Wild Cards: Inside Straight

by George R. R. Martin

  Keel’s head rested quietly on the pillow. Behind her, on the green panels, her heart and lungs created cool, luminous graphics. Physically, she was restored. Emotionally, mentally, spiritually, she might be damaged beyond repair.

  He turned away from the window and walked on down the corridor. He walked past his sleeping quarters to the control room. He undressed and lay down on the utilitarian flat and let the neuronet embrace him. He was aware, as always, of guilt and a hangdog sense of betrayal.

  The virtual had come on the Highway two weeks ago. He’d already left Addiction Resources with Keel, traveling west into the wilderness of Pit Finitum, away from the treatment center and New Vegas.

  Know the enemy. He’d sampled all the vees, played at lowest res with all the safeguards maxed, so that he could talk knowledgeably with his clients. But he’d never heard of this virtual—and it had a special fascination for him. It was called Halfway House.

  A training vee, not a recreational one, it consisted of a series of step-motivated, instructional virtuals designed to teach the apprentice addictions counselor his trade.

  So why this guilt attached to methodically running the course?

  What guilt?

  That guilt.

  Okay. Well . . .

  So far he had intervened on a fourteen-year-old boy addicted to Clawhammer Comix, masterfully diagnosed a woman suffering from Leary’s syndrome, and led an entire Group of mix-feeders through a nasty withdrawal episode.

  He could tell himself he was learning valuable healing techniques.

  Or he could tell himself that he was succumbing to the world that killed his clients, the hurt-free world where everything worked out for the best, good triumphed, bad withered and died, rewards came effortlessly—and if that was not enough, the volume could always be turned up.

  He had reservations. Adjusting the neuronet, he thought, “I will be careful.” It was what his clients always said.

  He did not come at all. When the sun was high in the sky, she began to shout for him. That was useless, of course.

  She ran into the ocean, but it was a low res ghost and only filled her with vee-panic. She stumbled back to the beach chair, tried to calm herself with a rational voice: Someone will come.

  But would they? She was, according to her wilson, in the wilds of Pit Finitum, hundreds of miles to the west of New Vegas, traveling toward a halfway house hidden in some dirty corner of the mining warren known as the Slash.

  Darkness came, and the programmed current took her into unconsciousness.

  The second day was the same, although she sensed a physical weakness that emanated from Big R. Probably nutrients in one of the IV pockets had been depleted. I’ll die, she thought. Night snuffed the thought.

  A new dawn arrived without Dr. Marx. Was he dead? And if so, was he dead by accident or design? And if by design, whose? Perhaps he had killed himself; perhaps this whole business of Virtvana’s persecution was a delusion.

  Keel remembered the wilson’s despair, felt a sudden conviction that Dr. Marx had fled Addiction Resources without that center’s knowledge, a victim of the evangelism/paranoia psychosis that sometimes accompanied counselor burnout.

  Keel had survived much in her twenty years. She had donned some deadly v-gear and made it back to Big R intact. True, she had been saved a couple of times, and she probably wasn’t what anyone would call psychologically sound, but . . . it would be an ugly irony if it was an addictions rehab, an unhinged wilson, that finally killed her.

  Keel hated irony, and it was this disgust that pressed her into action.

  She went looking for the plug. She began by focusing on her spine, the patches, the slightly off-body temp of the sensor pad. Had her v-universe been more engrossing, this would have been harder to do, but the ocean was deteriorating daily, the seagulls now no more than scissoring disruptions in the mottled sky.

  On the third afternoon of her imposed solitude, she was able to sit upright in Big R. It required all her strength, the double-think of real Big-R motion while in the virtual. The effect in vee was to momentarily tilt the ocean and cause the sky to leak blue pixels into the sand.

  Had her arms been locked, had her body been glove-secured, it would have been wasted effort, of course, but Keel’s willing participation in her treatment, her daily exercise regimen, had allowed relaxed physical inhibitors. There had been no reason for Dr. Marx to anticipate Keel’s attempting a Big-R disruption.

  She certainly didn’t want to.

  The nausea and terror induced by contrary motion in Big R while simulating a virtual was considerable.

  Keel relied on gravity, shifting, leaning to the right. The bed shifted to regain balance.

  She screamed, twisted, hurled herself sideways into Big R.

  And her world exploded. The ocean raced up the beach, a black tidal wave that screeched and rattled as though some monstrous mechanical beast were being demolished by giant pistons.

  Black water engulfed her. She coughed and it filled her lungs. She flayed; her right fist slammed painfully against the side of the container, making it hum.

  She clambered out of the exercise vat, placed conveniently next to the bed, stumbled, and sprawled on the floor in naked triumph.

  “Hello Big R,” she said, tasting blood on her lips.

  This Halfway House was proving to be a remarkable instructional tool. In retrospect, his fear of its virtual form had been pure superstition. He smiled at his own irrationality. HE would have slept that night in ignorance, but he decided to give the perimeter of his makeshift compound a last security check before retiring.

  To that effect, he dressed and went outside.

  In the flare of the compound lights, the jungle’s purple vegetation looked particularly unpleasant, like the swollen limbs of long-drowned corpses. The usual skittering things made a racket. There was nothing in the area inclined to attack a man, but the planet’s evolution hadn’t stinted on biting and stinging vermin, and . . .

  And one of the vermin was missing.

  He had, as always, been frugal in his breathing, gathering into his lungs as little of the noxious atmosphere as possible. The cloying mint scent never failed to sicken him.

  But the odor was gone.

  It had been there earlier in the evening, and now it was gone. He stood in jungle night, in the glare of the compound lights, waiting for his brain to process this piece of information, but his brain told him only that the odor had been there and now it was gone.

  Still, some knowledge of what this meant was leaking through, creating a roiling fear.

  If you knew what to look for, you could find it. No vee was as detailed as nature.

  You only had to find one seam, one faint oscillation in a rock, one incongruent shadow.

  It was a first-rate sim, and it would have fooled him. But they had had to work fast, fabricating and downloading it, and no one had noted that a nasty alien-bug filled the Big-R air with its mating fragrance.

  Dr. Marx didn’t hesitate. He strained for the Big R, traced the line of his arm, moved. It was there; he found it. Pressed.

  Nothing.

  Then, out of the jungle, a figure came.

  “Who are you?” He was not intimidated by this military mockup, the boom of its metal voice, the faint whine of its servos. It was a virtual puppet, of course. Its masters were the thing to fear.

  “We are concerned citizens,” the soldier said. “We have reason to believe that you are preventing a client of ours, a client-in-good-credit, from satisfying her constitutionally sanctioned appetites.”

  “Keel Benning came to us of her own free will. Ask her and she will tell you as much.”

  “We will ask her. And that is not what she will say. She will say, for all the world to hear, that her freedom was compromised by so-called caregivers.”

  “Leave her alone.”

  The soldier came closer. It looked up at the dark blanket of the sky. “Too late to leave anyone alone, Doctor. Everyone is in t
he path of progress. One day we will all live in the vee. It is the natural home of gods.”

  The sky began to glow as the black giant raised its gleaming arms.

  “You act largely out of ignorance,” the soldier said. “The god-seekers come, and you treat them like aberrations, like madmen burning with sickness. This is because you do not know the virtual yourself. Fearing it, you have confined and studied it. You have refused to taste it, to savor it.”

  The sky was glowing gold, and figures seemed to move in it, beautiful, winged humanforms.

  Virtvana, Marx thought. Ape and Angels.

  It was his last coherent thought before enlightenment.

  “I give you a feast,” the soldier roared. And all the denizens of heaven swarmed down, surrounding Dr. Marx with love and compassion and that absolute, impossible distillation of a hundred thousand insights that formed a single, tear-shaped truth: Euphoria.

  But a closer look showed signs of v-overload epilepsy. Keel had seen it before and knew that one’s first inclination, to shut down every incoming signal, was not the way to go. First you shut down any chemical enhances—and, if you happened to have a hospital handy (as she did), you slowed the system more with something like clemadine or hetlin—then, if you were truly fortunate and your spike was epping in a high-tech detox (again, she was so fortunate), you plugged in a regulator, spliced it and started running the signals through that, toning them down.

  Keel got to it. As she moved, quickly, confidently, she had time to think that this was something she knew about (a consumer’s knowledge, not a tech’s, but still, her knowledge was extensive).

  Keel scrambled to the corridor where she’d seen the habitat sweep. She swung the ungainly tool around, falling to one knee as she struggled to unbolt the barrel lock. Fizzing pocky low-tech grubber.

  The barrel-locking casing clattered to the floor just as the door collapsed.

  The man in the doorway held a weapon, which, in retrospect, made Keel feel a little better. Had he been weapon-less, she would still have done what she did.

  She swept him out the door. The sonic blast scattered him across the cleared area, a tumbling, bloody mass of rags and unraveling flesh, a thigh bone tumbling into smaller bits as it rolled under frayed vegetation.

  She was standing in the doorway when an explosion rocked the unit and sent her crashing backward. She crawled down the corridor, still lugging the habitat gun, and fell into the doorway of a cluttered storage room. An alarm continued to shriek somewhere.

  The mobile now lay on its side. She fired in front of her. The roof rippled and roared, looked like it might hold, and then flapped away like an unholy, howling v-demon, a vast silver blade that smoothly severed the leafy tops of the jungle’s tallest sentinels. Keel plunged into the night, ran to the edge of the unit and peered out into the glare of the compound lights.

  The man was crossing the clearing.

  She crouched, and he turned, sensing motion. He was trained to fire reflexively but he was too late. The rolling sonic blast from Keel’s habitat gun swept man and weapon and weapon’s discharge into rolling motes that mixed with rock and sand and vegetation, a stew of organic and inorganic matter for the wind to stir.

  Keel waited for others to come but none did.

  Finally, she reentered the mobile to retrieve her wilson, dragging him (unconscious) into the scuffed arena of the compound.

  Later that night, exhausted, she discovered the aircraft that had brought the two men. She hesitated, then decided to destroy it. It would do her no good; it was not a vehicle she could operate, and its continued existence might bring others.

  Dr. Marx was now conscious but fairly insufferable. He could talk about nothing but angels and the Light. A long, hard dose of Apes and Angels had filled him with fuzzy love and an uncomplicated metaphysics in which smiling angels fixed bad stuff and protected all good people (and, it went without saying, all people were good).

  Keel had managed to dress Dr. Marx in a suit again, and this restored a professional appearance to the wilson. But, to Keel’s dismay, Dr. Marx in virtual-withdrawal was a shameless whiner.

  “Please,” he would implore. “Please, I am in terrible terrible Neeeeeeed.”

  He complained that the therapy-v was too weak, that he was sinking into a catatonic state. Later, he would stop entirely, of course, but now, please, something stronger . . .

  No.

  He told her she was heartless, cruel, sadistic, vengeful. She was taking revenge for her own treatment program, although, if she would just recall, he had been the soul of gentleness and solicitude.

  “You can’t be in virtual and make the journey,” Keel said. “I need you to navigate. We will take breaks, but I’m afraid they will be brief. Say goodbye to your mobile.”

  She destroyed it with the habitat sweep, and they were on their way. It was a limping, difficult progress, for they took much with them: food, emergency camping and sleeping gear, a portable, two-feed v-rig, the virtual black box, and the security image grabs. And Dr. Marx was not a good traveler.

  It took six days to get to the Slash, and then Dr. Marx said he wasn’t sure just where the halfway house was.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I’m disoriented.”

  “You’ll never be a good v-addict,” Keel said. “You can’t lie.”

  “I’m not lying!” Dr. Marx snapped, goggle-eyed with feigned innocence.

  Keel knew what was going on, of course. He wanted to give her the slip and find a v-hovel where he could swap good feelings with his old angel buddies. Keel knew.

  “I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she said.

  The Slash was a squalid mining town with every vice a disenfranchised population could buy. It had meaner toys than New Vegas, and no semblance of law.

  Keel couldn’t just ask around for a treatment house. You could get hurt that way.

  But luck was with her. She spied the symbol of a triangle inside a circle on the side of what looked like an abandoned office. She watched a man descend a flight of stairs directly beneath the painted triangle. She followed him.

  “Where are we going?” Dr. Marx said. He was still a bundle of tics from angel-deprivation.

  Keel didn’t answer, just dragged him along. Inside, she saw the “Easy Does It” sign and knew everything was going to be okay.

  An old man saw her and waved. Incredibly, he knew her, even knew her name. “Keel,” he shouted. “I’m delighted to see you.”

  “It’s a small world, Solly.”

  “It’s that. But you get around some too. You cover some ground, you know. I figured ground might be covering you by now.”

  Keel laughed. “Yeah.” She reached out and touched the old man’s arm. “I’m looking for a house,” she said.

  Brake Madders thought it was a narc thing and wanted to hurt Marx.

  “No, he’s one of us,” Keel said.

  And so, Keel thought, am I.

  She had recognized every denial system and thwarted it with logic. When logic was not enough, she had simply shared his sadness and pain and doubt.

  “I’ve been there,” she had said.

  “I WAS preoccupied at the time,” Dr. Marx would tell young listeners. “I kept making plans to slip out and find some Apes and Angels. You weren’t hard pressed then—and you aren’t now—to find some mind-flaming vee in the Slash. My thoughts would go that way a lot.

  “So I didn’t stop and think, ‘Here’s a woman who’s been rehabbed six times; it’s not likely she’ll stop on the seventh. She’s just endured some genuine nasty events, and she’s probably feeling the need for some quality downtime.’

  “What I saw was a woman who spent every waking moment working on her recovery. And when she wasn’t doing mental, spiritual, or physical push-ups, she was helping those around her, all us shaking, vision-hungry, fizz-headed needers.

  “I didn’t think, ‘What the hell is this?’ back then. But I thought it later. I thought it whe
n I saw her graduate from medical school.

  “When she went back and got a law degree, so she could fight the bastards who wouldn’t let her practice addiction medicine properly, I thought it again. That time, I asked her. I asked her what had wrought the change.”

  Dr. Marx would wait as long as it took for someone to ask, “What did she say?”

  “It unsettled me some,” he would say, then wait again to be prompted.

  They’d prompt.

  “ ‘Helping people,’ she’d said. She’d found it was a thing she could do; she had a gift for it. All those no-counts and dead-enders in a halfway house in the Slash. She found she could help them all.”

  Dr. Marx saw it then, and saw it every time after that, every time he’d seen her speaking on some monolith grid at some rally, some hearing, some whatever. Once he’d seen it, he saw it every time: that glint in her eye, the incorrigible, unsinkable addict.

  “People,” she had said. “What a rush.”

  HER OWN PRIVATE SITCOM

  Allen Steele

  The Reality TV craze has helped to generate the idea that anybody and everybody can be a television star, but as the sly story that follows indicates, it’s not always as easy as it looks . . .

  Allen Steele made his first sale to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in 1988, soon following it up with a long string of other sales to Asimov’s, as well as to markets such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Science Fiction Age. In 1990, he published his critically acclaimed first novel, Orbital Decay, which subsequently won the Locus Poll as Best First Novel of the year, and soon Steele was being compared to Golden Age Heinlein by no less an authority than Gregory Benford. His other books include the novels Clarke County Space, Lunar Descent, Labyrinth of Night. The Weight, The Tranquillity Alternative, A King of Infinite Space, Oceanspace, Chronospace, Coyote, and Coyote Rising. His short work has been gathered in two collections, Rude Astronauts and Sex and Violence in Zero G. His most recent book is a new novel in the Coyote sequence, Coyote Frontier. He won a Hugo Award in 1996 for his novella “The Death of Captain Future,” and another Hugo in 1998 for his novella “Where Angels Fear to Tread.” Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he has worked for a variety of newspapers and magazines, covering science and business assignments, and is now a full-time writer living in Whately, Massachusetts with his wife, Linda.