by Eric Brown
* * * *
New York Dreams
[The Virex Trilogy 03]
By Eric Brown
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU
* * * *
One
Halliday climbed the path to the highest point of the headland and stopped. A huge boulder was embedded in the sandy soil beside the path, and as usual he leaned against it and took in the view.
The sky had the silver-blue sheen of burnished aluminium, merging at the horizon with the deeper blue of the ocean. The coastline was an intricate series of islands and inlets, and directly below was the bay beside which Halliday had his camp. The circular surface of the bay fitted perfectly between the twin headlands like the lug of a jigsaw puzzle piece, no movement discernible at this elevation but for the occasional ripple as the warm wind raked across the shallows.
Perfection, Halliday thought. There was a time when all North America looked like this, unspoilt in its natural beauty.
He came to this stretch of Virginia coastline on average three times a week, leaving behind New York and his life there. His only regret was that he could not leave his memories of the city, too. They were a constant nagging presence, preventing his total appreciation of the scenery.
He closed his eyes, felt the warm wind against his skin. The scent of the pines, the juniper bushes that flanked the path, hit him like a drug rush. He heard the ripsaw cawing of a bird, and when he opened his eyes he made out, high above the shelving foreshore, the majestic sight of an eagle soaring stiff-winged on a thermal.
Perfection.
He heard the sound of voices behind him and turned. A family of four was making its way along the path towards him, junior and sis leading the way, thwacking at the high grass with custom-made sticks. They looked African. At least, they dressed that way; the mother and father wore psychedelically patterned jellabas. But they might have been from anywhere. They might even, for that matter, have been any nationality: whites trying on Senegalese personas for the hell of it.
They smiled and said hi as they passed him in single file. Halliday turned away, ignoring them. He watched as they disappeared down the precipitous path, stung by a ridiculous feeling that they had trespassed on his territory. Even here he could not leave the world behind without being followed.
He gave the family ten minutes to lose themselves in the vastness of the coastline, then stood and made his way slowly down the track.
He stopped from time to time and left the path to examine the occasional tree that caught his attention. He gave every specimen its common name, and rummaged in his memory for their Latin titles. He still had the Natural History DVD his father had bought him for his tenth birthday, one of the few possessions he had kept from his childhood. He’d been obsessed with trees as a kid. They had filled him then, as they still did now, with a sense that he could never be alone when in their presence. There was something mighty and powerful, and at the same time mysterious, about the giant lifeforms: they existed in a kind of self-sufficient disdain of the materialistic doings of humankind.
The path dropped towards the bay and deposited Halliday on the pebbled foreshore. He picked up a small, flat stone and skimmed it across the water. It hopped once, twice, a third time, and then sank.
He continued around the curve of the bay. His tent was a hemispherical crimson blister pitched in the shade of a fir tree, and beside it Casey was crouching over a heater, frying bacon.
Halliday felt a sudden, surging regret that his allotted immersion time was almost finished.
She looked up as he approached and gave him a dazzling smile. ‘There you are, Hal. Breakfast’s up!’
She stood and hurried over to him, and the feel of the seventeen-year-old in his arms was the physical equivalent of the smell of the cooking breakfast, the beauty of the surrounding scenery.
Casey pulled away. ‘You hungry, Hal? I’m starving!’
They sat beside the tent and tucked into plates of bacon and eggs.
Casey wore denim shorts and a red-checked lumberjack’s shirt. She was blonde and pretty in a thin-faced, waif-like kind of way that Halliday found enchanting.
‘Hey, guess what!’ she managed past a mouthful. ‘We got neighbours.’ She jerked her thumb inland, towards an emerald family tent erected beyond a stand of spruce.
‘The Africans? I saw them earlier.’
She shrugged with off-hand teenage unconcern. ‘Guess the place is big enough for all of us.’
Halliday wanted to argue with her, but knew better.
He’d booked this stretch of Virginia coastline for exclusive use, and had expected just that. He’d demand a partial refund when he got back, but he knew what the operators would say. Sometimes, exclusivity could not be guaranteed. The system became so overloaded that visitors had to be shunted into already occupied sites. He knew he was being small-minded, but he had paid well over the odds to be alone.
Alone with Casey, that was.
After breakfast, she sat on his lap and laid her head on his shoulder, and Halliday held the girl in his arms, marvelling at her reality.
He’d programmed a platonic relationship with Casey. The parameters of her persona stipulated a full and trusting friendship, and no more. He could have programmed a sexual relationship with her, of course, and had sometimes wondered what had prevented him from doing so.
He told himself that it was because to have initiated a physical liaison with Casey in virtual reality, without the knowledge of her real-world self, would have been betraying her trust...But he knew he was kidding himself. He knew himself well enough to understand the truth. The only reason he wasn’t making love to the ersatz Casey right at this moment was because to do so would remind him that she was unavailable in the real world.
As ever, virtual reality only served to point up the inadequacy of the real world - in this case, though, the inadequacy was wholly his own.
Not long ago, after a well-paid job had given him the cash to spend on the luxury of VR, Halliday had surfed the various cyberverse realities on offer. He’d used the sex-zones to excess, until the pleasures palled and reminded him of his isolation in reality. He’d travelled in space and time, experiencing wonders he had never thought possible. But again and again he’d returned to VR’s more prosaic delights: nature sites and historical zones which showed the world as it had been in a more pristine, earlier era. He’d often come to be alone, to walk in the natural splendour of oak forests and jungles.
Then it came to him that he was missing something. Casey had stopped visiting him months ago - too busy enjoying life with her new boyfriend - and he admitted to himself that she was the only person he really missed from his former life.
So he’d invested in an expensive program and synthesised Casey’s persona from the computer data he had of her on file, visual and aural. He’d come up with a pretty faithful likeness, even down to the content of her conversation, her irreverent teenage sarcasm.
‘Hey, sleepy!’ she called out now. ‘Let’s walk, okay? Show me the trees. Tell me all their funny foreign names!’
She pulled him to his feet with both hands, straining comically as if taking on a tug-o’-war team.
They strolled towards the pines, away from the bay, and up a winding, shadowed track.
Over the past year, the legally allowed immersion time in VR had risen from four hours to twenty-four. One day was as long as a citizen could spend in a jellytank, though there were measures under way to increase the upper limit. Halliday had heard that volunteers had spent weeks fully immersed. It was only a matter of time, according to those in the know, before people would be able to live indefinitely in virtual reality.
Halliday spent perhaps every other day in hi
s own tank, which he’d bought with the proceeds of the Artois case. After twenty-four hours sunk in the jelly, he felt wrung-out and wasted. In the early days he’d maintained a regime of physical fitness to combat the effects of so many inactive hours; he’d eaten well and worked-out down the gym ... But laziness had got the better of him. He’d stopped putting in the hours on the running machine, and he’d gone back to snacking at the local Chinese and Thai stalls.
He’d even wondered about getting a pirate tech in to tamper with his jellytank, fix it so that he could spend longer than the stipulated twenty-four hours away from the horrors of the real world - but the thought of the heavy fines, and the physical dangers involved, had stayed his hand.
In the meantime he wondered when he’d become tired of the nature sites, and his paternal relationship with Casey, and want something just a little bit more exciting.
She danced ahead of him. ‘What’s that, Hal?’ she asked, pointing to a stately spruce.
He stared at her small, denim-clad bottom and thought: Oh, Christ, give me strength ...
They climbed through the forest, up the steeply inclined hillside to the ridge path, Halliday making Casey laugh with his knowledge of Latin arboreal nomenclature.
When they reached the path, they paused and gazed out to sea. Casey slipped an arm around his waist, and Halliday found himself caressing the nape of her neck.
She made a small, kittenish sound.
‘This is my favouritest view in all Virginia,’ she said.
This simulacrum of the real-life Casey looked like the real thing, and sounded like the kid, but its verisimilitude was limited by the degree of information Halliday had been able to supply to the identity program. The VR Casey had none of the real girl’s memories, though the program running her was stocked with banks of popular current knowledge the programmers assumed would be within the ken of an average seventeen-year-old New Yorker. Halliday had had to supply Casey’s intelligence quotient, and he thought he’d erred on the low side. It had been difficult: she was uneducated, almost illiterate, and knew next to nothing about the arts and sciences - but to counter that she was a sharp, wise-cracking street kid who’d lived by her wits for years before Halliday had befriended her.
They walked along the ridge path, Halliday pointing out things he thought might interest her. She responded with genuine-sounding enthusiasm, and then, like the kid she was, began prattling about the last time they had been here. ‘Remember the grizzly we saw by the fallen pine, Hal? You think he’ll be there today?’
He laughed and told her that he was sure it would have moved on by now.
He smiled as he listened to her chatter. He wondered what he’d do if the speculation was right and the VR companies did come up with the technology capable of sustaining citizens in virtual reality for extended periods.
Would he turn his back on the real world, sign up and live out a life of dreams in some fabulous ersatz reality?
The trouble was, of course, that no matter how realistic the physical reality of a VR site, no matter how convincing the world appeared to the senses of the participant, you always knew where you were. You knew that you were living an incredibly realistic cyber-dream...Your memories of who you were would not be banished.
That would change, of course, if the VR companies succeeded in producing memory-suppressant drugs. Then, in the not too distant future, a citizen would be able to enter VR and live a life in blithe ignorance of who and what they had once been. VR would effectively become the real world.
Halliday considered losing himself in such a reality, being able to forget his worries, assume a new, carefree identity in a perfect world. Perhaps after a while he’d become tired of who he was and desire a change, become yet another person ... Wasn’t it a dream that everyone had considered, at some point?
He wondered if his real life had become so destitute that he was serious about signing on the dotted line, come the day.
They followed the path as it dipped towards the small, sheltered cove where Halliday often bathed when he came here by himself. The blue sea shrugged itself ashore with a rhythmic, lulling susurration.
‘Hey!’ Casey cried, skipping across the sand towards the waves. ‘This is great!’
Halliday was aware that his mouth was suddenly dry. ‘Why don’t we go for a swim, Casey?’
She twisted a frown. ‘Haven’t brought my costume, Hal.’
His heartbeat thudded in his ears. ‘Neither have I. So what? Come here ... ‘
She came, innocently. He reached out and began unbuttoning her shirt. She bent - at first he thought she was attempting to avoid his hands: then he saw that she was enthusiastically unfastening her shorts.
She unbuttoned the rest of her shirt and shrugged it off, and Halliday saw that she was wearing no bra. She lowered her shorts and panties together, kicked off her sneakers and, naked, skipped into the shallows.
Halliday stared at her skinny nakedness, her small breasts and tuft of pubic hair, as she danced laughing in the waves.
He wondered how the program that was Casey might react when he undressed and joined her in the sea, pulled her to him and kissed her.
He was aware that what he was about to do was somehow wrong, but for the life of him he could not stop now.
He was unbuttoning his own shirt when he was alerted by the tingling of his right hand. He stared at the metacarpal quit decal: it was flashing on and off with the upper time-limit warning. He had been in the Virginia site for twenty-four hours, and in seconds he would be automatically ejected.
He smiled to himself as he stared at the naked girl frolicking in the sea, and a surge of regret was replaced by relief that he had been saved from what could only have been a harmful and demeaning intimacy.
Seconds later he made the transition.
* * * *
Two
Halliday stood up, forcing his way through the cloying medium of the amber suspension gel. He pulled off the face-mask and the electrodes that adhered to his limbs. He felt weak, and as he stepped from the tank he was forced to reach out and make a grab for the wall as his legs buckled beneath his weight. He pushed himself across the sticky carpet, trailing goo, and made it to the shower-stall.
He stood beneath the spray with his arms braced against the tiled wall, head hanging. He took a series of deep breaths, fighting the urge to vomit.
Ten minutes later, revived by the steaming jet of water, he turned under the blow-drier. As the condensation evaporated from the glass of the stall, he caught a quick, unexpected glimpse of his face. He looked as bad as he felt: a two-day growth of beard lent a desperate quality to the dark, sunken eyes that stared back at him.
He looked down the length of his body, his flesh sallow, his arms and legs wasted. He was developing a pot-belly from all the junk food and beer he was putting away. He was thirty-six and he looked, if he were honest with himself, about fifty.
He thought of the naked simulacrum of Casey in the Virginia site, and experienced only a bitter feeling of self-loathing at the thought of what he had been about to do.
He would scrub her program from his files, he told himself, spend time alone in the site, next time. Yet, even as he thought this, he knew that he would be too weak to do anything of the kind.
He quit the stall, dressed in an old pair of beige chinos and a frayed white shirt, and stepped from his bedroom into the office.
Dust coated every surface. The fan on the ceiling turned languidly, doing nothing at all to cool the room’s stifling humidity.
He walked around the desk and opened the window. A panting wind, freighted with a chemical cocktail of varied airborne pollutants, added to the office’s intolerable heat.
He brewed himself a strong coffee, then sat on the swivel chair and lodged his feet on the desk.
He recalled some good times here in the office with his ex-partner. He’d worked with Barney for eight years, Barney doing days, Halliday taking the graveyard shift through the night. He’d prefer
red it that way, had liked the anonymity of darkness, when the buildings of Manhattan wore gaudy holo-façades like Cinderella’s magical fineries. Days in New York were depressing; even in summer the sunlight rarely made it through the smog, and in daylight the holo-façades were wan ghosts, doing nothing to conceal the architectural decay and dereliction beneath.
Now, night or day, Halliday never ventured further than Olga’s bar on the corner, or the closest fast-food stall. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d left El Barrio for a trip into Manhattan.
He realised that he had no idea whether it was morning or night. He switched on his desk-com. The screen read: 11:59. Midday, then. A full day in the Virginia site ... No wonder he felt like he’d died and been brought back to life against his will.
He took another swallow of coffee. The caffeine began to kick.