Corvallis had come to know that voice. Since their last face-to-face meeting in Zelrijk-Aalberg, it was the only voice in which Corvallis had heard Elmo Shepherd speak.

People had long since got in the habit of representing themselves, in virtual spaces, with avatars. Audio representation—the voice your avatar spoke in—had lagged somewhat behind. It had become important in T’Rain, the game that Richard and Pluto and Corvallis and others at Corporation 9592 had pioneered. It was a devilish problem that no programming team in its right mind would want to be saddled with, and so it had fallen into, or been elevated to the status of, weird stuff. It was all well and good to imagine how cool it would be if your dungeon-raiding team of wizards, dwarves, elves, and the like could all communicate freely in voices and accents that were movie-quality, as finely realized in their own way as the avatars, weapons, and environments. But when one of the players was Chinese and didn’t speak much English; and another was from rural Arkansas and making no effort to hide his accent; and another was from Boston but trying to fake the Scottish accent that he fancied a dwarf would speak in; and another was in London and acutely sensitive to how badly the guy from Boston was getting it wrong; and one of them was a woman playing a male character; and one of them was carrying on a running argument with his mom, who wanted him to take out the garbage; when all of that was happening at once, in real time, making those characters sound as good as they did in the movies was impossible. The Weird Stuff team had made some headway using a divide-and-conquer approach. They had figured out ways to make male voices sound female and vice versa. They had used speech-to-text systems to decode what the players were saying, then used AI algorithms to filter out the “Take out the garbage now or you are grounded” chatter, then used text-to-speech technology to re-render them with correct accents, and so on. That technology had made its way into applications beyond gaming.