“No you don’t. You’re just a simulation. You’re perfect in every detail but you’re no more him than a photograph would be.” I felt a coldness in the pit of my stomach, a growing sense of unreality and estrangement.
“I’m me,” he said. “You have to believe that. All the emotions, the memories make me what I am. If I chose they could download me into a clone body and I would be back in your world. I would be the same person. The cell structure would be identical, my memories and personality would be the same. If that’s not real what is?”
“What about your soul? Did they record that too?”
“Maybe. Anyway, I thought you were an agnostic?”
“I don’t know. I’m confused.”
He seemed to become desperate. “Souls? They were just the old way of explaining your personalities, our individuality. A superstition. All we ever were was software driving flesh. You know as well as I do that it can all be explained in terms of electrochemical reaction. Hell, you’ve built people. Biology and artificial intelligence research outdated the old religion.”
“Software souls driving meat machines? Maybe science is the new religion.”
“Look, we were brought up between two ages, the old explanations and the new. The last generation with a choice. The kids don’t have the same problems with these concepts as us. They don’t have the same fear of death either.”
“That’s because they visit simulations where it seems the dead still live. The afterlife has invaded the real world.”
“Look, maybe they’re right. Perhaps this is the only form of immortality we will ever have. Don’t you at least want to consider that?”
“No,” I almost screamed. “I want to get out of here. How do I do it?” “I’ll get you out. You are wrong. I am me and I do care about you.”
I saw only genuine concern on his face. I nodded, embarrassed. I hugged him and he felt real. Then I was back in my body, tied into the Frame.
“I have to get back,” I said.
* * *
Deborah accompanied me to the station. All the way it looked as if she were trying to summon up the courage to say something. She carried my bag to the platform and we stood there. The silence grew. I looked at her expectantly. She stared at her feet, confused.
“You think he’s gone forever, don’t you? That’s why you’re sad.” I could see it came as a revelation to her.
I stared at her, trying to find the words. What could I say? My brother was gone, dead as the hope of heaven. To her it did not matter. She could visit him, visit the dead. Perhaps one day the dead would visit her. A sort of resurrection is possible.
The fundamentalists think it is a mockery of the work of God. I’m not sure I disagree with them. They say that the new science glorifies Satan. If Satan is the absence of God as darkness is the absence of light then they are correct.
The fear of nothingness is a terrible thing. Almost anything is preferable. It is this fear that fuels the Jihad, the fear that we are mortal and the universe doesn’t care. God is supposed to care. They hate the Grey Men because the constructs remind them that we are simply machines constructed from protoplasm. Do machines have souls?
I looked at Deborah and tried to find words. They did not come, so I stayed silent.
“You’re not coming back, are you? Not ever.”
I nodded. “If you ever want to come to the Overtowns, get in touch.”
She shook her head. Abruptly she stuck out a hand. I took it gently, afraid that the Frame might crush it. We shook hands. “Saw it in a simulation,” she said sadly. “Is that right?”
“Yes, perfect,” I said. She smiled. I boarded the train. She waved as it pulled out of the station. I tried to wave back but the clumsiness of the Frame and the smooth acceleration of the mag-lev kept me from doing so until she was out of sight.
* * *
Now war has come. The work of Satan is no longer to be tolerated by the believers. The godless and all their works are to be overthrown. This is the word from Tehran.
The armies of the righteous have swept through Spain and Greece but soon they will encounter the main strength of their enemy. Then they will die, finally and forever.
The believers see only the soft decadent face of their foe. They do not know what a terrible power they have roused, one that has sunk the lands and may raise the dead. The vats will spew forth a million combatants and nothing human can stand against them.
This struggle will determine the face of the new millennium. The believers think they shall win because they fight against Satan and for God. I believe the outcome will be different.
BRUCE STERLING
Dori Bangs
One of the major new talents to enter SF in recent years, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976, and has since sold stories to Universe, OMNI, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Last Dangerous Visions, Lone Star Universe, and elsewhere. He has attracted special acclaim in the last few years for a series of stories set in his exotic Shaper/Mechanist future, a complex and disturbing future where warring political factions struggle to control the shape of human destiny, and the nature of humanity itself. His story “Cicada Queen” was in our First Annual Collection; his “Sunken Gardens” was in our Second Annual Collection; his “Green Days in Brunei” and “Diner in Audoghast” were in our Third Annual Collection; his “The Beautiful and the Sublime” was in our Fourth Annual Collection; his “Flowers of Edo” was in our Fifth Annual Collection, and his “Our Neural Chernobyl” was in our Sixth Annual Collection. His books include the novels The Artificial Kid, Involution Ocean, and Schismatrix, a novel set in the Shaper/Mechanist future, and, as editor, Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology. His most recent books were the novel Islands in the Net and the collection Crystal Express. Upcoming is another novel, The Difference Engine, in collaboration with William Gibson.
In the funny, hard-edged, and poignant story that follows, Sterling spins a very odd kind of Alternate Worlds story, unlike any you’ve ever seen before—we guarantee it.
Dori Bangs
BRUCE STERLING
True facts, mostly: Lester Bangs was born in California in 1948. He published his first article in 1969. It came in over the transom at Rolling Stone. It was a frenzied review of the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams.”
Without much meaning to, Lester Bangs slowly changed from a Romilarguzzling college kid into a “professional rock critic.” There wasn’t much precedent for this job in 1969, so Lester kinda had to make it up as he went along. Kind of smell his way into the role, as it were. But Lester had a fine set of cultural antennae. For instance, Lester invented the tag “punk rock.” This is posterity’s primary debt to the Bangs oeuvre.
Lester’s not as famous now as he used to be, because he’s been dead for some time, but in the 70s Lester wrote a million record reviews, for Creem and the Village Voice and NME and Who Put The Bomp. He liked to crouch over his old manual typewriter, and slam out wild Beat-influenced copy, while the Velvet Underground or Stooges were on the box. This made life a hideous trial for the neighborhood, but in Lester’s opinion the neighborhood pretty much had it coming. Epater les bourgeois, man!
Lester was a party animal. It was a professional obligation, actually. Lester was great fun to hang with, because he usually had a jagged speed-edge, which made him smart and bold and rude and crazy. Lester was a one-man band, until he got drunk. Nutmeg, Romilar, belladonna, crank, those substances Lester could handle. But booze seemed to crack him open, and an unexpected black dreck of rage and pain would come dripping out, like oil from a broken crankcase.
Toward the end—but Lester had no notion that the end was nigh. He’d given up the booze, more or less. Even a single beer often triggered frenzies of self-contempt. Lester was thirty-three, and sick of being groovy; he was restless, and the stuff he’d been writing lately no longer meshed with the surroundings that had made him what he was. Lester told his friends that he was gonna leave New York and go to Mexico and work o
n a deep, serious novel, about deep serious issues, man. The real thing, this time. He was really gonna pin it down, get into the guts of Western Culture, what it really was, how it really felt.
But then, in April ‘82, Lester happened to catch the flu. Lester was living alone at the time, his mom, the Jehovah’s Witness, having died recently. He had no one to make him chicken soup, and the flu really took him down. Tricky stuff, flu; it has a way of getting on top of you.
Lester ate some Darvon, but instead of giving him that buzzed-out float it usually did, the pills made him feel foggy and dull and desperate. He was too sick to leave his room, or hassle with doctors or ambulances, so instead he just did more Darvon. And his heart stopped.
There was nobody there to do anything about it, so he lay there for a couple of days, until a friend showed up and found him.
* * *
More true fax, pretty much: Dori Seda was born in 1951. She was a cartoonist, of the “underground” variety. Dori wasn’t ever famous, certainly not in Lester’s league, but then she didn’t beat her chest and bend every ear in the effort to make herself a Living Legend, either. She had a lot of friends in San Francisco, anyway.
Dori did a “comic book” once, called Lonely Nights. An unusual “comic book” for those who haven’t followed the “funnies” trade lately, as Lonely Nights was not particularly “funny,” unless you really get a hoot from deeply revealing tales of frustrated personal relationships. Dori also did a lot of work for WEIRDO magazine, which emanated from the artistic circles of R. Crumb, he of “Keep On Truckin’” and “Fritz the Cat” fame.
R. Crumb once said: “Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures!” As a manifesto, it was a typically American declaration, and it was a truth that Dori held to be self-evident.
Dori wanted to be a True Artist in her own real-gone little 80s-esque medium. Comix, or “graphic narrative” if you want a snazzier cognomen for it, was a breaking thing, and she had to feel her way into it. You can see the struggle in her “comics”—always relentlessly autobiographical—Dori hanging around in the “Café La Boheme” trying to trade food stamps for cigs; Dori living in drafty warehouses in the Shabby Hippie Section of San Francisco, sketching under the skylight and squabbling with her roommate’s boyfriend; Dori trying to scrape up money to have her dog treated for mange.
Dori’s comics are littered with dead cig-butts and toppled wine-bottles. She was, in a classic nutshell, Wild, Zany, and Self-Destructive. In 1988 Dori was in a car-wreck which cracked her pelvis and collarbone. She was laid up, bored, and in pain. To kill time, she drank and smoked and took painkillers.
She caught the flu. She had friends who loved her, but nobody realized how badly off she was; probably she didn’t know it herself. She just went down hard, and couldn’t get up alone. On February 26 her heart stopped. She was thirty-six.
So enough “true facts.” Now for some comforting lies.
* * *
As it happens, even while a malignant cloud of flu virus was lying in wait for the warm hospitable lungs of Lester Bangs, the Fate, Atropos, she who weaves the things that are to be, accidentally dropped a stitch. Knit one? Purl two? What the hell does it matter, anyway? It’s just human lives, right?
So Lester, instead of inhaling a cloud of invisible contagion from the exhalations of a passing junkie, is almost hit by a Yellow Cab. This mishap on his way back from the deli shocks Lester out of his dogmatic slumbers. High time, Lester concludes, to get out of this burg and down to sunny old Mexico. He’s gonna tackle his great American novel: All My Friends are Hermits.
So true. None of Lester’s groovy friends go out much any more. Always ahead of their time, Lester’s Bohemian cadre are no longer rock and roll animals. They still wear black leather jackets, they still stay up all night, they still hate Ronald Reagan with fantastic virulence; but they never leave home. They pursue an unnamed lifestyle that sociologist Faith Popcorn—(and how can you doubt anyone with a name like Faith Popcorn)—will describe years later as “cocooning.”
Lester has eight zillion rock, blues, and jazz albums, crammed into his grubby NYC apartment. Books are piled feet deep on every available surface: Wm. Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, Celine, Kerouac, Huysmans, Foucault, and dozens of unsold copies of Blondie, Lester’s book-length band-bio.
More albums and singles come in the mail every day. People used to send Lester records in the forlorn hope he would review them. But now it’s simply a tradition. Lester has transformed himself into a counter-cultural info-sump. People send him vinyl just because he’s Lester Bangs, man!
Still jittery from his thrilling brush with death, Lester looks over this lifetime of loot with a surge of Sartrean nausea. He resists the urge to raid the fridge for his last desperate can of Blatz Beer. Instead, Lester snorts some speed, and calls an airline to plan his Mexican wanderjahr. After screaming in confusion at the hopeless stupid bitch of a receptionist, he gets a ticket to San Francisco, best he can do on short notice. He packs in a frenzy and splits.
Next morning finds Lester exhausted and wired and on the wrong side of the continent. He’s brought nothing with him but an Army duffel-bag with his Olympia portable, some typing paper, shirts, assorted vials of dope, and a paperback copy of Moby Dick, which he’s always meant to get around to re-reading.
Lester takes a cab out of the airport. He tells the cabbie to drive nowhere, feeling a vague compulsive urge to soak up the local vibe. San Francisco reminds him of his Rolling Stone days, back before Wenner fired him for being nasty to rock-stars. Fuck Wenner, he thinks. Fuck this city that was almost Avalon for a few months in ‘67 and has been on greased skids to Hell ever since.
The hilly half-familiar streets creep and wriggle with memories, avatars, talismans. Decadence, man, a no-kidding death of affect. It all ties in for Lester, in a bilious mental stew: snuff movies, discos, the cold-blooded whine of synthesizers, Pet Rocks, S&M, mindfuck self-improvement cults, Winning Through Intimidation, every aspect of the invisible war slowly eating the soul of the world.
After an hour or so he stops the cab at random. He needs coffee, white sugar, human beings, maybe a cheese Danish. Lester glimpses himself in the cab’s window as he turns to pay: a chunky jobless thirty-three-year-old in a biker jacket, speed-pale dissipated New York face, Fu Manchu mustache looking pasted on. Running to fat, running for shelter.… no excuses, Bangs! Lester hands the driver a big tip. Chew on that, pal—you just drove the next Oswald Spengler.
Lester staggers into the cafe. It’s crowded and stinks of patchouli and clove. He sees two chainsmoking punkettes hanging out at a formica table. CBGB’s types, but with California suntans. The kind of women, Lester thinks, who sit crosslegged on the floor and won’t fuck you but are perfectly willing to describe in detail their highly complex postexistential weltanschauung. Tall and skinny and crazy-looking and bad news. Exactly his type, really. Lester sits down at their table and gives them his big rubber grin.
“Been having fun?” Lester says.
They look at him like he’s crazy, which he is, but he wangles their names out: “Dori” and “Krystine.” Dori’s wearing fishnet stockings, cowboy boots, a strapless second-hand bodice-hugger covered with peeling pink feathers. Her long brown hair’s streaked blonde. Krystine’s got a black knit tank-top and a leather skirt and a skull-tattoo on her stomach.
Dori and Krystine have never heard of “Lester Bangs.” They don’t read much. They’re artists. They do cartoons. Underground comix. Lester’s mildly interested. Manifestations of the trash aesthetic always strongly appeal to him. It seems so American, the good America that is: the righteous wild America of rootless European refuse picking up discarded pop-junk and making it shine like the Koh-i-noor. To make “comic books” into Art—what a hopeless fucking effort, worse than rock and roll and you don’t even get heavy bread for it. Lester says as much, to see what they’ll do.
Krystine wanders off for a refill. Dori, who is mildly weirded-out
by this tubby red-eyed stranger with his loud come-on, gives Lester her double-barreled brush-off. Which consists of opening up this Windex-clear vision into the Vent of Hell that is her daily life. Dori lights another Camel from the butt of the last, smiles at Lester with her big gappy front teeth and says brightly:
“You like dogs, Lester? I have this dog, and he has eczema and disgusting open sores all over his body, and he smells really bad … I can’t get friends to come over because he likes to shove his nose right into their, you know, crotch … and go Snort! Snort!”
“ ‘I want to scream with wild dog joy in the smoking pit of a charnel house,’” Lester says.
Dori stares at him. “Did you make that up?”
“Yeah,” Lester says. “Where were you when Elvis died?”
“You taking a survey on it?” Dori says.
“No, I just wondered,” Lester says, “There was talk of having Elvis’s corpse dug up, and the stomach analyzed. For dope, y’know. Can you imagine that? I mean, the thrill of sticking your hand and forearm into Elvis’s rotted guts and slopping around in the stomach lining and liver and kidneys and coming up out of dead Elvis’s innards triumphantly clenching some crumbs off a few Percodans and Desoxyns and ‘ludes … and then this is the real kick, Dori: you pop these crumbled-up bits of pills in your own mouth and bolt ‘em down and get high on drugs that not only has Elvis Presley, the King, gotten high on, not the same brand mind you but the same pills, all slimy with little bits of his innards, so you’ve actually gotten to eat the King of Rock and Roll!”
“Who did you say you were?” Dori says. “A rock journalist? I thought you were putting me on. ‘Lester Bangs,’ that’s a fucking weird name!”
Dori and Krystine have been up all night, dancing to the heroin head banger vibes of Darby Crash and the Germs. Lester watches through hooded eyes: this Dori is a woman over thirty, but she’s got this wacky airhead routine down smooth, the Big Shiny Fun of the American Pop Bohemia. “Fuck you for believing I’m this shallow.” Beneath the skin of her Attitude he can sense a bracing skeleton of pure desperation. There is hollow fear and sadness in the marrow of her bones. He’s been writing about a topic just like this lately.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection Page 31