Server Extant

‘In the city of the Kysairons, all perversions were practiced.’

-the Book of Orm, Digital Revelation Bible

It was night over Kys One. It was always night. A second server, Gloomwing, a lowly partition of the Pacific West, barely able to tessellate itself into a sphere, hung at the exact position to perpetually place Extant in its shadow. Since most of the server surfaces rotated, like R1 planets, they produced an effect analogous to the R1 Earth’s night and day, but the city of the Kysairons was always in darkness, its sun a black hole, rimmed with fire.

Morghain was standing in a ‘shack’, Knet slang, (although she’d heard it on Ping too), for a commercial space, point or store. It belonged to ChokingHazard420, a well-respected modder. It was open, on one wall, to the swarming street and bright as a white-tiled operating theater, festooned with tools and devices that hung from its ceiling. These weird, technological organs were programs and systems developed by their creator for specialized purposes. They could just as easily appear to be simple boxes or spheres, or even simple files with the program names written on them, but that wouldn’t look cool and, for ChokingHazard, life was art.

From her position, Morghain’s disapproving gaze was directed across the street, where a centipede-like man, with a snake-like body of seven conjoined torsos, each sporting a huge sexual organ that was only partly human, was having what could only charitably be described as ‘consensual’ relations with a half-dozen nude girls that writhed and squealed in exaggerated shrillness, stacked on top of each other in stocks.

This colorful demonstration of modding prowess was occurring in a fluorescent-green square of another shack, an open-walled room under morphing, hologramatic letters, proclaiming FUCKSPEC 201- SHOW US WHAT YOU GOT! Some lethargic spectators had gathered to watch but, for the most part, the traffic pressed by, indifferent. Morghain noticed, with idle distaste, the implied pubescence of the faux-reluctant recipients of centipede penis. Their skin was painfully white under the hard light, like alabaster on the slab, with little impression of biological frailty to them, smooth-skinned as store manikins, save for their elaborate, anime-esque hairdos. They were thankfully human-shaped, except for their ears, which tapered to points. This, Morghain knew, was a slimy attempt at getting around the Block’s ban on pedo or pedo-ish porn by pretending the creatures were ‘elves’ instead of what they looked like; distinctly under-aged girls. Morghain knew this because she had been on the board that drafted the edict. She had also sponsored one to ban depictions of rape. That one had gone nowhere.

‘I should report that turd,’ she said, of whatever artist was behind the, unfortunately, not-at-all-unusual display. But she knew she wouldn’t. She was standing in a vast hallucination, a dreaming world, where the psychological viscera of humanity gibbered, exhibiting its deformities. It was hard to get people worked up over computer-generated ephemera here.

Still, it was the principle of the thing.

Her companion, a green-furred ape in O.R scrubs, perched on a stool in the corner of the machinery-crowded shop. He made no reply, seemingly lost in contemplation, his eyes disassociated, blinking and flickering, as if detracted by ideas dancing about his head like motes of light.

His Id, his personal virtual body, was a work of art. Most modders walked around in something that advertised their taste and skill. After all, nobody would hire a fat personal trainer. ChokingHazard’s was magnificent. The lines of his simian face, its wrinkled brow and drooping eyelids, were beautifully organic, sculptural, but not overly stylized. The bare flesh merged with fur seamlessly, which was sometimes combed back, sometimes matted, colliding with his perfectly-simmed clothing without intersection or error. Such was the impression of solidity in his form, that one might feel it possessed the R1’s capacity for infinite resolution, as if one might draw closer and closer to him, finding, still, no flaw in the illusion.

He had remained motionless throughout the process, save for his face. The meat version of himself was apparently out of his player’s rig and working on a terminal, with only his head still in the set.

Morghain returned her attention to the mirror. Reflected, was her own Id, drawn in predatory lines, a human lioness. Her physique was an exaggerated hourglass. She was clad in black chitin armor, as the other Kysairon rankers were. Of her face was a beautiful, implacable Valkyrie mask, but her close-skinned armor parted at the front into an inverted teardrop, ascending from the tip of her pubis to the bared under-hang of her heavy breasts. It showed far more ‘skin’ than the clan’s kultura specs allowed, but Morghain had long skirted the guidelines and nobody had called her on it.

‘I like that dress you made for Sem,’ she said.

It had been a stylish piece of work, a living cloud of white butterflies that flitted strategically around her friend’s body, flowing in her train.

‘Particle dynamics, right?’

‘Nope’ said the ape. ‘Way too prop intensive, too much collision to get the behavior right.’

ChokingHazard’s voice had a eastern-European quality that made his simian visage seem curiously scholarly and grave. Morghain thought the effect was oddly charming. He gave the impression of a calm and wise animal, its fur as glimmering green as emeralds, its eyes dim lamps, slumped like a languid doll on its stool, performing manipulations of her digital flesh with nothing but the thoughts in his head. She felt that there was something vaguely intimate about it, like being worked on by a handsome dentist.

‘How’d you do it then?’ she asked. ‘It looks so natural.’

‘It’s just a cloth sim.’

‘What?’

‘There’s an invisible, zero-mass cloth body, that moves around her, kinda like gauze, blown about a manikin. I wrote a script that links the butterflies to points in its mesh. Then I just wrote some simple behaviors to orientate them to direction and make their wings flap to match their rate of movement. Gives you that flowing behavior, without the proc overhead. Simple.’

Morghain thought about it. It was simple, in the way that clever solutions are. Choking Hazard, she thought, was very clever. In a previous century he might have been an inventor or an engineer. In these present times, he wasted his life online, like everybody else, designing illusions. Morghain sometimes wondered of the singularity had come and gone, and no one had noticed. It was as if the ship of human history had struck an invisible rock and spilled its passengers onto two separate beaches. The ones who still mattered and the ones who were surplus to requirement.

‘Neat’ she said.

Morghain ‘jumped head’ to examine her virtual body. The external camera view, because all properties in Knet had to be linked to mass, was represented a little cube that darted about her body as she scrolled around herself, examining her modded body from all angles. The trick with huge tits, she reflected, was not to enlarge them to the point of cartoonishness and to be careful to retain a sense of weight. She twisted her torso sharply to the left and right. Although seamlessly skinned to retain their volume and solidity, her breasts didn’t sway with her body movement. That made them look a little fake, but if she put flesh-dynamics into them, even a simple one, like additional bones in the upper rig to express momentum and inertia, the effect of physical weight would smack of vanity, instead of an accident of design.

Fucking narcissist, she thought. Morghain came back to her head. ‘Skinning looks great, C.H’.

‘Tell your friends’, said ChokingHazard, his ape-body coming back to life, like a puppet reanimating, one string at a time. Whoever ChokingHazard was in the R1, he was re-donning his gear. Its limbs active again, the ape hopped down from his bench and walked over, scanning her form for imperfections, awkward faces, imperfectly tessellated or deformed geometry. ‘Squat’ he commanded. ‘How stand and raise your arms.’ He examined the join between the muscles of her shoulder and her neck, with impersonal professionalism of a sculptor, running his eyes over his creation one last time. ‘You going to the all-committee?’ He asked.

‘Yah. You?’

‘No. I got disillusioned with the political process’ he said, as if the phrase had some value as an old joke. They both smiled at it.

‘How much do I owe you?’ asked Morghain.

‘Triple-oh-two and we’re good,’ replied the modder, meaning.0002 of a Vapourcoin, the most common variant left, after the world’s various governments had finally given up trying to suppress crypto.

‘Jesus, C.H, if you’re going to rob me, just use a gun.’

‘Talent costs. It’s the only thing that always will.’

‘You did good’ she conceded. Morghain was no slouch as a modder herself but ChockingHazard was a technical deep-diver. Her Id was a powerful gamer’s body, with a six and a half million vertex count, packed so dense that her simulated curvatures and surfaces were indistinguishable from reality. The Knet was no chat room where you could ‘be’ anything, or microcredit shitshow where you could buy anything, density had to be earned here by the implacable rules of the accretion system. Morghain’s body was as finely tuned as a race car, and to mod the maximum ‘prop’, or embedded property, allowed by her rating, she needed an expert like ChokingHazard, to find every efficiency.

’Alright ’she said. ‘Gotta go. Public service and all.’

‘Don’t speak against them Morghain,’ said ChokingHazard, ‘there’s allot of people, in the Strip, who like you. We don’t have many voices. You should save yours.’

‘What’s the point of having it then?’

‘For better times. When the peace faction is discredited.’

‘By then there’ll be nothing left. Motor will eat the servers, one by one.’

‘He’ll implode.’

’People have been saying that for years. He’ll implode, he’ll implode. He never does. He just gets bigger and bigger, and his enemies fewer and fewer.’

‘At least reconcile with the clans’ said ChokingHazard. ’You can’t stand at odds with your enemies and your friends.′

‘Just do me this, Choke,’ smiled Morghain, ‘if I’m exed, don’t join the mob that comes after me.’

‘No, I’ll just watch,’ replied the green ape, with its melancholy face, ‘like always.’

With a final wave, the Valkyrie-shape of the Kysairon ranker stepped out of the shack front and merging into the crowd. But before the modder could turn his attention to other business, she was suddenly back, her head around the corner. ‘You know what?’ she said, ‘I think I will have those breast dynamics after all. Just mod them back into the build and I’ll update tomorrow.’

‘Sure.’

Morghain was gone again.

* * *

Morghain pressed through the crowded, (flashing, singing, blaring) vertical, neon-veined valley of a Kys-1 street. The Maze, also called ‘the Strip’, was a great band of deep, luminous canyons that surrounded the firewall and the Block. It was designed to bewilder an invading enemy but it did the job pretty good on locals too. It was a creature fabulous, a sinuous, intestinal labyrinth that coiled endlessly into itself. The tops of the street-canyons, cropped to a universal height, formed a bare plane, which exposed an enemy to the full lethality of the Block, the fortress at its heart, forcing him to work his way through the streets, like a bowl obstruction, or break through, wall by wall. Kys-1, the city-state that dominated Extant, was one of the oldest civs in Knet. It had never been conquered.

Morghain made her way through the maze with surety. As a known-known and member of the server’s warrior caste, she was frequently hailed by the citizens that thronged about her, some friendly, others not so. Morghain stopped for none, pressing towards the center. The city was a place of devils and wonders. It’s citizenry was as chimeraic and multiform as the LSD-laced dreams of its creators. Many of the figures crowding the curving concourses were combinations of human and monstrous, the animal and the mythological. Some were sleek and elaborately dressed, some demure, others grotesquely sexual. She passed a wizard, his robed body surrounded by blue brightness, flickering crustaceans and fish, as if he strolled through an invisible sea, disturbing the phosphorescent ghosts of departed creatures that darted around his body at the edge of visibility. A nude woman-shape walked past, her body so perfectly translucent that there was almost not enough index of refraction to create the outline that gave her away. Through her center was a string of slim, inhuman organs, glowing like pearls on a string. The effect was beautiful, as if she was some gleaming thought-projection, an astral body, through which could be seen the delicate biology of her soul. It took allot of processing power to calculate such an immaculate, refractive translucency, so the effect was tremendously render-heavy, a form of conspicuous consumption, like publicly-worn jewelery. The Ksource renderer didn’t allow for ‘cheats’ like arbitrary grading. All light had to follow its proper course.

It was hard to talk in the maze. There was a volume control in the side of the physical VR headset, but there was no such control to Kys. Above the crowd, animated street signs and looping animations, three-dimensional, brilliant in their saturation, gyrated and flashed against one another as each shackfront attempted to deafen-out its competitors with an attack on their senses. ’SAFE BOXES, blared a recording, red cubeoid letters marching the words, ‘STOW YOUR ID! - FIVE MILLION POLY DENSITY PER WALL! - FULLY ENCRYPTED BARRIER! ARMED INTRUSION RESPONSE!’ Those were ‘lockups’, banks for Ids. Knet was one hundred percent persistent. You could log off if you liked, but your Id didn’t disappear. The system kept track of all matter and energy and was indifferent to your problems. If you wanted your digital self to be alive when you came back, you had to lock it up, hide it or both.

Morghain was now approaching the inner most of the five rings and choke points that surrounded the city center and its dominating fortress, The Block, looming above her. Appropriate to its name, it was a featureless square of glossy-surfaced darkness, a great, black brick. Knet units of distance were analogous to the R1, one millimeter being the smallest size of any legally renderable object. The Block was exactly one ‘kilometer’ on each side and half of that tall. In times of war its seemingly featureless surface would unfold into a hedgehog skin of outward-facing shield projectors and guns.

Morghain broke from the maze and entered a circular cavity, the great ‘O’ in the center. Here, the ground fell way to a sheer cliff. A great, circular moat ringed the Block, descending into, seemingly, infinite darkness. This was called ‘The Drop’ and was both a defensive measure and a popular form of execution. On the far side was a ring wall, made of the same glossy-dark matter, called the ‘Firewall’, the second defense. It rotated with ponderous slowness, meaning that any gap made in it by an attacker would not stay still to be exploited.

Spanning the gap from the labyrinth to the Firewall, Morghain could see a narrow bridge, without guardrails. Where the bridge touched the Firewall, a Boolean, a negative space about five-by-five meters, opened in the surface. This was the only entrance to the central fortress. It was guarded by three bulbous monster-shapes, bipedal and cyclopean, which towered above the crowd. These were Peacekeepers, the civic-volunteer police force. From this distance, Morghain could see them checking over and interrogating the would-be entrants, who formed an impatient queue along the bridge. As she watched, one of the Peacekeepers picked up a supplicant and tossed him into the abyss. The little figure fell into darkness, limbs flailing, a high, tinny voice shrieking curses audible even at this distance. The Drop was not technically bottomless, but its ground plane was a universal teleporter that sent its victim a kilometer back up the shaft, so that, once an unfortunate fell in, he would fall, endlessly, at terminal velocity, looping the same distance over and over, forever. The only realistic thing someone could do, in those circumstances, was abandon their Id and start again.

Such effective, if not literal, execution of loudmouths was not technically permitted the Peacekeepers but they had to put up with allot of shit and the positions were hard to fill. Maintaining order on Ket, even here, at the center of one of its oldest civs, was a thankless task.

Now upon the threshold, Morghain was suddenly reluctant to go fully into the citadel’s power. After all, trusting the sanity and rationality of one’s fellow citizens was the mistake Socrates had made. She fell back, stepping into the lee of a shackfront that looked like an ascending caterpillar, writhing languorously up the wall, never breaking free of the ground. ‘DYNAMO’S SURFACING’ read the glowing letters on its luminous hide, ‘ELEGANT SOLUTIONS, BEST CRAM FOR YOUR PROP, LOW $$$.’

Morghain looked up the body of the undulating invertebrate. At the top, a narrow gantry attached it to the wall.

When the strength ‘propped’ in an Id (meaning a property expressed) was an order of magnitude higher than that merely needed to support the construct’s weight, the Id was said to be ‘fully ninja’. Ninja-grade mobility made a great deal of acrobatics and nimble evasion possible. It was the minimum entry to ranked status, a person of almost-power and prestige, a clan member. Morghain leapt up the wall with the gibbon-like grace of her disproportional strength-to-weight ratio, her hoof-feet catching the supports, throwing her two dozen meters above the street. Here, concealed in the shadows of the signage’s bulbous, larval head, she perched and rested, her eyes on the Boolean.

The vote wasn’t until 15:50, KST, she reflected. It was always good to see who else was going to an all-faction meeting, because it significantly reduced one’s chances of getting murdered at one.

Sit a while, she thought, and see what comes.