Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  Together forever.

  “Miss Duchenne?” An unfamiliar man’s voice echoed like a ghost in the whiteness. It carried a tone of authority, sounding intelligent and refined like someone her father might have known. “Officer Duchenne, can you hear me?” It changed, low and muttering. “Does this thing even work?”

  She wanted to say something. No sound came when she tried to talk. No air moved inside her, and she could not tell if she was even breathing.

  “…interested in our offer…” Fragments of words danced within the amorphous world in which she floated. “…need your agreement…”

  Nina wondered if this was the afterlife. The blinding light existed in her thoughts simultaneously as the headlights of an armored crew car, the overhead lights of an operating room, and a the mysterious sublime presence of an otherworld she never cared to believe in before. She wanted to live; she tried to scream.

  Yes! Yes, I want to live!

  Her voice hid and refused to come out.

  “It went green. We have a yes. Do it.” The man’s voice again.

  The light dimmed; the sound of a strong exhale preceded the smell of a cigar.

  Utter silence.

  She drifted in a sea of numbness for a time that eluded perception. Days, hours, weeks―it could have been that or a few seconds before she broke from the mental fog. The light dimmed to black. The perfection of the infinite void filled with thousands of tiny specks that grew and took on detail. Traction coating, black and cold, hovered in her view―the feeling of the spray-on roadway caressed her cheek for the most fleeting of instants.

  She tasted her own blood.

  As her unconscious mind gave way to the waking world, the gore soaked surface rose up and away and flattened. The peaks of the magnified road shrank and became tiny dots, holes in the charcoal colored ceiling tiles of her apartment. She lay in bed with the sound of her own voice crying out to Vincent, a pale arm extended upwards, clawing through empty air. That night had been almost ten months ago.

  How cruel to dream you cannot sleep.

  istant gunfire cracked Joey Dillon’s right eye open, a bloodshot portal into his foggy mind. The past twenty-four hours were as indistinct in his memory as the particles of dust that shimmered through a strip of sunlight above him. Dozens of bullet holes in the walls sent crisscrossing streaks through the darkness, invading his inner sanctum.

  His body stretched a lanky path of flesh beneath a layer of trash, embedded in the dull olive fabric of an object that, ten years ago, would have been considered a sofa.

  Closing the eye, he released a groan of dread that scattered the luminescent particles into a flurry. Last night’s frivolity had an iron fingered grip on the back of his neck, squeezing its way into a full-on occipital lobe throbber. He tensed his legs, pulling his body so that his head came to rest on the cushion rather than the arm. His choice of sleeping position was as complicit as the tequila in the war that raged within his cranium. The couch offered no comfort; he was too hungry, too tall, and too hung over.

  With his attempts to find a posture that did not hurt, falling bits of detritus created a clattering disharmonic assault of sound; a symphony borne of concrete floor and metal cans. With a grunt, he forced himself up and leaned forward, balancing his head in his hands. His long hair slid off his shoulders and hung in a raven curtain over his face, caressing the tops of his feet with each breath. Pain descended from his neck, filling out the rest of his existence in an even shade of discomfort.

  A vehicle rumbled by outside, with shouted obscenities trailing in its wake. The last barrage of insults ended with the period of a gunshot. Joey did not react; his disinterested gaze returned after a moment to the blurry wall as he tried without success to will the grip of phantom fingers from his neck. A clear plastic box shifted, catching his eye as it moved on the table in front of him. A four-inch roach investigated what remained of an instant pizza meal.

  “Dammit, Howard.” Joey flicked it away and swiped the box with his other hand. “I told you already, the pizza nibbles are mine… anything on the floor is yours.”

  Stunned from its landing, it seemed to glare at him for an instant before darting off like a shark through an ocean of debris.

  The space in which he slept was a two-room affair that had once belonged to the superintendent of this dead apartment building. The back end split in half with one side an enclosed bathroom and the other a kitchen so small it could barely be considered a separate room. A lovely shade of bare concrete decorated the entire apartment, specked with blotches of colored mold that accentuated the ambiance of the city. It smelled of booze, sweat, rotting food, and a mysterious cloying chemical that left a sooty flavor in the back of the throat before he had finally gotten used to it.

  A lone window on the north wall looked out from the sunken apartment, right along the level of the sidewalk. The same four rusting hulks of cars had been there since long before Joey found this place. To the west, a reinforced metal door hung half open to the outside. Its constant battle with the floor often saw it wedged immobile for weeks at a time. Despite its obvious flaws, the place exceeded the hopes of any reasonable person wanting to dwell within a grey zone.

  Granted, reasonable people seldom wanted such things.

  Joey plodded to the bathroom, coveting his discovered meal. The cold pastry exploded as his teeth closed around it, flooding his mouth with artificial sauce and something attempting to pass itself off as mozzarella cheese. Food made from OmniSoy, molecularly reassembled into other things, often devolved into the basic slime from whence it came after several hours.

  This must be the third stage. Joey maneuvered it on his tongue as if tasting fine wine. “Early 2413. Excellent body, firm texture, possibly penicillium candidum.”

  The chemicals used to heat the instant food had little effect on the flavor initially, but after two days, they lent a piquant essence that he had come to savor.

  Howard the roach slid out of sight.

  “What?” Joey swallowed. “It’s stage three… it has the consistency of cheese again.”

  He thought he saw the roach shudder.

  Tossing the empty carton on the pile of trash that buried the bathroom wastebasket, Joey glanced around the cowboy hat that hung at the corner of the mirror. The emaciated form looking back at him was a stranger. Each rib was distinct in its protrusion from his chest and his body tapered inward like a cartoon until his jeans covered the rest.

  “Yeah…” he muttered. “Probably ‘bout time I get some damn food.”

  At some point during his childhood, he had developed a fondness for the old west. The frontier life on Mars resembled that era; perhaps that had done it. People on Earth considered it anachronistic, and that made it even more appealing. He spun the hat over his hand and put it on. Despite knowing the cabinet offered no painkillers, he looked anyway. Three empty bottles were crusted to a shelf, their tenure in this place far beyond his. Another roach waved its antennae at him from the bottom shelf. He pictured it gaping at him as if he had opened the bathroom door while it sat on the bowl.

  Done in the bathroom, he stumbled over to a table against the far wall. Take-out food containers, synth beer cans, and an uncountable number of silver OmniSoy packets were stacked four feet high upon it. With one sweep of his arm, Joey cleared off his cyberspace deck and took a seat. Twenty-four inches long, eight deep, and three thick, the boxy device responded to his touch and filled the air above it with an array of holographic displays. The Teradyne Silver series was still an entry-level deck, even if it was grade 3, but his happiness at finding it for next to nothing at a pawnshop had long since faded away to annoyance at being stuck with a newbie’s toy.

  He stared into the expanding black squares that formed between him and the wall, grumbling at the lack of new messages. Bands of reflected light scrolled over his face as he pondered the paradox of needing a better deck to make real money―but needing money to get a better deck.

  “I’m sure yo
u’ll figure it out soon.” His father’s singsong voice floated through the room.

  “Yeah… yeah…” Joey had already prepared himself for the inevitable back and forth when it occurred to him that the old man had been dead for more than a year.

  For the first time that day, Joey’s eyes opened all the way. He swung around to look behind him, finding the room still quite dim, save for the dust particles dancing in the sunlight from the cluster of bullet holes. He was alone except for the scratching of an unseen roach.

  “Fuck me…” He sank back into the seat, turning to face the deck. “I gotta make some creds before I lose it.”

  He pulled the link cable out of the side panel, fingers securing a grip on the plastic housing at the end of the wire. With a squeeze, a half inch metal prong snapped out with a click. He turned it over in his fingers, searching for dirt; the razor edged fins glinted in the holograms.

  That plug, and his hat, represented the only two things about which Joey gave a damn.

  He felt around behind his ear for the receiver and lined it up with the prong. It slid in with a soft click that resonated through his skull. Joey expected the world around him to dissolve into the constructed reality of cyberspace.

  He did not expect the burning electrical current that came over his skull like an army of crawling needle-legged spiders, wrapping around his arms until flickering arcs of blue lightning connected his fingertips to the metal table. He thrashed like a fish on a line for several seconds before a shower of orange sparks spewed from the deck and it went dark. His face bounced off the chair on its way to the floor, where he lay twitching for several minutes. Smoke fumed out from his hair in silence. The scent of burnt Joey filled the air.

  “You bitch,” he shouted as he sat bolt upright.

  Removing the hot wire from the side of his head, he pulled his protesting body back into the chair and surveyed the damage. The deck survived with minimal damage, just a blown fuse. The shock elevated his hangover headache into an Armageddon-class event, but posed no risk to his life.

  Cleopatra. Four months of this never-ending bullshit…

  The few times he had managed to find her in cyberspace, her skills felt far from impressive, making it more vexing how slippery she was. One chance meeting left him enough time to mount an attack and her defense was one shade removed from nonexistent.

  Makes no damn sense.

  She could be a beginner with an expensive deck; a high grade and ghost mods could make it hard for his pitiful board to find her. That would be his revenge. Once he found her, he would take her amazing deck.

  Hours later, he brought the Teradyne Silver back to life in a cloud of solder fumes. The reassuring glow of holographic displays flickered on one after the next and made him smile. A few chips around the power uplink had blown out as well, an easy but tedious fix. He held the wire up, but paused. Squinting at the plug, he put it down and ran a diagnostic.

  Ugh, this bitch is making me type with my hands.

  Images and icons shimmered and slid about as he grabbed and tossed his way through the menus. A poke at a cartoon dog triggered a Watchdog program that leapt about, digging through memory constructs. Gravity pulled him down in the chair as memory addresses scrolled by in text too fast to read.

  So damn boring.

  This line of work, if you could call it work, appealed to his need for the thrill of going into secret and well-protected places. His stuck up bitch of a sister did not share his enthusiasm for what he did with his degree in electrical engineering.

  Growling snapped him out of his fantasy of embarrassing her in front of her lawyer friends. The watchdog sat back with a data tile in its mouth, thrashing it back and forth after having hunted down a concealed joybuzzer soft. Visions filled his head of strangling some faceless woman with an interface wire. He wanted to beat Cleopatra until she begged. No longer propped upright on coursing anger, he slumped. With more than three seconds of thought, he decided he would still feel guilty about hitting a girl that did not try to kill him. Vengeance would have to take some other form, once he knew what she most feared. Unfortunately, before he could do a damn thing, he had to overcome the little issue of being unable to find her.

  Joey fantasized through various tortures he could visit upon her as he checked the business end of the M3 plug. After a long hesitant stare, he stuck it into his head and cringed. The wall in front of him liquefied and melted away into nothingness. A momentary sensation of floating passed and random flashing lights danced about as his brain adjusted to receiving its input from the Neural Interface Unit instead of his normal senses. Billions of electrons swarmed from the deck, over the wire and into his mind through the NIU. In less than the span of a single breath, he stood in the center of a well-kept ranch house with a view of rolling plains. Deer heads and ancient rifles lined the walls around a room warmed by a virtual fireplace.

  Within the realm of cyberspace he took on the appearance of an older man every bit as gaunt and pale as Joey, but taller. Coarse grey hair hung to the shoulders of a long black coat. The visage of an aging gunslinger radiated a paranormal otherness to anyone in the same node. Mood manipulation was tricky. A bit of software he borrowed from an entertainment sim could manipulate the amygdala, the deep brain region responsible for emotion, of other plugged-in users in a way that caused inexplicable dread at the sight of him―just enough to keep the kiddies and noobs from bothering him.

  He had hoped it would scare Cleopatra off, but she did not even notice it. In retrospect, it seemed to have made her come after him more.

  He strode towards the exit, followed by the echo of his boots. Outside waited a sea of blackness, a sight far removed from the vibrant meadows in the window. A virtual representation of the real world, constructed of gloss black shapes highlighted in glowing azure, stretched into the digital sky. The backbone systems responsible for cyberspace filled in this basic grid wherever no one had customized it.

  Deep in the grey, there was no one here, no one else foolish enough to abandon their body to such a deep sleep in a place like this.

  Time to make some creds.

  Civilization waited several blocks west; the amber gleam of sundown beckoned from where drawn-in city covered the skeleton. A four-foot wide pane opened beside him: his contact management interface. The low profile he kept among the cyberspace crowd protected him from the police and corporate heavies, but it also kept jobs from coming to him. He plucked the face of a contact from the list and threw it into space in front of him, starting a call.

  Alex Hunter was a product of a wealthy family and had the appearance of a man fond of the finer things in life. His shimmering blue suit glimmered in the cyberlight, its design somehow contemporary and antiquated at the same time. Dense brown hair framed a boyish face with an air of playful sophistication. Joey knew he was in his late twenties, but the man looked eighteen.

  Must be nice to have creds to waste on cosmetic work.

  “Bonjour, monsieur Dillon.”

  Joey rolled his eyes. “Again with the Frenchie crap?”

  “Despite my best efforts to educate you in the ways of a civilized language, you continue to speak in the peasant’s tongue.” Alex chuckled with an air of haughtiness.

  “Hunter… You were born in Sector 87. You’re about as French as my scrotum.” The dark cowboy’s voice flowed thick with gravel and a supernatural echo. “Spare me the bullshit. I’m looking for work, you have anything?”

  Alex’s face reddened. He reached to hang up, but hesitated as displeasure shifted to amusement on a whim. The mischievous smirk caused Joey to narrow his eyes.

  “I do…” Alex touched his fingertips in front of his face. “It just so happens that I have a small data acquisition request sitting around that fits you perfectly.”

  “Really, now?”

  “Oh yes. It’s simple, cheap, and dirty.” Alex’s smile broadened.

  Joey growled low in his throat, too soft to go out over the comm signal. “How chea
p is cheap?”

  Alex swirled an unknown dark liquid in a glass. “A distrustful wife wants some proof that her husband is having an affair. The man has been patronizing a club in Sector 113 called ‘Anonymous Notoriety’. There is a rumor that it may be a front for more than just social pleasantries.”

  As he spoke, a few data points popped up below the video feed, containing network information about the club’s presence in cyberspace, as well as a picture of a man named David Stone.

  The club’s network looked weak in terms of security. It should be an easy in and out job, but that also meant it would be dull.

  “That sounds like a job from you… boring and pretentious.”

  Alex smiled, reaching for the console in slow motion. “Oh well, then, if it’s beneath you, I’ll find someone else. I’m sure you don’t really need five thousand credits that much.”

  “Fine… Fine…” He glanced into the distance at the glowing cityscape. “I’ll call you when it’s done.”

  athering his bearings, Joey plotted a route to Anonymous Notoriety. As data nabs went, five grand was a crummy payoff, but the job was too easy to turn down. Added to that, he knew his credit statement could not afford one take out entree and it was a done deal.

  Up ahead, the glow of populated areas came into view. Along a defined line that crept from one edge of the horizon to the other, the city went from black glass to full color as if someone had poured liquid reality over the digital models. Almost-human-shaped clouds of darkness drifted by, indicating the presence of people in the real world as detected by citywide surveillance cameras. Joey walked among the oblivious shadows, keeping a careful eye on a handful of other avatars.

  A pink haired pixie complete with filament wings and a star capped wand chatted with a man in a suit. Across the street, a flaming skull with bat wings argued with an anthropomorphic bear in a blue ball cap. Something about Gee-ball scores from a game last Saturday.