by Jack Dann
An atavism she hadn't controlled had brought her this far. A rented car took her the rest of the way to the ranch. She thought only to look around, but when she found the tenants packing for a month's holiday, she couldn't resist the opportunity. She carried her leather satchel into their crocheted, frilled guest room—it had been her room fifteen years before—with a remote kind of satisfaction.
That night, she slept like the dead—except for some dreams. But there was nothing she could do about them.
Lightning and thunder. I should stop now, she thought, wary of power surges through the new board which she was charging as she worked. She saved her file, unplugged the power, stood, stretched, and walked to the window to look at the mountains.
The storm illuminated the closer slopes erratically, the rain hid the distances. She felt some heaviness lift. The cool wind through the window refreshed her. She heard the program stop, and turned off the machine. Sliding out the backup capsule, she smiled her angry smile unconsciously. When I get back to the Ottawa Valley, she thought, where weather never comes from the west like it's supposed to, I'll make those fuckers eat this.
Out in the corrals where the tenants kept their rodeo horses, there was animal noise, and she turned off the light to go and look out the side window. A young man was leaning his weight against the reins-length pull of a rearing, terrified horse. Angel watched as flashes of lightning strobed the hackneyed scene. This was where she came from. She remembered her father in the same struggle. And her mother at this window with her, both of them watching the man. Her mother's anger she never understood until now. Her father's abandonment of all that was in the house, including her brother, Brian, inert and restless in his oversized crib.
Angel walked back through the house, furnished now in the kitschy western style of every trailer and bungalow in this countryside. She was lucky to stay, invited on a generous impulse, while all but their son were away. She felt vaguely guilty at her implicit criticism.
Angel invited the young rancher into the house only because this is what her mother and her grandmother would have done. Even Angel's great-grandmother, whose father kept the stopping house, which meant she kept the travelers fed, even her spirit infused in Angel the unwilling act. She watched him almost sullenly as he left his rain gear in the wide porch.
He was big, sitting in the big farm kitchen. His hair was wet, and he swore almost as much as she did. He told her how he had put a trailer on the north forty, and lived there now, instead of in the little room where she'd been invited to sleep. He told her about the stock he'd accumulated riding the rodeo. They drank Glenfiddich. She told him her father had been a rodeo cowboy. He told her about his university degree in agriculture. She told him she'd never been to university. They drank more whiskey and he told her he couldn't drink that other rotgut any more since he tasted real Scotch. He invited her to see his computer. She went with him across the yard and through the trees in the rain, her bag over her shoulder, board hidden in it, and he showed her his computer. It turned out to be the first machine she designed for Northern—archaic now, compared with the one she'd just invented.
Fair is fair, she thought drunkenly, and she pulled out her board and unfolded it.
"You showed me yours, I'll show you mine," she said.
He liked the board. He was amazed that she had made it. They finished the Scotch.
"I like you," she said. "Let me show you something. You can be the first." And she ran Machine Sex for him.
He was the first to see it: before Whitman and Kozyk who bought it to sell to people who already have had and done everything; before David and Jonathan, the Hardware Twins in MannComp's Gulf Islands shop, who made the touchpad devices necessary to run it properly; before a world market hungry for the kind of glossy degradation Machine Sex could give them bought it in droves from a hastily-created—MannComp-subsidiary—numbered company. She ran it for him with just the automouse on her board, and a description of what it would do when the hardware was upgraded to it.
It was very simple, really. If orgasm was binary, it could be programmed. Feed back the sensation through one or more touchpads to program the body. The other thing she knew about human sex was that it was as much cortical as genital, or more so: touch is optional for the turn-on. Also easy, then, to produce cortical stimuli by programmed input. The rest was a cosmetic elaboration of the premise.
At first it did turn him on, then off, then it made his blood run cold. She was pleased by that: her work had chilled her too.
"You can't market that thing!" he said.
"Why not. It's a fucking good program. Hey, get it? Fucking good."
"It's not real."
"Of course it isn't. So what?"
"So, people don't need that kind of stuff to get turned on."
She told him about people. More people than he'd known were in the world. People who made her those designer drugs, given in return for favors she never granted until after Whitman sold her like a used car. People like Whitman, teaching her about sexual equipment while dealing with the Pentagon and CSIS to sell them Angel's sharp angry mind, as if she'd work on killing others as eagerly as she was trying to kill herself. People who would hire a woman on the street, as they had her during that two-week nightmare almost a year before, and use her as casually as their own hand, without giving a damn.
"One night," she said, "just to see, I told all the johns I was fourteen. I was skinny enough, even then, to get away with it. And they all loved it. Every single one gave me a bonus, and took me anyway."
The whiskey fog was wearing a little thin. More time had passed than she thought, and more had been said than she had intended. She went to her bag, rummaged, but she'd left her drugs in Toronto, some dim idea at the time that she should clean up her act. All that had happened was that she had spent the days so tight with rage that she couldn't eat, and she'd already cured herself of that once; for the record, she thought, she'd rather be stoned.
"Do you have any more booze?" she said, and he went to look. She followed him around his kitchen.
"Furthermore," she said, "I rolled every one of them that I could, and all but one had pictures of his kids in his wallet, and all of them were teenagers. Boys and girls together. And their saintly dads out fucking someone who looked just like them. Just like them."
Luckily, he had another bottle. Not quite the same quality, but she wasn't fussy.
"So I figured," she finished, "that they don't care who they fuck. Why not the computer in the den? Or the office system at lunch hour?"
"It's not like that," he said. "It's nothing like that. People deserve better." He had the neck of the bottle in his big hand, was seriously, carefully pouring himself another shot. He gestured with both bottle and glass. "People deserve to have—love."
"Love?"
"Yeah, love. You think I'm stupid, you think I watched too much TV as a kid, but I know it's out there. Somewhere. Other people think so too. Don't you? Didn't you, even if you won't admit it now, fall in love with that guy Max at first? You never said what he did at the beginning, how he talked you into being his lover. Something must have happened. Well, that's what I mean: love."
"Let me tell you about love. Love is a guy who talks real smooth taking me out to the woods and telling me he just loves my smile. And then taking me home and putting me in leather handcuffs so he can come. And if I hurt he likes it, because he likes it to hurt a little and he thinks I must like it like he does. And if I moan he thinks I'm coming. And if I cry he thinks it's love. And so do I. Until one evening—not too long after my last birthday, as I recall—he tells me that he has sold me to another company. And this only after he fucks me one last time. Even though I don't belong to him anymore. After all, he had the option on all my bioware."
"All this is just politics." He was sharp, she had' to grant him that.
"Politics," she said, "give me a break. Was it politics made Max able to sell me with the stock: hardware, software, liveware?"
"Oh, sure I did. I always have. Why do you think I changed my name? Why do you think I dress in natural fibers and go through all the rest of this bullshit? I know how to set up power blocs. Except in mine there is only one party—me. And that's the way it's going to stay. Me against them from now on."
"It's not always like that. There are assholes in the world, and there are other people too. Everyone around here still remembers your grandfather, even though he's been retired in Camrose for fifteen years. They still talk about the way he and his wife used to waltz at the Legion Hall. What about him? There are more people like him than there are Whitmans."
"Charlotte doesn't waltz much since her stroke."
"That's a cheap shot. You can't get away with cheap shots. Speaking of shots, have another."
"Don't mind if I do. Okay, I give you Eric and Charlotte. But one half-happy ending doesn't balance out the people who go through their lives with their teeth clenched, trying to make it come out the same as a True Romance comic, and always wondering what's missing. They read those bodice-ripper novels, and make that do for the love you believe in so naively." Call her naive, would he? Two could play at that game. "That's why they'll all go crazy for Machine Sex. So simple. So linear. So fast. So uncomplicated."
"You underestimate people's ability to be happy. People are better at loving than you think."
"You think so? Wait until you have your own little piece of land and some sweetheart takes you out in the trees on a moonlit night and gives you head until you think your heart will break. So you marry her and have some kids. She furnishes the trailer in a five-room sale grouping. You have to quit drinking Glenfiddich because she hates it when you talk too loud. She gets an allowance every month and crochets a cozy for the TV. You work all day out in the rain and all evening in the back room making the books balance on the outdated computer. After the kids come she gains weight and sells real estate if you're lucky. If not she makes things out of recycled bleach bottles and hangs them in the yard. Pretty soon she wears a nightgown to bed and turns her back when you slip in after a hard night at the keyboard. So you take up drinking again and teach the kids about the rodeo. And you find some square-dancing chick who gives you head out behind the bleachers one night in Trochu, so sweet you think your heart will break. What you gonna do then, mountain man?"
"Okay, we can tell stories until the sun comes up. Which won't be too long, look at the time; but no matter how many stories you tell you can't make me forget about that thing." He pointed to the computer with loathing.
"It's just a machine."
"You know what I mean. That thing in it. And besides, I'm gay. Your little scenario wouldn't work."
She laughed and laughed. "So that's why you haven't made a pass at me yet." She wondered coldly how gay he was, but she was tired, so tired of proving power. His virtue was safe with her; so, she thought suddenly strangely, was hers with him. It was unsettling and comforting at once.
"Maybe," he said. "Or maybe I'm just a liar like you think everyone is. Eh? You think everyone strings everyone else a line? Crap. Who has the time for that shit?"
Perhaps they were drinking beer now. Or was it vodka? She found it hard to tell after a while.
"You know what I mean," she said. "You should know. The sweet young thing who has AIDS and doesn't tell you. Or me. I'm lucky so far. Are you? Or who sucks you for your money. Or josses you 'cause he's into denim and Nordic looks."
"Okay, okay. I give up. Everybody's a creep but you and me."
"And I'm not so sure about you."
"Likewise, I'm sure. Have another. So, if you're so pure, what about the ethics of it?"
"What about the ethics of it?" she asked. "Do you think I went through all that sex without paying attention? I had nothing else to do but watch other people come. I saw that old cult movie, where the aliens feed on heroin addiction and orgasm, and the woman's not allowed orgasm so she has to O.D. on smack. Orgasm's more decadent than shooting heroin? I can't buy that, but there's something about a world that sells it over and over again. Sells the thought of pleasure as a commodity, sells the getting of it as if it were the getting of wisdom. And all these times I told you about, I saw other people get it through me. Even when someone finally made me come, it was just a feather in his cap, an accomplishment, nothing personal. Like you said. All I was was a program, they plugged into me and went through the motions and got their result. Nobody cares if the AI finds fulfillment running their damned data analyses. Nobody thinks about depressed and angry Mannboard ROMs. They just think about getting theirs.
"So why not get mine?" She was pacing now, angry, leaning that thin body as if the wind were against her. "Let me be the one who runs the program."
"But you won't be there. You told me how you were going to hide out, all that spy stuff."
She leaned against the wall, smiling a new smile she thought of as predatory. And maybe it was. "Oh, yes," she said. "I'll be there the first time. When Max and Kozyk run this thing and it turns them on. I'll be there. That's all I care to see."
He put his big hands on the wall on either side of her and leaned in. He smelled of sweat and liquor and his face was earnest with intoxication.
"I'll tell you something," he said. "As long as there's the real thing, it won't sell. They'll never buy it."
Angel thought so too. Secretly, because she wouldn't give him the satisfaction of agreement, she too thought they would not go that low. That's right, she told herself, trying to sell it is all right—because they will never buy it.
But they did.
A woman and a computer. Which attracts you most? Now you don't have to choose. Angel has made the choice irrelevant.
In Kozyk's office, he and Max go over the ad campaign. They've already tested the program themselves quite a lot; Angel knows this because it's company gossip, heard over the cubicle walls in the washrooms. The two men are so absorbed that they don't notice her arrival.
"Why is a woman better than a sheep? Because sheep can't cook. Why is a woman better than a Mannboard? Because you haven't bought your sensory add-on." Max laughs.
"And what's better than a man?" Angel says; they jump slightly. "Why, your MannComp touchpads, with two-way input. I bet you'll be able to have them personally fitted."
"Good idea," says Kozyk, and Whitman makes a note on his lapboard. Angel, still stunned though she's had weeks to get used to this, looks at them, then reaches across the desk and picks up her prototype board. "This one's mine," she says. "You play with yourselves and your touchpads all you want."
"Well, you wrote it, baby," said Max. "If you can't come with your own program . . ."
Kozyk hiccoughs a short laugh before he shakes his head. "Shut up, Whitman," he says. "You're talking to a very rich and famous woman."
Whitman looks up from the simulations of his advertising storyboards, smiling a little, anticipating his joke. "Yeah. It's just too bad she finally burned herself out with this one. They always did say it gives you brain damage."
But Angel hadn't waited for the punch line. She was gone.
Peterborough, Rouyn, Edmonton
1986-1988
CONVERSATIONS WITH MICHAEL
Daniel Marcus
New writer Daniel Marcus is a graduate of Clarion West who holds a Ph.D. in engineering and who has worked as an applied mathematician at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His technical papers have appeared in Communications in Mathematical Physics and the Journal of Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics, but he made his first fiction sale within the genre in 1992, and has since appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Age. In 1995, he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, was marketing his first novel
, and was at work on several more. He lives with his wife in Berkeley, California, where he also teaches a course in science fiction writing.
In the compelling and compassionate story that follows, he shows us that the price of being a hacker can be very high—sometimes higher than we are willing, or able, to pay . . .
"I'm not ready," I said. I laced my fingers together and learned forward in the soft chair, perching on the edge of the cushion. I looked up at Alice. The window behind her was polarized black as pitch and gave the unsettling impression of limitless depth, framing her face like one of those velvet paintings you could buy down in Tijuana before the Burning.
"I think you are, Stacey," she said. "We've been working toward this for a long time. We've done everything we can in realspace. It's time for you to face him." She looked at me with an expectant, open expression, as if she was wondering what my response was going to be. I suspected that she knew, though. She always knew.
I looked down at my hand, leaned back in the chair, shifted my weight. The chair responded by subtly rearranging the cushions to support me. The silence hung between us. Our sessions were often like this—islands of brief dialogue separated by vast gulfs. Finally, I heaved a huge sigh. It felt like it was coming not just from my chest but from my whole body, like my soul was escaping. There was a tightness around the corners of my eyes and across my forehead. I looked up at her. I nodded.
The Virtual Session room—real wood paneling, indirect lighting, abstract art on three walls. A fourth wall dominated by an instrument panel of black glass and polished chrome. Two pieces of furniture, elaborate barcaloungers crowned with spiky helmets, sprouted neatly tied bundles of wires leading to the panel. Red and yellow telltales winked from beneath the glass like the eyes of jungle animals.
Alice led me to one of the chairs and strapped me in. "Remember, I'll be right here the whole time. I'll be him."