She turned toward the center of the room. The top of the wood-grain desk boasted a single framed photograph. Mia made stepping motions in place, and managed to reach the virtual desk without barging through it. She reached out one hand, fishing for the photo. The glove interface was hopelessly bad, full of stutter and overlap.
This was a very unhappy interface. And small wonder. No doubt this entire virtual environment was being encrypted, decrypted, reencrypted, anonymously routed through satellites and cables, emulated on alien machinery through ill-fitting, out-of-date protocols, then displayed through long-dead graphics standards. Dismembered, piped, compressed, packeted, unpacketed, decompressed, unpiped and re-membered. Worse yet, the place was old. Virtual buildings didn’t age like physical ones, but they aged in subtle pathways of arcane decline, in much the way that their owners did. A little bijou table in the corner had a pronounced case of bit-rot: from a certain angle it lost all surface tint.
The place wasn’t dead, though. A virtual gecko appeared and sneaked its way along the wall, a sure sign that little health-assuring subroutines were still working their way through the damper, darker spots in the palace’s code.
Mia got a tentative grip on the photograph. She lifted it from the desktop, and the image burst free from the frame like a hemorrhage, and leapt up onto the fabric wall of the curtain unit, flinging itself all around her in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree blast of bright red pixels the size of bloody thumbprints. Mia winced, put the photo back down, and peered at it sidelong through the membrane of her wrist-fan. Objects within hand’s reach seemed a lot better realized graphically than the jittery mess up on the curtain walls.
The frame held another digital photograph of herself. A different picture this time: the very young Mia Ziemann was sitting on a threadbare red fabric couch in her red terry-cloth bathrobe, reading a paper magazine, her slim bare legs perched on a coffee table. Her hair was wet. The floor was littered with collegiate junk: fast-food packets, disks of recorded music, two unlaced walking shoes. The young Mia was unaware of the photographer. She looked relaxed and comfortable, yet deeply intent on her magazine.
Another little keepsake of Martin’s. His posthumous message to the palace’s chosen heiress.
Mia clawed open a drawer of the virtual desk. Empty. She knocked the photo into the empty drawer and shut it.
She opened another desk drawer. Scissors, paper, pens, tape, pins. She tried repeatedly, but failed to get a decent grip on the virtual scissors. She opened another drawer. A box of colored chalk.
Mia plucked a stick of pale green chalk from the box, and turned toward the chalkboard on the far wall. She marched in place toward the chalkboard—it reeled disturbingly as she grew nearer—and she reached out, her gloved fingers pinched and the virtual chalk outstretched.
Clearly this action called for much better gloves than the cheap peel-aways she was wearing. The chalk wobbled in and out of the surface of chalkboard like Dodgson’s Alice having fits in a mirror. After prolonged struggle Mia managed to shakily scrawl a random message, the first thing that had come into her head:
MAYA WAS HERE
She added a potato-nosed Kilroy face, and, for good measure, scrawled some childish Miss Kilroy curls on Kilroy’s domed noggin. She accidentally dropped the virtual chalk, which hit the floor with an audible click and vanished. After searching for it hopelessly with her wrist-fans, Mia found herself getting seriously seasick. She unplugged the touchscreen, threw open the wall of the curtain, and stepped outside.
Swallowing bile, she unstrapped the wrist-fans and put them away. She peeled off the gloves into shredded strips and dropped them into a recycler. That had been more than enough for a first try. If she ever entered Warshaw’s palace again, she’d use top-of-the-line datagloves from work, and some decent spex. Mia felt nauseated. And obscurely disappointed. And deeply cheated. And desolately sad.
She walked down a crooked aisle among Stuart’s phalanx of machines, breathing hard and trying to clear her head. She walked the length of the barn, down among the new machines. At the far end of the building she turned and headed back. She felt better now. Walking always helped her.
“Come with me to Europe,” a woman said aloud. Mia stopped.
“We don’t have time for Europe. Or the money,” a man grumbled. The two of them were sitting together on a blanket on the floor, in an aisle among the machines. The man wore a big padded jacket and dirty leggings and big scuffed boots; he had a pair of glittering spex propped on his forehead. The woman wore a very peculiar garment, a tentlike brown poncho somehow suspender-strapped to a baggy pair of pleated harem pants. They’d been working together at a CAD rig. They’d stripped off their manipulation gauntlets and they were sprawling on their blanket and eating biscuits from a paper bag.
They looked rather dirty. They were talking too loud. Their faces were strange: unlined, lithe. Their gestures were sharp and abrupt. They seemed very upset about something.
They were young people.
“They could spin that polymer in six days in Stuttgart,” said the girl. “Six hours, maybe.”
“Stuttgart’s not a real answer. At least here we’ve got some connections.”
“That old man only keeps us here ’cause he likes to watch us play! We need some vivid people. People like us. In a place where it’s happening. Not like this museum.”
“We’ll never get anywhere in Stuttgart. You know what the rents are like in Stuttgart? Anyway, are you saying we’re not vivid? You and me? We gotta be vivid in our own way, on our own ground! It doesn’t mean anything, otherwise.”
Mia walked past them, pretending not to eavesdrop. They paid her no attention. She sought out Mr. Stuart behind his counter. Stuart was digging with a multitool in the silvery innards of a broken helmet.
“I’m done, for now,” Mia said.
“Great,” Stuart said indifferently, tucking a spex monocle into one eye.
“Tell me about those two young people over there, the ones doing CAD work.”
Stuart stared at her, his monocle gleaming. “Are you kidding? What business is that of yours?”
“I’m not asking you what networks they’re accessing,” Mia explained. “I just want to know a little about their personal lives.”
“Oh, okay, no problem,” Stuart said, relieved. “Those kids are in their twenties. Always got some little project going, you know how it is at that age. No sense of time scale, lots of energy to waste, head in the clouds. They make clothes. Try to.”
“Really.”
“Clothes for other kids. She designs them, and he instantiates them. They’re a team. It’s a kid romance. It’s cute.”
“What are their names?”
“I never asked.”
“How do they pay you for the access time?”
Stuart said nothing. Pointedly.
“Thanks,” Mia said. She went back to eavesdrop at greater length. The young people were gone. Mia quickly snagged her cashcard from the entranceway. There wasn’t much left on the card, for Stuart’s rates were very cruel to strangers. She hurried out of the building.
The boy and girl had backpacks slung over their shoulders and were walking uphill toward a bus stop.
When the bus arrived, Mia climbed aboard behind them. They sat in the back. Mia sat near them, across the aisle. They took no notice of her. Young people didn’t like to notice old people.
“This town,” the girl announced bitterly, “is boring me to death.”
“Sure,” the boy said, yawning.
“I’m bored right now,” the girl said.