The fluorescent light fixtures were torn from the ceiling and in their place a bubbly glowing ooze flowed through winding tubes. The bacteria ooze cast a blue-green light, the effect made Rachel feel like she was underwater. She had tweaked it a bit to add more color, but it kept returning to the ocean depths. Streaks of sunlight would, on occasion, make an appearance through a small window that Rachel only looked out of twice in her life. The window had the fortunate circum- stance of being just big enough for a book to fit through.
Rachel’s apartment was on the bottom floor of the stack. The stack of cubes had small patio’s, green roofs, and apiaries scattered throughout. The eclectic assembly looked as if a giant child had started to make a grand space-ship out of Lego blocks but threw it down for icecream and never came back. The stack was one of the few places that was cheap enough that people on The Plan could afford some semblance of a life. The rooms were small, there were no amenities beyond the green roofs, but one key feature was it was close to the fiber.
The fiber ran through Sequim on it’s way to Seattle, which meant it had the three magic ingredi- ents for a giganode. Plenty of water, plenty of sun, and few people(relatively speaking). The gigan- ode was powered by wind and solar plants, and was one of the primary information and process- ing points between the Far East and the United States.
This only mattered, because in the corner of the basement was a machine that looked like a cross between the Millennium Falcon and an Octopus, gently flowing in the watery lights. Rachel’s prized Augment Station had been improved with ’special modifications’ that increased the speed at which the arms could think on their own, giving her rig an advantage in multiple player games that used the entire body as part of the simu- lation. She excelled at kick-boxing and ninja games and made a fair amount of spare cash helping newbs. The advertising revenue she made from people watching her avatar take out the bad guys on popular vids gave her enough money to keep the bacteria lights on. Nobody on-line knew that when they played the great Jago on NinjaCraft 7 they were playing a 17 year old girl in the stacks way out in Sequim.
Rachel was in the midst of pummeling an armada of Warrior Panda ships when it happened. Everything went black, silent. If her basement had electronic lights, they would have gone out. Then a small point of light appeared a few feet in front Rachel. At first she backed up, then realized it was part of her Augmented vision. The interface was what was showing a single point of light, which suddenly grew to show a small man-like thing standing at the edge of forest, beckoning her to follow. The point then shrunk back down, and twinkled as slowly it appeared as a dot within the most realistic picture of the solar system Rachel had ever seen.
She realized the scale was correct, the planets were their proper size and so hardly visible. As she reached out to zoom in she shockingly found that she could. Feeling excited at this new ’game’ and forgetting the odd creature she began testing the interactive map to the limits. Rachel zoomed into Earth, North west toward the Olympic Peninsula, found the spit where she caught fish in the summer and zoomed to the stack. She was shocked at the detail, she could make out birds flying and realized it was not a static map, but a video. She could see AVs lined up on the streets, carrying people to trivial things. Her heart skipped a beat. This wasn’t just a video, but a live feed. She zoomed in further to the pathway outside her room. Without disengaging from the ’octopus’ she grabbed a copy of Looking for Alaska and chucked it out the window. Within a split second she saw the book fly out the window on her vid. She couldn’t contain a little yelp. This was in- credible.
Feeling a tingle down her spine, she zoomed in closer, wondering what the resolution limit could possibly be. She zoomed in on the Oak tree in the courtyard, the leaves had just started to bud. She choose a leaf and the closer she got the more it filled the screen. She cold see the tiny hairs, she knew they were called trichomes, on the leaf, and as she zoomed in further things started to go wonky as they do in a microscope. She thought she had reached the limit of visible light and was about to back out but just before she disengaged the world snapped into a new kind of focus.
It was like looking at soup, but very close, there was a new feature blinking in her field of vision that tracked with her every move, she reached out to touch it and suddenly the world dissolved into a diagrammatic vision of reality. Lines and spheres, outlined and glowing slipped past her, around her. Wiggling shapes of every color jostled for their place. She selected a particularly large shape and in her display the word popped up ’Chlorophyll-a’.
”O.M.G.” Rachel literally thought out those letters to herself. This is a repository of knowledge unlike anything she had ever imagined. The question that then began to consume her, besides the fact that it was now raining and her book was likely ruined, was who was this man in the forest, why do this, and what did he want?