ALL NOVEL Chapter One: Love & Nihilism
I was asleep, dreaming deeply when my apartment woke me up. With the sound of an airhorn, no less.
I jerked awake, nearly banging my head on the top of my moulded plastic bedframe as I flailed around in the dark room for the control panel next to my bed. This blind flailing failed to do more than knock over the glass of water sitting on my bedside table, and cause my SpiderCloth™ bedsheets to slide onto the now-wet floor.
Eventually, I managed to switch off the ear-splitting noise, which my SmartHome™ home operating system took as an indication that I was now awake, and that it should open the blinds.
The smart-plastic shutters slowly rolled up, letting the light of the massive neon billboard outside my window light my tiny apartment with a harsh multichromatic glare. I raised a hand to block my eyes from the sudden flood of harsh light, and blinked the spots out of my vision. Eventually, my eyes adjusted, and I lowered my arm. As usual, this deep into the urban sprawl of Neo-Sydney, it was impossible to tell what time of day it was, let alone if it was day or night. All I knew is that, whatever time it was right now, it was too fucking early.
The light illuminated the single room apartment I called home. Every surface was made from moulded polymer, cheap and durable, and slightly sticky due to decay. The ceiling housed a series of fluorescent LED lighting strips which cast a harsh white light onto the unpainted white walls of my apartment. Piles of clothes lay heaped around space near my bed. As I stretched, I noticed that my AR glasses were buzzing. My house was trying to get my attention.
I grabbed my glasses from my bedside table and slid them on, my field of vision lighting up with icons and windows almost instantly. Weather panes told me today was going to be smoggy with a chance of mild acid rain. A small calendar noted that I had to have my weekly homework in by tomorrow evening. But, most importantly, a clock hovering in the upper corner of my vision told me that it was way too fucking early. My goddamn smart home had woken me up at five AM.
“House?” I said, collapsing back onto my synthetic mattress. “I thought I said to wake me at six.”
The apartment spoke with the cheerful and bubbly synthetic voice that was, unfortunately, the only option that came with the system. “I apologise, Kara, but your schedule said very clearly to wake you in time for your morning classes. Your average prep time, according to historical data is around an hour, plus or minus two minutes and eighteen seconds. If this was in error, please accept my apolo-”
I swiped at the mute icon in my AR interface, and the voice cut off mid-sentence, replaced by a scrolling field of text towards the top of my field of view that I could thankfully now ignore. I’d been living by myself for a year now, and I still could not stand the home AI that had come with the apartment. Fuck, I couldn’t stand most of the shit that came with living in the 22nd Century, let alone the fact that my home wouldn’t shut the hell up.
I walked over to the window and started out at the towering megablock that occupied most of the world outside my window. The holographic billboard, now advertising the latest brand of medicated toothpaste, towered over my 59th floor apartment, the advertisement repeated multiple times along its length. Between me and the billboard, swarms of flying drones (and the occasional AirCar) zipped past, hovering above the thick fog that obscured the streets below.
Most of my classmates found this sort of thing “inspiring”, the future corporate wage-slaves that they were. Hell, why wouldn’t they? This was the world we had all been born into, and had existed for far longer than the sixteen years we had been alive. Some of their families had been working the same jobs at the same company for three generations. My family…well, they didn’t approve of who I was. Who I am. They certainly didn’t want me in their life after I came out, let alone working the same jobs.
Not wanting to get bogged down in bad memories, I dragged myself over to my apartment’s kitchen nook, and powered on the coffee maker. My house automatically deducted the cost of the crappy Soy-Espresso pod from my monthly welfare budget, and helpfully flashed a reminder in my field of view noting that I had successfully cut down on coffee consumption by 50% this last month, earning me a healthy living merit. Virtual confetti began raining from my ceiling, disappearing a few seconds after touching a real surface. I resisted the urge to imagine throttling the programmer at LifeCorp who came up with such an obnoxious visual effect. And then made it impossible to dismiss.
Soon, my coffee machine was pouring the almost-tasteless greyish-brown “coffee” into a plastic mug, I was doomscrolling through the daily news, and my SoyFlakes™ were going down like the vaguely corn-flavoured cardboard they tasted like. I still had a full hour to get ready for class, and it’s not like I was attending in person anyway. I hadn’t gone to school in person since I came out, not least because of my body-image related issues.
The news was the usual affair. Riots in Old Berlin over the demolition of the historic holocaust museum in favour of a modernised and corporate-funded exhibit in the Telekom Überlegene Ausstellung museum complex. Massive election fraud for the 2182 Australian Presidential elections. Five arcologies in Neo-Paris on fire after a terrorist attack on the local Potemkin Security Solutions research laboratory.
Chemical spills. Terrorism. Corporate Warfare. Ecological Collapse. This was the world I had been born into. The world in which I wished I could ignore. A world where I was stuck in the wrong body, given the wrong name, by parents who refused to accept me the moment I told them who I was inside.
I looked down at my body. Broad shoulders, a flat chest, a bulge down at the groin. This was not what I wanted for myself. And I was a long way off from being able to afford the nanite infusions that were the best way for me to become who I wanted to be. Every day, I felt myself tearing a little bit more from being in a body that felt so wrong. From being unable to meet my small group of school friends in person because they’d probably reject me if they knew what I actually looked like outside of AR. From living in a world where I was a small, unimportant cog living on welfare in the biggest megacity in the southern hemisphere.
Half the time, I was bored of engaging with the world, and the other half I was scared of engaging with the world. I was practically a shut-in, only leaving my apartment to go running, the one activity which didn’t make me feel physically sick with my body and the way it moved.
No wonder I got called a nihilist by everyone. It was practically mandatory in this day and age.
I walked over to my favourite chair, a ratty old beanbag that was one of the few possessions I’d taken when I left home, and collapsed into it. I checked the time. 05:50 on Wednesday, the 25th of September 2182. Time for school. Tapping the frame of my glasses, I switched them off, and set them down on a pile of books beside my beanbag that served as a makeshift table. I then grabbed my VR headset from a hook beside my beanbag, and began wiping off the small metal disks around the headband with a small cleaning cloth.
My headset was a Toshiba Dynamix-II, a cheap entry-level immersion headset. It was a few years old at this point, having been a birthday gift from my parents before I was forced to leave home. On the outside, it was little more than a thick loop of scuffed white polymer, which fitted snugly around my temples. However, closer inspection revealed that it was much more than that.
A large battery pack was attached to the back, and a small antenna stuck up from one of the sides. A series of LED indicators blinked along the right side of the loop. Along the inside of the device, positioned so that they touched the skin of the user directly, were small metal disks, about the size of a fifty cent coin. They were dual-mode neural imagers/stimulators that allowed the device to interface my brain with a computer. Essentially, it was what science fiction authors had written about in the early years of the 21st century: a fully-immersive VR device that allowed me to access cyberspace.
Using it, I could virtually appear at school without ever having to show my face. Of course, I had no physical presence at school. While I had my own desk for the purpose of seating arrangements, and I technically had my own locker, I had no way to interact physically with the school. I could “see” by the means of a cleverly stitched-together simulation that took data from the school’s camera network, other students’ AR glasses, and various other sensors to give me a near-perfect perspective of what was going on where I was “standing”, and teachers and other students could see my virtual avatar with their AR glasses to give the illusion that they were talking face to face with me.
There were tells, however, that what I was seeing was not fully accurate, however. If someone tried to show me a physical page on a book, I wouldn’t be able to read it unless they were also looking at the page. I couldn’t open doors, or interact with objects, so it would appear to other students as if I had ghosted through a door, and to my as if my perspective had suddenly shifted to be inside the room. If the cameras didn’t have a good view of an area, and nobody else was around to fill in the blanks, that area would be filled by a static or semi-static image of the last time that area was imaged.
All of this was piped directly to my brain via the headset, while my real body sat immobilised in my beanbag. I wasn’t completely disconnected from my physical presence, as what the headset was really doing was artificially inducing a state of REM sleep that I could “wake” from at any time.
While I could feel my virtual avatar as if it was really my body, it didn’t feel right. Touch felt muted, although I could only feel that if another person remoting in touched me. Heat and cold were also not simulated, meaning that the only way the simulation would render such sensory information was, again, if a remote user also touched me, and even then it was very clearly artificial in nature.
About the only senses that were accurately reproduced were sight and sound, and that itself took more computing power than was available in the first fifty years of the last century. Fortunately, computing power was cheap these days thanks to publicly subsidised service providers, hybridised quantum computing, and superluminal network uplinks.
If there was one think that I didn’t find depressing about the state of things, it was that our drive to turn more and more of our planet into an unbroken cityscape meant that we at least had fast internet.
With the contacts fully clean, and the battery indicator on the power pack reading a full charge, I pulled my messy hair into a loose ponytail, and pulled on the Dynamix. The smart-polymer device automatically adjusted itself to fit my head, and chirped once it was ready to make the connection. The Toshiba’s own AR field appeared around me as I leaned back in my beanbag, and logged into the school’s VR portal with the virtual keyboard that floated in front of me. This interface wasn’t being overlaid via lenses, like my AR glasses, but rather being piped directly into my visual cortex.
While I could always just use direct neural commands to interface with the device, I preferred the device’s virtual interface. It was easier than relying on my own fucked-up head. As the clock ticked over to 06:00, I rested my head back against the wall behind me, and closed my eyes.
“Connect to simulation: Macquarie Public School, classroom 406”
And then the world went white.
I opened my eyes to find myself where I was yesterday morning, sitting in my seat in my tutor group room. The classroom was a multipurpose space, oriented in a semicircle around the teacher’s podium in the centre. The seating was tiered, with each seat facing inwards towards the teacher.
When classes were in progress, the teacher could use their AR controls to ensure each student could see the learning material, which would appear to float in space above the plinth, and could pipe their voice through each students’ AR glasses to make sure each student could hear them properly. My best friend, Becky Stewart, always used to jokingly remark that the classroom was “A Greek theatre, with the tragedy being the Australian public educational system.”
She was unfortunately not sitting on my left today, as she was currently away at her grandmother’s funeral over in New London. The seat to the right of me was also empty, having not been assigned to anyone yet. Most of my tutor group was already here, including…
“Oi, troll-face! You’re in my way! Maybe you want to turn transparent, so I don’t have to look at the back of your deformed skull?”
Her. Jessica. I twisted in my chair, my virtual avatar- a generic auburn-haired girl wearing the school uniform- presumably doing the same in Jessica’s AR field. Jessica was a pasty-faced, blond-haired girl with rounded facial features, and thin lips. She was also a complete bitch.
“I’m not in your way, Jessica,” I responded curtly. Fortunately, I'd perfected a feminine voice well before I came to school, so I didn't have to worry about giving myself away. “And even if I was, there’s nothing to see. You’re in the second row, we’re not in class, and you can easily just set your glasses to filter me out anyway.”
She pretended to look around. “Oh, wait, where’s that ugly ghost-bitch gone? Can anyone else see her? Maybe it was just my imagination.”
Maxine, the black-haired crony who was her best friend, cackled shrilly and made a face at me. I turned back to the front of the room in disgust. I couldn’t remember when Jessica had first started calling me troll-face, but it was an insult she’d been throwing my way since the day I transferred here. There were very few students who used virtual presence software to attend school, a practice commonly referred to as ‘remoting’. Most of them did so for reasons linked to social anxiety, or to some form of medical condition.
In my case, it was because my psychologist had given the school a letter excusing me from physical attendance due to “long-term body image anxiety”. This generic and wide-reaching diagnosis covered the specific diagnosis, which was that I suffered from gender dysphoria. This, coupled with the anti-discrimination laws of the Australian Federal Republic, meant that not even the principal could access my full student records, which contained my birth gender, birth name, and other information that would out me for sure. Which was fortunate, considering that the principal of this school was Jessica’s mother, something which did not endear her to me.
Before Jessica could launch into yet another list of barbs, our aging tutor, Mr. MacAdams, walked into the room and took his chair at the podium. He cleared his throat, and then clapped his hands. Everyone in the room suddenly stopped talking.
“Good morning, tutor group,” he started, making hand motions that could only mean he was interacting with a private AR window that only he could see. “How was everyone’s day yesterday? Was the weather good out at Centennial Park?”
There were mumbles of affirmation from around the classroom. Yesterday had been the sports carnival, which fortunately meant I had the day off school. Unfortunately, it also meant that I had spent the day without my friends to talk to, and with nothing to do but watch shitty television and catch up on homework. Mr. Macadams finished what he was doing in AR, and refocused on the class.
“Now, while I’m sure you’re all eager to get your names ticked off, and head off to your first class, I have a couple of small announcements to make. First off, the school would like to remind all students that the HSC examinations for year 12 start four weeks from now.”
He paused and coughed into his elbow. I stared at the wall behind him, wondering why he thought we wouldn’t be aware of this. This had already been bought up in assembly last week. Most of the class was in a similar state of annoyance, as he continued to drone on.
“All students should be mindful that the senior students require peace and quiet during their exams, and that noise in the corridors should be kept to a minimum. Furthermore, students are to be reminded that scheduling alterations are in effect during this period, and that room assignments for your classes during the exam period are subject to change.”
He stopped, straightened his tie, and got up out of his chair. “As for the second announcement…Alice, you want to introduce yourself?”
A beautiful young woman, with long dark brown hair, and bright green eyes appeared next to the desk as if she had always been there. She was around 5’7”, fair skinned, and remarkably slender. Her facial features were sharp and elfin, and she had a mischievous grin across her face. She looked around the room, waving. Jessica groaned, and whispered to Maxine at a volume she knew I could easily hear.
“Oh god, not another lazy stay at home. I wonder how hideous she is that she needs to wear a custom avatar like that.”
Alice, if that was her name, cleared her throat, and began to speak, her voice inflected with a strong Australian accent. “Hello, folks! I’m Alice Miller, pleasure to meet you. I’m transferring here from Central Sydney Girl’s Academy, and I’ll be joining the year ten cohort here at MQPS.”
She continued to introduce herself, but I didn’t really listen to the rest. Something about her made my heart flutter, in a way that was strange and unfamiliar. It felt like a thousand butterflies were landing inside my chest, and gently fluttering their wings. It felt…good. I was suddenly aware that Mr. MacAdams was talking to me, and I quickly composed myself.
“Sorry sir, I was deep in thought. What were you saying?”
Jessica sniggered from behind me, but I ignored her. MacAdams sighed, and repeated himself wearily.
“As I was saying, Miss Porter, since you’re the only virtually present student in this tutor group, I’d like you to shadow Miss Miller around for the next few days. Show her where everything is, and make sure she feels comfortable at our school.”
Alice beamed at me, and I barely supressed the urge to giggle as the feeling in my chest was set off again. Goddamnit, this was an unfamiliar feeling. She walked over, her virtual feet not quite touching the floor, and sat down next to me, the VR mesh over the simulated physical space allowing her to contact both the desk and the chair without phasing through it. She grinned at me, and stuck out her hand.
“Hi, I’m Alice. You are…?”
I swallowed, and took her hand gently. It felt weird, like I was holding her hand through layers of gloves wrapped around my hand. Her hand felt warm, but again the feeling was muted.
“Kara. Kara Porter. I guess I’m making sure you get to know the school.”
Jessica leered down at us, but I quickly adjusted my setting to block her out from my perception. This wouldn’t last long, as tutor group was nearly over, but it would allow me and Alice to talk without her interrupting. While I was at it, I also blocked Maxine. The two of them became mute blurred out smears that I tuned out easily. I copied my settings, and silently sent them to Alice’s own VR system. She looked at them, said something that I couldn’t make out, and then turned back to me.
“I’m guessing you’re not a fan of them. I don’t think I like them either.”
I groaned. “Trust me, the feeling’s mutual. So, yeah, now that we can’t hear them, and they can’t hear us, how about I show you around? I don’t have classes till after lunch today, so I have most of the morning off, so long as I remain online and “on campus”.
She laughed, making my heart flutter again. I quickly nipped that feeling in the bud, and resolved to check my VR setup for potential problems. She grinned, and brought up an AR window with her schedule.
“Let’s see…I don’t have class until the period before lunch, and then I have two more classes after lunch. English is up next, and then computer science and physics after lunch.”
I grinned, unusually elated. “Oh cool! You have Mrs. Carter for both?”
She looked at her timetable again, frowning. “Uh…yes. I assume that means we’re in the same class?”
“Yeah,” I said, mindlessly twirling one of my avatar’s locks of hair. “It does. You want to go see where everything…”
I stood up, intending to leave, and realised I was still holding her hand. I blushed furiously and let go. She looked down at her hand, looked up, and realised she had also still been holding my hand. Her face went red, and she quickly stood up as well.
“Uh, yeah, a tour sounds good,” she said quickly, nodding furiously and backing away. “How about we start with my English classroom?”