Chapter Fifteen - Surfing

I eyed the screen floating before me for a moment, then pressed a paw to the ‘X’ in its corner. “What’s that?” I asked.

Unlike every other ad I’ve been blocking, this one was sent by a fellow AI. This area is under the control of a Class III AI which is, in turn, owned by a Vanguard. There was no spyware or any other malicious content, just a greeting.

“Huh,” I said. “Are we supposed to... reply?”

That would be polite.

I nodded. “Send something nice back?” I said before turning my focus back onto the world around me.

The Portal Palace lived up to its name. It was a huge open area, like the ballroom of some fantastical castle. There were huge mirror-like surfaces against every wall, and through them I could see shifting scenes from different places, all of them moving as we moved as if those places were just one room over. None of that made any real sense though, the rooms I saw would all be overlapping and some seemed to be operating on different scales.

There were lines of avatars waiting before the mirrors, each one waiting their turn to interact with a panel that changed the image in the mirror. Once someone pressed on their panel a few times, they’d jump into the mirror and be off to who-knows-where.

The number of rooms I saw that had vaguely pornographic images in them said lots.

“Let’s find a place to port from, and then we’ll be real close to your Samurai buddies,” Daniel said.

*