Patiently she blinks through malformed menus. She teases faux reality into perspective, the spex’s still functioning LIDAR scan of the room calibrated to fit across the geometry of the actual. No more double images, no more disturbing misalignment, no scrabbling around in the unseen for the UI. Normal function returns, and with it the strange dread of the mundane.
Most of the spex’s functions are dead, pointless, having purpose only when there’s a network to attach to, peers to talk with. Resignedly she scans the local area for other nodes, knowing full well what results will come back. Text floats in the air in front of her face, at the focal point between her and the girl.
No other users detected in range.
Find friends in your neighbourhood to talk and share with!
One of a kind, the last working spex in the Croft.
She slips them off again, smiles at the girl.
“One last thing I need to try, and then you can have your glasses back. Okay?”
“I know they’re called spex, you know. I’m not stupid.”
“I know you’re not.”
Anika places the spex on the floor between them, arms still unfurled, lenses facing back toward her. From her bag she brings out another pair—bulkier, scratched gloss-black finish—that College gave her earlier. She places them on the floor in front of Mary’s, facing them, as though the two pairs are nose to nose.
“What are you doing?” Mary asks.
“I’m not sure exactly… but apparently this should work.”
They stare at the floor in silence together, for what feels like a long minute. Mary opens her mouth to speak, but before she can form words she’s interrupted by a sudden loud chime. They both jump.
Anika gingerly picks up the black spex. As she touches them, green power bars glow along its arms. She slips them on.
In front of her the words FLEX OS 10.74 INSTALLING and a quickly filling progress bar float in the swirling sunlit dust. They chime again. Welcoming screen. Ready.
(1) other users detected in range. Connect now?
Find more friends in your neighbourhood to talk and share with!
“Well, that was quick.”
“What happened?”
“Those ones, your spex—they just repaired these ones.” She taps the ones she’s wearing, then takes them off. “Made them start working again.”
“How?”
“Magic.”
“Shut up.” It’s the first time she’s seen Mary annoyed. “It’s not magic. There’s no fucking magic.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Well, you’re right there. There’s no fucking magic.” She picks up Mary’s spex and hands them back to her. “Ask College. He’ll tell you. He knows how all this shit works more than I do.”
“So… now what?”
“Now what? Well, now I can see what you see, I guess.”
“You’re looking for people too?”
“Me?” Anika laughs. “No. I’m not looking for anyone.” She doubts her own words as she says them.
“Really? I reckon everybody is looking for someone.”
“Right? That’s what you reckon, is it? So who are you looking for?”
“I dunno. Someone called Melody.” Mary seems embarrassed. Her eyes drop to the ground again. “For Grids.”
“Oh, right.”
“You knew her?”
“Not personally.”
“Oh.”
“I—I don’t think you’ll find her.” Anika tries to pick her words carefully. “Not here. She… died. Away from here.”
“Yeah, I know. Grids knows that, too. But he wants some… memory of her, I guess. A picture. Some of her music. So that’s what I’m looking for.”
“Right.” Anika isn’t sure what to say.
“Could you help me?”
Anika wants to straight-out tell her no, to not get involved. Wants to take the spex and go. Not her fucking problem. But the kid seems insistent.
“I’m not really sure how I could—”
“Please? Look, you know how this all works. Better than I do. I don’t think I’m using it properly. You said yourself earlier, it must be giving me headaches. It does. Because I don’t know how it works. Nobody has ever shown me. Can you just show me, a bit?”
“Talk to College. I’m not—”
“Please? Look, I helped you.” She points at the spex in Anika’s hands. “Just show me a few things?”
Anika sighs. Fuck it.
“Okay, okay. Whatever. But quickly.”
“Yes!” The girl smiles and bounces, claps her hands once. Anika suddenly sees how fucking young she is again.
“So, what now? Here?”
“Why not?”
Because this place is crawling with fucking ghosts, Anika thinks. Dread creeps along her spine, seeping up from the cold concrete.
“Okay. Sure. You never been up here before?”
“Nah. Grids won’t let me. He doesn’t know I’m here now.”
“Yeah, I guessed as much.”
Mary looks around some more, at the shattered plaster and fading scrawls. “What is this place?”
“This is where it all happened.”
“Happened?”
“Yeah. Where it all started.”
Mary’s eyes open wide. “Show me.”
Eventually she finds it, buried deep in a settings menu. The surveillance app that nobody apart from Rush knew was there, installed by him and pushed out to everyone without them even knowing. Watching everyone, recording everything. She remembers people freaking out in that final week, as their spex’s inbuilt storage mysteriously started to fill up with data, not being able to work out what it was and assuming it must be the lethal malware, eating away at their system. Instead it was just Rush, squirreling away his surveillance recordings in the distributed cloud of his decentralized network, capturing everyone’s reality and hiding it right under—or resting just above, in fact—their own noses.
Before they dive in, she shows and explains a few things to Mary. How it works, the principles behind it. How it can only show things that people in the Croft saw that one week—how, although it looks real, everything is just an illusion, a mix-and-match collage of hundreds of people’s viewpoints. She shows her how the interface works, how the spex track the movements of her eyes, and how she can use that to control things; to swipe-scroll, to pull menus down from her periphery, how she can blink to select things. She shows her how they can send messages between them, how to share their spaces so they can see the same things.
Then she fires the app up, and the room changes. Graffiti is replaced with collages of Post-it notes on the few spaces where the walls are still visible; most of them are hidden behind server racks and piles of disused, half-repaired computers. Mission control, they used to call it. A heavyset figure moves among them, vague and unclear at first.
Mary recognizes him first. “College!”
His virtual presence startles Anika for a second, but that’s soon replaced with a melancholic fondness. He looks younger, lighter. His dreads are shorter, less gray, his hairline receding less. As quickly as it comes, the flash of nostalgic joy at seeing him in his youth again vanishes, replaced by concern. She can see he’s not happy. Frantic. He’s packing a small black backpack with seemingly random items; a laptop, cables, two pairs of spex. Dead technology.
And then it happens, before he can finish or react, a loud popping sound from all around, the flash of sparks from some of the server stacks, and then freeze-frame, glitch out.
Back in the shattered room, her skull rests against the brick wall.
“Well, that’s the end of the recording, then, I guess.”