This is Five(5), a short story in progress. It’s… sci-fi? Slice-of-life? Neither? Anyways, I’m always looking for inspiration to write more! Content after the break.
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Five(5) by Brendan Balson
8:00am –
Khadijah Rampoor stands on the corner of the street, huddled against the cold beside the grimy, sticker-envandalismed street car stop. She’s the only one there. The lazily falling snow is illuminated by the last remnants of the sickly artificial street lights as they are starting to get turned off by the rising sun. A decent amount of snow must have fallen last night, as the roads are still white, not having had enough time to be pulverized into the brown salty mush that every Toronto resident is familiar with.
She pulls her cellphone out of her pocket to glance at the time. She’s a bit of a nut for smartphones – the technology is changing so fast, it’s kinda exciting to keep up with. The one she has is a brand new Panasonic model, one you can’t even obtain in North America without importing it. It’s got a full-panel OLED touchscreen, hi-definition motion camera, high-speed internet access, the works for a modern phone. They normally came with Android installed as the operating system, but she hacked Apple’s iPhone OS onto hers.
So naturally, she names her phone “Warranty Void”.
Today she’s a bit nervous. She’s starting an internship at a multimedia content development company. They do a whole bunch of things, but perhaps most importantly is that they have access to all sorts of cool tools and software. The one she’s hoping to get the most face time with is the VCI – the Visual Cortex Imager. They had a whole room filled with them, and not the consumer-grade Mark Ones either. These were Mark Twos. Pro grade equipment. She couldn’t afford one of her own, not even a measly Mark One like they have at school, so she’s glad to be able to work with them.
Yesterday she’d gone in and had an interview with a guy named Wade. Wade owns the company. He’s a skinny, balding, straight-to-business type guy. He asked her a bunch of the standard questions, you know, ‘Why choose Innovation Studios?’ and stuff like that. Her answer to that question had much to do with the equipment they had and using the opportunity to learn new things… pretty much how they taught her to take interviews in school.
After the interview, he’d taken her to the Mark Two in the corner of his office, signed her in, put the brainwave pickup helmet on her head, and told her to do various things in the software, while taking notes in a binder.
The Mark Two Visual Cortex Imager is the result of a strange and sudden discovery in neuroscience. A group of scientists in Bern, Switzerland had developed a noninvasive method of not just scanning a human brain, but actually being able to display the visual and (later) auditory contents of the mind, allowing those hooked up to it to project their thoughts as images. Psychologists, neurologists and the like were the first interested in the tech, but a graphics workstation company by the name of Cortizone Systems saw potential in the device and produced a model aimed at the creative community.
The Mark One was met with skepticism and was primarily a proof-of-concept. It was severely limited in ability and fidelity. Plus you have to keep your eyes closed while using it or the device could accidentally lock onto and pick up what you were looking at instead of what you were thinking about – users called such happenings the ‘hall of mirrors acid trip’ cause of how bizarre it looked. Oh, and it couldn’t pick up audio – at all.
A few cartoons made with the equipment popped up on YouTube, some film companies used the machine for directors to be able to produce their own animatics quickly, but overall while it made a huge deal of press it did not sell well. Apparently they fixed the lock-on problem, and after a few choice changes the Mark Two was released into the general market.
This new machine could do things people would only dream of on the One. Images had greatly improved resolution, texture and colour fidelity. Sensors on the side of the helmet could now pick up a soundtrack alongside the visuals. A few advertising and design firms started to use the machine as an inexpensive alternative to things like film shoots. It’s supposed to be much cheaper to just tell someone to visualize an ad, as opposed to bringing in dozens of people and lots of equipment for a shoot. Supposedly that’s what Innovation Studios uses them for – it’s primarily an advertising company.
To put it mildly, the film and television business are not all that amused. In their eyes, this technology puts at risk thousands of jobs both in front of and behind the camera – at its core, Hollywood itself. The main ramification of this is that at this time, anyone who works in or with film companies (which includes a great deal of talent and every one of the studios) won’t touch anything made with the VCI. Oh, this include distribution models too, so iTunes, Amazon and Netflix is out. Youtube and a surprising number of their ilk still play nice with the VCI content creation guys, though.
The Hollywood Embargo, as it’s called, was always one thing Khadijah and her classmates at school could always be counted on to follow in the news. It’s hard not to – the industry that Khadija’s in (She’s a Multimedia Production major at OCD) is in the middle of a complete overhaul, partly because of it and mostly because of the VCI. The VCI’s the newest Top Shit, and the thing about Top Shit was that the only thing you can be certain about was the fact that today’s Top Shit is different from yesterday’s Top Shit. Everything is changing all the time, and Khadija finds keeping up to be entertaining in and of itself.
One of the ugly new TTC streetcars pulls up to her stop, screeches to a halt. She boards, flicking her hologram-emblazoned pass in the general direction of the operator, who barely looks in her direction from behind his transparent plexiglas shield. Khadija loves the old-school 20th-century kitsch of a non-intelligent plastic card with -get this! A magnetic strip. There’s something slightly ironic about using it- like listening to music on vinyl or cassette tapes.
She pulls off her olive-green wool hat, shaking a few flakes of already-melting snow from it before stuffing it into her laptop bag. After taking a seat, she runs her fingers through her short, black hair in a futile attempt to make it behave itself. She gives up, and prepares for the trip.
Time for her to mentally check her route: She’s taking the streetcar to the subway, then she gets off at Dupont and walks from there.
That’ll take maybe only half an hour, but she likes being early. She pulls out Warranty Void and plugs into it a pair of earbuds: one end into the phone, the other silicone-tip first into her ears. Her phone can contact her computer at home and use her music library as a virtual drive, which is convenient as hell and pretty much the only reason she booted Apple software onto the thing. Well, it’s not like she’s a hacker or anything. Some dude on the internet created a script or two, which when used according to directions did all the hard work for you, reformatting the phone and installing a different set of software. All you have to do is wait for it to work, and insert your SIM card, or whatever those miniature SIM card replacements were supposed to be called.
She thumbs the display, selecting the song she wants and the volume at which it plays. She puts the display on hold and stuffs it into her jeans pocket again.
She looks around the streetcar. There are a couple of those creepy new animated advertising panels. They actually have a power supply and display built into the flexible panel, and are made by an inkjet printer. The one immediately across from her is advertising a new Will Ferrel movie. Some of the display’s rows of pixels have been damaged, so half of the lead actor’s face is frozen in position, instead of laughing like the rest of the ad. Hmm. Even in the future, nothing works.
8:32am –
The guy she’s supposed to meeting is named Andy David, though everybody knows him better as the Youtuber “Hexagon7”. His hacker/technothriller miniseries “Chaos Abyss”, created entirely on the Mark 2 VCI, has a number of views in the seven digits so far.
She’s a bit nervous to meet him, actually. She’s never met someone from the internet before.
Khadija climbs the escalator to the bubble-windowed street exit of Dupont Subway Station. It’s north. She starts walking in that direction, lucky to get a “cross” symbol at the lights. Cars impatiently idle, their headlamps illuminating the flakes of falling snow.
She’s actually surprised with herself. She should be really nervous at a time like this, but she’s not. She’s glad she’s lucky enough to even have the opportunity to work at a place like Innovation. She smiles a little to herself as her foot hits a snow-covered icy patch of sidewalk, sending her flipping hard onto her back.
A bystander, a guy in a blue trenchcoat offers a hand up, which she takes once she can breathe again. She assures the guy that she’s okay once she’s performed the perfunctory “broken cell phone” check. It’s fine. Her pants aren’t, and she spends a minute brushing the slush and snow off of herself.
What a way to start. She shrugs to herself and trudges through the adjacent underpass, a freight train making deep rhythmic clunking noises as it passes overhead. This shakes loose rust from overhead, falling like brown dandruff.
Time to find this place again. It was the first right after the underpass… well, she’ll recognize the building when she sees it again.
She isn’t looking for too long – she only has to walk down two wrong streets before finally checking her phone’s Google Maps app.
“Innovation Studios” says the sign at the front of the building in a very nice white LED backlit sans serif. Helvetica, she thinks. Maybe Akzidenz Grotesk. It’s attached to an older, modern concrete, stainless steel and darkened tinted glass type of office building with a nice set of double doors up a few steel grip-taped stairs.
From what she’d gathered in her last visit here, it’s actually a two-story building, with the other story underground. The narrow windows at floor level probably bring light into that floor.
Khadija climbs the stairs while awkwardly attempting to brush off the last of the snow from her pants and hair, takes a breath and hauls the glass door open.
The lobby smells of air freshener and coffee. Its receptionist (“Tina” says her nametag. Everyone here wears nametags.) is on the phone, typing on her current model iMac while speaking into one of those little boom microphone things. Khadija suspects they probably have a bin for last year’s Apple model out back. Tina shows no sign of acknowledging her existence, so she’ll have to wait, then.
She sits on one of the black pleather chairs by beside the door. Khadija can’t help but stare at Tina’s desk, which is a massive granite slab, black speckled in places with white and the particular shimmer of mica. It looks like it must have needed a crane to lift it in.
After a minute or two of listening to Tina agitatedly argue with someone over their meeting schedule on the phone, the door beside her opens. It’s blue trenchcoat, that guy that Khadija slipped in front of before.
She’s mortified.
“Nice spill you took earlier.” he says. “Thought you could use a coffee.”
He hands her one. Its cardboard cup is not the green-and-white of a Starbucks grind like she usually expects to have handed to her by typical creative types, it’s the red-brown-and-yellow of a Tim Hortons morning brew, boldly extolling to her the prizes available if one is lucky enough upon rolling up the rim of the cup. Avoidance of Starbucks means in her experience either he’s one of the more unusual amongst the creative types or there isn’t a Starbucks nearby. Perhaps a bit of both.
“Thanks.” she stammers. “Ummm.. I’m Khadija. I’m supposed to be meeting with Andy today? Oh. Is that you?”
“Oh!” he says, “That’s me. Yeah, we’re going to throw you right into some cool stuff today.”
“Just my luck. Thanks for the coffee, by the way.”
“Didn’t know what you take, so… it’s a double-double.”
“Thanks. Umm.. “
“Don’t worry about that spill you took on the sidewalk making a bad impression, if that’s what you’re worried about.” he says, “If Wade thinks you’re good, then today’s interview is probably just a formality. Are you ok though? You look like you landed rough.”
“Yeah, I might have a bruise. Thanks.” she says. Andy’s begun beaconing her to move to follow him, so she does, shifting the coffee to her other hand because it’s hot.
“Okay, so has Wade given you the tour?”
“No, we just used the Mark 2 in his office.”
“Excellent!” he exclaims. “You can use the Mark Two, unlike the last applicant.”
Khadija doesn’t know what to say. He just keeps talking.
“So, you just met Tina, sorta. You saw Tina. Anyways, she’s the one you talk to when you call in sick or something. If clients or whatever call here looking for you or me well they go through her. Wade’s office is right across from her, as you’re probably aware since you just told me you were just in there. Duh.”
He lightly smacks himself in the head, motions to the doorway beside the front door, then sweeps his hand right across the lobby, “ So all down the right hall and back of the top floor is the advertising arm of Innovation. We do stuff for them quite often.”
They walk into the left hallway. The walls are finished in what looks like hand-made Japanese wallpaper, the doors are mahogany and brushed stainless steel, and look like they’d open smoothly, on powerful bearings. Expensive doors.
“These are the accounts guys. Accounting yes, but also media buyers, agents that get us around the Hollywood Embargo, legal. Good to be on their side, even if some of us can’t work with ‘em directly. For copyright concerns, which is a ten-times-a-week thing here sometimes, talk to our IP guy Stan.”
After half the hallway they take a left and head down a wide staircase, past the accessible elevator immediately beside it. Everything is spotless. Andy pushes open a set of doors at the bottom.
“Ahh, home! Floor Zero, the Creative Department!” he says, arms wide. While the top floor is mainly a corridor lined with offices, “Floor Zero” as Andy calls it is a darker but more open space. Khadija can count maybe twenty banks of mark 2s, and half of them are in use right now. The far wall’s glass with (currently shut) floor-ceiling black venetian blinds, around some of which peek occasional glimpses of sunlight. Must be a courtyard beyond, she reasons.
“The last part of the tour I’ll save for later. Right now, let’s go to that mark 2 in the corner and we’ll get you started.” he says, then pops open the lid on his coffee. “But first, let’s sit and have some coffee. Here’s your name tag.”
She repositions her coffee again as he hands the tag to her. It has her name, a barcode and it seems (according to an “RF” logo of sorts printed on it) to also have an RF antenna. She sees that Andy’s got his on some sort of contraption on his belt with his keys. She just opens her jacket and sticks it to her black tee shirt.
“It can open doors, literally. That door…” he says, gesturing back to where they just arrived through, “…would not have opened for you if you weren’t with me, cause of the RF antenna in the tag.”
He jangles his keys for emphasis.
“That’s high-tech.” she says, taking the time to get it properly pinned to her shirt this time.
“That’s nothing. The machine at the desk you’re sitting at is what I’d start to call ‘high-tech’”
She looks at the Mark 2. It’s a pretty unassuming tower PC. Large, perhaps, for a modern PC, with fat cables connected to an electrode helmet and a large heat sink hanging out the back, but other than that indistinguishable from what would be typical.
“It’s what’s inside. You know these things have a quantum chip in there?”
“What’s that?” she asks.
“It’s a lead box with half-inch-thick walls protecting a chip inside that ten years ago would have been only theoretical. We got it as part of the ‘peace trade’, remember?”
“Oh yeah.” Five years ago, we made first contact with aliens. Khadija was 17.
“The Tyrranians wanted to see what we’d do with it.” says Andy, “Apparently despite being primitive compared to them in many areas of technology, we were miles ahead of them in IT.”
“So we used it to scan the brain?” she asks, carefully sipping her coffee. It is, as the cup warns, hot after all.
“Interpret the scans. The actual scanning is easy by comparison.”
“We use the quantum chip thingy to turn the scans into something useful?”
“Yeah, sorta. Even I don’t really understand it.” he says.
9:40am –
“So, Wade’s marked you as ‘high potential’ on the tests he gave you.” says Andy, carefully dissecting the edge of his coffee cup with his thumbs.
“What’s that mean?” asks Khadija, the Mark Two’s helmet’s cables swaying as she moves her head to speak. The helmet is a big cluster of shiny rounded pluglike electrodes held in place by a blue-grey plastic shell. Most of the electrodes are near the back and sides of the head, and that’s where the two plugs come out.
“It means that your brain interacts well with the equipment and you should be able to get good resolution. Probably a class three, maybe a four on the scale.” he answers, tossing the apparently non-winning cup aside into a nearby trashcan and licking his sticky fingers.
“Scale?” she asks, raising her eyebrow. The helmet’s forehead strip scratches a bit when she does this.
“It’s a rating from one to four of the degree to which your brain can successfully interface with the device. So, to test it further we’ll do some standardized tests! Yay!” he says, throwing up his hands in mock amusement, and opening his binder to read from a page he has there.
“Okay, first up I’d like you to make an entirely blue panel with a yellow circle somewhere in it.” he says. Khadija puts her mind towards visualizing what he said, and in the Stage window on the Mark Two a blue panel with a yellow circle appears.
“Okay, hold it there.” he says, moving his face close to the screen, checking out something.
“Good, you’re steady. Nice clean divisions of shape. Okaaaay, now make that circle a sphere.” he says. Khadija senses a challenge. The circle gains highlights and shadows and casts a shadow of its own onto the flat blue background.
“Cool. Now play the trombone while holding the image.”
The sounds of a trombone playing a raunchy riff erupt from the speakers.
“Nice!” he says, laughing “Now make the sphere look like its made of yellow glass.”
She does.
“Wonderful. Nice touch with the lensing in the shadow.” he says, marking something on the page.
“Okay, now if you would kindly conjure up a view of the planet earth.”
She focuses on a reference in her mind – Nasa’s famous ‘blue marble’ photo.
“Oooh cheater, everyone uses blue marble.” Andy says, laughing. “Even I did. But you actually have to be careful – copyright issues.”
“Are you serious?” Khadija says, looking sideways at Andy.
“Yeah, the courts ruled that ‘memory’ was a valid media for copyrighted works, if you got it out of the head with a machine like this.”
Khadija tries hard to make her Earth not exactly like Blue Marble.
“Okay, so now start zooming in smoothly until you reach this building.”
Her globe spins around as the camera moves in, passing through layers of cloud until what she thinks the Innovation building looks like from the top is front and centre.
“Hmm. Ok. I think I’ve only got one more because you seem pretty decent. Are you up for a challenge?”
“Sure. Go for it.” Khadija says. She’s having fun.
“Ok. We call this the Crowd Test. Make me the sights and sounds of a city street corner, with at least twenty pedestrians going their own ways.” he says, grinning.
She narrows her eyes fiendishly.
10:00am –
Andy passes the second set of printouts over the divider next to them.
“Alan, meet Khadija.” he says. A guy pokes his head out at them. Khadija thinks he’s kinda scruffy, though it could have been his resemblance to that stoner dude, Shaggy, on his green, faded “Scooby-Doo” t-shirt. He’s got a Mark 2 helmet on his head, which he doesn’t bother to take off. Its thick cord trails down his back.
“Charmed. Did you want me to check these?”
“Yeah, they’re the Crowd Test.”
“I can tell that. And I was listening in.” he says, then disappears again.
“What’s going on?” Khadija asks.
“Ahhh, nothing much, I just wanted him to verify my findings.” Andy says.
“No matches.” Alan says after a few minutes, then sticks his head back over the divider. “No matches. You sure this is the first time using a Mark Two?”
“No, I used one yesterday. And the one at school a few times.”
“But still, you’re a newbie.” Alan says, passing the papers over. “I invented the Crowd Test. Everybody, when making a big enough crowd scene, will repeat faces or bodies. I…”
“You got no matches. Every face or body is different. The same with the first set of printouts.” Andy finishes.
“Thank you for interrupting me.” Alan says, glaring at Andy.
“So… what does that mean?” asks Khadija.
Andy looks like he’s thinking for a second.
“That means that we ditch the rest of these tests,” he says, stuffing the papers into his bag, “and I show you the Dungeon.”
Khadija gets a worried look on her face.
“Oh!” Alan says, getting a bemused smile on his stubbly face, “No, it’s not that kind of dungeon. It’s a passcode-protected room at the back of this floor, where Andy here usually works with the thing of which I know absolutely nothing about. Lucky bastard.”
Andy gets a grin on his face, too. “Follow me. The tests I have in mind can’t be done on the Two.” he says, getting up and striding past the rows of Mark Twos towards the back of Floor Zero. Khadija pulls off the helmet, grabs her bag and cold, half-full Tim Hortons cup and follows him. The back wall has no windows, as grade is higher on this side of the building. It does have doors, several of them and of the soundproof type.
“These were traditionally just sound booths, and five of them still are, for recording audio, you know. This one,” he says, gesturing to the red door on the far left, “is The Dungeon. and where we’ll be working.”
He hands her a clipboard that’s hanging on a nail beside the door. There’s a pen attached to it by long rubber bands held on with multiple layers of tape, and half a pad of letter-sized paper, each page of which is printed with the exact same mass of text, which has the title “Cortizone Systems Inc. Non-Disclosure Agreement” at the top in bold, serifed capitals.
“Please sign this before I’m allowed let you in.” he says as she glances over it and signs her name at the bottom. She hopes there isn’t anything about forced live organ donations or something hidden in the fine print but decides the chances of that are fairly low.
“What’s inside that door, alien technology?” she asks, eyebrow raised.
“Partially, yes.”
Andy rips the paper off of the clipboard and punches a five-digit code into a keypad.
“They don’t trust the name tags with this. And you can’t talk about what you see in here with anybody but me and Wade. And Alan knows about it but don’t tell anybody.” he says, opening the door and letting her in. The silence gets oppressive once the door closes. Andy turns on the light, and she can see that inside The Dungeon is a massive desk covered in computer equipment, multiple huge monitors and monitor speakers, vaguely resembling the recording studio it was before. The only truly unique addition is the electrode helmet on a stand – she can tell from back here it’s not a Mark Two helmet. This one is more… substantial. The walls are all very dark grey sound-absorbing carpet-like stuff.
“What I couldn’t talk to you about out there was this. This is where we keep the Mark Three.”
“Mark Three?” asks Khadija. “When did they make a Mark Three?”
“Technically they will, two or three months from now. She’s one of only five in the world outside of the manufacturer; they’re still in beta testing. We’re in talks to get a second, once that period is up. It makes the Mark Two look like a toy.”
“And you get to play with it?”
Andy gets a huge grin on his face. “And so will you. I was one of the first people using it at a trade show four months ago.”
Andy directs for her to approach the desk. “Unlike the Mark Two, the Mark Three’s more of a collection of interconnected systems than a device by itself. You can see how we’ve got several different towers here, I’ll explain what they do shortly. There’s a big storage server in the server room that the system records to as well. This thing’s made for serious work.”
She’s impressed.
“”Ok, take a seat and we can get started.” says Andy, proffering the one directly in front of the keyboard, which she sits in.
“Let’s get the helmet on you.” he says, picking it up off its stand. Khadijah guides the helmet as Andy slips it over her head. It’s built from smooth, undulating grey and black plastic, with the plasma electrodes arranged underneath a face-hugger-like starfish-esque arm arrangement. The arm at the front holds the forehead strip in place and scans the top of your brain, the two at the sides of the head scan the sides. It appears far more sophisticated than the Mark Two helmets, in any case. Like the Mark Two helmet, most of the electrodes are at the back and sides of the head – that’s because this is primarily where the brain processes visual and auditory memories. In the middle where all the arms meet is a blue plastic wheel. Andy starts turning it, one click at a time.
“Tell me when it starts to pinch.” he says, continuing to tighten.
“Ow.” she says. That last click made it too tight. She feels like Pinhead, with all the electrodes digging into her scalp. Andy backs the tightness wheel off a click. “Better?”
She nods.
“Can it move around? Is it tight enough?”
Khadijah shakes her head around gently. The helmet remains firmly in place.
Andy has already moved to a smaller computer to the right of the media tower. It’s a nondescript, beige tower decorated only with the Cortizone Systems logo. A series of massive plugs erupt from fat jacks in one of the towers’ drive trays, the other end of their respective cables plugging into the helmet, which is interfacing with Khadijah’s brain. A series of equally large conduits lead into a series of sockets and, if she isn’t mistaken, a faucet on the wall.
+++SEE FIGURE+++ (figure TBI – to be illustrated. Sorry! -bb)
She hears a mild buzzing sound emanating from her general head region and gets a warm sensation around each electrode as the helmet presumably gets turned on.
“I figure you’re secure enough. Okay, now for it to scan your brain. This is the computer that manages the brain/computer interface and does all the imaging. It’s basically got a single, massive, water-cooled quantum processor farm for a CPU. Err… QPU? Anyways, it’s also more advanced, so doesn’t need nearly as much lead shielding to protect it from cosmic rays as the Two does.” he says, typing away at a small keyboard, and finishing off with a powerful press of the “Enter” key. He turns around.
“So, while we wait for the scan, let me tell you about what it’s scanning for. It’s looking for where, for example, your brain temporarily stores visual memories when you are recalling them, and remembering it. So when we get to doing stuff on the Stage software, it will know how to tell what you’re thinking. You can help it along by thinking of things, textures, colours, stuff like that.”
“So it’s calibrating itself to my brain?” she asks, looking over at him. The helmet’s two thick cords hang awkwardly down her back and under the chair’s right armrest. They’re starting to annoy her already.
“Yep, you could call it that.” he says.
“The Mark Twos didn’t need that much calibration.”
“No, they don’t. The sensors are much more broad, plus they’re fixed in aim. This helmet’s probes have little solenoid arrays to aim the plasma-generated EMF sensor rays.”
“Plasma?!” she asks, eyebrows raising in alarm. She associated plasma with science fiction ray guns.
“Yup. You can probably feel it now, it’s a warm sensation, kinda like little spots of heat where the electrodes are. In the surround around each spike is an extremely high-voltage arc that pulses according to precise frequencies, and gives off a little corona of plasma as a byproduct. It’s mostly harmless. How exactly this reads your mind is beyond me, just don’t use this thing with wet hair, or an excess of styling gel.”
“Really? You’re joking?”
“Sorry, I’m serious.” he says. Andy turns around and reaches for something. He hands it to her, open to this page:
—Insert Manual Page here— (Also TBD -bb)
“Okay, wow. Finished already.”
Khadijah looks up from the page, slightly more concerned that her hair is going to catch on fire. “Is that unusual?”
“Kinda. You’re good to go, though. The software will remember who you are.”
Andy leans over Khadijah and types his user name and password into the main system. The screens all start their boot-up rigamarole. Finally, she is met with an OS-Eleven desktop on the left monitor, a grey centre panel which is mildly and fuzzily glowing around the edges, and a large, glossy AMOLED touchscreen tablet placed where a second keyboard would be if you were a crazy person or MMO addict who set your desk up for multiple keyboards.
“Okay, time for a quick rundown of the system.” he says, smiling. Clearly, this guy likes giving technical explanations.
“First thing’s first, this screen on the left is the Browser. It’s basically just an iMac. You use it for saving, loading, importing and web surfing. You’ve got a script? Read it off of that. Write it on that, whatever. You can send screencaps of the Stage to Photoshop, too. And, um, Photoshop them. You know.
“The touchscreen tablet to the right of the keyboard is the mixer, and controls the media tower. You mix audio and do video splicing on that pad. It send raw video from the Stage to the massive RAID in the server room to get recorded. You can also choose what source displays on the big monitor there- “ he gestures to the big one in the middle “-which usually displays what we called the ‘Stage Window’ on the Mark two and now just call ‘the Stage’, which is more or less a monitor of what the VCI is receiving of your visualization. That’s what it’s set on now. As I hit these buttons, the screen changes from the Stage, to the Edit Preview, to a second screen of the Browser. I’m gonna keep it on the Stage, because we’re trying to see what you can do.”
She looks up at the Stage, and tries visualizing something, like she did with the Mark Two. The image appears on the Stage, an elf from a fantasy novel she’s in the middle of writing in her spare time. The elf is wearing leather armour and carrying an ornate wooden bow with white fletched arrows. She thinks for a second, and the elf’s long white hair starts to undulate realistically in the wind. She can already feel that this thing is miles beyond what the Two could do – like comparing an open-wheeled Formula One racer to an off-the-shelf sports car. It just picks up her thoughts that more easily and effortlessly.
“I see you can pick it up quickly.” Andy says, sitting down on a little stool.
“But you can get more detail than that, we record everything in 8K resolution. And why is she in the middle of a blank grey panel?”
Khadijah hadn’t thought of that. She thinks back to what she’d done with her experience on the Mark Two, and the screen flashes. Blindingly.
“Ow, wow. You really need to be careful of that. This is a true HDR OLED screen. The brightness can be cranked to eleven on individual pixels.”
“Sorry.” she replies, then looks back at he screen. She’d put the elf in the middle of a grove in the forest. Zombies approach from all angles, and the elf pulls out her sword, anticipating fighting.
“That screen must be expensive.” she says.
“Tremendously.” says Andy, “It’s an 8K HDR OLED display. Panels that size without defects in manufacturing are rare still so there’s not many on the market that size. Wade wouldn’t tell me how much it cost.”
She’s focused back on the contents of what she was displaying.
“Make the trees move in the breeze. Try long grass.” Andy says, his hand over his mouth, his eyes glued to the screen. “…and wouldn’t orcs be more topical than zombies?”
Khadijah makes the change and the scene bursts alive with motion, but keeps the zombies.
“She’s an elven zombie hunter.” she replies half-distracted, her eyes rapt on the screen.
“Fair enough. Tone the motion down a tad, It’s making me a bit seasick. Also, try a different palette.”
She makes the changes, casting the scene in a blue-and-orange sunset. Blue and orange is all the rage nowadays.
“This machine is incredible.” she says.
The zombies approach within sword range of the elf, and Khadijah has a greed deal of fun making her elf chop the undead daylights out of zombies with a sword. Small flecks of blood, hair and gore fly in all directions, cast off by her sinuous blade, which the viewpoint zooms in on to focus on the blood-stained elven etching that decorates the steel. She tries experimenting with camera angles, slow motion, special effects, cuts and fades. Some effects (like cuts) are easy to enact, others (like depth-of-field blur) take a bit of experimenting. After about five minutes of this, Andy stops her, the screen pausing and slowly fading to fuzzy grey as her attention is pulled from the screen.
“Okay, That’s a great start. Let’s get on with the testing now that you’ve had time to acclimatize yourself with the system.”
Andy takes a second to pull a file up on a tiny laptop that he keeps on the second desk alongside all his other clutter. “Oh, this should be right up your alley. Make me… a dragon.” he says.
“Okay.” she says, a large dragon appearing on the screen. It distorts and mutates as she changes things to her liking. Finally she settles on one. It’s dark blue and has scales made of crystals. As it sits on the screen she makes it roar, spit blue flame and generally show itself off.
“Okay, now make a castle to defend against that dragon. After you’re done, the dragon will attack the castle. Simple enough?”
She laughs, not taking her eyes off the screen. “Sure.” She purses her lips and squints her eyes. A valley in what appears to be medieval Europe is sprouting a massive castle with ramparts, towers, trebouchets and hordes of defenders. She spends a few minutes setting things up, flying the camera around the battlefield to get a better look. The trees in the valley are knarled and twisted, like that of Fangorn forest from the Lord of the Rings films. Finally, she turns to Andy.
“How much can I store in memory?”
Andy laughs. “How much memory do you have?”
“What?” she asks.
“This whole scene is in your head. The fact that everything you’ve been creating remains where and how you put it is entirely up to your brain.”
“Oh, wow.” she says, makes a few more changes to the scene as she zooms out, then turns back to Andy.
“Okay, done. Ready?”
“Ready when you are.”
Khadijah switches the stage from an overhead view to one that is following her newly-created dragon in flight as it descends on the castle. The rushing of air, flapping of wings and hoarse rush of the dragon’s breathing all erupted from the speakers. She might as well show off a bit.
Quick camera switch to the castle walls. Defenders look like typical soldiers, with bows, spears etc. They look nervously up at the dragon, one person on the wall yelling the alarm.
Back to the dragon. He’s passed close enough to the castle to lob a fireball at the defenders. The blue, incandescent ball smashes into the top of the rampart, taking a few soldiers with it. Black smoke and bits of rock and dust fly everywhere. Quick cut to the burned soldiers, the grievous injuries they have received.
As the dragon comes around for a second pass, the artillery guys have apparently gotten their trebuchets set up as large rocks get lobbed at the dragon, interrupting its aim but doing otherwise no damage. Finally a wizard steps out of a high tower…
Andy, who had been silent the whole time finally speaks up. “You stay here and play around with this stuff, I have to talk to Wade. I’ll be back in five.”
Khadijah barely notices.
10:35am –
Andy leaves the Dungeon, and starts briskly walking past the rows of Mark Twos. He’d been speechless ever since the video of the attack started. The Crowd Test was only the first sign of the depth of her talent.
From his Mark Two comes a voice, “Hey dude, where you going? How’s your intern working out?” It’s Alan, of course.
“Come with me as I tell Wade.”
“Tell Wade what?”
“Dude, she’s a five. We’ve found another five.”
“No shit!” Alan responds enthusiastically.
“I didn’t tell her yet. Besides, it shouldn’t surprise me. She gave a flawless performance, and you saw the Crowd Test.”
“Yeah I did.” Alan starts to reply, then notices that Wade’s office door is locked. “Shit, what time is it?”
“No fucking way.” Andy says. Wade takes a call from his mother daily from 10:30 till 11:00 each morning. Wade’s Rule number 3: Don’t disrupt Wade in the middle of a call with his mother. His door is locked and he’s basically unreachable. Andy gets an idea, heads into one of the advertising rooms, which is currently holding a small meeting of one of the ad teams. As he busts in, they all turn to face him, staring. The advertising team leader starts to open his mouth to complain, but Andy’s already in the room and heading to the front of the room by the whiteboard.
“Excuse us. All we need is a black marker and an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven.”
He takes the two objects from a little blue plastic basket at the side of a large sketch easel, scribbles a big, bold numeral “5” on the paper, caps and returns the marker to the slightly bewildered ad team.
“The multimedia department thanks you.” he says, bowing as he exits. Alan gives the ad guys an apologetic shrug as he follows Andy out of the room. He’s used to Andy’s antics. Andy is standing, leaning against the numerically-adorned piece of paper. The paper in turn is being pressed, numeral-first, into the glass window that separates Wade’s office from the hallway. After about fifteen seconds, Wade bursts his head out.
“Really?”
To be continued.
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