‘I’m still not sure what you want to do with it.’ Quy put on her immerser, adjusting the thin metal mesh around her head until it fitted. She winced as the interface synched with her brain. She moved her hands, adjusting some settings lower than the factory ones – darn thing always reset itself to factory, which she suspected was no accident. A shimmering lattice surrounded her: her avatar, slowly taking shape around her. She could still see the room – the lattice was only faintly opaque – but ancestors, how she hated the feeling of not quite being there. ‘How do I look?’
‘Horrible. Your avatar looks like it’s died or something.’
‘Ha ha ha,’ Quy said. Her avatar was paler than her, and taller: it made her look beautiful, most customers agreed. In those moments, Quy was glad she had an avatar, so they wouldn’t see the anger on her face. ‘You haven’t answered my question.’
Tam’s eyes glinted. ‘Just think of the things we couldn’t do. This is the best piece of tech Galactics have ever brought us.’
Which wasn’t much, but Quy didn’t need to say it aloud. Tam knew exactly how Quy felt about Galactics and their hollow promises.
‘It’s their weapon too.’ Tam pushed at the entertainment unit. ‘Just like their books and their holos and their live games. It’s fine for them – they put the immersers on tourist settings, they get just what they need to navigate a foreign environment from whatever idiot’s written the Rong script for that thing. But we – we worship them. We wear the immersers on Galactic all the time. We make ourselves like them, because they push, and because we’re naive enough to give in.’
‘And you think you can make this better?’ Quy couldn’t help it. It wasn’t that she needed to be convinced: on Prime, she’d never seen immersers. They were tourist stuff, and even while travelling from one city to another, the citizens just assumed they’d know enough to get by. But the stations, their ex-colonies, were flooded with immersers.
Tam’s eyes glinted, as savage as those of the rebels in the history holos. ‘If I can take them apart, I can rebuild them and disconnect the logical circuits. I can give us the language and the tools to deal with them without being swallowed by them.’
Mind lost in the mountains, Third Aunt said. No one had ever accused Tam of thinking small. Or of not achieving what she set her mind on, come to think of it. And every revolution had to start somewhere – hadn’t Longevity’s War of Independence started over a single poem, and the unfair imprisonment of the poet who’d written it?
Quy nodded. She believed Tam, though she didn’t know how far. ‘Fair point. Have to go now, or Second Uncle will skin me. See you later, lil’ sis.’
*
As you walk under the wide arch of the restaurant with your husband, you glance upwards, at the calligraphy that forms its sign. The immerser translates it for you into ‘Sister Hai’s Kitchen’, and starts giving you a detailed background of the place: the menu and the most recommended dishes. As you walk past the various tables, it highlights items it thinks you would like, from rolled-up rice dumplings to fried shrimps. It warns you about the more exotic dishes, like the pickled pig’s ears, the fermented meat (you have to be careful about that one, because its name changes depending on which station dialect you order in), or the reeking durian fruit that the natives so love.
It feels… not quite right, you think, as you struggle to follow Galen, who is already far away, striding ahead with the same confidence he always exudes in life. People part before him; a waitress with a young, pretty avatar bows before him, though Galen himself takes no notice. You know that such obsequiousness unnerves him; he always rants about the outdated customs aboard Longevity, the inequalities and the lack of democratic government – he thinks it’s only a matter of time before they change, adapt themselves to fit into Galactic society. You – you have a faint memory of arguing with him, a long time ago, but now you can’t find the words anymore, or even the reason why – it makes sense, it all makes sense. The Galactics rose against the tyranny of Old Earth and overthrew their shackles, and won the right to determine their own destiny; and every other station and planet will do the same, eventually, rise against the dictatorships that hold them back from progress. It’s right; it’s always been right.
Unbidden, you stop at a table, and watch two young women pick at a dish of chicken with chopsticks – the smell of fish sauce and lemongrass rises in the air, as pungent and as unbearable as rotten meat… No, no, that’s not it – you have an image of a dark-skinned woman, bringing a dish of steamed rice to the table, her hands filled with that same smell, and your mouth watering in anticipation…
The young women are looking at you. They both wear standard-issue avatars, the bottom-of-the-line kind – their clothes are a garish mix of red and yellow, with the odd, uneasy cut of cheap designers, and their faces waver, letting you glimpse a hint of darker skin beneath the red flush of their cheeks. Cheap and tawdry, and altogether inappropriate, and you’re glad you’re not one of them.
‘Can I help you, older sister?’ one of them asks.
Older sister. A pronoun you were looking for earlier; one of the things that seem to have vanished from your mind. You struggle for words, but all the
