by Yoon Ha Lee
It was after a long silence that he said, “To tell you the truth, I’m thinking of getting out of the addiction treatment business. I’m sick of being on the losing side.”
Keel felt a coldness in her then, which, later, she identified as fear.
He continued: “They are winning. Virtvana, MindSlide, Right to Flight. They’ve got the sex, the style, and the flash. All we wilsons have is a sense of mission, this knowledge that people are dying, and the ones that don’t die are being lost to lives of purpose.
“Maybe we’re right—sure, we’re right—but we can’t sell it. In two, three days we’ll come to our destination and you’ll have to come into Big R and meet your fellow addicts. You won’t be impressed. It’s a henry-hovel in the Slash. It’s not a terrific advertisement for Big R.”
Keel felt strange, comforting her wilson. Nonetheless, she reached forward and touched his bare shoulder. “You want to help people. That is a good and noble impulse.”
He looked up at her, a curious nakedness in his eyes. “Maybe that is hubris.
“Hubris?”
“Are you not familiar with the word? It means to try to steal the work of the gods.”
Keel thought about that in the brief moment between the dimming of the seascape and the nothingness of night. She thought it would be a fine thing to do, to steal the work of the gods.
Dr. Marx checked the perimeter, the security net. All seemed to be in order. The air was heavy with moisture and the cloying odor of mint. This mint scent was the olfactory love song of an insect-like creature that flourished in the tropical belt. The creature looked like an unpleasant mix of spider and wasp. Knowing that the sweet scent came from it, Dr. Marx breathed shallowly and had to fight against an inclination to gag. Interesting, the way knowledge affected one. An odor, pleasant in itself, could induce nausea when its source was identified.
He was too weary to pursue the thought. He returned to the mobile unit, climbed in and locked the door behind him. He walked down the corridor, paused to peer into the room where Keel rested, sedated electrically.
He should not have spoken his doubts. He was weary, depressed, and it was true that he might very well abandon this crumbling profession. But he had no right to be so self-revealing to a client. As long as he was employed, it behooved him to conduct himself in a professional manner.
Keel’s head rested quietly on the pillow. Behind her, on the green panels, her heart and lungs created cool, luminous graphics. Physically, she was restored. Emotionally, mentally, spiritually, she might be damaged beyond repair.
He turned away from the window and walked on down the corridor. He walked past his sleeping quarters to the control room. He undressed and lay down on the utilitarian flat and let the neuronet embrace him. He was aware, as always, of guilt and a hangdog sense of betrayal.
The virtual had come on the Highway two weeks ago. He’d already left Addiction Resources with Keel, traveling west into the wilderness of Pit Finitum, away from the treatment center and New Vegas.
Know the enemy. He’d sampled all the vees, played at lowest res with all the safeguards maxed, so that he could talk knowledgeably with his clients. But he’d never heard of this virtual—and it had a special fascination for him. It was called Halfway House.
A training vee, not a recreational one, it consisted of a series of step-motivated, instructional virtuals designed to teach the apprentice addictions counselor his trade.
So why this guilt attached to methodically running the course?
What guilt?
That guilt.
Okay. Well . . .
The answer was simple enough: Here all interventions came to a good end, all problems were resolved, all clients were healed.
So far he had intervened on a fourteen-year-old boy addicted to Clawhammer Comix, masterfully diagnosed a woman suffering from Leary’s syndrome, and led an entire group of mix-feeders through a nasty withdrawal episode.
He could tell himself he was learning valuable healing techniques.
Or he could tell himself that he was succumbing to the world that killed his clients, the hurt-free world where everything worked out for the best, good triumphed, bad withered and died, rewards came effortlessly—and if that was not enough, the volume could always be turned up.
He had reservations. Adjusting the neuronet, he thought, “I will be careful.” It was what his clients always said.
Keel watched the insipid ocean, waited. Generally, Dr. Marx arrived soon after the darkness of sleep had fled. He did not come at all. When the sun was high in the sky, she began to shout for him. That was useless, of course.
She ran into the ocean, but it was a low res ghost and only filled her with vee-panic. She stumbled back to the beach chair, tried to calm herself with a rational voice: Someone will come.
But would they? She was, according to her wilson, in the wilds of Pit Finitum, hundreds of miles to the west of New Vegas, traveling toward a halfway house hidden in some dirty corner of the mining warren known as the Slash.
Darkness came, and the programmed current took her into unconsciousness.
The second day was the same, although she sensed a physical weakness that emanated from Big R. Probably nutrients in one of the IV pockets had been depleted. I’ll die, she thought. Night snuffed the thought.
A new dawn arrived without Dr. Marx. Was he dead? And if so, was he dead by accident or design? And if by design, whose? Perhaps he had killed himself; perhaps this whole business of Virtvana’s persecution was a delusion.
Keel remembered the wilson’s despair, felt a sudden conviction that Dr. Marx had fled Addiction Resources without that center’s knowledge, a victim of the evangelism/paranoia psychosis that sometimes accompanied counselor burnout.
Keel had survived much in her twenty years. She had donned some deadly v-gear and made it back to Big R intact. True, she had been saved a couple of times, and she probably wasn’t what anyone would call psychologically sound, but . . . it would be an ugly irony if it was an addictions rehab, an unhinged wilson, that finally killed her.
Keel hated irony, and it was this disgust that pressed her into action.
She went looking for the plug. She began by focusing on her spine, the patches, the slightly off-body temp of the sensor pad. Had her v-universe been more engrossing, this would have been harder to do, but the ocean was deteriorating daily, the seagulls now no more than scissoring disruptions in the mottled sky.
On the third afternoon of her imposed solitude, she was able to sit upright in Big R. It required all her strength, the double-think of real Big-R motion while in the virtual. The affect in vee was to momentarily tilt the ocean and cause the sky to leak blue pixels into the sand.
Had her arms been locked, had her body been glove-secured, it would have been wasted effort, of course, but Keel’s willing participation in her treatment, her daily exercise regimen, had allowed relaxed physical inhibitors. There had been no reason for Dr. Marx to anticipate Keel’s attempting a Big-R disruption.
She certainly didn’t want to.
The nausea and terror induced by contrary motion in Big R while simulating a virtual was considerable.
Keel relied on gravity, shifting, leaning to the right. The bed shifted to regain balance.
She screamed, twisted, hurled herself sideways into Big R.
And her world exploded. The ocean raced up the beach, a black tidal wave that screeched and rattled as though some monstrous mechanical beast were being demolished by giant pistons.
Black water engulfed her. She coughed and it filled her lungs. She flayed; her right fist slammed painfully against the side of the container, making it hum.
She clambered out of the exercise vat, placed conveniently next to the bed, stumbled, and sprawled on the floor in naked triumph.
“Hello Big R,” she said, tasting blood on her lips.
Dr. Marx had let the system ease him back into Big R. The sessions room dimmed to glittering black, then the light retu
rned. He was back in the bright control room. He removed the neuronet, swung his legs to the side of the flatbed, stretched. It had been a good session. He had learned something about distinguishing (behaviorally) the transitory feedback psychosis called frets from the organic v-disease, Viller’s Pathway.
This Halfway House was proving to be a remarkable instructional tool. In retrospect, his fear of its virtual form had been pure superstition. He smiled at his own irrationality.
He would have slept that night in ignorance, but he decided to give the perimeter of his makeshift compound a last security check before retiring.
To that effect, he dressed and went outside.
In the flare of the compound lights, the jungle’s purple vegetation looked particularly unpleasant, like the swollen limbs of long-drowned corpses. The usual skittering things made a racket. There was nothing in the area inclined to attack a man, but the planet’s evolution hadn’t stinted on biting and stinging vermin, and . . .
And one of the vermin was missing.
He had, as always, been frugal in his breathing, gathering into his lungs as little of the noxious atmosphere as possible. The cloying mint scent never failed to sicken him.
But the odor was gone.
It had been there earlier in the evening, and now it was gone. He stood in jungle night, in the glare of the compound lights, waiting for his brain to process this piece of information, but his brain told him only that the odor had been there and now it was gone.
Still, some knowledge of what this meant was leaking through, creating a roiling fear.
If you knew what to look for, you could find it. No vee was as detailed as nature.
You only had to find one seam, one faint oscillation in a rock, one incongruent shadow.
It was a first-rate sim, and it would have fooled him. But they had had to work fast, fabricating and downloading it, and no one had noted that a nasty alien bug filled the Big-R air with its mating fragrance.
Dr. Marx knew he was still in the vee. That meant, of course, that he had not walked outside at all. He was still lying on the flat. And, thanks to his blessed paranoia, there was a button at the base of the flat, two inches from where his left hand naturally lay. Pushing it would disrupt all current and activate a hypodermic containing twenty cc’s of hapotile-4. Hapotile-4 could get the attention of the deepest v-diver. The aftereffects were not pleasant, but, for many v-devotees, there wouldn’t have been an “after” without hapotile.
Dr. Marx didn’t hesitate. He strained for the Big R, traced the line of his arm, moved. It was there; he found it. Pressed.
Nothing.
Then, out of the jungle, a figure came.
Eight feet tall, carved from black steel, the vee soldier bowed at the waist. Then, standing erect, it spoke: “We deactivated your failsafe before you embarked, Doctor.”
“Who are you?” He was not intimidated by this military mockup, the boom of its metal voice, the faint whine of its servos. It was a virtual puppet, of course. Its masters were the thing to fear.
“We are concerned citizens,” the soldier said. “We have reason to believe that you are preventing a client of ours, a client-in-good-credit, from satisfying her constitutionally sanctioned appetites.”
“Keel Benning came to us of her own free will. Ask her and she will tell you as much.”
“We will ask her. And that is not what she will say. She will say, for all the world to hear, that her freedom was compromised by so-called caregivers.”
“Leave her a1one.”
The soldier came closer. It looked up at the dark blanket of the sky. “Too late to leave anyone alone, Doctor. Everyone is in the path of progress. One day we will all live in the vee. It is the natural home of gods.”
The sky began to glow as the black giant raised its gleaming arms.
“You act largely out of ignorance,” the soldier said. “The godseekers come, and you treat them like aberrations, like madmen burning with sickness. This is because you do not know the virtual yourself. Fearing it, you have confined and studied it. You have refused to taste it, to savor it.”
The sky was glowing gold, and figures seemed to move in it, beautiful, winged humanforms.
Virtvana, Marx thought. Apes and Angels.
It was his last coherent thought before enlightenment.
“I give you a feast,” the soldier roared. And all the denizens of heaven swarmed down, surrounding Dr. Marx with love and compassion and that absolute, impossible distillation of a hundred thousand insights that formed a single, tear-shaped truth: Euphoria.
Keel found she could stand. A couple of days of inaction hadn’t entirely destroyed the work of all that exercise. Shakily, she navigated the small room. The room had the sanitized, hospital look she’d grown to know and loathe. If this room followed the general scheme, the shelves over the bed should contain . . . They did, and Keel donned one of the gray, disposable client suits.
She found Dr. Marx by the noise he was making, a kind of huh, huh, huh delivered in a monotonous chant and punctuated by an occasional Ah! The sounds, and the writhing, near-naked body that lay on the table emitting these sounds, suggested to Keel that her doctor, naughty man, might be auditing something sexual on the virtual.
But a closer look showed signs of v-overload epilepsy. Keel had seen it before and knew that one’s first inclination, to shut down every incoming signal, was not the way to go. First you shut down any chemical enhancers—and, if you happened to have a hospital handy (as she did), you slowed the system more with something like clemadine or hetlin—then, if you were truly fortunate and your spike was epping in a high-tech detox (again, she was so fortunate), you plugged in a regulator, spliced it and started running the signals through that, toning them down.
Keel got to it. As she moved, quickly, confidently, she had time to think that this was something she knew about (a consumer’s knowledge, not a tech’s, but still, her knowledge was extensive).
Dr. Marx had been freed from the virtual for approximately ten minutes (but was obviously not about to break the surface of Big R), when Keel heard the whine of the security alarm. The front door of the unit was being breached with an L-saw.
Keel scrambled to the corridor where she’d seen the habitat sweep. She swung the ungainly tool around, falling to one knee as she struggled to unbolt the barrel lock. Fizzing pocky low-tech grubber.
The barrel-locking casing clattered to the floor just as the door collapsed.
The man in the doorway held a weapon, which, in retrospect, made Keel feel a little better. Had he been weaponless, she would still have done what she did.
She swept him out the door. The sonic blast scattered him across the cleared area, a tumbling, bloody mass of rags and unraveling flesh, a thigh bone tumbling into smaller bits as it rolled under frayed vegetation.
She was standing in the doorway when an explosion rocked the unit and sent her crashing backward. She crawled down the corridor, still lugging the habitat gun, and fell into the doorway of a cluttered storage room. An alarm continued to shriek somewhere.
The mobile now lay on its side. She fired in front of her. The roof rippled and roared, looked like it might hold, and then flapped away like an unholy, howling v-demon, a vast silver blade that smoothly severed the leafy tops of the jungle’s tallest sentinels. Keel plunged into the night, ran to the edge of the unit and peered out into the glare of the compound lights.
The man was crossing the clearing.
She crouched, and he turned, sensing motion. He was trained to fire reflexively but he was too late. The rolling sonic blast from Keel’s habitat gun swept man and weapon and weapon’s discharge into roiling motes that mixed with rock and sand and vegetation, a stew of organic and inorganic matter for the wind to stir.
Keel waited for others to come but none did.
Finally, she reentered the mobile to retrieve her wilson, dragging him (unconscious) into the scuffed arena of the compound.
Later that night, exha
usted, she discovered the aircraft that had brought the two men. She hesitated, then decided to destroy it. It would do her no good; it was not a vehicle she could operate, and its continued existence might bring others.
The next morning, Keel’s mood improved when she found a pair of boots that almost fit. They were a little tight but, she reasoned, that was probably better than a little loose. They had, according to Dr. Marx, a four-day trek ahead of them.
Dr. Marx was now conscious but fairly insufferable. He could talk about nothing but angels and the Light. A long, hard dose of Apes and Angels had filled him with fuzzy love and an uncomplicated metaphysics in which smiling angels fixed bad stuff and protected all good people (and, it went without saying, all people were good).
Keel had managed to dress Dr. Marx in a suit again, and this restored a professional appearance to the wilson. But, to Keel’s dismay, Dr. Marx in virtual-withdrawal was a shameless whiner.
“Please,” he would implore. “Please, I am in terrible terrible Neeeeeeed.”
He complained that the therapy-v was too weak, that he was sinking into a catatonic state. Later, he would stop entirely, of course, but now, please, something stronger . . . .
No.
He told her she was heartless, cruel, sadistic, vengeful. She was taking revenge for her own treatment program, although, if she would just recall, he had been the soul of gentleness and solicitude.
“You can’t be in virtual and make the journey,” Keel said. “I need you to navigate. We will take breaks, but I’m afraid they will brief. Say goodbye to your mobile.”
She destroyed it with the habitat sweep, and they were on their way. It was a limping, difficult progress, for they took much with them: food, emergency camping and sleeping gear, a portable, two-feed v-rig, the virtual black box, and the security image grabs. And Dr. Marx was not a good traveler.
It took six days to get to the Slash, and then Dr. Marx said he wasn’t sure just where the halfway house was.
“What?”
“I don’t know. I’m disoriented.”
“You’ll never be a good v-addict,” Keel said. “You can’t lie.”