Chapter Sixteen - It

“You would be right to think that the Mesh is a full-immersion world, that being in the Mesh can trigger every human sense, from smell to balance and even the sense and perception of time.

The Mesh can do all of these things.

If you have the right gear.

The issue comes with the steep price of that kind of gear. Most normal Mesh users are simple people, usually in first-world countries, and at middling incomes. That is to say, that even the middle-tier Mesh gear is above their standard paygrade, and most need to purchase their equipment on credit or with payments.

Higher-end gear, the kind of equipment really needed to fully experience the Mesh? That can run for prices in the tens of millions of credits. More than a low-class person would make in a lifetime.

Unfortunately, despite improvements in manufacturing and processing power, these set-ups are still beyond the average person’s means. Mostly because the few companies making them want to keep the prices artificially inflated.

That must end!”

--Meshizen for a Better Tomorrow, public address 2050

***

“That’s it,” Daniel said as he floated down a dimly lit street.

There was no reason for the street to be poorly lit. It had just as many ‘lights’ along its sides as any of the other streets we passed.

That had to be deliberate. It certainly gave a sinister cast to all the people walking along the sidewalks. I had to keep reminding myself that in one sense, none of this was real. Being a cat certainly helped with the unreality of it all.

At the end of the street was the thing Daniel was talking about, the ‘it.’

It was a huge bulky building. Or maybe calling it a building was off, I wasn’t all that knowledgeable about architecture, but a huge black cube without so much as a window on it didn’t ping me as a building.

The closer we came, the bigger it felt like the building was. It certainly towered above the street, just kind of there. The strangest thing was the absolute blackness of it. None of the buildings around it, all of them festooned in ads and neon highlights, reflected the building. It was just not showing up in any glass or anything, and its surface was pitch black, without so much as a hint of light splashing against it.

It certainly left a mark. And yet it was smaller than a lot of the skyscrapers around it.

Glancing up, I could see its opposite in the cityscape way above, just hanging off the ceiling like so many other buildings.

“So, is there an entrance?” I asked.

“Not really,” Daniel said. He started to slow down, and the reason was obvious. The road leading up to the building (because it was right in the middle of an intersection) veered off to the left and right, but never reached out to the building proper. Instead, there was a railing at about waist height and then a half-dozen meters of pavement before a sheer drop.

From my vantage above Daniel’s head, I could make out the lack of a bottom to the building. It was just floating there, without even the common courtesy of throwing a shadow.

“Freaky,” I said.

Daniel stopped right next to the rails, and I realized that we had something of a berth around us. The other avatars were keeping their distances. “Right past this,” he said while bringing a tentacle around to smack the rail. “Is a PVP zone.”

“I thought you couldn’t have those out in the open like this. I mean, outside of like, game areas.”

“You can’t,” he said.

I looked down, then smacked his head with a paw. “And? How come there’s one here?”

“Because the people in that said so?” he said while pointing to the building. “This is, like, the place for all the cool hackers and crackers to hang out. Breaking the Mesh’s code to have an illegal PVP zone on their doorstep was probably child’s play for them.”

I eyed the building up and down, then bunched my legs up under me. “Right, give me a minute.”

“Serious?” Daniel asked.

I answered by jumping off of him, over the rail, and landing on the pavement beyond with a bit of a bounce. I shook a little, setting the scarf around my neck to ruffling. With a wag of my new tail, I set off towards the building until a prompt appeared in the corner of my vision.

YOU HAVE ENTERED A PVP AREA.

How daring.

“Yup, that’s me,” I said. “So, uh, think we can send a message to the people in there?”

I could. But you should maybe focus on dodging in the meantime.

“Dodg--oh shit!” I bounced straight up and narrowly avoided a searing red beam about the width of a thumb that passed right where I’d been.

Stay close to the building. I’m sending a message over.

“Stay close?” I asked before leaping to the side. The beams--because they couldn’t be satisfied with only one laser emplacement--were coming at me fairly slowly. Fastballs instead of lasers, basically.

I jumped, then spun in mid-air to avoid a beam that tried to pin me at the apex of my leap.

“Myalis, are you sending anything?”

I am. This place actually has some pretty decent cybersecurity. Though I suppose that’s normal, all things considered. Nothing I can’t bypass, of course, but it is taking me some time.”

Time that I was spending trying not to get fried. The moment there was a pause in the rate of fire from the lasers I started sprinting as fast as my cat body could, beams spearing out and hitting the ground behind me as I went. They weren’t even marking the ground or anything, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be hit.

Ah, there we go.

And just like that, the lasers stopped.

I slowed down and eyed the building, noticing for the first time the black-on-black turrets that were even then sinking back into the surface of the structure. I panted for a bit, then realized that I wasn’t actually out of breath. “Okay. Okay, no more lasers. I like that. What did they say?”

They should be extending a bridge.

As Myalis spoke, a small door opened in the side of the building and a glowing bridge flickered into existence leading up to the pavement not too far from where I was. I looked over to Daniel who was quick to jump the fence. Quite a few avatars behind him stopped to look, and there were suddenly a bunch of emotes floating in the air around them.

“You go in?” Daniel asked. “Didn’t know if they’d lower the loser’s door for you.”

“Loser’s door?” I asked. A glance back at the opening revealed a little neon sign right above it with the word ‘LOSER’ on it. “Ah, nevermind.”

I shook myself one more time, resettling the weird clothes I was wearing, then started strutting over to the bridge. It felt cold-but-not under my paws, which was a bit strange. The moment Daniel and I slipped into the room at the top, the walls closed in behind us and we found ourselves in a small room. The walls were the same black as the exterior, but the floors and ceilings were grey, and recessed lights in the corners lit up the room from within.

In the far end of the room was a barbie. It was a bog-standard avatar dressed in an off-white leotard. Even I recognized it as the default outfit, the thing that came with the plain model. “Welcome to the Black Cube,” the avatar said in a feminine voice that sounded just a little bit off. A synth voice?

“Hey,” I said as I looked up to the Barbie. “Are you the greeter here?”

“I am,” the avatar said. “It is uncommon for the Black Cube to accept undeserving into its hallowed halls. Why have you come?”

“Undeserving?” I asked.

Daniel shifted lower. “That’s because we didn’t break in, or crack past their security. We basically cheated.”

“Exactly,” the Barbie said.

“Yeah, well I’m not here to show off any hacking skills,” I said. “Not that I have any. I’m here to talk to Dial-Up and Lag. I’ve got some things to ask them.”

“Merely being a Samurai won’t get you as far here as it would in the IRL.” The Barbie looked over its shoulder, then back to us. “The Black Lords are busy. Can you state your business?”

I considered telling the avatar off, but I was on their turf, and this wasn’t a situation I could explode my way out of. “There’s a girl. Katallina McCarthy. She went missing during yesterday’s incursion. She’s a Samurai. She was kidnapped by some corpo goon types. I’m trying to track them down. Longbow said you could help.”

The Barbie locked up, no emotions showing on her too-perfect face for a long, long time. Then she blinked. “Come with me. I’ll lead you to them.”

***