Chapter 2: Chapter 2: Gumdrop

“GumDrop, connect to Cloris,” Maya repeated the command again, both verbally and mentally this time. In front of her the virtual world was represented as a grid pattern - the default for GumDrop’s interface; she should really decorate this space. Though the VR world was presented before her, she could still feel the damp air of The Sand’s shop around her. Damp polycarb walls, the scent of hydraulic fluid pooled on the floor like tiny lakes spotted across hardcrete. If she wanted to, of course, she could disable to the external stimuli and fully embrace the virtual world but she rather preferred having that last anchor to the real world as this false one unfolded in front of her. “Gumdrop,” She said again. “Connect to Cloris.”

“Trouble with your link, hon?” Maileen called out from another room, invisible to Maya with her optic nerve fully commandeered by the link. 

“It’s been acting up,” Maya said with obvious annoyance. “Been showing me things.”

“That’s what GumDrop does, dear, shows you things,” Maileen called back, leaving Maya to wonder if the sarcasm was intentional. Maya bit the sides of her cheeks and lamented the fact that she hadn’t drank any water before going in. It would be an endeavor now to disconnect and hunt down a cup. She returned her attention to the field in front of her and repeated the command. This time she saw a shimmer as the room began to melt away, grid lines first and then the walls, revealing a void of white. She expected to see the main platform of Synthia, the hub world where GumDrop defaulted to whenever it couldn’t establish a connection, instead it showed something else.

“Maileen?” She called out as hardcrete materialized beneath her feet and buildings dropped in from the sky. One by one, smashing into place, the people next, then the vehicles. “Maileen?”

The world was fully formed, free of wireframe and in focus but she was having a hard time getting a grip on exactly what she was looking at. It was a city but unlike anything she’d ever seen. Above her , skyscrapers made from hardcrete stretched to an endless blue sky and up to the horizon she could see swaths of people filling the streets. Some kind of food vendor pushing a cart, people yelling out rudely and most importantly males walking alongside femmes. She frowned and looked down at her hands, counting her fingers and making sure that she was intact - not that it mattered here. 

“What is this?” She whispered to no one as a crowd of computer generated people stepped forward, jostling her as they moved past and crossed the street. Then, suddenly, it was gone; replaced entirely by the grid starting room once again. “GrumDrop, connect to Cloris.”

This time, the link obeyed, the name ‘Cloris’ appearing in thick blue letters in the air above her. Seconds later a brunette woman with pin-straight shoulder-length hair appeared in front of her. The woman was a very basic GumDrop avatar that went by the name of Sari; Maya hadn’t bothered to customize her yet. She stood there in a basic outfit; a pair of black slacks and a tan sweater. Her hands were folded in front of her, right hand over left, shoulders straight; a Corum standard. 

“Hello, Maya,” The avatar said. “I have located Cloris from your Contacts list. How would you like to proceed?” 

“Where is she?” Maya asked. 

“Locating Cloris!” The avatar said happily, her voice suddenly shifting into a hard upward inflection. Sometimes one could easily mistake the avatar for a real woman, but in moments like these where the vocal shift was too sharp, you could almost tell that the dialogue was a series of words and phrases strung together in a voice synthesizer. Still, her manufactured intelligence, or MI was advanced, considering. “I have located Cloris in The Verge, Club Sed, level five. How would you like to proceed?” 

“Run subroutine Omega X X Five, pair with file MTen dot four.”

“I’m sorry, Maya,” The MI feigned an emotional apology but smiled softly. “The file is incompatible with that subroutine.”

“Enable unauthorized programming,” She said quickly. “Authorization, delta, delta, sigma, omega, delta.” 

“Confirm?”

“Confirm,” Maya acknowledged. As the words left her ‘mouth’, she realized that she no longer felt thirsty. The dry, feeling in her throat had subsided and most importantly she could no longer smell the moisture or hydraulic fluid from The Sand’s workshop. Somehow, the neural input had changed; she was fully immersed in the VR world. It hadn’t been her intention, but it was also nothing that couldn’t be quickly changed with a visit to the settings menu and a swipe of her finger. She shrugged and waited patiently for the avatar to finish running the subroutine. Seconds after she’d issued the commend, the world around her changed, once again transformed into a white void and built from the ground up. A wooden door frame slammed into the ground in front of her followed by karamite tiles, then the walls, curved along an invisible axis and built in the shape of a half-oval that connected to four others. Along the edges of the floor, partial glass partitions appeared, each one preventing avatars from slipping off the edge of the karamite and tumbling five stories to the concourse below - not that it would have hurt them. She began to walk even as the world came into existence around her, and even as women, represented by their avatars began to drop from the sky, falling into position. From their perspective nothing had changed other than Maya materializing by the door but from Maya’s perspective the initial load had been nothing short of a miracle of creation - an MI manufactured miracle, but those were indiscernible from the genuine article, other than being real. 

In most cases she would have been popping into a VR simulator but today she’d chosen to follow Cloris into a real-world location. She could interact with it as if it were a VR simulator but in truth, it was a club located in the Kalle district - a place that Maya would likely never see in person. Dropping into a real-world location was simple; nearly all public locations were equipped with holographic drones that would project a player’s avatar into the real world, the only catch was that those drones would typically stop at the door of the venue. Maya had chosen a slightly different route this time: a fully functioning and mobile bi-pedal automaton body. The moment her avatar had occupied the neural net of the robot, a hologram resembling her own avatar had been cast over the frame, and now, a girl about her own size but with a slightly different face was standing there - an avatar for Maya to control in the real world. She instinctively flexed her hands and wiggled her ‘toes’, verifying that the input control was accurate and connected. The last thing to load was the lighting, though it happened within the span of a few heartbeats. 

The light in the space immediately dimmed, dipping Maya into pitch blackness for a second or two and then the venue was selectively illuminated by a series of spotlights placed in strategic positions. In the center of the three ovals, a square dance floor, white in color and fluctuating beneath several multicolored, strobing lights. Girls and women of all ages had thrown themselves into the dance fueled by the rhythmic beats of a familiar music track. Maya’s kept her head on a swivel, looking across the sea of round tables surrounding the dance floor; past them, to the bar at the back of the establishment lit with a neon pink backsplash and occupied by three women in their twenties. Maya watched as they interacted with the crowd, laughter and smiles as they filled drinks or recited some story, rehearsed and prepared. 

“Sari,” Maya said the name of the avatar quietly; the brunette woman appeared next to her as a neural projection that only she could see. The moment Sari appeared, a woman in the club simply passed through her, unaware that she even existed. “Set the language to Corum Standard.”

“Confirmed, Corum Standard,” Sari acknowledged. 

She found herself stepping in time to the beat as she surveyed the room, her eyes resting briefly on every table until she found exactly who she was looking for. It was a girl about her age seated at one of the tables; their eyes locked and Maya was unable to suppress a grin a she moved toward her. Cloris was a black haired girl with a thin face and skin a shade darker than Maya’s pale white complexion. Like her, Cloris was using one of the club’s robotic avatars, a service that usually cost, and yet.

“That code you wrote is amazing,” Cloris said as she sat down at the table across from her. “How long can we use these bodies for free?” 

“Until they catch us,” Maya shrugged. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

“Is your hair really red?” Cloris raised her voice as she tried to shout over the increasingly loud music. 

“Yep!” Maya nodded. It was perhaps the only thing ‘true’ about her avatar; she’d always been proud of her bright red hair. 

“I don’t know many people with red hair!” Cloris grinned, biting her lip as she regarded Maya. 

“You’ve known me for a while,” Maya pointed out.

“Yeah and I still don’t even know your real name!”

“Do I know yours?” Maya stared at her intently. “Is your real name ‘Cloris’?”

“Good point,” Cloris laughed. “But is your real name July? What kind of name is that?” 

“What kind of name is Cloris?”

“Did you really ask to meet so we could make fun of eachother’s names?” She grinned, scooting around the table to sit closer to Maya. She squeezed her hand and Maya noted once again just how real it felt. She drank in the warmth of Cloris’s hand, relishing the feelings that it spawned. It wasn’t real of course; it was the thousands of tiny sensors built into the synth’s hand - no more than a mere composite glove stretched over five mechanical fingers. 

“You got me,” Maya forced a grin as she remembered her true purpose in coming here. “But…it’s…something else.”

“Something we could have met in person for?” Cloris raised an eyebrow and slowly pulled her hand away, setting it on the table and meeting Maya’s gaze. “How long are we going to do this?”

Maya struggled to come up with an answer; it was a fair question given that they’d been meeting like this for the last two months at least. Ever since she’d met Cloris in the ‘Arianna’s World’ VR sim. She’d come up with excuse after excuse but in the end, there should have been nothing stopping them from meeting in the real world, barring Maya’s social status.

“Just…school stuff, you know?” She tried to shrug off the question. “The perks of being fourteen.”

“School stuff,” Cloris repeated back; Maya could tell that she was having a hard time suppressing an eye roll. “So…”

“Right,” Maya waved her hand, gesturing in the air with her left index finger. A menu, visible only to her appeared in the air. She scrolled through several items until she came to a gray ‘bag’ icon. She pulled up an image, taken about a month ago and made it visible to Cloris who used her own air gesture to flip it and enlarge before looking up at Maya. “It’s a male, his name is Jonath-”

“You really remember their names?” Cloris scoffed. 

“I do,” Maya replied quietly and waited for the mask of derision to fade from Cloris’s holographic face. “He disappeared, this is the security footage from that night-”

“And he’s important to you?” 

“Yes,” Maya said quickly, trying to return the conversation to the image. “There’s this woman with him, I can’t really tell who she is-”

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“July,” Cloris spoke Maya’s chosed avatar name. “males disappear. All the time. What do you expect to find?”

“In the video file, it’s this woman, she looks important, and this LPI officer. I just…I need to know what happened to him.”

“Fine,” Cloris sighed. “If this is really more import to you than our relationship-”

“Hey!” Maya hissed. “Our relationship is important to me. Okay? But we have friends, right?”

“Friends,” Cloris repeated, studying the image. “You do realize they can’t do basic math, right? They can barely do physical labor, can’t tell colors apart, talking to them is like having a conversation with a rock. How are you friends with one of them?”

“He’s different,” Maya insisted. “He’s my friend and I need to find him.”

“You’re touched in the head,” Cloris rolled her eyes. “Okay if you insist, then I can take the image and run a facial recognition scan, on the woman at least. The LPI officer is wearing a visor so that’s no good. My mom, she has access to the citizenship records. We aren’t going to find the male in there, but she definitely looks important. Look, if you want to get anywhere then you need to find out why the male was arrested. What the offense was, where they would have taken him. Detention records aren’t extensive.”

“I can’t exactly break into arrest records, that’s the LPI database, Cloris. I don’t have…”

“Yes?” Cloris tilted her head as Maya took pause and scrunched her forehead. 

“My neural link doesn’t have the right hardware. I can’t match their protocols. The newer ones though…”

“You mean the LEZ Proto?”

“They’re not even available here,” Maya sighed. “Do you have one?”

“They’re not even for civilians,July,” Cloris informed her. “My mom has one at work. I’ll never be able to touch it.” 

“Then just do the facial recognition thing,” Maya shook her head. “if I can figure out who she is then maybe I can figure out where they took him.”

“Or,” Cloris reached across the table placing her hands atop Maya’s. “You could focus on what you have right in front of you.”

“Cloris I am focusing on you, I just…I- I need to figure this out, okay? You just have to trust me-”

Maya’s face dropped as a notification appeared in the upper right corner of her heads-up display. She read the small blue text and then looked back to Cloris who studied her with concern. Maya twisted her synth head around, surveying the room. It was packed with people, some at tables, many on the dance floor. 

“Security notification,” She explained quickly. “Someone’s onto us.”

“Onto us?” Cloris frowned. “What do you mean?”

“We’re using synth bodies that we didn’t pay for. Someone noticed, we have to get out of here.” 

“So we’ll just disconnect,” Cloris said quickly, raising her finger to gesture for the menu; Maya grabbed her hand and pushed it back to the table. 

“There’s a connection log,” Maya said hurridly. “If we leave now they’re going to be able to access the log and find out exactly who we are. Then the LPI comes knocking at our doors. I coded a subroutine, we just need to activate it but it’s going to take three minutes to purge the log. We need to hide until then.”

“I know just the place,” Cloris grinned. She rose from the table and Maya was able to see her full avatar for the first time since entering the club. Her heart, virtual as it was, fluttered in her chest as she took in the shape of her body paired with an otherwise simple black dress that hung just below her knees. Maya took a deep breath as she took in the sight of Cloris’s long black hair flowing past her shoulders, framing her face perfectly. Did she look like this in real life, or had she crafted her avatar just as Maya had? 

“Stop gawking!” Cloris laughed as she took Maya by the hand and led her across the club, toward the dance floor. They passed through strobing lights and past people, jostling shoulders, butting arms, flattening herself between two women who were apparently in separable. As she followed Cloris, her eyes scanned the periphery, looking for suspicious figures in the crowd. She thought she could see two women in black moving through the swathes of people, their heads on a swivel as they sought out the two rogue synths. Detecting she and Cloris wouldn’t be a difficult feat; they would likely be equipped with visual augments that would highlight the two stolen bodies in bright red - their only hope would be to disappear into the crowd. 

“Okay, I’m going to activate the subroutine for both of us,” Maya said above the pounding music as she tried to keep a visual on Cloris. The strobes were effective, plunging sections of the club into complete darkness for fractions of a second at a time, giving the illusion that the people around them were exhibiting choppy movement, dances played out in stop motion to an unrelenting symphonic soundtrack. As Maya activated the subroutine, a countdown timer appeared in the corner of her vision, starting at 03:00:59. The numbers began to count down as Cloris pulled her into the center of the dance floor; Maya instinctively began to move her body in time with Cloris who grinned as she extended her hands above her head, keeping in time with the music. Overhead, different colored lights flashed on and off, shrouding Cloris in darkness, then illuminating her at intervals. Maya tried to focus on the countdown timer but instead found herself staring at Cloris’s perfect features. She smiled widely, noting Maya’s attention and for a brief moment, amidt the throngs of people, the symphonic soundtrack, and the illuminated squares of the dance floor, they were alone, lost in eachother’s eyes, drawing closer and closer until they came together in the darkness, drawing one another in an embrace as their lips met. Kissing in a synth body was nowhere near the real thing, but it was real enough, and Maya surrendured to the feeling as her tension momentarily died. They separated, Cloris looking into her eyes as they parted and the club slowly came back into the forefront of their awareness. 

“Someday,” She whispered to Cloris, a promise that she couldn’t keep. They maintained eye contact as the timer hit zero and the scene in front of Maya abruptly ended, knocking her back to reality as the neural link disconnected. The damp air, the smell of hydraulic fluid, the sound of The Sand operating a pneumatic drill out in the garage. Cloris was gone, Maya was back. She coughed as the dryness in her throat returned and she gripped the wireless headset on her forehead. Pulling it aside, she hopped out of the chair to see Maileen sitting at the steel table, her eyes focused on a holo screen displayed directly in front of her. Maya couldn’t see the contents of the display from this side, but she was sure that it contained facts and figures - expense reports from the shop and the budget available for the month. In name, she owned the shop, or at least the contract for it. The Sand, however, tended to do most of the heavy lifting. His affinity for vehicle maintenance and weapon repair reminded her of what Cloris had just said about male intelligence. Clearly the stereotype wasn’t entirely true, and it hadn’t held true with Jonathan. 

“Did you see Cloris again?” Maileen asked, barely looking away from the screen.

“Yeah,” Maya crossed the room and stopped at the basin sink, snatching a transparent cup and holding it beneath the faucet. She filled it to the brim with lukewarm water and gulping it down; the soreness in her throat began to subside, and she set the cup down on the edge of the sink, wiping her mouth with her hand. 

“You should meet with her, in the real world,” Maileen suggested. “If she means this much to you.”

“Won’t work,” Maya shook her head and then leaned back into the lip of the sink, her hands folded in front of her. “Do you have any idea where she lives?”

“People have overcome greater distances,” Maileen suggested.

“If she knew where I lived, she would never speak to me again,” Maya argued. “Those people-”

“If you have such a dislike for those people, then why are you so attached to her?” Maileen disengaged the holo-screen and looked to Maya. She was a fair skinned woman with a head full of brown hair that hung past her shoulders, even tied into a tail as it was. “And if you have no intention of meeting her, then what you’re doing is a bit immoral, is it not?”

“I don’t know what’s moral anymore,” Maya told her. “Three months since Jonathan disappared, since they took him. A year since they took my- since they took Takis. Who even cares about what’s right?”

“Lots of people will try tellin’ you what’s right,” The Sand stepped through the door from the connected garage, a soiled wrench in his hand. Maya hadn’t even heard the pneumatic drill cease operation. The Sand was an older man, Maya probably could have guessed around sixty with graying hair and a mural of wrinkles creasing his face. The gray on his head was accompanied by stubble across his cheeks and upper lips. He was dressed in a simple brown tunic with a pair of cloth pants, typical for males in an industrial role. “Some people, they’ll tell you that right’s what’s in your heart. But you wanna know what the truth is?”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me,” Maya crossed her arms. The Sand always had some piece of advice tucked away for anyone that would listen. 

“Truth be,” He cleared his throat. “You tell you what’s right. You listen, you learn, you change your ways bit by bit. Y’see, people out there, always talk about changing, about how they think they need ta’ become a better person, but does anyone ever change? Ain’t no one ever change,” The Sand scoffed. “That’s a pile o’ you know what. They all stay the same, they just follow directions, they do pretend, and some of the best people, they do pretend that they know’ll do better for everyone else.”

“But what if what people think is right isn’t what’s actually right? What if they’re actually doing wrong by everyone?” Maya argued. 

“Well, then it’d be up to which side is more determined,” The Sand shrugged as he partially turned to return to the garage. “But that’s a whole ‘nother thing, isn’t it?”

“I really just wanted to kiss a girl,” Maya sighed.

“Who doesn’t?” 

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