“Do you charge more for discretion, Mr. Stuart? I’m rather interested in discretion.”
“I charge just to enter my building,” Stuart said. “That’s sufficiently outrageous for most folks.” Someone yelled a long question at him from the new machines at the western end of the building—something about “naming trees” and “defuzzification.” Stuart whipped his leathery neck around like an owl. “Read the manual!” he shouted. He turned to Mia again. “Kids … Where were we, ma’am?”
“Mia.”
“What?”
“There is no manual!” the boy screamed in reply.
“Mia, M-I-A,” Mia said patiently.
“Oh,” Stuart said, tapping one hearing aid. “Nice to have you in the shop, Maya. Don’t mind the kids here, they get a little rowdy sometimes.”
“I’ll try the curtain unit and the slate, please.”
“I’ll check you in,” said Stuart.
Discretion was the sole advantage of obsolete hardware. Obsolete hardware was so bafflingly out-of-date as to be basically unpoliceable. Modern virtuality standards were far tidier, sturdier, and more sensible than the primitive, frazzled, often dangerous junk from the rest of the century. Modern data archives were astonishingly free, accessible, and open. But there were hundreds of obsolescent formats, and vast backwaters of obsolescent data, that were accessible only on machines no longer manufactured or supported. Machines of this sort could only be used by hobbyist fanatics—or by people so old that they had learned to use these machines decades ago and had never abandoned them.
Stuart gave Mia a battered touchslate and a virtuality jewel case. Mia retired to the netsite’s bathroom, with its pedestal sinks and mirrors. She washed her hands.
Mia clicked open the jewelry case, took its two featherlight earring phones, and cuffed them deftly onto her ears. She dabbed the little beauty-mark microphone to the corner of her upper lip. She carefully glued the false lashes to her eyelids. Each lash would monitor the shape of her eyeball, and therefore the direction of her gaze.
Mia opened the hinged lid of a glove font and dipped both her hands, up to the wrists, into a thick bath of hot adhesive plastic. She pulled her hands out, and waved them to cool and congeal.
The gloves crackled on her fingers as they cured and set. Mia worked her finger joints, then clenched her fists, methodically. The plastic surface of the gloves split like drying mud into hundreds of tiny platelets. She then dipped her gloves into a second tank, then pulled free. Thin, conductive veins of wetly glittering organic circuitry dried swiftly among the cracks.
When her gloves were nicely done, Mia pulled a wrist-fan from a slot below the basin. She cracked the fan against her forearm to activate it, then opened it around her left wrist and buttoned it shut. The rainbow-tinted fabric stiffened nicely. When she had opened and buttoned her second wrist-fan, she had two large visual membranes the size of dinner plates radiating from the ends of her arms.
The plastic gloves came alive as their circuitry met and meshed with the undersides of the wrist-fans. Mia worked her fingers again. The wrist-fans swiftly mapped out the shape of the gloves, making themselves thoroughly familiar with the size, shape, and movements of her hands.
The fans went opaque. Her hands vanished from sight. Then the image of her hands reappeared, cleverly mapped and simulated onto the outer surfaces of the wrist-fans. Reality vanished at the rim of the fans, and Mia saw virtual images of both her hands extended into twin circles of blue void.
Tucking the touchslate under one arm, Mia left the bathroom and walked to her chosen curtain unit. She stepped inside and shut and sealed the curtain behind her. The fabric stiffened with a sudden top-to-bottom shudder, and the machine woke itself around her. The stiff curtain fabric turned a uniform shade of cerulean. Much more of reality vanished, and Mia stood suspended in a swimming sky blue virtuality. Immersive virtuality—except, of course, for the solid floor beneath her feet, and the ceiling overhead, an insect-elbowed mess of remote locators, tracking devices, and recording equipment.
The fabric curtain was woven from glass fiber, thousands of hair-thin multicolored fiber-optic scan-lines. Following the cues from her false eyelashes, the curtain wall lit up and displayed its imagery wherever Mia’s eyesight happened to rest. Wherever her gaze moved and fell, the curtain was always ahead of her, instantly illuminated, rendering its imagery in a fraction of a second, so that the woven illusion looked seamless, and surrounded her.
Mia fumbled for a jack and plugged in the touchslate. The curtain unit recognized the smaller machine and immediately wrapped her in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree touchplate display, a virtual abyss of smoky gray. Mia dabbled at the touchscreen with her gloved fingertips until a few useful displays tumbled up from its glassy depths: a cycle tachometer, a clock, a network chooser.
She picked one of San Francisco’s bigger public net gates, held her breath, and traced in Martin Warshaw’s passtouch. The wall faithfully sketched out the scrawling of her gloved fingertip, monster glyphs of vivid charcoal against the gray fabric.
The tracing faded. The curtain unit went sky blue again. Nothing much happened after that. Still, the little tachometer showed processing churning away, somewhere, somehow, out in the depths of the net. So Mia waited patiently.
After eight minutes, the tachometer vanished. The walls went stellar black, then leapt into a full-scale virtually rendition.
Mia found herself in an architect’s office. There was a big desk in simulated wood grain, and painfully gleaming brass lamps, and algorithmic swirls of simulated marble. The chairs were puffy, overstuffed, and swaddlingly comfortable. Old people’s chairs. They were the kind of chairs that top-flight furniture designers had begun making back in the 2070s, when furniture designers suddenly realized that very old people possessed all the money in the world, and that from now on very old people were going to have all the money until the end of time.
The virtual office, with some fine display of irony, had been designed to resemble the office of a civil architect. Architects who designed actual buildings, as opposed to those who built virtual structures, tended to be rather snobbish and pushy about their intimate relation to tangible physicality. The walls around her were all corkboards, chalkboards, crayons, drafting paper, and string. All very analog and tactile. There wasn’t a data screen anywhere in the place. Except, of course, that this entire virtual environment was itself a data screen.
There was a serious mismatch between Martin Warshaw’s sophisticated memory palace and this randomly chosen and somewhat pokey little curtain unit. Against the rounded fabric walls, the corners of the virtual room looked quite nasty, with a stomach-churning visual warp. The simulation couldn’t seem to decide where to put the floor. Rims of flooring slopped up on the lower edges of the screen, like a swamped rowboat slowly going under.
A simulated window in one wall showed an arty glimpse of a fake exterior garden, but the organic shapes within the garden were disastrous. The trees were jerky half-rendered blurs, a nightmare vision of x-rayed vegetation under alien sunlight as thick as cheese. The inside of the office boasted a virtual potted plant. Its big serrated leaves looked as stiff and lifeless as waffle irons.
Mia turned in place, gazing about the virtual office cautiously. A massive framed blueprint hung on the wall to her left. It showed a vast multistory edifice—the ground-floor plans of the memory palace itself, presumably. The blueprints were lavishly annotated, in horribly blurred and tiny print. The palace looked huge, elaborate, and quite intimidating. Mia felt as if she’d unwrapped a Christmas gift and found an entire steam locomotive crammed inside it. A multi-ton coal-fired virtual jack-in-the-box.