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= META 4 CITY =

a DarkSF Novel

by John Argo

Page 29.

Chapter 23

Tedda's partners in the Monorail board game included Wally and a strong female player, with a Latina accent, named Dominica. This woman was dark-skinned and dark-haired, with a full body and smooth, youthful cheeks. Dominica was the soul of kindness and competence, and Tedda felt a growing liking for her. Dominica would say "Play your best hand; you're doing fine" and then clean up as she took tokens and money and reduced Tedda to penury. They all laughed at Dominica's uncanny ability to excel at that board game. Tedda found herself drawn not only to Dominica as a friend, but to this strangely appealing, addictive game. Sometimes Lindy came by to watch, but Lindy rarely ever picked up tokens to play.

Tedda found that the game was fun. The board was worn, its edges frayed and showing the brown cardboard inside. Its surfaces were painted in happy pastels—a mild sky blue, a mild bilious green, tomato reds, all edged in quaint black borders. When a good game was in progress, workers young and old would cluster around, and a chorus of groans or cheers accompanied each play. Stacks of wrinkled play money would change hands amid stacks of sandwiches, open soda cans, and discarded cookie wrappers. A cola belch was not unusual among the spirited players as they bantered while throwing dice and moving their pieces.

One day, the fatherland detective, Werner von Werner, approached Tedda. She was finishing a cup of peach yogurt, and sat alone at the Monorail table while the players had just left to respond to some technical crisis (there were at least two or three a day).

The detective introduced himself. He was a middle-aged man with smooth, ruddy skin and a round head of very tightly cropped fine white hairs. The first pink splash of baldness was seeping through the hair on top. He always dressed conservatively, in a white shirt, dark red tie, and charcoal suit trousers. Usually, the matching jacket hung draped over the back of his chair in a special cubicle with a door near Wally's cubicle.

"How are you today?" he asked, sitting down nearby. He had soft pink hands that he folded in his lap while steepling his thumbs. His eyes were blue, Tedda saw, and his soft features seemed to harbor some repressed steel-spring energy—maybe rage, she guessed. Whatever it was, and however mild he looked, he projected an inner tension and severity that made her uneasy.

"I'm fine." She sucked on her spoon and tried to emanate waves of repulsion at him, hoping he would go away.

"I guess you know of me. I'm Werner von Werner, the political officer on this project. I haven't had time to welcome you directly, but I find that it's important to chat a little bit."

"Okay, Werner, chat."

"Thank you. I guess you understand you are here under duress."

"Yes. Supposedly I ate babies or something equally horrible."

"Yes, something equally horrible, but it wasn't cannibalism." His demeanor was mild but firm.

"You know a lot about me." It was a question.

"I know what I need to know."

"More than I know about myself."

"Yes. Try not to be uneasy. I don't mean you any harm."

"For some reason I get nervous just being near you."

"Thanks for your honesty."

"I love the fatherland and only wish to do good." Tears welled up on her lower lids, making her eyes swimmy, and she thought she was about to lose it. She put her yogurt aside and covered her eyes with her hands.

He gently pried one hand loose and looked at her closely with one light-blue eye. "I am certain you are a patriotic woman. I just want to ask you if you have a real sense of what is going on here."

She blurted: "We made a mistake developing this technology."

"You think V.R. is a mistake?"

"This is not V.R., mister. This is something totally unrelated."

"Oh?"

"Not a technical heavy, are you?"

He shrugged lightly. "I know what I need to know. Don't waste time trying to second-guess me. Just answer my questions."

She felt outflanked on posturing, and switched to facts. "This isn't Virtual Reality at all, though I suspect it started as something along those lines." He looked at her intently, without speaking, and she continued: "This is something else."

He volunteered: "Intereality."

"Is that what they call it?"

He shrugged lightly, flicking his eyes upward a second.

"Intereality," she echoed. "An interesting term. What does it mean? A person from inside that cloud of miniature world over there could step out here and pop into a full-blown person in our world. That's intereality, I suppose. Good term then. In V.R., it's all a metaphor and you can't pop back and forth. There is a real world and an imaginary world. Here, it's different. Far more powerful. We can apply physics and Rules and all sorts of esoteric science to create a tiny artificial space, which then gets out of control and starts growing. Even if it's many miles across in all directions, it's still invisible because it fits into the space between a nucleus and its electron swarm."

He looked at her as if he had not heard a thing she'd said. "What were your parents' names?"

She stared at him, rattled. Tedda and von Werner were back in the world of posturing and feeling. She felt him bullying her in some subtle but raw, powerful way. Tears sprang up again. Had he said 'were'? Did that mean her parents were dead? And she couldn't even picture them vaguely, much less know their names. "I have no idea," she blurted, and started bawling with a bottomless sense of loss.

"Thank you," he said and rose, leaving quickly.

Lindy came by a few minutes later to comfort her. Lindy handed her a handkerchief that smelled of Lindy's body heat and cheap but sweet perfume. Tedda sobbed into the handkerchief, welcoming its warmth from where it must have spent hours in Lindy's ratty pockets. Lindy rubbed Tedda's back while Tedda bawled face-down into her hands on the hard table.

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