Mitigated Futures by Tobias S Buckell

Author:Tobias S Buckell [Buckell, Tobias S]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-12-31T20:00:00+00:00

***

Jericho caught up to him on a horse-drawn carriage. The robotic horse snorted in gamespace. In the real the fur was a bit shabby, the horse far too skeletal. Overton had peeked once. But in gamespace extra augmented reality finessed and rendered the fur to make it look vibrant and brushed down. And firm muscles bulged as the horse plodded along.

“Get in, hurry up,” Jericho grunted. “Traffic’s miserable right now.” Jericho always made a point of staying in the real. Sometimes Overton suspected he didn’t even really like his job.

But despite the incident in the morning, Overton was full of cheer. He loved his jobs.

The augmented reality contacts edited out things like traffic, and since cars were all run by overware they slipped around the robot horse and carriage, and around Overton.

The Broad Way to him right now was a dirt road, filled with other fast moving carts and steam-machines that were probably buses, or that rare hand-driven machine. Overware caught and flagged those so Overton didn’t step in front of a moving bus.

Getting trampled in the Clockwork Empire meant death as surely as it did in the real.

He remembered an old friend, Khousa, who’d gotten carried away in a quest and ran out in front of a grand contraption. He’d spent a month holed away in a Healer’s Cave, refusing to see them.

“Where are we going today?” Overton asked.

“Rat hunting in the Central Park,” Jericho said.

“What is this Central Park?” Overton projected an earnest bewilderment.

Jericho sighed and spat. “The Great Clockwork King’s Woods, then.”

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