Avatar Dreams by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WordFire Press

Avatar Syndrome

by Harry Doc Kloor

Avatar Syndrome

by Harry Doc Kloor

The cacophony from the torrential rain sounded like a thousand cymbal-banging monkeys. The noise irritated Mike, grated on his already frayed nerves. It was one of the reasons he hated coming to Rio de Janeiro. He was a California boy, and had an innate dislike of overindulgent storm clouds. Whenever it rained like this in Southern “Cal,” homes went mud surfing down the Malibu hills. Anything over a light sprinkle made him feel uneasy.

He looked up into the sky. The dark mocha clouds reminded him of a bad vacation he once took when he was six, but he couldn’t recall quite where he’d gone. It was one of his favorite memories, he knew that much—but the details eluded him. In fact, these days much of his past seemed to be a forgotten dream, a sign that he needed to take a break, or perhaps use less Avatars. He heard that some rare individuals who spent too much time in them could have memory issues. It was why he decided to come here in person. (Well, that was a lie. He came in person because he needed to be here in the flesh.) He pushed away the thought that he might be suffering AMFS—Avatar Memory Loss Syndrome. He just needed to rest, but that wasn’t going to happen till he caught the Roman.

He scanned the sky again and let out a sigh of relief as he spotted a small formation of bees flying toward the large warehouse. Only they weren’t bees, but surveillance drones. Mike activated a matrix of mixed-reality screens (MRS) with a simple touch on the frame of his Buddy Holly replica-style eyeglasses. He loved Holly’s music, a classic musician from the last century, whose life had been cut short by a plane crash. Almost no one used eyewear anymore, though Mike still did—but at 53 he was set in his ways and not about to get an implant. Besides, he had these MRS glasses 3D printed to his exact specifications. They made him feel cool. Too bad no one else thought so.

He had worried that the rain would delay their raid; that it would interfere with the drones. He was wrong. The screens showed that the twenty or so microdrones were nearing their target, a decaying mega-warehouse, the central building in this long-forgotten complex. At least the damned things are waterproof, he thought, and the rain should cover their hum. A hum the manufacturer insisted didn’t exist, but anyone whose ears had not been blown out at a Holo-Gendev-VR-Concert rave would easily hear them coming.

The antiquated “hummers” slipped through a broken window on the third story. The building once served to process thousands of tons of raw sugar, but that was more than fifteen years ago, before the collapse of the sugar market, a commodity that much of the world in the year 2042 considered to be an addictive poison and the leading cause of preventable diabetes.

Mike scoffed at that

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