—
When your body experienced discomfort while you were in the Altus Space, it filtered through, even if dampened, and just then I felt a pushing pain in my side. “Exit,” I said, and then I pulled off the headset. Bex was standing over me. I think she had just kicked me! Not hard, but hard enough.
“Really?” she said, her hands on her hips. She was only wearing her underwear, and I couldn’t help but take her in.
I sat up. “I just wanted to see . . .” And then I trailed off.
“Yeah, OK,” she said, and then she started searching around for her clothes.
“Bex, look. I screwed up. It was just too compelling. I thought I’d drop in for a second.”
“Uh-huh,” she said as she pulled her shirt over her head.
“It’s not an excuse, it was shitty. I’m really sorry.”
“Yep.” She was pulling on her pants now.
“Can I walk you to the train? We can talk.”
“Not right now, no,” she said, not meeting my eyes as she walked past me and out of the room.
I sat down on my bed and waited to hear the door to my apartment close. I pulled out my phone and wrote several texts to Bex, all of which I deleted before sending.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
There was no way to fix what I’d just done to Bex, at least not right now, and my VR headset wouldn’t stop staring at me. I lay down on my bed and went back into the Space.
In there, I discovered that experiences like the one I’d just enjoyed could be purchased. In the Open Access Space, an object might, at most, cost 10 AltaCoin, which was, at the moment, around twenty-five dollars and going up as demand for the currency outpaced supply. In the Premium Space, there were no experiences for sale for under 20 AltaCoin, and they were regularly in the hundreds. Of course, I had enough AltaCoin to last a dozen lifetimes, but clearly if this product was here to revolutionize the way we learn and think and interact, it was going to do it for rich people first.
MIRANDA
I had no cell phone, no window. There were armed guards between me and the outside, and no one would even talk to me, much less talk about letting me outside. I had no access to internet of any kind. I didn’t even have access to a computer terminal. All I had was an Altus headset. I didn’t want to go into the Space, but eventually boredom wins. I had been given a job, and even if I knew it was useless, doing something was better than doing nothing.
My job now was no longer anything to do with understanding how Altus’s (or, rather, Carl’s) brain interface worked.
I was what they called a “client.” Clients were people who made content for Altus. This was some wild doublespeak, as it seemed to indicate that Altus worked for us, when in reality, we clearly worked for Altus. I never saw the room full of “clients” who were mining AltaCoin. Instead, I walked back and forth between my sleeping room and a private room, where I sat and built a learning sandbox.
Altus could either capture and share the direct experiences of someone else’s mind, or they could build environments, shape by shape. But there was no way to scan images into the Space, which made things like books basically impossible to reproduce. You could experience someone else reading a book, but you couldn’t read it yourself.
In this way, Altus experiences were a kind of ultimate laziness. Not only could you skip the reading part, you could just fall into someone else’s thoughts about the book. You didn’t even have to do the work of imagining.
But if you wanted to have an environment you were in control of, it had to be a sandbox. I was tasked with creating classroom sandboxes. It was hugely labor-intensive, and ultimately it felt like a futile project because real classrooms are not about the rooms; they’re about people gathering.
It felt like busywork for a prisoner, and I knew that was exactly what it was. No one yelled at me or called me a traitor; in fact, no one said anything to me at all. I just didn’t get to do anything useful or see anyone, and I never got to go outside.
But in my off-hours, I was allowed to go into the Premium Space. It’s a little upsetting how quickly I caved. I went from thinking I would never go back into the Altus Space again to using it every chance I got. But it was the only way I could get out of the high-security wing. In the Space, I could go outside and feel my fake legs running my fake body around in sandboxes created by other clients. I experienced strangers connecting with each other and it was almost like talking to someone. And so, ironically, the Altus Space became my only respite from the prison that Altus had put me in.
It was infuriating, but I had no choice but to just chill and handle it. If I could just keep pretending I wasn’t in prison, I wouldn’t feel like a prisoner.
That was only going to carry me so far, but maybe it would carry me far enough.
—
I had become obsessed with learning more about what was happening at the end of the hallway. How were they taking care of those people? Where did they bathe? When did they eat and go to the bathroom? How were they being compensated? Did anyone have any idea what the impact of such long-term and unrelenting exposure to the Altus Space meant?
Peter Petrawicki had gone from stoking terror about the invasion
