Wild Cards: Inside Straight

by George R. R. Martin

  Then Fearing’s voice dropped out, and the scapes started.

  So I pulled open a drawer. It only looked big enough to hold some pencils or whatever but when I pulled it opened like a door and I went through.

  “Welcome to Intense Personals,” said a voice. There were just some colors to look at. The door closed behind me. “You must be eighteen years of age or older to use this service. To avoid any charges, please exit now.”

  I didn’t exit because I didn’t know how. The space with colors was kind of small except it didn’t have any edges. But it felt small.

  “This is the main menu. Please reach out and make one of the following selections: women seeking men, men seeking women, women seeking women, men seeking men, or alternatives.”

  Each of them was a block of words in the air. I reached up and touched the first one.

  “After each selection touch one to play the recording again, two to record a message for this person, or three to advance to the next selection. You may touch three at any time to advance to the next selection, or four to return to the main menu.”

  Then a woman came into the colored space with me. She was dressed up and wearing lipstick.

  “Hi, my name is Kate,” she said. She stared like she was looking through my head at something behind me, and poked at her hair while she talked. “I live in San Francisco. I work in the financial district, as a personnel manager, but my real love is the arts, currently painting and writing—

  “How did you get into San Francisco?” I said.

  “—just bought a new pair of hiking boots and I’m hoping to tackle Mount Tam this weekend,” she said, ignoring me.

  “I never met anyone from there,” I said.

  “—looking for a man who’s not intimidated by intelligence,” she went on. “It’s important that you like what you do, like where you are. I also want someone who’s confident enough that I can express my vulnerability. You should be a good listener—”

  I touched three. I can read numbers.

  Another woman came in, just like that. This one was as young as Gloria, but kind of soft-looking.

  “I continue to ask myself why in the heck I’m doing this personals thing,” she said, sighing. “But I know the reason—I want to date. I’m new to the San Francisco area. I like to go to the theater, but I’m really open-minded. I was born and raised in Chicago, so I think I’m a little more east coast than west. I’m fast-talking and cynical. I guess I’m getting a little cynical about these ads; the sky has yet to part; lightning has yet to strike—”

  I got rid of her, now that I knew how.

  “—I have my own garden and landscape business—”

  “—someone who’s fun, not nerdy—”

  “—I’m tender, I’m sensuous—”

  I started to wonder how long ago these women were from. I didn’t like the way they were making me feel, sort of guilty and bullied at the same time. I didn’t think I could make any of them happy the way they were hoping but I didn’t think I was going to get a chance to try, anyway.

  It took pretty long for me to get back out into the hallway. From then on I paid more attention to how I got into things.

  The next drawer I got into was just about the opposite. All space and no people. I was driving an airplane over almost the whole world, as far as I could tell. There was a row of dials and switches under the windows but it didn’t mean anything to me. First I was in the mountains and I crashed a lot, and that was dull because a voice would lecture me before I could start again, and I had to wait. But then I got to the desert and I kept it up without crashing much. I just learned to say “no” whenever the voice suggested something different like “engage target” or “evasive action.” I wanted to fly a while, that’s all. The desert looked good from up there, even though I’d been walking around in deserts too often.

  Except that I had to pee I could have done that forever. Fearing’s voice broke in, though, and said it was time for the first rest period.

  Gloria showed me how to unsnap the cables so I could walk out of the middle of all that stuff still wearing the suit, leaving the mask behind. Everybody lined up for the bathroom. Then we went to the big hall in the back where they had the cots, but nobody went to sleep or anything. I guessed we’d all want to next time, but right now I was too excited and so was everybody else. Fearing just kept talking like us taking a break was as much a part of the show as anything else.

  “Splendors, hah,” said Gloria. “Bunch of secondhand cyberjunk.”

  “I was in a plane,” I started.

  “Shut up,” said Gloria. “We’re not supposed to talk about it. Only, if you find something you like, remember where it is.”

  I hadn’t done that, but I wasn’t worried.

  “Drink some water,” she said. “And get some food.”

  They were going around with sandwiches and I got a couple, one for Gloria. But she didn’t seem to want to talk.

  Gilmartin the fake doctor was making a big deal of going around checking everybody even though it was only the first break. I figured that the whole point of taking care of us so hard was to remind the people in the seats that they might see somebody get hurt.

  Ed was giving out apples from a bag. I took one and went over and sat on Lane’s cot. She looked nice in her suit.

  “My boyfriend’s here,” she said.

  “You’re back together?”

  “I mean ex-. I’m pretending I didn’t see him.”

  “Where?”

  “He’s sitting right in front of my monitor.” She tipped her head to point.

  I didn’t say anything but I wished I had somebody watching me from the audience.

  Then I went into a dungeon. It started with a wizard growing me up from a bug. We were in his workshop, which was all full of jars and cobwebs. He had a face like a melted candle and he talked as much as Fearing. There were bats flying around.

  “You must resume the quest of Kroyd,” he said to me, and started touching me with his stick. I could see my arms and legs, but they weren’t wearing the scaper suit. They were covered with muscles. When the wizard touched me I got a sword and a shield. “These are your companions, Rip and Batter,” said the wizard. “They will obey you and protect you. You must never betray them for any other. That was Kroyd’s mistake.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  The wizard sent me into the dungeon and Rip and Batter talked to me. They told me what to do. They sounded a lot like the wizard.

  We met a Wormlion. That’s what Rip and Batter called it. It had a head full of worms with little faces and Rip and Batter said to kill it, which wasn’t hard. The head exploded and all the worms started running away into the stones of the floor like water.

  Then we met a woman in sexy clothes who was holding a sword and shield too. Hers were loaded with jewels and looked a lot nicer than Rip and Batter. This was Kroyd’s mistake, anyone could see that. Only I figured Kroyd wasn’t here and I was, and so maybe his mistake was one I wanted to make too.

  Rip and Batter started screaming when I traded with the woman, and then she put them on and we fought. When she killed me I was back in the doorway to the wizard’s room, where I first ran in, bug-sized. This time I went the other way, back to the drawers.

  Which is when I met the snowman.

  I was looking around in a drawer that didn’t seem to have anything in it. Everything was just black. Then I saw a little blinking list of numbers in the corner, touched the numbers. None of them did anything except one.

  It was still black but there were five pictures of a snowman. He was three balls of white, more like plastic than snow. His eyes were just o’s and his mouth didn’t move right when he talked. His arms were sticks but they bent like rubber. There were two pictures of him small and far away, one from underneath like he was on a hill and one that showed the top of his head, like he was in a hole. Then there was a big one of just his head, and a big one of his whole body. The last one was of him looking
in through a window, only you couldn’t see the window, just the way it cut off part of the snowman.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Lewis.”

  “I’m Mr. Sneeze.” His head and arms moved in all five pictures when he talked. His eyes got big and small.

  “What’s this place you’re in?”

  “It’s no place,” said Mr. Sneeze. “Just a garbage file.”

  “Why do you live in a garbage file?”

  “Copyright lawyers,” said Mr. Sneeze. “I made them nervous.” He sounded happy no matter what he was saying.

  “Nervous about what?”

  “I was in a Christmas special for interactive television. But at the last minute somebody from the legal department thought I looked too much like a snowman on a video game called Mud Flinger. It was too late to redesign me so they just cut me out and dumped me in this file.”

  “Can’t you go somewhere else?”

  “I don’t have too much mobility.” He jumped and twirled upside down and landed in the same place, five times at once. The one without a body spun too.

  “Do you miss the show?”

  “I just hope they’re doing well. Everybody has been working so hard.”

  I didn’t want to tell him it was probably a long time ago.

  “What are you doing here, Lewis?” said Mr. Sneeze.

  “I’m in a scape-athon.”

  “What’s that?”

  I told him about Gloria and Fearing and Kromer, and about the contest. I think he liked that he was on television again.

  I lay down on the cot beside Gloria. “I’m tired now,” I said.

  “So sleep a little,” she said, and put her arm over me. But I could hear Fearing outside talking about a “Sexathon” and I asked Gloria what it was.

  “That’s tomorrow night,” she said. “Don’t worry about it now.”

  Gloria wasn’t going to sleep, just looking around.

  “Answer the phone!” it said. The phone was ringing.

  I picked up the phone, and the lights in the room changed to a desk light on the table with the phone. The music in the room turned off.

  “How’s that for responsiveness?”

  “Fine,” I said. I hung up the phone. There was a television in the room, and it turned on. It was a picture of food. “See that?”

  “The food, you mean?” I said.

  “That’s the contents of your refrigerator!” it said. “The packages with the blue halo will go bad in the next twenty-four hours. The package with the black halo has already expired! Would you like me to dispose of it for you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Now look out the windows!”

  I looked. There were mountains outside.

  “Imagine waking up in the Alps every morning!”

  “I—”

  “And when you’re ready for work, your car is already warm in the garage!”

  The windows switched from the mountains to a picture of a car in a garage.

  “And your voicemail tells callers that you’re not home when it senses the car is gone from the garage!”

  I wondered if there was somewhere I could get if I went down to drive the car. But they were trying to sell me this house, so probably not.

  “And the television notifies you when the book you’re reading is available this week as a movie!”

  The television switched to a movie, the window curtains closed, and the light by the phone went off.

  “I can’t read,” I said.

  “All the more important, then, isn’t it?” said the house.

  “What about the bedroom?” I said. I was thinking about sleep.

  “Here you go!” A door opened and I went in. The bedroom had another television. But the bed wasn’t right. It had a scribble of electronic stuff over it.

  “What’s wrong with the bed?”

  “Somebody defaced it,” said the house. “Pity.”

  I knew it must have been Fearing or Kromer who wrecked the bed because they didn’t want anyone getting that comfortable and falling asleep and out of the contest. At least not yet.

  “Sorry!” said the house. “Let me show you the work center!”

  Kromer woke us up. “He always have to sleep with you, like a baby?”

  Gloria said, “Leave him alone. He can sleep where he wants.”

  “I can’t figure,” said Kromer. “Is he your boyfriend or your kid brother?”

  “Neither,” said Gloria. “What do you care?”

  “Okay,” said Kromer. “We’ve got a job for him to do tomorrow, though.”

  “What job?” said Gloria. They talked like I wasn’t there.

  “We need a hacker boy for a little sideshow we put on,” said Kromer. “He’s it.”

  “He’s never been in a scape before,” said Gloria. “He’s no hacker.”

  “He’s the nearest we’ve got. We’ll walk him through it.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Okay, but then leave him out of the Sexathon,” said Gloria.

  Kromer smiled. “You’re protecting him? Sorry. Everybody plays in the Sexathon, sweetheart. That’s bread and butter. The customers don’t let us break the rules.” He pointed out to the rigs. “You’d better get out there.”

  I knew Kromer thought I didn’t know about Gloria and Fearing, or other things. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t so innocent, but I didn’t think Gloria would like it, so I kept quiet.

  “What’s a Sexathon?” I said.

  “I don’t know, Lewis.”

  “I’ve never had sex,” I said.

  “Me neither,” said Mr. Sneeze.

  “Everybody always thinks I do with Gloria just because we go around together. But we’re just friends.”

  “That’s fine,” said Mr. Sneeze. “It’s okay to be friends.”

  “I’d like to be Lane’s boyfriend,” I said.

  Fearing was up again welcoming some people back in. I couldn’t believe anybody wanted to start watching first thing in the morning but Fearing was saying “the gritty determination to survive that epitomizes the frontier spirit that once made a country called America great” and “young bodies writhing in agonized congress with the future” and that sounded like a lot of fun, I guess.

  A woman from the town had quit already. Not Lane though.

  I found a bunch of papers with writing. Some of the words were blacked out and some were bright red and blinking. There was a siren sound. Then I felt hands pulling on me from outside and somebody took off my mask.

  There were two guys pulling on me who I had never seen before, and Ed and Kromer were pulling on them. Everybody was screaming at each other but it was kind of fake, because nobody was pulling or yelling very hard. Fearing said, “The feds, the feds!” A bunch of people were crowded around my television screen I guess looking at the papers I’d dug up, but now they were watching the action.

  Fearing came over and pulled out a toy gun and so did Kromer, and they were backing the two men away from me. I’m sure the audience could tell it was fake. But they were pretty excited, maybe just from remembering when feds were real.

  I got off my frame and looked around. I didn’t know what they were going to do with me now that I was out but I didn’t care. It was my first chance to see what it was like when the contestants were all in their suits and masks, swimming in the information. None of them knew what was happening, not even Gloria, who was right next to me the whole time. They just kept moving in the scapes. I looked at Lane. She looked good, like she was dancing.

  Meanwhile Fearing and Kromer chased those guys out the back. People were craning around to see. Fearing came out and took his microphone and said, “It isn’t his fault, folks. Just good hacker instincts for ferreting out corruption from encrypted data. The feds don’t want us digging up their trail, but the kid couldn’t help it.”

  Ed and Kromer started snapping me back into my suit. “We chased them off,” Fearing said, patting his gun. “We do t
ake care of our own. You can’t tell who’s going to come sniffing around, can you? For his protection and ours we’re going to have to delete that file, but it goes to show, there’s no limit to what a kid with a nose for data’s going to root out of cyberspace. We can’t throw him out of the contest for doing what comes natural. Give him a big hand, folks.”

  People clapped and a few threw coins. Ed picked the change up for me, then told me to put on my mask. Meanwhile Gloria and Lane and everybody else just went on through their scapes.

  I began to see what Kromer and Fearing were selling. It wasn’t any one thing. Some of it was fake and some was real, and some was a mix so you couldn’t tell.

  The people watching probably didn’t know why they wanted to, except it made them forget their screwed-up life for a while to watch the only suckers bigger than themselves—us.

  “Meanwhile, the big show goes on,” said Fearing. “How long will they last? Who will take the prize?”

  I TOLD Gloria about it at the break. She just shrugged and said to make sure I got my money from Kromer. Fearing was talking to Anne, the woman from the van, and Gloria was staring at them like she wanted them dead.

  A guy was lying in his cot talking to himself as if nobody could hear and Gilmartin and Kromer went over and told him he was kicked out. He didn’t seem to care.

  I went to see Lane but we didn’t talk. We sat on her cot and held hands. I didn’t know if it meant the same thing to her that it did to me but I liked it.

  After the break I went and talked to Mr. Sneeze. He told me the story of the show about Christmas. He said it wasn’t about always getting gifts. Sometimes you had to give gifts too.

  “What would scapes be without virtual sex?” he said. “Our voyagers must now prove themselves in the sensual realm—for the future consists of far more than cold, hard information. It’s a place of desire and temptation, and as always, survival belongs to the fittest. The soldiers will now be steered onto the sexual battlescape—the question is, will they meet with the Little Death, or the Big one?”