Mandatory Nihilism

The bell rang, and students filed out of the classroom I stood outside of, waiting for Alice. It was time for lunch, and I’d promised to wait for Alice outside her classroom. The tour earlier had gone well, and I’d shown her all of the important parts of the school. Obviously, this did not include the toilets or the gym, since neither of us would be using those facilities any time soon, especially me. I had found out more about her and her family while we walked and chatted.

   She was remoting in because she lived on the other side of the city and couldn’t commute here easily, she was from a well-off family and had previously gone to a private school before bullying issues forced her into the public system, and she was an academic achiever. All very good things to know. Hell, we even exchanged phone numbers like stereotypical teenage girls. Then, she’d gone off to English, and I’d settled into a chair in the library and browsed the library’s eBook selection for an hour and a half.

   While I stood there, I pondered what exactly it was that I’d felt earlier today. The most cliché answer would be “love”, but that could never work. I was a girl with the body of a boy, and she…well, I hadn’t asked her sexual preferences, and I didn’t intend to. I didn’t want to know the answer.

   Even if I got lucky and she was a lesbian…I was physically male, and the minute we met in person she’d reject me. Hell, she might even lock me out of her life like my parents…

…like my parents did. God, I love running into mental brick walls. I immediately resolved to talk about this with my psychologist during our meeting this Friday.

   Just then, Alice walked out of the classroom (or, rather, glided out with her legs moving as if she was walking- the simulation technology the school was using was quite old, and had some problems animating walking physics correctly), and tapped me on the shoulder.

   “Hey, Kara,” she said, smiling. “Time for lunch?”

   I grinned back. “Yeah, time for lunch. Follow me, I’ll introduce you to the nerd herd.”

---

   The cafeteria was packed with real students, all sitting down to eat their food. I’d already had my lunch while I was waiting for Alice, leaving VR briefly to choke down a SoyBeef and Cheese sandwich from the food dispenser in my apartment, but I still showed up to lunches to talk with my small group of fellow outcasts and nerds.

   A century ago, Australian children wouldn’t have been eating in a cafeteria, at least not normally. Most of the old schools had outdoor spaces for kids to eat their lunch in, and get some fresh air and sun. They would also have probably had their own packed lunch, or a choice of menu options from the school canteen. Unfortunately for the old ways, rapid urbanisation and heavy pollution meant that it was both healthier and more practical for kids to eat their lunch in a closed-in space, and the rising global population meant that it was more practical to serve kids the same slop made from genetically engineered soybeans and lichen.

   It didn’t matter whether it was nominally called “beef stew” or “vegetable salad”. All it was composed of was a few strains of genetically modified lichen plus soy paste for texture and thickness. Plus flavouring and the occasional nutritional supplement. Real food, the sort that people ate back in the 21st century, was prohibitively expensive, and often in short supply.

   Even the bread in my sandwich was made from soy, and tasted about as good as slightly damp cardboard. It wasn’t like I had anything to compare it to, but the human body has standards about what it will tolerate eating, and therefore I still found it hard to consume something that tasted only marginally better than the box it came in.

   With Alice trailing behind me, I found my friends sitting around a small table at the back of the room. To my surprise, Becky was there too, albeit remoting in. Two of them looked up at Alice and I and grinned.

   “Ayy, look who finally turned up!” exclaimed Jaime, shaking out her long blond hair and grinning maniacally. “It’s Ghost-Girl! And she brought a new person!”

   Becky simply smiled at us. She looked sad, her avatar out of uniform and wearing a simple black dress. I felt sorrow wash over me. She was usually so much more chipper.

   I sat down on one of the benches, my hand briefly ghosting through Becky’s right arm, and patted the spot to the left of me. Alice tentatively sat down where I’d indicated, across from Jaime. As usual, Mike, the sole boy of the group, had his head down in a book, and didn’t appear to have noticed that anyone had showed up. His AR glasses were sitting on the table in front of him, and his reading glasses were on his face. Jaime tapped him on the shoulder, and he jerked upright.

   “What?” he yelped, his head snapping from side to side in confusion. “I was reading, I swear! What’s going on?”

   Jaime sighed. “Mike, everyone’s here. Put your damn glasses on.”

   He pawed around on the table for his AR glasses, before awkwardly trying to fit them over his reading lenses. Realising his mistake, he quickly pulled off his reading glasses, and popped them in his pocket before putting on his AR glasses. His glasses slightly crooked, and his curly black hair messier than it was before, he looked around the table, grinning.

   “Ah, sorry, Kara,” he said apologetically, rubbing the back of his head with his right hand. “I was really stuck into this old novel. I should really look into getting some AR glasses with prescription lenses.”

   I reached over and mimed mussing his hair. He self-consciously tried to grab my arm to stop me from doing so, but his hand passed right through me, and he quickly put it back down. He then looked towards Alice, and his eyes went wide.

   “Oh…um…uh…new person. Hi! I’m…I’m…”

   He began stuttering, which caused Alice to break out into laughter. Mike’s face went red.

   “Hey,” he said, embarrassed. “I…I’ll…”

   Alice stopped laughing, and turned to me. “So, um, Kara…introductions?”

   I rolled my eyes, and swivelled to face her. “So, this is the nerd herd. Nerd herd, this is Alice.”

   Becky and Jaime both waved, and smiled. Mike was too busy burying his face in his hands and rocking back and forth gently. I tapped Alice on the shoulder, and pointed to Mike.

   “Prince charming over there is called Mike Horner. He runs D&D games for us in VR every Saturday. Don’t worry about the rocking, it’s some sort of stim for him to calm himself down. You’ll see him after lunch for programming.”

   Mike, while continuing to rock, raised one hand briefly in acknowledgement before dropping it back to the table. I moved my hand to Jaime, and gestured theatrically. “This, dear Alice, is Jaime Merrow.  She’s the resident board games nerd. If she offers to play chess with you, run away, very quickly. If there’s a bet involved, run twice as fast.”

   Jaime held her heart and pretended to swoon. “How dare you, madame! What a heinous accusation! But seriously, ignore her, she’s just bitter I’ve beaten her in every game of chess we’ve played.”

   I shook my head, and finally pointed to Becky. “And this is Becky, my best friend. She’s currently away for family reasons, so she’s remoting in. And not wearing school uniform as well?”

   Becky looked down. “I needed to talk to my friends, so I remoted in for our usual lunch meetup. It’s…hard, with Grannie gone. It’s good to see you all. I wish I could say I’m excited to meet you, Alice, but…yeah, it’s been a rough few days.”

   She looked up, and smiled sadly. There was a stoney silence around the table, before Mike jumped in.

   “So…um…Becky,” he blurted. “If you’re feeling down, we can always skip our D&D session this Saturday, so you don’t miss anything. I mean, only if you want to, but you may not and…”

   Becky held up a hand, and he stopped talking. “Mike, you don’t have to worry. Right now, I need to keep my mind out of the weeds, and spending my Saturday playing with my friends sounds like a fantastic idea. Anyway, I’ll be back home by Friday evening, and I’ll have plenty of time to get some rest before the game.”

   Mike grinned, and turned to Alice, his eyes not quite focusing on hers. “So, um, Alice?”

   “Yes, Mike?” she said, slowly. “That is my name.”

   His face went red again, and he began stuttering. “Do…do you want to…to…to…”

   Jaime stepped in. “What I think our illustrious friend here is trying to say is that we would be honoured, Alice, if you joined our group this Saturday for a game. That is, if you’re interested?”

   Alice frowned. “I’ve never played D&D before. Are you sure you want me there?”

   I laughed. “Trust me, the only person here who’s been playing for any significant length of time is Mike. And it’s not exactly D&D in the traditional sense either. You’ll see, assuming you join us.”

   I patted her on the hand, and she blushed, lowering her head to conceal her smile.

   Jaime began clapping her hands. “Join us!” she chanted, clapping in time. “Join us! Join us! Join us!”

   Alice raised her head and nodded. “Oh, alright. I’ll tag along. Might as well, since I don’t have anywhere else to be. You guys seem alright, and you all seem to know what’s going on around here. I guess I’ll hang with you. For now.”

   Before anyone could cheer or do much more than grin, the bell rang, and everyone began filing off to classes. I grabbed Alice’s hand again, and rose to my feet, pulling her up with me.

   “Come on, we have class to get to. I’ll show you to the computer lab.”

---

   The computer lab was a large room, with a circle of recliners arranged around a central processor hub. VR headsets sat on hooks next to each seat, and a large, curved window gave an excellent view of the towers of the Macquarie University campus across the way from our school building. The eternally greyish-green clouds had parted slightly to allow some shafts of light down into the city, turning what was usually a very depressing vista into something that could possibly be called pretty.

   As usual, the view out the window gave me nothing but a further sense of apathy, so I tried my best not to look in that direction. Alice and I were the first ones to arrive at the classroom, with Mrs. Carter late as usual. Her green jacket was hung over the back of the teacher’s chair, and there was a cup of blue jelly sitting half-eaten on her desk, so I knew she’d at least been here relatively recently before ducking out. Alice walked over to the window and stared out.

   “Man, this is the first time I’ve seen this part of Sydney,” she said, turning around. “You can actually distinguish the individual buildings out here without having to rely on AR tags. It’s nowhere near as urbanised here, is it?”

   I shook my head. “Nah, this whole area was mainly a technology park up until around 2080,” I explained, walking over to join Alice. “That’s when the city limits began to encroach on North Ryde. See, over there, you can see some of the historic parts of the old university around the base of the towers.”

   I pointed to a barely visible patch of parkland and small buildings surrounding the base of the two 90 story buildings that constituted Macquarie University. Then I pointed over to the large pyramid-shaped arcology to the far right.

   “And over there is the Optus-Telstra Telecommunications Anex,” I said, grinning. “It’s one of the best places in Sydney to work and live. I was born at the hospital there.”

   Alice smiled. “Oh? Do you still live there?”

   My grin faded. “I…I live by myself now. In welfare housing. Over near the Glebe sector. My parents sorta kinda disowned me a year ago.”

   I began to breathe a little faster, and became aware that my mouth had suddenly gone dry. Alice pulled my avatar into a hug, the feeling of touch calming me down. I was suddenly aware that my virtual breasts were pressing into hers.

   “Hey, it’s OK,” she said soothingly. “Don’t worry, I think I got the picture. You OK?”

   She released me, and I stumbled backwards, my heart thumping, and my cheeks red. She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, a familiar cackle rang out from behind us.

   “Oh, look. Troll-girl found a Troll friend,” sneered Maxine, walking over to one of the recliners and relaxing in it. “Why don’t you lesbians find another place to mash your deformed faces together in?”

   Alice looked momentarily shocked, but quickly composed herself. She turned on Maxine and crossed her arms.

   “Mate, what is your problem?” she asked, furious. “And what’s with the lame pre-school insults? “Troll-girl”? “Troll Friend”? Are you implying that there’s something wrong with the way I look?”

   Maxine snickered. “Come on, now. Your avatar looks like a supermodel, and you’re a remote learner. You’re either ugly as sin, or the size of a whale. Or both! As for her, well, she’s using the default avatar. The only reason she’d be hiding behind that is if her real appearance is too misshapen for anyone to see without puking.”

   I clenched my fists and tried to reign in my anger. If I was attending school in person, I would have slugged Maxine in the face long ago. The problem was that I had very little recourse. I couldn’t interact with her in any way because she was at the school in meatspace. I was simply a digital ghost that could only be perceived in AR, and who lacked any real physicality.

   If I launched back my own barbs, Maxine could easily tune them out. And the school’s settings didn’t allow long-term muting of other students without special permission from the principal. Who was Jessica’s mother, and therefore unlikely to take my side. Furthermore, if I did so, it would likely land me in trouble, something that I couldn’t afford to end up dealing with when my social services guardian next got my school reports. If I was caught fighting, even verbally, she’d restrict my internet access for sure, cutting off my one viable form of social communication.

   Alice was less subtle about her anger. Striding forwards, she attempted to slap Maxine, her hand passing right through the girl’s head. The taller, dark haired teen looked surprised for a second, before bursting out into laughter.

   “Oh my god, you actually tried to slap me while remoting? God, I wish I’d gotten that on video, Troll-friend.”

   Alice looked like she was building up to a massive tirade, but was stopped when the rest of the class, along with Mrs. Carter filed into the room. The blond haired woman walked over to her chair, and cleared her throat.

   “I’m sorry, is there a problem?” she asked, picking up her jelly and scooping a spoonful of it into her mouth. “Or do I have to start handing out demerits?”

   Maxine smirked, and leaned back in her chair. “No, Mrs. Carter. I’m all good.”

   Mrs. Carter looked sceptically at Maxine, but said nothing more on the matter. The rest of the class began sitting down in the VR recliners, but didn’t begin pulling on their headsets yet. Mrs. Carter bought up a private AR window, and began ticking off the roll. Meanwhile, I lead Alice over to the back of the room, where a pair of ordinary plastic seats sat.

   “OK, so, since we’re both already in VR, we won’t have our own seats,” I said, sitting down. “But it’s rather rude to stand while class is in session. Or at least that’s what Mrs. Carter says.”

   Alice sat down next to me, just as the teacher stopped listing off the roll.

   “Alright, class, today we’re going to be continuing where we left off with our lesson on coding in Kaparthy-IIIa,” said Mrs. Carter. “If you wouldn’t mind plugging yourselves into simulation four-two, that would be great. Kara, if you wouldn’t mind helping Alice out, that would also be great.”

   I bought up my simulation controls, and quickly typed in the simulation name, and created an instance for me and Alice to share. I sent an invite to Alice, who accepted.

   “Ready?” I asked, my finger hovering over the activation button.

   “Ready,” she confirmed. “Let’s go visit the wonderful wizard.”

   I pressed the button, and for the second time today, everything went white.

---

   When the world faded back in, I was floating in a black void, surrounded by strings of coloured light. This was the coding environment for Kaparthy-IIIa, a brain-computer interface programming language commonly taught to students in high school. I had read in history books about how coders used to program computers using lines of syntax, clunkily assembling functions from either compiled or interpreted languages that the computer then used to carry out instructions. In the intervening century and a half, computer programming had been revolutionised by the introduction of commercial-grade neural interfaces, making the process more abstract in appearance, but opening up a large range of possibilities for programming.

   Usually, I ran my personal instance of the coding simulation without any rendered physical form for myself. However, today I was working with a partner, and therefore needed to make a few changes. Alice’s disembodied voice seemed to ring inside my “head”, or what I perceived as my head.

   “Oh. This is different.”

   I chuckled, a difficult thing to do without a body, but capable if you knew what you were doing. In reality, I was just imagining myself laughing, and transmitting that abstract thought process to Alice via the uplink we had with the simulation environment. “Yes, welcome to my domain! I will be giving us some sort of physicality in just a second. Let me just fiddle with the settings.”

   I drifted towards a strand of twisted red and blue lights, and reached out towards it with my mind. It contorted, and split into multiple separate strings of light. These lights then flowed towards me and the point in the void where Alice was presumably located. The lights then coalesced into rough wireframe outlines, which were shaped vaguely like our AR avatars.

   “There we go,” I said, grinning. “That’ll do for now. Anyway, um, yeah. We have work to do.”

   Alice’s wireframe avatar blinked, before pulling up a window with a wave of her hand. She proceeded to read out our classwork, her avatar attempting to fiddle with its wireframe hair. We worked together without much chatter for the next half an hour, before she finally decided to talk about something other than our work.

   “Kara…I want to tell you why I left my old school.”

   I stopped meshing together the program I was working on, and turned to her. “I'm sorry if I misunderstood, but didn't you already tell me that?"

   She looked down. “All I said was that I had to move to remoting in due to physical distance. That was only half true.”

   She paused. “The thing is that…I had a small crush on another girl, and it turned out she was a homophobe. She told all her friends, and they proceeded to make my life hell for the next year. I moved schools twice, but she had friends at all the schools in the area, and I was beginning to crack under the pressure. This was the furthest school from where I lived that allowed remoting, so I decided to ask my parents to enrol me here.”

   I blinked. “So…um…you’re…?”

   She nodded. “A lesbian, yes. That bitch, Maxine or whatever, was at least right about that. I just wanted you to know, so that it didn’t fuck things up for us down the line or something. Fuck, I don’t even know why I’m telling you this now. I’ve known you for less than half a day. I don’t even know what you look like.”

   I looked down towards the coloured lights I was fiddling with and fidgeted a little. Then I looked up.

   “I ran away from home when I was fifteen. My parents rejected me when I came out, and my sister…well, I haven’t heard from her for a year. My mother called me a freak, and my father tried to beat the shit out of me. They were both highly religious, and the idea of me being something they hated was…too much for them. I was picked up by social services after a week, and made a ward of the state. So, I live alone now in welfare housing, with weekly checkups by Sarah, my quote-unquote “guardian”. I can understand what you went through, Alice.”

   She moved over, and attempted to hug me, but without any sort of way for her wireframe form to collide with me, the best she could manage was an awkward tackle that passed through my polygonal body. We floated there for some time before we silently resumed our work. Although it wasn’t accurately represented by my current avatar, I was smiling like an idiot.

---

   The next two days passed without much of note occurring. Alice only had two classes with me on Wednesday, and while we continued to meet up for lunch for the rest of the week, I didn’t see much of her during the day. After school on Friday, I forced myself from the artificial sleep that my headset induced, and pulled off the device. It was warm inside my small one-room apartment, the air conditioning switched off to save power.

   The blinds were open, letting in the neon lighting of the billboard outside. Across from where I sat, the dishwasher in the kitchen hummed away, washing up the plastic dishes that I had used to eat my lunch off earlier in the afternoon. My bed was still unmade, but that wasn’t unusual for me. Something felt wrong though. It was…lonelier than usual.

   Getting up from my beanbag, I walked a few steps to the sliding door that opened into the bathroom, and slid open the divider. The lights above the sink came on automatically, as did the shower light. I looked into the mirror. While I kept my face shaven at all times, and my hair was relatively neat, I was still a total mess. Acne scars dotted my face, and my skin was greasy and pale. Then there was the fact that I…I…

   I looked wrong. Like a man. Not like I should. Fucking hell, now I knew for sure that Alice would never be into me. I had probed at lunch about whether she was bi or full-on gay, and she’d answered the latter rather that the former. I still hadn’t told her that I was trans, but I also hadn’t told the people I’d been friends with for an entire year either. Why was it so hard to tell her? We had got along famously. I don’t think I’d ever gotten on as well with someone as well as I did with Alice. I had dreamed of someone like her every night for the last year. I was most definitely, most clichédly, most certainly in love. And it was a love that would never be requitted as long as I remained as I was.

   Washing my face off, I walked to the closet, and grabbed my sneakers. I needed to clear my head. I needed to run.

---

   I jogged through the streets of Glebe, a light drizzle of rain splashing down around me. The world was ablaze with neon signs and holographic displays, all trying to sell me and everyone around me some small slice of happiness that ultimately wouldn’t do anything but make you poorer, and the seller richer. Street cars trailed through the roads, their electric motors whining faintly as they drifted past on SmartRubber™ wheels. Smart. Everything had to be “smart” nowadays. I had long since decided that the only smart thing about anything with that word in its product name was that whoever realised that they could sell more of those products because of a meaningless word in the name was a genius.

   The air around me was acrid and harsh, laden with a miasma of chemicals that I really shouldn’t be breathing in. Glebe was, at one point, a relatively upmarket area of Sydney, located in the inner west near the historic CBD area. It was only a short walk from Old Darling Harbour, and was (at one point) home to a thriving commercial and residential district. Now, it was the heart of an industrial slum that housed both factories and welfare rats like me.

   While Sydney was better than most cities in terms of air pollution- I wouldn’t want to even set foot outside of a building in, say, Los Angeles without an acid-proof coat and a full hazmat suit- I could easily get away with a short half-hour run before returning home. Besides, most of the so-called toxins that the news feeds warned about were already in our bodies, ingested before we were even born.

   Most of the people out at this time of day were hurrying home from work. A couple of heavily armed police riot cops stood on the street corner a few meters away, accompanied by a hulking patrol robot that silently scanned passersby with integrated weapons detectors and facial recognition systems. The cops wore full-face helmets, with mirrored face shields and integrated communications and respirator gear, their armour consisting of reinforced polymer hardshell, coloured blue and white. In their hands, they carried their standard-issue carbines, loaded with flechette ammunition that could tear through both armour and flesh like a knife. 

  As I passed, their robot, an ape-like boxy machine fitted with some sort of long-barrelled weapon on its right shoulder turned towards me. It looked me up and down with a glowing red eye, invisible sensor beams scanning every part of my body in case I was on some sort of wanted list or carrying illegal weaponry. I quickly moved on, rounding the corner and heading back to my apartment. The cops weren’t particularly fond of people like me, and I didn’t want to spend any longer than I had to in their vicinity.

   Sydney’s population had boomed during the 2130’s, when the Resource Wars resulted in a mass influx of refugees. Australia had emerged from that war mainly unscathed, luckier than the US and China, who had both suffered severe casualties during the Battle of San Francisco, the Second Battle of Midway, and the Razing of Beijing. Australia had been forced to pour massive amounts of resources into construction, and even more into trying to make sure there was enough food and water to go around.

  The inner city (consisting of the Sydney basin and surrounding areas) now housed around thirty million people, with an additional twenty five million or so living out in the surrounding urban and semi-urban sprawl. Sydney now stretched from the former city of Wollongong in the south all the way up to where Newcastle once stood before it was destroyed during the failed invasion of Australia by the Southeast Asia Directorate in 2078.

   Rounding the last corner, I approached my building, and slowed to a halt next to the reinforced sliding door. I entered my door code, the armoured hatch sliding open with a groan of tortured metal. My building was a 75-story welfare block on Kelly Street in what was once the suburb of Ultimo, and housed around two thousand people. It was one of the less densely populated welfare buildings, mainly owing to its location in an area renowned for industrial pollution, and the steady effort by the city council to move people out of the area to make room for more industrial facilities. My building would be here for maybe another two years, and then I’d have to move to one of the more modern facilities elsewhere in the city.

   I waited for the door to slide closed, and began walking to the lift. I tipped my ballcap at the security guard on duty at the front desk. I pressed the call button on the lift, and when the doors opened, swiped my access card and selected my floor. On the way up, I checked my email with my AR glasses, and found nothing new of note. Just spam and some administration junk from social services. The lift was an older model, and it took forever to reach my floor.

   On the way up, it made several stops, other people wearily filing in before getting off at the floors they wished to go to. Some of them I knew were affiliated with some nasty crowds from their gang tats, so I made sure to keep to myself and avoid notice. Fortunately, they left me alone. When the lift reached my floor, I exited the lift, walked to my apartment, and opened the door with my keycode. Slamming the door shut behind me, I took off my sneakers, pulled off my clothes, and jumped in the shower.

   If there was one thing I could rely on, it was that running through a city as grim as this one was a great way to clear my thoughts and get my head on straight. But, even as I scrubbed myself off, trying to avoid thoughts about her, my mind kept turning back to Alice. Fuck me, I was in love. And that sucked.