"We're here to see Cody," said Naomi to the woman on reception.
"That'll be thirty-five dollars each," replied the woman without looking up from her screen.
"No, we're not here for that, we just want to speak to Cody," protested Naomi firmly.
"Doesn't matter, you still need to pay. You can't go in without the glasses, and they are thirty-five dollars to rent." Naomi, clearly fuming on the inside, slapped her large leather handbag on the counter and fished out her phone. She tapped the card reader and it beeped successfully. She shot Brendon a stare of incredulity.
Brendon looked back helpless.
Without looking, the woman reached down under the counter and handed two zip lock bags, each with a pair of clear wraparound glasses in them. Brendon pulled his out and looked at the artefact suspiciously. They reminded him of the safety glasses they used at the hospital.
One single piece of clear plastic shaped and cut into a wraparound visor with a black plastic frame on the top that held the arms. The only difference with these was the weight. They felt much, much heavier, and Brendon wondered if the plastic was in fact some kind of heavy glass.
Naomi had told him yesterday to meet her here and hadn't explained much more than that. He'd waited outside for her next to the entrance of the bodega that was at the address, but when she arrived, she forcefully led him into the unmarked door that separated it from the vape café next door.
Inside was a drab shabby staircase that led to the basement. The carpet was a worn and torn swirl of colours and shapes which nicely complimented the worn and torn lines of colour that peeled from the wallpaper. A chipped and shredded gold banister hung precariously off the wall. Whatever this place was, it was well past its heyday.
At the bottom of the stairs was a small reception area with big double doors at the back. A sign read "El Paraíso" in swirly writing over the top of the frame. It was a neon sign and turned off. Probably hadn't been turned on for years given that the filaments inside the tubes looked yellow.
The receptionist was standing behind a high counter staring at something on a screen. She was a dumpy middle-aged woman wearing a black "El Paraíso" crop top and black leggings. A generous portion of belly overflowed from between the two garments. Her brown hair was pulled back tight and her makeup-free skin was either greasy or sweaty.
Brendon continued to inspect the glasses.
They had a few scuffs and scratches on them so they weren't new, but they'd been hygienically cleaned as they smelt of disinfectant. He noticed a tiny flashing green light on the right-hand arm. Naomi was organising her handbag on the counter and wasn't even holding her pair.
Brendon slipped his on. His eyes strained briefly but when they settled, he couldn't believe what he was seeing.
The receptionist had transformed into a toned, athletic twenty-something with her dark hair in a neat ponytail, lush thick eyelashes and bright red lips. She was still wearing her branded crop top, except now it sat snugly around perfect pert full breasts that were supported by a sculpted midriff with six-pack abs. Her leggings sat taut around defined thigh muscles and the parts of her ass that Brendon could see looked lean and strong.
He quickly whipped the glasses off in amazement.
He found himself looking into the sardonic expression of the original receptionist. She must have experienced this a thousand times. "You must keep the glasses on at all times and return them to the box when you have finished with them," she said in a monotone. Brendon nodded. He put them back on and turned to Naomi. She was wearing hers now and looking at him.
"You OK hon?" He nodded. "OK let's go." She walked them through the big double doors and into the club. Brendon was still aghast by the difference the Augmented Reality glasses made. The carpet now looked plush and thick with no bald patches, the colours in it were now rich and intense. No rips on the wallpaper and even the neon sign was on, shining out an iridescent blue light. Naomi looked exactly the same and he assumed he did too, but everything else was now shiny, new and perfect.
Inside the club, it was gleaming.
A large space with a sprawling central stage that had a long thirty-foot runway extending from it, then smaller satellite platforms dotted around the room. Each with a pole and each with a beautiful naked dancer rotating around it in some incredibly gymnastic and artistic manner.
Around the edges were booths covered in plush purple velvets. In fact, purple velvet was the thread that tied the room together. The curtains, chairs and barstools were all upholstered in the fabric. At tables on the main floor, dancers gave one-to-one shows for patrons who sat drinking from huge heavy-looking crystal tumblers or sleek tall cocktail glasses filled with exotic shades of ice and liquor.
Brendon looked around, taking it all in.
For a mid-morning on a Tuesday the place was busy. Brendon had always avoided strip clubs, but he was pretty sure that weekdays before twelve noon was not normally a buzzy time. He tried to surreptitiously slip the glasses down his nose and look over the top of the rim.
The place was dead.
The drab and sad from the reception continued into the club. Without the filter of the A.R. glasses, the place looked practically derelict. The main stage didn't even have a curtain. One guy was passed out on a table nearby while a cleaner swept debris into a pan on a long handle.
There were dancers at least, but they were far from the nubile, flexible specimens Brendon had been watching moments before. Fat, old, and lacking any kind of enthusiasm, they sort of gyrated in half-assed attempts to be sexy, in outfits that really did not suit their physiques.
Naomi was powering through the room, not taking much notice.
"Hey! Put yo glasses back on!" Brendon looked around but struggled to catch who yelled it. From the dank, dust-filled distance, a short, skinny figure appeared, pacing towards Brendon. He was a good head shorter than Brendon and at least thirty years older. He was breathy but walked with purpose. "Put yo dam glasses back on or ya'll be out!" Brendon tweaked the situation and quickly slid the glasses back up his nose, dropping into the strip club fantasy land that layered on top of this decaying sham.
In this reality, the bouncer was at least six foot tall with a chiseled jawline and muscles that seemed seconds from exploding out of his t-shirt. He pushed his face right into Brendon's.
Brendon took a step back and arched himself away.
The man's skin was flawless, almost like he was wearing makeup. Tanned, smooth, and so closely shaven that you couldn't see a single hair follicle. Only a dusky, unwashed odor hinted at the reality on the other side of the glass. If the guy had been wearing some kind of Cool Water or Paco Rabanne scent, Brendon would have been sold. "I see yo mess with yo glasses again, ya'll be out! Yo got that!" he yelled in a feeble voice. Brendon nodded cordially and stepped away.
Naomi had backtracked to collect him. "Where are we?" Brendon asked with an expression of mixed amazement and disgust. "What are we doing here?"
"We're here to see Cody." She chaperoned him through the room of fake digital people. "He works here." They came to a door at the back of the main salon, and Naomi pressed a buzzer and looked up at a camera overhanging the door. "He's the one that wrote a lot of Riley's plugins and hacks that let him operate the way he did."
The door buzzed open and she pushed her way through. "We ain't got a lot of time. His boss doesn't like us being here." She whipped off the glasses and hung them off her vest top. "You can lose the glasses now, hon."
"Oh, OK." Brendon lifted them onto his head. They walked down a long corridor with doors on either side. The first door was the dressing room. Brendon caught sight of a couple of performers squeezing themselves into G-strings and hot-pants. Then a kitchen area, and then, male and female toilets.
At the end of the corridor was a stairway that snaked around two flights. On the landing was another, shorter corridor with two doors. One had an ornate plaque on it that read, "Office" in a handwritten swirly script, and on the other door a big industrial sign warning, "Danger! Do Not Enter!" Naomi opened this one. As she did, she called out, "Hi hon, how are ya?"
Brendon followed her into the control room.
It was a big space with screens on two walls. On the desks in front of them were keyboards and laptops. It was dark except for the glow from the screens. Some of the screens were security cameras, others were dashboards and readouts of some kind. One of them spun some kind of avatar with dials and settings to the right of it. Brendon was sure it looked like Princess Diana in a tiny bikini and heels.
Cody spun his wheelchair around to face Naomi.
She gave him a huge smile and a big warm hug with a kiss. He was really pleased to see her. "This is Brendon. Brendon, this is Cody." Brendon shook his hand.
Cody was young, slim and had a very similar complexion and bone structure to Naomi. He had thin rimmed, round glasses and his hair was a crazy patch of short spiky dreadlocks. He wore a faded black music t-shirt, Brendon didn't recognize the brand, and green cargo pants. His legs were tightly strapped into his wheelchair, which seemed like a stripped-down sporty type. He had white Nikes on his feet. He was clearly athletic and had big, toned arms and a wide chest. "Good to meet you Brendon," he said cordially.
"You too."
"How long we got till Dmitri gets back?" asked Naomi.
"Probably about an hour, he's out pitching investors." Cody turned to Brendon and explained, "He's the founder of this setup. He's out trying to raise funding to keep this place going till we can prove the tech and franchise it out."
"Well, it seems pretty impressive to me," offered Brendon.
"Thanks man!" returned Cody with a big grin. "I designed it myself," he said proudly. "Anyway, he doesn't like visitors back here so we need to jam."
"OK, let's get to it," said Naomi, bringing everyone back on point.
"Sure thing, what do you need?" said Cody, spinning around to face the desk on the far wall, hands poised over one of the keyboards.
Naomi began to brief.
"We need to know what Riley was doing before he died. We think he was trying to get into a closed community called The Sanctuary and we want to know if whatever happened in there caused his headset to malfunction." Cody was looking ahead at the screen, nodding as he listened. "Are you able to pull up the archive file from his last session and replay what he was doing?"
"No problem, just give me a sec." Cody hit a few keys and the biggest screen on the wall in front cleared. A terminal window popped up. He started typing away furiously. The lines of code cascaded down the screen as windows and dashboards popped up around the empty real estate.
"I'll pull his profile from the archive; he was still using the same username?"
"Yeah, think so," informed Naomi.
"OK." More typing.
A screen appeared that looked like some kind of directory with a huge list of numbered files. Cody opened the top one. "Right, this is the last logged entry," he said. "Let's first see where he was." He opened a text file and copied a line of code from the third line. He then took it to another open application and pasted it into a field.
The screen changed to a simple line map of an area with a large chunk of it missing, while an extensive data table populated slowly on the right-hand side. Cody's eyes scanned the screen quickly. "So this is The Sanctuary," he said ponderously. "Not a lot of data on it. Let me run a profiler." Another window appeared with a loading circle spinning. The group waited as it worked.
"Does it normally take this long?" asked Naomi.
"Nope," replied Cody, shaking his head. The screen stayed blank for a few more minutes until it blinked clear and rendered an empty table. "Shit, nothing?" questioned Cody. "This place must have some serious protection. I've never had any issues getting into closed communities, even the high end ones.
"All I can see is that Riley was here on his last session and that he never logged out. Let me try and see if we can get in there to take a look."
He opened a small window and pasted the same code into a field. It quickly threw up an error page, with a mean looking skull and crossbones and, "Not Permitted," printed in a heavy font underneath. "Dang! We can't even get in to take a look see. This is one powerful firewall."
"What about recordings from his session, can you bring those up?" asked Naomi. Cody navigated to a folder that contained a long list of video files. He opened the top one. It was blank.
"Doesn't even record a user's session, that's nuts. I've never seen anything like it," exclaimed Cody. "These guys must be very, very good!"
"So where does that leave us?" interjected Brendon. Silence followed. Naomi looked at both of them in turn.
"Do you still have his headset?" asked Cody, looking straight ahead. Brendon pondered.
"I could get it, I think," replied Brendon. "We kept it aside to hand over to the investigation team. It'll be in a lock up back at the hospital."
"OK," said Naomi, nodding. "Sounds like you've got a plan, hon." Something beeped in the corner. Cody spun around to check one of the monitors on the side. It was one of the closed-circuit monitors.
"Shit, Dmitri's back. You guys gotta go," said Cody, wheeling back to face them. Naomi started gathering her things.
Brendon took a look at Dmitri.
A heavy-set guy with what looked like bodyguards or bouncers walking into the main salon. These ones didn't need filters to look menacing. Brendon swallowed slowly. He didn't want to get caught by these guys.
"Can you hand these back?" she asked, taking the glasses out of her top. "I don't want them stinging me for replacements."
"Sure," Cody said, collecting the eyewear from both of them.
"Come on, hon," nodded Naomi. "We'll leave out the back." She gave Cody another kiss and hug and motioned to leave.
"Good to meet you, Cody." Brendon shook his hand again.
"Get me that headset and we'll be able to see what's stored on its local memory. We'll be able to see the last things he saw."