Meadow had been to more countries in W.2 than she’d ever visit in the real world, but the cities were depressingly similar, the way it was possible to pull off the expressway at almost any point in the U.S. and find the same small-town cluster of Big-Box Furniture Store, Home Improvement Chain, and four flavors of restaurant: Red Garden, Olive Lobster, Lobster Garden…. Funny, how no one she knew wanted to live in a culture like this, and yet here it was.
On-screen, an image of Earth slowly rotated, waiting for her to type in where she wanted to go. The Arctic was noticeably smaller than it had been the first time she joined W.2, and she thought of real-world glaciers melting, the tremendous weight they had placed on the earth’s tectonic plates easing like a brick lifting from a sponge, allowing the plates to shift and set off tsunamis like the one Nico had had a front-row seat for. What were the odds that vectors so colossal would converge to take the life of one small boy?—the plates of the earth slowly grinding over millions of years to be in the position they had had on the morning that hundreds of years of burning coal, and car exhaust, and fluorocarbons from air conditioners and hair spray had allowed ice thousands of miles away to melt enough to let one plate slip under another, lifting the sea along the coast they had flown to because they had taken advantage of a vacation discount at the hotel they slept in while Nico stood on the beach, watching a towering wall of water come for him? Who could comprehend the convergence of such cosmic forces? Such mundane vectors? The incalculable odds of the cosmic and mundane coming together at the precise moment needed to make Nico pay for generations of sins against the earth? Meadow sighed to catch herself at it again. There couldn’t be any more solid proof than the drowning of such an innocent that the Earth and its cosmos just did what they did, regardless of who or what was in the way. Just ask the dinosaurs.
Maybe there was some comfort in that, she thought. An acceptance of the inevitability of ends. Let go your strife and come to me, saith the Earth. Where had she read that? Probably in an ad for W.2.
As it turned, she was taken by how many came here and how much effort they put into making this virtual world mirror the actual world their bodies inhabited: the nighttime glow of cities in actual satellite photos were aglow in W.2 with the activity of avatars building, buying, selling, partying, living…. The Bottom Billion sections of the real globe that had gone dark were likewise dark on this globe, parts of the Middle East too hot for humans. She’d heard that there were only a dozen lines for Internet coming out of Africa now, and, as the globe rotated, patches shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces showed areas of the world that had been blacked out. Like the Maldives or Florida Keys, little islands were gone, as were parts of the Netherlands after dikes had failed, drought evaporating the fresh water that had balanced the pressure of the sea. But the Amazon River, swollen to the thickness of a Great Lake, was surrounded by green: virtual rain forests that users of W.2 were replanting by buying carbon offsets.
If someone built a fish farm in the real world, it was supposed to show up in W.2 and vice versa, the program more of an interface than a model, its developers claimed, blurring the line between the two so much that it made as much sense to ask which was real as it did to ask whether a Vespa bought online or in person was the real purchase.
Meadow could see why Silpa and Guy used W.2 for their rendezvous. Though the parts of the globe were dotted by fires—red for forest fires, green for the gas flames of offshore drilling platforms that had been set ablaze by guerillas—here in W.2, there was no death. The real Switzerland might be littered with cows that had died of thirst, and other online worlds might be awash in people teaming up to slaughter space aliens, or each other, but here at least, the planet was Lego-clean.
She typed in Singapore City and the rotation of the globe sped up, the landmass of Asia coming into view, then as the camera pulled in, Singapore Island rose up: its turquoise shoreline, its delta, then its capital. The grid spread apart like filaments on a microscope slide as the magnification was increased, then she was on the ground—street view—the Rainforest Cafe directly in front of her.
She had to laugh, imagining profiling software trolling her computer, an OS licensed to a biology lab, compiling a concordance of ‘environmental’ key words in her emails and Google searches, then matching these dots of info to its list of sponsors to place her before an energy-hog restaurant full of jungle animatronics.
She clicked her arrow keys to rotate her avatar’s view. Red Lobster, Shangri-La. Glass skyscrapers. A Starbucks had a pagoda roof. Orchid Road—The Rodeo Drive of Singapore—was lined with avatar palm trees. Store windows were filled with the avatars of iFlex and high-end phones. Boutique dresses. Neon ads. Though the real Singapore was densely populated, there were few pedestrians here: other avatars dressed as skateboarders, neo-hippies, and clubbers—the usual, except with Asian faces. One had the head of a Chinese dragon. Another glided by on large, white angel wings. Most of them were going into a movie theater—Kill Chicks—tough guy on a marquee three-stories high, babes with guns.
Last week, she’d begun her search in Indonesia, where her, Nico, and William had been staying when the tsunami hit. But the names of the streets, beaches, and other landmarks—Banda Aceh—the sight of them, even in their W.2 versions, was hard to take—especially given the way resort owners were desperately using W.2 to lure back tourists.
She’d been using her avatar to comb the beach for?.... For what? She didn’t know, she’d realized, bending to pick up a seashell. Maybe the flip-flops her son had been wearing when he went out to watch the ocean recede. Maybe she should look for them among the trash that still washed up on the beaches in California. Maybe that flute they’d bought for him in the market—any clue….
In the real world, she’d read about a Japanese father whose twenty-year-old daughter had been swept off the roof of the bank she worked in. He had dropped her off that morning, a sunny morning like many others. Afterwards, he learned to scuba dive, and had been making dives ever since, growing old looking for her, and Meadow walked down the virtual beach, hoping for a sign that the rumor she’d heard was true: that those who had vanished could be found here in W.2.
Looking out to the virtual sea, she was approached by tour guides who mistook her for one of the surfers who had continued to come from as far away as Australia or California. In the days after the tsunami, Meadow and her husband had made their way up the Indonesian coast, searching for their son, first in the makeshift hospitals that had been set up, and then, in the morgues. Traveling up the coastline in the hopes of closure, it was called, they’d run into the real-world counterpart of these blonde avatars: men and women who’d been arriving with surfboards, somber out of respect for the destruction around them, but heading to beaches still strewn with palm fronds and roofing tiles nonetheless, their nonrefundable vacations paid long in advance.
It was obvious that virtual versions of these real-world people were here in W.2 as well. “People are people,” someone once said to explain why the National Guard had to be called in to keep people from going to restaurants during the last pandemic, even when infections were still doubling every 30 days. Sure enough, local avatars, or speculators posing as them, continually mistook her for a tourist, offering to guide her to one of the coast’s famous surf breaks where the continental shelf that generated those perfect, blue-crystal waves that surfers lusted after could also produce such devastating tsunamis.
“Mama, I’m going down to the beach to see the water go out,” Nico had said that morning. A warm ocean breeze coming in through the window of their beach-side hotel room, Meadow didn’t want to get out of bed. “Hmmm?” she groggily murmured, “Why don’t you wait for mommy and daddy to wake up?” Then she fell back asleep.
The next she knew, water was pouring in through that window. It was as if the window had been a portal in a ship that was suddenly sinking, seawater, sand, and crabs pouring in, filling the hotel room as though she’d awoken in a surreal nightmare. The beach that had been outside their window was gone: all sea. Frantically, she looked for Nico. Nowhere inside. The room rapidly filled with water, chests and backpacks and sandals turning into flotsam as she remembered Nico saying he was going down to the beach. By then it was impossible to get the hallway door open, the weight of the sea inside holding it shut against William’s efforts. Still nude, she and William had managed to wriggle out through the window, fighting hard against the current pouring in….
She didn’t even get to say goodbye.
And she couldn’t stop watching the home videos. Meadow was shaken from her remembrance by an avatar speaking to her on-screen: “Are you here to see the world premiere of Kill Chicks?” she asked, gesturing toward the theater. The avatar was dressed like a fantasy schoolgirl: long legs, knee-socks and the miniskirt of a little sailor suit girls wore in mangas. One of those imaginary, too-cute creatures hovered just over her shoulder, giggling at everything she said. Whoever was controlling the avatar was typing, so probably on a slow node; maybe in a poor country, but maybe not. Just because she was on a slow node didn’t necessarily mean anything. Meadow could only use the AI available in W.2 if she logged on using the computers at work, and even then she often used the typing mode so those working around her couldn’t tell she was in W.2 instead of with them. “It doesn’t premier in the real world until next week,” School-Girl said. She gave a wink: one of those preprogrammed emoticons. “What are you trying to sell?”
“Nothing,” Meadow typed. There was a pause as the message traveled to who knows where—around the world or down the hall. Then after another emoticon—a head nod this time—the words came back slowly, and with a herky-jerky speed of a one-finger typer: “Then why are you here?” Meadow wasn’t sure herself. Chasing ghosts? When she hadn’t been able to turn up any sign of Nico back in Indonesia.2, she thought she’d just make her way back the route they’d taken in the real world. Singapore was stop two. Before she could formulate an answer, School-Girl said, “Do you like to see pretty things? I take you see pretty things.”
It was sometimes hard to tell if the person you were conversing with in W.2 had an accent or was just a crummy typist. “No,” Meadow typed. “I’m looking for—”
Before she had finished typing, more words came out of the avatar: “I can take you to see Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. Or Orchid Garden….”
Meadow wanted to ask if she’d seen her son but wasn’t sure how. What would he look like in W.2? Would he look the same as he had in life, four years ago? He’d be 11 if he had lived. Would she recognize him even if he stood before her? And if he was here, where? W.2 was the size of the planet. Planet W.2. He could be anywhere. Or nowhere. More likely, far more likely, he was nowhere. The bottom of the sea.
School-Girl’s hovering creature scrunched up its nose to exude cuteness.
This is stupid, Meadow thought.
“Do you want to go shopping?” School-Girl said. “I can take you shopping.”
“No. I’m not really here to go shopping.”
“If not shopping, what else you do? Most people here are shopping.”
“I’m looking for someone.” There. She’d said it.
“Another shopper?”
Meadow began to type, No. But maybe she was. If some shade or avatar or echo or memory of Nico was here, he could be doing anything. Even shopping. She typed, “I don’t think so.”
“Well everyone here is shopping. Or going to the movie.” There was another pause, a soft clicking indicating that whoever was working the School-Girl avatar had continued typing. Another speech bubble came on-screen: “Maybe we could look for him over by the animals.”
Nico had stopped wanting to go to the zoo after he was able to read the signs: Extinct in the Wild or Endangered. There didn’t seem to be a third choice for anything less common than a rat. But as School-Girl continued typing, Meadow realized she’d meant Party Animals.
“No, never mind. We won’t find him there.”
“Well, what is he into?”
He was into mummies and dinosaurs and dancing like a robot. He loved his Z-Game. Pyramids, like every seven-year-old, and drawing rockets that transformed into robots. He was one of those kids you always read about but never actually met who could find a film-editing program online, and be making his rocket-robot animation by evening. But when they arrived in Indonesia, he’d been fascinated by a handmade flute: one of those crudely carved, bright red flutes sold to tourists. Somehow it was the low-tech nature of the thing that made it exotic to him. She could still see him struggling to get his lips to form just the right amount of air pressure to make it play. The woman who’d sold it to them tried to show him how to do it, her tightening smile revealing that she thought he was the densest kid on Earth because he had to be shown how to do something every Indonesian kid could do as naturally as blowing across the mouth of a bottle. And even then Nico couldn’t make it work. Forgotten knowledge. The workings of graphic programs were intuitively transparent to him, but ask him to ride a bike, or work a yo-yo, or do anything that involved interfacing with the old-fashioned material world and he was hopeless. Meadow could see him struggling with the flute back at their hotel room. How proud he’d been when a note suddenly came cleanly out! She could still hear that note: a strong, clear piercing ‘C’. It reminded William of his didgeridoo; he’d promised to dig it out of storage for Nico when they got back, but of course Nico never saw it, and when they returned, William wanted to get rid of the instrument.
“…sex clubs, art openings, opium dens, Medieval libraries full of rare manuscripts…. There’s lots of things in W.2 besides shopping,” School-Girl was saying. “If I was looking for someone I’d try to think of the place they most wanted to visit and then—”
“Music?” Meadow blurted. “Is there music here? Or robots?”
“Sure! There’s lots of music, silly. And robots. What kind of music does your friend like?”