Chapter Seventeen - Dial-Up and Lag

“Pop Culture IS Mesh Culture.

Memes are the currency of the digital world. It’s a world where being a sweet-talker can get you further than having any amount of money, and when everyone is divided into cliques and little in-groups, a bunch of them with huge crossover to other groups, knowing the right meme to say at the right time is like passing the right code phrase along to make sure you really do fit in.

It’s chaotic, it’s a mess, and it’s fucking beautiful.”

--Anonymous Meshizen, 2031

***

The Barbie led us through a paper-thin portal in a wall that opened up onto a catwalk. Below were dozens of cubes, each one with plenty of space to walk around them. And each face of the cubes led into a different space occupying the entire cube.

“What?”

“Oh, neat,” Daniel said as he spun his upper body around to see better. “They’ve got full non-euclidian here.”

“Please walk in the centre of the catwalk. It’s the shortest path to the far end of the room,” the barbie said.

I looked at the back of her head, then stepped to the side so that I was on the edge of the catwalk. Suddenly, the other two were shooting out ahead of me. Returning to the middle made the space between us shorter in a way that had my head twinging in pain. “What?”

“Space doesn’t need to obey normal rules in the Mesh. Gravity and inertia are the rules that we usually break. You know, like how I’m floating right now,” Daniel said. “But things like linear space can be messed with too.”

“Yeah, but why?” I asked.

Daniel wiggled in a sort of shrug. “Because it means having more space in less space if two things can be in the same space at the same time?”

I shook my head, whiskers wiggling, and looked down again towards the cubes. There were people in them, some in very strange avatars. They were lounging around, others were typing on floating keyboards, and no two cubes were the same. “Are those cubicles?”

“Not quite,” the Barbie said. “If you can prove that you’re worthy of being here, you get some cube space. What you do with it is up to you. Most just carve out a little space for themselves. Some turn it into an exhibit, others into an access port to some other place in the Mesh. We attract some very creative people here.”

“I can imagine,” I said. “Gotta be creative to be a proper criminal, right?”

The Barbie slowed to a stop, turned, and looked down at me without her expression so much as twitching. “Is there a problem?”

“Uh, no? I’m cool with criminals. I crime all the time,” I said. “But seriously, I’m just here to find some clues to save some girl. That’s it.”

“The people here, the real hackers and crackers, do more good for society than you could imagine. We act as a counter to some of the most corrupt assholes in the IRL. We make medical bills disappear, send the wrong information to the right people, make R&D projects for some nasty shit fall through.”

“And yet the world’s still a shit hole,” I said. “Doing your part’s nice, but that’s not what I’m here for.”

“You’re here for a single person. How narrow.”

I shrugged. “I’m here because I’m being... I don’t know if it’s blackmail, a bribe, or some sort of really fucked up favour, actually. Doesn’t matter. I’m here for my own reasons. Now are you going to bring me to Dial Up and Lag or not?”

The Barbie looked at me with her pretty, vacant, baby blues for a moment before turning around and moving on.

“You’re a real people person,” Daniel said.

“I was raised in a barn.”

He slowed down a little more. “Did someone piss in your cereal?”

I huffed. I was in a bit of a poor mood. “I’d rather be home, with Lucy, than out here. Also, I’m a cat. Also-also, this place just feels so wrong. I don’t like it.”

“It’s not a reason to be... okay, so it is a reason to be prissy, but it’s not a real good one. Maybe don’t piss off the nice hackers when they’re being nice,” Daniel said.

I tried to hum, but it came out as a meow. “When did you get so diplomatic?”

“Yesterday I was a shit-talking cripple whose entire family was made up of idiots like you. I learned how to be real diplomatic. Keeps my head on straight.” He wiggled a bit. “Plus, I kinda respect these guys. Some of their stunts are famous.”

We reached the end of the catwalk, the Barbie stepping aside to open a large door that looked like something out of a bank vault.

The room we entered was a huge, expansive space with no floor. In the middle of it all, glowing a bright yellow, was a ball the size of a minivan, and a dozen steps past that were two guys staring at a red ball the size of their fist.

The Barbie stepped in first. There was no floor, but she didn’t seem to have trouble just standing on nothing and letting a few asteroids the size of grains of dust flick through her. “Sirs, Stray Cat, for you.”

The guy turned our way, revealing a shock of white hair held back by some weird silver goggles. He had a stained lab-coat on, and a strange thing over one arm with the words ‘Power Glove’ written in electric blue over the knuckles.

Next to him was a golden robot with one leg that was red from foot to knee. His avatar was shiny and all, but it moved clunkily. “Oh my, we have a guest!” he said before raising his arms up. Not very high, they looked like something out of a failed science fair project.

The doctor looking one brought his arm up and tapped at the controls on his glove.

The solar system around us, including all the little screens hovering around Mars, disappeared in a blink and we were suddenly in a garage. A really messy garage. One wall was covered in clocks of all sorts, and at the back of the room was an old school speaker taller than I was... as a human, that is.

“Hey,” I said before taking a chance and jumping up onto one of the counters so that I wasn’t looking up at everyone.

“You must be Stray Cat,” the doctor said. “I’m Dial Up, the tin can next to me is Lag.”

“Greetings!” the robot said.

“I will leave you to it. I’ll be waiting by the exit,” the Barbie said. She left, the vault door now replaced by a pretty typical wooden door straight out of the set from a really old movie.

I finished looking around and settled down a bit. “So, uh, hey,” I said. “Nice avatars?”

“Thanks,” Dial-Up said. “I’m a huge Back to the Future fan. A sci-fi classic, you know? This idiot got that piece of trash avatar from a fucking bootleg Disney merch stall.”

“Hey, this thing works well enough,” Lag said. It really didn’t look like it was working well at all.

“So, what was with the solar system?” I asked.

The doctor shrugged. “We tapped into SpaceX’s sensor suite and were snooping around. Just keeping an eye on things.” He reached under a desk, pulled out a seat, and plopped himself down on it. “So, you were sent by Longbow, right?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I’m looking for a girl. A Katalina McCarthy. I got some video from the security system around her place. She was taken by a bunch of assholes.”

“Send the footage over,” Dial-Up asked. “We’ll see what we can do.”

“Just like that?” I asked. “No payment or anything?”

“If you’re actually looking for your lost girlfriend or something we’ll donate all your assets to the Eastern Russian Sewage Reconstruction fund, then make your digital life a digital nightmare,” Lag said. “But yeah, you’re looking for a kid Samurai, right? We don’t charge for that.”

“Taking some of our time though,” Dial-Up said.

“Time better spent snooping on Mars?” I asked.

“Yes, actually.”

Sending now!

“Nice avatar by the way. Most folk stick to humanoids, but the both of you went off script. Good detail work on the fur. Bet some folks would pay top dollar for such an accurate model,” Dial-up said.

“Got the files,” Lag said.

A moment later the robot’s eyes went red, and suddenly we were no longer in a garage, but in a familiar corridor. The one McCarthy had been kidnapped from. I fell a few feet to the carpeted floor when the counter I was on disappeared.

“This is a reconstruction. It’s not accurate,” Dial-Up said. He gestured to some parts of the room that were just colourless holes in reality. “Blindspots. Now, let’s see what’s what.”

I got to watch the mercenaries kidnap Kattalina all over again, though this time in full three-dimensions.

“Well, well,” Dial-Up said. “Isn’t that interesting.”

***