The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [65]
Osbourne’s writhing and rambling urban destroyer had been first designed within an immersive world as a popular hallucination. Still, the toy physics in a modern sealed immersive play world were almost identical to the genuine stress dynamics of real-world architecture. So Osbourne’s game contraption worked: it stepped seamlessly out of the immersive play world, into the real-world streets of Los Angeles, and it smashed things.
Osbourne’s walking anti-city burned ethanol and ran on three wiggling accordion legs of crystal-steel rebar and nanocarbon cable. Since he’d built only one of these monster devices, it naturally looked like nothing else on Earth. The gamer crowds were delighted to see Osbourne’s monster in action. They were used to playing with monsters. They no longer drew distinctions between immersive games and the city streets. Advances in modern entertainment had erased those notions.
The air still stank of the newly doused urban fires when Radmila’s twenty backup dancers filed onto their metal stage—a stage bracketed on top of Osbourne’s walking monster. The dancers had slightly puppetlike dance steps, for they were following immersive cues.
The cue arrived for her obligatory labors. Radmila bounded onto the stage, with the urban-scale version of her signature entry track. The racket was audible for blocks around.
A flurry of aerial stage lights followed her as she shimmied through her paces. The city wrecker rose beneath her feet like a thrill ride. Its snaky legs slithered, buckled, wriggled. It clomped the cracked sidewalks with the tread of doom.
With its complex, gripping feet and its unstable tentacle legs, Osbourne’s city wrecker could walk straight up the sides of buildings. When it did this, the tripod’s stage tipped and dropped like a falling elevator. That fluttered the floating veils of the backup dancers.
Of course all this dramatic stunting was entirely safe, since it had been simulated a million times within immersive worlds. Still, a city-crushing metal monster looked very remarkable in daylight, especially if one was ten years old.
As the city breaker cakewalked through the chosen streets, it fired dust-glittering beams into the doomed buildings—lasers of some kind, she’d been told. The lasers were entirely for show, for the buildings had been booby-trapped by busy Dispensation operatives. It was a pleasure to see such professional work. The useless old buildings literally curtsied to the public as they fell. The precisely wrecked structures fell with a soft mock intelligence, as if they were truly tired of standing there and genuinely glad to make way for the Shock of the New.
Radmila dutifully mimed her awed rapture at these catastrophic goings-on. The demolition was conforming to schedule, but her pride was rather hurt. Radmila knew there was something kitschy and cheesy and intensely Californian about surfing over the city on a dance stage. This overbaked and overpriced public spectacle revealed a kind of childishness in the culture. To simply destroy a badly damaged building should not require any dancing bimbos. The Dispensation was a military-entertainment complex, it always had to throw its marked cards into the magician’s hat, its disappearing rabbits, its custard pies … As an artist, she felt that this was demeaning to her.
And yet, it always pleased Radmila to have a popular hit. Show business did have its native satisfactions for her: shoulders back, chin up, big smile, deep breath, just go … Do it: perform, be there in public, be public. In certain timeless, gratifying zones of raw sensation,