Atlas Alone Page 5

  I guess not giving me a specific purpose for the report is part of the test. Carolina will want to see what catches my eye and how I interpret it. The only thing that bothers me is whether all the years of experience I have will be of any use here. This is a strange sample group after all. The only ones I know anything about are the members of the Circle, and they are hardly average people.

  “Sod it,” I say to the ceiling. “I’ll do my best.”

  It takes less than a minute to instruct Ada to carry out the first batch of data crunching. I pop out to the communal food printer before the lunchtime rush, print myself a goulash with pasta, Croatian style, and eat it alone. A glass of water later, I’m ready to dive in.

  It’s much easier to play with data in a virtual space, so I go in for full immersion. After the usual checks from my APA that I’m not about to try to do this while standing up, driving machinery or any of the other dumb things it already knows I’m not doing, I’m in my office.

  I say office; it’s more a blank slate. Literally. I’ve made myself a giant slab of dark gray slate that stretches in all directions as far as I can see. Above me is a night sky filled with stars. Nice and spacious, a comfortable twenty degrees Celsius and no wind.

  “Okay, give it to me,” I say, and Ada drops in three-dimensional graphs and Venn diagrams around me. Each one is as tall as I am and lands with a thud that I find very satisfying. I can walk up to them, pull out data points and examine outliers, all by grabbing them with my hands or simply pointing to them.

  There’s demographic data, a variety of graphs on consumption behavior including level of immersion, duration and other standard criteria, and on categories of mersives. There are at least ten of those and that’s just for starters. Being such complex things, mersive categories can span factors as diverse as age suitability, level of realism (the definition of which is constantly argued over), whether they are recorded and replayed by the consumer or created by a third party, and level of neurophysiological integration. The latter can be a very telling metric, as it indicates the sort of experience people are looking for. In the simplest terms, it shows if they want to watch something passively or feel like they are inside the story, with different levels of immersion between the two.

  Back on Earth I worked with creators of all types of mersive. Some were purely focused on the story, aiming to give the audience as much freedom to explore it in as many different ways as possible. For them, the variety of routes that people can take through a story was far more important than anything else. If there was a scene in a forest, they didn’t care what species of trees were there, or even what season it was, necessarily. What mattered was what was happening there, who was saying what and how the plot was being advanced—be it through conversation with NPCs or through finding key objects or other types of information, if it was more interactive. That meant they could build the mersive using instructions to neural chips with greatly reduced cost, the chips being instructed to create the experience of a forest by triggering whatever had been encoded in the consumer’s brain already. Depending on where someone had grown up, or the media they’d consumed the most, they could experience a chase through a Nordic pine forest or a dense jungle. To the creators it didn’t matter, as long as the story was cohesive.

  Other creatives found this approach abhorrent; for them, it was just as important to control the aesthetics of the experience. They argued that relying on a person’s prior experiences to create art was elitist; what about those who’d never experienced a forest, or those for whom such environments were encoded so differently that they would negatively impact the story? Their critics in turn said that the cost of the mersives created using real locations was prohibitive to those in lower pay grades. I don’t know how many hours of my life I wasted listening to advocates of each approach arguing it out in bland virtual conference rooms.

  I wonder if any of those creatives are on board. It’s impossible to tell without knowing the selection criteria for the other people outside of the Circle. If there’s a military-style command structure, they may also have been in charge of passenger selection. JeeMuh, am I on a ship filled with thousands of soldiers? But thousands of soldiers would mean invasion . . . was the US gov-corp planning to invade the Pathfinder’s colony? No, surely not. Why would—

  A “new message” ping interrupts my thoughts. I accept the invitation to read it.

 

  I groan at the cheesy sales tone and am just about to delete it when I remember that I haven’t had any sort of spam like this for months. Somehow Carolina’s message has put me on the radar. Haven’t I been craving information about the people outside the Circle?

  There’s no signature, but there is the option to reply. I look for the profile of the sender and the lack of it confuses me. Online anonymity is illegal. Then I realize it’s not a standard e-mail, but some sort of live chat that looks . . . weird.

  “What the hell is this person using to talk to me?” I say aloud to Ada.

  “A person-to-person chatbox.”

  “But how?”

  “A person-to-person chatbox is—”

  “No, I mean . . . is this new software?”

  “This has never been used to contact you before. Would you like me to block its use?”

  “No. Is it legal?”

  “I cannot determine that.”

  “What?”

  “I cannot—”

  “Oh, shut up.” I frown at the message. If I can’t determine the sender, surely it must be illegal. I grin and rub my hands together. Brilliant.

  I tap my finger on the reply option and have my APA turn my speech into text.

 

 

 

  Whoever this is, they are one cocky bastard. Intense? I’ll be the judge of that.

 

  I actually laugh out loud. They’ve played too many spy mersives; that’s for certain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  “You are fucking joking,” I whisper to myself, but still turn around. On the floor behind me there’s a box made from solid black glass. It’s only the size of my fist, but it freaks me out.

  “Ada, did you give anyone access to my mersive?”

  “No access has been requested.”

  I point at the box. “Then what the cocking hell is that?”

  “A box.”

  “Jesus fucking wept,” I mutter beneath my breath.

 

  Must be a bloke, and a young one at that. Do I really want to play in a mersive created by someone who clearly has dodgy opinions about boundaries?

  Of course I do. He can’t do anything to me in a mersive. And who knows? It might break me out of my gaming slump.

  4

  IT’S HARD TO work with that black box behind me, tempting me, but soon enough I am so absorbed in my task that I actually forget about it. Even though I thought I wasn’t missing my old job, there’s no denying that digging into the data, making notes, testing theories and seeing if the data bears them out gi
ves me so much pleasure. It’s the sense of total mental absorption that I love, the fading of my own noisy mind into the background with only the work filling the space. When I’m looking at the data, finding different ways to slice it up and examine it, there’s just the right balance of total objectivity in the form of the numbers and the subjectivity of my interpretation. The data is both rigid in its accuracy and malleable in my hands. The thrust of the report soon coalesces in my mind, so swiftly, in fact, that I hold off writing it for a while. I’m always suspicious when the data seems to support any prediction made before I start the work.

  The prediction as it stands is also too simplistic: that people will be using mersives more than usual and that they will be favoring personally recorded mersives rather than consumables. Any idiot could hypothesize that, and it would be embarrassing to send that in to Carolina, even with a stack of evidence behind it. Of course people are spending time in their recordings of home. We’re all crammed into a huge traveling skyscraper, hurtling through space at terrifying speed, for heaven’s sake. We’re homesick. Well, they are, anyway.

  What’s of more interest—and will make a better report—is an analysis of the elements these personal mersives have in common. It would be impossible for me to download one of their recordings and experience it myself, as neural chips simply don’t work that way, partly because of the distribution of memory across the brain and the fact that that differs from person to person, and partly by design. In the early days of immersion technology, people did attempt to share personal recordings, driven inevitably by the porn industry. But then people started sharing murders, violent attacks as both the perpetrator and the victim and even heart attacks. Human beings are mostly garbage, after all. When one particular recording caused the death of thirty men in one night, the firmware was radically overhauled. Part of the problem was the very fact that the recordings could not be experienced in exactly the same way as the person recording them had. The neural chips were simply doing their best to reproduce the physiological experience, and when that was someone dying of a coronary in a bootleg mersive with dodgy settings designed to override a person’s MyPhys safeguards, that meant driving heart rates and blood pressure to dangerous levels.

  Now the firmware has been updated many times, and the software is far more sophisticated too. I can’t walk around a room someone has recorded, experiencing it like they can, but I can look at the raw code used to re-create it. All the little markers such as “temperature twenty degrees Celsius” or “Walls: emulsion paint #3498DB” are encoded in each recording. It is possible to make a nonimmersive render of another person’s recording, but it’s never accurate and doesn’t give sensory feedback—feeling more like a cheap game render. And of course, it has none of the emotional attachment, or the unique perspective given by looking through that person’s eyes.

  With the help of my APA, I start calling up all these tags, the AI automatically sorting them into broad categories. I look at the frequency and range of elements, across individuals and different chunks of population. Then I get that tingle, that sort of flutter in my throat when I know I’m onto something. This data looks weird as fuck.

  I knew that the demographic data would be unusual; there isn’t a single person on this ship who is over sixty-five, and there are only a handful of people over sixty, Gabriel being one of them. Ninety percent are between the ages of twenty and forty. Fine, that’s to be expected. The youngest people who have data here are nineteen, but there’s every possibility there are children on board. They won’t be chipped until their late teens though, so they wouldn’t appear in this data set anyway.

  But what’s strange is the massive difference in element tags for those under forty. A look at the frequency and range of the elements in personally recorded mersives consumed by people aged forty and above shows a very broad distribution. They incorporate a vast array of environments, from deserts to forests to moorland. Lots of coastal element tags too. There is a normal range of solo and group mersives too, and while I can’t see who the people are in those mersives, I would guess they are recordings of parties, special occasions and perhaps large-scale public events. For individuals, it’s even possible to deduce when they found out they’d made the cut and got a place on board Atlas 2, by noting the sudden increase in number of recordings, particularly those made in natural environments. They were building a bank of perfectly recorded memories of Earth to take with them. In short, the same sort of data I’d expect to see in a population of people who knew they were leaving Earth for good.

  But the data for the under-forties is bizarre. It’s an incredibly limited range of element tags. In the younger people’s mersives, the trees are less diverse, but that could be because they are limited to one continent. That’s interesting too; they all seem to be American. Only species of flora or fauna indigenous to North America have been tagged. Okay, fine, the US gov-corp picked the younger ones from the home crop, unlike the Circle, who cherry-picked their members from all over the world. Given the way the US has been since the 2020s, it doesn’t surprise me that they haven’t ever traveled outside of their home country.

  It’s when I look at the data for individuals that I start to feel really freaked-out. The first thing that leaps out at me is the lack of the “Oh shit, I’m leaving Earth forever, I better go record everything” spike. Not only is it nonexistent, but the sheer number of personally recorded mersives is way below average. I pluck out ten individuals at random and expand out their data. Each is characterized by low numbers of mersives, an impoverished environmental tag range (implying that these people didn’t travel much at all) and zero mersives featuring other people.

  Surely that’s an error? I carry out a quick analysis of that specific data element for that population, and only ten percent of them have personally recorded mersives that feature other people.

  Am I on a ship full of introverts? It wouldn’t be a bad thing. But Americans tend to prefer the extroverted approach to corporate life. Lots of socializing within your corporate department or where you live—often both are one and the same thing. Lots of meetings. Lots of talks and outreach programs to spread best practice and religious ideals.

  I twitch. I haven’t noticed anything that suggests churches or religious iconography, but that wouldn’t be something I would look for unprompted, being the filthy atheist that I am. With a smirk, I remember the interview when they were evaluating my suitability. The data from my chip had already told them I didn’t practice a religion, which for some Americans would have eliminated me entirely. Perhaps the people in charge of my fate back then reasoned that no religion was better than one of the long list from other cultures that they really didn’t like. By the time I was in the tiny town close to the border of the Circle’s land, waiting in a frigid air-conditioned room for the interviewer to arrive, I’d already worked out my angle.

  The US gov-corp’s evaluator had the archetypal strong American jaw, bronze tan and incredibly white and even teeth. His name was . . . probably Chad or Brett or something. I remember him lacing his fingers together and leaning forward, taking a breath before asking the next question. His hesitation told me that it was going to be about faith. It was the critical divider between our formerly close nations, after all.

  “So, I see that you don’t practice a religion,” he said.

  “It’s difficult to go to church in my corporate sector,” I said with a sprinkling of sadness. “It’s actively frowned upon,” I added sotto voce.

  He shook his head sadly. “I know it can be tough over the pond. Would you go to church if it didn’t reflect badly upon you?”

  I paused, pretending to be nervous about my reply. “Is there any way this interview will get back to my employers?”

  He leaned in, lowered his voice too. “No. It will be shared with my boss, but no one else.”

  “I would,” I said, looking down as if it were something to be embarrassed about. �
��I went when I was really small, to a church that still did services regularly. I still think about it.”

  He smiled. “Tell me about that.”

  “My grandmother took me. She was Polish—well, her mother and father were. She moved to Norope when she was a babe in arms. I can remember incense . . . the sound of the voices . . . like everyone’s singing was lifting something to God. I felt safe and happy there. Held, I suppose.”

  His eyebrow had twitched at the mention of God. “So you’re a woman of faith, then?”

  “I could never admit it at home, but here, I feel I can.” I looked him in the eye then, portraying a woman who had carried that terrible, shameful secret all her adult life and could finally set it down at his feet. “I do believe in God. And I pray, often, but inside my head. You know what I mean?”

  And he looked at me with such sadness and such . . . what even was that? A strange sort of joy, I think. “I think there are a lot of people in England who feel the same way.”

  It was hard not to yell at him about crappy assumptions. “It can be hard to keep it private,” I said, bedding into the lie to stop myself from ranting about how everyone in England was getting along just fine without all their hypocritical religious bollocks. “And to live by my principles in a place like that. If you note the mersives I’ve personally commissioned, none of them explore religious themes at all.”

  “I did notice that.”

  “It’s because the network has an antireligious agenda. There’s no way they’d let me put something together that was unbiased, let alone faith positive. I guess it was cowardly of me, but I worked damn hard for that position and I didn’t want to be ostracized.”