Erin, who passed the actual magazine building on his daily jog in the physical world, had made the virtual building his team’s virtual office. The first time they’d all assembled there in avatar form, he’d been struck by how many of them had created recognizably enhanced versions of themselves—a trend consistent in The Garden at large, where there was the occasional mythical creature or anime-inspired character or something wholly other, but the majority were straight-up humanoids. As the world digitized, people seemed increasingly invested in their human identity, though investment in the species as a whole remained consistently low. Back in high school, he and Anja had spent hours recreating themselves from photographs they thought most accurately captured them. Now, seven years older, Erin had considered aging his avatar, but he had reasons to keep himself recognizably embalmed at seventeen.
At the building’s virtual glass doors, he punched in a passcode and crossed the lobby to a bank of gold mailboxes. This was a nostalgic touch, but every so often he’d find a virtual letter or a postcard, and it would remind him that it was also this pleasure that kept people in The Garden, not just their planetary concerns. He pressed the elevator button and punched in a second code. The doors slid closed, and the elevator dinged to the seventh floor.
The office was quiet, the sweep of windows a liquidy obsidian reflecting a row of worktables, their bare wood surfaces lonesome for the storyboards and architectural drafts they’d once been designed for. At one, Mortimer, The Garden’s co-developer, was hunched over an antique-looking map. A former college roommate, he was the only person who knew something of The Garden’s origin story. Mortimer swiveled his half-robot, half-human face toward him.
“How’s Gale?” Erin asked, surveying the weather panel taking up one wall of the virtual office. Off the coasts of North America, the sky was beginning to spin cotton candy, waves beginning to peak and roughen. If Gale Inc. proceeded as planned, it would be the fourth lab to virtually test its climate technology since The Garden introduced the Test Your Tech feature several weeks ago. From inception, the feature had been a win-win solution, giving them a revenue source while companies like Gale gained access to a no-risk testing ground for their beta programs. Unsurprisingly, suitors looking to buy The Garden also began approaching them, pleasing their investors but dividing the team. How much control were they willing to cede? One consensus was that nobody wanted to negotiate with their biggest, most aggressive suitor, Titan, a cybertech engineering company with ties to the military, who wanted them to cede everything. Then, five days ago, they received a threat. Titan had learned the location of their virtual office—known only to the team—and dispatched a representative: an avatar with rimless glasses who keyed in random passcodes until it tripped the alarm. Mortimer arrived first and, as in a B-movie, was greeted with a handshake and a message: a gentlemanly suggestion that the team accept Titan’s offer and take the money while they still could. Erin called an emergency meeting; the team scoured the system but found nothing. How had Titan located their office? Eventually, someone suggested a leaker in their midst, and the office had gone still. Erin’s mind leapt to his laptop “visitor,” who never left digital crumbs Erin wasn’t meant to find, and it jangled all the bells in his nerves. But he’d said nothing.
“What about the space suits?” Erin asked now.
Mortimer rotated the map toward him. “These popped up about an hour ago, but otherwise no changes,” he said, pointing out the new pairs of white space-suited avatars with the now familiar double-arrowed red triangle emblazoned on their chests. A couple of weeks back, they’d spotted the first pair in a nearby street, their identical look prompting them to speculate whether they were twins—or soulmates? Illicit lovers? Since then, replicas of the pair had proliferated in alarming succession around the globe. Mortimer had begun flagging them, but so far they’d done little except multiply and mill about. Erin had run a logo search, but there had been no matches, at least not in any existing database. The team hadn’t known what to do. Were they Russian bots? Or some kind of Trojan horse—maybe ransomware? The insignia reminded everyone of the recycling symbol enforced on every product, except for the color, emergency red, and the direction of the arrows, double-pointed, like a process that could go both ways. So maybe they’re a biohazard crew, someone had suggested; biohazard containment was a rapidly expanding industry. Or maybe they’re here to combat a pandemic we don’t yet know about, someone else had said.
“Are they still logging weather patterns?” Erin asked now.
“Half are,” Mortimer said. “But what does that tell us? That they’re legitimate participants? Look at them.” He pinch-zoomed out to show the thousands of flags covering the globe like scales. “They look like Stormtroopers.”
The proliferating insignia was ominous, each iteration like an insistent sign whose significance they ought to be grasping but were not. Users had begun contacting them too, their concerns still friendly rather than alarmed (What’s with the patrols? Adding surveillance or something? ☺), but the disquiet was there.
“If this is a threat,” Erin said now, “we better hope it’s someone like Titan, not a government—or terrorist.”
Mortimer didn’t reply. Instead, Erin heard his physical phone in his apartment ping. He lifted his VR headset. A text message from Mortimer: re titan. talk later. outside G. “G” being The Garden. Smart, Erin texted back, a dose of dread flooding his pulse. Back in The Garden, Mortimer headed for the elevators. “We’ll keep tabs on the wind. Gale’s hoping for seventy, eighty miles an hour to test their windbreaker prototype.”
Hoping, Erin thought. Even in the physical world, the question wasn’t if there would be storm winds but what category. “We’ll see everyone tomorrow,” he said to the closing elevator.
* * *
—
ONE ADVANTAGE of being the smartest kid in school had been, for Erin, security: that certainty of being special, like he was meant for something, a destined life. Anja, gifted at a completely different level, could’ve taken that from him—or, worse, brought out that Darwinian edge he hated in himself: a hard, wily pugnacity that bared itself like a set of overwhite teeth whenever he felt threatened. But Anja didn’t do either, and that was probably what he missed most when she was gone: the feeling of being two against the rest in an overpopulated planet going to shit. Where they diverged was how they thought they should fight the dissolution. It was their one active fault line.
“Do you think The Garden’s a bad idea?” Erin had asked halfway into their senior year. They were preparing to present their progress to their teachers.
Anja had shrugged. At this point humans have one way forward: Climate Control, she wrote.
“Okay, but you know people are going to use it for world domination, not human preservation, right?”