augmented it, and blew it into her eyes with a mediated overlay.
It was doing this amazing feat in real time. Brilliantly, speedily. Using just a pair of flimsy-looking spex, instead of an entire heavy Acquis helmet and faceplate.
“Your augment is really fine-grained.”
“Thank you,” said Montalban. “It’s the state-of-the-art from UCLA’s graphics school. We’re rather proud.”
Vera turned her spex-covered eyes in the direction of his voice. The augment faltered a bit, and then let Montalban pop into her view. MontaIban looked particularly pleased with himself, and, if anything, handsomer than before. “Of course, your Dr. Radic was a lot of help with our little project.”
Vera pressed the spex against the bridge of her nose. She rocked her head from side to side. Everything panned smoothly: no breakups, no freezes, no jitters. The world had turned into a movie. A special effect.
She stared at the dead woman again. Confronted with death, at last, the Hollywood fakery became obvious. Vera had seen plenty of dead people. This was the Hollywood special-effects version of a dead person: much too tasteful, too bright, too crisp and neat.
“She’s so tiny! Why is she so small?”
“That’s the size most people really were, in the Dark Ages. You know our Dr. Radic. That old gent’s a stickler for accurate forensics.”
Arms stretched for balance, with small, careful steps, Vera sidled around the sarcophagus.
The dead woman had a thick waist, and no bust, and short, crooked legs. Her mouth and her jaws had a lemon-sucking look, for she had lost some teeth young and had grown old without dentistry.
Her brow was creased with sullen menace and there was a practiced sneer at the wings of her waxy nose. The Duchess was a vicious, imperious, feudal grandmother. She looked like her evil eyes might flick open at any moment.
Vera reached out a hand. She saw her fingers appear within her field of vision.
She reached out to touch the sarcophagus. Her fingers vanished into the thick visual lacquer of the augment. Finally she felt her fingers contact real stone. Not new stone. Cold stone, dead stone, eroded by centuries.
Vera jerked her hand back with a feeling of shame. She was suddenly ashamed of her crude local Acquis sensorweb, with its corny visual tags, its blurs of golden glory, its sadly primitive icons. She’d thought that she understood mediation, but now she knew she was just a hick, a regional peasant. Because this California augment was years ahead of anything she’d ever used or built. It was otherworldly.
“I can’t believe my eyes! This is so swift and brilliant! People would queue up to see this, they would make long lines to see!”
“Yes, that would be the basic business plan,” Montalban told her. “Mediation is a key enabler for tomorrow’s heritage economy.”
“What?”
“‘The replacement of national sovereignty and class consciousness by technically sophisticated yet ethically savage private cartels which dissolve social protections and the rule of law while encouraging the ruthless black- marketization of higher technologies…’ That’s what a famous Acquis critic once said about this technology. Augmentation is a little dodgy. I agree it’s not for amateurs.”
Vera couldn’t understand this long rote-quote of his—Montalban was a Dispensation gentleman. Itwas as if he were quoting classical Latin at her. His chatter didn’t seem to matter much. Not when confronted with this. “Did you say this is ‘dodgy’? Mr. Montalban—this isn’t even supposed to be possible.”
“I’m pleased that you appreciate our modest efforts,” said Montalban, with just the lightest hint of imperial sarcasm. “Would you care to step outside this tent, and have a look around?”
Vera lurched at once for the flapping tent door.
She stood outside. The excavated soil of old Ivanje Polje had suddenly become a Slavic Dark Age village. The spex augment showed her writhing plum trees, clumsy vineyards, muddy pigpens, a big stone-fenced villa. The stone longhouse was half surrounded by squalid peasant huts, homemade from mingled mud and twigs. It looked insanely real, like drowning in a glossy cartoon.
The sky above medieval Mljet was truly astounding, staggering: a heartaching vista of pure fluffy clouds. That medieval sky was scarily blue and clean. Vera had never stood beneath such a sky in her whole life. Because this sky was not her own deadly Greenhouse sky, the sky of a world in the grip of a global catastrophe. This historical sky had never known one single smokestack. It was the natural sky of the long-vanished natural Earth.
Vera took one reeling, awestruck step and tripped over her own feet. Somehow, Montalban was there for her. He caught her arm.
“Are there people here?” she shouted at him. “Where are all the people?”
“We didn’t yet write any avatars for this Dark Age augment,” Montalban told her, his calm voice close to her ear. “Our Dark Age plug-in is still in alpha.”
Vera plucked the clinging spex from her face. Karen appeared in the flowering field, with Mary Montalban. Karen had both her bony arms out, and she was laughing. The child was cheerfully climbing her exposed ribs.
“Watch me throw her high in the air!” Karen crowed.
“Oh my God,” moaned Montalban, “please don’t do that.”
VERA FORCED HERSELF to pick at Dr. Radic’s elaborate lunch, for the old man had outdone himself in honor of his guests. This done, they hiked on foot to the ruins of Polace, over a narrow trail that Radic’s people had taken some pains to clear. Montalban carried his daughter on his shoulders. Karen was in a buoyant mood, bounding along comically and making the child crow with glee.
When they descended from the island’s rugged backbone to the northern shore, it was clear why Montalban had been so eager to visit these ruins.
The augment for Polace simulated ancient Roman Palatium. Palatium, an imperial Roman beach resort in the year zero.
The island’s beaches had changed a great deal in the passage of twenty-one centuries. This meant a design conflict between strict geolocative accuracy and an augment that everyday viewers might willingly pay to see. That controversy hadn’t yet been settled, so much of imperial Roman Palatium appeared to be hovering, uneasily, over the rising Greenhouse waters of the bay.
Ancient Palatium was not ancient yet. Palatium was raw and new, a Roman frontier town. The island village featured sturdy wooden docks, and two wooden Roman galleys with their wooden oars up, and some very authentic-looking sacks of grain. It had one donkey-driven mill, and many careless heaps of scattered amphoras.
The village featured a host of makeshift wooden fishing shacks, and one small but showily elegant upscale limestone palace. Palatium also featured a public bath, a wine bar, a temple, and a brothel.
To Vera’s consternation, Roman Palatium had some avatars installed. These ghosts strolled their simulated Roman town, moving in the semirandom, irrational, traumatized way that ghosts roamed the Earth. The imperial Roman avatars were rather sketchily realized: tidy cartoons with olive skin and bowl-like haircuts.
One particularly horrible ghost, some kind of Roman butcher in a stained apron, seemed to have some dim machine awareness of Vera’s presence as a viewer within the scene. This ghost kept crowding up in the corners of her spex, with a tourist-friendly look, inviting user interactions that the system did not yet afford.
Vera handed the spex back to Montalban. She was powerfully shaken. “You’ve turned this dead town into some kind of… dead movie game.”
“That’s not the way I myself would have phrased it,” said Montalban, smiling. “I’d say that we’re browsing the historical event heap in search of future opportunities.” He stooped suddenly. The tide was out, and he’d alertly spotted a coinlike disk by the toe of his beach sandal. He plucked it up, had a closer look, and tossed it into the bay.
“The Palatium project,” he told her, “is a coproduction of the University of Southern California’s Advanced Culture Lab and Dr. Radic’s scholars in Zagreb. They’ve done pretty well with this demo, given their limited time and resources. Frankly, those USC kids really worked their hearts out for us.” Montalban slid the spex into a velvet- lined case. “If this demo catches on with our stakeholders, we’ll be catering to a top-end tourist demographic here.”
“But you made it… and it’s just a fantasy. It’s not real.”
