the expensive one, which had a sofa and a vending machine; the cheap one, which was standard; and the thin one, which cost the least amount of money (besides the free one), but was only thick enough for one person to uncomfortably stand in it.

Darek took the free one. Sure enough, it broke only three floors down. Darek sighed and leaned against the wall. This was going to be a bad day.

Someone managed to get the thing fixed in about fifteen minutes, and it continued slowly down the rest of the three hundred forty-four stories to the ground. Darek lived in the Rapid Tower, named because it broadcasted the net to all the REM computers in the city. Darek had a cheap room about half-way up it, but he got great reception from living in the same place as the signal.

He stepped out of the elevator as it reached the bottom and glanced at his card. It was 603 hours. He was late, yet again. He rushed through the filthy lobby to the doors as a Chinese receptionist tried to tell him not to run. He burst through the doors and right into the crowded street. A million sights, sounds, and tastes bombarded Darek at once, and it was all he could do to fend them off. It was his bad luck he lived right next to the downtown’s busiest plaza: the Cytroscopy. Eighty thousand brats who thought they were cool because they routinely wasted their money on computer programs, games, and REMs down at the largest communication center in New York City. Darek couldn’t imagine lving like that. If you had to be hooked to the nets, which Darek was, you designed your own software, made do with the worst to become the best. That was Darek’s opinion anyway.

He shoved past a man talking rapidly into a cell phone attached to his head with what looked like bolts. He yelled angrily at Darek in some Slavic tongue that Darek didn’t understand, or care to. He was marching against the waves of people, out of the Cytroscopy rather than into it. The needle-like buildings on either side of him stretched into the clouds, each more than a mile high. What Darek would give to be Estierre Pioutnic, the designer of the stabilization molecule. Darek wasn’t sure exactly how it worked, but Pioutnic had created some kind of system of nanotechnology that could atomically change the way ordinary elements reacted to gravity. That meant that buildings could be built higher and thinner than ever before, which rich men loved. Pioutnic was in his eighties now, and he was a multi-billionaire from the money he made selling his process everywhere. Some said that it would have been impossible to colonize Mars without the stabilization molecule since it was so needed for structure, energy efficiency, and gravity concerns for the spaceships that ferried goods and people between Earth and Mars. Pioutnic now lived in the lap of luxury on Mars’ capital city, Westinbrook, where he could fully enjoy his own work. The skyscraper he lived in was more than three miles high, an impossible feat on Earth due to stronger gravity.

A car swerved in the road so that its mirror nearly took of Darek’s hand. The driver flashed Darek the finger and sped off. There were so many less cars these days. The subways and tubeways had stolen many of the car companies profits, since now riding a train was cheaper than gas. But Darek was hearing that pollution was still a growing problem. Someone had found a way to use a mineral on Mars as a cheap fuel, but that was clearly more damaging to the environment than gasoline. Not that most people cared. They were too caught up in their REMs and net-personalties to do anything. It seemed that the feeling of invincibility of adolescence had permeated the entire society. Nobody gave a damn about anything but themselves these days. South America was enough to prove that. The once lush tropical beauty that Darek saw in old photographs was now mainly desert, as it had been mined extensively for what oil remained and then bombed when too many world leaders got angry at the rebellions occurring there. The world was going to Hell and bringing Darek with it. But what did he care, himself? He had his REM, his job, his apartment. Let China bomb Latin America, let Russia isolate itself, let France wither and die, let Switzerland blackmail half the world. To Darek, as long as the money kept coming and the nets didn’t shut down, he was happy enough.

The immense banner vibrantly proclaiming the name “TRACKERS” hailed Darek upon his approach. The revolving doors at its base seemed to be spitting out so many tech- nicians, lawyers, and communications advisors that Darek wondered how it was that there were enough inside not fervently trying to get somewhere they weren’t to get any amount of work done. He used a side door labeled “EMPLOYEES ONLY” and slid inside the massive building. A woman with small glasses and black hair accosted him shoving a finger unceremoniously in his face.

“Mr. Elson, you have once again managed to try my patience and force me to shift work from your hideous ass onto others of your station. You can expect a deduction from your paycheck this month due to your lack of discipline and inability to achieve any amount of work.”

“Love you, too, Carrie,” Darek said, rolling his eyes. Carrie grinned at him.

“That’s what he was muttering to himself in his office. He actually rehearses the tongue-lashings he gives you ” She pulled a small rectangular data file from her pocket.

“Cheese wants me to give you this. Don’t give me that look! I didn’t look at it, okay?” Darek smiled.

“You said that last time, too, and we
both know how that turned out.”

“What, you want a contract signed in blood? Take the stupid file, moron. And guess what else?”

“The boss wants to see me.”

“Bingo. See you later, cowboy.” Carrie sauntered off to her office and the door slid closed behind her. Darek smiled. Carrie had the unconscious ability to make anyone around her instantly comfortable. Darek had been going out with Carrie for a while, but she’d left him for Bleu, more commonly called Cheese because of his ridiculous first name. Darek didn’t mind too much. The first rule of Carrie was Carrie does what she will.

Darek stepped up to the tube-elevator that had recently been installed and punched in the room number of Archibald Trudas. Trudas was a red-faced hairless excuse for a man, but he was the boss, and he had undeniable intelligence, so everyone had to do what he said. The tube-elevator appeared in moments, and Darek boarded it. A voice in Mandarin told him to stay in the center of the elevator and to avoid unnecessary movement, and other such safety procedures. By the time it finished speaking Darek was at the right floor, and was stepping off. Trudas’ was the only office on this floor, which he thought gave himself an impression of grandiosity, though pretty much everyone ridiculed him behind his back for such useless waste of space.

Darek tapped lightly on the door and it slid upward immediately. Darek entered the room nonchalantly, and halted in the middle of the carpet in front of Trudas.

“Mr. Elson, you have once again managed to try my patience and force me to shift work from your hideous ass onto others of your station. You can expect a deduction from your paycheck this month due to your lack of discipline and inability to achieve any amount of work.” The man’s beady eyes glowed in anger, but it was all Darek could do not to laugh out loud. Word for word, Carrie, word for word.

“I’m very sorry, sir, it won’t happen again.”

“You had better hope not. Your job is in danger as it is, Mr. Elson. Continued tardiness could just get you fired. I’ve sent you today’s assignment, now get to your office and get to work ”

Darek didn’t stay to say anything more. He headed straight back to the tube-elevator and down to his own office. His work REM was there. He sat down at his desk and placed the goggles over his eyes. Trudas’ assignment was waiting for him. Today he had to unearth some old data files concerning a serial-hacker who shut down a system of communications that connected much of southern India to the rest of the world. Evidently, the hacker had never been caught and it was thought that he was back. Trudas needed the old files to try to find a pattern in the way the hacker attacked the nets. Darek’s fingers tingled and he raced off into the net.


Pizza again. That seemed to be all you could get on the markets these days. So much demand made the companies and businesses sloppy. Even Darek, at twenty-four years old, could remember a time when care and precision was put into the art of making pizza. These days, pizza was bread, red, and topping. It was once crust, tomato sauce, and cheese, along with grease, grace, and character.

He ordered pepperoni and munched on it on the pizzeria’s front porch. Tasteless, like always. Darek gulped down his soda, quickly scanned his card for the check and headed back across the street. “TRACKERS” was only his morning job, for which he was glad since he had furthered lowered his own salary by botching a cyber investigation. His afternoon job, which was of far more importance to him, was the games.

At the other side of the road, Darek swerved left and headed back to his apartment. He stopped briefly at his favorite shop in the Cytroscopy to see if his computer upgrade had come yet. Darek knew he was a hypocrite for spending any time at all in the Cytroscopy, especially since he was actually buying something, but he tried to rationalize it by saying that he was supporting his friend Vriold and at the same time buying something of lesser quality than he could make. In Darek’s mind, if you could make it better, it didn’t matter if you bought it. Right now, he was just being lazy.
The upgrade had of course not come, and Vriold told him in a Russian accent that the packaging had gotten screwed up, adding another two to three weeks onto the delivery time. Darek didn’t even argue, he was so used to this response. He picked up his pace as he approached his apartment. He was now late for a game match he had scheduled with a Taiwanese player who had been looking forward to a high-risk game for some time.

The main games Darek played were Go, Wereld Houwer, and Reseki. Go was an old Japanese strategy game using black and white pieces on a grid-board to try to gain control of the board. Darek wasn’t very good at it, but he occasionally made a quick yen off weaker players. Wereld Houwer was less of a board game than a sort of role-playing virtual world, translated from Dutch roughly, “world to hack”, a play on words meaning that the game revolved around battle, or hacking, and that it meant that most of the functions of the game were created through raw code, or hacking again. There were basic laws built into the game that prevented too much over-use of hacking, but it rewarded hard work and skill with computer systems. Each player had an avatar that represented themselves. Darek had worked his avatar out to be a sort of gunslinger who used a pair of long pistols for weapons. Not much real money was made off Wereld Houwer, and Darek mainly played it for enjoyment.

The last game Darek played was also his favorite: Reseki. Reseki was a very complex game where the two players engaged in a battle of intellect around a board with two hundred fifty-six pieces that could be moved in certain ways to try to surround or destroy the enemy. One of the catches was that any one of your own pieces could be used by your opponent against you, so every precaution had to be taken with strategical positioning. Once one player’s position was strong enough that his pieces couldn’t be weakened even from within his deep lines, the game ended. Darek competed on an international professional level with Reseki, and he was very good. He made the majority of his money off of Reseki games, so he had to do well.

Today, Darek made thirty-eight yen off his games, but actually lost more games than he won. He was lucky enough to win the important, high stakes games, but seemed to be useless when little was on the line. By the time the sun was beginning to set through the city haze, Darek had a headache the size of the Amazon Desert. He called Julio and was able to force down another hardpack before he collapsed on his bed. A helicopter thumped outside.

Darek’s REM goggles flickered then died as they turned off from inactivity. Darek’s eyes ached from their constant movement across the computer screen. Darek knew what would be on the vids, but he turned them on anyway. Trash, trash, and more trash. China was getting ready to release Nepal from its iron grip, but they’d been saying that for as long as Darek could remember. Stupid cartoons appeared as he flicked through the channels. Gradually, his eyes drooped lower and lower until finally, with a sigh, he fell into his dreams.

They were real tonight.