A Virtual Murder

"To Silicon Valley, huh? Now, let me get this straight. You made up an arcade game, is that it? What is it? One of those mind-numbing, blast-the-enemy space ships gizmos? Or, perhaps it's the one where one little face goes running around eating up all the other little faces."

- "Oh, of course not. Stop it. This is very fresh. It's a whole new technology and they call it virtual reality."

"Murder She Wrote: A Virtual Murder"

Still haven't played any VR videogames....

Xuni Jietou Piaoliuji ("A Wandering Tale In The Virtual Streets") may have been written in 2009, but it is set in the not-so-distant future year of... 2020 (ahem). While Taiwan has recovered mostly from the major earthquake that hit it in 2014, not everything is back the way it was. With city development projects concentrating on the east, Ximendeng, the popular shopping district in Taipei, never quite recovered from the blow, with most of the shops closed or moved away, leaving a ghost town behind. It is not forgotten however, and there is even a government-backed project by the company MirageSys to resurrect Ximendeng. Virtually, that is. In this computer-created recreation of Ximendeng as it was in 2008, customers can walk around, go shopping in the various shops manned by both NPCs and real people (purchases made are sent to your real address) and even go see movies. Plentiful of log-in booths are set across Taiwan, where people can log in and enter the virtual world simply by putting on a VR headset and haptic equipment. At the moment however, Virtual Ximendeng is still in the testing phase, with Luhua as one of the main testers. One day, Luhua is asked to oversee a server stress test by Yanshan, head of development, as he has added a new system to track client activity. Various beta testers log into the Virtual Ximendeng over the course of the day through the 800 VR booths to see if the system can handle varying streams of traffic, but Luhua and Yanshan stumble upon a problem at the very end of the stress test, when they notice that while the new client system says there are 0 clients logged-in, the old system says there's still one active client virtually shopping. Luhua and Yanshan both enter Virtual Ximendeng to see if they can find this zombie client and they split up to search the large virtual shopping district. Eventually they find their problem: a dead person. While the original system simply tracked log-ins and log-outs, the new system tracks eye-activity to determine whether a client is active, which led to the difference. Unfortunately this means that the man they see lying dead in the virtual world, is very likely to be dead in the real world too. They quickly find out which booth is still in use, and after a call to the police, a man is indeed discovered dead inside the booth. Because there was no sign of a third party having entered the VR booth itself to kill the man while virtually shopping, it is believed that the victim was actually killed by a person inside the virtual world. Someone must've hit the man very hard on the head inside the virtual world, and this virtual trauma was replicated by the haptic equipment, killing the man in real-life. While at first both Luhua and Yanshan seem to have an alibi for the time of the murder, suspicion towards Yanshan grows when the police unveils a tragic connection between Yanshan and the victim. Luhua however can not believe that her boss would kill someone inside his own creation and hopes to find out who really killed the victim.

In 2009 Xuni Jietou Piaoliuji ("A Wandering Tale In The Virtual Streets") became the very first winner of the Soji Shimada Mystery Award, a Taiwanese award obviously set-up with the help of Shimada Souji. Entries have to be unpublished works written originally in Chinese (though there are no restriction where the author's from) and several publishers around the world are involved with the project, with the winning works being translated and published in several countries, including Japan, China, Taiwan and even Italy. In the past I have reviewed the Japanese translations of Chan Ho-Kei's The Man Who Sold The World (second Soji Shimada Award) and Hu Jie's Who Shi Manhua Dawang (third Soji Shimada Award), and this time too, I have of course read the Japanese 2010 translation of Xuni Jietou Piaoliuji, titled Kyogi Gaitou Hyouryuuki. The Taiwanese author is Chongwu Xiansheng, though I'll go with their English name as featured in the Japanese translation: Mister Pets.

A comment posted a while back reminded me I still had this novel lying around and funnily enough, it meant I actually got to read this book in 2020 (*I actually read this book soon after that comment, but I always have this long backlog of unpublished posts). Which makes the depiction of virtual reality in this book a bit silly, as it's just a few steps further than we are now. The technology depicted in this novel is recognizable enough that you don't really feel it's science-fiction (the various elements are definitely possible now even for consumers), but the way it is all put together to create an actual virtual shopping district where hundreds of people can actually walk around and do their shopping and hanging around does make it like it's still a few years ahead from 2020. It's quite different from the virtual reality as depicted in Okajima Futari's Klein no Tsubo, which was published in 1989, but the things shown there are still not possible.

I quite like the premise of this tale: a mystery plot revolving around a murder in virtual reality and a 'game-esque' world has a lot of potential, and most readers will probably anticipate some trickery involving how the real and virtual world interact or cross each other (or don't). The problem I had throughout a very large part of the novel however is that the virtual world as depicted in this novel doesn't really make much sense practically. Virtual Ximendeng is conceived to serve its purpose in the plot, to creae the situation of a 'murder committed in a virtual world' but it doesn't take a genius to notice how silly it is to have a end user haptic system so powerful it can emulate a virtual lethal hit or blow. What purpose could such a system ever have in a world that was designed to be a shopping district? Why in heavens would the developer ever think: "Let's introduce a force feedback system in this virtual world. And have it replicate every stimulus to the character exactly. Even if the blow is lethal to the user." It makes no sense whatsoever. What if someone in the Virtual World would trip and fall on their head? You could say, 'but it's a bug' but no developer would even program a virtual reality in such a way that this could be possible in the first place: this has to be an explicitly programmed feature, but it has no sane reason for being there. In the story, they make it a point to say that the physical strength of every client logged into Virtual Ximendeng is reduced by 20%, so any action done in the virtual world is only at 80% strength compared to the same action in the real world. But why would you adopt such a system for what is basically a shopping hub in the first place! It becomes clear that the deadly haptic system was only added to facilitate the possibility of a murder in virtual reality, but there's no internal justification for such a thing to be even considered by the developers, let alone exist and being implemented in a beta of Virtual Ximendeng! The story is also a bit abritrary in regards to what data could possibly be overwritten afterwards to confuse the investigation, and what couldn't. It's not really convincing when the police says this part can be easily overwritten by a third party, and that other part can't, while both systems aren't really explained in detail to the reader. Overall, the idea of a Virtual Ximendeng is alluring, but it could have been fleshed out much better to make for a more convincing setting.

The plot does make better use of its virtual environment in regards to how/when the murder was committed, though the implementation of the 'rules' of the virtual world is fairly bland: it's pretty clear one feature of Virtual Ximendeng will be used the moment it is introduced in the story, and it is used in a pretty straightforward manner. I like the idea, and I've seen it in other virtual reality/fantasy-related mystery stories too, but the way it was used here is a bit simple. What is done isn't particularly original and you can also find similar tropes in mystery stories in "normal" settings, but the act itself is well-translated into the new context of a virtual world. Yet, it remains fairly basic, and while it may be more surprising to people not familiar with videogames 'grammar', the moment the 'device' that only could exist in a virtual world is introduced, you know it's going to be used in one way or another. Ultimately, I do think this is a mystery story that does make good use of the fact it is set in such a virtual world (killing someone inside Virtual Ximendeng to kill them for real, making use of the rules of the virtual world), but especially with such a 'non-standard' setting, it's better to have justification for every element in the Virtual world that is explicitly different from the real world, and that's where this story trips a bit. Especially when the truth about the murder is revealed at the very end, you're left wondering why in heaven the developer would add in all these features and parameters to the client avatars and connect all virtual input to a force feedback system in the real world.

The plot also has another surprise hidden within the investigation, though I think that one is telegraphed pretty early on. Feels more sprung on the reader than on the in-universe characters, and ultimately, it doesn't really do *that much* to strengthen the core plot of the murder in the virtual world, though it does help flesh out the background story, so your mileage on this may vary here: I think I would've preferred a short(er) story focusing only on the murder in Virtual Ximendeng.

So for me, Xuni Jietou Piaoliuji didn't quite live up to its potential. The setting of Virtual Ximendeng is definitely interesting, and there are some good things done here, but too much of the plot feels... contrived isn't exactly the word I'm looking for. Most of the mystery novels I love are in a way contrived, but I feel that the novel struggles a bit with presenting the underlying logic of the workings of Virtual Ximendeng, which are fundamental to making the murder possible in the first place. Perhaps it's easier to accept if you're not familiar with virtual reality/games, but I had difficulties getting into the story because the way Virtual Ximendeng is explained just didn't click with me. A different reader may find this a more satisfying experience.

Original Taiwanese title: 寵物先生 "虛擬街頭漂流記"