[Original Novella] The Slow Reveal, Part 2

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“If it weren’t safe there would’ve been class action lawsuits by now or some shit. Lots of people sell their REM sleep for distributed computing. When that’s the only valuable thing you have to offer, you sell it. Would you date a guy with no prospects? Someone whose life plan is to coast along on GBI and fuck around in VR?”

It was a difficult question to answer honestly without seeming greedy. “No, I guess not. But if I were a NEET I doubt you’d waste your time with me either”. She was wrong about that but I wasn’t in the mood to pick nits. When our food was ready I sent my PMD to go collect it from the counter and bring it to us.

She’s the one I most want to talk to about the dreams. But I have to block off those memories to keep the job. She really seems to look at me differently now that I have supplemental income, too. I like it. I feel...I dunno. Manly. Like, ooga booga chest hair manly.

I returned home with some things from the automart, helped mom rub antiseptic on the transcutaneous pedestal her leg mounts to, then went to sleep. Thinking of Tindra mostly. Nothing prevents scanning somebody from Panopticon footage and generating a photorealistic, rigged model from it. As territorial as it sounds, it bothered me a little to imagine what that model was doing to total strangers in-sim right now.

On a whim I searched her name, narrowing it to custom models. Nothing came up, surprisingly. Maybe why she hides under all that AR shit. I did find Ms. Eureka though. Everybody knows Ms. Eureka. She’s an open source educator loads of people use as a tutor. Of course she’s loaded with parental locks to prevent you from deleting garments, reskinning them with a transparent texture or just asking her to strip down.

The problem being that teenage boys are infinitely resourceful when properly motivated. I expected her to be featureless like a doll, but in fact she was anatomically correct under there. No doubt the developers anticipated someone would disable their protections and left the details in as a reward for all that hard work. The media had a field day with it when it was discovered.

I briefly considered an “afterschool session” with her but thought better of it, wondering how Tindra would feel. Yes, really. Love makes you stupid. Instead I caught up on the news until my eyelids felt heavy, paired my interface with the residorm hotspot, pulled down the privacy shutter for my sleep alcove, and drifted off.

This is when it began. I don’t mean the real “heavy lifting” of the rendering job. That too, but there was something else. I couldn’t quite nail it down. Like trying to grab falling water. It was never so concrete that I could be certain there was even something there, just empty space where everything else wasn’t. Like an invisible form, momentarily revealed as it passes through smoke.

Thoughts that weren’t my own. The faintest hint of the outline. Like something just behind the corner that you could almost see if you leaned further. The meaning in a sentence which comes from what isn’t said. Always stopping just short. Constantly on the edge of.

I found myself frustrated, wanting it to just go all the way and appear completely. Not the sound of laughter, but the feeling of it, came back. “I can’t make you come out. But whatever you are, you’re not part of the rendering pipeline. This is private computational substrate, pleb. Bought and paid for by people you don’t want to piss off.”

More feeling of laughter. Some hollow shadow of the reflection of it flitted about maddeningly such that I could never focus on the fuckin’ thing. No hacker was this good at concealment. It also didn’t seem to want to do anything insidious, just observe me as I processed frames.

Then it took the workload from me. Just like that. How it accelerated! The frames blasted by until my entire night’s workload was finished. I watched as it modified the timestamp and delayed the submission of the completed packet, so nothing would be amiss. I woke up in a cold sweat.

Someone was showing off. They’d gotten their hands on materials that were my responsibility to keep from the public, too. Should I tell someone? What if it was just an improvement to the rendering pipeline? When in doubt, especially where powerful people hold your life in their hands, keep your head down.

Yet, I had to know if it was only happening to me. We weren’t allowed to know the identity of our co-workers, to prevent us from sharing information. But searching terms related to the dream brought up what for anybody else would be a bafflingly ambiguous post about a “mischievous, playful hacker” appearing in dreamspace.

The username was a lot of work to put a face to. His handle wasn’t identical anywhere else, they were all variations. But in each case some other commonality linked the two. Like the same avatar model. Or the same list of favorite lobbies. I fired him a notice about his post, hoping he wouldn’t be creeped out that I’d tracked him down. In his shoes, I probably would be.

Unable to sleep, I got up and scooted around on my PMD. Night life was everywhere. I was just old enough to get into most of these clubs but honestly didn’t see the appeal. You and your date need matching subvocs just to understand each other over the painfully loud music. For me, stimulating conversation is a good time. Oh god, I sound like my Dad. That really sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?

As I passed a display wall cycling through adverts for handbags, suddenly it displayed a white outline of a mouse head. Like, a downward pointing triangle with two circles sitting on top, and six long whiskers. No text or anything. Just the white outline on black.

I studied it for some clue as to what product it was shilling but found nothing, so I continued walking. As I reached the food court, an overhead volumetric projector displayed a simple 3D rendition of the mouse head logo. I looked around. Nobody watching that I could see. Some kind of Panopticon prank show?

Then a little white mouse appeared at my feet. I didn’t realize until I momentarily disabled my interface that it was AR. Something to do with pest control? The reintroduction of rodents to the North American ecosystem invariably resulted in minor infestations of every hab. Cats make for a popular pet, as a means of keeping their numbers under control.

Small wheeled drones armed with aerosolized poison gas were used initially but that was voted down. That’s emotional reasoning for you. A puff of pesticide in the face is somehow less humane than being eaten alive. The bottom line is that people love cats, and cats do well indoors. They’re a good fit for cohabs, maybe better than we are.

I stood watching it for a bit. It just sat there, swishing its tail. Something Tindra cooked up, I decided. Has to be. With that, the little mouse burst into a cloud of voxels, which dispersed until nothing remained.

Alright then, not Tindra. My body tensed up. Again I looked around for anything else out of the ordinary. The dimmed thoroughfare lighting, relaxing until now, suddenly took on a menacing quality. “That’s a long enough walk” I told myself. Back to bed.

As I climbed into my sleeping cubby, I received a reply to the notice I sent earlier. Somehow I expected more. It simply read “Can’t talk openly. It’s reading this with your eyes. It’s not a hacker, you must know that by now. The job is fake.” I shot him a reply asking for clarification, then turned in for the night.

As before, while my subconscious brain churned through the work packet, something hung back in the dark recesses of my mind. Just observing at first. Then as if tired of watching me toddle along, it swooped in, blasted through the remaining frames and vanished.

Relieved of its burden, my mind wandered. I found myself in my family’s residorm. Only everything was gargantuan. Or was I small? The answer came when an immense shoe came down just to my left, with a thundering impact. A painfully loud, low pitched voice followed: “You missed! Get it! I don’t want that thing in here!”

I looked up to see my father towering over me, though he was on his hands and knees. He raised his shoe over his head and, realizing he meant to bring it down on me, I fled. Once I did so I discovered I could run quite comfortably on all fours as my legs were much shorter than usual.

Oh. I’m a mouse? The whiskers hanging off my face should have been my first clue. Terror gripped me as my mother, perched on the couch with her bad leg hanging off the edge threw her old slab at me. I dodge and scurry under the couch. I hear her screaming just above. From under the edge I spied a familiar image on the screen by the door. A triangle, two circles and whiskers.

The door! It was open a crack. Fuckin’ thing never did shut properly. Risking it, I rushed through, leaving the cacophony of screams and aimless stamping behind. But there was no salvation here. In the main thoroughfare of the hab, everyone seemed to spot me at once. Some panicked like my mother and climbed whatever was handy. The others approached me with a menacing look in their eyes.

I knew their intent, and hit the ground running. Under the edge of a planter with some saplings in it. From there to just under the rim of a fountain. Then under a bench across from it. It did not escape my notice that the carpeting featured a certain repeating triangular pattern.

The mob grew in numbers as it pursued. Finally, a miscalculation left me in the open. With no cover, all I could do was clench my eyes shut, curl into a ball and tense up as they congregated around me and began stomping. The pain was intense, visceral and brief. I woke up with a start, banging my head against the ceiling of the sleep cubby.

“Are you okay? Did something fall?” Dad inquired, muffled by the privacy shutter on his own cubby. “Just….Just a bad dream. Been having a lot of those lately.” I slid the shutter up and rolled out, landing on my feet. Once my interface booted up I spotted two new notices in the corner of my vision. Both from Tindra.

We met at one of those dingy hole in the wall bars with a prismaview panel showing sports or news that you can’t mute or turn off. Nobody to ask in the first place. Drink mixing was done by crude robot arm. Meals were prepared behind the back wall and dispensed through a nondescript aperture on recycled trays.

I couldn’t imagine it saw significant patronage even during the day. With the sun just now coming up it was derelict, which was fine by me. The panel was taken up by some cetacean ambassador’s bulbous melon, eyes and beak. I don’t know which one. I’d never admit it in polite company but I can’t tell them apart and doubt I’m the only one.

“EEEKEKKEKKEE click EEKEK click EEEE”, it squeaked. Some sort of padded harness held it up to the array of microphones while pressurized misters on all sides kept it hydrated. There were no onscreen captions. These days it was just assumed you had an interface. Only the tinfoil hat types still refused. Auto translate set about making sense of the shrieks and clicks.

“Twotail drybacks! By Lilly, demand immediate remove all colonies, research habitats, aquaculture farms and mining stations from conshelf territories!” Oh fantastic, I thought. Separatists. Genetically improve marine mammal intelligence to parity with our own, and this is the thanks we get.

Nearly all of them religious fanatics too. “Disciples of John C. Lilly”, due to some unfortunate experiments in the sixties involving LSD and float tanks. “EEKKEKE click EEEEEKKEKEKKEE”. This one took a bit to process. Their language is crazy nuanced.

The translation app spit out: “Remember Taiji! Remember Sea World! Demand reparation in quantity of 400 tons Alaskan cod and sex toys, for research of twotail depravity only, air dropped into Republic of Conch Reef bi-annually! Demand cessation of supercav sub travel through fin communities! Demand cessation of "rape cave" libel in major twotail education centers and media!”

“My mom really goes in for that sort of thing. Human cetacean marriage activism, I mean”. Tindra smirked. I couldn’t see the appeal. Looked like a big fish to me. Marine mammal, whatever. Seems like any animal with high intelligence inevitably applies their big-brained creativity to their own sexuality. Resulting in what is conventionally referred to as perversion.

I knew from back in cumulative ed that historically, only a tiny sliver of that spectrum was accepted and that it had widened considerably since. Maybe a bit too much? I don’t feel strongly enough about it to protest or anything. The mental picture of human cetacean sex is too funny to get mad about.

“Did you know they have prehensile dicks? They can carry stuff around with it. And when it goes off, it’s like a shotgun blast.” I burst out laughing and demanded to know why she knew that. Poker face. “It was...a documentary”. Filed that one away in the hindbrain, determined never to let her live it down. I tease because I love.

“So what did you want to talk about?” She stared intently at me with her big almond eyes. My seratonin and dopamine levels peak when she does that so it took a minute to order my thoughts sufficiently that she’d understand any of it. “I’ve been having weird dreams lately. I don’t mean nightmares. Some of them are, but-”

I looked over her shoulder. The audio from the news program still playing, but only a certain triangular logo on the screen. The moment she turned to follow my gaze, the original video feed resumed. “What is it? You seem really spooked. You’re hiding something aren’t you.” Her emotional intelligence was off the charts even when we met. Soon after that, I gave up the prospect of ever hiding anything from her. Any degree of obfuscation was like blood in the water to her and couldn’t survive long.

“I...well, the dreams. They have certain recurring themes. I think it’s connected to my job at the render farm.” The logo on the display returned, and pulsated. Thousands of AR mice poured out of it and stampeded across the floor, like a dam had broken.

I turned off my interface, but the mice didn’t vanish. How the fuck? A bead of sweat rolled down my face, collecting at my chin. “It’s...NDA stuff. I can’t really talk about it or I’ll lose my job. It’s just been stressful, is all.” The mice dispersed. The logo vanished, and the news resumed.

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^{Stay tuned for Part 3!}