The Core: The First Guest

13. History of secrets

Did I give my AI too much personality juice or was there something that I was missing here? "George... why the long face? Is there something you know about keys?" I asked him as I studied the citizen bubbles in front of me. It was quite interesting, each took up its own real estate and some looked a little different than others. Mostly they all were cookie-cutter Citizen homes it seemed. Some seemed to shimmer with light or movement. Perhaps those were for interest or security? I could see through my metal bubble and see the internal oddly shaped things inside that might have been advanced circuitry or cabbage for all I knew. The one thing that I noticed was that I didn't see any blinking lights like those you always seemed to see in alien science fiction films. Maybe blinking lights were kind of pointless after a certain level, I mused.

"In my records, I have a log that was in Hxerdinand the 9th's shared data. It is the only mention I have of keys from all of the data he shared with Tutor. It reads like a youngling's journal entry and it says that his father was always lamenting about a lost key. It seems that when Hxerdinand the 9th was a child the father tried to pass the key to the boy to greatly rewrite and boost his future. It would have worked but for the presence of a hacker in his father's VR home. Once the hacker realized that a secret key was being transferred the System took over and deleted it from existence. To Joe or Hxerdinand, this wasn't a big deal since he never got to even read the description of the key or to use its power. What made him sad as a child was to see the loss in his father's eyes every time he remembered what could have been." George recalled for me.

"Ouch, that really sucks, kind of like a father getting his son's inheritance taken away. It must have been a really special key for it to have troubled him so much." I said as the conversation dropped off.

I moved the view closer to a neighboring bubble and attempted to see inside its metal shell. When I got close and was just about to try to pass through the shell my screen had a block of text popup.

Would you like to enter the home of Uranle the 82nd?

"What? No!" I said as I quickly backed up the view and turned to look at George. "You didn't tell me this was live."

"Well yes, this is one way for a Citizen to move around the Core physically. Sure you could use the virtual pathways and walk around the Core city streets but you wanted to see what it was actually like, so I brought you out here." He said as he went on to describe how Citizens could keep their anonymity with this sort of setup and even move their living location to another empty shell whenever they wanted to pay for the service. The different colors and effects on the bubbles were in fact security, advertisements, and even invitations for visitors. There were also places of business that sold real materials but that was all mostly on another layer of the Core.

"What sort of things tend to sell on Cores?" I asked when my interest spiked as I thought about all the alien artifacts I might find.

"Oh, some very different things than you are expecting I am sure." He said with a slight chuckle. "The thing is, many citizens live comfortably inside their virtual homes. They buy virtual things, pets, ideas, and rebuilds. The rich, however, have lived a long life and tend to look down upon the limits of VR life. They are the ones who pay for couriers of exotic pets, woods, and materials. Those are the citizens who like things to be real and if they can pay for them or the fee to have what they want to be brought to them, then it is all available. That is how and why couriers get paid what they do. It is a lucrative business if you don't mind the super long and boring years of transporting stasis pods and materials." he said as he willed a steaming cup of coffee into his hand and sniffed at it before taking a long sip.

I now understood one beneficial use for speeding up time, it would keep a courier from going crazy on long trips. All they would need to do would be to speed up the observable time happening around them, making it seem as though each trip took but a few hours from their point of view. Adding the fact that the hulls of space traveling vehicles were made of cr... it didn't matter if you happened to accidentally hit anything. You were impervious to damage while traveling in space.