He stood in a small apartment. It was lit to look larger than it was, decorated with the finest in high-tech luxuries. Across from him, perched upon a antique leather chair, sat the mask.
Short brunette hair framed her reading glasses, and she exaggeratedly puffed on a Sherlock Holmes pipe. With an slight grin, she leaned forward, and asked, “You tried to watch, didn't you?”
Firenze staggered towards his chair. The air hissed around him, like rain on a radiator. His mind rang, pieces of the twirling code and mathematical objects spinning just beyond his view. All of it collapsed down, into the classical study – into the apartment – into the technical workshop – now an apartment again, so many things at once. The world twisted, but one point was constant, the young woman sitting in the chair, bouncing one shoe off her foot as she watched him.
Everything was steady. He was in the apartment. He was safe, amid the blend of hyper-modern workshop and pre-Collapse smoking room. Firenze nestled into the chair, let his head rest on the leather, heard it sigh beneath him. He closed his eyes, just for a moment, shut down external stimuli. He admitted, “I always watch.”
As a child, when they'd opened the community pool, one summer before they'd closed it, he’d tried to watch the water line. He'd stood in the shallows, slowly lowered his nose into the water until the waves were halfway up his eyeballs. He’d tried to see the world above and below as one, to study the break between them.
“That water was chlorinated.” She said, flatly.
“And it burned like hell.” Firenze said. He opened is eyes again, and allowed the hard jack to return to full sensory mode.
She was still seated on the chair, but no longer had the pipe. Things shifted when he wasn't looking. She asked, “And did you see anything?”
Firenze laughed, and picked up a glass of water from the end table. It was cold and clear, with little beads of condensation that ran under his fingers. It was so very real, it was hard to remember that the glass hadn't been there a moment before. “I saw a blue blur, lots of light, and then got thumped in the face with a ball.”
“I think that's allegorical, Grant.”
“Yeah, or at least symbolic.” He glanced to the viewer on the wall, and the display sprang to life, showed a room very similar to this one in size, but filled with as much trash as this one had class. Gone were the leather chairs, replaced by cast plastics. Gone was the fireplace, replaced by a pile of old hardware. Gone, too, was the chaise longue, replaced with a stained mattress and piles of foil wrappers. Upon the mattress, a scrawny young man sprawled amid a mass of wires, eyes flicking to and fro.
“You're doing fine. I'd warn you if you weren't.” Lauren stated, almost looking hurt from the implied question. She watched the screen as intently as he did, perhaps more so. “Pulse is a little high, probably from trying to watch the water line.”
Firenze didn't try to conjure up a witty reply. She would either embarrassingly outmaneuver him, or become insulted and refuse to let him use advanced cracking software for an hour. It was often better to just shut up and let the mask win.
Somewhere, in the back of his mind, Professor Neland lectured him on mask development, reminded him that the mask was not real, scolded him that the adaptive code mimicked desirable behavior from the user, how it mutated to produce synergies with the operator, and how these factors produced simulations of person-hood. Somewhere, back in that corner of his mind, he could remember staring at the hard code, tens of thousands of pages of raw data, the discreet text of a pseudo-person.
It was very hard to remember those things, though, when he sat in a chair that was not a chair, and could feel the bumps of the false metal fasteners under his fingertips, and could taste the very real not-quite-taste of water that was not water. All of these things were washed away when he felt a sudden weight on his lap, and realized that she was sitting there, staring him in the eyes, and he could feel her, smell her hair, all so very real-
“Am I real?” She asked. There was no light humor, no flirtation, just the raw question. She picked up his hand, held it against her own. “Is this real?”
His head was buzzing again, from pieces of the code he'd almost seen when the world jumped, and from from the collision of clean neural input with root biological processes. The sane response, the response he should have taken, was to stand up, pull the plug, and purge the system. This was too much. His objectivity was compromised. His perceptions were skewed-
She pulled his face around, made sure he kept eye contact. Those eyes were so bright. So intense. They echoed the question, refused to let him step away from the physicality. She blocked his retreat into analysis, with every breath on his cheek. Oh God damn it. The absurdity was too much, and he giggled, pushed her away, desperate for space from the digital real. And now I'm embarrassed. Remember the code. You've seen the code.
She kept her stare, pulled herself back close, and said, “This is physical sensation, sensory input predicated by a nervous system and mimicked with direct neural stimulation. You feel me because the hard jack conveys that you should. You see me because you've coded the interface to relay this data. These things are not real.” God, why does she sound so damn sad about it? The answer was clear, but it didn't help: Adaptive code that imitates a living mind would determine that a living mind would be upset at the possibility of not existing.
“But you feel in the physical world what your nervous system conveys, as your genetics have been coded to represent. A texture is rough or smooth, a temperature is hot or cold. You understand these things as real because you've never been without or before them. You could be just as unreal as this world.”
The virtual world is just as real as our own. He'd said that, in a lecture two semesters ago, discussing total immersion, direct interfaces, and the risks and benefits. His own words, looped back at him through the mask. It made sense. Adaptive code, it mimics the user to become more symbiotic, to increase efficiency of interaction within the net.
Firenze had his answer. He grabbed her hand, held it out, away from both of them, and stated, “I have no idea.” He met her gaze for a brief moment. “I believe that I exist, because I am aware of my own thinking. Anything else is taken on faith and trust. All I can do is ask you. Do you think you exist?”
She leaned away from him, her eyes darted to the side. It was a tell, an indication that she was searching through some database. He hadn't programmed that, not directly, he'd simply allowed constraints for analogous physical tics based on understood human body-language. She'd adapted to integrate that behavior emergently.
“I think so.” She said. “But I may be programmed to think so.” She shifted a little. Another tic, one that revealed ambiguity in her fuzzy math matrices. “The act of my thinking this should require me to subject myself to testing, to make sure I am not showing dangerous rampancy. If I did not fear this testing, it would indicate that I lack self-preservation impulses, which would be evidence that I do not exist, so I must ask you instead not to turn me in for examination, as evidence that I do, in fact, possess the imperatives which would require the examination.” She picked up the glass of water, tilted it to the side, let a tiny bit slide over the rim and crash to the floor. “Which brings us back to the core question. I believe I exist because I am programmed to believe I exist, or am programmed to convey that I believe I exist. There is no easy answer to your question.” She tilted the glass back, caught the firelight in the water. “Which means that all you have is the assurances of a program, to which you've held the hardware, to which you've seen the base code, that it believes that it exists. You are confronted with the problem of the p-zombie.”
“When did you pick up philosophy?” He asked.
She grinned, and answered, “Last semester. When you knocked out those ‘soft’ credits. Easy four-pointer, I believe you said?”
He made a little noise, like a balloon deflating, and admitted, “Not quite… question stands-”
“-am I real?” She completed.
“I say I am, but is that enough?”
“It has to be.” He answered. “It has to be, or the argument is circular, and I'm losing my mind.”
“Does this solve the question?” She pushed the water back into his hands.
“No.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“Because I can, and I must.” He answered, with a small shrug, and a drink from the glass. The water was not-quite-sweet, like water should be.
“I knew I liked you.” She replied, and treated him to a broad smile.
“Yeah, well, that's what all the masks say.”
She pushed him back playfully, into the chair. Instantly, she stood in the center of the room. There was no movement, no snap or blur, she simply shifted, and was elsewhere. She tapped her sudden pocket-watch, and said, “You need to get up, and get something to eat.”
He waved his hand, and a macro executed, conjured up a ham sandwich on the side table, complete with a refill on his drink. He reached for the sandwich, but grabbed only empty air.
“No.” She stated, the small trails of the delete command still twirling about her fingertips. “Real food. Not simulated, not a meat-space IV. You need to get up, get some water, and a decent meal. Meet me back here in forty minutes, you've got a conference with Professor Neland. I'll take messages until then, and pretend to be you if I have to, but you’ve skipped two meals this week. No more.”
Firenze sighed, and put his glass down. He said, “Yes, nanny.”
She glared at him.
“I'm going, I'm going!” He leaned back, and cut the connection in his mind. Like a puppet aware of its strings, he cut at them-
He fell.
It was the only way to describe it. It was like the vertigo he got when he was almost asleep, the sudden gut feeling of twisting and plunging, only to realize he hadn't fallen at all, but was merely clinging to the sides of his mattress. It was more than that, too, the sudden loss of color, the sudden collapse of a million sensations into just a few, the ringing tunnel vision of the physical world, the smallness and shallowness of a dishpan compared to the ocean. All of that, the oceans drying, the trees whithering, the wind tearing the dirt from the plains and revealing bedrock beneath, the rolling of code and numbers than retreated as the red carpet frayed to dust, all of it in a split moment. From grandeur to void, through a light-speed rush of entropic force - he crashed back to the flimsy little thing called reality.
He opened his eyes, his physical eyes, and he could feel the sting of the hardjack in his upper arm, the ache in his muscles, the pull of the IV tube on his wrist, and the hollowness in his stomach. Hurt. Hurt was the first thing he felt in the physical world. With a groan, and shaking hand, he plucked the dataport from his arm. The IV followed, from the dock above his wrist. Slowly, like waking from a deep slumber, he rolled to a seated position, rested his elbows on his legs, and massaged his eyes. When the blurry hurt resolved into discrete blobs of muted color, he pulled his glasses over his nose, and confronted ‘reality’.
The apartment was too cold. It was the second thing he felt. The wind cut in through the cracks in the balcony window, whistled through the plastic blinds, and sliced into his core. The temperature had fallen with the sun, brought on the autumn chill. A wrapper from the overflowing trash can danced across the shabby carpet, pulled by the frigid breeze. Light streamed in, from the thousand-story high neon barricades of dronetown. Even at night, there was no silence, no still. There was always the buzz of the lights, the choking thrum of the pipes. He could hear the sirens outside. Another beautiful night in the city.
He stood, and walked barefoot to the fridge, threaded the trash with shuffling steps. He swung the old industrial monster open, snatched an energy drink and a protein bar. Today was a busy day, he'd treat himself to a “peanut butter chocolate” instead of just “peanut butter” for dinner. It was all protein paste, anyway.
He took a swig of the soda, using it to burn away the clog in his throat, and then tried to force down the first bite of the protein bar. It was tough, like rubber, but with less taste. He sawed on the bar, bent it, twisted it, before finally snapping the stretched confection in half, and then set about to chewing it into a more digestible form, if 'chewing' were indeed the right word; it would be more accurate to describe the process as 'bludgeoning it into compliance with his teeth'. For five credits a meal, you couldn't do better.
Firenze stepped towards the cracked window, treaded carefully over the pile of electronics and computer frames that built up about his desk, past his toolkits, flash memory banks, and microfab. He tried to swallow the bar, but the mush was still too solid. He took another drink of the soda, tried to dissolve the stubborn mass that glued his teeth shut.
Inside the local node, he could eat a five course meal, prepared by expert chefs from around the globe. In meat space, he was eating weaponized protein paste that the Authority wouldn't even issue to its soldiers. Inside the net, he could walk a beach or climb Everest. In this apartment block, the heater had two settings, “freeze” and “ boil”. Tell me again, why am I out here?
He pushed open the door, and stepped onto the balcony. Above and below, lights. Greens, blues, and oranges, blood reds and lemon yellows, bathed him. A hundred balconies like his own popped from duracrete towers, close enough he could throw a ball to them, far enough that he never had to know them. A liftcar blasted past, a wave of scalding heat pushed steam through the canyon, which froze in gray slicks along the walls. Far below, a half-drowned street promised temporary relief in crimson lights, so long as you had the credits. Firenze took a long pull from his soda, and tried to go to the far-away campus green.
Online, there was a rolling park, with crystal streams. He played flag sports with his fellow grad students, and talked shop over a beer. He sat on the brick half-walls, and counseled the undergrads. He took lessons in stately halls, build of wood and glass.
Below, a crowd had filled the street, chanting something near-incoherent through the echoing towers, half-lost in the blast of airvents, steam, and engines. They had signs, though, OLED placards as violently-lit as the billboards. Firenze fished out his binocs from the bowl of his plastic tree, and focused on the crowd below.
“END THE OCCUPATION” one sign declared. “LIBERTY NOW!” called out a second. “YOU ARE THE CRISIS!” screamed another. A chant took the crowd, and they carried it for a moment. Firenze chewed on his protein sludge, and washed it down with carbonated dreck, and listened to the burbling echoes through the pipes and stone.
Down the street, the blue flare of lights waited. Rows of security stood ready. Cops behind barricades. Agency espos in black coated huddles, their caps pulled low. Guardsmen half-resting in the hatch of armored cars. Lines of shields, batons, and stingers waited for the rally to metastisize.
They've already lost control. They lost it the moment they opened the net. Firenze glanced from the street, towards the portable computer resting on his mattress. There's a gate, right there, that they can never close. They can't burn down an idea.
From in the ankle-deep waters, the chant turned to Monterrey, to a city torched and drowned in blood. Firenze had seen the news, before the blackout hit. He'd seen the horror. Fucking army, gone nuts on its own country, willing to burn down the city to “save it”. The Authority was a joke, and it didn’t understand that it was the punchline.
Below, there was a sinlge “whoop” from a siren. The guards stood straighter. The guardsmen vanished into their hatches. Here it comes, guys.
Firenze had been to a rally, back when they first started. Susan had made him go, she was a real fire-breather, just like kendrix, talking about “new orders” and the necessity of Article Two, and the “betrayal of the charter” and on and on. It was cool that she'd been so passionate about it, but he'd really just gone because she was down with it, and after one near-miss with the water cannon, he was thoroughly done with activism. At least the after-party was totally worth the running and screaming.
; After Monterrey, though, it changed. Suze went from passionate student activist to “hanging out in drone town and talking about bombs”, and the protests turned from marches with occasional tear gas into... well, a city full of bodies.
There was no reason to get shot, gassed, or clobbered to death over something that was going to fall apart anyway, and he sure wasn't going to get wrapped up in some Path-throwback group or a neo-Faction suicide squad. So he'd cut ties with Suze, let her shave her head and plot to blow up postal stations, or whatever the hell they did down there. He'd just watch, and root for whichever team looked the least terrible for the moment.
Down below, the rally dispersed. The blackshirts were moving in, batons ready, splitting the crowd, seizing signs. The crowd broke, like it usually did. Most of the kids here came from money, they would be back tomorrow, and they didn't want the broken noses that came from pissing off the espos. The others, well, they were probably scholarship kids, and they sure as hell weren't getting shipped back down to drone town.
Mom would beat the stupid out of me. Firenze washed the last of the bar out of his mouth, tossed the empty soda can into the corner pile. Six kids and five fuck-ups, no way I'm crawling back down there for some stupid cause.
In the street, someone had picked a fight. It ended as quickly as it started, with the would-be-boxer jerking under the flash of an electrolaser. Even from here, he could see the crackle of electricity, the herky-jerk dance of the victim, and the sack-of-potatoes drop for the finale. One of the blackshirts moved in, waved a can over the prone fighter. The student twisted, feebly batted at the double dose of compliance. A quick slap of cuffs, and the rally was over. Dinner and a show. Firenze took in a deep breath, but almost choked on the ionized air. Another beautiful night in the city.
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