by Eric Brown
Kim tugged his hand. ‘Our turn.’ She led him around the hexagonal column, from one scene to the next: fabulous cities, rural landscapes, alien vistas . . . Every ten seconds the scene on each facet switched, providing a staggering choice of locales.
‘Where do you want to go, Hal?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know . . . You choose.’
‘Hokay.’ She pursed her lips. ‘How about there?’
A picture of tropical paradise, a calm lagoon, a crescent of sand, rolling greenery. He nodded. ‘After you.’
Kim approached the portal, hesitated and stepped through. She was instantly transported onto the beach. The transition from his point of view seemed to remove her from him, imprison her in a distant, unreal world. She turned and waved at him from the picture postcard paradise.
Halliday stepped forward, paused, and then passed through the portal as if stepping from one room to the next. Instantly, warm sunlight beat down on his skin, a gentle salt breeze blew; he heard the rasp of cicadas and the sound of Kim’s delighted laughter as she watched his expression of amazement.
He walked with her along the beach, then turned. The interface between this world and that of Central Park hung in the air above the sand, like a detail from a painting by Dali. As he watched, the scene changed. ‘How do we get back?’ he began.
‘If we want to, we just wait till the park cycles round again. Or we can go to another location.’
‘How do we get back to the VR Bar?’
‘Our ticket entitles us to one hour. After that, we’ll be returned to the tank.’ She lifted her hand. ‘If we want to leave before that, we just touch the red spot on the back of our hands.’
He glanced down at the crimson circle located at the base of his index finger. ‘So we only have one hour?’ He tried to keep the disappointment from his voice.
She laughed at him. ‘And you were the one who told Barney you didn’t like the idea of VR!’
He shrugged. ‘So I was wrong. I admit it. I think Barney should thank you for converting me.’
She ran off along the beach, stopped suddenly and began pulling off her clothes. She kicked off her shoes, bent her arms around her back to reach the fastener of her dress.
‘What if someone . . .’ he began.
‘There’s no one here, Hal! We have the whole beach to ourselves! Come for a swim!’
She pushed the dress down the length of her body, unhooked her bra, allowing her enlarged breasts to spill free. She removed her panties, cast them aside and skipped into the lagoon.
Halliday watched her go, affected by her nakedness despite the changes to her body. He glanced back at the portal in the distance. They were still alone.
Quickly, he undressed. He dropped his clothes beside Kim’s and joined her in the water. She had waded out until it covered her knees, and now turned to watch his approach.
They faced each other, a metre apart. He looked down at his body and smiled in bewilderment. ‘How the hell did the programme know what it looked like?’ he asked.
Kim smirked. ‘They were filming you when you undressed, remember?’
He was pleased to see that she had not augmented her womanly attributes with the addition of body hair. She was staring at him.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Do you wish it was bigger?’
She shook her head, wordless. In the real world, arousal often rendered her unable to articulate her thoughts in English, and while making love she would cry aloud in Mandarin. His pulse quickening, he stepped forward and fell to his knees in the shallows. She threw her right leg over his shoulder and he coaxed her lips apart with his tongue and found the pink slick pearl of her clitoris, holding her thighs as she bucked slowly, rhythmically.
He ate her until the sound of her Chinese cries almost brought him to climax, and then moved up her body. Kissing her belly, her unfamiliar breasts. They passed, lips and tongue crashing briefly, in a kind of frantic, inarticulate language of desire, and she moved down his body and he hung his head as his heart pounded. She took him in her perfect teeth, her head sideways, and bit his length, some gentle wild beast tearing at the kill.
And suddenly she gave up and swam away towards the shore. On all fours she crawled into the shallows, sprawled on her belly with her legs apart, and looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes beseeching. He almost ran at her. His fingers found her perfect bottom and parted the lips, and she reached through her legs, grasping him and guiding him home.
They lay on the beach, later, pressed together. He stroked her hair and stared down into her eyes. He wanted to ask her, irrationally, if here in this technological wonderland she still believed in spirits, but at the same time he had no desire to spoil the perfection of the moment.
She propped herself up on one elbow, lodged her chin on his chest. ‘Hour’s almost up,’ she said.
‘How do you know?’ he asked sleepily.
She raised her hand in the air. He saw that the disc at the base of her index finger now showed only a sliver of red, like the sun eclipsed.
‘When the dot is all white, goodbye virtual reality.’
He sat up and reached for his clothes.
Still propped on her elbow, she gazed up lazily at him and laughed. ‘Come back here, silly. No need to get dressed!’
He smiled. Old habits died hard. He lay back down, fitted himself to the shape of her body and closed his eyes.
At first, he thought that it was an effect of the transition from the beach back to the tank and wondered why he had not experienced a similar sensation upon immersion. Something seemed to explode inside his head. He was aware of a silver flash in his mind’s eye, a fleeting recollection that vanished at once but left in its place a stabbing, painful melancholy, like a lifetime’s depression distilled and experienced in an instant. He sat up, crying out, expecting to find himself back in the jellytank.
He was still on the beach and he glimpsed, fleeting, elusive, the distant image of a little girl improbably walking on the water of the lagoon. In a twinkling, she turned and looked at him over her shoulder, and then she was gone.
‘Hal?’ Kim was sitting up, concern on her face. ‘Hal, what is it?’
He could hardly speak for the melancholy that echoed in his head. As he took in the beach scene, Kim staring at him, the feeling abated, but something told him that it would remain for a long time, haunting him, like grief recalled.
‘Nothing. It’s okay. I thought I saw something. It’s nothing.’
She was rubbing his back, repeating soothing sounds, when suddenly he was no longer on the beach. His vision blanked, and the sun no longer warmed his skin. He was back in the tank, enclosed in the viscous jelly. He sat up, the ecstasy of his love-making with Kim usurped, eclipsed by whatever had happened to him in the final seconds on the tropical beach.
He climbed to his feet, forcing his way through the heavy clinging jelly, and stepped unsteadily from the tank. As he stood, the goo drained from the tank, to be cleaned in readiness for the next customer.
Halliday removed the facemask and the leads. Kim was already out, her slim body streaked with jelly. She hurried round to him and touched his arm. ‘Hal, what happened to you in there? Are you okay?’
He smiled through his fear. ‘I’m fine, honest. It was nothing.’ In a bid to convince her, he pulled her to him. ‘It was wonderful, Kim.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘Thank you.’
They showered, soaping the clinging jelly from their bodies. Once or twice Kim caught his gaze and half-smiled, as if awaiting some signal that he wanted her, but the strange experience on the beach had emptied him of desire. He felt suddenly, bone-achingly tired.
They stood beneath the drier, then dressed quietly and left the VR Bar. Halliday drove home through a Manhattan made shabby in comparison to the programmer’s futuristic version of the city. It was almost four, and as they sped north the first flurry of snow eddied down through the gathering twilight. Beside him, Kim shivered, found his hand and squeezed.
> The office light was off when they got back: Barney was out, for which Halliday was grateful. He was dead beat and a bull session with Barney was the last thing he needed. He followed Kim up to the loft, sat on the futon and wearily removed his jeans and shirt. He set the alarm for midnight, the start of another shift.
Kim stood before him and undressed. She was watching him, an unreadable expression on her face. Usually they undressed seated on the bed, their backs to each other, and met naked beneath the warmth of the thermal blanket. Something in Kim’s attitude now registered her unease.
She stepped from the pool of the red dress around her ankles, quickly divested herself of her panties and bra. She stood before him in the cold air of the loft, shivering, something almost childishly pathetic in her need to prove herself to him.
She stared.
‘What?’ he asked, at last.
‘Do you like me, Hal?’ she asked.
‘Like you?’ He almost laughed. ‘Of course I like you.’
‘I mean ... I mean, do you like me as much as the other . . .’ She stopped, her eyes downcast. ‘As much as the other me?’
‘Oh, Christ.’ He reached out, snared her legs, and pulled her to him. She came in a reluctant shuffle. He hugged her legs and lay his head against her thigh. ‘Kim, I love you, okay?’
He felt something fall onto his back, quick and warm, a tear.
‘But . . . but it’s never been as good as it was on the beach, Hal. We were perfect!’
He looked up the length of her body at her tear-stained cheeks. ‘Kim, it’s been as good as that in the past . . . it’s been as good as that for me.’
She laughed through her tears. ‘You’re just saying that,’ she murmured. ‘You like my improved body better.’
He almost told her that she could think what she wanted, that words were useless, that she would disbelieve whatever he told her anyway.
He calmed his sudden anger and buried his head in her crotch.
‘I think you’re perfect,’ he whispered. ‘I love you as you are. I don’t want anyone else, not even a different version of you.’
He almost laughed as he listened to what he was saying, as he tried to persuade her not to be jealous of her virtual alter ego.
He felt her shaking. It was an indication of how variable he knew her moods to be that he could not tell, now, whether she was laughing or crying. He looked up.
She was crying.
‘Christ, Kim
Her words were almost inarticulate. ‘You didn’t choose me,’ she sobbed.
‘What?’
‘I said, you didn’t choose me! I just walked into your life, decided I loved you. You didn’t choose me, you accepted me.’ She paused, then sobbed, ‘So how can I be perfect for you?’ .
He worked to quell his anger again. ‘Kim, I had a choice once I knew you, whether to stay with you or not. Can’t you understand that? I’m here, aren’t I? You’re still here? What’s your problem?’
She shook her head, would not, or could not, answer him. He had lost count of the number of times over the past six months that she had tried to explain why he did not love her. He wondered why she insisted on these tortuous inquisitions, why she did not instead allow the simple fact of his presence, his actions, to stand in lieu of words.
He pulled her down without protest and rolled her into bed, drew the thermal over them and held her. He turned out the light and stroked her back until her small, hiccoughing sobs ceased and eventually she fell asleep.
Ten months ago, Kim had turned up out of the blue. He’d met her at his favourite food-stall. He was ordering sweet and sour chicken, noodles and rice. A small woman, her Oriental features almost martially severe, jet slant eyes set above arrowhead cheekbones, watched him from behind the counter. Halliday had seen her before; she never seemed to be working, just casting imperious glances up and down the stalls that lined the gutter. Halliday had figured her for the big-shot owner of these cut-price eateries.
‘You regular customer, mister?’
‘Every day for the past, hell. . . five years, at a guess.’
The young woman looked him up and down, a swift glance that seemed to assess him and make some impulsive decision. She spoke rapidly to the boy serving Halliday, all glottal stops and elasticated whining vowel sounds.
‘This meal’s on me, mister.’ She packed the take-out herself. ‘You run detective agency, yes?’
Halliday nodded. ‘Word gets around.’
‘Never met detective before,’ she said. ‘Never seen detective agency.’ Her expression was unreadable.
Halliday took his chance. ‘Why don’t I show you around?’
‘Hokay, why not?’
He ushered her across the street to the three-storey walk-up. On the second floor, he opened the office door. Barney’s snores reverberated from the adjoining bedroom. ‘This is the headquarters, such as it is,’ he said.
She sniffed and gave the room a swift glance. In retrospect, he knew she was assessing the room’s negative energy, already making plans to move the desk.
‘My place is up there,’ he said, indicating the loft. ‘How about a coffee?’
She had accepted, and they had sat and talked, shared the takeout. She told him about her flight from Singapore ten years earlier, her start in America. As she talked, she lost some of her imperious severity, became human. When she smiled, he thought, she was even beautiful.
She had said goodbye and quickly left, as summarily as she had introduced herself, saying that she was busy-busy. He had watched her go with amazement, shaking his head. He had looked out for her on the street for a week after that, without a single sighting, and then one night before he was due to start work he was roused from sleep by an insistent tapping on the door of the loft. When he answered, she walked straight in, bearing food, and after they had eaten the meal - Kim telling him a long, involved story about venal wholesalers - she had paused, staring at him with that unnerving, assessing look, before quickly undressing and wrestling him to the futon.
Now, as he lay on his back and stared up at the skylight, he knew that for all the intimacies they had shared in the ten months they had been together, in spite of the many hours of traded history and confessions, the workings of her tortured psychology was a complete mystery to him. He did not know Kim Long, and her neurosis frightened him.
He was awoken, later, by a nightmare. He sat up, sweating. He could not recall the contents of the dream, but now a familiar, stabbing sensation of melancholy pierced his consciousness. It faded, leaving the same faint after-echo of depression ringing in his head.
He turned, quickly. Across the loft, before the door, he made out a faint shape. He had no doubt that she was real, that he was not hallucinating. He rolled out of bed, moved across the room. Already she was through the door: a quick twist of slim body and she was gone. He snatched open the door, stared. She was running down the stairs, and as he watched, a cry frozen on his lips, she turned her pale face over her shoulder and smiled up at him.
He reached out. ‘Eloise . . .?’ and, as he said her name, the vision faded and he was alone.
He had no idea how long he remained at the top of the stairs in the freezing cold, leaning against the wall and staring into space. The cold finally moved him to return to the loft. It was almost eleven-thirty. Kim was sleeping peacefully. He found his clothes and dressed, then made his way down to the office.
He turned the heater up to full, brewed himself a strong coffee, and sat in the swivel chair before the noisily humming desk-com.
He tapped the keyboard. It was a long time since he’d bothered to contact his father. How long, now? Five years, more? So long, anyway, that he could hardly recall the details, except that it must have ended, as it always did, in an impasse of silence and the mutual inability to express sentiments of any real meaning at all.
He listened to the ringing tone. His father would still be up. Halliday’s liking for the night was one of the few things, thankfully
, that he had inherited from his father.
It was a full minute before his call was answered. The screen remained blank, however; only a querulous voice greeted him. ‘Who is it?’
Halliday cleared his throat. ‘It’s me, Dad. Hal. I ... I just thought I’d call. I need to talk.’