Restricted Fantasies Read online

  And there were so many sims with so much data being streamed over so many networks that nobody could possibly check it all. We’d tried a sniffer A.I., but we hadn’t come up with a thing. It didn’t surprise me. Heinrich would have registered his daughters with fake names if they were in a public center. If he had the money stashed away somewhere, he might even have found a black market center willing to hide their datastream entirely, no questions asked.

  Regardless of where they were, there wasn’t any way to find them, not in the real world. It wasn’t like they were the only children being raised in-sim. Lots of people did it, and the most competitive parents demanded it. Gives the kids an edge, they thought, and they were probably right. Some of those worlds are perfectly designed teaching tools, and a child who goes through a few years of that can put a Harvard grad to shame. There were too many children growing up in-sim to monitor, and people like Heinrich were taking advantage of it to raise their kids with something less than their best interests at heart.

  But if Anna and Lisa were physically in the U.S., we could still get them back. Their minds were connected here, to this place, and there was a stream of data flowing from Thailand back through the networks to their VR pods. This was the source, the world the data came from. It’s why I was here. If I could tag the data where it started, we’d have a trace. We’d follow the datastream to wherever they were, and the Division would find them back in the real world and get them out.

  Now all I had to do was find them in here.

  I ran down the hallway, slowing to a brisk walk as I came to another pack of guards at the building’s entrance. I had to be careful. They couldn’t hurt me, but they could slow me down for long enough for Heinrich to find me and stop me himself. I wasn’t sure how they’d been programmed, and as dumb as their A.I. probably was, they might notice someone running through the building like a madman. They eyed me suspiciously as I walked outside, but otherwise they didn’t do a thing.

  I put a hand to my eyes and scanned the plaza. It was filled with people Heinrich had summoned, party members wearing starched brown shirts and crowding around the gallows at the center. There were loudspeakers fitted atop the gallows, blaring out their speeches as the bodies swung below them, and the crowd was growing angrier the longer the speeches went on.

  A few soldiers dragged an old woman onto the wooden platform. She was dressed in rags, terror shining from her eyes, and she started screaming something about her son. Nobody cared. The soldiers fitted her with a noose, and a chant rose from the crowd. It was in German, and I couldn’t make it out at first. But then the words clicked, and I heard his name.

  “Hessel-mann. Hessel-mann. Hessel-mann.”

  It made sense. Heinrich was the Führer here. His type always were. They never simulated a world with their hero in charge, because every single one of them secretly dreamed of taking his place. But the Führer was occupied, and I had more important things to do than watch the twisted show his puppets were performing.

  “Scanner,” I said. Another device appeared in my hand, a tiny green computer screen with a handle attached. I pressed a button on it and the beeping started. Little blips on the screen, pointing me in the right direction. Showing me where the girls had to be.

  It was easier to track someone inside a simulation than you might think. The key was to follow the data.

  Some people used to think sims like this weren’t even possible, that you’d have to spend an infinite amount of energy to come anywhere close to something realistic. Some people thought you’d have to simulate each and every galaxy and each and every atom, and you’d never find a way to power it all.

  Some people aren’t very imaginative.

  The place looked real, but most of it wasn’t even active at any given time. It saved power that way. Why simulate an entire galaxy when no one can even see it? Why simulate anything other than what a person was actually perceiving at any given moment? It was a waste of time and energy, and it didn’t make any sense, not when you thought about it for more than a minute.

  Trickery and deceit were key to the efficiency of the design of any good sim. The important part is that there isn’t really a world inside a simulation, there’s just a person’s point of view. When you simulate a world, you’re not simulating everything. You’re only generating enough of it to fool someone into thinking they’re really there. The second I stop looking at something, the computer stops processing it. It’s surprisingly easy to simulate an entire universe when there’s only a few people living in it. All it takes to simulate a galaxy you can never actually visit is a telescope, some pictures, and a few guys in white coats to swear up and down that it’s really there whenever you’re not looking.

  That’s where the scanner came in. Wherever data was being processed in the sim, a real live human being was there. It followed the data, and it pointed me towards them like a dowsing rod. I spun in a slow circle, waving the scanner all around me. I started in the direction of the concentration camps. Not a single blip, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The girls weren’t there; no one was. It didn’t even exist, not right now, and it wouldn’t until there was someone there to see it again.

  I kept moving the scanner until finally there was a soft beep. I stepped towards the sound, listening to the beeping grow louder. Then I heard a high-pitched whine, and I had them: east. There was data being processed somewhere to the east. I completed the circle, and by the time I was done I was sure it had to be them. There were only three hits: from the east, from back in Heinrich’s bunker, and from when I pointed the scanner directly at myself.

  I headed east, keeping my distance from the crowd until I made it to a side street. I looked up at the sign for the name: Göringstrasse. It was a thin cobblestone path that ran between rows of apartments in a run-down ghetto, but it was exactly what I needed. I ducked past a group of brownshirts parading towards the plaza, and I slipped onto the street and broke into a run. I didn’t have long before Heinrich would be awake again, and I had to get to his daughters before he figured out a way to stop me.

  The beeps grew louder the further I went. A pair of soldiers eyed me from the doorway of one of the buildings, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t have time for stealth. I just kept running, following the sound of the scanner. I heard them yelling from behind me: “Halten sie!” But I was too close for that. I could see it up ahead, the place his daughters had to be.

  I didn’t speak enough German to be able to read all the signs, but the building ahead of me couldn’t be anything but a school. It was the only bright building in the entire place, its roof a vibrant dollhouse pink. There was a small playground nearby, a see-saw and a jungle gym planted in the middle of an adjacent grassy field.

  And the scanner was going wild. There was data being processed inside, data that was being sent outside of the sim. Someone was perceiving what was inside the building. There was someone real in there. It wasn’t Heinrich, and it wasn’t me, and that meant it had to be them.

  The shouts grew louder from behind me; the soldiers were closing in. They shouldn’t have been that close. I turned and looked: they were jumping through space, blinking out and then reappearing closer to me, ignoring the laws of physics and coming at me faster than a human could run. They aimed their rifles at me, shouting something I couldn’t understand. But I got the gist of it. I turned away, hoofing it for the school. I was out in the open now, an easy target, and I didn’t make it far before they opened fire.

  The first bullet struck me in the right shoulder, knocking me to the ground. It didn’t hurt, but I felt the force of it like I’d been punched. Blood was streaming all over my shirt, and I couldn’t move my arm. Sparks flew from the cobblestones in front of me, painting the street orange. Another bullet hit my leg, and another my stomach. None of it hurt, but I’d be crippled before long. And I only had a few more minutes before Heinrich was awake again and coming after me.

  I couldn’t move one arm, but I still had the other. I had to stop th
em. If they hit me too many more times I was done. My body wouldn’t move in here, and the only choice I’d have would be to log out and start all over. And Anna and Lisa might not be here by the time I got back.

  I turned, aiming the remote at the soldiers with my left hand and pressing away, over and over again. I was pointing wildly, and bullets were still punching through me, jerking my hand from side to side. But somehow I got the closest one, leaving him hanging in the air mid-stride, popping in and out of existence and totally helpless.

  The other soldier stopped firing, just for a second, eyes agog at his friend. It wasn’t real surprise, just an automatic response that made him seem more human. But the delay was enough. I zapped him next, leaving him staring at the other soldier in mock astonishment.

  I pointed the remote at my arm. “Heal,” I said, and clicked the button. That was all it took; the wound was gone, and I had control of both arms again. A few more clicks and my body was in working order, the blood had disappeared, and I was back on my feet.

  I stood there for a minute, breathing hard and working to calm myself down. I hated getting wounded in-sim. Hated it. It didn’t hurt, not here. Whether he had the pain settings on or not, I didn’t know. It didn’t really matter. Heinrich’s simulation could stream whatever data it wanted to me, but my VR pod was the one that controlled how I experienced it. It wouldn’t simulate anything even approaching pain, let alone the feeling of a gunshot wound.

  But it hadn’t always been that way. Not for me.

  My mother’s husband had been something of an extremist when it came to religion. He was a member of the Church of the Electric Spirit, and once he had his hooks in my mother, then she was, too. They’re small, and they’re more of a cult than anything. And they’re into pain. Flagellation gone digital. It was all about feeling the pain of Christ as a way of communing with him. About knowing him through knowing his suffering, exactly the way he’d experienced it. And with the right sim, you can suffer however you’d like.

  I was just a teenager, but it didn’t matter. The younger the better, as far as they were concerned.

  Every day, I’d carry the cross. Every day, I’d feel those thorns poking into my forehead. Every day, Roman soldiers would whip me until the flesh of my back was a scarlet mess. And every day, I’d reach the top of the mount and get nailed to the wood. I’d feel every blow of the hammer as it sent the metal into one hand, then the next, and finally through my feet. I suffered, died, and was buried, nearly every day for four years before someone from the Division finally found me and got me out.

  I still remember the day they saved me. I was hanging there on the cross, my throat parched, a crow pecking at my shoulder and eating little bits of me while I watched. The soldiers laughed, shouting insults up at me. Liar. Thief. King of the Jews, and now king of nothing. Then a woman came, auburn hair tied in a bun behind her and horror in her eyes. I thought she was an illusion, maybe some kind of glitch in the system.

  But then she pointed a remote at me and she clicked. The nails disappeared, I fell to the ground, and a few clicks later all the pain was gone. The woman told me she was sorry, that it was time for me to leave. My mother appeared from nowhere, shrieking at her, demanding that she stop. She told the woman she was a blasphemer, a whore, and she shouted at me that they were taking me off to the fires of Hell. Then it all went black, and I woke up again in the real world.

  I believed my mother for years. I thought I was damned, and I was in my mid-twenties before I really understood that they’d helped me by taking me out of there. I even simulated the crucifixion again once, a few years later and in private. I forced the pain on myself because I thought I deserved it. I didn’t last long, not when it was my choice instead of someone else’s. I didn’t even make it all the way to Calvary.

  I never saw my mother again, and now I wouldn’t want to. But it’s what made me join the Restricted Fantasies Division. Memories of the pain, memories of what it’s like to learn that everything you’d been taught was a lie. It’s what brought me here, and it’s why I wasn’t leaving without those two girls.

  I sprinted towards the schoolhouse, throwing open the door. A plump old matron blocked my way, shouting at me to go, telling me I wasn’t wanted here. I just zapped her and pushed by, squeezing past her through the hallway.

  The schoolhouse was small, only a few rooms, and I kicked open every door I saw. On the third one I found what I’d come for: a room full of children and a teacher standing at the front of it, scrawling out math problems on the chalkboard.

  I scanned the room. There were probably forty kids in there, mostly girls. Every one of them blonde, all around the same age and virtually indistinguishable. The pictures I’d seen didn’t help; Heinrich had put them into idealized bodies just as perfectly Aryan as his own. I had to find the two I was looking for, and the scanner wasn’t any good. It was beeping anywhere I pointed it; the entire room was being processed by the sim, and I didn’t have any way to tell who was really perceiving it and who was just an AI.

  “Anna,” I called. “Lisa.”

  None of them answered. I tried again. “Your father sent me here. He wants you to come with me, just for a minute.” A roomful of blank faces stared back at me, none of them acknowledging that I’d said a word.

  I heard sirens blaring from outside and dogs barking in the distance. Heinrich was awake again, and he wasn’t going to be happy.

  “Fuck it,” I said, and went with Plan B.

  I pointed the remote out at the classroom and clicked. The desks blinked upwards, suddenly hovering six feet off the ground, the children still in them. Most of the kids just sat there, ignoring the impossible and looking straight ahead as if nothing had happened. Only two of them reacted: two girls in the back of the room, squirming and squealing in terror.

  The AI wasn’t programmed to react to something as absurd as that, and so it didn’t. I knew who I was looking for, and I had them. I clicked again, and the desks blinked back to the floor. I heard the door to the schoolhouse slamming open, and I heard shouting from out in the halls. I only had a few seconds. Heinrich had me, and there wasn’t any more time to waste.

  “Anna,” I said, holding out my hand to the taller one. “We have to go.”

  She looked up, her perfect blue eyes staring up at me. She was the picture of innocence, a little angel who’d been pulled into a Hell she couldn’t even understand. She didn’t deserve this. Neither of them did. She looked back at my hand, back up at me, and then she stood from her chair.

  “Jew,” she said, and she spat in my face.

  I wiped it from my eyes, looking down to see both little girls kicking away at my shins, their faces distorted with anger and hatred. Something inside me sank. The word bit me, and not how they’d intended. They were right, in a way. I’d been a Jew so many times, in so many simulations. Hanging there on that cross, pretending I was him. Tears dripped down my cheeks as memories flooded my mind.

  I didn’t know which of us had had it worse. I’d been shown the suffering of another to try to make me care for the rest of mankind. It had worked, but it had warped me in the process, and I’d been damaged for years because of it. These little girls had been shown the suffering of others, too. But to them it had all been cheap entertainment. Something that didn’t really affect them. Something to laugh at and giggle at, so long as it was directed at someone who they thought deserved it.

  I’d been taught how to die on a cross. They’d been taught how to nail someone up on one.

  But there wasn’t anything I could do about it, not now. So I did the only thing I could: I pointed the remote at them, and I clicked it for the last time.

  Their eyes glowed orange, and then they both dropped limp to the floor. The trace was on, following the datastream back to wherever their bodies were. There’d be a signal when it arrived, and an entire team from the Division was waiting to find them and pick them up. I’d done it. They weren’t out yet, but they would be soon. They’d get
better in time, I hoped. They were still young. They could learn to live another way. I knew that more than anyone.

  I felt a kick in my back, and then another. I slumped to my knees, blood dripping from my chest. New wounds from new bullets. It didn’t matter. I was done here. The girls would be rescued soon, and Heinrich would be the only one left in this little world of his, railing against his enemies alone. I could hear him behind me, barking commands at his men. I tried to move my arms, but I couldn’t. The sound blurred, and so did my vision. I closed my eyes, smiled, and waited for it to end.

  Everything was going dark, and I was going home.

  PANOPTICON

  Three-hundred eighty-four years. That’s how much time Lew Novak had left. They’d given him six life sentences without parole, and they were going to make him serve every minute of it. They weren’t for his entire life. Not really. Seventy-two years subjective time was the flat limit for each one. He’d already done forty-eight of them. Only another three-hundred eighty-four years, and he’d be a free man again.

  “Everyone to their table,” said RITA. “A prompt citizen is a productive citizen.” The voice sounded like it was coming from the ceiling, but it wasn’t. It was in his head, in all of their heads. It wasn’t a real person, either. It was a computer. The Rehabilitative Intelligent Therapy Algorithm, but they all just called it RITA.

  Lew rolled out of his cot, his back sore from a night of fitful sleep. They didn’t skimp on any of the traditional discomforts, not in here and not for him. He was Privilege Level Four. If he was a good boy for the rest of this life sentence, he might make it to a Six. And if he worked at it, he could be an Eight by the time the next life sentence was done. You got to watch the vids again if you were an Eight, and sometimes you even got desserts with your meals.