Goodbye Eden — Chapter 1

“You are God.”

A calm disembodied voice echoed through the mountain peaks of Utopium.

“You are the architect of the universe.”

“The destiny of space and time.”

“You define the infinite.”

“You command the celestial.”

Gideon craned his neck towards the mountain, its peak so high it wasn’t visible through the wispy purple clouds that spiralled anti-clockwise around it.

“Hey.” He said scanning the profiles around him. “Does anyone have any idea what goes with a Sarong? I downloaded this pack and I’ve been through like two billion combinations and I swear nothing goes.”

“Once you throw off the shackles of those puny bodies and truly give yourself to The Ether…”

The disembodied voice crystallised into the shape of a human who paced back and forth across the flat mountain peak. Chadif had a disarming smile but steel cold eyes projected directly into the cortex of the million or so profiles gathered.

“…Then, and only then, will you understand that consciousness need not be limited by the laws of physics but has the power to redefine a whole new set of laws. Customizable physics. Just one of the features I’m going to talk about today.”

“It’s like it’s not quite a skirt and it’s not quite a towel. It sort of falls between the gaps. ”

“I want to talk about time travel.”

Silence viraled through the mountains. Nobody responded to Gideon’s question.

“With a consciousness the size of the universe connected to every atom, and unbound by the brutal physical laws that govern our organically limited minds, you’ll have access to everything that has or will ever happen.”

Chadif resumed his trademark pacing, head bowed, hand to chin, holding the crowd in the gaps between his words; gaps filled with more terms, conditions and caveats to The Ether’s functionality than it was possible for a single human mind to process.

“Re-experience any moment in the history or future of the universe. See long dead relatives. Zoom forward and watch the stars explode. We call it, ‘FreeTime’”.

Frenzied applause.

“Have as much time as you want. Have it all. You’re God now.”

Gideon glanced at the profiles around him staring awestruck towards the mountain.

“You know what the problem with this thing is?” Gideon said, sharing his thoughts with nobody in particular, but hoping everyone would respond.

“This Ether thing is, you know, trying too hard. Anybody else think it’s all a bit desperate?”

“Gidz!”

“Damn it Mo.”

Mo’s coarse digital voice took Gideon by surprise. He had a habit of doing that. Gideon knew what Mo was going to say. He’d already had the pep talk. Been shown the statistics.

“So. The stats I’m running on this. Definitely suggesting to a ninety nine point nine, nine, nine percent confidence interval that you should try and find something more positive to say.”

“Oh come on. All this master of the universe stuff. It’s just, you know, so.”

He put a mod to work coming up with an end to his sentence. Gideon didn’t really care about being a God. His only aspiration was to be the best Gideon Smith he could be in order to avoid yet another eviction, but the ads and reminders to try The Ether had become so relentless he felt left with little choice.

“And has anyone noticed what he’s not talking about?”

“Gidz. You know my sole reason for existing is to serve you, but right now you’re making me question whether it’s worth it.”

“All the mods that have been transferred to The Ether.” A few heads turned nearby. Gideon felt emboldened. This could trend.

“All done under the cover of routine ‘upgrades’. And the fact they’ve reduced the memory quotas. Not heard him talk about that?” A few more heads turned, and some of the original heads turned away.

“That’s right.”

“Gideon!” Mo only used Gideon’s full name when he was projecting frustration.

“Who can remember their childhood? Like, the detail?”

There was a pregnant pause as the profiles around him presumably searched their archives.

“I can’t even remember my parent’s face. How messed up is that?”

“Gideon. Stop!”

“And they want us to abandon our bodies for this? No way. I love my body. Who doesn’t love their body? The flesh is the best. Right?”

As soon as the thought was projected he was convinced it would trend. He’d just come up with a slogan. It was sure to trend. It had to. It didn’t. Gideon scanned the profiles around him. Nobody was sharing his slogan or reacting in any way.

“If you’re going to think like this at least mark it as private.” Mo said. “Buddy. Come on.”

In recent weeks Gideon had started marking many of his thoughts as private on Mo’s advice. Society was becoming increasingly hostile to any form of sarcasm, negativity or ‘banter’. His self proclaimed ‘witty biting responses’ and keen eye for colour had once seen him climb up to zone five, but it had got to the point now that to share such thoughts was inviting suspicion and was damaging his already anaemic rank. He was marking too many thoughts as private, which he was sure he hated. Honesty was now only rewarded if it was the right kind of honesty. The self-affirming, self-congratulating, self-aggrandizing kind of honesty. The kind of honesty that, as far as Gideon was concerned, was about as far from honest as it was possible to get.

Above Utopium the purple clouds began to swirl directly over the peak forming a vortex that tugged on Gideon’s profile; on his body; his mind; his digital soul.

“The Ether is woven into the fabric of space-time itself. Backed up and distributed to every atom in the Universe. In The Ether you are truly infinite. Join the eight billion who have already uploaded and will outlive the Earth, The Sun and the Milky Way.”

Gideon gave in and let the energy drag him into the air and up the side of the mountain along with everyone else who’d agreed to try the demo. There was nothing unfamiliar or unsettling about the experience, the vortex was an overused but expected method of entry into a new realm when dramatic effect was required. As the vortex got closer, beams of light lasered towards and around him and white noise numbed Gideon’s mind.

“So what happens to us at the end of the universe?” Gideon shared. He couldn’t help himself. The thought saw his rank drop by another two hundred places.

“Your universe is ready for you.” A softly spoken voice whispered between Gideon’s ears. It wasn’t his voice. Or was it. It didn’t matter.

Gideon found himself running his hand through a field of banana yellow wheat that flowed across his palm with the texture of finest silk. He looked up. The air was crisp and clean. The reality Gideon now occupied felt no more or less real to him than the reality of Utopium, or the base reality beneath it, apart from an overwhelming feeling of blissful serenity. He no longer felt like he needed or wanted a body or even a mind. These were obsolete organs that needed exorcising before they succumbed to the inevitable fate of all flesh. It was an opinion just as likely generated by the demo as coming from Gideon’s own mind, but he was the demo and the demo was him, so the opinion was his as much as it was the demo’s. Nonetheless, what he understood to be his skin felt warmed by a bright sun and cooled by a gentle breeze. A Starling chirped lyrically overhead in an azure sky that swirled with cotton wool clouds. Hills of green, yellow and turquoise rolled over the horizon and Gideon followed a familiar grass path that wound along the side of a stream next to a line of trees that marked the edge of the woodland Gideon remembered vividly as the one he spent his childhood exploring and playing in. A pristine white farmhouse emerged from the periphery of his imagination. Smoke drifted lazily from the chimney and dissolved into the air. The heavy oak door creaked open and a woman he instantly recognised as his mother stepped out holding a basket of wildflowers and summer berries. She smiled. Her face had a porcelain quality, all wrinkles and imperfections removed. To Gideon it felt as if no time had passed since he last saw her, but the bitter decades of loss and yearning couldn’t help but break through the simulation and render Gideon overcome with grief, love and then bliss. She picked him up and he nestled his cheek into her shoulder, draped his arms around her neck, and twirled her long, glossy brown hair in his fingers. She carried him back into the house, whatever it was she had come out to do long forgotten. She sat Gideon at what he knew to be his chair around the enormous wooden dinner table laid with a spread of freshly baked bread and homemade jam. He grabbed the jar and smelt it. Raspberries. It smelt of raspberries. And sugar. Looking up, his father — thick black beard and a twinkle in his youthful eyes — ruffled Gideon’s hair and told him he loved him, something he had never actually done.

“You know we love you.” His mother said. “Everything is going to be perfect.”

The bliss was making Gideon feel sick and dizzy. His mother never spoke like that. She was much more aggressive and short-tempered. Why didn’t the rhythms use this in their simulation? He became aware of his stomach dragging his attention through the layers of reality that separated him from his digestive tract. Acid churned. His senses fused into a synaesthetic cocktail. He smelt confused. He tasted love. In the blink of a neurone his father’s face became his mother’s and back again. Something wasn’t right. He ran his hand across the table. Where were the knots of wood and dirt filled cracks? Where were the plate rings stained into the varnish? With access to his own memories he knew these things were part of his past, but they’d been whitewashed from the simulation. He drew his mind back out and examined everything simultaneously. The ability to perceive on multiple levels was an impressive feature of the demo but now he’d seen one airbrushed detail, he saw them all; the smoke rising from the chimney; the clouds; the texture of the wheat; the breeze. They were all too perfect. They lacked the authenticity of decay. They were nothing more than ciphers of the childhood he could no longer visualise but desperately missed. A message watermarked his mind, reminding him that what he was experiencing was a demonstration; nothing more than a rounding error on the features and customisations available in the full version of ‘The Ether’. An alarm replaced the message. He had thirty minutes to get to zone three.

Soft blue light filled Gideon’s awareness as the muscles that clung to the sides of his eyeballs dragged his focus inwards, onion skinning him back to the base reality; the reality of the flesh that presented itself to him as the curved featureless wall of his pod. Gideon lifted his head and peered down towards his feet that bobbed suspended in the fluid that half filled the tube he called home and supported his body in a constantly monitored mix of salts, moisturizers and antibacterials kept at air temperature to make it impossible to differentiate them. It allowed Gideon to spend as long as the demands of his body would allow him to indulge in and explore the millions of realms that offered an almost limitless and ever expanding universe of entertainment, adventure, gratification and other rank building activities. The realms existed long before the cortical interface (CI), but back then they required inhabitants to wear external devices to enable access. Those who took a passing interest in the history would find it amusing to look through archive footage of people waving their arms around, pretending to shoot and run whilst wearing what looked like massively ill-fitting sunglasses. The CI was a breakthrough, allowing full conscious emersion as well as augmentation of one reality with another and rendered the concept of reality itself as meaningless. Spliced into the genetics of the mind shortly after birth or inherited from parents already signed up for the service the CI was a cluster of engineered transceiver cells situated in the brain stem and designed to convert neural activity into radio waves and vice versa and by its seventh version had achieved global market saturation.

Gideon wiggled his toes to reassure himself that he still could and checked his rank. Down fifty since he last checked six minutes ago.

“Well that was…” He stopped the thought in its tracks and marked it as private. “Underwhelming.”

“Hey Gideon. Wasn’t that great?” The personalised auto-generated message rang through Gideon’s mind.

“No.” Gideon replied, privately.

“Listen. I know you’re wondering what happens to your body once you upload.”

Gideon knew full well what happened. He’d lost count of how many times he’d heard this message, but was not offered the option to dismiss it.

“What goes with a sarong?”

There was a microsecond pause as the rhythm handling the conversation switched off its receiver.

“Your body will be preserved inside your existing pod.”

“What’s your name?”

“Once you upload, a simple pod upgrade will convert it into a fully featured, self regulating cryogenic chamber.”

“What are you doing tonight?”

“If you do ever want to leave, just request access and twenty four hours later you’re thawed and back in the base reality, but honestly, so far, not a single person has requested this — and why would they.”

“We could go dancing? Few laughs. Then back to my pod for ice cream?”

“The Ether is next stage evolution. The Ether is beyond infinite.”

“I bet you like it vanilla.”

Gideon dismissed the message but another appeared at the top of his stream straight after.

“See you soon in The Ether. Be sure to share your experience.”

Gideon held his breath and waited for a few seconds expecting another message. Thankfully none came.

“Hey budz.” Mo cut into Gideon’s thoughts.

“Damn it!” Gideon exclaimed. “Can’t you give me some warning? Flash a light. Send me a message? Modify your voice so it’s less… I don’t know, grating?”

“Don’t you think it’s interesting that even though you could have done anything or gone anywhere at any point in the history or future of the entire universe…”

“That I chose to recreate my childhood.” Gideon cut in. “I was waiting for you to say something like that. Don’t analyse me Mo.”

“That is my primary function buddy.”

“No. Your primary function is to kiss my ass.”

“Figuratively speaking, yes.”

Seeing his parents left Gideon suspecting he wanted to feel a whole raft of emotions thankfully suppressed by the neuroregulators that kept a constant watch on his affect. The regulation of emotion, like memory, was a mental function long since handed over to modifiers or mods as they were abbreviated to. Mods, like the mind-network interface they depended on were aggressively marketed to parents as a vaccine against the frailties and inconsistencies of the organic brain. Adverts and articles bombarded expectant parents with facts and figures. They sold them on promises of lifelong happiness and super-intelligence. They promised unlimited storage, instant access, quick search functionality, super high definition recollection and the end to mental illness. Thousands of scientific papers were published describing how the minds of those who had installed were re-assigning the decaying neural circuitry of long term memory and emotion to functions that were crying out for more processing power. Areas involved in attention and task switching that struggled to keep up with the technological pace of evolution. There were no laws that demanded bulk off-mind memory storage or the neuro-regulation of emotions but social norms emerged that enforced it nonetheless. Those who refused to regulate their emotions were viewed with suspicion fuelled by the rhythmically controlled media who generated millions of keyword-laden articles describing the horror for those whose emotions were left unchecked. They warned of the terrible rage, fear and anxiety their minds were wracked with; the danger they posed to society and the moral and social pressure to regulate that transformed rebellion into terror.

“Hi Gidz. Just a quick one.” Mo chirped. “About your rank. You’re one hundred places from losing access to your current pod. Just wanted to flag it up. Something to work on. Have a think.”

Gideon checked his rank. It was down two hundred since the demo.

“Any suggestions?”

“Maybe share something positive about The Ether?”

“Whose side are you on?” Gideon said. “You do know if I upload I won’t need you anymore?”

“I exist to serve. When you no longer need me I will no longer need to exist.”

“I’m looking for reasons not to upload. Put your rhythms to work on that.”

“Just repeat after me.” Mo said. “The Ether is amazing. The Ether is the future. The Ether here I come.”

“Repeat after me. The Ether is an embarrassment, The Ether is pointless and for the millionth time do you know what goes with a sarong?”

Gideon knew Mo was right. The demo should have been an opportunity for him to improve his rank through the crafting of witty and urbane memes that would viral and trend him up through the zones to a penthouse apartment with panoramic views, access to the most coveted neural upgrades, moderator privileges to the most exclusive realms and a wardrobe of the finest def silks. He just couldn’t help it. The more pressure there was to only share positivity the more he wanted to share nothing but profanity.

“You know I love you?” Mo said, softening his tone as much as he could.

“I feel your digital love.” Gideon said.

“How many gender packs do you have left? Your wardrobe is looking relatively bare.” Mo said. “The stats on this are very clear. Eviction will land you in zone ten.”

“I might get another zone 9 pod.”

“That’s statistically unlikely.”

Gideon couldn’t grasp what was happening. It was like there was something in him that wanted to be evicted. This would be his tenth. He couldn’t face being assigned to another building even further from the centre, to a smaller pod. Fewer mods. He didn’t have many as it was but he’d invested heavily in his wardrobe and gender packs. Since very few people owned physical possessions, it was very easy to move, too easy. You took your world with you, stored and backed up on the network and distributed over millions of nodes in thousands of data centres scattered across the globe. He dismissed the thought of uploading to The Ether. It was a targeted ad. It was becoming impossible to tell the difference.

He pressed both hands against the curved wall above him and signalled to the pod that he wanted to get out. Narrow slits opened up in the floor and the liquid quickly drained away leaving him lying on the padded curved floor, its hydrophobic coating leaving it instantly bone dry. In the privacy of his pod, Gideon wore only the ubiquitous nano-infused body suit that constantly monitored his health, provided warmth and cleaned and protected his skin. It was a simple light grey affair, skin tight and full length including a hood that covered the head leaving only Gideon’s face peering through. Gideon projected an image of himself into his mind’s eye affording an external 360-degree view of himself. He put his tailoring mods to work selecting an outfit that would replace his body suit in the projection that was presented to the minds of anyone who saw or thought of him. The mods first took a scan of his emotional state to act as a basic filter. He was apparently feeling fine. They then augmented this by filtering out clothing combinations and styles worn in the last seven hours. They flicked through two hundred billion clothing combinations and two and a half seconds later presented two options. The first was a pulsating suit of fluorescent grass. The second was a light green business suit that came with a full male gender pack, all penis and pecs. Gideon wasn’t feeling particularly male. He’d had enough false realities and craved the authentic — an almost impossible ask. He really wanted to wear a sarong but had already been through every item of clothing he had access to and nothing looked right. The suit would do, for now, but he adjusted it to hug and accentuate the femininity his genetics had selected for him at conception. Gideon enjoyed the androgyny his small breasts and narrow hips afforded him. Gender was no more relevant or significant a part of anyone’s identity as their hair colour or the shape of their toes, and was as fluid as reality itself, but that wasn’t to say it didn’t matter at an individual level and Gideon liked the flexibility his gender neutrality gave him to be whatever he wanted with minimal augmentation.

The door slid open above his head and light flooding in from the corridor. He grabbed the handles above him and slid himself out and into the pristine white corridor of his apartment building. As his profile projected advertisements for myriad mods, events, courses and handy time saving hints and tips onto the walls, ceiling and floor, his pod reminded him how amazing he was. Gideon coughed and patted his chest. As he made his way towards the front door, the paper-thin walls between the honeycomb of pods offered an instant insight into the lives of his neighbours. Laughter mingled with cries of anguish. A female voice shouted in Russian. All clinging onto whatever social niche they had carved out in order to maintain the rank required for zone nine. Around half the residents had already uploaded, their pod number replaced with the pulsating sideways figure eight infinity logo of The Ether. As he walked along the corridor he’d developed a ritual of banging on a few of these pods to see if their residents would stir, but from their frozen states they never did. The demands to stop banging on the walls that filled his stream from the residents that remained had become a reassuring reminder that there were still plenty of people who weren’t sold on the benefits of abandoning their bodies.

The front door slid open and dust swirled into the corridor but was repelled by a wall of purified air pumped in to preserve the sterile living conditions. The building pumped some ego massaging affirmations to the top of Gideon’s stream.

“I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and choose its contents.”

“I am superior to negative thoughts and low actions.”

Gideon stopped and walked backwards out of the building.

“Thank you building. Thank you for caring.” He tagged the thought with as many positive keywords as he could and set it free.

“You’re grinding your teeth Gidz.”

“Thanks Mo.”

He rubbed his jaw and made the conscious decision to never think again, a daily pledge he could only maintain for an hour or so.

Gideon’s traditional senses flooded with the sights sounds, smells and tastes of the zone nine crowds. The magnetic tug of various groups vying for attention combined with a host of additional senses Gideon had installed. The echolocation of a troupe of five dimensional artists sprung momentarily to the top of his stream, but was almost instantly replaced by the proprioceptive experience of falling in love with a new type of hair. Compared to the inner zones, zone nine felt like a party the morning after. Advertisements for upcoming events adorned every millimetre of every building. The sky, augmented to lift the mood of whoever glanced at it, combined soothing synaesthesia with affirmation-laden ads and humourous questionnaires. There was so much to ignore.

He weaved a chaotic path through the crowd, projecting the image he’d selected straight into the profiles, and therefore the visual cortex of everyone who saw him. His collision detection mods prevented him from walking into people but for every person he avoided, he passed straight through another. To the uninitiated it would have seemed as if ghosts had been accepted as a thing, but then completely ignored. There were myriad mods to enable the differentiation between the projected and physical self, but the prevailing social etiquette dictated it was rude to ask, and rude to advertise — people preferring the flexibility to pretend to be present when not, or pretend to not be present when they were. He strobed his attention through the barrage of targeted ads that made up the bulk of his stream and ran a mod over his personality, selecting traits most likely to maximise his share rate. Four percent increase in projected confidence through increased volume of laughter, dominant body language and looking through, rather than at people. Eleven percent increase in expressions of humble gratitude. Twenty five percent decrease in swallowing, sniffing, neck rubbing and nodding. Gideon was acutely aware of the need to present the best version of himself in any given situation and his rhythms were constantly evaluating his status and making myriad decisions on his behalf at microsecond speed whilst occasionally requesting his input to give him the illusion of control.

Only a small dip in rank now would see him evicted. Zone ten probably. The need to fit in just enough to be accepted, but not too much to be ignored was overwhelming. Industries had sprung up to serve the demand for personality optimization, offering services, mods and training. The longing for a stable personality, once considered the cornerstone of mental health, had long since been replaced by the demand for psycho-plasticity and continuous optimization.

The idea of a woman with lavish genitalia making love to themselves flashed through Gideon’s mind, followed instantly by a reminder to share a thought he’d put on a timer.

“How much time do you waste walking to vends? We’ve all got better things to do right?”

The thought bore no relation to the orgy he’d subscribed to, but like everyone Gideon was no longer hardwired to hold his attention on one thing for more than a few seconds.

Days earlier, in an attempt to boost his rank, Gideon had joined ‘The centre for the advancement of reality’ (CAR) — a group defining itself as a ‘think tank’. It promised members the opportunity to make a genuine difference to society through thinking, and a seventy five percent chance of a rank uplift of two thousand or more. Both of these things appealed and Gideon couldn’t understand why more people weren’t interested. A condition of joining was to come up with an issue that needed some thought applied to it. As his rank gradually slid him down through the city zones, Gideon had noticed that the density of vending machines decreased, requiring people to walk up to thirty seconds to get food. Of course there was the network of drones that could deliver direct to pod, but they too discriminated against the outer zones, their prioritization rhythms weighted by rank. Gideon had set a mod to work coming up with a new vend distribution plan that would reduce walk times to no more than twenty seconds. He then started a petition to lobby the rhythm that controls vend distribution and demand his new plan be implemented. He thought it was genius and he liked the idea of going up against the rhythms. Gideon had what he considered a healthy scepticism about the rhythms, but what others often interpreted as delusion.

“Your time is too precious, your life too important. You are too perfect for such inefficiencies. It’s time to change the rhythm.”

He juggled his attention across to the developing orgy. A neural switch released dopamine into his prefrontal cortex and various mods took care of ensuring emotional connection with the writhing wall of flesh that sent pulses of orgasmic neural electricity up his spine which then fanned out across his entire body, ending where they began on the tip of his clitoris.

“Research I commissioned.” He took a deep breath and cleared his throat.

“Great orgasm Gids.” Mo piped up.

“Research I commissioned has found that people waste more than thirty minutes every day walking to the nearest vend bank or waiting for deliveries. The madness must stop!”

As he sidestepped through the crowds he became the fantasy, indulged the pleasure. His mind convulsed with an onslaught of orgasms that consumed every sense and was manifest physically as an almost imperceptible yelp of pleasure.

“Convenient access to food is a basic human right. Sign my petition to lobby the rhythm.”

The hermaphroditic moans dragged his attention back to the pornography. He shared the fantasy, and more importantly his participation in it, to ensure it was at least indexed before disappearing down the endless and unstoppable collective streams of consciousness. It earned him a dopa-shot and four shares.

“Thanks everyone. Great times. Same time whenever.”

He shared his petition with the thousand or so profiles that attended the virtual orgy and turning a corner was engulfed in a cloud of dust, through which a cab lifted silently into the air. Gideon covered his face and waited for the dust to clear. Cabs were a relic of a bygone era. There were very few reasons to physically travel anywhere, but there were still enough people who did it to justify the maintenance of the infrastructure. Like most basic services, nobody knew or cared who was in charge of it. The army of rhythms and bots that maintained it did so efficiently enough for nobody to ever have to devote their attention to it, but the lack of demand dictated a lack of investment and innovation, hence the outdated use of gyros and the inconvenience of the dust. It was quite likely that new forms of propulsion were available. Less messy and quiet enough that they didn’t require universal dampening mods to filter out the specific frequency ranges, but that was the price of distributed democracy. People got what they demanded, and nobody had demanded an upgrade to the cab network since before Gideon was born. There were much more important things to demand. Gideon was demanding more vending machines.

As he stepped into the cab he checked his rank; up fifty. The door swung closed and the cab lifted into the air through its own cloud of dust.

“Love is ‘The Juzz’.” Gideon thought as the gleaming ocean of luxury apartment blocks passed beneath him.

“The neurostar of tomorrow. Wrecking your mind from ten.”

The smiling, porcelain, doll face of ‘The Juzz’ strobed between Gideon’s ears. He tagged the ad. It was important to keep up with who and what was trending or might trend in the future.

“Gids!” Mo exclaimed as the cab landed in a silent cloud of dust.

“What!” Gideon grabbed his chest feeling his racing heart beat. How, even after sixty years together, Mo was still able to startle him every time he spoke was a mystery to Gideon.

“Quick update. This week your nano has destroyed fourteen tumours, twelve viral infections and over seventeen thousand neural plaques.”

“Right. Thanks Mo.”

“Keeping things ticking over. All headed in the right direction.”

Gideon loved the inner zones. It was neurochemically impossible not to. The permanent Mardi Gras atmosphere was intoxicating. Tens of thousands of people in elaborate, brightly coloured costumes. Singers. Dancers. Acrobatic teams performing gravity defying feats. An overwhelming cocktail of smells and tastes assaulted his sensory cortex.

“Physex. It stinks.” He thought, “The shocking truth about the people who still do it and the enormous danger they put us all in. Four shares to view.”

He dismissed the ad and the smell of fried chicken, fresh vegetables, flowers, love, and roasted ego flooded Gideon’s olfactory centre. A cacophony of steel drums, electric guitars, harps and choirs swirled around his auditory cortex. Colours seemed richer, more intense and movement through his visual field was exaggerated. Thousands of profiles crowded Gideon’s mind; requests for comms, points, DopaShots, SynoBadges. He followed behind a crocodile juggling a fire-breathing midget on its tail. A conga line snaked past that had been going for fourteen days. At night the congas took full advantage of the darkness to indulge in phosphorescence, fireworks, laser displays and pyrotechnics projected straight through the profiles of anyone who cared to look. Gideon requested permission to join, was immediately granted access and a gap opened up next to him. A game of virtual ping-pong being played by thousands around the world tempted Gideon away and he joined in, batting an invisible ball over an invisible net towards whoever was randomly selected by the rhythm that controlled the game. His ego bathed in the relentless profile-affirming onslaught of city life, the perfect opportunity to take advantage of his proximity to so many profiles. He shared his petition with everyone within direct range of his profile. Geolocated content appeared higher in a person’s stream, a relic from a time when physical presence was still considered preferable to the projected self.

He left it to his neuro to navigate him through the crowds and flipped his attention to a bland, painfully generic looking smoke filled room tagged as being modelled on an eighteenth century gentleman’s club. It was furnished with heavy wooden chairs positions in groups around small coffee tables populated with objects tagged as ashtrays, whiskey, and newspaper. Large potted plants added a touch of green to the sea of brown and paintings of old white men looking stern adorned the wood panelled walls.

“Welcome.” A genderless voice wafted through Gideon’s mind. Borton was the ‘director’ of the group and had clearly spent quite some time crafting his projection. The innocent, almost apologetic smile. The rows of dimples. The rainbow of freckles. The dressing gown. The bright orange flotation rings around his upper arms. All rhythmically designed to elicit curiosity and flag up Borton’s uniqueness of character, imagination, leadership style and bold political fashion.

“Thank you. Thank you.” Borton said, as if attempting to quieten a rapturous applause that was in fact completely absent.

“I’ll give you a quick update on my project first. So it’s going fantastic.” Nearly two hundred and fifty thousand suggestions.”

The rest of the group clamoured to be the first to congratulate him. His eyes flickered uncontrollably from the Dopa Shots. This was completely unnecessary since they weren’t really his eyes, but merely a projection of his eyes into a virtual reality, but it was these small touches that added authenticity to a realm, even a realm as bland as this one.

“So far the favourite is a new form of lust.”

Borton’s campaign centred on designing a custom emotion for London.

“But there are loads of amazing suggestions. I’m just overwhelmed with the response. I really am.”

Being only his second meeting, Gideon was struggling to buy into its rituals and accept the reality. At this stage he was happy to just watch from the periphery of his attention so flipped it back to the streets. Shoppers browsed long rows of colourful vending machines below a neuroneon sky pulsing with personalised ads for every sense. The smell of a clown troupe trended through Gideon’s olfactory centre and waves of classical neuro danced across his skin. Overhead, swarms of tiny drones weaved a frantic dance, ferrying food from vend to mouth, and beyond it all, through the haze of personalisation, augmented stars projected themselves onto the sky, twinkling and shimmering brighter than their own ancient light ever could.

Gideon was alerted that he’d reached his destination. The shop was a sterile neon lit room with brightly coloured vending machines lining each wall. To celebrate the opening, the name of the shop was projected, via the profiles of everyone present, onto the ceiling and floor, along with a constant stream of reminders to share, comment on, and rate the establishment. Change happens slowly and as humanity squeezed itself into the ever-expanding mega-cities, the vending machine network had grown to become the only source of food. Apartments shrank and kitchens became obsolete. In parallel, virtualization and augmentation meant that any substance could be made to look and taste like any other substance. You could make cyanide taste like cherries if you wanted — and early on a few people did. With the global population hitting the twelve billion mark, it was clear that food production needed a radical overhaul. There had been various experiments with mono-diets; milkshakes that contained all the nutrients the body needs, but a global problem demanded a corporate solution, so of course the multinationals stepped in and Supplement was born — a nutritionally balanced cocktail of chemicals mass produced in vast automated laboratories. A substance that could be tailored to individual needs and produced in solid, liquid, jelly or any other form. Add a dash of augmentation and voila, any food imaginable, delivered vacuum-sealed to a vending machine near you.

And so it was that Gideon found himself at the opening of a vending machine shop, an anachronism to when money existed as a medium of exchange and before the global ranking system fulfilled societies need for inequality.

“Gidz!” Mo shouted.

“I’ve located the owner. Profile’s impressive. Name is Wizard Horse Bleeder Zygote.”

“Rank?” Gideon said.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Achievements?”

“Yeah. The stats are telling me you probably don’t want to know that either.”

“You know, Mo, sometimes it’s worse you telling me I don’t want to know than just supplying the information like I asked and letting me make up my own mind.”

“Just here to protect you budz. The statistics don’t lie. Just telling it like it is.”

“But you’re not are you. You’re just, you know. It’s like telling someone not to panic about the enormous monster or whatever, that’s you know, right behind them.”

“No problem. In future I will simply describe the monster for you.”

Gideon ran a mood stabiliser to keep from being overwhelmed with what he suspected as being intimidation, but was manifesting itself as dry lips. The shop owner’s wizard hat was difficult to spot through the sea of profiles, but Gideon made his way around and through the crowd and pinged the wizard in preparation for their meeting.

“Fantastic place. Congratulations.”

“Welcome to VenderRoom9874 — part of the ‘where shopping lives’ group.”

The message was auto-generated in response to Gideon’s opening greeting. Various mods got to work, running through the initial rituals of social interaction. The augmented handshake. The exchange of tips and tricks. The banter about shared realms. By the time Gideon was stood physically next to the shop owner, they had both successfully ingested and deleted year’s worth of friendship related data and Gideon felt sufficiently prepped for the actual meeting.

“What do you want?” The shopkeeper said, his gaze flitting impatiently around the room.

Gideon understood and sympathised with the shopkeeper’s blunt tone. Gideon’s rank was almost toxic and made him appear predatory. He knew it, the shopkeeper knew it — anyone with a rank higher than his knew it. Gideon needed reflected glory. He needed to bask in the social chatter. He needed to get this guy to sign his petition and get everyone he was connected to, to do the same. He bumped his confidence mods up a quartile and raised his chin by seven degrees. It did nothing to reduce the sense of awkwardness Gideon felt about this contrived social situation.

“I want to help you expand.” Gideon said. “I can see the potential in this place and in you. I’ve started a petition to have another twenty thousand vending machines manufactured.”

“Is that it?” The shopkeeper said, his response tagged as incredulous.

“It’s very straightforward. A million sigs and the rhythm will have to consider it.”

“What if you can’t get that many?”

“Well.” Gideon said wiping his lips. “Between five hundred thousand and a million it will have to at least respond.”

“And less than that?”

The shopkeeper was making no secret of the fact that he already knew the answer but wanted to hear Gideon say it. He instructed one of the political mods he had recently installed to come up with an answer.

“I’m confident we’ll get enough signatures. As a high ranking and well respected local businessmen, It would mean a lot to have yours.”

Gideon’s poor rank had meant that the response was watermarked with the name of the mod that generated it. The shopkeeper tagged a grin and Gideon watched with horror as his attention quotient plummeted. Gideon was losing him. The shopkeeper turned and wandered off through the crowd. An alert informed him it was his turn to update CAR on the progress of his campaign. He dismissed it and followed the shopkeeper — the closer his physical proximity, the better his chance of getting his petition in an attention grabbing position on his stream.

“Vends are the lifeblood of this city right? You know that better than anyone. Nobody should be more than twenty seconds from this crucial infrastructure. Am I right?”

“Maybe you should change tack.” Mo said.

“Suggestions welcome.”

Mo shared a thought.

“We need to give people reasons to stay.” Gideon said, reading the words Mo planted at the top of his stream. “Aren’t you worried about everyone uploading?”

“Not really.” The shopkeeper replied.

“Am I Ether ready?” The ad cut through Gideon’s attention, presumably picking up on the fact that he’d referred to The Ether. “How will my mind cope with being able to access an infinite number of dimensions? I’d better get some training.”

A hunger warning popped up and Gideon was overwhelmed with the desire for banana ice cream. A hatch opened in the vending machine closest to him revealing a bowl of seductively melting peppercorn Dango ice cream topped with discs of crystallized banana positioned in a geometrically precise ring. He picked up a plastic spoon that had dropped next to the bowl. He stared at it, then at the ice cream. He changed his mind. He wanted strawberry topped ice cream. The banana disks transformed into strawberry halves without Gideon even noticing, any thought of banana never having time to be remembered before being replaced with the new thought that frantically scrambled to form a neural record in Gideon’s mind. A few mouthfuls later and a larger hatch opened in the same machine. Gideon tossed the bowl into it.

“Thank you for recycling.” The machine shared.

He flipped his attention back to CAR, but the meeting had finished. He sent a message of thanks and attached the neurographic his mod had now finished.

Back in the shop, Gideon found the shopkeeper stood right next to him, purple stardust raining down from a fountain atop his wizard hat. Gideon got a message to accept a package, which he instantly did.

“What is this?” Gideon said, even though he was already scanning the package. It was filled with news clippings and a link to an encrypted profile, almost empty of content, with no achievements and very little meta. Gideon scanned the articles. The summary described a person of statistically questionable mental capacity caught on multiple occasions smashing vending machines with a hammer and whose profile goes off-network shortly after each attack.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on this.” The shopkeeper said. “If you really want to increase the number of vends, do something about this.”

“What realm is this from?” Gideon asked.

“This one.” The shopkeeper replied.

He shared the tracker tagged to the profile.

“A hammer?” Gideon found himself questioning out loud. Tools such as hammers were generally only found on retro-construction realms. Gideon had once been a moderator on one and spent a summer building a rope bridge that connected two planets in the Bray system. It’s still there.

“Are you sure this is happening here?”

The shopkeeper blew fire above the heads of the crowd, a sheet of gently scented flame descending overhead that tasting like chilli popcorn. It was nice.

“Have you contacted the police?” Gideon said.

“They told me it’s attention seeking.” The shopkeeper said. “They said to ignore it, but I can’t ignore it if they smash this place up.”

Gideon checked the shopkeeper’s rank. It had jumped more than five thousand places.

“Gidz.” Mo said. “There could be something in this. You should offer your support, but not commit to anything at this stage.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Gideon said. “Thanks for the info. Muchas gracias. You know.”

Gideon pinned the profile tracker to his stream — not at the top, but near.

“Hey. Do you ever wear a sarong?” Gideon said.

The shopkeeper shook his head, advertised his gratitude with a dopa-shot but by the time Gideon noticed it, he’d already lost himself in the crowds.

He wasn’t sure what to do next. He was notified that he hadn’t slept in twenty seven hours and was struggling to suppress his fatigue. His eyes ached. His mind felt muddy.

“Is Maynard Higgs Boson guilty of murder? You decide on the trial that’s gripping the planet.”

Gideon scanned the message. It was the first suspected murder in more than a hundred years, Maynard’s rank riding a wave of interest in the hideous crime. It was the kind of publicity Gideon could only dream of. Justice was a social affair, judges replaced by rhythms that collated votes and passed sentences, juries expanded to include anyone who took a passing interest. The notes were extensive. Gideon scanned the first few lines and a video from Maynard pleading his innocence flashed across his thoughts. Gideon’s indecision had him blinking his attention to Utopium — hovering at the limit of his rank, some four hundred metres lower than the last time he was there, less than thirty minutes ago. Staring up at the swirling vortex above the mountain peak he felt tempted to just upload and be done with it. He blinked his attention back to the shop. He groomed his profile, put his thoughts in order, cleared his cache and curated his stream. He projected a paw, licked it and rubbed it across the top of his head. The fatigue warning blinked front of mind and top of stream. He had to sleep. The rhythms demanded it. He got in the nearest cab.

An alert bubbled up through Gideon’s awareness. His eyes blinked open dragging him through the layers of his unconscious leaving him staring at the soothing blue light of his pod. He projected the sky into his mind. It was light outside. The alert was attached to a profile that had just connected to the network. It was encrypted and empty apart from a name — ‘Elle’. He checked the tags. It was the tracker. He returned his attention to the profile. He rescanned the articles the shopkeeper had shared with him and kicked in a melatonin regulator to up his resting state and ran the articles through his various analysers to decide whether he should do anything with this information.

“Hey Gids.” Mo said. “We think you should definitely do something. Might want to check your rank.”

Gideon did. It was down eighty-seven.

“Sorry bud. We’re pretty certain, to a ninety nine point nine five percent confidence interval actually, that this is probably your last chance of avoiding another eviction. And you know, vandalism is pretty rare these days. Could have a rank boost?”

“Thanks Mo.” Gideon said clambering out of his pod. Another alert popped up reminding him to vote on the Maynard Higgs Boson case. He voted guilty.

As the cab lifted through its dust, Gideon crafted a speech and selected a soundtrack befitting a confrontation. An ad for The Ether popped to the front of his mind. He dismissed it.