Rising Heights

Gwen was roused into consciousness by the sound of gentle tinkling chimes and birds breaking into song. Warmth cascaded across her naked body as the cocoon sheet reacted to a change in her pulse and breathing. She opened her eyes and was greeted by the diffused orange sunlight from the windows. Not a synthview projection or even renderchrome, real glass and actual sunlight. She turned her head slowly towards floor-to-ceiling glass walls like a flower basking in the UV radiation. Cracked a smile and fluttered her lids with practised artistry. With equally slow dramatics she uncurled herself. The memory-reactive gel shifted beneath her, waterbed-soft at first, then rising thirty degrees and firming to meet her weight. She greeted the day with open arms and a full smile making sure to get the angle just right. Sunbeams across laser whitened teeth. The chimes and chirping receded as smoothly as they had begun as the apartment's motion sensors clocked her movement. And we are up, she thought, letting herself slide from the soft sheets and stepping out of her bed. Her feet connected with the warm, lightly textured bio-wood floor and she stepped the few metres towards the glass. A swarm drone dropped from the ceiling circling behind her to capture the shot with a soft buzz.

With a blink and a thought, she activated her neural lace Mesh letting the HUD overlay settle across her vision.

“You’re the third-most-watched dreamer in Rezo Heights,” purred Honey, her tone velvet-smooth. “Apparently the city has a thing for how your left eyelid twitches.”

Gwen smiled half for Honey, half for the watchers. It was all in the delivery and the mystique.

“And wouldn’t they like to know what dreams I enjoy” she replied to the larger drone, Honey, as it too dropped from its ceiling nest to roughly head height. Its fields pulsed scarlet in response.

A red flame flashed at the bottom left of her vision $SIIV-ST flaring up in red.

Damn, token burned. Poor Siiva’s breakup arc had tanked, Gwen thought. I told him that was a ghost-pump. Emotional blackmail was a bear market right now. But shit, that was rough. She quickly tagged it under #EmotionalBankruptcy and cleared the alert.

Gwen stretched out her arms, reaching up high and wide and extending out her fingers. She pirouetted as she walked ensuring that the cameras could get various angles of her still naked form. Three of Honey’s swarm were now circling her. One had a small flashing orange-red field to show it was the current live feed. The others would be spliced into a recap montage later by Honey.

“Morning light’s jealous today,” Honey said as she applied a rose tint to the window. “Let’s prove you’re still the real thing.”

Gwen cleared the last meter to the slick black section of the wall and reached out with both hands, palms to the surface and fingers outstretched. Concentric rings of red light pulsed out like a stone dropped in a sink.

“Begin Proof of Human verification,” Gwen said in a dramatic yet clear faux whisper.

The rings transitioned from red through to amber.

The rings went now from pale orange to a vibrant green.

Gwen felt her heart rate rise without even having to check statistics on her HUD. She had that pang of fear every time even if that was quite irrational. She was careful; her brand was planning and execution. It was those who rode the far extremes of the risk-curve that burned. Emotion and attention junkies mostly. Gwen, she was different: never gamble on what you are not prepared to lose. PoH verification was only required every 100 Standard Days legally, 10 for some occupation contracts but here in Rezo Heights it was different. Her apartment contract with EcoDeath Opulence required it every 25 hours.

A green lock icon appeared in the top left of the HoloSynth wall and began counting down from 24:59:59 before fading into black.

“Congratulations, darling—you’re statistically human.” Honey chimed, briefly flashing green matching the hue of the screen.

“Always nice to know,” Gwen said removing her hands from the cool surface and requesting her HUD to patch in the news.

The dark reflective surface exploded into a myriad of colours. Trending graphs and charts of the current Whalewatch assets appeared in sensory cacophony.

“You’d trend even if you weren’t,” Honey teased.

“I’d trend chain dead!” Gwen replied, cracking another full smile to the swirling drones. That was a lie of course and everyone knew it. But people did not watch for truths: they watched for dreams.

“Not this cycle, babe” Honey said.

“Breakfast?” Gwen said pacing over to the bathroom module.

“Sentiment favours sincerity,” Honey said. “GlowFast Revival Bowl packed with antioxidants and finished with edible glitter clusters. 100% Vegan. Complete karma Coded. Emotion-clean.”

“Extra pink,” Gwen said stepping into the steam-shower unit. “Make it uploadable.”

Gwen sighed as the plastic panel slid into place. A moment of privacy. At least she could enjoy this part of the ritual alone. She had brought a camera drone into this once, but it had not helped the viewer count—the opposite in fact—her silhouette was more enticing than she was in the shower apparently. Well, that was all the better. Steam, soap and solitude. I wonder when hair will be back in vogue she thought running her hands over her shaved scalp. It was a pleasant feeling to the touch and was low maintenance, but she preferred her hair long—shoulder length preferably.

As the clock counted to 30 seconds Gwen turned and engaged the dry cycle, on zero, she emerged into the bathroom and back into camera shot. She walked back into the main room of her apartment and across to the walk-in closet. Clothing sorted by brands, logos clear for the viewers, interspaced with mirror panels to cover every possible angle.

She made a show of inspecting her clothes. Never waste a moment to remind people how much her wardrobe would cost them.

Honey mapped in the brand logos and price index in near-real time as she made the show of deciding what to wear.

This had been Honey’s idea to auction off her outfit choice to her VIP subscribers. Private bids and this was the big reveal.

“Hmm, today will be the bare essentials” Gwen said stepping to the SecondSkin booth and taking the one-piece suit from the rack and sliding it on slowly toes then legs, hands and finally up to her neck. It hung loose for a fraction of a second and then pulled in tight matching her form perfectly. “60% opacity” she said and keyed in the same instructions over her HUD causing the naturally transparent cloth to mist up with swirling wave patterns from foot to head. Her dark skin tone providing the perfect backdrop for the expensive covering.

She dismissed the stream view from her vision just as the sound of a gong resonated back in the main room.

“Your breakfast has arrived,” Honey said in redundant commentary as she exited the studio.

Gwen headed in towards the delivery window and extracted the small cubic package before taking the circuitous route to the small table set up in front of one of the full-length glass windows. There was no point paying for the view if you did not get it in shot. The drones spiralled to ensure every angle gave the viewers both the food and the real estate. This far up in Rezo Heights the sky was visible above the clouds that hung like a sea hundreds of metres below obfuscating the lower districts. Other towers pierced that pale pink oceans and traffic was running heavy now.

“Window rich” she said between bites of the blank granules over perfectly spherical nutrients. Designer and bland. She smiled for the camera “And worth every Sat.”

Third day in a row now, she thought, #Basalisk254 had old money stakes in blood-coin. Not her usual crowd but as long as he kept dropping the BLDC she would dress however he wanted. Mystery monetized but agency was addictive. Well, lets ride the curve.

A news feed popped up as she finished eating.

“Poor Siiva, he rode that narrative arc too hard,” she said dropping the cutlery back into the box.

“May the chain forgive him” Honey replied.

She held the empty box for a moment longer than she needed to.

“Well, if you are not setting the pump you are waiting for the dump. Stay tuned people as today will be fabulous” Gwen said, rising and turning to the cameras as they panned ready for the multi-shot finale.

“Afternoon agenda will be published within the hour”

Gwen left the table at the window and flopped down onto her bed, now raised up into something between lying and sitting. It anticipated her and adjusted to welcome her with soft cushioning. Time to read the personal messages. Two invitations, the one for the evening caught her eye Surrealist Mint, that was a very exclusive event. Location tag #Heaven Apex, that was corporate level. Well, that was afternoon taken care of. She hit the RSVP. The other was a charity event #Ghosttokenawareness but a week out—who knew where they would be in a week or what was trending—she filed it to review later. Maybe sympathy will be in vogue by then. The last message was more personal and something she had been waiting for. Sparen was her Brand Asset consultant. Finally, she had sent the order days ago.

Gwen sighed. Honey could have knocked up something passable in minutes. Who was she kidding, she knew damn well the old bird would do what she asked but insist on a personal call. Secretly liked the personal touch and the real authentic conversation. She fired off a quick response that she would drop by after some shopping. She did need to be seen and get something, different for the evening rendezvous.

“What’s on at the Jeda Worlds Plaza?” She asked Honey

“Desert Moon,” the drone replied from its ceiling nest “second day and moderately trending.”

“Sand? Why is it never an ocean or lagoon? Never mind, update and post my schedule Honey. I will go visit Sparen first then we can come online for the afternoon stream at the Plaza. The party in the Heavens should be hook enough for the evening stream.”

“Want me to post both now, or leave them hanging on the evening location?” Honey said, fields modulating a pale orange matching the morning sky.

“Slight delay but give them enough time to speculate who else might be there. Hint at something big but release it early enough for anticipation to kick in.”

The boutique's entry seal killed the feed at the threshold. Honey's swarm stacked up behind the biometric line, fields cycling to amber — no drones admitted. Gwen stepped through into the noise without them, her HUD logging the signal drop and then going very quiet.

Visiting Sparen’s boutique was like entering a museum. Not digital dioramas of the past though like in most of the museums she had been to but legitimate—real—pieces of antiquity. It was often weird, occasionally unsettling but always an authentic experience. The woman claimed to be the oldest living person in the whole Cichora Beta system. She had asked Jiff—her agent—and most informed person she knew about this and he had responded that she probably wasn’t wrong.

Gwen dismissed the warning from her lace about the ambient noise level exceeding recommended comfort levels. Sparen was operating a small black machine that was producing a sound like it was malfunctioning. It was incredibly loud for such a small device and could not have been designed like that, surely. After torturing the thing for a few minutes Sparen attached it to thin metal piping running from a cylinder which wooshed and threw out a cloud of steam. Another minute of engineering involving canisters and Sparen returned to her chocolate-coloured desk where Gwen was sat in the very angular and unpadded chair.

“Here you go, lovely,” Sparen said placing a steaming cup of coffee on the table. “Made the way God intended. Freshly ground beans and boiling water. No synthetic crap.”

“Seems a lot of effort for coffee. You can have it drone delivered from maybe a thousand places on this level alone.”

“Pff, I don’t trust any machine to make my coffee and certainly not when they ask me what colour I want it. It's coffee, it comes coffee coloured. Simple.” Sparen said gesticulating dismissively. A rather comical gesture in the fluffy yellow dressing gown she was wearing.

“I don’t think anyone else knows the difference. Coffee is more of a descriptor than a beverage. Like vanilla or sprinkles” Gwen said taking up the porcelain mug and blowing into the steaming liquid. The smell was pleasant but definitely more woody than she was accustomed to.

“Well that’s kinda the point. Everything is fake. Hell people are manufactured, live in virtual hallucination and focus is watching others rather than getting off their asses and experiencing something. Coffee is more than a drink; it is a life choice: an experience.”

Gwen shook her head, “I wonder how you even ended up here. Surely there are other worlds more… suitable?”

Sparen set down her cup. "Off-world they still have L0 economies," she said. "Every transaction costs you something real. Before they stacked the chains and called it progress." She said it without judgment — a record, not a complaint. "There's no value without consensus. E=MIND. And the D term asks for range, not performance — this city can't tell the difference anymore."

There was a rifle on the wall behind her. Off-world make — the casing alloy unfamiliar, the geometry built for somewhere else. Not Rezo-licensed. The kind of hardware that didn't clear customs without a story behind it. Chain-knows what that story was. Gwen didn't ask.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. This place has its upsides. Progress is not all bad — far from it. I embrace what makes my life better and hold onto what I already like. That is what is appealing about Rezo, all are welcome and judgement is consensus.” Sparen chuckled, “I believe they classify me as eccentric and harmless.”

“Just figured that with the whole galaxy…why the Cichora cluster?” Gwen said, sipping the coffee. It was bitter and oddly textured. She could feel the tiny organic grains on her tongue.

“You can add sugar if you really want,” Sparen said placing a small bowl on the desk “The galaxy is a monumentally large place and we have barely scratched the surface as far as I know. Cichora 9 and Rezo are like that coffee, they might be an acquired taste but once you get to like it, well, I would miss it. Besides space travel is for the young my dear. I have been living on local time too long now.” Sparen said returning to her own chair and sipping her coffee.

Gwen was a little lost at the last comment. If she was honest this was why she liked these visits. In theory her HUD and Honey had open access to the Chain-Web and almost infinite information. Freedom of information was a core tenet of law. The sum of human knowledge was decentralised and replicated on nodes spanning across the galaxy. The problem was that it was too much information and that unless you knew what questions to ask you could remain ignorant through complacency: if I ever need to know it I can just ask. This was a nugget of wisdom Sparen had shared months ago — why she refused to have a Neural mesh fitted or have memory augmentation — it forced her to prioritise what information to consume and retain. The old woman picked up on the silence and continued…

“I doubt it is something they taught you or you will ever need to know. Ask your lace to cross reference Standard Days, Universal Reference, and Referential Ship Time.” Sparen said fumbling with the box terminal on her desk to adjust the lighting.

The halogen tubes set into the ceiling oscillated from a warm yellow to intense white before setting to somewhere in between.

“Uh, can you just give me the dumb printed-girl version?” Gwen replied with her own smile.

“Come for the coffee, stay for the education.” The woman said rotating the flex-screen that was attached to her desk on a pivoting arm. “Okay, the days here in Rezo are set by the standard 25 hours of a Referential day which makes this easier. Not all systems adhere to this but this, at least to my knowledge, is always used for Referential Ship time. This is converted into old earth solar years, so a standard galactic year is 350 SD, 351 every other year to keep step with old Earth’s sun. Call it 350 and a half. Good so far?”

“Yep, this we covered at school. Just never understood why there was two ways to name the same 25 hour day – is it not redundant?”

“This is where it gets a little complicated. There is only one clock that truly matters, the chain’s. Every stamp on the Ledger is written against it and it reads the same in every system, no matter where you are standing. Simple. Now, a ship under fold is sealed. Off the record. Nothing in, nothing out, and the chain cannot see her again until she surfaces at the far end. So the ship keeps her own count, and that is your Referential Ship Time. On arrival the count is re-certified against the chain before she is allowed to merge. The two always agree, the physics makes sure of that. The law just wants its receipt. No, the complication is not the clock, my dear. It is what the distance costs the people riding it. Basic example.” She said punching in some references into the old touch keyboard.

She used a shorthand syntax language that Gwen did not understand. She could have requested her HUD overlay but this seemed pointless. The dark screen flashed ‘working’ and then filled with text.

“Basically, even with FTL drives the transit from Sol to Cichora Prime takes the better part of sixty years, of corridor time, if you believe the transit tables. And I can tell you that is priority routing estimates. There is no shortcut inside the hull either. A crew lives every one of those years, the same years as everyone they left behind. So they choose not to live them. Cryo, dock to dock, a watch rotation if you are crew. Sixty years in transit and you are awake for two months of it. Do enough runs back to back and, well, it is easy to miss centuries. Make it a career choice and you can cross a hundred years of everyone else’s lives and be awake for less than ten of them. The ledger counts every day you skipped. You do not.”

“Shit,” Gwen said. “How old are you?”

“Never ask a lady her age, my dear” Sparen replied with a wink. “Anyway, here are the designs you requested. They are fractal locked and commercially logged. They are not untraceable but unless someone puts in some serious MIND credit you will be fine. You are thinking of rebranding your token?”

“Not exactly, more branching out. Not Gwen. That is why I came to you.”

Sparen handed over a small black plastic cube "I did a little research. LUST is a registered bounty brand — already chain-synced. That's a dangerous branch. High risk asset, why?"

Gwen shrugged. “I want to matter. To pump higher than Rezo heights and fashionable memes. I want to be the meme.”

“Memes come and go Gwen. Who we are rarely matters these days. What we intend is lost in the noise. What the chain understands is what you do, how you interact with the consensus…”

Gwen picked up the cube. Black plastic, weightless. She turned it once — the whole of LUST sealed inside — and pocketed it.

"Thanks for the coffee," she said. "And the education."

Outside, the city was waiting. She had somewhere to be, and tonight, for the first time in a long time, she was going up.