(just a little)

“Kallen, we have a problem,” the voice came through the nearly-invisible comm in her ear. Without acknowledging anything, the woman with the severe cheekbones and white-blond hair pulled back into a tight bun turned from the action and sluiced through the gathering crowd down the street and hurried towards an alley. Halfway down the alley, the noise from the crowd dimming, she turned around to see whether anyone had followed her – no one came around the corner. She was safe.

“Hey, baby, what’s a girl like you doing in an alley like this?” she turned to see the gap-toothed, rag-clothed man picking his dirt-black nails with a long, wavy knife. “How about you and I have some fun,” his face split into a grin that showed just how few teeth he actually had left in his mouth.

In a practiced motion, she smoothly drew a long-barreled blaster from her leather trench, took aim and fired, putting a smoldering hole in the middle of the man’s temple. She had already holstered the blaster and passed deeper into the shadows of the alley before the man’s body hit the ground.

“Kallen here. What’s going on?” she spoke to the air, her Danish accent lightly touching her words.

“We have a situation with the finale,” the man’s voice came back.

“What sort of problem? I was there before you called…”

“For starters, do you have your token?”

“What? Of course I have…” with impatience she reached her finger-less gloved hand into a pocket on the side of the duster and fished around looking for the silver-dollar-sized token. When her fingers didn’t close on the token, she furiously started fumbling through her other pockets on the coat, then the pockets of her trousers… empty. “Fuck!”

“That’s what I thought,” the voice wasn’t smug, but rather angrily resigned. “One of the staff was set to break a few minutes ago and discovered her token was gone. We’ve checked the other staff we could reach immediately and no one has a token.”

“How… how is that possible?” Kallen stared around at the dingy buildings looming around her. “They don’t just… disappear!”

“I know. I know…” the voice repeated. “We’re scanning the vids to see what we can find. For the time being, let’s let this play – you might as well head back to the finale.”

Kallen nodded to herself, “Yeah… I will….”

“Kallen?”

“Yes, Eddie?”

“Keep your guard up.”

“Roger that.”

***

“Thank you for coming today,” the bald man with the neatly trimmed goatee and black sport coat over a tie-less gray button-down shirt and dark jeans. “I hope your trip wasn’t too bad?” His genuine smile warmed the room.

The three visitors sat in a cluster at the opposite end of the table, exchanged nods, then the dark-skinned woman in a blazer spoke for the group, “It was fine.”

“Glad to hear it, uh…?”

“Janet,” she said.

“Janet,” The bald man nodded as if he had to process the name. “Have any of you been to Minneapolis before?”

Head shakes.

“Well, we’ve got a lot to offer, though I know you’ve come to see what’s inside here, so let’s get this started! My name is David Cook, and please don’t hesitate to interrupt me to ask any questions you might have, okay?”

Nods.

He pressed a button on the cylinder he palmed and the RepliVentures logo appeared “Here at RepliVentures we specialize in creating not just a simulation of your adventure scenario, but an actual adventure where you feel, see, smell, experience everything around you. We’ve been offering adventures to groups in our dystopian cyber-future biome for about two years now,” the screen behind him shifted to various shots of a far-future urban city: a busy intersection with hover-cars speeding past, and pedestrians with strange clothes and hairstyles; then an aerial shot over a vast metropolis of towering skyscrapers. “But we’ve been around for more than five years,” he continued, “and we’re just about to open our new jungle archeological biome this summer…” the screen switched to a verdant jungle, a first-person view of moving through vines and thickets and bursting out into a bright clearing where a Mayan-looking pyramid loomed sun-bleached stone masonry covered in green creepers.

The man with short curly black hair on the woman’s left tentatively raised his hand.

“Yes, uh…?”

“Brian. So, what do you mean by ‘biome’?”

“Great question, Brian. When you came across our website that offered simulated adventures you probably thought of some kind of Westworld or Holodeck thing, am I right?”

Tentative nods.

“Well, good news – we’re not staffed by homicidal robots like Westworld, and we’re a far cry from your Star Trek Holodeck. What we do that is revolutionary is to create biomes. Simply put, a biome is a self-contained, fully-realized, actual world.” He paused dramatically. “How do we do that?” The face of Kallen appeared on screen, her hair down barely touching her shoulders, a smile touching her eyes. “Our founder, Doctor Kallen Pedersen spent five years as a leading nuclear physicist at CERN before founding RepliVentures. Her breakthrough came as she was able to create a self-contained world held in stasis in an ionized particle field. I’m no nuclear physicist myself,” he chucked in a self-deprecating way, “but the takeaway is that the ‘biome’ she created is as real a universe as this is. By containing the universe we’re able to accelerate and manipulate its development to suit our needs – in this case, to develop a futuristic dystopian techno world where you and your group band with freedom fighters to overthrow the repressive government.”

“That sounds… dangerous,” the woman stated.

“It does, right?” David acknowledged, “Fortunately, in addition to your group we have dozens of staff members in the world whose sole purpose is to make sure that no harm comes to anyone in your group.”

“But you said it’s a separate contained universe,” Brian started, “How do we get there? And how do we get back?”

“Great question, Brian. We are able to effectively ‘beam’ you to the universe,” he used his fingers to indicate air quotes around “beam”. “Once there – and, Janet, this speaks to your question of safety – you’re all given a token,” he fished a gold-colored coin out of the pocket of his sport coat and held it up. “At any time you can press this coin and it will instantly open a portal back to this world. Things a little too intense?” he clicked the button, “boom, you’re back. Need to check on your kids?” he clicked, “you’re back here. No problem!” He dropped the token back into his pocket. “Enough of me prattling on, let’s go for a tour of the facilities!”

***

“I think we found something,” said a woman at a console with three other people crowded around.

Eddie looked over to her, “Maddy, can you put it up on the screen?”

“Yes,” she said, keying something before the image on her console lit up the theater-sized screen at the front of the room. The rows of consoles gave the room a very Mission Control vibe, which, Eddie thought, was apt – they were, after all, supervising a group of users in a separate world – the parallels to a ship in space seemed apt. The view looked to be from a surveillance camera on a street corner in the world.

“What am I looking at?” Eddie asked impatiently.

“This is 25^th and Lothal,” she said. “Most of the people are NPCs – world-dwellers – but coming into the frame… now, is Lucy, one of our staff members – there in the silver jacket and purple hair.”

Eddie watched the woman come onto the screen and pause at the corner waiting for a light to change. “Okay…?”

“Here we go…. Check out that NPC to her right….” The man wore a threadbare black jacket and walked purposefully down the street heading to cross the street perpendicular to the purple-haired woman. At the last minute he bumped into the woman, spun, held up his hands in an apologetic gesture, and hurried across the street as his light turned red.

“You have more than that, yes?”

“Yes,” she said, keying her terminal and the scene zoomed so that the purple-haired woman filled the massive screen. The video moved in slow motion as the NPC in the jacket came into frame, bumped her, turned and spun. Maddie rewound the image and simultaneously zoomed into Lucy’s coat as the man bumped her. In the zoomed, frame-by-frame video, the action was unmistakable. “You can see him slip his hand into her pocket for just a second…”

“…And steal her token,” Eddie finished. “Shit!” He ran his hands through his hair. “How long ago was this? Is this an isolated incident?”

Maddie gestured to her coworkers in her row, “We’ve isolated half a dozen instances – this is the clearest shot. The earliest occurred yesterday biome-time, and the most recent was a few hours ago.”

“How many personnel and users are in the biome right now?”

“Twenty-three staff, six users, and Dr. Pedersen.”

Eddie turned to the screen filled with the still image of the man’s hand in the pocket. “What is going on here?” he said to himself.

***

Kallen pushed back through the crowd, now twice as large as when she had left. This scene was familiar, yet something did seem off – she wasn’t sure whether that was just her fear of not having a token in her possession. She clicked a button on a device in her pocket changing the channel of her communicator to the in-world staff. Without worrying about anyone in the noisy crowd hearing her, she spoke, “This is Kallen. Give me a sitrep.”

“Dr. Pedersen,” a woman’s voice sounded surprised.

“This is no time for formalities – it’s Kallen. What are we looking at? How is the finale going?”

“This is Lucy,” the same voice came back. “I’m spotting from the steps to the west of the podium, above the crowd. Alexander Fist, the president’s top lieutenant is speaking. They’re expecting the presidential limo to arrive at any time. Our six Users are with three staff and three NPCs waiting to ambush the president when he gets here.”

“Excellent, sounds just like the script,” Kallen said.

“Aye, Dr… err, Kallen. Something seems up, though. The crowd is looking… I don’t know… more amped up. We’ve run this scenario so many times and, you know, the fact that we’re dealing with sentient beings means every time is going to be a little different, but… I can’t put my finger on it.”

“Okay, Lucy, you keep me informed as the situation develops. I’m down in the crowd. If you are able to put your finger on something, let me know ASAP.”

“Roger that, boss.”

***

“These are the transport vessels,” David said, gesturing to a row of ten bright white booths that looked like a cross between an old-fashioned salon chair complete with oversized hair dryer and an MRI machine.

The three visitors moved around the booths running hands over the smooth curved plastic shell, pressing on the generously padded leather cushions. “You just sit here and…”

“Once you’re prepped for transport, you are led out here, take a seat and once everyone is seated the transport process takes about thirty seconds. There’s a bright flash of light and you’ll find yourself literally in another world, in seats just like these in a penthouse apartment. Once there you’re checked out by our staff, given your token, and that’s your entrance point for your adventure!”

“Have you done the adventure?” Janet stood next to one of the booths, arms crossed.

“I have,” he said. “Twice. The first time was when they were working the bugs out pre-release. I’ve served as staff on another scenario. Oh, and I’ve been in the new jungle biome, too. That’s going to be fun, let me tell you!”

“So, when you click your token you’re brought right back here?” Bryan asked.

David nodded, “That’s right. The click opens a portal, you step through and, boom, you’re sitting here back in the real world.”

***

The thought that she and her staff were stuck here weighed increasingly on Kallen’s mind as she pushed her way to the front of the crowd which was delineated by a line of black armor-clad police stormtroopers with transparent shields and stun batons at the ready.

“Kallen, the limo is inbound.”

“Thanks Lucy,” Kallen responded.

Indeed, the crowd to the west began to part for the black hover-limo making its way towards the foot of the stairs just ahead of Kallen’s position. A reflection from behind a column up above the square caught her eye and she suspected it was Lucy. The black limo glided silently to a stop only feet away.

Kallen liked to visit the biomes during scenarios as often as possible. Having studied as a theoretical physicist, when she made the leap to actual practical quantum physics at CERN (as practical as they were…) her enthusiasm for the subject expanded two-fold. However, after  hours when she was able to test some of her theories about creating quantum universes and then “blooming” them into a stasis-reality, her professional ambition transitioned to an obsession. Sleep became an amenity. She lost friends. Her family actually filed a Missing Persons report on her once when she’d spent five days straight in the lab without answering texts or email. But the day she transferred into a biome she had created, all the sacrifices were worth it. The first time she traded Krat, the currency of the biome, with a vendor for a plate of noodles and duck cooked over a converted flaming oil drum, she cried – though she claimed it was from the local pepper flakes in the noodles sauce.

Feeling the air of the limo coming to rest, Kallen realized this was far and away the closest she had been to the actual scenario. Her concerns for getting back vanished as the rear door to the limo opened. A red-helmed presidential guard climbed out, surveyed the crowd and the steps between the car and the podium, then nodded inside. Next out was the president’s personal secretary, a dour looking man in a black suit and aviator shades. After him, a hush fell over the crowd in anticipation of the next person exiting. Even though most of the crowd had been booing the lieutenant and the limo, everyone quieted in expectation as they watched the open door. A moment later, the carefully coifed head of the president poked out of the limo. Then he was standing in front of it, waving to the crowd that erupted again in choruses of cheers and boos.

“In position?” Lucy asked through the comm.

“Roger that,” a chorus of voices came back at close to the same time.

The secretary leaned over and whispered something in the ear of the president who nodded and turned and started up the stairs, his red guard just ahead of him.

What happened next occurred with such swiftness and ferocity that despite the fact that Kallen had witnessed it from a distance countless times as well as on vid, it still took her breath away. The red-helmed guard’s head jerked and he fell, as did the head of the secretary. A split second later two loud blaster reports echoed through the canyon of buildings. Before anyone could react to the shots or the downed people, a dozen heavily armed civilians swept in from the side, surrounding the president and placing numerous blasters to his head. The stormtroopers failed to react due to their backs being to the action, but several started to turn towards the commotion and the crowd surged at their inattention, overpowering them. Kallen struggled to stay upright as the mass of bodies pushed forward. She could see the tight phalanx of rebels around the president hauling him bodily up to the podium. She saw one of them shoot the lieutenant numerous times.  Kallen couldn’t tell whether the crowd seemed more eager this time or it was just her being down in the scrum.

“Are you okay down there, boss?” Lucy’s voice came into her comm.

Kallen struggled laterally in the crowd, knowing fighting against their forward momentum would be useless. She managed to ride the wave of people to the far west side of the stairs where she responded, “Yes, I’m alright. Everything looking okay?”

“Affirmative. They’re about to start the speeches…”

Kallen listened to the amplified PA as one of the rebels addressed the crowd. She recognized him as the Alpha Male in the group of users inserted for this scenario. There was always one that rose above – and that was necessary, really. This was a coup, and coups didn’t happen when the meek led.

“Fellow citizens of Tzen! Today is a day that will live in history as the moment we wrested power from this dictator!” he waved a handheld blaster in the face of the terrified president. The crowd roared its approval. “My friends, comrades, this begins a new chapter of hope and prosperity!” More cheers. Suddenly another man pushed in front to the mic.

“Sorry to interrupt,” the man with tightly-cropped black hair spoke in a drawl Kallen recognized as native to a southern part of Tzen. “Or, as you people say, ‘Imma let you finish, but I want to say a few words…’”

Kallen’s heart dropped. “Lucy?”

“This is new, boss.”

Kallen clicked over to the control frequency, “What the fuck is going on, Eddie?”

“This might be a coup of the coup,” the voice came back.

“What?”

“The NPCs have been pick-pocketing our people of their tokens for the last couple days. We don’t know what they’re up to, but I think we’re about to find out…”

“My name is Aegis,” the man at the microphone boomed. “First things first,” he said, and shot the president in the head at point blank range. An audible gasp sounded through the crowd and across the comm channels. “He’s really unnecessary at this point. This isn’t about him, so let’s stop this little charade, shall we?” He looked behind him, “Men?” and a number of men in khaki fatigues surrounded the civilians on the podium platform, aiming blaster rifles at the Users and Staff as well as the NPCs working with them. “We have a special guest with us today!” he announced as Kallen felt the sharp jab of the barrel of a blaster rifle in her back. Looking behind her, she saw three of Aegis’s men behind her, weapons drawn, shoving her forward.

When she cleared the crowd and the militia herded her onto the podium, gasps came through the comm. “What the fuck?” Eddie swore. “Boss, say the word, I’ve got a bead on Aegis…” For her part, Kallen quietly said, “Hold.”

“Welcome, doctor Pedersen! I know you’ve been here so many times, I figured I’d finally give you this vantage point!” he gestured to the crowd with an expansive arm and they in turn roared. “What’s wrong, Doctor, cat’s got your tongue? Certainly, you have something to say to these hundreds of thousands of lives you created and intend to, once again, wipe out in a little bit.”

Kallen stood stone-faced. Countless questions and hypothesis swam through her head – how did this happen? How did Aegis have any knowledge of previous iterations of the biome? How could they get out of this and back to their own world? Her face belied none of the swarm of thoughts. When she finally spoke, it was in a near whisper. “What do you want, Aegis?”

“What do I want?” he repeated for the benefit of the crowd. “What I want is so utterly basic and straight-forward that it hardly constitutes ‘demands’. But seeing as I literally have guns you your heads, I suppose they are demands. So, just this, Doctor: in exchange for letting you and your people go back to your world, we want out world left alone. You want to send people back in, fine, but it’s like crossing into a sovereign nation – you get permission. You don’t act unilaterally. Because, Doctor, we are a sovereign world, and we demand to be treated with respect.” More cheering.

“Is that all?” Kallen asked.

“No more, no less,” Aegis turned from the microphone and spoke directly to Kallen. “Give me your assurances, your word, Doctor, and I’ll hand your staff back their tokens right now. We’ve already secured your penthouse apartment on the northside as a border crossing. We can discuss the vagaries of entrance at a later date. For now, I just need your promise that you won’t cross over and pull the plug on this world.”

“Kallen? Is this something we really want to entertain?” Eddie’s voice came into her comm.

“Please tell Eddie that, yes, this is absolutely something you want to entertain because I am deadly serious,” he reached out an arm and shot one of the Staff in the leg. “I’m a reasonable man, Doctor. All I want is self-determination for my fellow citizens of Tzen. But if you test me, I will not hesitate to use violence to underscore my seriousness.” He followed Kallen’s gaze to the wounded employee, now on her back, as a User sought to make a tourniquet from his pant leg. “I doubt that wound will be life threatening, but you really need to get her back to your reality to make sure. That makes time of the essence, Doctor. What say you?”

Kallen started at him impassively. Finally, “Okay. You have my word, your world is sovereign. We will not reboot this biome.”

Clearly most of her promise was picked up by the mic, as the crowd cheered louder than before, a veritable wall of noise pulsing through the canyon of buildings. Aegis gestured to one of his troops who presented a cloth bag to Aegis. He handed it across to Kallen. “There. I believe you’ll find all of your tokens there. Please leave and we can discuss our formalities at a later date.”

Kallen dumped the tokens into her hand and immediately started handing them to her staff and Users. One by one their forms went ridged and then transparent, and finally gone. She saw the purple-haired Lucy jogging down the steps, long-range blaster and its heavy sight in her arms. As Kallen waited for Lucy, Aegis spoke quietly, “You had her up there with that rifle with my head in her sights the whole time. And yet…”

“And yet…” a smile touched her eyes as she tossed a token to the purple-haired woman now in range. She regarded the four tokens left in her hand. “One is mine,” she said, “And I have three more staff here.”

“I will make sure they get these poste-haste, Doctor. You have my word.”

“Until we speak again, Aegis,” she nodded.

“Doctor Pedersen,” he returned her nod as her form went ridged and winked out of existence.

***

As soon as her head cleared from the transport, Kallan practically leapt from her chair and headed to sick bay to see how her wounded staff member was. Convinced that it was, indeed, not life threatening and the doctor on duty had already removed sealed the wound, Kallen hurried to Mission Control.

Pushing open the doors, the darkened room buzzed like an agitated hornet’s nest. The screen in the front of the room was split into numerous video feeds from the biome, though a few just showed static.

“Kallen!” Eddie roared when he saw her in the doorway. “Are you okay to be here? Are you feeling alright?”

“Yes, yes, Eddie, I’m okay,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“The last staffer cleared the biome ten minutes ago. As soon as he was back we immediately moved to reset the biome.”

“You what?!”

“What?” he asked, “We tried to reset the biome. It was a little sooner than we normally do, but given the hostile nature of that scenario, we felt it best to purge that instance as quickly as possible.”

“My god, Eddie, I gave Aegis my word…”

“Look, Doctor,” he switched to formality, “We created this as a business. We can’t very well let revolutionary NPCs with delusions of grandeur get in the way of our operation.”

“Eddie, don’t you see, this is about bigger ideas than commerce…” she protested.

“We can have philosophical debates on this later, but for now it’s a moot point,” he said. “We can’t decouple the power grid to destabilize the instance.”

“What do you mean, ‘can’t’?”

The door at the back opened and the purple-haired Lucy stood framed in the doorway, now wearing a more sedate jeans and beige company-branded t-shirt. Kallen gestured for the women to come down to the front.

“I mean that procedure has been deleted from our systems. We just now tried to manually force an override to destabilize the grid, but a safety procedure stopped us,” Eddie explained.

“How is that possible?”

“I don’t know yet, all I know is we’re not yet able to reboot that thing and that has me worried, Kallen.”

Kallen noticed that Lucy, now down in front with her and Eddie, was scanning the room with a discerning eye. “Lucy? What is it?”

Lucy didn’t speak but stared at the workers at their terminals carefully. “Him,” she said, pointing to a young man with a long face and a brown mop of hair above his rimless glasses.

Upon being pointed out, he rose and started hurriedly down the row towards the exit. “Security!” Eddie yelled, though the uniformed security were already moving to intercept the man. He put up no fight as they expeditiously zip-tied his hands behind his back and led him up front.

“You’re the hacker we hired to splice the government’s data stream,” Lucy said.

He smiled, “One in the same.”

“How did you get here?” Kallen asked.

“While all of you were focused on the grand finale, two of us used your tokens to come here. He took the tokens back, and I spent the time hacking your system.”

“So, you blocked the reset protocols?” Eddie asked.

“You have no idea how tightly I wound that instance to utility power. You can’t shut that thing off without powering down the entire mid-west!” he gloated. Then yelled, “Viva Tzen!”

A silence fell on Mission Control, interrupted a moment later when the doors at the top opened. David led his guests in, “This is it. This is the heart of RepliVentures! We call it Mission Control,” he said proudly. “Oh look, down in front is Doctor Pedersen talking to Eddie Larson, our head of operations… This looks pretty intense. We should step out.” And he quietly herded the three guests out of the control room.

When they were back in the well-lit foyer and the door to Mission Control was closed again, David smiled broadly and said, “Well, that concludes the tour! Do you have any questions?”

Janet’s face split with a grin for the first time, “When can we begin?”