Page 23 of Tapeworld Induction

Elodie simply looked at him, a sardonic smile on her lips.

At this, the ground drone withdrew the plastic sheathing from what might be called its snout and displayed a set of shiny metal teeth. A tiny spark arced between them.

Isaak, who had been planning to pat the drone’s head, pulled back his hand immediately, letting out a long, drawn out “Okayyyy.”

He had what he’d come here for.

Still, he couldn’t help but ask, “How come I never see you in there?”

“Come on, look at my sweet set-up here,” Elodie said, smiling. She gestured to the collection of computers, monitors, and skittering drones, the room looking bigger than it was due to her stature. “I pay fools like you to go in.”

Isaak thought of asking Elodie about the guard he’d shot in the Tapeworld. She might have been able to find out if he was a bot or a strider.

“Is everything alright, Isaak?” Elodie studied him, eyes straining. “You look worried. More than usual, I mean.”

“It’s nothing…” He walked towards the door, roll of tape in his jacket pocket.

He heard her let out a deep sigh as he left her flat.

Doing strides, being a cog in Elo and Astrid’s designs. It did grant him unlimited access to the tape, but was it worth the risk? He wasn’t sure he could trust Elodie enough to tell her about the guard. He decided he’d have to confront Astrid about it.

Shit!

A screech brought him back from his reverie as an auto-car slammed on the breaks. He'd nearly been run over, his mind on the guard and his hands fiddling with the tape in his pocket.

9

Salt Water

Dylan

Last night at the beach was special, but she worried it would be a one-night stand. Except that it hadn’t even been that… Unless you counted spending the better part of the evening hanging out in virtual reality without so much as a kiss, virtual or otherwise, a one-night stand.

As her contract-appointed eight hours of veganism outreach for resilient meat-eaters finished for the day, she tugged her beige duffel jacket closed, its lower half like an A-line dress billowing in the wind, as she hurried deep into London’s brick and concrete streets. Mirrored glass buildings swooped up and down, her horizon a matted mesh. The new boroughs, built under the government’s expansionist policies, post-revolution, were all thankfully free of the dangerous fire-propellant cladding that like a pandemic had been bolted on to so many high-rises back in the day. But the massive expansion of housing had retained other problems from the past: business centres where the work happened were surrounded by soulless housing towers, and then the remnants of the more spacious pre-existing residential neighbourhoods, the pattern repeating near infinitum. Travelling between them were an army of flying metal and plastic drones.

A huge shape, nestled between the skyscrapers, blocked a large portion of what remained of the sky: one of London’s zeppelins, advertising that week’s ReSports match between the London Lazarus and the Paris Polyphontes. In the past, Isaak’s face would have been up there. She still hadn’t told him that she knew who he was.

As her eyes gazed at the horizon of Greater Greater London, last night was on her mind again.

When she’d first woken up, still in her bed, still with the solar system hanging above her as it ever was, she wondered if it had been a dream.

A drug-fuelled hallucination? No, it felt too real. The experience was no field of flowers, head tilted back, lying on someone else’s bed after taking a deep breath, joint between her lips, like summers past. After Isaak summoned the waves, the place even tasted real. The tang of salt water still stuck to her tongue long after she taped out.

Growing up, she hadn’t been allowed a virtual reality headset. Her dad called the tech an early system of control designed by the Kingdoms. “Tech feudalism is only concerned with two things: creating new land, and renting it to you. VR is ideal for them. Infinite fake land at zero cost, where they can charge you real-life money.” Perhaps the fact it had been forbidden explained her fascination with ReSports. Nowadays, the only time she used VR was at the gym, practising against basic bots.

The only conclusion, she thought, hands tucked under her folded arms, was that the Tapeworld was real. That little piece of sticky tape, indistinguishable from plain old stationery, was the ticket in.

At the monorail station, masses of bankers, executives, city boys and city girls in a parade of dresses and suits, gathered at the mouth of the carriages. She hopped onto hers.

Shared metaverses had come and gone over the years. Each King tried their hand at a virtual world, and each had failed at mass adoption. People weren’t interested in yet another place to see ads. Decades of digital billboards had done enough harm to the collective psyche that people started rejecting ads outright. They’d wised up, like her dad. But not in large enough numbers to completely upturn traditional marketing-driven consumption.

Arm looped around a pole, Dylan carefully unwrapped and sunk her teeth into the post-work chocolate cracker that she ate every day on the way home. The sweet release of the cocoa mixture mingled in her mouth with her saliva, and for a few minutes she didn’t give a damn about Tapeworlds and tall boys named Isaak.

Rows and rows of passengers went about their commute routines around her. The more work-weathered they looked, the less likely they’d stare out of the windows of the monorail carriage.

Her journey was just about as long as it could be before it started to drive her up the walls. Longer trips were an expected side effect of London’s expansion.

No message from Isaak yet today. She could forgive a sleepy head, a night-shift worker, but the whole day without anything? She scrolled her feeds, breath half held, to distract herself.