Restricted Fantasies Read online

  I could cover my eyes, but I couldn’t keep myself from hearing them. And I couldn’t do anything about the stench. Burnt flesh mixed with a foul chemical stew. A waft of bleach, or something that smelled like it, and the odor of dirt-caked people who hadn’t bathed in months. It sent me into a coughing fit, and I had to take off my suit jacket and cover up my nose just to get past them.

  I kept telling myself that none of it was real, repeating it under my breath like a mantra. It was all just somebody else’s fantasy, his own private world where he could live exactly how he pleased. That was the only way I was going to make it: reminding myself that none of it was real in the end.

  But the longer I walked, the more I hated him for his fantasies. He’d put them here, right out in the front as a greeting to visitors. I expect he didn’t get many. He wanted to offend me, to force me to run this gauntlet of horrors if I was going to see him. He didn’t want me there, but he wasn’t going to get rid of me that easily.

  I came to a grassy plaza surrounded by a scattering of squat grey buildings. It was plastered with more banners, flapping those nasty lines back and forth in the wind. I could hear the speeches droning out over the city through the loudspeakers, chanting a never-ending prayer to false gods the rest of us had buried long ago. And there were more bodies hanging from the gallows in the center of the plaza, sacrificial tributes to the man they worshipped here.

  A platoon of soldiers stomped through the streets in their metal helmets and their jackboots. A few of them pulled a frightened man into an alley. He was thin, with frizzy black hair tucked under his cap and hollow eyes filled with fear. “Jew,” they said, and spat in his face. They shouted things at him, screaming into his ears from either side. One of them slapped him, knocking his cap to the ground.

  “I’m not,” he said. “My mother—”

  The soldiers didn’t care, and they didn’t listen. They started into him, fists and elbows and knees barraging the man until his face was a featureless purple mush. He fell to the ground and they kept at it, kicking at his skull with their jackboots until the alley was covered in a sickly pink puddle and the man moved no more. They laughed, then, leaning against the alley wall to smoke their cigarettes and stare at me with predator’s eyes as I passed.

  All those things were bad, and all of them made my stomach turn. But they weren’t the worst thing about the place, not by a longshot.

  The worst thing was what he was doing to his kids.

  I headed for a blocky concrete building that took up most of the city’s center. It looked like a bunker, with barbed wire ringing the perimeter and rolling along the roof like a crown of thorns. The guards practically growled as I walked inside, but there was nothing they could do to me. I was real and they weren’t, and their master knew he had to let me through. He didn’t know why I was here, not yet, and he was probably hoping he could bluster his way past whatever bureaucratic obstacle I posed.

  The inside of the building was all soldiers and checkpoints, cold efficiency without even a splotch of color to humanize the place. The guards pointed me towards a corner office at the end of the hall, and then they went back to their vigil. I walked there alone, opening the door and steeling myself for the confrontation to come. A man sat before me, the vision of Nordic perfection.

  Heinrich Hesselmann.

  His hair was blonde, his eyes were blue, and his skin had practically been bleached. He had the physique of an Olympian, even though he hadn’t earned it.

  I knew what he really looked like. I had photos, and they weren’t anything like this. Potbellied and bald, with yellow teeth in place of yellow hair. Heinrich wasn’t his real name, either. He’d been born as Bert Hamilton, but he didn’t like the ring of that one. Not that any of it mattered. He was the one I’d come for, and the digital makeover couldn’t hide who he really was. Not from me.

  The walls of his office were lined with standards, golden eagles perching atop that flag he loved so much. A copy of Mein Kampf was on his desk, right there in the middle of it. He’d put it there to tweak me, I think. He didn’t strike me as the type who liked to read. Heinrich’s portrait took up most of the wall behind him, the idealized blonde version of him, his hand angled upwards in salute. Two soldiers stood at attention on either side of the door. Waffen-SS, by the uniforms. Those black jackets, those skulls, and the Iron Cross hanging from each of their necks. I knew exactly who they were, and I knew exactly who old Bert was, too.

  “Mr. Hamilton,” I said, extending my hand. His face went sour as I dropped his real name. Two could play these little games, and I was as happy to take jabs at him as he was to take them at me.

  “Hesselmann,” said Heinrich, bristling. “My name is Hesselmann.”

  “Nice place,” I said. “Scenic.”

  “I thought you’d like it,” said Heinrich. He muttered something under his breath. A command to the computer that ran the simulation, most likely. The speeches outside grew louder, angry German ravings that pounded against the walls of the building. I could hear a crowd in the square outside, warped into existence from nowhere. They were applauding the speech, sounding out their salutes and roaring at every word.

  But I couldn’t let Heinrich rattle me. He wanted me scared, and he wanted me gone, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

  “I expect you want to know why I’m here,” I said.

  “I already know,” said Heinrich. “Because your Jew paymasters sent you. They gave you a handful of shekels to turn Judas against your own kind. They may run the world out there. But I run the world in here. And there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it.”

  I didn’t take the bait. I took a breath instead, kept my calm demeanor, and stayed professional for as long as I could manage it.

  “You know the law, Heinrich,” I said. “And you’re breaking it.”

  “My world,” said Heinrich. “My reality. My laws.”

  “To a point,” I said. “But there’s laws outside, too.”

  “I know the laws outside pretty damned well,” said Heinrich. “And I’ve got a right to fantasize about whatever I want, period. Supreme Court says so. I take it you’ve heard of Wheeler v. Quarterman?” I had, of course. A seminal legal case, the one that made all of this possible. He smiled smugly, savoring a victory he thought was already in the bag. “My fantasies are private, and so are everyone else’s. The law says you can’t regulate what I do in here. Don’t like it? Get your own simulation.”

  I hated when they got like this. They always did when they cut themselves off from everyone else for long enough. He was right, in a sense. This was his reality. He was the ruler of his own private kingdom, a virtual reality world that he could run however he pleased. The law was clear on that: a person’s private fantasies are their own private business.

  It had taken a while to get there. We’d tried regulation at first, but that was a mess. Too many weirdos, too many people to go after, and too many people who thought they were the normal ones and everyone else’s fantasies should be banned instead. And after the Great Social Media War of 2037, nobody was interested in another ten or twenty thousand deaths over somebody else’s political views, no matter extreme they were. The courts had stepped in and ruled that regulating what someone does in the privacy of their own simulation was entirely unconstitutional, the violence had finally stopped, and that was that.

  But the law Heinrich was hiding behind wasn’t the only law. He’d crossed a line. He was a grown man, and he could simulate whatever fantasies he wanted.

  His children were an entirely different matter.

  I cleared my throat, and then I started into it. The reason I’d come to this bleak little place, this throwback to a world most people just wanted to forget about. “This environment. It’s inappropriate. Kids shouldn’t be raised in it. You know better than that.”

  Heinrich’s eyes narrowed, and his perfect face was marred with a scowl. He hadn’t seen that one coming. He’d thought I was just some
helpless bureaucrat here to put a scare into him. It happened from time to time, when the craziest ones left their sims and started trying to force their reality onto everyone else. He’d thought I didn’t know what he’d done, and he’d thought he was safe. Now his eyes lit with suspicion. “They’re my kids. My family. And it’s our right to live however we please.”

  “That’s true enough for you,” I said. “But not for them.”

  “Go to hell,” snarled Heinrich. “Or better yet, go right on down to the camps. We’ve still got them, just up the road.” I must have squirmed a little in the chair. His mouth curved up into half a smirk, his tongue flicking out and lapping up my discomfort. “You can smell ‘em from here, if you open up the window. Thousands and thousands of Jews, burning away into ash. Just like they did in the forties. Just like they should have done to all of ‘em.”

  I didn’t react, and I didn’t let him get to me. I just snapped my fingers and my business card appeared in my hand, materializing from nowhere. I flipped the card onto his desk with a theatrical toss, and his eyes went cold as he read it: Mark Kenneton, Department of Social Services, Restricted Fantasies Division.

  It was a little trick I had to let them know I meant business. Some of them thought they could control everything as long as it was inside their own sim. They were right, to a point, but we had a few tools of our own. “I saw what you’re simulating. I saw it all. Fine for you, but your kids are minors, and I make the rules for them. And I say this little sim of yours is an entirely inappropriate environment to raise children in.”

  He rolled the card in his hands, memorizing my name. Probably thought he’d retaliate somehow, or tell one of his real world buddies about me and ask them to threaten me offline. I wasn’t scared. Not a bit. There were thousands of men just like him. They lived in private fantasy worlds, simulations of history gone wrong. Worlds where the Germans had won the war and everything was the way it should have been, if only the Führer had gotten his way.

  But having thousands of men behind you didn’t matter if every one of them was a coward. They could talk a big game inside their sims, but none of them would ever leave their VR pods to confront you in real life. They certainly wouldn’t do it to fight someone else’s battle, not even for someone like Heinrich who was one of their own.

  “You say this place is inappropriate for children,” said Heinrich. “What about your world? Run by Jews. Filled with mongrels, with Aryans made slaves to the lesser races. My kids won’t be raised in a place like that. They’re going to grow up here. With me. With the world like it’s supposed to be.”

  “They’re not just your kids,” I said. “I talked to your wife. And she’s not exactly happy about this.”

  Unhappy was an understatement. She’d been hysterical, and if she hadn’t turned us onto Heinrich we’d probably have never even known what he was doing. Two daughters, and he’d kidnapped them both. He’d taken them on a routine custody visit, and then he’d just disappeared. It’d been years before we’d been able to track any of them down, and even then we’d only managed to find Heinrich. Where his daughters were was anyone’s guess.

  “She’s a bitch,” said Heinrich. He made a cutting gesture across his throat with one of his fingers. “A bitch and a snitch.”

  I’d met guys like this before. My mom married one of them a few years after she broke up with my dad. I spent my teenage years being raised in-sim, and it wasn’t any more pleasant than what Heinrich was doing to his own kids. My dad still got visitation, and every day he had us was a risk. They never knew what I was going to say to him, and they never knew what ideas I’d come back to the sim with.

  My mother’s new husband didn’t like me going, and he did everything he could to stop me. And any time he even suspected that I’d said a word about how we lived to anyone outside of the family, I caught a beating, or worse. You could do terrible things to someone in-sim, and none of it would ever leave a mark. Snitches got stitches. That’s what he always said. You needed to teach your kids that attitude if they were going to keep something like this a secret for very long.

  “You’ll never find them,” said Heinrich. “Never in a million years. You can look and look and look. They might not even be in the country.” His face lit up with a triumphant glow. “I know I’m not.”

  “Bangkok Smiles and Happiness Simulation Center,” I said. “We looked.” The really screwed up types tended to end up in places like that. It was easier to find someone willing to design the type of sim you wanted to live in, no questions asked. And there wasn’t any risk of the place that was housing you suddenly growing a conscience and deleting all of your code.

  “They could be here, too,” said Heinrich. “There isn’t any extradition from here, not for crimes in-sim. They could be anywhere. The world’s too big. Too many pods to search. Billions and billions.”

  He was right, about the real world at least. Billions of people living out their lives in whatever private fantasy they wanted. Most of them stay connected with the rest of society, even if only virtually. Normal people keep their sex fantasies to themselves and spend the rest of their time in the multis. You can talk with people in the multis, and you’re all playing in the same sandbox.

  But the crazy ones, they live alone. They have to, because most of them fantasize about shitting all over everyone who isn’t exactly like them. I’ve seen some screwed up stuff. I’ve seen fantasies about killing off all the men or enslaving all the women. I’ve seen fantasies for every race, color, or creed where one of them rules over all the other ones. And I once saw a fantasy about “social justice” where everyone had to correctly use 1,187 different personal pronouns on penalty of death.

  This Nazi thing wasn’t the darkest fantasy I’d come across, not by a longshot. The world my mother’s husband put me into was even worse. And every political group had its crazies, even if one particular side can only ever see the crazies on the other. Right and left, and at the far end they’re just the same lunatics wearing different symbols. I’d pulled kids out of a few sims run by “anti-fascists,” and there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between them and Heinrich. They all liked the pomp and circumstance, they all liked the fantasies of power, and more than anything they all liked the violence. Just peas in a pod, the jackboots the same even if their flags were a different color.

  Heinrich leaned back in his chair, plopping his own pair of black boots atop his desk. I knew we were done here. His daughters’ physical bodies were who knew where, and he was off in Thailand with their minds, running the world I was visiting with an iron fist. He thought he’d won, and he thought he was in charge. He would have been, too, if the code for his sim was running the way it was supposed to.

  But he didn’t know how determined the Restricted Fantasies Division could be.

  I stood from my seat, acting like I’d given up, like I was just about to leave. He stood, too, holding out his hand to shake and send me on my way. I reached into my jacket and pulled out a little grey device that looked like a remote control. He gave me a funny look, but not before I’d pointed it at him and pressed one of the buttons.

  He fizzled as electricity ran up and down his body, his skin turning a pale shade of blue. His face twisted into a grimace, he rose halfway out of his seat, and then he stopped, frozen in place and flickering in and out of existence.

  I rolled the remote control in my hand. It wasn’t a remote, not really; they picked that shape because it’s easy to use. It was just a visual representation of what amounted to a set of cheat codes for Heinrich’s little world: back-door commands that some hacker at the Division had spliced into the software that ran his simulation. They could give me some limited control over the place while I was here, at least for a while. The Thais wouldn’t like that we’d done it, but if they didn’t want to follow our laws, then we weren’t going to follow theirs, either.

  I did the SS guards next, just in case. They couldn’t hurt me, but they could slow me down, or even give Hei
nrich enough time to stop me and boot me out of the sim. They were standing there like statues; he hadn’t had time to give them any orders, and they couldn’t form a coherent thought on their own. Just like the real thing, if I remember my history correctly. I zapped them with the remote and made sure they stayed that way.

  All that was the easy part. But Heinrich would only be out of it for ten minutes, tops. At the end of the day it was his simulation, and even our best hackers couldn’t get more than the bare minimum of overrides installed behind the Thai firewalls. The Thais kept their sims as locked down as they could; taboos were big business, and nobody wanted to frighten the customers. Sim tourists spent a lot of money, and the Thais wouldn’t even have let me inside if Heinrich’s daughters weren’t U.S. citizens.

  They were in here somewhere. Anna, age six, and Lisa, age nine. Despite what Heinrich had said, we were sure their physical bodies were in the U.S. back in meat space. They didn’t have passports, and Heinrich had left the country alone, one man with a one-way ticket to his own personal paradise.

  But it wasn’t hard to hook up to a sim from anywhere in the world. The software generating the sim didn’t have to run in the U.S.; all it had to do was stream data over to our networks and someone could jack into a simulation running anywhere on the planet. We could make all the laws we wanted for our own sims. The rest of the world didn’t always care. And some countries made it a point not to verify the ages of the people jacking in.

  Heinrich must have stashed the two of them away somewhere in the real world before he left for Thailand. Probably in a public sim center, sleeping their lives away in a little box with tubes to keep them fed while they dreamed. The centers didn’t cost a dime, and they were filled to the brim with the poor and the homeless. It was the perfect place to hide. They wouldn’t need money, and they’d wouldn’t ever need to leave.