K-Rox knew that if he was going to chase Malcraft across the greater network of sidechains, then he was going to need money, and a lot of it.
K-Rox accessed the note he had received when he'd left Empires, after the evac. He read the message once more to make sure he hadn't misunderstood it the first time:
K=Rox paused in thought before replying, as before, he was pretty certain that the name Isaac.Asimov in relation to Steemit, was in reference to an old file found from near the start of the Great Confusion. K-Rox had been fascinated with the file, as it was written cryptically and could so easily been about something other than the subject matter.
If this aZorl_291 character wanted access to that file, then it would be the easiest; and in fact the only, fifty grand he'd ever earned. Receiving the money into his Principia wallet, would save him about two thousand of his personal K-Coin in conversion fees.
K-Rox was naturally suspicious of why aZorl would want to pay so much for this info; what did he know that K-Rox didn't? Maybe there was something in the file he'd missed, something worth at least fifty thousand STN.
He sent a simple mission accepted, reply and immediately opened up the project details that were pinged back to him.
As he read the details of the mission, K-Rox could barely believe what he was seeing. aZorl wanted to meet with him in the Itchako sidechain, on the Sumitomo network. Once there he would give K-Rox the rest of his instructions.
For a moment K-Rox wondered what other crazy things aZorl would or indeed could ask of him, his mission brief was mad enough. For now though, K-Rox had to logout and go and meet Ziper in the real.
aZorl didn't want to meet for two network-subjective weeks, which gave him just over a day in the real, plenty of time to meet Ziper and get back to the Block.
K-Rox desperately wanted to go back over the details of aZorl's mission, instead he restrained himself and shutdown his message centre and got up.
When logging off from the Qblock, a lot of people like to simply clap there hands or say a secret word, at which point the room in which they are standing will disappear, and seconds later they will be back in the real.
However K-Rox was a grey, which meant he liked to live as much time as possible onblock, in a state as close to reality as the situation allowed.
K-Rox walked to the back of the room he'd been standing in and through a door. He traversed the short passageway into a smaller room with an opening that revealed itself as he approached.
He stepped through the opening into a small space, he turned just in time to see the door slide shut. K-Rox parted his lips slightly and spoke the soft words; "log out". As he did so, he felt the upward motion of a smooth and silent elevator.
His eyes closed and then...
Nothing.
He was conscious again, the feeling of rising in a lift, still almost there, but gone. The live bioreadout, K-Rox was receiving via his nanoswarm told him he was he was back in the real
He checked his various automatic systems, before activating some of the manual ones. The dissasociative feeling brought on from resurfacing into the real ebbed away as he slowly brought feeling back to his skin. As he did so K-Rox could feel his tank had already drained over half its amniotic fluid.
His lung-gills had been emptied of all fluid and air began to circulate through them for the first time in months. K-Rox waited patiently for the pod to give over control of his breathing.
He felt the pod's microfilaments begin to detach themselves from his body, each one feeling like a tiny hair being tugged from his skin. K-Rox dialed his pain feedback down, as he finally took control of his own breathing again.
The last of the fluid had been drained, and he sat up as an invisible cloud forming part of his nanoswarm, emerged from his body and began to dry his skin.
Other parts of the swarm leaked out of his skin and flew off in several different directions performing a plethora of varying duties, from recycling bodily wastes to reconnecting with the smart systems ofhis house.
K-Rox sat up in the pod, idly monitoring the activities of his nanoscopic army of robot companions, that resided within him. He pushed himself to standing and stepped out onto the floor, K-Rox reached his hands up and stretched reflexively. Not that he needed to, he had been inside the pod for three objective months; though between the pod and his nanoswarm, his body had been kept in perfect working order.
K-Rox felt as though he had woken from a good night's sleep; he left his pod room and stepped into the long thin tube, that was his shower cubicle. A column of pressurised air, lifted him off his feet as he was blasted with a mixture of water, soaps, and perfumes.
K-Rox exited the shower and walked around his apartment in silence; even though he got no extra reality awards for it, he had still designed his dwelling in Principia pretty much the same way as his apartment in the real. He didn't really know why he had done it. Most people put something familiar in their virtual dwellings, a favourite piece of furniture maybe, or even a single room.
However, as far as K-Rox knew, he was the only person that had designed everything to the last detail exactly the same. Often after spending long times onblock, he would perform various checks to make sure he was really in the real.
One of the checks was attempting to access his teleport protocols via his Nplants, the other being standing outside on his balcony.
K-Rox stood in the cool morning air, his mind wandering as he looked out at the sea of rooftops from the window of his third level dome apartment on the Central Pacific Island.
Shortly after the end of the Great Confusion, in the early 22nd century, the Earth's population had hit 14 billion, space was becoming a serious factor.
It was felt that the Pacific Ocean; seeing as you could fit all the countries in the world into it, with room left over for an extra Canada, was the perfect site for a new continent.
The Island had been designed by the Fuzzies in 2144; huge swarms of nano-constructors were set loose into the middle of the Pacific and within five years, a land mass twice the size of Australia was created.
Due to Earth Consensus greening rules; the machine-made, Central Pacific Island rotated around the penumbra point at 5°N latitude as it described a 2 year circle that took it on a 5000 mile circular journey.
The island also rotated around its axis, which meant that the sunrise and sunset times on the island, would swap each year, so that if you were an East Coaster the sun rose for you at 0500 utc in the summer and would set at that time in the winter, when the east side, had rotated around so that it was now the west side.
Even though CP Island was machine made, Earth's greening laws meant that it was built with nature in mind, K-Rox's neighbourhood, was in the rain forest district, and so the designs of the houses, had to be in sync with the general ambience of the area. Domed roofs of bubble-shaped habitats stretched away from K-Rox's window far into the mists of the horizon; in places the canopy of the forest, completely enveloping the dwellings below.
He'd asked the house to order a sky taxi for him; K-Rox watched as the soft white coloured cab, came in from the West, skimming silently over the lowest parts of the canopy. The taxi pinged him as he approached, K-Rox sensed his nanoswarm responding automatically. He watched via a vector display on his left retina, as four or five hundred of his swarm left his body and flew out to join the taxi, disappearing into unseen spaces.
The cab stopped in front of his balcony; bobbing slightly as it came to rest as it switched power from its plasma engines to it's four compressed air turbines. K-Rox stepped up onto the balcony edge and paused as he looked over the roof of the cab to the forest beyond.
The Impossible Of Being
K-Rox sat in the back of the cab, on sterile white seats, he set the interior to transparent so that it seemed to him as if he was floating unaided.
He told the cabs to open the vents, and the fresh live smells of the forest below wafted up and danced on the breeze created by the moving car. The overriding smell was that of damp, dead leaves, left stricken on the forest floor, soaked by days of hot, muggy rain.
The leaf smell was mixed with the potent aromas of the various flowers and trees, as the cab flew overhead, K-Rox could smell the perfumed and pungent aromas, swirled together in a sweet bouquet.
If he had been so inclined, K-Rox could have ordered his nanoswarm to separate each scent, so that he could experience them individually. But somehow he felt like that would be destroying the simple perfection of the whole, at the cost of knowing its parts. Rather like trying to single out each instrument of the orchestra, while they were playing a beautiful symphony.
K-Rox was jolted out of his olfactory daydream as the car ducked down and banked hard to the right as it flew underneath a higher part of the canopy. K-Rox watched as the landscape blurred by below. Sometimes he felt like he could make out people going about their daily lives, but for the most part he wasn't trying to focus.
The sky darkened on the horizon as the taxi flew into a fine swirling mist of rain; K-Rox was lost in thought, as the chillier breeze blew through the vents of the cab and cooled his skin he was cast back to another time, in another reality.
* * *
"Do you feel that? What does it feel like to you?"
They were standing on a cracked and barren tundra in the Frozen sidechain, the thaw was starting, it was warm enough to rain instead of snow, but the water still felt like icy needles on his naked skin. Amorphia had insisted they come here, she wanted to experience extreme sensation. She had insisted that they both shed their clothes and for K-Rox turn off all emergency medical procedures in his Nplants.
He stood there shivering, looking into her bottomless blue eyes.
"It-it, feels c-cold, I'm shivering, my teeth are knocking together for some reason."
"Yes but how does it feel?"
K-Rox was losing patience, he wanted to put his clothes back on and/or turn his pain receptors off, he snapped at her.
"I don't know! It feels unpleasant, horrible, like I'm glad that I don't have to do this ever again!"
Amorphia stepped closer to him, the rain was getting heavier now, and a harsh southerly wind had picked up and was racing around them, threatening to tear them from where they stood.
Even in his extreme discomfort, K-Rox was entranced as he watched tiny rivulets of water ran from the side of her head, down her cheeks, before pooling at the base of her neck and continuing down between her breasts. She came closer still, and took his fingers gently in her own, and whispered so that he could barely hear her over the howling winds.
"You see my little K-Bot, I can feel the cold as well, I feel the unrelenting wind stripping my skin of moisture as fast as the ice cold rain, attempts to replace it.
But I don't feel like you do, I don't have the biological response of my teeth chattering, wired into my code. I am sentient K-Rox, but I don't feel; at best I simulated feeling, through a feedback loop that is forever doomed by its own inaccuracy. You were born in the real, I in a virtually real world; with programmed responses and feelings.
What does it feel like K-Rox? Is the cold you feel here, the same as in the real? The sound of that distant thunder, of the rain splashing in muddy pools at our feet. Do they sound the same?
What's it like to be real K-Rox?"
Apart from his involuntary shaking, K-Rox was still, Amorphia had a way of creating moments like these, where all the noise stopped and his senses were heightened.
"OK, well, I guess that it doesn't sound the same, it's not the sounds themselves... It's, it's like the echoes are different. No, that's not it, of course sound is perfectly reconstructed, it's just, they can't get the way it makes you feel."
K-Rox had never spoken these words to anyone, mainly because he didn't believe anyone would get what he meant, he wasn't even sure he knew what he was trying to say. But there were certain things, and sound was one of those things, that the Fuzzies, just couldn't seem to get quite right.
Amorphia pressed her body to K-Rox, her arms encircled him around his waist, their lips were millimetres apart, she spoke even more softly than she had before.
*"Now you get it my organic friend, that is what I have been talking about, qualia; this is true feeling, an amalgamation of all sensory inputs, processed by the collection of neurons and code that can be said to be us. All coming together, to create our qualia, you can appreciate a difference that I cannot even begin to comprehend.
I should be happy with this existence...and I am; but I know there's more"*
She kissed him, he kissed her back, the two of them sank slowly to the floor, and made passionate, nonspeaking, love, as the rain continued with its relentless symphony on the barren, cold tundra.
* * *
Where Is Real?
K-Rox was snapped out of his reverie as the cab chimed at him, a QSID screen appeared a few feet in front of him and on it was Ziper's smiling face.
Ziper's appearance was nothing like any of the avatars he used onblock, his favourite avatar was a tall, imposing figure, who wore midnight black robes, had silver-black skin to match. In real life however, Ziper had decided to forego most of the genetic enhancements available to the average 23rd century basic human, living on Earth.
Instead he had decided to let the natural physical genetic traits of his ancestors to develop completely unchecked. As a result he was under six foot, had excess fat and his hair was receding. The first time K-Rox had seen Ziper in the real, he thought that he looked like one of the Ai-bots in Empires designed to look like a genuine 21st century human.
Looking at Ziper was like looking into a time machine. Of course he wasn't stupid enough to let any inherent genetic defects to bloom, and internally his organs matched any other human of the time. However his appearance was enough of an eccentricity to endear him to K-Rox.
Ziper's recorded message began:
"Hey buddy! I'll be in the water when you get here, turn on your empLink and come find me, Zee out!"
K-Rox appreciated Ziper's cheery nature, he was often warning K-Rox of the dangers of spending too much time onblock, and promoting the merits of taking part in real activities.
Ziper lived in the northeast of CP Island, in a place called Lake Jaya, on a part of a beach that stretched for six kilometres of white sand, blue water and an unbroken view. The topography was very different from K-Rox's neighborhood. Gone were the, large, flat leaves of the canopy, to be replaced by green valleys, and brown and white mountains.
Beyond the mountains was Lake Jaya; as the cab flew in over the southern tip towards the landing pads, K-Rox could make people out in the water below. Playing various water sports, swimming and relaxing, there were a few impromptu gatherings along the beachfront, but it was mainly empty, with more people preferring to be in the water.
The cab landed on a pad set back about 20 metres from the beach, K-Rox got out and paid the cab in STN coin for a better rate.
As he walked toward the beach, K-Rox fed Ziper's empLink code into his GPS. K-Rox instinctively turned towards the direction Ziper's signal was coming from and walked towards it.
He got to the edge of the water and looked out towards where the GPS was telling him Ziper was. He had a small red dot over his left retina, but needed to activate his optical zoom in order to see his friend.
K-Rox stripped down to his shorts and got in the water. Lake Jaya was the biggest one on CP Island, and was fed directly from the Pacific a mile below.
This feature gave Jaya a fairly strong current, K-Rox searched through his swimming programs. He selected the appropriate one and uploaded it directly into his motorcortex. His nanoswarm made their own connections and he struck out towards Ziper.
When he reached him, Ziper was treading water and grinning that big grin of his. empLink Shared Transmission: greetings warmth hugs"Hey Kay! Good to see you offblock for once, I had to get you down here, Jaya is the best this time of year. No good for surfing, but wonderful for swimming and diving."
"Yeah well, I guess it's good to surface now and again." empLink Transmission: Worry"You spend far too much time onblock Kay, even for a high level grey; how long have you been under this time around?"
For a brief moment K-Rox thought about lying to his friend, but such was the complexity of their shared empLink channel, that Ziper would have known it was a lie.
"A little over six objective."
"Weeks?"
"Months."
"For the love of L Ron! six months, that's crazy Kay! How much of that was spent in Empires?"
"I don't know Zee, I'd have to check; but I've done at least three decades. I rarely do the whole thing from start to finish, but you know..."
K-Rox trailed off, Ziper was looking at him with the same look that everyone gave him, when he told them how long he spent in Empires.
The game of Empires ran for ten subjective years between the years 2009 and 2019, in objectively real time, this worked out at roughly six weeks. So in the six months that K-Rox had been onblock, the game had reset four times and around forty years had passed.
Very few people had ever played the game from start to finish without leaving it. Most people would login and play for a few game subjective days or weeks, maybe even months.
Even though you knew time back in the real was running a lot slower than it was for you in Empires, years still felt like years. So the idea of somebody spending decades in a 20th century simulation, with no access to modern tech, was pretty crazy to most people.
The main thing that sent people a bit crazy, was that the silence in their heads. Empires ran the game like a true simulation, and therefore you were only allowed restricted access to your Nplants.
This meant that you did not have any feedback from your bio systems, you couldn't talk to any machinery, and worst of all, you were cut off from the Quantum Block. No messages, news items, general info, local info, no GPS, nothing; just you and the thoughts in your head.
Ziper realised that he was giving K-Rox that look, he decided to brake the mood.
"Come on then, I'll race you back to shore, we can talk there."
Ziper struck out for the shore, K-Rox watched him swim off; he clearly wasn't using any augmentation programs. He used his GPS to place a vector track on Ziper, the readout told him that he would have to let him swim for another 47.347 seconds in order for them to reach the beach at the same time.
* * *
"...so when you surface in the real, what makes you so sure you are back in actual reality?"
"Many things, I can access my biometrics, my comms channel is back online, and..."
"All those things are devices, I'm not talking about feedback from devices, I'm asking how you; the organic you, knows, without any shadow of a doubt that you're back in the real."
K-Rox frowned at Amorphia; they were sitting in the Circus Maximus in ancient Rome, on one of the StayTel history chains; it often amused K-Rox that they knew more about ancient Rome than they did about the early to mid 21st century.
Amorphia had been quizzing him on the real again, sometimes he had the answers for her questions. However other times, such as this, her questions made his head hurt.
"But I was born with most of those devices, they are as much a part of me as my organic tissue. I can't separate the two, so I use them to determine where I am and in what state I'm in."
"So what you're saying is; if you logged off the Qblock, there would be no objective test to guarantee you were in the real?"
"No, of course not, I'm not saying that; I can look out the window and see that the rings of Jupiter aren't swirling about in the skies of Earth."
"OK, that would work if you had logged off from Principia, but what if you had come from one of the hyper-real sidechains, one almost indistinguishable from the Earth you know; what then?"
K-Rox had to admit, that he couldn't think of any way of verifying whether he was in a virtuality or an actuality.
"Well, I can't think of any way to objectively prove where I am, I guess it's just subjective familiarity that tells me whether I'm onblock or in the real."
"Have you ever considered that the place you consider the real, is also a virtuality?"
"But I would have had to have been born into it for that to possibly be true."
Amorphia held his gaze in silence for awhile, her expression was unreadable. When she spoke, he could hardly hear her over the roar of the crowd.
"I was born in a virtual world within a virtual universe; why not you too?"