22
Jay spent the day firmly rooted in the real world, although he felt at times like he'd stepped into another dimension. After he left the apartment his first stop was the top of Petal 3, the art and cyberculture hub, as it was described in Epoch's. Several different lifts, escalators, and the better part of half an hour later, he reached where he wanted to go. The final elevator, a massive sturdy looking beast, opened its doors and released its gaggle of passengers onto a wide platform, about a hundred feet from end to end. Stairs spanned the length of the platform and ran downward into the huge depression that was the district itself.
As he arrive the atmosphere made him feel at home—perhaps because it was not at all what he had expected. It was not the seamless and inorganic construction of the rest of the Villa, or the marked technological prowess bolted and woven into every window, chair, table and surface.
He stood a moment at the top of the stairs—it must have been five or six stories from top to bottom—and took in the scenery.
The most beautiful things he could see were the buildings. Buildings within a building. They were small, most made of brick or wood, narrow and built along narrower streets that followed little logic. Roofs were low and sometimes nothing more than straw. The Petal's ceiling, a gigantic clear glass structure shaped like a warped pyramid, prevented damage from the elements. Most buildings sat along the terraced borders of the district, making the whole district look very much like a basin. Green creepers riddled the cracks and walls of the upper terraces.
The effect created a beatific and paradoxical feeling to the viewer. It all looked haphazard, to be sure, but the chaos excited Jay for reasons he didn't really understand. He hadn't moved, he was still looking at the scene from the height of the platform. He saw the streets below, at the bottom of the basin. They were full of pedestrians, potted trees, chairs and cafes.
He shook off his amazement and made his way down the stairs toward the bottommost floor of the district. His amazement only continued to grow the farther he walked. The stairs just kept going. He descended hundreds until he found himself in a narrow and crowded street. Overcast light filtered uninhibited through the glass ceiling. The road was roughly cobbled, even here hundreds of floors above the ground, and the stones were peppered with soil and weeds.
He wandered around, trying to get his bearings, taking in as much as he could.
Even the people struck him as somehow different. Jay did not see any of the callous professionals, the desperate middle-agers, nor the beautiful children of the elite, who so celebrated their own births. Still, a younger crowd patrolled the streets in this district, not rich, not poor, counterculture—perhaps—in the least counterculture place on the globe? He stopped himself. It had always been a personal defect of his to characterize too much.
Buildings along the central street were so small that Jay had to stoop his head to enter the first coffee bar he neared. The barista, a younger chap with long hair and a mustache, motioned for him to sit anywhere as he bobbed his head to some dub tune Jay had never heard. A miniature plastic pole Rasta flag rippled softly in the wind created by a fan behind the bar. Maybe he's got the spirit, thought Jay, time for the test.
"Hey, sorry. I've got no money."
This was something Blake had taught him. God knows were he learned it. If they give you something: you’re in the right place. If they tell you to leave: leave. If they let you stay: stay. Devised and meant to get to know someone before you know them. It was silly and simplistic, but sometimes it was accurate, and right now it was the only shade of truth he had to go by. Beside, I really don’t have any money. Blake called it the Code of the Bum, but just now Jay thought Code of the Beggar was more accurate.
"Sorry, mate. It's not my place to be giving things away."
One down. He shrugged and left, taking care to be polite, and thanked the man.
Colorful walls of painted brick crammed together on the sides of the pedestrian streets. Windows, small with recklessly constructed frames, gave only hints at what was inside each of the miniature hovels. As he ambled slowly past, he saw a menagerie of different artistic trades: shining prints on the photographer's wall, a slap-dash painted façade with canvases leaning outside the painter’s, an open-faced café hungrily called the visitors to a musician's bar, welding sculptor beside fashion designer beside thin and starving poet beside game architect, as high a concentration of talent as he had ever beheld. The whole place was so wondrously open and humble. More a secluded town secret among high mountains than part of a Villa.
He explored the lowest level a good while, testing several more cafés, but in the end always moved on.
It wasn't until he reached the first sign that he became aware of their general lack. The sign's rotting wood made him chuckle. It was propped lazily on the side of a wall, words and arrow pointing vertically, straight up. The sign said: Cyberdistrict.
Jay was unsure where that led but having already explored the ground level, he decided to find some way up the basin walls. He imagined that somewhere among the forest of idolatrous Rasta images and flags, mirages really, one might touch the real thing.
Around a bend an unauthentically crumbling staircase led up to the ring road, which circled the ground floor, and then another leading to a second more elevated ring road. It was on this he finally found a place that more than any of the rest caught his eye.
Infohogs Cyber Café, should have enticed the eye with giant parabolic screens, the inescapable ergonomics of its furniture, or the impressive appearance of its intelligentsia clientèle, but it did not. It had none of those things, nor any of the expected sophistication of a typical cyber hub. At least, not that he could see. There was only an open porch, behind which no café brewed drinks or flashed internet pages. There was just a wide hole framed with pitch covered railroad ties and half lit stairwells leading downward.
Mystery felt more appealing to him than some amazing certainty. He left the dappled sky in favor of the dingy way down.
The bottom stair brought him face to face with a long nosed, droopy faced gent. He was wearing earphones and a brown and orange scarf that was wrapped fastidiously around his neck. He did not look up to meet Jay's eyes or respond to his greeting. The man's eyes were glued to a pair of 3D monitors. Text scrolled frantically from top to bottom, much faster than Jay could read. He waved his hand at the man.
The fellow appeared genuinely shocked. He bent over in his chair and started breathing raggedly, clutching frantically around him, eyes bulging and darting around. Jay could only stand there and watch in desperate helplessness as the man flung himself about searching for something, clumsily bashing about the things on his desk. His keyboard clattered onto the brick floor, followed shortly by a rollerball mouse and a camera. Jay began to wonder if he shouldn't really call for help. The man appeared to be drowning in good air. Finally, one clutching hand found something and brought it to the man's lips—an inhaler. He breathed in sharply several times on it but remained bent over in a half-fetal position. He turned his head upward to meet Jay's eyes, and after a few seconds he said hoarsely:
"Jesus Hell, man! Where did you come from?!"
Jay could still hardly believe what happened. He stumbled over his words.
"Uh . . . sorry. Don't have any money on me at the moment though . . . Mind if I sit down somewhere and check out the place?"
The man seemed to regain his composure. He looked at Jay strangely without much enthusiasm.
"Sorry also. You scared the shit out of me, my son!"
He thought a second, fumbling with his scarf.
"Sure, whatever. You've already come close to killing me. Why not have a seat? Wherever you like, through there." He did not appear very friendly, face affecting a dull apathy but, Jay chided himself, he had passed the test. As he moved lower into the café, the walls narrowed and the ceiling lowered. The café seemed modeled after something Jay could not quite put his finger on; good old fashioned English brick ran from seven to midnight and down to five but as he emerged from the short corridor the room ballooned into a grungy and poorly lit seating area. Several padded and silky divans on the outside. A few thin dubious tables and chairs in the middle of the room.
There was no one in the room. Opposite the entrance, another door.
Jay went over to a table and pulled out one of the more sturdy looking chairs.
"Shit man! Don't sit there!" A voice rang out from behind him.
Jay jumped and let go of the chair. He turned opposite to find the man from down the hall squinting and blinking his eyes as if they had sand trapped in them. He was holding a steaming mug of tea in one hand.
"You must be all type's of weird. No one's ever tried to actually sit in one of those shitty things. Probably get splinters up your arse. Sit over there." Free arm gesticulated wildly to all the divans around the room. He sopped tea over the edge of the mug. "Sore arse, no good, mate."
"Uh . . . yeah."
Jay situated himself as per the man's recommendations and accepted the mug of tea gratefully. The divan's silky covering had a faint oleaginous feel that he tried his best to ignore. The man whose red scarf was twined so intricately around his neck put the tea down on the table in front of Jay, and dropped casually onto the other divan with a hefty exhalation. No invitation required.
"Who then, good son, are you? My name's Piper, if you're interested, or if you're not."
He smiled a drained, detached, unsettling sort of smile, although it was not exactly unfriendly. The folds of his long face bunched into a mess of crows feet.
"I'm Jay. I just thought I'd check out your place. Looked interesting from above."
"That is just the word I'd use, stranger. But what do you think now that you've seen the place? Not all you expected?" His expression was twinged with some irony Jay did not understand. Reclined, he once more waved a scrawny arm, drawing Jay’s attention to the reality of the rather drab interior.
"Not sure what I expected," he shrugged, "but the hospitality's good. Cheers," he said, pointing to the cup.
Piper warded off his politeness with an undignified guttural noise. He said nothing else. Eyes trained steadily on Jay as if expecting him to say something more. The man's concentration was relentless, and despite his bleary eyes, he hardly blinked to clear them. The moment's awkwardness built slowly but surely until Jay felt he absolutely must say something, anything to alleviate the stress.
"Um, maybe I was expecting something a bit more . . . busy. There's no one here. I've only been here two days, but it seems like the only time I'm alone is when I'm in bed asleep."
"Know what you mean. Hard to get on sometimes." He laughed oddly. For minutes now the fellow's gaze hadn't wavered, and Jay was not sure how to react and felt himself parching like desert grass under the sun. He fidgeted nervously on the divan's oily surface. Another awkward silence. Drooped and saggy as his visage was, he still looked tightly wound, as if trying to size up Jay's character. Piper leaned back, finally relaxing his stare, and put his head back against the brick wall.
Jay began to wonder if he was the first person to every come down the stairs and into the café. Judging from the man's bizarreness—asthma, tea, scarves, and staredowns, in turn—he was not a social creature.
Piper exhaled explosively.
"So, Mr. Jay. If that is your real letter . . . who are you? Not a policeman, are you? Or one of those stupid Villa rentmen? Not from around here, but none of us are. Don't look like a businessman, or an artist. Not even a traveller, not really. Who are you then?" He smirked awkwardly, delusion of the melodramatic catching hold of him like a devil. "A policeman? A narc? Counterterrorism? One of those suspicious looking fellows always trying to poke his nose into things."
"No, no." Jay waved his hand warding off the illusion. He really couldn't get a feel for the guy. "Just a visitor, nothing like that."
"Well, goddamn, my son, why you acting so . . . suspicious!?" Piper shouted aggressively and banged his skinny fist on the table.
Just then a young woman stalked into the room from the door opposite the entrance. An annoyed scowl etched across her face. She came right for them. Stomped her feet with visible rancor. Her features were Middle Eastern; a shallow bronze face, a small lightly pointed chin, especially large, pretty eyes aimed like crossbows at Piper, and thin pursed lips.
"Piper! What do you think you're doing. I've told you so many f*cking times, if you want to work at the front you have to let customers inside!"
Piper's brazen eccentricities withered under her pitiless onslaught. He wriggled slightly on the divan, even the perfect asymmetry of his scarf was threatening to unravel.
"But he's not a customer, Miss Omid. He said he's got no money."
She rotated over to Jay and sighed, perhaps accidentally, and refocused her anger on Piper.
"If someone comes in rich, you show them the back room. If someone comes in skint, you be sure to be nice, and show them the back room!” She waved a slender hand. "They'll never come back if you're all they see. So show them that.” She pointed through the door. “And at least they know how we're in business. At least they know that we're a we! Get up! You slack jawed idiot, and go back to your desk. Next time, I will fire you!"
Piper's fuzzy eyes darted from the woman, his lap, to Jay, and back to the woman. His breath came in bursts, as if he might have another asthma attack. He waited only a second. Apparently, he judged it too dangerous to stay and got up to leave. He sent an evil and, Jay thought, undeserved look toward him before he did so.
The woman turned her attention to Jay. She seemed to be trying very hard to release her anger.
"Another poor Villan. I should ask you how it's possible, as the government likes to know these things. But nevermind, such is the nature of our business not to ask too many questions. If you'd like to come with me, I'll give you a tour. This is only the waiting room. My idiot associate has something against intelligent business practices."
She smiled at him—a nice smile.
Jay, for the third time in only a few minutes, was trying to process what had happened. He managed to stumble over a thank you and a gruff expression of interest and followed the woman into the next room.
He met the room with a sharp intake of breath.
"Starting to make sense now?" Miss Omid asked amusedly.
It was indeed. A massive amalgamation of den and machine, Infohogs, was thrilling to see. He stood with the woman at the peak of a metal walkway that spanned the length of the great room, below which a complexity of spacious and roofless cubicles (which, he learned later with some amusement, were called berths) flashed an army of lights. Most came from expansive curved monitors or projectors. Jay peered over the rail and into the nearest one, expecting to see some raucous game flashing: explosives and gunmetal, but he was intrigued when he saw only text; something, the nature of the screen perhaps, prevented him from reading the information. He noticed something else, the room was almost completely silent.
"No games, just the web?"
"Not exactly," she said. "Much of what our clientèle do involves searching for information that is not easy to find. We have just streamlined the process for them. Of course, to our paying customers we offer anonymity, or good as we can guarantee." She saw something behind Jay's eye's flicker. "You've stumbled upon the hive of conspiracy theorists, social dissidents, and who knows what other monsters. We don't ask questions."
She continued to speak as they walked over the lifted walkway.
"We help anyone who can afford it to absorb net information quickly. In fact, that is our speciality, the only reason, really, why all these people have come to us. Our method really is impressive, a combination of software manipulation, chemical enhancement and brain training."
She led him to the opposite corner, where another room provided weary readers an area for respite, rehydration, and, Miss Omid said, "drugs and resocialization."
The trip across the room was an experience in itself. He could not see the content of the monitors but the clientèle were nothing short of surreal. The Infohogs looked not far from their suidae counterparts. Some were a roundish shape, rotundity that followed from years of inactivity. Most that he saw, regardless of body shape, shared not only Piper's foggy-eyed glaze, but his fantastic reading speed. He could only just see the content of the screens, though blurred, as it whirred upward at an uncanny rate.
He had asked Miss Omid how exactly they did it.
"Our training," she said seriously, "and a great deal of practice." They were seated in the café and a few of the infohogs in the area noted Jay's curiosity with friendly amusement.
"And drugs," one had breathed quietly.
Jay talked with Miss Omid for a long while, watching as the clientèle flitted in and out of the breakroom. He managed to eavesdrop on a few conversations between hogs, some interesting, others banal. He asked them many questions, thinking in the back of his mind that he might learn something useful or discover a fact that might help the three boys understand their situation, but he never managed to find the right person with the right information.
After an hour, Jay thought to himself that he should return and bade a few of the hogs and Miss Omid farewell and made his way back to street level, trying to ignore Piper's unfriendly stare as he left. Perhaps tomorrow he would come back.
The three reconvened at the flat with remarkable synchronization sometime around five o'clock. Jay was first back and already eating a computer-made dish of Shepard's Pie when Faraji walked through the door. Billy returned only a few minutes later. They sat around the table and talked about the day's adventures. Jay noted that it was the first time they had acted happy since they had all been forced to watch Gus' death.
They took turns telling accounts:
Faraji spoke first. With great vigor he described the association process in Oz, and then talked about the incredible sights and sounds and feats in Blizzard's Gate: violent yet bloodless battles between men and beasts, freedom to create digital sorcery, travel in its various uncanny modes and vehicles—magic, unreal beasts, steampunk machine—the traversing of the gap between experience and usership, but most of all, the fun of doing the impossible.
For all Faraji's fervor, Billy was equally withdrawn. He seemed happy, but in a stupor—for all the other two could see. He was guarded and barely spoke of his experiences, remarking mostly on what Jay and Faraji said. Jay pressed him a little, asking questions that were clearly unwelcome or uncomfortable and received deflecting or uncooperative responses. He gave up, but took note of the strange look Faraji gave Billy. They seemed to have had very different afternoons.
Then Jay told them of Petal 3 and the cyberart district: varieties of small and uneconomical art shops, inexplicably rickety buildings, terraced neighborhoods beneath the pointed clear pyramidal ceiling, the different qualities of a few people, some bizarre looking, some uncommonly friendly or weird, his search for a welcoming place, and how he eventually found Infohogs Café—the haven for (paying) anonymous web-surfing and data collection, not to mention some of the most knowledgeable, or crackpot, users on the net.
Faraji was particularly keen to explore the Net from Infohogs, but likewise felt stumped since none of them had any money. Only the apartment, the food it made automatically for them, and the access to the Villa's residential entertainment, which was free. Billy showed less excitement about the whole idea, but did unenthusiastically signal his approval.
They talked on towards midnight around the living room, appreciating the artificial vista the courtyard provided. The display really lacked nothing and they looked on with as much enjoyment as if it were real, not just a dense conglomeration of pixels.
As the night unwound, they all agreed that they needed a plan. Odin had sent them here for a reason, and while it seemed he could at any moment tell them exactly what that reason was, he'd left it up to them. Faraji blurted out that he absolutely must go back to Oz the next day, and Billy was quick to follow. Faraji wanted to meet the Raiders, he said, who might teach him something how to really use the machines. Billy was less forthcoming. Jay acceded to their plans, but was secretly happy about them; they would not include him, as he was not interested in anything but the immediacy of their situation, and it prevented him from doing his duty of watching over them.
Billy was first to bed, further worrying his brother. Faraji and himself yawned copiously until the younger boy left to go to sleep. Jay sat crosslegged in a chair, tired but thinking too much to drift off. He thought about where they had been only a fortnight ago, joyously thumbing their noses at everything, their parents, the government, and how strangely that had turned on them: to hiding, to death, and now to this exploration. He fought in the dark with his own fears, and batted at the tiny inklings that flew about his head like pipistrelles, whimpering of danger.
In the end, it was a simple idea that saved him from having nightmares. It came to him as he looked out at the courtyard—a representation of something real, made especially for the voyeur. How different were his eyes, just then, from the surface of the windows? He got up and turned on the lights with a verbal command. He search for a pen and paper found both stashed in a drawer across from the dining room.
On the paper he wrote two simple words in thick bold print.
NEED MONEY.
Instantly, the greenish text responded; typical of Odin's emotionless diction.
>>>Noted.