“Close the door behind you.”
I did as asked, then made my way back to the pair of seats opposite his desk. Unable to determine which one had seen more asses, I chose the one on the right. Harry’s office had large stained glass windows, and though he did his best to block out the late afternoon sun with heavy curtains and blinds, thin blades of amber and ruby poked through to the opposing wall in long, vertical strips.
Dust motes meandered in the room, ducking in and out of existence as they passed through the streams of light. I'd only been in his office a handful of times with the sun at this angle, but those instances always reminded me of my grandmother's house. She’d developed skin cancer, and taken her doctor's recommendation to “avoid direct sunlight” to heart. That wasn't what had eventually taken her life, though. Skin cancer is like HIV, it’s never what ends up killing you, it just breaks down the door and lets in what does.
The only other source of light in the room was the glass name plate on the desk. It read Harry Deveau-Editor in Chief, the name and title standing out against the relative darkness of the rest of the room. The little blue LEDs hidden in the base were solar powered, and clearly punching above their weight. As Harry closed his desk drawer, having retrieved a small stack of papers, I absently wondered how long the the battery could hold back the darkness. A wry smile threatened to disturb my stoicism as I rolled the thought around a little. The author’s curse, finding metaphors in the unlikeliest of places. The papers brought me out of my existential angst as they struck the desk with a slap.
“I have a lead on a story for you, but I need you to sign this before I can tell you what it is.”
The NDA was standard practice, but the printed hard copy let me know that this wasn’t a client covering their intellectual property, this was Harry Deveau covering his own ass. He wanted something that was legally binding if he needed it to be, but offline, where any 12 year old with a deck couldn’t stumble through a low level firewall and land on it. Harry was a hard one to spook, having started in the industry back when we still sold hardcopy of our own. This must be something big.
I looked at the paper for a moment, and Harry must have taken my silence as some sort of internal moral struggle.
“The NDA is actually for your protection. This piece will be published anonymously, and I need something on file in case the union comes back on me. This story might end up being incredibly unpopular, depending on how things shake out, and I want to take every precaution.”
I took a deep breath, his words sinking in. I’d never get credit for the story. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, and wondered if the trade off in not being able to claim it in my work history was worth whatever job security the favor might buy me.
At any rate, signing the NDA didn't mean that I couldn't refuse the job, so my curiosity won out. I picked up the pen, stroked out the unpracticed spastic scrawl that passed for my signature, and sat back, eyebrows raised.
After a brief glance at my handiwork, Harry relaxed, much of the formality dropping out of his voice.
“Good. How familiar are you with d.o.mai.n?”
“The alternate reality system?” I'd been hearing about it all over the place, but life had kept me so busy that I hadn't the time to explore any reality except the one that my parents had burdened me with.
“Yes.”
“A little. Haven't had a chance to check it out yet.”
“I’d hoped as much, it will give you fresh eyes on everything. This story is less about the technology or the companies or people creating it, and more about the people using it.”
“So...a fluff piece? You know I don't do th…”
“No, it's nothing like that.”
I wasn't convinced. Harry knew I enjoyed engaging in deep dive, hard-nosed investigative journalism, but he’d tried to pull me off on shit detail before. I owed him my job many times over, and someone that never bothered to look below the surface would assume that was his motivation, but the truth was that the site didn't have the resources to devote to the sort of research my type of writing required. He had to make the case each month to the board for each of our jobs, and if viewership didn't provide enough value to the company, the weakest performers found themselves at Basic Inc., the popular derogatory term for the Universal Basic Income office. A couple dozen multi-page clickbait articles generated more advertising revenue each month than one well informed one, though one could argue that there were artificial intelligence packages capable of putting out that sort of content at a quarter of the cost.
So far, I’d managed to create enough of a splash each month to make up the majority of that deficit, but the margin I operated on was much thinner than the “15 times the cameraman caught more than they expected” crowd.
Harry leaned in, placing his left fist on his knee. It was his best, “let's get down to brass tacks” affectation, meant to denote when the conversation had become serious.
“There are a bunch of new types of virtual worlds being built on the d.o.mai.n platform, and some pretty crazy stories coming out about what goes on in them.”
That was an understatement. I'd heard some of the rumors, and it seemed like whatever you couldn't do in reality, either because of money, legality, or due to reality having immutable laws of physics, you could do there.
“Yeah. People talk.”
Harry nodded. He could tell I was prepping to turn him down if I thought the assignment too creepy or strange.
“Right, well this assignment is actually being sponsored by Scource Technologies.”
“Don’t they own d.o.mai.n?”
“Well, they make the software it runs on. Kincaid Industries builds the hardware. Joint venture.”
As he talked, he reached into a folder in his desk and handed me a coded ticket for a lockbox. I’d seen the type, useful as a way to receive goods purchased online if you weren’t lucky enough to be member of the rapidly diminishing ranks of homeowners, and needed a secure place to receive a package.
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“That's the ticket to the storage locker where they shipped the hardware you’ll need to visit this place. This one is a bit different. UNDR, they call it. It's a cyberpunk neo noir world, but the interesting part is that it's designed for working people.”
Harry saw my provisional interest slipping, and hurried on.
“...because you don't log into it like you would a normal simulation. Instead of coming home from work, logging into the system and doing your thing for a couple hours, then logging back off before going to bed, this system is designed to function while you sleep. You lay down, connect to the system when you're ready to go to bed, and you drop into UNDR while your body sleeps. If your character is killed or you log out early, it just lets you sleep. You set your morning alarm, and through time dilation the system makes sure that when the sun rises in game or you’re killed, it's to the sound of your alarm going off.”
“Okay,” I interrupted, “Time dilation? Is thing going to fuck up my brain?”
Harry laughed.
“No. Over 2 million people log in all around the world, and they haven't had a problem with the hardware yet. With different time zones, it staggers the load on the system by functioning only at night. It’s also always night time in UNDR, a way of keeping everyone's Circadian rhythms in sync. That's why everyone gets booted at sunrise, they need to free up space for the next batch of players on the other side of the world that are logging in. Pretty genius, actually.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about this for a humble news outlet editor.”
“Well, I might have tried it out a few times.”
“Is that why I'm being offered this story? You had a good time and Scource offered to partner up, to sponsor this? I thought you said this wasn't a fluff piece?”
Harry took a shaky breath.
“Casey, this isn't about the company. Not really. The story was my idea. I said I tried it out a few times, not that I still use it. I...uh...had a bad experience on my last login a little over a week ago.”
“A bad experience?”
Nothing to do with the system itself. The hardware is safe, I told you.”
I couldn’t place the look in his eyes at first, but I saw it for what it was as he turned away from me, the focused beam of light from the window crossing his face without so much as a blink from him. Haunted. That was the word for it.
“Of course, Harry.”
I paused for a moment, to make sure my words had a chance to fully sink in before continuing.
“I need to explain how the world of UNDR works. At least the basics.”
He reached out to adjust the NDA I signed. Any other stack of paper, it would have looked like nervous fidgeting. In his current state, it felt a little like he was verifying the pages were real, questioning reality. Harry was the most grounded person I knew. His need to do that, even if the action had been subconscious, made me more than a bit uneasy about the story he wanted me to run down.
“Alright. What I’m about to tell you...I’m really putting myself out there. NDA aside, I hope you appreciate the amount of trust that I’m putting in you.”
Not knowing what else to do, I nodded in what I hoped to be a reassuring way. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to know what he was about to tell me, but I thought a lot of Harry. A part of me felt obligated to step up and repay some of the faith he’d had in me over the years. I wasn’t eager to share the weight of whatever it was, but somewhere along the way I’d passed the point of no return.
“I was...am,” he emphasized the word before moving on, as if to remind himself that he wasn't free of whatever hell he was currently in,” being extorted for money. It's not a sum of money that I can come up without attracting a lot of attention.”
“How much money are we talking about?”
The question was out before my sense of propriety could check it.
“The exact amount doesn't matter, just know that to pay it would require me to sell my house. If I do that, there’s no chance of keeping the larger secret. I want to keep Carla out of this. That's why I'm not going to the cops, that's why I'm not hiring a private eye. I need someone I can trust to keep my secret.”
I levelled my best, can you get to the fucking point glare at him.
“A few weeks ago...I made a horrible mistake. I cheated on Carla.”
I deadpanned, “inside of a video game?”
His mouth, which had spent the majority of the conversation contorted into a grimace, compressed into a thin line. I could tell he was actively composing himself, so I gave him the handful of seconds he needed to reign in his temper.
“Casey, if that was all this was, do you think I'd let someone hang it over my head?”
I thought about it, and agreed that it wouldn't make any sense. Carla wasn't the jealous type, and I'd bet even money she knew just enough about simulated reality sex to equate it to jacking off to two dimensional porn. After a few moments, I realized that his question wasn't rhetorical.
“No, I guess not.”
“No. That wasn't what they were threatening to release to the media.”
He paused, collecting his courage. It came out in a rush, like he was ripping off a metaphorical bandage.
“The girl was under age. At least, that's what they're saying. The avatar was a middle aged woman, but there's no way to tell for sure. They showed me the video, the girl’s ID, even the account in UNDR with the girls information. It said she was 13. Fucking 13, Casey.”
I thought about that for a second, a few of his earlier statements dropping into place. Simulated realities weren't considered reality in the eyes of the law. Murder in a digital world wasn't considered murder in the eyes of the law, for obvious reasons. It wouldn't even count as a child porn charge, because the avatar was of a middle aged woman. Even in virtual reality, appearances were everything. It was a gray area, but it would play poorly in the court of public opinion, that was for sure.
Carla probably wouldn't forgive him for virtually fucking a 13 year old in the same way she would a virtual middle-aged woman. Her not knowing much about simulated realities would make it nearly impossible for her to see her husband as anything but a child molester. She wouldn't care that Harry had been tricked. She wouldn't care that it wasn't technically illegal. All she would see was Harry the kiddie fucker, and once that was out in the world, a sympathetic ear would be hard to find.
I then understood why he couldn't go to the police. They'd be forced to open an investigation. They'd have to make sure no laws were broken, and given the questionable legality of the act, Harry would spend months or even years enjoying the half-star accommodations of the criminal justice system while the terminology was hammered out. By that time, Carla would leave him. The news outlet would replace him, or even more likely farm out the work to a rack of servers in Colorado, and anything he had that was worth a damn would be gone.
“That’s pretty fucking awful, Harry, but I'm not sure what I can do to help.”
The entire character of his face shifted. Where before he’d been sullen and remorseful, now his features hardened. Harry was always at his best when making moves, putting a plan into motion, and over the span of a heartbeat, the Harry I knew returned.
“All I need is to know who these assholes are. I can't be the only person they've pulled this racket on, there have to be others. I need to know as much as you can find out about their operation, so that I can get ahead of this thing.”
“How so?”
“I need to know if the girl I slept with was really underage. If you can't find that out I need to know who is behind this extortion ring. I need to know how the operation works, I need to know anything that can help me, then turn the tables around on them. I need either to be able to clear my name or to leverage them, so that they can't drag my name though the mud without getting themselves dirty in the process. Mutually assured destruction, in other words.”
I understood what he was asking for, and why he was asking me for it. That only left one part of the puzzle left to negotiate.