Free WetWeb by Robert Haney

about the tall buildings glimmering with neon along the bund. Shanghai was a city that seemed to be moving backwards in time.  The black smoke from coal burning factories made the city seem like London from a century ago when smoke from coal burning stoves created an artificial fog that filled the wet streets.  I imagined a romantic haze drifting about gas-lights and a city in perpetual darkness.  The Shanghai version of London fog looked mysterious and romantic as we circled above.  However, once we touched down on the runway, the smog began to permeate into the ventilation system.  My eyes began to water and turned red.  Coughing and wheezing could be heard up and down the fuselage.  Many veteran travelers had donned individual respirators and smog filters.
    While California engineered a massive conversion in personal transportation from combustion engine automobiles to the clean engine skimmer that moved soundlessly down the streets and highways, it was major manufacturing centers surrounding key port cities like Shanghai that paid the price.   The smog from cars on the roads in California was now more than replaced by new sources of smog here in Shanghai.  The factory that built the skimmers burned coal.  The factories that manufactured the clean burning fuel cells also burned fossil fuels to charge their power cells.  All of this new industry was based in and around port cities.  The true cost of clear blue skies above California was being paid by the denizens of factory towns in China and India and Mexico.
    For my part, my eyes watered as I boarded the small plane that would take on the last leg of my journey to Wild West Alive.  Wild West Alive was built in a small village upwind from the skimmer factories.  The air would be clean there.  The site was selected because it was inside a valley.  The rolling hills surrounding the set afforded privacy to the town.
    Before I boarded the small plane to take me into the WWA valley, I was able to connect my computer and synch up with communications from Henry Cheung, my lead technician on-site at WWA.  As the plane made its way steadily closer, I read with growing concern.  Henry had forwarded me the incident reports from the last few days.
    Wild West Alive, which we abbreviated to WWA, consisted of three zones:  The game zone, where we built the western town of Squabash and some surrounding structures.  This is the only area that they players see.  Next was the factory zone, this was an old plastic brush factory that we purchased and then converted.  The factory zone is where we maintained all essential support for the game, from technicians monitoring a complex array of gaming servers to the costumes and stables
    for the horses.  Finally there was the village zone.  This was the original Chinese village that was here even before the plastic brush factory turned the area into a factory town.  The village was left alone by the RSI Gaming company .  This was where most of our employee’s maintained their extended families.  This is where our employees would generally go when they were disconnected from the game and not working in Squabash. 
    Now, because RSI gaming employed the almost the entire population of working age people in the valley, the village was populated by family elders and small children.  The village consisted of schools, churches and family farms and a small market.
    What was disturbing to read in the report from Henry was a gang of RSI cowboys had loaded real lead bullets in their guns and started shooting up the village zone.  This was their own home town, their friends and family.  People were shot.  One of the local village girls had been taken back to Squabash. 
    It was clear that the simulated violence and lawlessness they lived with daily inside the game zone was now spilling over into the village.  Our employees seemed to have lost the ability to move between the reality of the village and the fantasy of Squabash.