Poverty.
What was produced on the net was by no means an illustration of society. You could fall ill here. Hackers planted cyber-plagues and scattered viruses. You could have an accident or simply not feel so great, or become addicted to something. In times of ultra-thin sensor skins that you slipped into in order to feel the illusion of perfect graphics on your body as well, cyber-sex was a great source of income and expenditure. Compulsive gaming flourished, avatars suffered from morbid fears like claustrophobia, agoraphobia and arachnophobia. But far and wide there was no hint of overpopulation. The poor as a source of all evil had been identified and removed from human perception. Networked people could afford a Mumbai or a Rio de Janeiro that was constantly growing, with no impoverishment involved, because bits and bytes were an abundant resource. Even natural disasters had haunted the cybercities – anyone who lived in Tokyo expected an authentic little earthquake from time to time.
But there were no slums.
The representation of the world as it could be became the world itself, with all the light and shade of real existence – and demonstrated who was responsible for global abuse. Not capitalism, not the industrial societies that supposedly didn’t want to share. With empirical ruthlessness the virtual experiment identified the guilty as those who had the least. The army of the poor in Quyu, in the Brazilian favelas, the Turkish gecekondular, the megaslums of Mumbai and Nairobi, billions of people who lived on less than a dollar a day – in cyberspace they weren’t isolated and locked away, not exploited in the class-war, not the object of Third World summits, development aid, pangs of conscience and denial, they weren’t even hate objects.
They simply didn’t exist.
And suddenly everything worked smoothly. So where did the problem lie? Who was responsible for the lack of space, overexploitation, environmental pollution, since the virtual universe worked so wonderfully well without poverty? It was the poor. No point stressing the impossibility of comparing the two systems, the carbon-based and the hard-drive-based. With the naïve cynicism of the philosopher who sees overpopulation as the root of all human evil, and stops listening as soon as consequences are discussed, representatives of the net community pointed out that there were no poor here. Not because someone had cut funds, knocked down slums or even killed millions. They had simply never appeared. Second Life showed what the world looked like without them, and it certainly looked considerably better, honi soit qui mal y pense.
Of course there were other things that didn’t exist in virtual Shanghai. There was no smog, for example, which always unsettled Jericho. Precisely because simulation took human visual habits into account, the lack of the permanent haze completely altered the overall impression.
He looked around and waited.
Avatars and bots of all kinds were on the move, many flying or floating along above the ground. Hardly anyone was walking. Walking in Second Life enjoyed a certain popularity, but more on short journeys. It was only in rurally programmed worlds that you encountered hikers, who could walk for hours. There was swiftly flowing traffic even above the highest buildings. Here too, the programmed Shanghai differed from the real one. On the net the vision of an air-propelled infrastructure had become reality.
Noisy and gesticulating, a group of extraterrestrial immigrants was heading towards Shanghai Art Museum. Recently reptiloids from Canis Major had been turning up in increasing numbers. No one really had much idea who was in charge of them. They were considered mysterious and uncouth, but they did successful business with new technologies for heightening sensitivity. Cyber-Shanghai was entirely controlled by State security which, with a great deal of trouble and the use of a number of bots, kept the huge cybercities under control. Possibly the reptiloids were just a few tolerated hackers, but they might equally have been disguised officers from Cypol. By now extraterrestrials were staggering around all the net metropolises, which hugely extended the possibilities of trade. As a general rule, software companies lay behind these, taking into account the fact that virtual universes had to offer constantly new attractions. The astral light-forms from Aldebaran, for example, with which you could temporarily merge in order to enjoy unimagined sound experiences, had by now been unmasked as representatives of IBM.
Jericho wondered what form Yoyo would appear in.
After a minute or so he glimpsed an elegant, French-looking woman with big dark eyes and a black pageboy cut crossing the square towards him. She was wearing an emerald-green trouser suit and stilettos. To Jericho she looked like a character out of a Hollywood film from the sixties in which Frenchwomen looked the way American directors imagined them. Jericho, who had several identities in Second Life, had appeared as himself, so that the woman recognised him straight away. She stopped right in front of him, looked at him seriously and held out her open right hand.
‘Yoyo?’ he asked.
She put her finger to her lips, took his hand and pulled him after her. She stopped by one of the flower stalls near the entrance to the metro, let go of his hand and opened a tiny handkerchief. The head of a lizard, the same emerald green as her outfit, peeped out from it. The creature’s golden eyes fastened on Jericho. Then the slender body darted upwards, landed on the ground at their feet and wriggled along the floral carpet, where it paused and looked round at them, as if to check that they were following it.
A moment later a transparent sphere about three metres in diameter was floating closely above her. The lizard turned around and darted a forked tongue.
‘Just a moment,’ he said. ‘Before we—’
The woman drew him to her and gave him a shove. The impetus propelled him straight into the inside of the sphere. He sank into a chair that hadn’t been there a moment before, as far as he remembered, or at least the sphere had looked completely empty from outside. She jumped after him, sat down beside him and crossed her legs. Jericho saw the lizard looking up at them through the transparent floor.
Then it had disappeared. In its place an illuminated and apparently bottomless shaft had opened up.
‘’ave you a strong estomac?’ The woman smiled. She sounded so French that a real French person would have been horrified.
Jericho shrugged. ‘Depends what—’
‘Good.’
The sphere plunged down the shaft like a stone.
The illusion was so real that all of Jericho’s skin, muscle and brain vessels suddenly contracted and adrenalin pumped violently into his bloodstream. His pulse and heartbeat quickened. For a moment he was actually glad not to have burdened his stomach with a generous breakfast.
‘Just shut you’ eyes if you don’t bear it,’ twittered his companion, as if he had complained about something. Jericho looked at her. She was still smiling, a mischievous smile, he thought.
‘Thanks, I like it.’
The surprise effect had fled. From now on he could choose which standpoint to emphasise. That of sitting in a hotel room watching a well-made film, or actually experiencing all this. Had he been wearing a sensor skin the choice would have been difficult, almost impossible. The skins erased all distance from the artificial world, while he was wearing only glasses and gloves. The rest of his equipment had stayed in Xintiandi.
‘Some people ’ave an injection,’ the Frenchwoman said calmly. ‘’ave you been once in a tank?’