#Beach
by
Kevin Houlihan
Smashwords Edition
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Published by:
Kevin Houlihan on Smashwords
#Beach
Copyright © 2010 by Kevin Houlihan
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#Beach
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She's just standing there, staring out to sea like her presence is nothing unusual. Tristan pms her, "Hi FemFacia! Been a while, where have you been hanging out?" but she doesn't respond. He's never encountered somebody who wasn't using a clone before. It's a little disturbing
The beach is about to wake up. Tristan gets up and fixes himself a drink, a summery cocktail of his own invention, a Rosemary Kennedy. He shoots off a quick tweet about it before he sits back down. His clone has been busy chit chatting on his behalf; he's a popular guy, and everybody wants a piece of him. Summaries of each conversation hover around the avatars on the screen that dominates the room. About the only person who hasn't pm'd him is FemFacia, who's still standing, still staring out, still not responding.
"FemFacia: You still playing those ARGs?"
The public chat of the channel has become bogged down in a heated discussion of the TOS. He flicks through the conversations his clones are currently having, looking for something to amuse himself. It's the usual collection of fans, braindead groupies and advertising bots, all trying to get something out of him. Usually he wouldn't bother dealing with any of that crap anymore, but since the luls are thin on the ground this evening he sits in on a conversation with the hottest female avatar he can find, a girl named catmeetspigeons.
"I'm trying your cocktail! It's yuuummmy!!", she says.
"Yeah, thanks. Glad you like," Tristan looks on as his clone responds.
"I think I'll teach them to make it in UrLeeder. Is that OK?"
"Of course, as long as you buy me one after."
She laughs too long and too hard, smiley faces bubbling out of the sand around her. Not worth it, he thinks. There's only one thing for it now.
"realboy™: Chess?"
realboy™'s faceless black avatar appears from nowhere with a chessboard. "Just a couple quick games maybe... White or black?" His voice is distorted, mangled electronically like he's a secret agent or something. Tristan picks white and makes the opening move, intending a King's Indian Attack but dissuaded by realboy™'s Scandinavian Defence. After that all bets are off.
"You working on anything realboy?"
"Yeah, I got a couple of things on the go."
The moves fly back and forth and the game ends in a stalemate. The board resets.
"Tell me," says Tristan. realboy™'s avatar doesn't change, but Tristan knows that he's smirking, somewhere.
"Are you convinced by what you see?" realboy plays white this time, opting for a Réti opening.
"What do you mean?"
"This beach, these people, this game... I mean, are we even playing, really? You assume that I'm running a program that scans ahead and suggests moves, just as I'm sure you are. But maybe mine is making the moves for me. Deciding the strategy as well as the tactics. Chances are high that at least one of us is an artificial personality clone as well."
Tristan is taken aback. "Well, yeah, the chess program... the tactical assistant is built in. Nobody plays standard chess anymore. And even if you are a clone, you still react the same, and you... uh, the real you will get caught up on this conversation eventually. When it's relevant."
"Will I? What if the real me is gone, or he never was, or has no interest in chess anymore? All we'd have then is a collection of programs interacting with another collection of programs. Simulated people playing games in a simulated environment, while the people they represent are off comatose from too many Rosemary Kennedys, or watching Asian movies, or dead..."
"Don't be so morbid."
The program suggests some moves, but Tristan does something else. His game rapidly disintegrates.
"You tried to do something different there, didn't you?"
"Would a clone do that?"
"Probably. Depends on how well you're programmed." realboy™ is smirking again. The game ends with a win for white.
"Interesting thoughts, but what are you going to do with them?"
"I don't know yet. You want to play again?"
"No, I have to go catch up with the band. You can continue talking to my clone, if you like."
The band's practice space is a dingy Brooklyn apartment with a nice view of the subway line. They picked it because all the best bands get their breaks in New York. It doesn't matter that they're each in their own homes in different corners of the world and have never met in person; New York isn't a place anymore, it's an idea.
Rashid and Joey are experimenting with some new sounds when Tristan enters, and he picks up his own instrument as he catches up on the more interesting points of the conversation his clone has been having with them. It seems Rashid has arranged them a gig at the prestigious Linden concert island. On an average day it's streaming room only for 70% of the audience regardless of who's playing, and there's sure to be some big promoters and advertisers tuning in.
"Damn, and I thought I had a groupie problem at the moment," he says as he noisily adjusts his instruments interface. His avatar is holding what looks like a guitar with a turntable on its face, but that's just a prop.
"You can never have too many groupies my friend," says Rashid. "They're like social currency."
"They're braindead. They'll leave as soon as their friends start listening to a shiny new band. The eyeballs are nice, but they're worth nothing." Tristan pulls audio streams from across the internet and weaves them into the glitchy, funky melody.
"If you don't want your share, send them my way man," says Joey. He sits behind a ridiculously well equipped drum kit, while Rashid sports a similar instrument to Tristan. Neithers appearance says much about the sound coming from them.
They meander back and forth between established material and wild experimentation for a few hours, the train going past the window marking the passing time as it lends the environment a more authentic feel. Eventually the conversation turns back to the upcoming concert.
"We should have something new and spectacular to unveil at this thing," says Tristan. "Something unexpected."
"I hate to break it to ya man, but everything's been done already," says Joey.
Tristan's mind drifts back to his conversation with realboy™. "What if... we have our clones participate in some way? Like have them play gigs in other locations, and we could mix the different feeds at the Linden concert island?"
"Is that even possible?" asks Rashid.
"I'm not sure, but I think I know somebody who could help us find out."
"Well bring him in!" Joey has stopped playing. "Something like that might get people talking."
"OK, I'll probably catch up with him later tonight. And on that note, I gotta go get ready."
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The centrepiece of UrLeeder is a representation of a retro-futuristic AI, a series of screens towering above the circular bar on trunks of pulsing, shimmering cables. They flick rapidly between popular images from the web and images of archetypal objects, waveforms and noise, as if to suggest a naive and childlike AI puzzling over a reality filled with cake, lolcats and war. It's also supposedly the DJ, but the crowd takes on most of that role by listening to their own tunes and upvoting whatever they like the most.
Spreading out from the bar is a rabbits warren of tunnels and alcoves. Tristan picks his way through the crowd, following the faint blue lines on the floor that lead from his feet to the corner that his posse has already staked out. They've started transforming it into another outpost of the beach by manipulating the displays that cover every surface. It's something of a chore if you can't get the people around you to join in. Tristan pulls in some videos of bikini'd babes and orders a round of outrageous cocktails, and soon the beach theme has taken on a life of its own and is spreading around the club.
He relaxes into the flow of information, letting himself be buffeted and carried down the more fascinating avenues, leaving the rest for his clones to deal with. He is surrounded by real people and telepresencing avatars, clouds of personal media floating around them, all lost in distributed conversations that span the globe. There's a club like this in every city in the world. People used to flock to them in person for the kind of immersive experience that wasn't available online. Now, more and more visit from home with a hologrammatic avatar because they have bigger screens and more intuitive controls, and they've grown used to a less tactile reality. Some day this will be a real space populated solely by virtual people, surviving only because of its momentum.
He's mixing a stream with a telepresencing avatar from Belgium when he receives a cryptic message from realboy™. "I'm sorry man. It was just an experiment, and I wasn't the only one watching."
Looking up from the mixer interface running on the table he notices a strange buzz growing in the club, focused on him. Something has happened, his name is showing up everywhere, but it's not clear why. Frantically sorting through the noise he arrives at the answer only moments before it's being played on all the ceilings and walls around him: a video of himself and realboy™, except that it's not a conversation that he ever participated in. He watches himself casually disparage his fans over a tactically flawless game of chess and senses the first wave of reaction poised to break over him.
The angry and mocking voices hound Tristan back to his house, where he is welcomed by hundreds more ongoing conversations and urgent summaries. Ignoring them for now he googles his name and his band's name, and pores over the results: articles, blog posts and video reactions with the common theme of a career in flames. There are even parodies of his clone's chess match already, featuring other prominent figures casually confessing that they are full of shit, or modified to show him dissing various other people.
Something needs to be done about this, but he has no idea what. He looks over the activity around him, and everywhere finds his clones handling interviews and pissed off fans as well as he could himself, if not better. His eye catches the still alluring avatar of catmeetspigeons on the beach, the groupie that he dismissed earlier.
"I really thought we could have had something, you know," her tears disappear before they hit the sand. "But I guess you weren't the person I thought you were if you could say something like that."
"You know that wasn't directed at you, right? I was talking about my other fans. The annoying ones." Tristan's clone keeps a straight face. He's not sure he could have managed that himself.
"I'd like to believe you, I would. Right now, I'm just not sure I can trust you."
Poor deluded thing, clinging to a relationship of lies with a piece of software. And it seems that's what's going on all around him, all these clones maintaining relationships with strangers and potentially leaking his secrets to the world... This one will forgive him, as will others, but none of them are conversations he wants to have.
He goes to mix himself another Rosemary Kennedy and then slumps under the glare of the massive screen once again. Nobody notices his absence. He joins FemFacia by the waters edge and sips his drink. She is still staring out over the ocean, her expression blank. She still hasn't returned his messages. He takes her hand and turns off his clones. The unfiltered, unreciprocated conversations break over him in loud, confused waves as he admires the clouds drifting over the horizon.
That night Tristan falls asleep on the beach, comforted by the sound of people realising that he was never really there.
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The End.
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