“I need to get in contact with a Dealer. Her name’s Mother Loose.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Server Name: Gamma Orange.
Final Location: Tokonatsu City, Peninsula District.
Log-out successful.
Thank you for playing, Kaname Suou.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Come on, big bro! When are you gonna stop playing?! Your food’s burning!!”
As his mind came back into focus, he heard a sound like trees rustling in the wind. His vision and consciousness were still foggy, a side effect of returning to the real world from a virtual one made of representational markers.
The type of VR technology used by the game relied on a smartphone’s ability to provide a host of patterns and symbols at a whopping hundred and twenty frames per second and the human brain’s power to draw connections between these images, stitching together the correct picture. The technology was cheap and highly effective, with the only drawback being the strain it caused on the eyes. Because of that, there were still critics insisting that playing games resulted in nearsightedness.
He blinked several times, waited for his eyes to readjust, then tilted his head back and inserted his contacts. At long last, the real world came into focus.
Sure enough, he could smell corn and meat roasting on the barbecue in front of him. The sky had darkened, and the sparks of the charcoal fire danced like fireflies.
They were at a campsite somewhere. It was the second of May, slap-bang in the middle of the Golden Week holidays. His whole family was there, enjoying an evening meal while fending off the moths attracted by the firelight.
His sister used a pair of tongs to lift a well-cooked sausage onto his paper plate, along with some potato slices. Then she addressed him, puffing out her rosy cheeks.
“I swear, you’re addicted to that thing. We’re supposed to be having a nice family meal. Why do you have to stay on your phone the whole time? We might as well not even be outdoors.”
The boy was at a loss. It hadn’t been entirely his fault, but with his parents sitting right in front of him, he couldn’t exactly say he’d been kidnapped and unable to log out.
“Well, you know. The stock market never sleeps.”
“That’s what you aaalways say!!”
At first glance, it might seem that they were camping in the middle of nowhere, but if you could see the radio waves, LAN packets, and satellite links constantly bouncing around them, you would realize they could never truly disconnect. And that wasn’t even counting the cameras monitoring the water levels of dams and rivers, the seismoscopes listening for minuscule vibrations in the earth to warn of oncoming quakes, or the sensor arrays constantly surveying the pollen count in the air. In Japan these days, even a seasoned mountain climber never went up without a GPS link and real-time meteorological data.
Looking up into the sky, he noticed a single star buzzing back and forth among the others. This was almost certainly no UFO but a drone taking aerial pictures for some photographer.
It was now difficult to find a single place in Japan without a decent phone signal. Just moving to a campsite a little ways out of the city wasn’t enough. Your only bet was to seal yourself underground in a basement lined with lead.
And it wasn’t just the boy on his phone out here. Over to the side, another group of campers were busy setting up a tent, while the smartphones in their hands offered an AR view of what it was meant to look like, overlaid onto the scenery. Any recipes were downloaded from the internet, and before eating any wild plants, you could scan them with an app, which would send the image to a large server somewhere and tell you if they were safe to eat or not. Nowadays, phones could even emit an ultrasonic noise that kept wild bears at bay.
There were no mosquitoes or flies anywhere to be seen, and it wasn’t just because summer hadn’t yet begun. Genetic splicing was another area dominated by AI. It had been a simple matter to create varieties that didn’t react to human blood or rotting food, and to release them into the population to breed. Stronger pesticides only resulted in more resilient pests, so why not focus on making the insects weaker instead?
People had even begun to wonder if similar methods were being used on humanity itself. It was already common to gestate a baby in a lab, so that genetic tests could be run. Who knew what kinds of procedures might be performed without the mother’s knowledge? After all, young people these days were exceedingly good with computers, and there was no shortage of conspiracy theories suggesting that something had been done to their genes and skeletal structure to achieve this.
“Anyway, it’s time to enjoy the outdoors with me. Here, have a nice, fat, juicy wiener ”
“Erp.”
“What kind of reaction is that? Is my food not good enough for you?”
“…No, it’s not that. You just reminded me of something that happened earlier.”
“?”
His sister tilted her head quizzically, but the boy was loath to explain, so the girl took the sausage for herself and began innocently nibbling on it.
“Om-nom. There’s nothing wrong with games, but everything in moderation.”
“You’re right. By the way, I’ve got something to say about Money (Game) Master.”
“More? Can’t we change the subject?”
“Just one thing. You see…”