WetWeb (8 page)

Now Franklin’s discomf
ort
grew to near panic.  He no longer cared about closing up the court room file or wrapping up his session with Reginald White, he
just
wanted out of the Synapse Suit
-
now!

Franklin Synapped off bypassing the shutdown sequence by disconnecting his suit from the WetWeb
.
  T
hen he pulled his face
,
arms
,
and torso up and away from the Synapse Suit.  He quickly wheeled about to confront an unseen assailant that he imagined must be behind him. 

Franklin screamed in shock and surprise when his paranoid imagination proved right.  A figure was standing directly behind him. 
Watching him.
  But
,
his scream turned into a laugh and then a chuckle.  Franklin inhaled deeply and then exhaled.  The panic attack subsided.  It was all for nothing.  No one was really in the room.  It was only Molly;
the new Warmbot. 
She was s
tanding quietly behind him; watching him.

“Kiss the Saloon girl, taste the whiskey, smell the gun smoke.”

- RSI Gaming Advertisement

“The flight to Shanghai from Los Angeles is long.  These days the flights are rare as people prefer to simply rent a local Synapse host and conduct their business without ever leaving their home or office.  The WetWeb and the availability of Synapse Host’s have definitely changed the way people travel.  But in those days, it was normal to get on a flight and sit for fourteen hours and physically move your body half way around the world.  The seats in first class were built to look like personal pods.  When you closed your pod, you felt cut off from the world around you.  The flight travels north over the Alaskan coastline so when you look out from a window all you will see is ice or water.  The world left behind, teaming with people, is easy to forget.  Family, colleagues, Sahdna Singh are left behind in time and space.  Flight time was my personal purgatory.  A time that existed between the worlds in which I lived.  When in Los Angeles, I live in the warm lush botanical garden and the clean bright neurology laboratory with Sahdna Singh.  When in China, I lived in
the
rough control center and the hot rancorous streets of Squabash.  The garden was “real world” of course, but in my memory it seems like a dream.  And “Wild West Alive” the adventure filled fantasy land, in retrospect seems crushingly real.

“I spent my flight thinking about the new neural implant device and the upgrade to Synaptic Derivation that we were perfecting.  With this new interface, we had made Synaptic Derivation real.  We were able to really occupy the body of the Synapse host and be somewhere else or be someone else.  We had tasted new knowledge. 

Our science had taken us outside the bounds of our customs, traditions and moral constructs.  Sitting in my first class pod, flying to Shanghai, I anticipated the violence that I would find at “Wild West Alive.”

I would doze and then the turbulence would rock me from a restless half sleep plagued with uncomfortable thoughts and dreams.  Heading west the flight chased the sunset and we approached Shanghai at dusk.  I remember looking out the window at the thick smog that drifted about the tall buildings glimmering with neon along the bund. Shanghai was a city that seemed to be moving backwards in time.  The black smoke from coal burning factories made the city seem like London from a century ago when smoke from coal burning stoves created an artificial fog that filled the wet streets.  I imagined a romantic haze drifting about gas-lights and a city in perpetual darkness.  The Shanghai version of London fog looked mysterious and romantic as we circled above.  However, once we touched down on the runway, the smog began to permeate into the ventilation system.  My eyes began to water and turned red.  Coughing and wheezing could be heard up and down the fuselage.  Many veteran travelers had donned individual respirators and smog filters.

While California engineered a massive conversion in personal transportation from combustion engine automobiles to the clean engine skimmer that moved soundlessly down the streets and highways, it was major manufacturing centers surrounding key port cities like Shanghai that paid the price.   The smog from cars on the roads in California was now more than replaced by new sources of smog here in Shanghai.  The factory that built the skimmers burned coal.  The factories that manufactured the clean burning fuel cells also burned fossil fuels to charge their power cells.  All of this new industry was based in and around port cities.  The true cost of clear blue skies above California was being paid by the denizens of factory towns in China and India and Mexico.

For my part, my eyes watered as I boarded the small plane that would take on the last leg of my journey to Wild West Alive.  Wild West Alive was built in a small village upwind from the skimmer factories.  The air would be clean there.  The site was selected because it was inside a valley.  The rolling hills surrounding the set afforded privacy to the town.

Before I boarded the small plane to take me into the WWA valley, I was able to connect my computer and synch up with communications from Henry Cheung, my lead technician on-site at WWA.  As the plane made its way steadily closer, I read with growing concern.  Henry had forwarded me the incident reports from the last few days.

Wild West Alive, which we abbreviated to WWA, consisted of three zones:  The game zone, where we built the western town of Squabash and some surrounding structures.  This is the only area that they players see.  Next was the factory zone, this was an old plastic brush factory that we purchased and then converted.  The factory zone is where we maintained all essential support for the game, from technicians monitoring a complex array of gaming servers to the costumes and stables

for
the horses.  Finally there was the village zone.  This was the original Chinese village that was here even before the plastic brush factory turned the area into a factory town.  The village was left alone by the RSI Gaming
company
.  This was where most of our employee’s maintained their extended families.  This is where our employees would generally go when they were disconnected from the game and not working in Squabash. 

Now, because RSI gaming employed the almost the entire population of working age people in the valley, the village was populated by family elders and small children.  The village consisted of schools, churches and family farms and a small market.

What was disturbing to read in the report from Henry was a gang of RSI cowboys had loaded real lead bullets in their guns and started shooting up the village zone.  This was their own home town, their friends and family.  People were shot.  One of the local village girls had been taken back to Squabash. 

It was clear that the simulated violence and lawlessness they lived with daily inside the game zone was now spilling over into the village.  Our employees seemed to have lost the ability to move between the reality of the village and the fantasy of Squabash.  This was something we had not anticipated.  We were not prepared to move into the village and restore order.  RSI gaming had only limited security setup and only in the factory zone.  The security that RSI had setup was oriented towards industrial espionage.  McKnight was anxious about the many trade secrets that were used to keep WWA running.  The game was a success, and powerful potential competitors had noticed.  We heard rumors of a Medieval Castle being built in a small village outside of Mumbai in India.

When I made my first trip to Wild West Alive, we were just setting up our technology wing in the factory.  Henry gave me a complete tour of the operations.  I first met Henry when I stepped off the small plane on the landing strip outside of the village zone.  He helped me with my bags and we bundled into a waiting van that would take us to the factory.  The driver took us through the village zone on the way to the factory zone.  Small brick buildings lined the main street.  I could see wires for a simple electric grid and telephone system criss-crossed overhead.  It was hot.  Thin wire-haired dogs slept with their tongues lolling out of their panting mouths on cool cement slabs shaded by canvas awnings.  The market was open air and the air was filled with dust and smoke and smells of rice and fish and other things that I did not recognize.

Our driver pointed out the highlights and Henry translated for me.  Henry was not a local.  There were no locals on my technology team.  Henry we recruited from Shanghai and he was now living in the employee dorm at the factory.  The driver, however, had grown up locally and was excited to point out the virtues of his village.

I asked Henry to ask the driver if he planned to audition for work in the Game Zone.  After some conversation in Chinese, Henry told me that the driver most definitely would audition, but he had to wait his turn.  Apparently, the Game zone jobs had become quite popular and hard to get.  This was a clear result from the high wages offered by RSI gaming.  RSI paid well above the local rates for labor to attract talent, but also to purchase silent complicity.

I asked Henry if the driver understood the nature of the jobs that were available in the game zone.  Again, Henry translated the question.  This time the driver answered directly saying;

“Cowboy, bang!
bang
!”

This brief interview gave me doubts that RSI gaming would be able to train these people to act like convincing western outlaws and lawmen.  My doubts diminished when we got inside the factory.  Henry guided me on a tour following the progression that our Driver would need to take to transform from Chinese taxi driver to Wild West Alive cowboy.

The tour started with the audition area.  We entered into a waiting room filled with applicants, both male and female, all ages.  RSI Gaming was attracting applicants from as far away as Shanghai and from many of the surrounding villages.  The applicants were willing to travel because the job as a host at RSI gaming promised good pay and a modicum of celebrity.

Henry explained that each applicant was evaluated across three separate auditions.  The first was for acting ability.  Here they were categorized into potential roles by age, sex and size.  Acting skills and English skills were noted.  The outlaw and lawman roles were coveted by the men. 

Attractive Women would be cast as Saloon girls.  But the acting audition needed to fill the town.  They hired blacksmiths, bar tenders, school teachers and hotel maids.  After they were categorized, acting skills and English skill were evaluated and noted.

The second audition was physical.  They were asked to climb, lift and jump through an obstacle course.  Then they were taught a series of rudimentary stunts and asked to perform.   Physical ability would be a key asset for the hosts at WWA.

Finally applicants arrived at the third and final audition room where they were greeted by the RSI hypno-therapist.  The purpose of this evaluation was to determine how well they would respond to hypnotic suggestion.  This ability was a critical factor as the remote player would want to take as much control of the host’s body as possible.  Therefore, the applicant needed to be able to enter into a meditative state and remain open to suggestion.  If the applicant scored well with the hypno-therapist, they were usually guaranteed work at RSI gaming.

From the audition rooms, Henry led me to the sets and costumes.  Here the successful applicants were assigned a character role and a Wild West name and identity.  They were outfitted with the appropriate clothes and weapons.  The Chinese cowboys wandering about in these rooms did not look convincing.  They all looked quite uncomfortable in their new clothes.

Henry noticed my doubts and reassured me saying,

“Do not worry, next is the training.”

I followed as he led me past the employee dorm to the training wing of the factory.  Here the applicants spent all day in “Cowboy College.”  During the day, they were taught to ride and shoot.  They were taught to fight like stunt-men.  At night they watched western movies from old black and white starring Tom Mix and Gene Audrey to classics with big stars like John Wayne. 

Using dialogue from these movies, they practiced the lingo of the old west.  Henry introduced me to some of the graduates of Cowboy College who were now helping train new students while waiting for WWA to open.  Meeting the graduates my doubts were erased.  They seemed like looked and talked like authentic Wild West gunmen.

The RSI training regimen never allowed the employees go back to the village zone once they entered Cowboy College.  Our strategy was total immersion into Wild West culture.  We were worried that if they went back to the village zone that they would revert to their old mannerisms and accents.  At the time, I remember thinking this was a good idea.

Returning to Wild West Alive now, knowing that real violence had erupted, I began to re-think a lot of things that I originally thought were good ideas. 

“What happened to the wounded cowboy?” Franklin asked.  He had enough technical background about the game and the setup.  He was interested to hear how the retro pulp feature would end.

“The outlaw that had his arm broken by the Stage Coach?”
Anand, clarified, “He woke up in the medical wing at the factory.”

Franklin turned his notebook to a clean page and prepared to write the pulp feature. As Anand spoke, Franklin could see the retro pulp feature playing out in his mind.

Yang knew he was no longer in Squabash, before he opened his eyes.  The familiar smell of the plastic factory, now converted to an RSI facility was all around him.  The soft murmuring conversation was in Chinese instead of western cowboy slang.  As he opened his eyes, blurry images slowly began to sharpen.  His Mother was there.  He recognized her voice before his vision cleared.  His cousin, Gus, was also in the room and when he could see clearly, the saw there was also a man in a white coat who was either a Doctor or a Nurse.  He was back in the plastic factory. He was in the medical wing of the RSI facility.

“He’s waking up,” Gus said switching back to Wild West English out of habit.

Yang’s mother was at his side.  She held his left hand tightly against her cheek.  Yang could feel wetness from her tears on the back of his hand. 

Yang tried to comfort her saying, “I’m OK” but found his tongue too thick and dry to talk.  The man in the white coat helped him drink cool water from a cup and he began to feel better.

He looked at his right arm.  It was tightly bandaged and there was a splint.  All he could see were the tips of his fingers.  His arm was supported by a sling with an I.V. dripping clear fluid into where his elbow would be.  Looking at the purple-red finger tips protruding from the bright white gauze, Yang felt sympathetic to his own arm as if it belonged to someone else.  And then he felt sorry for his Mom and Gus who looked so sad and concerned.  He struggled to find his voice to comfort them.