High-quality veils never distorted, except with the most violent motion.
D_Light looked over to see that Djoser had engaged his suit now. He resembled an ancient Victorian era gentleman, complete with a tall top hat. His face had changed from a man of roughly Indian descent to one of a darker African ancestry.
“You guys want to blend in, right? Why not choose a more common look?” D_Light was referring to the pandectic racial features of most contemporaries-skin that was a very dark tan, almost black, with relatively angular facial features close to that of a Caucasian.
“What’s the use of playing a game if you can’t have some fun?” Lyra shrugged. “Oh, we did some shopping on the way here and got you a veil too.”
D_Light laughed. “Let me guess, a greased-up albino in a G-string.” Not that it mattered. D_Light knew he could just select a design of his own choosing from his virtual closet.
Lyra walked around and up behind D_Light, whispering near his ear, “Close.” She unsnapped his collar and replaced it with the one embedded with a veil.
D_Light almost thought he could hear a low whistle as the nanothreads overhead scanned his face. With the momentary scanning complete, D_Light became a little girl. More precisely, he was a six foot one inch girl with the infantile facial features of a child no older than three. He wore a pink leotard, a large bow in his long blond hair, and frilly pink dancing shoes. D_Light chuckled as Djoser nearly busted a gut laughing.
Lyra frowned. “Oh, not funny! Not funny at all! Okay, I’ll change you fast before this is imprinted upon my psyche.”
Presently, D_Light’s body and face blurred and focused back in, displaying a Victorian like Djoser.
“I say, spot on!” D_Light did his best to mimic a British accent to accompany his new look. The country of England, like most countries, no longer had any real identity, but the accent still belonged to a few and, more importantly, remained part of entertainment culture.
“So now that we all look fabulous, where shall we go?” Lyra asked with enthusiasm. “We don’t have a quest yet, but our handsome couple here,” she said, pointing one index finger at Lily and the other at D_Light, “is surely being chased down by Soul knows what.”
D_Light nodded and added, “They’ll be using sniffer bots to find us. That’s what was chasing us at the spanker ghetto.”
“Righty-o! No one will be able to ID us with an image grok, but we’re still vulnerable to sniffers,” Djoser said with his own poor imitation of a British accent.
“Actually, not all scanners scan visual appearances, you know, not all scan light,” Lyra said. “Some use seismographic scanning, which draws our physical features and contours. The light illusion created by the suits we’re wearing will not fool these types of scanners.” Lyra smiled and added, “I did my research on my way here.”
“Sure, but these disguises will still fool people just using famscans,” D_Light said.
Lily furrowed her eyebrows slightly and said, “I must confess that I do not follow all of this discourse, but might I make a suggestion?”
Everyone turned to regard Lily; even the familiars fixed their cold eyes on her.
Upon gaining their attention, she said, “I would often go for walks at night, but as a precaution I would go for a swim before returning home. A scent cannot easily be followed through the water. The lake I swim in is only a few miles from here.”
No one answered her. Rather, they opened a conference blink with one another, again leaving Lily out. Despite some hesitation by members of the party regarding swimming in a cold and possibly dangerous lake, it was finally decided that going anywhere was better than staying put to be hunted down.
At last, Lyra said out loud, “Thank you, Lily. Let’s have a look at your lake.”
They followed a path covered by gold-colored fungi that offered excellent traction; it yielded enough to make walking comfortable, but not so much as to be extra work. Brian, skinned as a retro wrestler complete with evil leather mask, strutted ahead of the others, vigilantly grokking everything in sight. Djoser and Amanda lagged in the back, Amanda deftly massaging Djoser’s shoulder as they walked. Lyra was in the middle, apparently lost in thought. D_Light walked beside Lily, mesmerized by the undulating colors of her shawl. “You said you didn’t understand what we were saying earlier?” D_Light asked her quietly.
“Very little,” she nearly whispered. “What is a famscan?”
“Do you know anything-”
D_Light was startled by a nectar bat, the size of an eagle, flapping by on its leathery wings. I’m a jumpy newbie demon, he thought. Gotta get used to it.
Lily raised her eyebrows at him, and he quickly tried again. “Do you know anything about familiars?” He nodded toward his cat as it prowled just ahead of them.
“Some. I have used one before,” Lily answered.
“A famscan is an optical scanner familiars use to see light similar to a human, which can then be fed into its master’s mind. The reason these are bad for us is because of grokking.”
Quizzically, Lily looked over at him again. D_Light smiled and said, “Right. So, grokking is something strangers do to each other all the time. Let’s say you see someone you think is interesting.” D_Light winked at her. “The first thing most people do is discreetly have their familiar take a visual of the person with its famscan. Then they search the social registries to find the person’s profile. From there you can find out all kinds of stuff about the person.”
“How intrusive!” Lily recoiled. “But, well, maybe not,” she said thoughtfully. “Those profiles are voluntary, right?”
“Yes, and people love to blab on and on about themselves, so most players don’t mind being grokked,” he replied. “And why should they? No one’s finding out anything you’re not volunteering, and chances are that info is going to be pretty idealized.” He chuckled. “There’s always stuff on people in the Cloud besides their profile-stuff that might not be so flattering.”
Lily grinned. “Hmm, it still sounds a little creepy.”
“Not at all, once you get used to it,” D_Light assured her. “In fact, most players love it. For example, there are a lot of public places with the sole purpose of being seen and seeing what there is to see. These places are called grokstas. A groksta could be in an outdoor setting, like a traditional park, or indoors, like at a club. Of course, to most players the entire world is a groksta.”
They had passed by dozens of people on the trail. Most of them had familiars. Lily wondered if any of them had grokked her.
“Actually,” D_Light said, hesitating for a moment, “I have to confess that the first thing I did when I saw you was give you a grok.”
Lily rolled her eyes up at him. “I was wearing my cloak, was I not? You couldn’t ‘get a visual.’”
“No, no, your hood was off. You were under that tree just staring up into the branches.” D_Light hoped he was not blushing. Meanwhile, Brian had slowed down ahead and was cocking his head sideways as though attempting to listen in. D_Light slowed his own pace to widen the gap.
They were quiet for a moment. Then D_Light said, “But you weren’t in the register. In fact, there was nothing at all on you in the Cloud. You’re a demon-I know that now-but you didn’t come up as one when I grokked you.”
Lily was not eager to talk about why this would be, or anything else about herself, so she employed the strategy of harvesting information from D_Light at a furious rate. She had an endless array of questions that she fired off in rapid succession, and each answer prompted additional questions. As they spoke they watched the birds and bats gliding on the air currents high above. The two were so absorbed in this interview that when they finally reached the lake, they nearly tripped headlong into it.
CHAPTER 21
The beady eyes of fish #4332, which resembled the head of a pushpin, stared out into the murk unblinkingly. Its vision was poor, but a fish like this did not need to see. In fact, it had few needs at all. Like most
