Restricted Fantasies

by Kevin Kneupper

  Cathy walks towards me. She’s beaming, enjoying the hell out of the party. The table I’m sitting at is big. Ten people, including me. She starts greeting everyone, chatting up everyone at the table one by one. She starts with Dawson, one of the account execs who used to work on the floor above me.

  I’m seething inside. I wasn’t back when it really happened. When it really happened, I was so happy to see her. I remember that much for sure. We hadn’t spoken in months, even though our offices were right by each other. I missed her. We were friends, I thought. We’d both been so busy, but now we’d catch up. That’s how friendships worked. The fire might die down a little, but it’s always simmering in the logs and ready to flare up again.

  After a few minutes she moves on from Dawson. Laney’s up next, the secretary for one of the big bosses. She gives her a few minutes, and then Cathy’s on to the next person.

  Again and again and again. Everybody at the table. She gives all of them her smile, she gives all of them her time, she gives all of them her charm.

  All of them but me.

  In real life she walked off. I was at the end. She talked up everyone at the table, every single one of them, and when she came to me she didn’t even look at me. She just walked away like I wasn’t even there. That’s when I realized the friendship was done. It never even existed, really. I was useful, and then one day I wasn’t. I met some emotional need for her, and then I didn’t, so I was gone. And when I thought about things, when I went through the past few months in my head, I realized she’d dropped me like a rock a long time ago. I’d just been in denial about it.

  In real life, I sat there in silence, too stunned to say anything about it. It took me another couple of months to admit to myself that the person I cared so much about never really cared about me at all.

  In here, I just yell.

  I stand up and start screaming. Her face drops as I chew her out about everything. Not just that night, but everything that came before it and everything that came after it. I pour it all out. The anger, the venom, the hate, the love. The little ball of nastiness I’ve been carrying around inside me for so long.

  I feel release. The tension always builds up in me while I’m sitting there at that table, waiting for her to pretend I’m not there. It feels awful letting it build, but it’s all worth it once I let it out at the end.

  Simulated Cathy starts apologizing. Sometimes I let her, sometimes I don’t. Depends on how I’m feeling. Today I cut it short.

  “Lexia, how long until the meeting with Gutierrez?”

  The room freezes. Cathy turns into a statue.

  “Another hour,” says Lexia.

  An hour. I’m jacked into the sim from my office in the real world, so all I’ve gotta do is walk across the hall. There’s plenty of time. And I’m pretty worked up. I need another release.

  “Let’s run the Holstein simulation,” I say.

  The restaurant disappears. Now I’m in a school bus, and in a much smaller body.

  He was this older kid in elementary school who bullied the hell out of me. Had a pig’s face and a cow’s name, and he took it out on me. Wouldn’t let me sit down on the bus, tore the shit out of me every single day at school, and he even tried to run me down with his pick-up when he got a little older. I had to hide out at my friend’s house and wait until he finally drove off. In real life I brought a pair of scissors to school one day. I had this plan to stab him in the gut when he came at me on the bus, but I didn’t have the balls to go through with it.

  I’ve got time. I can run this two, maybe three times before I’ve gotta go talk to Gutierrez.

  Lexia says this isn’t healthy. She says I should quit dwelling on things. Just stop running the scenarios cold turkey. Let the memories fade and the grudges along with them. She says holding a grudge is like drinking a poison and waiting for your enemy to die. She says I’m just etching the pain into myself by reliving it so many times. She says it’ll be there forever until I get the strength to let the memories go.

  She’s right. I know she’s right. But simulated memories are so real. They feel that way, anyway. They’re not any more real than my actual memories, but they sure as hell feel that way. And the emotional release I get is off the charts. It’s not like a regular memory. It’s so much better. You’re there, and you can feel everything, and it always goes how you wish it had gone way back when. I should stop, and I will someday. Maybe I’ll cut it back a little. I’ll limit myself. Three times a day, maybe four. I’ll cut out one of the scenarios and let that one die. Forgiveness. That’s what I’ll do.

  But not today. Today’s important. I can’t make big changes like that, not before a meeting as important as this one. I’ve got to be fresh. Relaxed. In the perfect mood.

  I walk down the aisle of the bus, scissors in hand.

  I’ve still got another hour, and I want to make the most of it.

  FIRST CONTACT

  Kepler-452.

  It was a backwater as systems went. Only one star. Only one planet, a heavy old thing that circled right in the middle of the habitable zone. Its oceans were long evaporated, leaving a thin network of rivers and lakes dotting its brown surface. Population: give or take a hundred at any given time. People, that is. How many of the Cousins there were, nobody quite knew.

  They called them that, but they weren’t cousins to anything, at least not from Earth. No one was even sure what they looked like. Not yet. But they were there, sleeping. Dreaming their dreams and waiting in silence for untold millions of years.

  Waiting for someone like Mordecai.

  He was a thin man, perpetually twitchy from the cocktail of drugs he took. A pill a day, one big fat one that sat in his stomach and dissolved chamber by chamber according to a carefully planned schedule. It dosed him every hour with stimulants and cognitive enhancers and adrenal regulators, pushing his body up and down through a chemical roller coaster that left him exhausted when the ride was finally over.

  His eye was brown, the one he still had. The other was a metallic black ball fitted into his eye socket and wired directly to his brain to enhance his senses. Rotate a little this way, and he could see in infrared. Rotate a little that way, and it was ultraviolet. A little further still, and the device went from eye to microscope.

  His skin zig-zagged with circuitry, glowing purple data channels tattooed all along his body. It lit him up like a Christmas tree in the dark, but it was worth it. His body and brain were a network of man and metal, and when the drugs were at their peak he could process data faster than any computer ever could on its own.

  Mordecai was an info diver, a man who trawled the depths of the networks scooping up data. The gathering was the easy part; it was the sifting that only a diver could do. Little flecks of gold hiding in a beachful of sand, and it was his job to sort out which was which. There was so much data, and the right bit of it could be worth untold billions. It was all about understanding what you had, and all about connecting the dots. Patterns in cargo manifests could signal a secret mineral find in a distant star system, or fluctuations in an obscure cryptocurrency could mean the touts were at work and the market was about to turn.

  But that was small game, at least if you didn’t have the cryptos to invest on your own. Commission work at best, and Mordecai was hunting something bigger. Anyone could jack in from the comfort of their home, and the competition grew fiercer by the year. More divers meant leaner catches for everyone. You had to go out into the real world if you wanted something big. And Mordecai was chasing a whale.

  He was strapped into a passenger seat in the Warp Witch, a beat-up mining vessel long past its prime. It used to belong to one of the corporate majors, but some scavenger mini-corp had picked it up at auction and retrofitted it, gutting the insides and replacing everything but the Hopscotch drive. Now it was a transport, a private one, and it was the only ship headed to Kepler-452 for months.

  He’d have preferred something a little more luxurious. A cabin that wasn’t
the size of a broom closet, or food that didn’t come in a cube. A net terminal, or even just space to stretch his legs without bumping into the crew as they worked. Or best of all, a direct trip, one that didn’t bounce him from system to system and waste his precious days while the Warp Witch dropped off other passengers on other planets.

  But he couldn’t wait for another ship. Even the few extra days were almost too much. Others would travel the same route soon, searching for the same thing he was, and to the victor would go the spoils. A gold rush was on, and he had to get there fast.

  Because on Kepler-452b, they’d just discovered alien life.

  In and of itself, that was nothing special. The Hopscotch drive had been perfected a decade before, opening up the stars to humanity. Ships had leapt off in all directions, searching for an answer to the age-old question: was mankind alone in the universe?

  We shouldn’t have been, not with what was known to science. Galaxy upon galaxy filled with billions of planets capable of life, and humanity hadn’t heard a peep from any of them. Fermi’s Paradox, they called it. If there were so many places for life to spring up, then where were all the aliens, and why hadn’t they come and found us already?

  It wasn’t a paradox anymore. They were out there, all right, the aliens. Nearly everywhere. More than a hundred civilizations had been discovered, and a new one seemed to pop up every week. Ships swarmed all over the galaxy, surveying and laying what claims they could, a race between corporations to gobble up any territory they could find that didn’t already have a flag on it.

  But for all those other civilizations, there hadn’t been a one of them that was more than a hollowed-out shell of its former glory. They’d found aliens of all kinds: plant-creatures, sentient rocks, little green men, and ape-like beasts that looked too close to mankind for comfort. But all were silent, sleeping, living in worlds all their own.

  Because every single civilization the ships of humanity had discovered was tucked away in its own private simulated reality.

  Mordecai had grown obsessed with them, back in his conapt on the outskirts of the Chicago Independent Revitalization Zone. He’d been working for a mini-corp, a sham outfit with no more than a few hundred subscribers in its network. CheemaCorp, registered in Delaware with every one of its subscribers listed as living in or around Mumbai. It was a family affair, as best Mordecai could tell. A little tribe of people who’d gone corporate, ostensibly to govern themselves as Hindu nationalists.

  Of course he’d checked them out before he’d signed on, and of course they hadn’t been telling the truth. They wouldn’t have needed him if they had been. The whole corp was a fraud. They’d ginned up a subscriber base full of dead people, fake names, and double-dippers, all of whom had supposedly signed over their basic income checks in exchange for a Whole Life Goods and Services Package. Now CheemaCorp was scamming the IndoPaki government out of the money, draining the public coffers and funneling a taste back to the politicians who were supposed to be prosecuting that sort of thing in the first place.

  They’d hired Mordecai as a digital look-out. Watch the names, they said. Watch for activity. Watch for changes in the data. They didn’t tell him why, but he knew. If anyone came sniffing around, CheemaCorp would vanish and the money along with it.

  It was dirty, but so was Mordecai. You couldn’t survive as a data diver if you stayed on the path of the righteous. The job paid, and it paid well. Best of all, it was do-nothing. No one ever came for CheemaCorp, and no one ever would. His time was freed up to focus on an interest of his that had grown into an obsession: the burgeoning field of xenoarcheology.

  Mordecai was a man who saw the world as data, and the xenos were a gaping hole in his vision. Little trickled out about them. A few pictures of every new species, if it was possible to take them. A little basic information about their planets, and perhaps a dozen or so alien specimens brought back to Sol system, all non-sentient life forms. But there was never much about the dreamers. Nothing about who they were, how they lived, what they thought, or what they were doing inside their sims.

  The black-out was by design. All those planets with all those alien civs were nature preserves, at least as far as the major corps were concerned. The xenos had chosen to sleep, and the law said leave them alone. Here there be dragons, and who knew what would happen if they stirred from their slumber? The political types didn’t want to find out, and as far as they were concerned there was all the time in the world to take things slow. The business types didn’t all agree, but as valuable as that alien tech might be, a corp with a big enough subscriber base couldn’t just start poking around on an occupied planet, risking its charter and risking all those basic income checks.

  Not officially, at least, and not under their own name.

  At first, it had been about the money. Dollars signs had drawn Mordecai to the xenos, the promise of the big score that would buy him a mini-mans in the country stocked with servants. Human ones, too, not some dull staff of androids that could barely think for themselves. He’d wanted every diver’s dream: early retirement, comfort, luxury. And most of all, freedom from the drab, rationed existence of life on the basic minimum.

  The only real shot he had at that was the xenos. They were supposed to be off limits, but that was a joke if one traveled in unsavory circles. Space was too big, and the law was unenforceable. There weren’t enough ships to blockade every inhabited planet, or even to do basic patrols. Scavengers had free rein to loot anything that wasn’t tied down, and it hadn’t been long before the divers had tagged along with them.

  Divers were obsessive types by the nature of their work, and nothing obsessed them more than a challenge. Aliens living in simulated worlds, run by massive computer systems of their own design? Systems made using materials that were totally unfamiliar to humanity? What could be a bigger challenge to an info diver than trying to extract data from something like that?

  It was a race, and not just for the money. Mordecai had watched the feeds in awe as other divers had snuck off to far-flung systems and notched a series of firsts. First identification of a functioning xenocomputer had gone to BattleBlade, some fourteen-year-old from Buenos Aires who’d hitchhiked his way to KOB 7711. First coherent data extraction had gone to a Chinese consortium of divers, the Daring Dragons, who’d pulled out a packet of commands from something they thought was a power conduit. On and on and on, with every success leading to instant fame among the diver community.

  Those were giant technological leaps, even if they didn’t sound like much to outsiders. But the holy grail was something else entirely: first contact. To go inside one of their sims and see what the aliens saw themselves. To talk to them, to ask them a question, to let them know they weren’t alone anymore after all these years. To tell them that humanity had solved the problem of faster-than-light travel, and that it was time to come back out into the world again and meet their new neighbors.

  Whoever managed that would be immortalized forever. Not just among the divers, but across the whole damned species. An Armstrong, a Columbus, a Yakumato. It was the most momentous time in history, and Mordecai was living in it. Nothing was stopping him from being the one to do it. And nothing was going to stand in his way.

  He’d made his plans, and he’d watched the feeds. Pacing around his tiny little conapt, arguing with fools on the net, tinkering with a grab bag full of gadgets he’d designed that might help him with the toughest dive of his life. He waited months for the right target. An old discovery was no good; others would have gotten there first, and if contact were easy, they’d already have done it. He needed something fresh, something he could get to first, something where the conditions were just right. He’d only get the one shot; if he failed it’d be a year or two before he could afford another trip.

  And then came Kepler 452. Just a few pics and a few vids, a little blip in a sea of data. But he’d found it, and it looked perfect. A humanoid species, at least from the reports, and a planet humans could almost survi
ve on. There were cities, too. Intact ones. He doubted he’d get a better shot than that, and he’d booked his trip a few hours after he’d heard about it.

  And now he was there. He’d crammed his schedule with last minute contracts to afford the trip, but he’d managed to pay his freight. Travel opportunities were few and far between: the Hopscotch drive had opened up the galaxy to humanity, but there weren’t more than a few hundred thousand people living off-world at any given time. It took a certain sort of personality to leap off into an unknown frontier, to give up everything and risk their lives in the process. It created a weird mix: loners, the greedy, the desperate, and a whole lot of psychopaths. Reputable ships wouldn’t take someone like Mordecai, but he knew plenty of disreputable people. He’d found the Warp Witch without too much difficulty, and from there it was only a matter of price.

  They’d hopscotched from system to system, traveling thousands of light years from Earth, and finally they’d arrived at Kepler 452. It was just like the old children’s game: toss a quant-probe ahead of the ship, launching it towards the intended destination and following closely in its wake as it warped space and time all around it. Mordecai could see the quant-probe through the portholes: a big blue boulder-like thing, fizzling with probabilities and flickering in and out of existence just ahead of the ship.

  They left the quant-probe at the system’s outskirts and taxied towards the planet. Kepler 452-b. A dull name, but every planet couldn’t have a good one. Hundreds of billions of stars and trillions of planets, and that was just the Milky Way.

  The crew made ready to land, stomping back and forth along a narrow walkway that ran the length of the ship, their mag-boots fastening them to the floor in a semblance of gravity. Everything had to be packed up for landing: nothing could be loose, or it’d turn into a missile, bouncing around the insides of the ship and liable to tear right through the hull. A hobbit-sized man floated crates along the walkway, pulling them through the air towards the cargo hold. He looked like he’d been smashed up in a trash compactor, but it was entirely intentional. He was a gravver: he’d had himself rebuilt, and after a little recoding of his genes and a lot of surgery, he was custom designed for life on high-gravity worlds.