Asimov's SF, October-November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  She left Cassetti a week later.

  From that point on, their roles were set. Stango was the visionary with a fountain of ideas that never stopped. Gordie was the plant-your-butt-in-the-chair production coder. Yulani was the tech-girl publicist who charmed cash from Scrooge and left him feeling better for it, the woman whose face graced a thousand zines and still left people wanting more.

  Since she had no money to speak of, Yulani moved in with Gordie.

  For the first time, he had something to look forward to at home. They talked. They watched movies and ate pizza. They made love late into the night or in the afternoon or in the morning, sleeping in small snippets, waking up to go to work or to grab something to eat or to make love again. Gordie worked like a dog, eighteen, sometimes twenty hours at a crack. But time warped when they were together. Days and nights merged into single breathless moments that passed like overhot afternoons.

  He had never been happier.

  Then she sold optical push and could afford her own place.

  Only when she was gone did Gordie notice the vacuum that surrounded her. Everything they had done had been about him, what he wanted, what he did, where he planned to go. Her ability to focus on other people made her good at what she did, but it was also a shield, a barrier that obscured things she didn't want revealed, a firewall that let her steer clear of discussions that turned to families and life in the past.

  Gordie thought he had loved Yulani from the moment they first met, but he came eventually to realize that he'd never really known her.

  * * * *

  Her kiss was hot, her body volcano warm. Her skin slipped over his, breast to chest, their legs entangled, the sound of breathing an entity filling the space between them. His body was iron on fire, his muscles strained.

  He laid her back.

  Her eyes turned quavering silver, imploding, skin flaking, lush hair twisting, breaking, strands writhing like black mambas. Gordie lurched from his sleep. The brown boot. Whumpf. His ribs flared with pain. Razor blades slashed his lower lumbar. He groaned.

  The room was black.

  Cold sweat drenched his chest.

  Familiar things hid in indigo shadows: his cold and empty bed, the dresser with a drawer missing, a hard-backed chair, and an image of the Eiffel Tower at midnight. Mrs. Kale's last contractor had painted over the closed window, giving the place a cryptlike staleness. Moonlight was a dabbed spot upon the cotton drapes.

  His life had been built around a machine that knew nothing but simple arrangements of 1s and 0s, binary strings fed into processors that, in turn, interpreted those strings into commands and actions. A one meant something was there, active and current. One returns “true."

  Zero “false."

  Real life had a different scheme.

  He shivered at his nightmare. Part of it had happened. She had touched him before. She had once lain in the bed he lay on now. The thought made him feel better somehow. He swung his feet to the floor and took a deep breath. Four tabs had done nothing to quell the full-body ache the inspector's interrogation had left behind. The floor chilled the soles of his feet. The bed smelled of clammy sweat. The wall read quarter till midnight.

  Gordie pulled on a pair of pants.

  He couldn't grasp that she was gone. No, not gone—gone was what you were when you stepped out for a beer or a sandwich or to grab a walk. Yulani Morav was dead.

  Christ. He rubbed the back of his neck.

  She had been out of his life for almost a year, but the idea of Yulani being ... not alive ... felt wrong in a place so deep he was afraid to touch it. He still loved her, of course. He couldn't help it. All he had really learned since he'd left the company was that pretending she didn't exist didn't make it so.

  He had scoured the Nets most of the evening, but hadn't found anything new. Every story was similar.

  At approximately 7:15 in the morning of July 26, a woman identified as Yulani Morav, age twenty-nine, was found dead behind Barbertown Pub and Eatery. Details as to the cause of death were not immediately available, but the police are investigating the incident as a homicide.

  Spare and meaningless.

  Gordie stared at his dark apartment, steeling himself against a blow he felt coming yet could not see. The sensation ate at his nerves, but gave him an odd sense of strength at the same time.

  Two weeks. The inspector wanted a killer. Fair enough.

  Gordie knew where Stango would be.

  Might as well get it over with.

  * * * *

  The evening was unusually cool for midsummer. Midnight traffic rushed by as Gordie strode gingerly along the downtown sidewalks. He hated this place. Hated the buildings and the traffic, hated the clattering crescendo of fingers over portable keyboards that came from the gathering of software engineers who lined the streets and yanked code onto microblocks, hoping vainly to snatch a quick buck or, better even, an interview with someone important.

  “This'll get you into PussyDeep,” a kid said, pushing a cube into his face. “Only twenty bucks."

  “No, thanks,” Gordie said, shrugging and moving forward.

  “Got a demo with Susi Yasgaran,” the next guy said. “Totally nude. Do anything you want. For an extra five I'll even take off the fetish block."

  Gordie pushed through.

  The heyday of Silicon Valley, home of the teenage billionaire and the corporate merger, was long-gone history. Reality was streets filled with bleary-eyed coders whose careers had flamed out in the scalding heat of early Net development. Some still made it, of course. But for every one of them, hundreds like these lined the sidewalks.

  He walked into the Gig, the huge nightclub Stango had bought after they'd sold optical.

  The wall of heat was as solid as the music—the Ripping Lions, Karish Morreau screeching out vocals with a voice like broken concrete on chalkboard. The smell of warm bodies, liquor, and damp napkins lay under a haze of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume. Gordie slipped between a guy whose muscles bulged under a skin-tight body shirt and a girl with straight bangs and thick lipstick. She smoked a Conga, holding its long black form like a dart between her fingers and blowing a blue cone toward the ceiling.

  “Long time, Gordie,” the guy said.

  “Too long,” he yelled over the disjointed guitar line to “I'm the One."

  The building had been a football-field-sized warehouse before Stango had bought it. It was oblong with odd nooks and crannies built into it.

  “Seen Stango?” Gordie yelled.

  The man cocked his head toward the stage.

  The band leaped around under purple lighting.

  A girl danced in a three-quarters-height cube mounted halfway up the wall, undulating with the music, her hands and feet pressed against the cube walls, her skin painted with fluorescent blue glitter, and her thong an electric pink. Green lips mouthed lyrics like a pair of jacked glowworms.

  Stango sat in the harsh shadow of an amplifier that carried the pounding sound of Danny Ortega's bass. Dark sunglasses covered his eyes. His shoulders were slight beneath a silk jacket the same blue-sheened color as the shadows. As always, a half-empty glass sat before him.

  Gordie had never known Stango to touch the stuff, but appearances were everything. The younger man edged through the crush and sat down gingerly. No reaction.

  Stango was probably multiprocessing, checking databases and his usual contacts to trace where Gordie had come from. His silhouette hadn't changed. His nose was sharp and curved, and his British jawline could have been chiseled from white marble. His high forehead, with its dark hairline receding, gave him an air of superiority that Gordie knew so well.

  The amplifier drilled caves of sound into Gordie's brain. He clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from rattling. For the first time in months, he wanted a cigarette.

  Finally the violence on stage peaked. The table shook. Karish screamed. The lights went to black.

  The audience whooped and hollered for more.

  H
ouse music kicked in, and the walls rolled with blue and green lights, calming colors subliminally enhanced to lead people toward the joint's six bars. Stango twisted the base of his glass with long, crablike fingers. An image crossed Gordie's mind, those same long fingers skittering across a keyboard, a memory from when they had worked together in cramped rooms with shitty ventilation. Stango was Marc Chagall back then, throwing code down in surrealistic visions for Gordie to make happen in the sloppy world of half-baked interfaces and hacked-up protocols.

  Gordie wondered if the memory was his own or if Stango had pushed it to him. If it was Stango's work, he wondered, was his old friend trying to make him nostalgic or merely remorseful?

  Music swirled from every direction.

  “I knew you would come back,” Stango said, still facing the stage.

  “Yulani's dead,” Gordie replied.

  Stango nodded, his lips turned sourly downward.

  “I need your help,” Gordie said.

  Stango laughed out loud. “Shit."

  “Cops think I know something about it, Stango. And if they think I know something, you can bet your ass they think you do, too. You'll listen if you know what's good for you."

  Stango faced Gordie squarely. His breath reeked of alcohol. “You got a lot of fucking nerve coming in here and talking like that. You'll listen if you know what's good for you. Jesus fucking Christ. Here I thought you were gonna say you wanted to code again, and instead you sit there wagging your skinny-ass finger in my face."

  The black holes of Stango's sunglasses writhed with images of dragons and snakes.

  “Cut the pseudos, Stango. You owe me that much."

  “You left me. I don't owe you shit,” he replied.

  “You know better than that."

  The dragons faded as Stango sipped his drink.

  “Why did you do it?” Gordie said, both of them knowing what he meant.

  “She came on to me, man. Her fault."

  Gordie sat quietly. Music pounded.

  Stango squirmed like he needed to take a leak. “What Yulani wanted, Yulani got."

  “She was mine."

  Stango nearly choked. “If you thought she belonged to anyone, you were sadly mistaken."

  “I loved her."

  “I'm very sorry for you."

  He shouldn't have come, Gordie realized.

  He had cleared his life of everything that had to do with code. It was easier that way, simpler. But the sounds and sights of colors doing riffs on bodies and walls projecting images brought everything back. He felt the programming behind every effect, smelled interfaces and data flows. The hair on his arms tingled with the gritty symmetry of bracketed code blocks and elegant function calls.

  “I spent the entire day with our friendly police force,” he finally said.

  “They don't know what they're dealing with.” Stango raised his glass, then stopped and merely spun it in a wet circle. The black voids of his sunglasses hid any emotion that might be riding his face. “Neither do you."

  “What does that mean?"

  Stango's shrug was noncommittal arrogance. “What part didn't you catch?"

  “I see you haven't lost your flair for the dramatic."

  No response.

  “I need your help,” Gordie said, ashamed of the despair embedded in his voice. “The cops will pin this on me if I don't find them something else."

  Four men, obviously Stango's goons, emerged from the darkness, tall guys with shaved heads and thick chests plodding forward like lobotomized gorillas bent on escorting him back to the street. Only two were real, but the pseudos were good, and if Gordie hadn't been straight and known precisely what he was looking for he would never have tagged them.

  “Don't do this, man,” he said, his gaze snapping back to Stango. “I'm sorry I left. But you got your interface, right? Shit, Stango. You're rich because of me."

  Stango said nothing.

  It was over. Gordie stood. His chair gave a metallic stutter as it gouged the floor. The pressure of a thousand gazes fell on him. Still Stango said nothing. Embarrassed, Gordie turned and shouldered past the bouncers, aiming for the pseudo in the middle and steeling himself against showing surprise as he passed through it.

  Instead, the entirety of his body struck something heavy. The pseudo recoiled stiffly.

  Gordie's jaw gaped. This was a pseudo, a digital mirage piped into the processor at the base of his brain. It wasn't supposed to have any substance. Gordie touched the pseudo's shoulder. It was firm, too firm, actually, hard like wood grain rather than thick and fleshy, not realistic at all but passable in the bar's darkness and a hell of a first step.

  “You've got tactiles?” Gordie said, turning to Stango with undisguised wonder.

  Stango gave a snort that stripped the years away, laughing at the expression of raw desire on Gordie's face. “Still quick as ever, I see.” He dismissed the bouncers with a wave of his hand that let Gordie know he had summoned them merely to show off. Stango had always had a sadistic sense of the dramatic.

  And now he had tactiles.

  Full neurological push.

  Despite the dark glasses, Gordie could picture Stango's pupils lacing holes through him. It's hot shit, isn't it, that gaze had always said. It's hot shit, and we're gonna get rich.

  “Show me,” Gordie said, ignoring the warning signals going off around him.

  * * * *

  The downstairs hallway smelled of old dust.

  Stango walked with a stride that reminded Gordie of a sandpiper's jaunt across flat beach. They were under the club, in the quiet comfort of Stango's offices. The walls were freshly white. Framed posters of games they had coded and advertisement campaigns for companies they had started broke the space. A carpet of blue berber absorbed their footsteps.

  Gordie saw no sensory projectors here—no local pseudos. Stango wasn't above pushing images remotely, though, and walls were an easy cover.

  Crystalline beads dangled over the open doorway at the end of the hall. Perhaps these were imaging systems, he thought. Maybe Gordie had underestimated Stango once again. Lights snapped on as they pushed through the strands.

  The room was huge.

  A bank of processing units lined the far wall. Green and yellow lights flickered from their consoles. A flat panel above the boxes scrolled with reports of the system's status. Smaller stations were positioned around the room. A dead Net terminal sat in one corner, its power cable looped in electronic isolation.

  And, of course, there were the beanbag chairs—fifteen or twenty of them in rainbow variety scattered around the room. For a single, breathtaking moment Gordie saw Yulani sprawled over the big red one, feet propped against the wall, hair flowing to the floor as she closed her eyes, chewed her gum, and concentrated on a problem.

  He remembered one other time, too.

  It was past midnight.

  Gordie had gone home. He was tired, but his brain was stuck on a bug in the optical switch and couldn't stop. The answer hit with full force right in the middle of a swig of Orlando orange juice straight from the jug.

  He parked his car in the darkness. The office light was on, so he tried to stay quiet as he went upstairs, not wanting to interrupt Stango's thought pattern.

  He pushed the door.

  There they were, Yulani and Stango, naked and intertwined, right on the beanbags.

  If Stango saw Gordie's hesitation, he didn't show it. Instead, he pressed his hand against a wall display. A light flickered. Something clicked. Dataflows appeared, snippets of pseudocode and node annotations that diagrammed Stango's thoughts.

  A central processing core and a series of channels led to virtual switches and connectors. The output was easy, pretty much unchanged from how Gordie had left it. A switch latched to the optic nerve to create a channel. Once toggled, the processor intercepted visual signals, modified them, then piped data as a stream of electrical charges directly to the brain. This technology, and the image-processing code Gordie had w
ritten, was the idea that had made them both rich.

  Full tactiles had always been a possible next step in theory.

  Practice, however, was different.

  Optical push worked because the optic nerve was easily available. It dealt with only a single nervous process, and a DNA-based nano could be configured to handle the link. Full tactiles required the programmer to understand every nerve and have the ability to configure builder nanos to the exact nature of the host. Very tricky, and very deadly if done poorly.

  “Where do you personalize the system?” Gordie asked.

  Stango removed his sunglasses. His eyes sparkled and he grinned wryly.

  “Here,” he said, pressing his palm against the central logic driver to expand its diagram. “You need to go virtch to see the multidimensional detail, but this gives you the basic idea."

  Gordie scanned the cell's encapsulated algorithm. The interface was generic. I/O routines to preprocess information, context scripts, driver logic. All the usual stuff taught in every comsci school on the planet. Then he found it. He had to step back to take it all in, but he saw search routines and sensory inputs, a series of self-configuring initialization files, and an interface back into the host's primary processor and memory storage routines.

  “It's a configuration driver,” Gordie said.

  “Uh-huh."

  “It scans the nervous system, takes feedback from the host, then creates and loads a unique driver for every element it finds."

  Stango nodded.

  “Plug-n-play at the most complex level imaginable,” Gordie continued.

  “An oldie, but a goodie,” Stango replied.

  “It's fucking incredible, is what it is."

  Gordie opened another level, examining how the data fit together. As always, Stango's code was bold and flashy, full of vision but sloppy and frayed when it got to the details of its interface.

  He felt the itch stronger than ever. It was an odor, indescribable, the shallow breathing of total concentration, the mind buzz of immersion. He hadn't coded since the Cretaceous, but already Gordie found a place where the interface would hang, already his fingers ached to get in and mold this code.

  “Why are you showing me this?"