Lessons in Virtual Reality for Wayward Women
Tasha studies a boundless blotch in the Atlantic Ocean where she thinks Manhattan used to sit. The pier — if one could call the skeletal remains of a walkway on which she stands — is all that separates what is left of New Brooklyn from the encroaching coal-dark sludge. She ignores the protest from her knees and crouches down to spy the place where she’d marked the waterline last year on her fiftieth birthday. The crimson stroke is no longer visible, sacrificed to the swelling ocean. She resists estimating the number of years before this pier vanishes completely.
Bone by grinding bone, Tasha stands and lifts her gaze to the story of a mournful, gray-cloaked sky, a prologue to sunny days that will never materialize again. Sounds of the city echo behind her: bicycle horns, the creak of worn leather boots, and the telltale cacophony portending a parent who has reached the threshold of their patience, bickering children.
“Morning.” The woman is impressively clad in a leather corset, billowing ruffles of gauzy fabric at her neck and wrists. A loose skirt ends at the top of her low-heeled ankle boots. She cradles one child against her hip and is holding court between two others, one of whom has kicked her in the shin twice before he notices Tasha’s narrowed eyes on him and freezes, mid wind-up.
She taps the gear mechanism on her watch and says to the woman, “Day shift begins in a few minutes. You must work close-by? The nursery?”
The woman grimaces. Tasha wonders if it’s because of her question or the likely pain in her shin. “My job is keeping these three under control. It’s my choice and if you have a problem with that you can just keep it to yourself.”
Just then, the baby, a brown cherub of a thing, reaches her arms out toward Tasha. A gentle warmth spreads through her. “It’s the toughest job of them all,” Tasha says and means it as she moves away from the family and heads for the dim comfort of her office at the BVI-The Bureau for Virtual Investigations.
Tasha’s father had worked in one of the Manhattan towers, lost during the tidal wave that swallowed the island before rolling back out to the ocean. Left alone with the grim faces of her two children, her mother hadn’t been up to the task. Had folded in on herself, retreated to an inaccessible place she shared only with her grief. On a sun-bright day that Tasha will never forget, her mother had left her and her sister with a friend and never returned.
The BVI is in an unmarked two-story building, couched between an empty lot teeming with abandoned cars on one side and a narrow alleyway on the other.
Tasha turns into the alley and navigates overflowing trash bins and crates on her way to a door that opens with an aria of churning gears. She passes through the entrance, nods at the receptionist.
“Good morning, Mr. O.” His office is a hollowed-out airstream trailer. The rectangular cutout on the side is just large enough so that his head and shoulders are visible. A wilting fern adorns a ledge. He rolls his eyes before he answers.
“You might want to hold that thought,” he says, his face a shiny smudge against the dulled silver jail it occupies for his four-hour shift. “The elevator is broken, again.”
The real work of the BVI takes place on the lower levels; the top one is a ruin and the reception area, a first line of defense. Bad actors had tried to breach the building. Had mistaken Mr. O for something other than what he was, a highly trained weapon. Tasha groans and heads for the stairs.
The door opens to the reassuring thrum of activity. She realizes that she’s been holding her breath as she’s done every day since she began working at the BVI. Many things from the world before the collapse have disappeared and Tasha has the not-so-irrational fear that one day she’ll show up and it will all be gone.
The office is a cavern the size of her grandmother’s backyard in rural Georgia. Packed earthen walls are lined with lamps, powered by solar panels on the roof. Sunlight is as rare as prime rib these days, but what little energy gathered from the filtered light the clouds let through is often enough to prevent the staff from stumbling around in the dark.
The underground chamber is crammed with a hodge-podge of reclaimed metal and wooden desks, both varieties polished to a high sheen per code. Computer terminals cobbled together with the fossils of everything from old cars to pre-collapse tablets cover every surface.
Here, the staff goes about the business of monitoring the virtual world’s criminals for those most likely to create real-world crimes.
An attempt to train the robots for this work had failed. They lacked a certain nuance — an intuition or sixth sense. All the pre-programmed code in the word couldn’t grant them the ability to read the non-obvious signs their trained human counterparts easily discern.
Two alcoves serve as offices for the senior officials at this outpost. Tasha’s is on the left and her boss, Hilario, occupies the other. A group of virtual investigators huddle in a corner waiting for the steam to push the desalinated water into the waiting keg.
They are laughing about a virtual world criminal, a teenager who steals senior citizens’ underwear. “V.I. Mayne,” a portly man calls when he catches sight of her. And they all tense, eyes downcast.
“What’s this I hear about a teen with questionable taste?” Tasha craves the easy camaraderie they share. She’s tried so many times.
“Ah, it’s nothing,” one of them says. And then silence. Until.
The BVI’s newest recruit approaches. Standard issue woolen pants tailored to cling to her curves. While Tasha opts for a neat bun and has a pleasant, but unadorned face, the junior lets loose tendrils of hair escape her bun and her lips are tattooed a deep red.
The junior’s tunic has also been altered. A deep v-cut, in the manner that Tasha’s mother favored. The memories she’s sealed off tear free from their restraints.
Months, years without a word from her mother.
Each time the front door opened–not her. Hope dampened.
Each time the phone chimed–not her. Hope dashed.
Each stranger she passed on the street that for a blistering instant, she thought might be her mother. Hope obliterated.
When she did spot her mother, it was in a television commercial for plastic surgery—of the vanity, not medical variety. A farce of a thing that boasted all the magical ways in which enlarged breasts would enhance one’s life.
Similar commercials followed, all objectifying, reducing. Still, Tasha prayed for the moment that her mother would come to reclaim her.
Each passing year, her pleas remained unanswered until hope hardened into a thorn of hatred.
“Hey, guys!” The perky junior saunters into the midst of her colleagues. They part around her as if she were an island refuge in the center of choppy waters. Three days in and her attire has already earned her a place amongst them.
A dejected Tasha turns and slinks off to her office. She has just settled into her chair, constructed with her own hands from the front seat and demolished parts of a 2018 Tesla, when her boss pops in. His tunic has dark patches at the armpits. His expression a wash of emotion, fear foremost.
“We got a problem.” Hilario runs three miles every day but the three-step trip from his office to hers has him out of breath. He’s riled up about something, then.“A big freaking problem, man.” He leaves as quickly as he appeared. This means he won’t give her the details of the latest issue until she joins him in the situation room.
Tasha ignores her team’s eyes as they trail her to the alcove on the other side of Hilario’s office. There is barely room to move around the space dominated by a stained maple table more befitting a farmhouse dining room. Hilario’s tall, thin frame is nearly trembling as he paces back and forth. Tasha closes the door behind her and takes a seat.
“Is it one of the V-Nuts?” Tasha thrusts her chin at the back wall lined with photos of the top 100 virtual criminals the BVI has identified as most likely to commit a real-world crime. And since the bureau’s inception, they’ve escalated. “Someone done something horrible?”
“Worse. Far fucking worse, man.” Hilario has warring Cuban and Bronx accents. Today, the Cuban side is winning. “It’s the real deal. We had an actual.”
Tasha chuckles. Nobody has committed a real-world crime in over a decade. That’s what the virtual world was developed for. And then the feral, backed-into-a-corner expression on Hilario’s face, that crushes off her voice like a jackhammer to the throat. “An actual?” Her entire world has shifted. She’s on unsteady ground now, feels as if she’ll collapse if she stands. “Was it a . . . a murder?”
Hilario’s exhale is relief embodied, albeit temporary. “A precursor. A stalking. This lady up near the Old-Queens border says she was followed three different times.” He hands Tasha a wooden chip with gold connectors at the underside edge. She reaches for the laptop at the head of the table.
“That piece of shit is broken again,” Hilario barks. Tasha is about to grab one from her office but he isn’t finished. “A one hundred percent success rate.” For some reason, he holds up one finger to illustrate his point. “I’ve identified every perp in New Brooklyn who ever even thought about jaywalking. Now I got an actual that isn’t even on my radar? Find the perp, Mayne. Fuck that shit about the captain going down with the ship. I’m taking every one of you with me.”
Hilario storms out of the room and Tasha returns to her office, twirling the chip between her fingers to keep from hurling it across the room. If Hilario demotes her or worse, disappears her, she must be replaced by a woman and the curvy junior is the only other female junior at this outpost.
No more than two are allowed.
When the world upended, a flood of women opted out of what remained of the workforce, turning their eager and vital attention to their children.
But insecurity is an opportunist.
The female presidential despot and her male-dominated Congress seized the opportunity. Laws were quickly enacted — under the guise of what was best for the children — that restricted the number of women allowed to work at any company or agency. Unlike livestock, that bit of legislation survived the collapse.
The women didn’t know, could not know, that their actions would unravel a century of advancement. Every attempt at resistance had been stamped out, but whispers of another coup persisted.
Setting aside her indignation, Tasha allows herself to feel the adrenaline coursing through her, dulling her fury and what should have been the horror of an actual crime.
Her desktop terminal whirs to life as she slides the chip into the slot just above the keyboard. The machine’s churn evokes images of a chewed up, mangled chip, but they always eject intact. She drums her blunt nails across the pockmarked wooden surface of her desk to expend her nervous energy.
Soon, a grainy video flickers to life. A man tucked into a shadow, gaze fixed on the building across the street. Two more clips follow: same figure, watching our victim at different locations. Tasha has replayed the videos until her vision is swimming with spots. Searching for any distinguishing characteristics. But it is on the fourth clip of the stalking that a sliver of gray light lands on his face. Tasha taps and clicks furiously until the video zooms in. Tasha’s heart nearly thuds out of her chest. The perp isn’t a man at all, it’s a woman.
She hasn’t had a real case since before the collapse. Granted it’s only a stalking, but Hilario’s right, they can escalate.
A quick comparative scan confirms it, there’s no match to the bureau’s top one hundred.
Notes provide sparse details. The victim reported the crime to the closest robot neighborhood watchpost but refused medical care (she’d fallen and twisted her knee running away). She didn’t know the perp, had never seen her before. No words had been spoken, no threats made. It doesn’t add up. Tasha decides to interview the victim herself.
But as much as she tries to ignore the insistent tug of VR World, she cannot. The delicious violence, the artificial normalcy are constant and clawing like the call of opiates to an addict.
Tasha rises from her treasured chair and heads to the elevator — still broken. Though her mind tells her to head for street level, something darker sends her the other way. She trudges down to the bottom level that houses the VR pods.
No one takes notice as she wends around the pods, stretched out for at least a mile, concentric circles of escapism. She slips into a pod and nestles into the cushy material. She reaches over and attaches the contacts: one to each temple and one to the third eye space between and an inch above her brows. She exhales into the virtual world.
Tasha prowls a pristine replica of 42nd street in VR World 3.0 and remembers a time when people were more than surplus biomatter. She has been thinking about this since before VR World beta was announced.
VR World was conceived to solve two of the world’s largest issues: unemployment and crime. A 14th century philosopher whose name nobody remembers predicted what had taken centuries to manifest. A time would come when we out-thought, out-built, out-finessed ourselves. A time when our inventions (or abominations depending on who you ask) would render us a suffusion of redundancy.
For creatures who’d spent a decade and billions of dollars promoting productivity, boredom proved catastrophic. Those who didn’t sink into listless abandon turned to petty, then increasingly more sophisticated, more heinous crime. Not out of necessity, everything was provided; food, shelter, entertainment, but because purpose no longer drove the mindless pursuit of these things.
And boredom dominated the first week of a trial scheduled for 31 days. Initially it was evident that the subjects were cognizant of being watched. They were tentative and distrustful despite the EULA that guaranteed immunity from any acts criminal or otherwise, committed in VR World.
Something extraordinary happened on the second day of the second week. On that Tuesday, at 12:42 pm, a child committed a murder.
The child was immediately removed from the experiment and remanded to an off-site sanitorium whose existence some doubted. The details of the crime are unimportant and the victim had not died in reality of course, but soon, word of the crime spread to the tiny virtual community inside and out; NDA be damned.
Only thirteen people had signed up for VR World Beta, three hundred thousand signed up for VR World 2.0. Virtual crimes multiplied exponentially and real-world crime figures plummeted. VR World 3.0 was written into law on March 29, 2042, requiring 4 hours per day — no more, no less. A fringe, ineffectual outcry from human rights activists was quickly squashed and humanity complied, greedily crawling into their own virtual heavens and hells.
In the real world, the sky only issues a memory of something warm and pleasant against the skin. In VR world, the sunshine is ceaseless.
Tasha enters the world’s largest and most popular haunt, The Nuclear Summer. The 42nd street hangout was part cafe, part community center, and all raucous bar.
She orders a drink and positions herself where she has a view of everyone’s comings and goings. Dimly lit in the recesses, bright near the wall-to-wall windows that front the place. Modern tables and chairs and stools line the gleaming bar with every bottle of liquor you could imagine. One of the benefits of VR world was that there was no smell to the cigarette smoke wafting through the air.
“Ma’am,” with a beefy hand, the bartender slides Tasha a glass of orange soda. She’s never understood why people like the taste of alcohol. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure won’t stand out drinking an orange soda in a bar.”
Tasha ignores the jibe. “Got a v-nut actual.” She keeps her eyes focused on a spot near the door while the bartender busies himself with cleaning a non-existent smudge on the gleaming countertop.
The barkeep is a plant — a member of the BVI placed here to observe what the video screens can’t convey. He stops cleaning, the only sign of his alarm. “An actual?” He sticks a finger in his over-large ear and wiggles it. He claims the noise here in The Nuclear Summer has damaged his virtual hearing. Impossible but Tasha repeats what she said anyway.
“She wasn’t in the top 100 and I don’t have much on her. About my skin tone, tall. You seen anybody like that?”
“About fifty of ‘em every day,” he admits, then narrows his eyes. “There was this one, definitely had a vibe. Just kept watching everybody. Take that back, she sized up every woman that walked through those doors. Figured she was just diggin’ the view but something was a little off.”
“Anything distinguishing? ” Tasha sips from her straw and closes her eyes to relish the taste of orange even if it is fake.
“Some kinda bird tattoo — an eagle maybe; right forearm.”
Tasha jots this detail in her digital notebook and the operative/barkeep moves off to help another customer. She finishes her drink and ventures back onto the streets of VR world.
Her gaze floats down an alleyway and lands on a couple, no, perhaps a pimp and his prostitute — the attire fits. The argument is animated. The pimp slaps the woman, once, twice. She stumbles back then whips off a spiked-heel shoe and charges.
He takes one blow, dodges the next and locks eyes with Tasha. He regards her for a moment before he turns and lands an uppercut to the prostitute's jaw. Tasha casually strolls past. Those who know her well, might notice a spring in her step.
The thought of the tasteless seaweed and mushroom gruel she’ll have for dinner sends Tasha into an old Manhattan deli that used to sit on the corner of 9th avenue and 49th street.
She places her order and sits facing the door. A couple walks in. The man’s attire is the epitome of a fashion icon; head-to-toe. Shoulders squared, chin lifted. A man certain of his station. The woman beside him isn’t so much dressed as she is clad in strips of cloth barely concealing the flesh underneath. On her feet, shoes with heels of a height that Tasha favored in her unenlightened youth.
Her eyes roll over the couple, settling on the woman. She fidgets under Tasha’s gaze, tugs at the hem of the short skirt.
Memories of her mother crowd in. Commercials paved the way to films which always cast her as arm candy or street worker. Friends, neighbors, everyone knew. Kids tormented her relentlessly.
The meal is forgotten along with Tasha’s appetite and she heads back to the real world where she will get back to work after she erases the logs that document time in excess of her allotted four hours.
Facial recognition technology is not what it was before the collapse but using the grainy video image, the junior detective was able to narrow the suspects to seven women. Tasha spends much of the next day interviewing suspects she quickly dismisses. Then she finds herself outside the residence of Misty Simone.
Tenement apartments are towering hovels, fronted by a wall of dingy octagonally-shaped plastic. Metal and plastic tubing snaking along the outside walls, carrying goods, refuse, and sometimes, the dead on their way to the incinerators. Tasha knocks on the door of unit #K187.
“Misty Simone?” she asks the woman who opens the door. The tattoo — an eagle — is right there on her forearm. She stands eye-to-eye with Misty, even barefoot. Her long hair is braided and secured at the nape of her neck.
Misty is cool. Tasha wears the tell-tale badge and uniform of the BVI, so Misty knows who she is, but her expression doesn’t betray it. All the other suspects met Tasha with fear and trepidation. She senses it before Misty Simone utters a word, she is the perp.
“Virtual Investigator Tasha Mayne. May I speak with you for a moment?” Tasha doesn’t extend a hand and Misty doesn’t offer one. She moves aside.
Inside, room for a small sofa that serves as a bed, a table and little else. Misty’s clothes are neatly tucked into bins lining the wall near the bathroom door. Not so much as a sock is out of place.
“And what’s this about, VI . . . Mayne, is it?” Misty settles on the sofa and Tasha takes the chair at the table.
Tasha notes the military medals and stripes lining a wooden shelf above the sofa — the only non-utilitarian items in the room. Misty is too young to have earned these before the collapse; she guesses they belong to a parent or other family member. This also explains the tattoo, the eagle was a common patriotic symbol.
“An actual crime was committed.”
Misty’s surprise was a second too late to be credible. “That’s impossible.” She recovers smoothly. “You can do whatever the hell you want in VR. What’s the point?”
“Exactly,” Tasha says.
“Mind if I ask what the crime was?”
“Stalking,” Tasha says. Misty only nods.
“I’d like to ask about your whereabouts on three occasions.” Tasha tells her the dates and times of the stalking.
Misty waves a hand. “Either here or at work.” She then wags a finger at Tasha’s badge. “You’re pretty high up in the Bureau, huh? Do you run your outpost?”
Tasha notes the diversion but plays along. “Second in command.”
“And your boss? Is she a woman?”
Tasha shakes her head. “A man. Why do you ask?”
Misty deflates. “No reason. Just curious. Not many women get to work for the BVI.”
Tasha watches Misty while she counts to ten. In the third second, Misty blinks and casts an uneasy gaze out the window. She looks back at Tasha, then down at her bare feet. Tasha notices both her finger and toenails are clipped almost to stubs. Misty, of course, speaks first.
“Are you here to question me or stare at me?”
A small curve graces the corner of Tasha’s mouth. “Those your medals?”
“My Dad’s.” Misty brightens.
“Was your mom also in the military?” Tasha asks.
Misty scowls, her snort heavy as a giant’s footfall. “My mom? She couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed half the time let alone volunteer for combat.”
Tasha is trained to restrain emotion, but at this, she almost cracks. Misty’s pain is a mirror, reflecting herself on the other side. Both their mothers, for their own reasons, absent in different ways. She stands and closes her notebook. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Simone.”
Once outside the building, Tasha tears out the pages from her notebook and tosses them at a robot sentry who will see to it the paper is recycled.
Tasha takes the elevator to BVI’s third underground level - the center for subliminal suggestion. She sidesteps the section chief, opting for a junior VR manipulator who is likely underappreciated enough to let slip how suggestions are filtered into VR world.
“We don’t target the one-offs. It’s these serials, the ones that commit way more crimes than your average VR drone.” He talks animatedly with his hands, then leans forward in his chair. “Let’cha in on a secret? The Bundy and Son-of-Sam types, we send those v-nuts voices: do it, go ahead, do it, you know you want to.” He uses his forefinger and thumb to mime a gunshot.
Tasha imagines smacking the self-important expression off his face. But she’s intrigued. “Wow,” she says with wide-eyed exuberance, “That must be pretty complicated.”
“You’d think, right?” the junior level says, swiveling to face his monitor. “But it’s easy peasy.” He brings up a live image of VR world, heads to The Nuclear Summer, and focuses on a woman seated by a window. “Zoom in, tap here and here. Pinpoint object—that’s the tough part. Type in the command. One click and it’s bombs away.” He blanches at the ill-advised reference but Tasha is already, much to the dismay of her knees, heading for the stairwell.
Back at her desk, she harbors a sliver of hope that the group readying themselves for lunch will, just this once, include her. But they don’t. Isolation in the midst of ready companions is an ocean crueler than any sexist insult. No matter, she has work to do. A few deft maneuvers at the keyboard gets her past the firewall to the subliminal team’s servers. It takes more than an hour but her mark slinks into the bar. The junior was right, targeting is the hardest part, but she manages.
Suggestion sent, she pops in to see Hilario. “I got a hit. She’s number five on the suspect list.” The woman will be disappeared, the details of which are reserved for those above her station.
Hilario grins as if she’s announced that the sun has reappeared. “About time! Tell me everything. Depending on what I hear, I’ll decide if I make you walk the plank.”
Over the next several months, two actual crimes are committed but Tasha has taken to tracking the perp and is there to cover them up. A former professional cheerleader is found bludgeoned. There is a nearly head-severing asphyxiation of a woman in VR, who brutally beat a child for stepping on her designer shoe.
The next victim is a virtual music video dancer and part-time swimsuit model. Tasha stares down at the woman, propped up against a wall in an alley. She wonders if she knew, if any of them knew, how their choices impacted other women and more importantly, their children.
A knife is lodged in the woman’s gut and her tunic is soaked with blood. Tasha wraps the body in layers of wool and plastic. She calls a robot sentry to deposit the refuse in an incinerator before returning home.
Mr. Ono nods at Tasha the next morning and as she heads to the stairwell, he calls out. “The elevator is working.” Tasha spins around, but his gaze is plastered on his computer terminal.
Tasha enters the elevator on unsteady legs and presses the button. The doors part to reveal a portentous BVI staff conclave. Misty Simone handcuffed and flanked on either side by Hilario and the curvy junior. Misty is wearing her father’s medals clasped to her tunic.
“The robot sentry.” Hilario shakes his head. “That’s where you made your mistake. That bag of bolts broke down. Dumped the body right out on the street. Evidence took us right to Ms. Simone’s door.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tasha says. She doesn’t have a weapon, they are banned, but she is trained in hand-to-hand combat.
“I guess you thought you were doing women a favor?” the junior’s brow is furrowed, nostrils flared. “Your second mistake? That little visit to the VR manipulator? A friend of mine. You covered a murderers tracks better than you covered your own.”
Tasha moves forward, hoping to at least take out the junior, but behind her, the stairwell door crashes open. Her doom in the form of robot sentries led by a faceless, black-clad group. A group that she’s unleashed on others before and now, they are coming for her.
That distraction is all that they need. Tasha barrels forward and the sheer force of movement bowls over two of them. A handcuffed Misty is still her father’s daughter. She wrenches free and delivers a kick to one of their captors that topples them sideways.
But the others are back on their feet, circling. Tasha feints left and slips between them, pulling an assailant into a headlock. Misty’s kicks and elbow jabs are fending off the rest.
A smashing blow to Tasha’s side is the beginning of their end. She goes down, glimpsing someone grab hold and twist Misty’s handcuffed wrists.
She and Misty are rounded up after a valiant, but ineffectual battle.
Whatever feelings of guilt Tasha has are assuaged by the fact that she thought she was doing real women, women like herself, a favor. All she’d wanted is for the world to take them seriously.
There is no trial, no jury, not even a city judge. Her identity with the BVI will be erased, the junior investigator will assume her office and position. Tasha replays words Misty spoke as they ride in the unmarked van toward their fate:
I’m a military brat, a daughter no less. We’re as good as ghosts in those little fortresses our daddies built. He rules everything, even the goddam roaches. Once mama is cowed the daughter is all by her lonesome. Whether she rebels or conforms, she’s still a woman and she may as well be invisible.
Tasha never feels invisible, only keenly, uncomfortably conspicuous. She is a woman, capable of being intelligent and attractive. She only wishes that men were capable of seeing both halves. This is her last thought before she is weighed down and thrown off the pier where every day, she’d studied the boundless blotch in the Atlantic Ocean where she thinks Manhattan used to sit.
***
Released: April 15, 2024
Veronica G. Henry is the author of Bacchanal, The Quarter Storm, and The Foreign Exchange in the Mambo Reina series. Full Bio