New York Dreams - [Virex 03]

by Eric Brown

  ‘Barney, what’s the rush? You’re always up so early and shooting off!’

  She hurried over to him and took him in her arms, kissed his cheek and smiled. ‘Let’s have breakfast on the verandah and plan the rest of the day, okay?’

  He consented, as ever. He could not bring himself to disappoint her with a refusal, as ludicrous as he knew his reluctance to be.

  He stepped out onto the verandah and sat down at the table. The natural power and beauty of this stretch of Californian coastline never ceased to amaze him. He had walked for miles, north and south, marvelling at the fidelity of the rocks and plants, the giant redwoods that made him puny by comparison. Hal, he thought, would love it here, obsessed as he was with trees. He wished Hal was with him now, to provide some variation in the conversation, some excitement. Life with Estelle, his wife of thirty-five years, was becoming unbearable.

  He knew why that was, of course. Estelle was merely a construct - a brilliantly realised and faithful construct, but artificial all the same. Her programmed parameters were limited; she had memories, a stock of conversation, but after a time she became predictable: she did not have the near infinite resource of a real human for sustained and varied discourse.

  Barney had assumed that this would be no disadvantage; she was lifelike enough to satisfy the yawning loneliness that had filled his life since her death six years ago. For the first hour or so of their initial meeting here, that had been so. He had marvelled at the touch of her flesh, the sight of her familiar beauty, the sound of her voice; they had talked of old times, and then made love ... But the hour had stretched, become days, and her limitations had soon become apparent, her conversation limited. Even the sex had palled.

  For some reason... He wondered if that reason was purely the intellectual knowledge that none of this was real, that it was all a dream lived out in some cybernetic nirvana. Or was it some failing in himself that did not allow him to appreciate that which, a week ago, out there in the real world, he could only fantasise about?

  He wondered why he could no longer feel.

  Estelle stepped through the sliding French window carrying a tray. She set it down on the table before him and smiled, oblivious of his introspection.

  That was another thing which dissatisfied him: the real Estelle would have picked up on his mood instantly, would have questioned him, concerned.

  This Estelle was like a programmed doll, ever ready to please, but with little or no insight or understanding. Her physical likeness to the real Estelle only pointed up and made painful the psychological differences.

  ‘We’re running low on provisions again, Barney. Let’s drive into town and do a little shopping, shall we? I might even buy myself a new dress.’

  He said nothing, poured himself another coffee.

  ‘And we could stop off at that great seafood restaurant for lunch. You know, that place at the end of the jetty.’

  ‘The Oyster Cabin,’ he supplied.

  ‘That’s the place. They do heavenly lobster.’

  She poured coffee and fixed herself a bowl of muesli. Barney sipped his black coffee.

  He wondered if he could come to terms with existence here if there was more variation. It seemed that their life was locked into a perpetual round of shopping and eating, inane conversation and perfunctory love-making. Once or twice, unable to take it any longer, he had snapped at Estelle, asked her if she could think of nothing else but shopping and eating - but she had continued as if nothing had happened, smiled at him and said that she would go down to the store alone, then. And, dammit, he’d felt guilty at his outburst, and then had cursed himself for falling prey to such a conditioned response: the fact was that Estelle was a very clever computer-generated construct, with no feelings to hurt, no emotions to betray.

  Barney looked up from his coffee. ‘I want to go for a walk this morning, okay? But lunch sounds great. We could go to the store this afternoon.’

  She smiled. ‘Fine. Can I come with you this morning? We could explore the cove you found the other day...’

  ‘I’d rather be alone.’

  That complacent smile again. ‘Okay. I’ll fix something for dinner tonight.’

  At first, he had found sanctuary in going into town with Estelle, luxuriating in the illusion that he was out there in the inhabited real world again. The town was small, but there were always dozens, hundreds, of people about - only they were not people, he reminded himself. They were, like Estelle, computer constructs, though not as individually defined. Holding a conversation with one of the townsfolk was like trying to talk to a parrot. In the early days, he could make believe that he was in a real town, the bustle of people, the noise of the simulated conversation, satisfying some craving in him.

  Recently, though, having seen through the sham of artifice that was this site, he had taken to retreating along the coast by himself, coming across no one for miles and miles and relishing the solitude and the opportunity it afforded him to consider his thoughts.

  ‘Remember the lobsters we had in Virginia in...was it ‘21, Barney? You know, the holiday in Norfolk where we hired the boat and explored the coast... ?’

  He nodded. ‘The lobsters were great, Estelle.’

  She went on, ‘And remember that little island we found? We were all alone, no one for miles. Wasn’t it wonderful?’

  He forced a smile. The tragedy was that this Estelle had only so many programmed memories - recollections of shared events which, ironically enough, he had supplied to the Mantoni VR technicians. Over the past few days she had gone though her repertoire of memories, stories, repeating each one ad nauseam to the point where he thought that if he heard another of her reminiscences he would go mad.

  All the more painful was the fact that these often regurgitated memories provoked in Barney his own recollections of events and incidents, of which this artificial Estelle had no memory.

  Once he had recalled a holiday on Coney Island, a simple Italian meal they had shared on the sea front, and a leisurely stroll home through the warm summer evening.

  He had said to her, ‘Remember the pasta on Coney Island, Estelle?’

  He had often reminded the real Estelle of that day, with these simple words, and the shared memory had suffused them, then, with a glow of mutual pleasure. They had gone home, after the meal, and made love as they had never made love before.

  But when Barney mentioned the day for the first time in VR, Estelle only frowned. ‘It’s slipped my memory, dear. But do you recall...’

  He finished his coffee and stood. He almost leaned over to kiss her cheek, but stopped himself. He was a puppet to conditioned responses that had no real meaning, now.

  The fact was that he had no feelings for this Estelle; she provoked only bitterness that he had lost the original, a painful reminder of her death. This Estelle was merely an impostor, an interloper mocking him and the charade of this existence.

  ‘I’ll see you around one,’ he said, turned and stepped from the patio, heading towards the dunes that backed onto the beach.

  He heard her blithe farewell and hurried on without acknowledgement.

  He climbed the dune and paused at the top, gazing out at the vast expanse of the ocean and the long curve of the beach. He set off down the seaward side of the dune, half-walking, half-sliding through a demerara avalanche of golden sand.

  He walked towards the sea and stopped at the edge of the solid, wet sand that marked the extent of the high tide. It was the sight of the sea that caused him the most wonder in this virtual world; it bore not only a remarkable visual fidelity to the real thing, and sounded like the Pacific in full throat, but also recreated the original’s effect of boundless power and might. He had marvelled at the technicians’ ability to reproduce reconstructions of human beings in VR, but something about the energy of the ersatz ocean before him seemed an even more remarkable achievement.

  He removed his shoes and socks and left them on the beach, out of reach of the greedy incoming lick of
the waves.

  He walked north, the sun hot on his skin. He considered his life in the real world, his existence in the hell-hole that was modern New York; his old self would never have thought it possible that he might become bored by this virtual paradise.

  But something had gone very wrong since his immersion in the jellytank at the headquarters of Mantoni Entertainments, and Barney was at a loss to explain why.

  He had agreed to Lew Kramer’s offer a few months ago: it had seemed like too good an opportunity to turn down. Kramer and his techs in the Research and Development division were working on the reconstruction of famous people in virtual reality, with the aim of bringing back to life, for the education and entertainment of modern VR users, the legendary figures of yesteryear.

  To begin with, the R&D team had experimented with the construction of non-famous people in VR. Lew had contacted Barney and offered to produce a simulation of his dead wife, Estelle, in a VR site of his choice. The simulation would be based on old pix, video footage, recordings of her voice, even the scent of her favourite perfume. Barney had supplied shared memories - not nearly enough, as it turned out - and over the months Lew and his team had worked to bring Estelle to virtual life.

  Then Barney had immersed himself in the tank and met his wife for the first time since her death six years before.

  It had been an incredible moment, freighted with a gamut of emotions from love and wonder to a strange but undeniable sense of guilt that he was in some way being unfaithful to the memory of the real Estelle. But he had been so lonely, had missed her so much, that for the first hour in her company it was as if he had died and been resurrected in heaven ...

  They had talked, and then moved upstairs to the bedroom, and he had made love to her with a body twenty years younger than his overweight, out of condition, real-world body.

  He had been due to quit the virtual villa, take his leave of his resurrected wife, at the end of the hour. As he held her in his arms, conscious of the fleeting minutes that remained, he had wished that the moment could have gone on for ever.

  Minutes later he had been overcome with a strange and terrifying sensation that he had never before experienced when quitting VR.

  Instead of the bedroom scene vanishing and his finding himself in the warm grip of the suspension gel, he lived through what seemed like an eternity in which he teetered on the edge of a vast blackness, and then he fell, was diving through a kind of interstellar void in which he could make out sharp points of light like distant galaxies. The immensity of the scale, and his apparent insignificance beside it, was at once vertiginous and existentially appalling. It was as if he were plummeting into the immensity of existence but was himself too infinitesimal ever to land on anything solid. As if he might go falling through the universe for ever...

  And then he had heard the voices.

  ‘Reconfiguring the basal matrix ...’

  ‘... Check. Reconfigured. Establishing ...’

  The voices were tinny and distant and made no sense at all.

  What seemed like a second later - but, paradoxically, as if he had been falling through the dark interstices of nothingness for ever - he was back in the sunlit bedroom of the coastal villa.

  He marked the beginning of the terrible change from that very moment.

  He had opened his eyes and found himself lying in bed with the sleeping Estelle in his arms, but he was unable to bring himself to register the slightest emotional response. He distantly recalled what it was like to feel emotion, the combination of affection and the need to protect that was known as love - but it was as if he had an intellectual understanding of these emotions, and nothing else.

  He had his memories of their time together, a recollection of the love he had felt towards her, and the grief he had experienced at her death, along with his anticipation of this long-cherished moment. But it was as if these feelings belonged to another person entirely, as if a stranger had reported these emotions to Barney and expected him to be able to simulate their effect.

  It was impossible. He felt nothing. He had left the bedroom and walked from the villa, wondering what had happened in that strange moment of timeless eternity when he had slipped though the interstices of the universe. He should have been returned then to the real world, but here he was, still in the dream world of the Mantoni VR site.

  And here he had remained for days - even though, according to the experts, the safe upper-limit of immersion time was just four hours.

  So he had gone through the charade of living with Estelle in what before he might have considered an idyllic paradise, but his inability to generate any emotion, his knowledge that all this was nothing more than a cybernetic sham, had worried at him like a constant, nagging migraine.

  As the hours had turned to days, he had rationalised his inability to feel emotion. He told himself that it was the insufficiency of Estelle’s programming that deterred him from being able to empathise fully with the construct. But something within him feared that he was deluding himself. For the first hour in her company he had been so full of emotion and feeling that it had been painful. Then suddenly he had been robbed of the capacity to feel, and no amount of rationalisation could blind him to the fact that it had been at the very end of the first hour, after his bizarre cosmic experience, that this inability had begun.

  Something terrible had happened, then - and not merely the beginning of his imprisonment in VR.

  * * * *

  Eight

  Halliday bought three spring rolls at the food stall outside the Chinese laundry and began eating as he climbed the stairs to the office. He brewed himself a coffee; he’d prefer an ice-cold beer to wash down the take-out, but he had none in. He briefly thought about having an hour in Olga’s on the corner, but conscience got the better of him. He was working, after all, and he needed to be sober when he tanked.

  He finished the spring rolls and carried his coffee into the bedroom. His jellytank was set against the far wall, an old model he’d bought cheap from Thai Joe almost a year ago. He’d told himself at the time that it would be necessary for his investigations, but he’d known full well that he was only using it to escape.

  The tank was battered, and scaled on the outside with some repellent fungal growth, and the gel could have used a good cleaning. The effect of immersion, though, was the same whatever the state of the tank.

  He activated the computer set into the head of the tank and tapped in the code he’d copied from Anastasia Dah’s history file. The screen would come up with some information about the site, give him some idea what it might contain.

  Instead, the screen came up with nothing - or rather a terse message that flashed on and off: vrus~mp/ss/797: site unavailable. Restricted access.

  He decided to tank and attempt to access the site from one of the clearing zones. He tapped the zone code into the touchpad then stripped, peripherally aware of his naked form reflected in the wall mirror. He turned away, not wanting to be reminded of his physical state.

  He attached the faceplate and electrodes and stepped into the warm, cloying goo. He lay back, sank and floated, waiting for the bliss of total immersion to take away the aches and pains in his body.

  The transition hit him in a physical rush, a burst of sensory information that left him temporarily reeling. The first sensation was the absence of his old body, as if an unpleasant weight had been lifted from him: he no longer felt the aches in his muscles, the nausea that was for ever with him in the real world. He felt light-headed with relief, in possession of a new-born body as pristine and perfect as that of a child.

  He was standing in the silver concourse of a vast city, a sprawling metropolis that seemed conjured magically from some far-flung and idyllic future Earth. The sun shone with a brilliance that, after the smog-muffled New York, seemed artificial.

  A hundred citizens appeared in the plaza every second, establishing solidity in a quick fizz of pixels. They hurried over to tall, silver columns set in the tesserae of the
concourse, consulted codes and pix of destinations, and tapped their choices into touchpads. Instantly they vanished, fizzing into non-existence in an eye-blink.

  A fanfare of synthesised musical notes sounded, followed by a pleasant female voice: ‘Welcome to the Cyber-Tech clearing zone. Please select your destination from the columns. A thousand worlds at your fingertips. Welcome to the Cyber-Tech clearing zone.’

  Whenever he used a clearing zone, or experienced a site for the first time, he was always amazed at not only the fidelity of the ersatz world of which he was a part, but at the sheer physical difference of the site. The new reality seemed cleaner, brighter, somehow even more optimistic than the world he had just left.

  Also, the choices were endless, here. You could spend a lifetime experiencing the multitude of worlds offered by the many virtual reality companies. A year ago, new to the idea of the gaming and adventure sites, he had spent hours exploring a variety of strange alien worlds, revelling in the roles of a starship officer, the survivor of a crash-landing, a scientist charting a new world for colonisation. Each site had convinced him utterly, and the only hindrance to his complete acceptance of the site and his role within it was the memories he carried from the real world.