It never rains dirt in Nishito, and when it does, either the weathermen cloudseeded, or that the clouds were in god’s wrath.
It never rains dirt in Nishito, and when it does, either the weathermen cloudseeded, or that the clouds were in god’s wrath.
But not years ago. That afternoon, Nishito fell, and so did the rest of Petro. The entire skybox of Nishito’s urban along with its tight corners, claustrophobic dead ends soon submerged under the obscured silver linings, a sense of chill down to my spine, and as the first droplets began their diving, tasting bitter as would dirt, soil and gravel, so commenced the rainfall that would cast shades onto the unreachable rooftops. Funny thing is, the context went that Mr. Shoto guaranteed maximum renewable energy payoffs by converting its environmentally uncertified nuclear plants into advanced core-thermal energy shields (since heat power was possible thanks to efforts in drilling down to the Earth’s outer core now that heat resistance was “impeccable”). To his dismay, the war brought about dust and fallouts the world round, which ultimate hit the city hard. Another wave of degradation soon entailed as the concentration of sulfur dioxide skyrocketed. Acid rain.
From the slum of Hongkong it was almost impossible to get in touch even with the backend of technology. A few kilometers from our town lay the popular premium-leveled chains: XipStores, HelloPhones.cn, Mobula Express, … but prices were high due to going sanctions (and shortage of natural resources, rumors went) so we opted for online black markets instead, which was the sole purpose of sites like TickTock.com (phones, laptops and consumer goods), Jian.cn (everything in existence), and QShop (electronic components) or better yet, the dark web, which can be accessed through web browsers like Tor2 or GoCua.vn.cn.
My real breakthrough ever came when I was ten.
The real toys of year 2050 were not only quantum computers, a common, undermined misconception. My budget laptop could download triple-A video game titles was possible, and clearly (the only one in my family, since everyone preferred the more affordable smartphones) didn’t lack many novelties like face recognition or spatial simulation and calibration, which supported holograms, augmented keyboards (albeit not on a par with physical keyboard), as many dubbed it the PCAR. But it couldn’t help with realistic large-scale environmental simulation, which was necessary for not the age-old PCAR but XR, or simulated reality experiences. To that end, the only interesting piece of affordable toy was something called “Zeitgeist XR 2” a last century “xirtual” reality headset: best of all, one could build one from makeshift cardboards and magnets; and most importantly, a mandatory single-board computer (a raw, open mini-computer that is used to run softwares without a screen or display), so usually the KudoReef 2040 model, which was the most “expensive” component of the bunch (as in 20$, for kids of course).
Since my lunch savings and other residuals were meek in comparison, ten-year-old me may as well call quit or find other ways to go full Trojan, and that was when I discovered the JEC, Japanese Eloquence Contest, a once-a-lifetime national competition encouraging the use of Japanese as a tertiary language under the new sanction. Concretely, competitions like so were plentiful though less organized and low in cash (a single school wouldn’t gather enough funding).
Thankfully, my offspring was blessed with foreign pirated movie sites, free live-streamed web shows, and I assured not to miss on a single work of art. I watched all from Studio Gibbli, GAINAX, Trigger, Toei Animations, … Juji Ito’s Uzumaki, 2009 Fullmetal Alchemist, FLCL (the entire triology), Gurren Larange, Rebuild of Evangelion, The Sword Art Online saga, Keep your hands off Eizouken, Tatami Galaxy, Devilman Crybaby, … Western cartoons were also no stranger to me: Teen Titans, Power Buff Girls, Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, Rick and Morty, … For a kid from year 2040, the early years of our millenium wouldn’t matter, and it would seem I was the only child grown from the past. A blessing in disguise, these gifts were material to my command of Japanese and English, and from there I set out to dominate these contests, one by one.
At a moment’s notice, drones were visiting that one house in the slum of Hongkong.
Despite taking me one strenuous month to jog my memory for the two alphabets, it was a happy ending, and to my account was 100$ (Seeing that I was the tech-winner of the family)
Five minutes in, waves of saturnine rainfall began to cascade, and the mass sought for an immediate ceiling. The green hills and yards, far and few among branches of high concrete blocks, bridges and rooftops, had became desolated once more. I was one of the lucky few who had already occupied a roof, but before I could sense it the rest of my coat was cloaked in splashes of dirts and soils. Intrigued, whereby others hastily tucking their gloves deep in their coats and pockets, I instead lent a finger into the raging cascade, and the chill kept on throttling down my spines for each droplets, until half of me felt submerged in cold waters.
It was dirty water.
Nishito’s forcefield technology was flexible enough to protect you from almost every out-of-region hazard: fallout dust, tsunami, or incoming nuclear missiles, let it be one to hundreds in number; but except for an adhoc rainfall (at least not instantaneously) due to its sheer scale, which explained the slight delay in rendering. And years prior Petro installed a private-owned forcefield around the school district, yet of late it was rarely in action for some reasons. For the first time since its foundation, Petro couldn’t pay for its own service.
The same cold water cascaded five years ago when a boy was waiting by the doorstep, above him the pouch merely coated the boy against the downpour. Then the door opened as usual, with warm light and beacons, but the boy (stifled) hesitated. As he was hearing the boss music, his mother was standing in front of him, her hands???, her eyebrows raised. I couldn’t tell if it was rancor or care, still, I knew for an instant I was in troubled waters, but I couldn’t care less for my own, the numbness and inevitable fever. My father had to intervene, and i was finally let in.
That week, tragedies happened. A third of the rewards in cash plus my entire savings were devoted to the KudoReef, which was delivered on the doorstep by an autonomous drone when my family was away (with the context that I was the sole credit card holder of my family). I panned out half implemented the headset. It was a thin, rectangular cardboard box curved just for the temple, besides are a magnetically embedded touch pad the size of a double folded napkin, and a usb-e gate on the one side for connecting my computer to the KudoReef inside (while codes can be uploaded wirelessly to the Wifi-ready KudoReef, wiring and electrical testing must also be considered). Above, attaching to it was an adjustable head mount, which wrapped neatly (although finicky) around my cranium and was retractable through multiple layers, and which held the joint of the box so that I could turn it up and take it off my eyes safely without ever detaching it from the rest of the headset. Inside the headset lay the FOV separator, a 4K screen display for each eye (which was the minimum spec, given most headsets ran on 32K, if not ditched the AMOLED screen entirely), and behind it all, a wireless KudoReef.
The first version included no haptic gloves, controller or any hand-detection algorithm, but fortunately, a 6DOF positioning system; that standard was fine to a ten-year-old me. After the first boot, all the codes were ready to be uploaded (available on Stack Overflow), thus I put on the headset, and so transcended my reality into a new world.
It was a common misconception back in the early 2010s that a Link-Start would entail a flashy display of abstracts and flowing neuronlike animations, when in reality, hopping could be as instantaneous as pressing the PLAY button and there in the darkness would load all of the resource within five seconds or so.
The four walls that are my room then featured a limitless skybox blotting around which was the city scape of Hongkong, which was how the Zeitgeist signalled its successful connection to the rest of the world and detected my location. A few seconds had passed, and slowly materializing in front of me was not my avatar but a home menu, with stock Zeitgeist interface, hovering buttons in Mandarin, and above it all was a greeting message.
I positioned myself to the back where there was the control panel, and dragged my cursor (a direct beam from my character’s head) to the “Account NEW” button.
“ ACCOUNT NAME: WATARI WATSON LOGIN: jeong124 PASSWORD: ******** ACCOUNT ID: 1086-V6006-O9893-AC1 “ And so the boy-you-know was poised to play Minecraft World.
As regards the field of simulated reality there were many layers as to depth and alteration of one’s perceptional capacity and awareness. That was layer -1, which barely scratched the surface of reality manipulation
But it wouldn’t concern my parents whether humanity was in desperate of innovations, an innate thirst supposedly captivating us prisoners. I forced a few generous mistruth out of my mouth, either our school was on a last-ditch excursion or that I’d broken the school computer. Still, reckoning the danger of involving my worthwhile hobby with the school and adult businesses, I convinced Natushita to share our dorm for a shared headset. Not only he concurred, he became an SR map maker, or map tester.
My plan wouldn’t come into fruition for long. Long before my first headset setup I had been thinking of an insurgency plan, in the worst case scenarion when the thirsty, non tech-savvy would misunderstand the headset’s purpose and serve it to the junkyard trader’s, as even as little as ten dollars would still make a difference. So on the last night on our first year campus together, we were scheming to uproot and port our temporal setup in our actual hideout - that is our shared room - from the confined space of my filial home 5 kilometers away (without catching the Monitor’s attention), and while I was accessing my repo, I noticed something peculiar: that is, it couldn’t detect the SLIC (Space laser integrated connection) macro, which was for wireless connection. Before I could anticipate, all the files were unable to be found, and from what seemed like a DDOS attack the hub ground to a halt, then the whole repo crashed. Someone messed with the physical macro, the whole mainframe. I attempted to phone home, but no response. As a last resort we clubbed together a sum enough for my premium return ticket. And when I arrived at Xiho fifteen minutes later, a crew of two man in yellow striped black uniform was pulling out my whole bedroom’s content out. The bits and pieces, scraps, debris, items and stolen utensils, clums of mirrors, metal pipes and nuclear reactors, a desk clinging to the detached ceiling via the all-adhesive bands… which I suspected were floating in disarray, forming an astroid belt of wares and carton boxes. Then it was clear as day: they were retrivals from the service department so my room was held together by a central anti-gravitational force - another means of transporting goods. The man holding the agg (anti-gravity gun) with both hands had difficulties in supporting its sheer weight which pushed and pulled at intervals. The rancour was visible on his face.
I dashed along the snowcovered walkway only to find my entire room being robbed away. With the unimpeded force of muscles from a lad who had jogged to death ten times per day around the shoreline, I let my instinct take over as panic and sheer rancour launched me towards the agg’s gravitational link, my hands flinging in the air as would an enemy waving the white flag,, “WAIT WAIT”, as the men also panicked and graviously scolded at me and they had to diverge the gun’s target in emergency (before my internal organs would explode) thus the whole body of electronics fell apart and their landing made deafening clinging (I jumped on my back). I turned around and scavage for everything intact as little as possible but could only pick the headset which was fried and deformed from the outside, and the rest of the tools and accessories were all disected. The man holding the agg jumped out on me, “What the fuck?” but quickly froze and resorted to putting his hands up as from my bag I pulled out the stun glove, a bulky, robotic glove that could shoot lightning bolts from your palm. “Chill chill, we aren’t moving” he spoke in terror, “We’re the maintenance team and we had orders from this householder, please put down your weapon”,
But I saw it through. “Who’s behind this?”
“No, we do not -“
“Answer the god damn question!”
“We’re not supposed to-“
“Say it or I’ll fucking shoot!”
“Please just calm-“
“I’ll fucking shoot!”, my right hand in the glove was straightening forwards as my left hand held onto it and load the , and the palm of my glove began to lit up in accumulated electricity.
“All right!” his drifty hand made a swiping motion and a panel was thrown before me, showing the avatar of a late-30’s lady (the picture was poorly caliographed which was taken from the chin up) who I recognized as my mother. Before I could react further, the other man in the background stormed towards me in breakneck speed, and a slight sonic boom incidentally shot me off a great league away and into the foyer. Concretely he was an old android, slick gray plating and menacing red eyes in engagement mode, which explained his immense strength and total lack of empathy by attempting to choke me unconscious (“NEUTRALIZING SUSPECT” he pronounced) paving ways for the real man to call the police. Having anticipated the inevitable, despite my legs clanged tight by the android, I signalled to finish charging and shoot point-blank into the android’s head: the force was so awesome its neck evaporated as its head was blown back into its body top down, breaking all its spine and organs, and so he was ascended two leagues away, also knocking down the man from afar. And since the stun glove was charged, both men were being stunned and shocked to near-death for the subsequent ten minutes as their screams barely resonated through the thick snow of Xiho. Technically I didn’t kill them. Ten-year-old me couldn’t, and so I departed with my headset and an abandoned cottage, not looking back, apart from the agg on the ground, but I was forced to leave it behind lest I be in further legal trouble …