He looked at her as if she had missed something. “Thirty dollars if you didn’t prepurchase,” he said, and she guessed he was repeating it.
“I have a code? To get in free?” Apparently her nerves turned statements into questions.
“I’m working for SHL,” she said, attempting a sentence.
“Paste your code here.”
She opened her bag of holding and snagged the invitation, dropping it in front of his scanner.
The bot waved her past. “Door on the right.”
She guessed the left door was where the regulars went, whoever came here for the bar instead of the show. This bar probably existed in the SHL virtual landscape even when shows weren’t going on, for subscription holders’ benefit.
The ceiling dropped low as she entered, less than a foot over Rosemary’s head, the passage narrow and dark. She made it ten more feet before she encountered another person on another stool, this one a tiny blonde woman.
“ID,” said the woman. Av or bot?
Rosemary fumbled for her bag of holding again, managing to open two other apps and a screenshot camera before she flashed her digital ID. “Sorry, new Hoodie.”
The woman was unimpressed. “Bag.”
Nobody here spoke in anything more than one-syllable words. Rosemary opened access to her bag and waited while the woman searched it. “It’s my wallet and camera and workstation. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to bring, you know?”
The woman gave her a strange look, enough to tell Rosemary she was an av, not a bot.
“I’m sorry,” said Rosemary. “I know I’m talking a lot. It’s my first time here. First time at an SHL show, too. In case you couldn’t tell.”
The woman handed her bag access back. There didn’t seem to be any point to the security rituals; maybe they added authenticity for those who remembered real places like this. Or maybe they were meant to dissuade people who brought virtual guns to virtual bars.
As she moved past, the woman spoke. “You can only use your camera app for the first two minutes of the show. The first two minutes use a different format, so people can take pictures with the band if they want and tell people they were here. After that, don’t bother. The rest don’t photograph well. If you keep trying, people will know you’re new. Also, don’t go in the bathroom unless you’re looking for drugs or sex.”
Rosemary flashed a grateful smile. “Thanks!” She wasn’t sure why anyone wanted to photograph a holo, or why a virtual club needed a bathroom, but she filed the information away. She blew her next moment of cool by pushing on a pull door.
After passing Door Entry 101, she found herself in a room so dim she had no sense of the space’s size. It felt limitless. She’d seen the building from the outside, but the outer dimensions didn’t correspond to anything inside. This was SHL’s world.
SHL’s world. Her eyes adjusted. The club was as large as any room she’d ever been in, but blander, like it hadn’t yet been mapped over with any personality or style. No, on closer look, it was more than the black box it had at first appeared to be. There were layers, textures. Black paint on black walls, black tape on black paint on black walls, strata of stickers upon stickers upon stickers on black walls, some with embedded links. The illusion of metal struts and lighting scaffolds, far above their heads, and of grime on the scuffed cement floor.
Staring at the Bloom Bar logo on the wall revealed a text scroll explaining how this was an amalgamation of several venues from Before, not a re-creation of any one in particular. There were also options for a list of bands that had played here in the past, and the full upcoming music calendar. She blinked it all away.
The first person who crossed her sight line looked like a lion, and for a panicked moment Rosemary wondered if cat avatars had come back into style while she wasn’t paying attention. They had been all the rage among those who could afford them when she was in high school, but after schools and Superwally workplace policies banned them, the fad petered out. On second glance, this was a man’s avatar with a big teased halo of blond hair. She scanned the room to see if that hairstyle was a popular one, but there weren’t any others like him.
All the seats at the bar down the long side of the room were taken. She studied the people on the stools, trying to pick up what to say. She’d only been in a bar one time before, for her twenty-first birthday, when her school friends had made her meet them for drinks. Real cocktails, which droned to her doorstep in mason jars nestled in protective packaging. The bar itself had been flat and boring, a generic Irish bar with outdated graphics and a glitchy interface made worse by her Basic Hoodie. She’d never cared to repeat the experience; she preferred chatting with friends in a game or somewhere else where they had something to do while they talked. Her friend Donna had said the bar had history, like history was a selling point. The highlight had been the jar of vodka-spiked basil lemonade.
She watched people at the bar order wine by the glass, bottled beer, cocktails in tumblers. Somebody walked away, and she pushed in to grab his stool. Rested her elbows on the bar, careful not to let her hands touch it. It was virtual, but it still looked sticky. The bar itself held a shimmering menu that appeared when she was right on top of it, advertising a variety of drinks and legal drugs, with two prices beside each, real and virtual. When the bartender finally noticed her, she ordered a birch beer.
“Real or virtual?”
She was on the clock, and it took an hour for drones to get to her house, anyway. “Vee.”
“VCash or Superwally credit?”
“Superwally!” She hadn’t even thought that was an option. Excellent. The drink could be debited straight from her store credit account. The bartender pulled out a handheld and she passed her account number. He grunted and turned his back to make her drink. He’d have to hold the glass, and scoop the ice, but the birch beer came out of a bottle. She wasn’t really drinking it, she reminded herself. Any germs were virtual ones, too.
“If you use Superwally there’s no way to tip him. He only takes VCash tips,” whispered the person to Rosemary’s right. She turned. A black woman with a cloud of natural hair raised a phone in her direction and wagged it. “If you’re planning on having a second drink or coming back here again, throw a dollar or two in cash on the counter. He keeps track of who stiffs him.”
She hadn’t even considered anybody would need to be tipped.
“Thank you,” Rosemary whispered back, reaching for her wallet. When she looked over at the woman again, she was amazed to see that the avatar’s face was covered with pox scars. Even at Superwally, where avs were supposed to be photorealistic, she’d never seen one with scars. She hadn’t even considered that it was possible, though if you could have a cat head, of course you could have scars if you wanted. Her hand went to her stomach, where her own scars were worst.
She hadn’t meant to stare, but now the woman was watching her, and she felt obligated to make more conversation. “Are you a big fan of the band?”
“I don’t care who plays. This place reminds me of a club I used to hang out in. How about you?”
Rosemary shrugged. “I like their music, but this is my first time seeing them. My first time seeing any band, actually.”
The av brightened with enthusiasm. “In that case, you should go get closer.”
“Closer?”
“Trust me.” She pointed toward the room’s center. A loose circle of people had formed around the stage area. “If this were my first show, I’d be over there.”
The bartender handed Rosemary her drink in a red plastic cup. She made sure he saw his tip, then went in search of a good place to stand. The projectors—projections of projectors, really—moved in a circle above a clear area ringed with angled speakers. She guessed that meant the band holo appeared in the center. She situated herself behind the largest group, under the assumption they knew what they were doing.