Connect

by Julian Gough

  The heart must break open and allow in the world.

  Colt reaches out, to touch the new life again. It’s stronger than it looks.

  He hangs the dead snake on the green shoot, in the cool heart of the bush.

  Stands up.

  97

  Good.

  A very old bus. Should be human-operated, then. The driver probably gets to decide whether or not it’ll stop.

  But if it’s been upgraded inside, if it’s totally unmanned; then the bus will just alert the authorities to an unauthorized halt attempt, and keep going. Let the cops deal with it . . .

  They step out onto the road, to flag down the bus.

  Step back, hands still out. Wait to see will it stop.

  It’s a long moment.

  They both sigh with relief and pleasure, as it pulls in, and its shadow falls on them.

  The doors wheeze open. Cool air pours over them, and they look at each other. Naomi smiles. Colt, after a moment, slowly smiles back.

  They climb aboard, into the dim cool.

  Very old bus.

  It’s had a cheap upgrade, it’s self-driving, but it still has a human driver up front, to make stopping decisions, and deal with the customers.

  Naomi glances down the bus. Less than half full. Some people look up at her, but their gaze seems unfocused; their souls don’t seem present. Watching something. Playing something. Perhaps they have just been hypnotized by the landscape.

  She doesn’t feel they can see her at all.

  The doors sigh closed and it’s cool and they’re safe, and it’s . . . normal. And normal feels so weird.

  ‘Breakdown?’ says the driver.

  What a question! ‘Ah . . . ?’ And does he mean her, or Colt?

  Oh, breakdown.

  ‘No,’ says Naomi. ‘We just . . . got a little lost . . . hiking.’

  ‘Huh,’ says the driver. Naomi walks past him, past the hypnotized passengers, and sits down, close to the back of the bus. Colt nods a quieter thanks, without eye contact, and follows his mother to the seat.

  The bus doesn’t move.

  ‘Hey, lady.’

  Naomi, startled, looks up at the driver.

  He’s spun his seat, to stare at her. Not smiling.

  She looks away, out the window. Are there troops coming? No troops. Then what gave them away?

  Colt has tensed, is looking to her for guidance.

  The people on the bus are waking from their dreams. Staring at her.

  The driver clears his throat. ‘Lady, this is my son’s bus. You ain’t taking it from the man, you’re taking it from our pockets.’

  ‘Oh, I am so sorry.’ Of course. Everything’s switched off. Her e-purse, auto-pay, everything. ‘So sorry.’ Cash, cash. ‘It’s the heat, I wasn’t thinking.’ She stands up, walks back towards him, gropes for money. She gives him a note.

  ‘You have no e-bucks?’

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’

  He glances at the note. His sigh is louder than the one the bus door just made. ‘You don’t have change?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she says. Don’t look around. Don’t look around. ‘Keep it.’

  The driver stares at her. And now, despite the cool of the bus, fresh sweat breaks out down her spine. She is making them conspicuous. ‘It’s a nice bus,’ she says. Oh Christ, did she really say that? She’s falling to pieces. Act normal. What would be a normal thing to say?

  ‘It’s a nice bus, but it’s not that nice,’ says the driver. He holds the note up to the light, snorts again, tucks it into his shirt pocket. Settles back in his seat. ‘Lady, you need to drink some water when you get the chance.’

  Naomi nods.

  ‘The kid too. You going to Vegas? I’ll give you change closer to the city, when I’ve got a little more in the float. We don’t do much cash.’ He hits self-drive, and the bus moves off, oh thank God, they are moving.

  Naomi sways back to her seat, happy the movement of the bus is disguising the trembling of her body, her legs. She sits down again.

  After a few minutes, she begins to relax. Colt reaches for her hand.

  She turns to him, smiling.

  He’s not looking at her.

  Colt says, ‘They’re following us.’

  Naomi looks over her shoulder, out the window.

  She blinks, squints; the shimmering road is empty to the horizon. She glances back at Colt, questioning.

  He’s not looking at the road.

  He’s looking up.

  She looks up, too.

  Perhaps five hundred yards behind them, and about the same above – it’s hard to judge the distance – she sees two patches of the wrong blue, of shadow on the sky.

  Higher up, a bigger patch.

  Another.

  It takes her a moment to work it out.

  Chameleon-painted, they mimic the sky.

  They’re almost invisible, from most angles.

  But even the best changeable camo paint can’t fully match the brightness of a pale blue sky, when the object is backlit by the sun.

  ‘Oh, Colt,’ she whispers.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, still looking up. Glancing around the sky. Counting them. ‘Drones . . .’

  98

  ‘You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg, this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which will have as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of that cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell. It is an unbelievable thing, and yet there it is, popping neatly into its place amid the jumbled cells of every one of the several billion human embryos around the planet, just as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do.’

  — Lewis Thomas, On Embryology, from The Medusa and the Snail

  ‘He’s done it,’ says Colt.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Triggered the immune system.’

  Colt turns his helmet back on. All systems, everything.

  No point cutting himself off from the universe.

  No point hiding, now.

  They’ve already been found.

  Colt pulls in information, from wherever he can get it.

  Nothing.

  Nothing, anywhere, to indicate that anything big is going on in Nevada. No public alert, no breaking news. Yet.

  ‘Are they . . .’ Naomi isn’t sure what she was about to say. ‘Can they try to kill us?’

  ‘The little ones are just surveillance,’ Colt says absently. ‘Targeting. The big ones, yes, they kill.’

  ‘Did they see us get on the bus?’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  He’s having trouble dealing with the damburst of information that’s built up while he was offline.

  Oh, hey, that’s nice . . .

  He realizes he’s checking out some new code in the gameworld.

  Holy guacamole, Colt. Focus. Switch off the game.

  Be here now.

  ‘I guess,’ he says.

  ‘But if they saw us, why didn’t they do something?’ says Naomi.

  ‘Mmm, yeah,’ he says, ‘it’s weird . . . seriously, this system could kill us any time it wants.’

  His mother looks upset. He doesn’t like it when she looks upset.

  Whoa, here comes that big emotion again.

  Too much emotion, too fast . . . No, I don’t want to be here now.

  It’s automatic, it’s a reflex. Colt drops out of the physical world, and into the game. No mapping. He doesn’t want to be reminded of where he is.

  OK, and there is one other motivation . . .

  Maybe Sasha’s ingame . . .

  He uses his admin privileges to check.

  Yes. She’s not got mapping on: she’s just playing it freestyle, out in . . . oh.

  She’s playing in the test range. His realm.

>   That feels good.

  He spawns in the centre of the test range, looks around.

  He can’t see her.

  The symmetrical craters left by the open-air nuclear tests soothe him. Their clean, perfect lines resemble early computer graphics. The knowledge that such simple shapes are out there, in the landscape of the real world, is obscurely comforting.

  The gameworld is a highly secure environment, with its own isolated servers, and he’s running a fresh fake account, and a lot of encryption; but he’s aware that the immune system must be aware he’s ingame now. The hairs on the back of his neck stand up, in the real world.

  But he has to talk to her, ingame.

  Oh god, he should have said yes.

  He wants to be alone with her, with mapping on, with micromesh suit, gloves, full tactile mapping; he’ll disable his parental controls, it doesn’t matter now, nothing matters now, he’s probably going to die soon with Mama.

  But Sasha’s not in mapping mode; Colt’s sitting in a moving bus; the game couldn’t map this anyway, the gap between game and life is too wide.

  He abuses his admin privileges, gets her exact location, and respawns a few yards from her.

  Doesn’t even attempt to incorporate it into the logic of the game.

  He knows it’s rude to just appear, but he doesn’t have much time.

  99

  For a moment, he is lost between worlds, he isn’t sure where he is, where she is.

  Because standing in front of him is Sasha.

  Not her avatar. Sasha herself.

  Somehow, she is actually in the game.

  A real woman stands inside the game, and he feels existential vertigo, where is he? What level of reality is this?

  OK, she must be a live feed, from the real world, dropped into the game, like his father’s crappy low-res military hack, but with better graphics; but no, Sasha is totally integrated, she’s an ingame character, he can see the game light fall on her . . . but the way it falls . . .

  Wait. She has trashed her old avatar, and built a new avatar that is simply an exact copy of herself, as she is.

  An avatar with no stretching, no exaggeration, no enhancement.

  She has even managed to make the light fall on her, bounce off her, as it would in the world. Not enhanced. As flat – as unflattering – as real light.

  Good hack, he thinks. Not easy.

  He studies her face. It looks real. Not better than real, not hyper-real. Just real.

  Its uncompromising realism throws the subtle artificiality of the gameworld into a strange relief, and Colt regrets some of his decisions on the light.

  His eyes pull away from his conscious control. Override his attempt to keep them on Sasha’s face.

  Glance down.

  The large, gravity-defying breasts of her old avatar have been replaced by small breasts that put delicate curves into the matt black fabric of a man’s T-shirt. Her curves subtly reshape the strong, thick, straight white lines of the words BAD SEED, so that they swell a little. As a seed should.

  He knows, without knowing how he knows, that it is the T-shirt she is wearing in the real world, now.

  Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, he thinks, and blinks rapidly.

  His dad used to listen to Nick Cave, loud, all the time, in the year before he left. The year of the fights.

  No Pussy Blues . . .

  Hard On For Love . . .

  His dad would listen to Nick Cave, and tell Colt about women. Colt was scared of the music – it was always too loud – but he liked his dad talking to him, telling him things, even if he couldn’t understand much of it.

  Now Nick Cave songs, one after another, flood into memory, each triggering the next, it’s out of his control.

  ‘Tonight we sleep in separate ditches . . .’

  He looks up at Sasha’s face, which is mapping live from her real face; which might as well be her real face. She has a small pimple on the left side of her jaw, which he stares at now.

  ‘You better run to the City of Refuge . . .’

  With everything exposed, she looks . . . not vulnerable. That’s not it at all. The opposite, if anything.

  ‘Rain your kisses down in storms . . .’

  She looks so real. She looks so real. And a surge of emotion pushes up through his body.

  He fights it back, fights it down.

  ‘Get ready for love . . .’

  ‘Hi,’ says Colt. He’s subvocalizing; he dimly knows his body is, in fact, on the bus, beside his mother. That he isn’t speaking aloud in the real world. OK, maybe muttering a little. But his voice comes out enhanced and strong in the game.

  ‘Oh,’ says Sasha.

  ‘Hmmm?’ says his mother, from outside the game.

  He switches on noise cancelling, and gropes his way across to a free seat, away from his mother.

  Towards Sasha.

  He stares into the eyes of Sasha’s new avatar, into the eyes of her real face. Dark brown.

  Like my eyes.

  She stares back, into his avatar’s eyes. Artificial, blue.

  Nothing like his real eyes. A song his mother loves flutters through his mind.

  ‘Don’t it make your brown eyes blue . . .’

  ‘All the songs are about us, Sasha,’ he says.

  ‘What songs?’

  He gestures helplessly. ‘All the songs.’

  And she tilts her head. Stares into his avatar’s eyes.

  She can’t see me, he thinks, desolate. Not how I really am. Who I am.

  What I’m thinking.

  What I feel.

  Communicate.

  Communicate.

  ‘How are you?’ he says.

  ‘Terrible.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. He doesn’t have a script for that. ‘Oh. I’m OK.’

  ‘Love letter love letter

  Go get her go get her

  Love letter love letter

  Go tell her go tell her.’

  But tell her what? How do you talk about a feeling? What do you say? It’s big? I’m scared? It . . .

  Wait a minute.

  You’re enhanced. You’ve got your upgrade. Apply your processing power to this problem.

  Why does she feel terrible?

  ‘Why do you feel terrible?’ he says.

  ‘Your friends, the Brothers Karamazov, their crew, they wrote a triple-X mod . . .’

  ‘They’re not really my friends,’ says Colt, trying to be precise, trying to keep it accurate, so no gaps in understanding can open up between them.

  ‘Good,’ says Sasha. ‘Because they tried to rape me, ingame.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘They tried to force me out of the game. And they’d set up the mod so that if I left the game, my avatar stayed, and they could rape my avatar.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Colt. Why do you think? Because I’m a woman, and I don’t bend myself out of shape to please them. So they thought they’d try to bend me out of shape, to please them.’ She smiles, but it’s not a good smile.

  Wintry, thinks Colt. That’s what a wintry smile looks like.

  ‘But . . .’ It’s out before he can stop it. ‘Why?’

  ‘To punish me, for being myself. For existing.’

  ‘But wouldn’t parental controls . . .’ He trails off, as Sasha stares at him.

  ‘Your mom might set parental controls on your game in your house, and you might be OK with that, but out in the real world nobody uses them.’

  He doesn’t know where to begin. To make it OK. To make it better.

  ‘But . . . it’s not real . . .’ he says.

  ‘The acts aren’t real. The intent is real. The problem is real.’

  She’s angry. Is she angry at him? Why is she angry at him?

  Colt feels a little sick rise in his throat. This is all going wrong, again.

  ‘But,’ he says, ‘you know, I used to get killed. By guys. All the time.’

  ‘Colt, this isn’t jus
t random gameplay. They’re forcing all the women – coders, players, everyone – out of the game.’

  ‘I don’t really get involved . . .’ he says.

  ‘I know! And that’s a decision, with consequences! This is where the game has been going, Colt. This is where it’s been headed for a while.’

  ‘I didn’t know . . .’

  ‘You just haven’t been paying attention,’ she says. ‘You’ve opted out. It’s becoming a place that turns even perfectly nice guys into assholes, that rewards you for being an asshole, and you’ve just walked away.’

  ‘I guess I’ve been kind of busy . . .’

  ‘Yeah, playing around, in your own little world, making sure the lighting is perfect.’

  This isn’t going the way he wanted it to go at all.

  ‘I’m sorry . . . You could have just stopped playing . . .’

  ‘That’s what they wanted! But why should I? I helped build this world!’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘It was a bad mod. Their code was shitty.’ A shrug. ‘I did some stuff they weren’t expecting, crashed their mod, and then I killed them.’

  Colt stares at her.

  Her face is amazing.

  Not just her face.

  What’s behind her face.

  Her soul?

  He doesn’t want to use that word, but it comes into his head anyway.

  Who she is.

  The complicated thing that she is. The way she codes, the way she fights, the way she stays open to the world, even if it hurts her, the way she doesn’t walk away.

  The way her face shows who she is.

  What she feels.

  It’s alive.

  She’s alive.

  He suddenly, intensely, wants to see her in the real world, smell her in the real world, feel her in the real world, and with that intense desire comes intense fear.

  If this feeling gets any bigger, it’s going to kill him. He can hardly speak. It’s choking him. He’s panicking. Can’t think.

  He’s sorry, he wants to make it up to her, he wants to go back in time and say yes.

  He wants to touch her, he wants to hold her.

  He wants, he wants . . .

  How do you express this feeling? How do you communicate?

  What happens, when a man feels this way towards a woman? What do you do?

  Into his head comes a vision; a vision of himself making a move; a move he has seen a hundred times ingame, in the brothels of other gameworlds, in the virtual bars.