Heir of G.O'D. Revelations Read online

  As I amble back to my rig, I ponder my contempt for COGOD. On the face of it, a religion based on one man appears absurd, but he did invent Sol. He created 3arth and gave me access to wonders I would never have otherwise seen. Thanks to Gary O’Drae’s brainchild, I’ve wandered around museums and galleries, walked the Serengeti, explored Siberia and the Arctic, and observed how Yellowstone looked before it blew. I’ve wasted hours swimming in the crystal-clear Ionian seas, gazing at shoals of brightly coloured clown fish and corals and shipwrecks. I’ve climbed the tallest buildings and, together with Omar, I’ve summited the Rainbow Mountain high in the Andes of Peru, and potholed through the elaborate glistening Lechuguilla cave system. All these amazing sights G.O’D. replicated in the most perfect minute detail, from the largest stones to the tiniest grain of soil. All there for us to discover and explore inside the remarkable Sim. To me, Sol is the single wonder of the modern world.

  Thinking back to my earlier question, even considering the risks, I can only give myself one answer, “Yes,” I say into the darkness, because, when Sol goes, all the light in my life will be switched off.

  Forever.

  -11-

  Returning to Sol, I leave the in-Sim container on Steins, and port back to my apartment. This is my refuge, my private space and nobody, Denver included, has ever been inside. According to Hamilton, my view over Central Park is exactly how New York in America used to look. The pre-Devastation records show that the realworld value of my apartment was well into eight figures. When G.O’D. created 3arth, he replicated every building that existed on Earth back in 2020, so now many more homes exist in Sol than there are survivors to purchase them. The resulting lack of competition means lower R3al 3stat3 values – I only paid 100,000 $uns for this place, and every one of those $uns I earned myself in the Arenas. Everything in here, all the add-ons, my equipment and the hacks from Samir, I purchased with my Arena winnings (I spent more on the features and add-ons than the actual R3al 3stat3 cost, but it’s worth every $un).

  My place extends over what would have been two separate apartments in the realworld building, spanning the top four floors of the northern tower of 300 Central Park West. For scale, into just the lounge of the Sol apartment, I can fit my realworld container three times, and each floor could accommodate a block of at least twenty shipping containers. The apartment boasts a private teleport in the tower right at the top of the building, over thirty storeys up. But the rooftop garden is my favourite part of the whole place; it’s as far from the claustrophobia of realworld Earth as I can get. The views are incredible, from the sweeping expanse of the Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy Reservoir in Central Park that shimmers like a sea of diamonds in the Sol sun, over West New York across the murky grey flow of the Hudson and the soaring downtown tower blocks of the City. When Hamilton told me that, before the Devastation, one person would likely have lived alone in this apartment realworld, I remember how incredulously crazy I found the idea. Now a family of up to four, sometimes more, share a single container like mine (or a double unit if they can afford it). I’m lucky, thanks to my Arena skills I make enough $uns that I don’t have to share my home, and I can afford a few extra hard-fought salvaged luxuries, like my precious fridge and the reclaimed flat-screen TV.

  It took me years of dedication to move up through the ranks to the Elite Arenas, where I could make real $uns. I tried anything and everything in those early years; driving, sports, shooting, martial arts. With no parents to stop me, and little to entertain me realworld, if I was awake, then I was in-Sim exploring, or wasting endless hours watching reruns of old TV shows and movies. I discovered a natural affinity for shooting stuff, so I tried every format available, starting out in the free-roller battles to learn basic combat skills when I was eight, before settling on One-Kilometre Target Marksmanship in the ranges, and the Bounty Hunter Arena divisions. I don’t mind some of the other events, like the Fantasy battles or the Alien skirmishes, but they’re not really my thing. I do get a kick out of watching Denver and his four-man team run through the 4v4 Arenas though. His team are highly skilled, as good as any turn of the century soldier units, and Denver captains them with a true leader’s ability. Sometimes it kind of feels like he’s showing off, but I’m never sure who he’s flashing his peacock tails at (Nele fracking Mouse, probably).

  The best $uns that I ever spent inside my New York Sol apartment were on my cinema room – it boasts a massive screen that can show endless re-runs of ancient television programmes like Zenigata Heiji, Wansapanataym, Monty Python and Friends, and translate them all into any language I fancy. If I want, I can play chess or backgammon against the apartment AI, or pool (which I’m woeful at), or any old computer game I choose (the quaint sort, where you sit at a screen with a controller and move an avatar or object around within the confines of the screen). Most of the other items in my apartment are what I call Sol-fluff; things that look good, but have superficial or no use at all. For example, the in-Sim fridge holds lots of virtual Sol food, but I can’t actually eat it, so why bother buying the latest designs or models of fridge, or stocking it full of Sol food? Aside from vanity, or perhaps as a distraction from the monotonous lack of such things realworld, what’s the point? You see, this is what Sol is, a distraction, an augmentation of what realworld could be (of what realworld used to be according to the Oldearthers). It’s a little like those old gameshows where, when a contestant failed to win the star prize, it would get wheeled on regardless by smarmy aging host, with exclamations of “Look at what you could have won!”

  For this reason, my apartment remains almost identical to when I bought it, aside from practical upgrades like the cinema room. By current realworld living standards it’s still a vision of opulence, an Earth-sized museum to 2020-living replicated on 3arth. But it still feels frivolous to me, because it’s in Sol, and it doesn’t exist outside of my visor.

  Opening the French doors, I climb out and stand on the balcony, gazing out over Central Park. Buses and yellow cabs busy about like armies of multicoloured ants in relentless streams along the black tarmac streets. Any vehicle can be hailed and will drive you anywhere in the city for free. Trains and planes are free too for longer distances. I find myself holding the silver locket in my fingers, rolling it around as I often do when I’m thinking. It’s an unmarked oval, in purest silver, with a broken clip on the left side.

  The clock, and more importantly the Baktun-ticking-countdown-timer-of-doom, as I like to call it, jolts me out of my temporary stupor, reminding me that gazing out over the shimmering water is a waste of the paltry amount of time I have left. Shaking my head, I force myself to refocus and get on with some housekeeping.

  When deciding where to place my safe, I chose an old cliché – behind the painting of Galileo Galilei above the fireplace. The portrait opens smoothly, revealing a palm reader. Whenever I open the safe, I feel like I ought to invoke a magic word like they do in the movies, but apparently the scan is enough (perhaps Samir could work up an upgrade for me, if he wasn’t so busy trying to stop Baktun). Rather than being a storage space for valuables, inside the safe is a virtual inventory system that I can add or take items from, use for trading and use to access my Sol $uns balance. The safe is like a backup, a cyber wormhole, and is not part of Sol’s standard code at all. It’s more like a secure hole in the creases between the Sim’s fabric, similar to the Darknet. Using the correct unlock code on a tablet, I could access my $uns and the contents of the safe anywhere without needing my visor. I could buy and sell too, as well as order delivery of physical realworld goods (that’s assuming I could see the screen on a tablet realworld anyway).

  The latest Arena loot hoard is a real mixture of junk and Sol-fluff, with a meagre smattering of usefulness. As well as the usual weaponry and storage, like bags of holding, I did loot a few valuable trinkets. The blanket, much to my amazement, is a camouflage sheet of premium quality and is definitely too good to use in a weekly Arena. Well, it used to be anyway. The player I looted i
t from no doubt felt that she had no reason left to keep it, so she tried to use it to win the Arena. The blanket goes straight into my safe where I store my ever-dwindling list of retained possessions. Some things I won’t part with, but I’m growing increasingly aware of the need to be more ruthless. I pull up all bar my highest-flagged items and move them to the trade screen, along with everything else I looted in today’s Arena.

  Sol-Bay carries a Desires section, which I pull up and drop beside my trade menu. A quick sort by highest value, and I can browse for any matches between my stock and what people are looking for. The first thing that hits me is the plummeting prices for in-Sim items as, every day, more people look to offload Sol stuff at any price. The buyers, people gambling on the Heir saving Sol, are sweeping up everything at cockroach prices (about the cheapest realworld food product left). Whereas, things like food vouchers, power credits, maintenance contracts—essentially anything realworld—are soaring in cost.

  Food and energy vouchers are the most important commodities left. If anything, I should be buying as many of them as I can before they become too expensive. I’m tempted to invest now, but I need every single last $un that I own to pay the engineer. Musa likens the fevered rush to buy vouchers, and the rapid inflation of prices, to the long-forgotten trauma of the Covid-19 virus that started in China in 2019, then swept the world in 2020. In the UK, supermarket shelves were cleared of toilet paper and dried pasta within days, and in the US long queues grew outside of gun merchants in every state. It pains me to sell this cheaply, but I’m not going to use any of it before Baktun, if at all. I swipe to sell it all at the best ‘buy’ price. “Still nineteen thousand short,” I mumble into the silence.

  With chagrin, I scan the retained items and immediately spy the most valuable one that I kept back. Selling it would be like one of Denver’s gambles; ‘Speculate to accumulate’, he calls it. The ProPlus share ticket—a Remembrance Festival Marksman prize from two years back—is a lifetime voucher worth five percent off all Pro-Bar purchases. My stomach lurches at the thought of selling it. As I stare despondently at the voucher, I realise that my options are very limited; it’s an impossible choice between short-term need and possible long-term hardship. There are a couple of current listings on the auction markets, the bidding is high at 120,000 $uns, or I could sell it immediately on Sol-Bay for a 100,000 $uns. With reluctance, and a growing nausea in the pit of my stomach, I drop it into the auction system. Before I second-guess myself, I click to accept the highest pay-now offer, then lock up the safe.

  All the elated relief I feel from topping my target after weeks of fighting, saving and trading, is tempered by a gnawing sense of regret from selling the voucher. Perhaps I can earn enough $uns to buy another before the end of 3arth? Setting my growing list of worries aside, I pull up the message menu, swipe to select Musa, and dictate my message. Musa, a fixer of dubious standing (and occasionally of more dubious items), is where the hacked G28’s come from. She’s not currently active in-Sim, but being in the lucrative business of trade, she retains a message-bot service to flag incoming messages – messages are $uns to a trader.

  Moments later, I receive an incoming automated response from Sol-Escrow confirming the value of my funds to transfer. I click save with my haptic-gloved finger, then swipe the message closed. All I can do now is wait.

  Despite my fatigue, I don’t want to return to realworld straight away, I need to wind down first. Instead of logging, I head up to the highest of my floors, open the doors and step out to my roof garden. There’s no wind and there’s no smell of outside (I no longer use the scent module installed in a capsule behind my rig, it interfered with my realworld senses too much, and some frackers like to hit people with distracting stink-grenades in Arenas). I climb up to the portal and select Governor’s Island from my frequent destinations list. Taking my usual spot on the slope at the north end, I lay back and gaze at the Statue of Liberty on the distant island. Idly rolling the locket between my fingers, I take solace in the bright green glow of her torch. The Heir is still alive, whoever and wherever he is. According to the Darknet, if the torch goes red before Baktun, the Heir is dead, and it will be lights-out for me.

  I don’t laugh at my pun.

  Friday, Halley 19th, 2044

  10 days before Baktun

  Like a prophet of hope so did the Creator draw the people to him and his Havens. Born from desperation and growing from the fields of ocean-side containers, cities for the survivors bloomed. The Creator and his disciples covered the cities with a roof of black glass to protect the people and the land beneath. And the Creator ensured the survival of man.

  The Ordinance: Book of the Evacuation (34:01)

  -12-

  Another day and I awake to that familiar earworm tracking through my mind, it’s a riff of about a dozen notes that cycles through my brain like a song on repeat. Even though Sol contains the most expansive music and literary libraries in history, and hosts software widgets which can identify songs or tunes from a few notes sung by even the most tuneless of people (including me), not a single app recognises this tune. According to Denver, who covers his ears whenever I hum it aloud, I must have made it up.

  Humming to myself, I yawn and stretch. My head throbs from staying awake too long and vegging-out with Lady Liberty. I struggled to sleep last night, so I sat thinking until I couldn’t stay awake any longer. Even then, I took one of my most treasured possessions, one of my Braille books, and read myself to sleep. I own scant few of the precious volumes, but my small library does include The Alchemist, The Major Works of Byron, all the Games of Thrones books and the one I read last night, The Raven and Other Poems by Poe. I can read anything in-Sim, and almost every book ever written is also available in audio, but sometimes I want to chill out without needing to concentrate on letters, or someone long-dead chattering away in my ear.

  Reaching out with my right hand, I fumble around on top of the drawers and grab my visor. The moment I click the switch the screen blazes to life, showing the feeds from my cameras, with my legs visible on the bedroom image. Getting dressed is far more exciting now – I can watch myself like some disembodied being pull out my clothing and head to the shower. I grab some laundered llama wool underwear, my spare haptic suit and a towel, and pad my way to the shower. The faint scent of llamas follows me, making my nose wrinkle. According to the food feeds, some people actually eat llama steaks, their wool and milk are so valuable though, that llama meat is prohibitively expensive for plebs like me (and, if realworld llamas look as ridiculous as they do in Sol, I’m not sure I want to eat one anyway).

  Somehow, seeing my own container realworld is better than the Haven tour I took once in-Sim. Someone, for some reason I could never fathom, replicated the Singapore Haven on Neptune. Complete with five-high blocks of shipping container homes and roman-style straight streets running grid-like between them, the whole thing is capped off with a roof of solar panels. Even the closest subway station at Pasir Panjang MRT is replicated, similarly covered with a solar roof. The simulated version made me feel claustrophobic and giddy, and I had to leave not long after we arrived. From the oblique view of the street I get from my doorstep cam, outside here is just the same. We live like moles, beneath the layer of solar panels, prisoners to the acrid downpours and violent winds raging above.

  There’s nowhere to hang my stuff in the cubical, and neither camera is angled for the shower anyway, so I place my clothes carefully on the toilet seat, remove the visor and step into the shower. This is the only time that I’m in darkness now, but I know the routine. It takes a few seconds to spurt lukewarm treated saltwater onto my head, and I quickly scrub myself down and let the spray wash the suds away. Showering is another advantage of living alone because I always have enough treated water. Even so, it still costs $uns per millilitre, so I’m washed and out of the shower as quickly as possible. From there, I dab my head dry, pick the visor up and I’m able to see again. I ignore the image of my alabaster, scrawny b
ody (a far cry from my toned and tanned figure in-Sim), and dress quickly to stop the shivering.

  Breakfast is a tin of fresh water, and a llama milk-soaked oat pot from the right side of my fridge’s tiny freezer tray. My microwave, compact as it is, is almost as valuable as my fridge and takes only five minutes to defrost then heat the porridge. The cereal, like all grain and vegetable crops, is grown in massive LED underground farms. Cereal for breakfast is a luxury when I could eat a Pro-Bar, or perhaps a stuffed flatbread, so I savour every mouthful as if it were the most opulent Remembrance Day meal. If I can’t find a solution to my visor problem, I doubt I’ll be able to afford anything but basic stuff in future (and that’s being optimistic).

  “Fracking GOD,” I say out loud (not for the first time today). Who would provide something so magnificent as Sol, for free, and then build in a termination date? And why?

  With two rigs in the front space of my container, I don’t have enough room for an easy chair, so I hook myself into the rig instead, allowing the harness to take my weight, and munch my way through breakfast. I’m itching to get started, but I force myself to go steady and eat properly first.