But how? Assuming they were all in the same simulation and not living in their own trances, how could they communicate with one another? A computer could do it over wires or quant channels so long as the brain was hooked in, but there were no wires in here.
Mordecai pondered that one. If data could go in, then data could come out. They could have modified themselves if their biotechnology was sufficiently advanced. Maybe they didn’t even have to. Ants communicated that way, after all. Talking to one another through pheromones, each a chemical signal to the others.
Maybe that’s what the spores were like. Artificial pheromones, moving in and out of their bodies as they slept, the air of the building blanketed with them. It explained why there were two distinct types. One spore to carry information in, one spore to carry it out. All of them perceiving the same thing from the same fungus, the same reality it created. One of the Cousins does something in the organic simulation, his body encodes it onto the spores, and the data goes out to all the others. If they could share data, they could share a simulation. The methods of sharing that data were immaterial.
It certainly wouldn’t be as efficient as a quant chip, and there’d be significant delays in distributing the information between them. If those fungal spheres were indeed processers, they’d have to collect the spores, gather the information from the dreamers, and decide what the common reality was to be before broadcasting it out to the building using another set of spores. That would take time, and lots of it. But time was an artifact of perception, just like any other aspect of reality. A dreamer doesn’t know how long they’ve been dreaming. And they don’t really need to. They could all sit and wait hours for the next round of spores, and there wasn’t any reason they needed to be conscious of the delay.
It was a curious thing, assuming his theory was correct. A common hallucination turned into a common reality. They’d gone the organic route where humanity had taken the silicon one, controlling everything they perceived about the world around them by controlling their own sensory inputs. Your world could be whatever you wanted once you hijack your own senses. It was one big chemical fantasy, and an entire species was in it.
And now he had to figure out some way to get in there with them.
If he could get inside again, if he could get proof his theory was correct, it’d change everything. It’d be the biggest discovery in the history of humanity.
It’d be first contact, and everyone would know it had been him.
He got to work at once. He had to focus on the input spores, the kind that carried information into the Cousins’ brains. It was easy to tell which was which.
On one kind of spore the grafted chromosomes were all the same. The common reality, the next little bit of the simulation to feed to the dreamers to tell them what had happened in their shared fantasy world. Every few minutes they changed as another set of identical spores blanketed the air. A new round of input, a message to all the Cousins about what they should be hallucinating to keep dreaming roughly the same dream as all the others.
The other kind of spore were like snowflakes: no two alike. They couldn’t be; they were carrying information out of the individual Cousins and off to the fungal spheres. It could be anything. Decisions they’d made, the choice to flex a tendril or take a step or nod their heads. Things they said, things they heard. Whatever information the common simulation needed to know to keep track of who was doing what, who was where, and what each of the Cousins were up to inside their simulation.
He focused on the input spores, the ones that were all the same. It was an easier problem to solve, and besides, figuring out how the output spores worked wouldn’t be of any use to him. The Cousins might have modified their bodies to change the spores and send out information about what they were doing in there, but his human body would never be able to manage it.
He wouldn’t be able to talk to the Cousins. Not if he couldn’t send information back into their simulation. But if he could figure out how to make the input spores a little more compatible with the human body, he’d be able to see through their eyes. He’d know what it was really like in there. He’d see what the Cousins were doing, and what they’d been up to all these years.
It’d be one-way contact, but first contact nonetheless.
He dragged himself over to the far corner of the room, hiding himself away so he could trance out and focus on his work. The Koreans didn’t bother him. They didn’t even see him, at least as far as he could tell. Or if they did, they left him be.
He was focusing on two problems at once, his consciousness split almost in two. An unmodified human did that all the time, their subconscious minds solving problems while they sang in the shower or watched vids, oblivious to what their brains were doing under the hood.
Mordecai’s cybernetics let him harness his subconscious in ways the average human couldn’t imagine. He was in control of it all: half of him reading through every biology text he could find on the mini-quant, the other half peering at the genome of the spores and trying to piece together how it worked.
The hours passed. Night fell. The Koreans packed up and left for the day. Mordecai didn’t move. He analyzed, he processed, he thought. He moved pieces of the puzzle into place. He almost solved it, then realized he’d gone down a blind alley. He trashed his work in his head and started all over. Again and again.
And finally it clicked.
The pills. The biology of the Cousins was close, but not close enough for him to see things in there clearly. Something had to change. He couldn’t modify the spores, and he couldn’t modify himself. But he could change his pills, and he could use them to change his brain state. He’d brought every kind of pharmaceutical imaginable along with him, and he knew more about pharmacology than almost anyone. He popped enough pills every day that he’d had to become an expert. He could see it in his head: a hallucinogen, one designed for humans, one that would open up his mind to new experiences and new inputs. One that would make him susceptible to any fancies that popped into his head. And one that might make the visions from those spores just a little bit clearer.
He went to work at once. He pried open a few capsules, using a mixer to adjust the ingredients and brew up a moonshine of his own making. It took another hour, but then he was ready. He set it up in stages: the hallucinogen to let his mind wander, then a batch of stimulants set to release in an hour and wake him out of it. He didn’t want to stay in there too long. Not the first time, and not out here with nothing but his suit to help him breathe.
He programmed his suit to watch his vitals closely and to jack up the filter if anything went wrong. Then he held up the pill, opened the visor on his helmet, and swallowed it as the air rushed inside his suit.
The last thing he saw was the red flashing warning on his wrist as the visor slid shut.
He was in the jungle again. This time it was crystal clear. No blurring, no colors, just the planet as it must have been long ago. Those spiral trees were everywhere, the yellow sappy stuff dripping out the holes in the side. It took him at least a minute to orient himself in his body. It didn’t feel right, the way he stood. He couldn’t keep his balance. And his tendrils felt so strange, so squishy. Like he had a hundred little fingers moving everywhere at once.
He ran the tendrils along his chest, and a little bit of fungus puffed out in a purple cloud around him. The scent was wonderful: soothing, calming. It smelled a bit like yellow. No, that didn’t make any sense. Or maybe it did in a certain sort of way. He thought about it, and he decided. It definitely smelled like yellow, and he liked it.
He took a few tentative steps forward, leaning his tendrils against a tree to steady himself. Now that felt good. A rush of endorphins that bordered on sheer ecstasy, a sudden burst of energy. He wanted to stay here, to try these feelings out and see what it was like to be a Cousin. But that wasn’t what he’d come in for.
He’d come inside to see them.
There was a group of the Cousins up ahead, maybe seven o
r eight of them. He walked towards them, stumbling through the trees, his gait growing more confident as he went. They were surrounding one of the trees, busy with their own affairs, and they didn’t even notice him. Probably they couldn’t. His best guess was that he was “inside” one of them. Seeing the simulation from their point of view, making decisions as if he were them, his brain convincing himself that he was.
Of course his decisions wouldn’t matter. His real body wasn’t making any spores, and so he wasn’t sending any information back out. It was like he was running his own private development server in his head for a few minutes of their sim. He wasn’t connected to the rest of them, and he’d be the only one to see what he did.
But he could still see them, even if they couldn’t see him. And that was enough to give him his claim at the milestone.
It was momentous. He wished he’d thought of something to say beforehand, some little speech to give, something that’d be remembered through the ages and written on the memorial plaque.
It didn’t really matter. He could always make a speech up later and just pretend that he’d given it.
He stepped closer and closer to the group of Cousins. He started talking as he walked, even if it didn’t matter, even if they’d never hear. “Greetings from Sol System, from Mordecai of Earth, our planet’s greatest diver, even better than Rikksin, the first human being ever to….”
And that’s when he realized what they were doing.
They were fucking it.
They were fucking the tree, every one of them. They had organs protruding from their nether regions, and they were thrusting them into those holes, sloshing the yellow sap around as they did.
Mordecai looked around. More trees. More Cousins. All standing around the trees, all gyrating, not a single one of them doing anything else. No conversation, no philosophy, no adventure. Just one big alien orgy, plant and animal mating with one another for all eternity without so much as a word between them.
His vision pixilated again. The jungle faded, then blurred into a rainbow nothing. And then he was back in the spire.
He jerked upright with a gasp. The readout on his wrist was flashing. One hour. It felt like a few minutes, but he’d been in there for an hour. The spores needed time to spread, he supposed. To let them know what to dream from moment to moment.
He collected his things. He bagged up samples of the spores, and he took a few from one of the fungal spheres before he left. It was a long trudge down the ramps and a long walk back to the rover. He had to get back. He had to figure out what he was going to post to the boards, and he had to get it uploaded to the net and beat Rikksin to the punch. The question was what the hell he was going to say.
Maybe this was how it was everywhere. In every star, in every system. Maybe it was the inevitable arc of any advanced species. A flurry of technological growth, a rise to the greatest of heights, and then a descent into an endless loop of the primal pleasures that had driven them there in the first place. Probably no species could resist the call once they’d developed the technology to deliver their wildest fantasies directly into their brains. Probably we’d end up there too one day.
He’d have to make up more than a speech. Maybe he’d say he’d tried to talk to them, but couldn’t. Maybe he’d tell everyone they’d just been standing there. Or that he’d seen them, but not what they were doing. He wasn’t going to tell anyone what really happened, not ever.
He wasn’t going to go down in history as the first human being to discover that.
THE ONLY WAY OUT IS DOWN
The Linkletter Mansion.
The most infamous place in Hollywood. You’d never have guessed a tech guy would be A-list, but he is. The parties alone give him that kind of cachet. Everyone in the biz knows the stories. The late nights filled with booze and cocaine. The designer drugs designed by Linkletter himself. The Linkletter Ladies, straight out of the calendars. The secret pool hidden somewhere in a maze of tunnels that start out in the library.
I never thought I’d get an invite. Journalists aren’t welcome, not even the ones on the payroll. Nothing that goes on inside the Mansion ever gets out. There’ve been rumors, and there’ve been a few who tried to shop stories around. But Linkletter’s a trillionaire, the world’s first. He can buy people off, and if he can’t, there’s other ways to persuade them. When that doesn’t work, he gins up enough fake stories about himself that it’s almost impossible to tell what’s real from what his PR team made up.
Maybe that’s why we’re here. The PR flacks have been working overtime for the last few months. They’ve had to. Because Harper Linkletter hasn’t been seen in public for more than a year.
I’m in a limo heading up the long road that winds through the mansion’s surrounding estate. All the way up the hill it’s statues of naked nymphs, well-kept lawns, and fountains. Me and two other journalists are in the back. The only ones he invited, and none of us have any idea why. Why we’re here, or why out of anyone in the world he picked the three of us.
Bad Billy Scranton’s the gossip guy. He looks like a blonde Fat Elvis, right down to the rhinestone jumpsuit. I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be style or branding, or maybe some kind of campy joke, but it definitely makes him unique. I read his website sometimes, I admit it. Guilty pleasure. Ninety percent of what’s on there is total crap. I mean, he’ll publish anything, the more salacious the better. But that other ten percent…. He’s outed some of the most famous people in town for some of the most dirty shit you can imagine.
Pouring Bad Billy a scotch from the limo bar is Jed Johnson. Big nerdy glasses, hasn’t shaved in a few days, and couldn’t give a shit about the coffee stain on his shirt collar. He’s an old school journalist covering politics for the Times. Barely even posts on Twitter. He’s all about digging deep into documents and piecing things together until he gets the big story, the kind that might nab him a Pulitzer. A real journalist, not just a guy who drools out a hot take on somebody else’s hot take, every hour on the hour without leaving his chair.
Me, I flew down here from Silicon Valley. I’m on the tech beat for GizmoQuack. It sounds stupid, I know. All the good names are taken, and at this point you’ve got to just make something up. But it’s one of the premier tech journalism sites on the net, even if nobody outside the industry’s ever heard of us.
I’ve been covering Harper Linkletter since he launched his first start-up twenty years ago. I thought it was a piece of shit idea. Crowdsourced doctors. CrowdDoc, he called it. Everybody uploads their entire medical history, makes it public, lets the whole world see their boils and their rashes and their high cholesterol. Fifty bucks a month to subscribe, and bonuses to anyone in the crowd who nails the diagnosis. Even bigger bonuses if you help somebody find a cure for what’s ailing them.
It sounded so stupid at the time. Who’s gonna put all that shit about themselves out there for everybody else to see? What government’s gonna bend their medical privacy laws to allow something like that?
Tanzania, it turns out. And it turns out the crowd’s a hell of a lot better doctor than some guy who looks you over for ten minutes, no matter how smart that guy is. The governments? Most of them rolled over once the user base got big enough. The rest held out for a bunch of thinly veiled bribes and then they rolled over.
So Linkletter made himself his first few billion, he saved the world a hundred billion a year in health care costs, and it was the Midas touch from there. The orbital hotel. The floating libertarian sea colony. The space elevator and the hydrogen car.
Pretty soon he was tired of running up the score, and after that it was non-profits just for the fun of it. A generic drug company that made pills for pennies, putting the scammy price gougers out of business. A public interest law firm that challenged weak pharmaceutical patents and freed up medical treatments for everyone. An armada of underwater drones that float around the ocean and suck up trash and pollution.
I’ve written about them all. Some of them puff pi
eces, some of them hard hitting exposes. I never got personal, though. Maybe that’s why he picked me. Or maybe he just drew our names out of a hat. Either way, this is probably the biggest moment of my entire career, even if nobody outside Silicon Valley really gives a shit. Linkletter’s the most important man in the world as far as I’m concerned, but the general public doesn’t pay attention to this stuff. They don’t care. I don’t think Bad Billy even knows any of his companies exist. Unless some vid celeb got caught flashing her panties he thinks it’s a yawner.
“Dahhhrlings,” says Bad Billy in his sassiest gossip columnist voice. He’s rummaging through the limo bar, and he doesn’t look happy. “We’re out of lime. I’m going to leap out of this car screaming if I can’t get any lime.” He jiggles the door handle, and Jed’s eyes bulge wide. “I’m going to hurl all of us to our deaths. I swear it.”
Jed can’t take a joke. He looks like he’s about to shit himself. His eyes dart over to me, and he’s practically begging me to take over and stop Billy’s imminent murder-suicide.
“He’s not gonna do it,” I say. “He’s all drama, all the time.”
“It’s my job,” says Bad Billy. “Drama brings the clicks.” His voice goes sultry, or whatever he thinks passes for it. “You’d get paid more if you knew how to get the clicks.”
“Like drawing dicks all over the faces of the tech execs I cover?” I say.
“He does know,” says Bad Billy with an exaggerated wink.
“There’ll be lime up at the mansion,” I say. “You’ll survive ‘til then. I promise.”
Bad Billy swirls his scotch. He takes a sip, then makes a face like he’s about to vomit. “Hardly.”
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