Virtually Undead Read online

  Michael looked up. “Get lost, asshole,” he said.

  Melody blinked her eyes. The guy froze. “What did you say?”

  Michael produced his cell phone. “I turned this on two minutes ago. It’s recording everything we say and uploading it to a secure server. So…” Michael leaned back in his seat. “Let’s see: you’re bothering us. This is not your table. You’ve been told to leave. The lady has no interest in you or your drunken friends. Your actions have already verged on harassment. You want to add assault to that?” Michael grinned. “The penalty for assault in the state of New York is a jail term of up to seven years, and that doesn’t begin to cover the civil litigation. You lay a hand on either one of us, we’ll own you. So, go ahead. Make my day.”

  The guy stared at Michael. His face grew red. Michael smiled, held up the phone and waved it in front of the guy’s face. “Evidence,” Michael said. “Sooo much evidence.”

  The guy’s shoulders slumped. “Fuck you,” he said, but there wasn’t much heat in it. He turned and went back to his table.

  Melody looked at him. “Make my day?”

  “I’ve never said that before.” Michael chuckled. “I’ve always wanted to.”

  Melody frowned, shrugged, and ate her pasta.

  “Anything for dessert?” Michael asked.

  She tentatively smiled. “Let’s go back to your place.”

  “Good idea,” Michael said.

  Michael Foreman had spent the first fifteen years of his life wanting to be a concert pianist. He could read music before he could read the alphabet. He could play almost anything he could hear, by ear, before he was three. Something about that keyboard just called to him. It’s been said that the secret to excellence in any field is ten thousand hours of devoted study and practice. Nobody puts in ten thousand hours unless they’re driven to do so, and nobody gets successful, really successful, at anything, unless they’re driven to do so by themselves.

  Your parents can push you all they want, but there’s a difference between sitting in front of a keyboard for ten thousand hours, going through the motions, and trying your very, very best, because you love what you’re doing.

  There was a line from an old Barbra Streisand song, people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. Michael was a fan of Barbra Streisand’s voice but the song itself? Baloney. People come and go, but what we love stays with us. No, in Michael Foreman’s opinion, the luckiest people in the world are people who love what they’re doing.

  Michael’s parents, happy to participate in the social to-and-fro, were more than happy to encourage their son’s musical ambitions. In the academic circles in which they lived, music was a respected, even revered pursuit. They bought a Steinway grand piano for their budding little prodigy, installed it in their capacious living room and happily paid for all the lessons Michael could ever need.

  So, you want to play the piano? Wonderful. You’re a genius. Having a son who’s a genius is worth a lot of bragging rights. It always pays to stay one up on the neighbors, or in this case, on top of all the other parents in the faculty lounge.

  Being a pianist, however, an actual player of the piano, like in a music hall, or even (could God be so generous?) Carnegie Hall, well…let’s think this through. How much money does your average piano playing genius make?

  Not so much.

  Plenty of people play the piano. Plenty of people are good at playing the piano, and how much better was Vladimir Horowitz than the kid who could knock off Chopin’s Fifth Nocturne at the high school concert?

  Okay, he was better, but was he that much better?

  Okay, he probably was that much better, but here’s the fundamental point: most people, even most smart, well educated, cultured people, can’t tell the difference.

  Music is a field in which there has always been a lot more supply than demand. This had not occurred to Michael when he first began to play.

  There was this one kid, back in high school, named Ken Lieu. Ken was four years older than Michael. He was Michael’s tormenter, guiding star and inspiration. Ken was the only kid he knew who might have been better on the piano than Michael. Ken graduated high school a year early and went to Juilliard. He graduated Juilliard somewhere near the top of his class, but not at the very top of his class. Ken was universally respected and admired, but a big fish in a little pond is barely a minnow in the great big sea. He spent the first seven months after graduation unemployed, then got a job playing piano on Broadway, a job that paid maybe forty thousand a year…in a good year.

  Michael, a tenderly reared child of the upper middle classes, who lacked for nothing growing up, and who had, like Ken Lieu a few years before him, been admitted to Juilliard, but also to Columbia, Princeton and Amherst, saw the abyss yawning in front of him.

  He looked down, swallowed, and took a step back.

  There were better ways to earn a living. His parents had been not-so-subtly delivering this message for the past several years, and Michael had steadfastly been tuning them out, but when the decision was actually, finally upon him—which direction was his life going to take, poverty or a comfortable life…no. Just, no.

  He didn’t have to give up music. He could play the piano in his living room.

  Growing up in Westchester, Michael often took the train into Manhattan. He loved Manhattan, so he chose Columbia, graduated with a 3.96 GPA, was in the top 0.5 percent nationwide on the MCATS and decided that it was time to try another big city (a little further away from the parental units, who by now, were getting on his nerves).

  UCSF for medical school, Massachusetts General for his residency and then…he hesitated. The folks were not as young as they used to be. His grandparents, who had practically raised him, since his parents spent at least six months out of every year at some archaeologic dig somewhere in the North African desert, were on the verge of entering a nursing home.

  Time to come home.

  So here he was, a neurosurgeon, living in Manhattan, with a well-established practice, lots of money and a gorgeous girlfriend.

  All of which was boring him to tears.

  Chapter 4

  Not a bad game. Ralph had to admit. It had a creeping sense of realism. Virtual reality, everybody said, was the next big thing, but for most such games, suspension of disbelief and an active imagination were still required. This game, a lot less than most.

  It wasn’t just a game. It was an entire game system. Ralph was of two minds about that. Selling hardware as well as software offered more opportunity for profit but there were a lot of systems out there and everybody who was into gaming already had at least one. A very few die-hard fans were ready to buy the latest and greatest as soon as it came out but most were content to skip a few generations of hardware, not because they didn’t want to be on the cutting edge but because they didn’t have the money.

  In order to sell their hardware, they would have to create a market.

  Ralph had never heard of the company, Remington Simulations, and his efforts to investigate, both before and after the meeting, had revealed almost nothing of note. They had been recently incorporated in the state of Delaware. Their website gave a list of corporate officers, all of whom were young, none previously above middle management. The company’s source of funding was not mentioned in any of the online data, aside from a Kickstarter campaign that had already yielded a bit less than two million dollars, but the Kickstarter campaign seemed more for publicity than any other purpose.

  The meeting had taken place on the twenty-seventh floor of an office building in mid-town, which indicated serious money. Ralph had been ushered into a spacious office, more a library than a conventional office, with bookshelves on every wall holding an eclectic assortment of titles. Ralph recognized The Art of War and Aristotle’s Poetics, as well as The Lord of the Rings, American Gods and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  A young-looking guy in jeans and a sweater, the Steve Jobs look, and an equally young woman in a tan business s
uit smiled at him as soon as a receptionist ushered him into the room. Both rose to their feet. “Ralph Guthrie?” the guy had said. “Thanks for coming.” He waved a hand at the woman, who smiled. “This is Ellen Scott and I’m Jim Jameson.” He grinned. “A tough burden to bear, I know.”

  Coffee and tea were set up on a coffee table, surrounded by two low couches and an easy chair. “Please,” Jim Jameson said. “Sit down. Help yourself.”

  All very cordial. Nothing suspicious in that. Still, Ralph was suspicious. Ralph played games. These two did not look like gamers. They looked like capitalist pigs, slick ones, not that Ralph had ever had much to do with the corporate elite, but as a gamemaster and therefore possessed of an active imagination, he could easily imagine what the corporate elite were supposed to look like. In Ralph’s imagination, they looked just like these two.

  No reason, however, not to indulge in what turned out to be excellent coffee.

  “So,” Jim Jameson said, “you must be wondering why we asked you here, today?”

  Ralph smiled, nodded, and sipped his coffee. Jim Jameson smiled back as if Ralph had said something both amusing and insightful. There followed a very practiced, very enthusiastic spiel on the virtues of their new products. Ralph had heard such spiels before. The gaming community, after all, was filled with people who knew how to tell a story.

  These two were certainly excited about the endless potential of Virtually Undead.

  And if you can fake sincerity, Ralph thought, you’ve got it made.

  The game itself seemed slick and professionally done, but was otherwise nothing special. A futuristic, high tech city with a burned-out center, in which the inhabitants, consisting of orcs, demons, imps, trolls, vampires, and an assortment of warped creatures of darkness, preyed on each other and every unmodified human stupid enough to invade their territory. Pretty much the same as a hundred games before it.

  And why would anybody be stupid enough to invade said territory? The usual stuff: cures, serums, the elixir of life, secret formulas, pots of gold, glowing jewels and fabulous works of art hidden in long abandoned basements or in towering skyscrapers on the verge of collapse, each one assigned a point value, each point worth real, actual money.

  Extra points, of course, for wiping out the competition and stealing their stuff.

  You had to buy the system and you had to pay to play. Plenty of opportunity here for Remington Simulations to make a profit.

  “We need somebody with a good reputation in the gaming community to take charge, somebody who commands a high level of respect, who knows what they’re doing,” Jim Jameson said. He gave Ralph a bright smile. Ralph smiled tepidly back and sipped his coffee.

  “That, obviously, is where you come in,” Ellen Scott said.

  Well, yeah…Ralph thought.

  Sales estimates were specified, along with some colorful but unconvincing graphs, which Ralph took with a large grain of salt. The system was, however, impressive. Ralph had to admit. It took advantage of currently available technology and blended together proprietary variations on products already on the market. For starters, there was a Woojer style bodysuit, which Ralph approved of. Twice as much money as the Subpac, but delivering, in his opinion, a far more immersive experience, combined with an Oculus style headset, a pair of gauntlets resembling Captogloves and an eyepiece pretty similar to the ones made by Immersive Tech, the start-up founded by Michael Morse out in San Diego that had recently been sold for big bucks to some military contractor.

  “We expect the basic system to be available for under fifteen hundred dollars,” Ellen Scott said.

  A bargain, if true. Ralph nodded. A few claims of patent infringement might conceivably be forthcoming, but if so, these were not going to be Ralph’s problem.

  Jim Jameson gave a happy little smile, not quite a smirk. “That’s for the basic system. We have a lot more to offer than the basic system.”

  They better. What he had seen so far was nice, but hardly world-shaking, and only marginally superior to products already on the market. “I’m listening,” Ralph said.

  Jameson rose to his feet, smiling confidently. Ellen Scott also smiled. “Come with me,” Jameson said. He pointed a handheld control device at one of the bookcases, which slid aside.

  Really? Ralph thought. Secret passageways and such were all very well for games, were required even, but seemed to Ralph to lack a bit of gravitas for a serious company involved in serious business dealings. Ralph smiled to himself—but then, what the hell did he know about serious business dealings?

  “After you,” Jameson said.

  All three trooped into a well-lit room. What appeared to be a suit of whole-body armor stood on a pedestal, equipped with modifications of the vest, gloves and helmet Ralph had already been shown. The thing had spikes rising from the shoulders and metallic plates along the arms, legs and thorax. The eyes glowed a dark, baleful red. Very futuristic. The powered exosuit of many a sci-fi fantasy.

  Now, this was more like it.

  “What does it do?” Ralph asked.

  “Would you like to try it on?” Ellen Scott asked.

  Ralph grinned. “I guess I’d better.”

  The New York City sewage system comprises over 6600 miles of pipes and tunnels, some of which date back to the mid-1800’s. The system mixes waste from houses, apartment buildings and industrial plants with water collected from street runoff and storm drainage, in what is referred to as a “combined sewer system.” Approximately 1.3 billion gallons of dirty water run through the system each day, arriving at one of fourteen water treatment plants, before being cleaned, sanitized and discharged into the rivers, canals and harbors surrounding the city.

  Until 1986, when the North River Sewage Treatment Plant was completed, Manhattan discharged raw sewage directly into the Hudson River. While most New York residents are dimly aware of this fact, most today assume that those benighted days are behind us, that protection of both the environment and public health are a top priority for city, state and federal officials.

  This would be a naïve assumption. Even today, when more than a tenth of an inch of rain falls in a single hour, the capacity of the system becomes overwhelmed. When this happens, a series of bypasses open, allowing the mixture of runoff and raw sewage to be discharged at 460 locations throughout the city. This is referred to, in official parlance, as a “CSO” or “combined sewer system overflow.”

  Progress has certainly been made. The local waterways are cleaner than they used to be, so much so that oysters, after more than a century, have returned to New York harbor and numerous species of fish appear to be thriving. But still, it is estimated that even today, approximately twenty-seven-billion gallons of untreated water, a significant portion being raw sewage, is discharged into New York City waterways each year.

  Jason Enderby stared moodily at the brown slick that had suddenly surrounded his twenty-one-foot Grady White. His wife, Lynn Enderby, wrinkled her nose. “What is that smell?”

  Nothing good, Jason Enderby thought. A few floating mounds that might have been human turds floated by. Jason winced and repressed the urge to gag.

  The day was bright and clear, the sky blue and shining. It hadn’t rained in over a week and today had seemed like an excellent day to take the boat out on the river, maybe do a little fishing, though actually eating fish pulled from the lower Hudson was still not recommended, and perhaps never would be.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jason said.

  Jason Enderby was the first to become aware of the foul-smelling, brown slick. Over the next two days, the slick grew larger and spread, and on the third day, the authorities finally took notice.

  A valve, it turned out, had been left open, controlling access to one of the 460 overflow tunnels. The engineer assigned to investigate, one Max Josephs, had been on the job for nearly forty years, was six months away from retirement and basically, was marking time. It didn’t occur to him that it had rained no more than a drizzle in the past two we
eks. The valve shouldn’t have been opened at all. He closed the valve, didn’t think much of it one way or the other, and went on his way.

  Five days later, the valve opened again.

  “So, you took the job?” Michael Foreman said.

  “You bet, I took it.” Ralph Guthrie was still in awe. “Look, this is what we’ve all been aiming for, a virtual world that’s close to indistinguishable from the real one. It’s…remarkable.” Ralph tossed back the remainder of his beer, wiped his upper lip with a forearm and signaled to the waitress to bring him another.

  Long ago, in high school, Ralph and Michael had been in the orchestra together. Ralph played the clarinet. Ralph was not as good on his instrument as Michael was on his, but then, few were. Since then, Ralph, unlike most high school musicians, had continued to play, as, of course, had Michael. In high school, Michael and Ralph had formed the nucleus of a teenaged jazz-rock group called the Psonics. They kept in touch after graduation and two years ago, had started a new band called G-Street Blues. They had just finished rehearsal and were scheduled to audition for a gig at a small club in the Village three days hence. It wasn’t exactly Carnegie Hall, but it was enough to keep Michael feeling like music was still a part of his life.

  Didn’t pay much money, not surprisingly, even if they got it, but thankfully, Michael didn’t need the money.

  Another thing that had kept their friendship alive was their mutual interest in the uses of virtual reality. Ralph was primarily interested in games, while Michael’s research had gained him a reputation as a minor-league expert on BCI’s, or the “brain-computer-interface.”

  “The thing is fully mobile. You can walk around in it. The auditory and visuals are nearly perfect. Scent, not so much.” Ralph shrugged. “The human nose is a couple of hundred times less sensitive than a dog’s, but it can still identify over a million separate odors. The helmet has a dozen small receptacles they can fill with various liquids, according to the scenario they’re trying to construct. The programming sprays microscopic amounts into the helmets. It’s crude but better than nothing.”