Freenet

by Steve Stanton

  “You can probably tell I belong to the Way.” Exuberance shone in her face like a religious ecstasy.

  “The way?”

  “The Way,” she said. “The natural Way, you know?”

  The puzzlement in her eyes indicated that he obviously did not know, but Zen simply shrugged, weary now of being an idiot. “Sure.” He ducked out of the path of a charging man in a spandex exercise outfit.

  Nurse Stavos frowned and touched his arm. “It’s okay, Zen. They’re not physical. Don’t get lost in virtuality. Rise above it. You can do this.” She led him gently to the couch and landed him like a beached cavefish. “Have a seat and relax.”

  Zen closed his eyes, but a kaleidoscope of drama continued to parade across his eyescreen—weak version of the first immersion theorem of differential topology is due to the transversality of two-­dimensional manifolds intersecting generically in zero-dimensional space—and he clutched his head and pulled at his hair, his brain a battlefield of noise and strange visions. “I can’t process all this information! Turn it off!”

  Nurse Nancy bent close to study him with clinical care. “Don’t give up on me, Zen. You can get through this. Soon it will all be optional, just passing fancies.”

  “I can’t tell what’s real. I’ve got to get away.” He flinched as a dark object fell across his field of vision like a meteor. He gazed past her at fleeting images and swung his eyes around the room in search of stability—bringing the future to life with enough bandwidth for all your peripherals—

  Nancy took his hand and warmed it between gentle palms. “Stay with me, honey. We can work it out together. That’s why I’m here. You’ll get the hang of the net once your brain starts to filter out the sidebars. You know what they say: ‘Tune it, tone it, and claim it.’ That’s the beauty of the V-net. Everyone creates their own reality, customized to individual perceptions and internalized assumptions, with advertising tailored to specific desires. You open your own windows and set your own parameters. C’mon, try to concentrate on my face for a minute. I’m all you need for now. Can you see me clearly?”

  Her bright blue eyes filled his view and dispelled phantoms from the periphery. Her plump cheeks came into focus, her narrow nose and delicate chin. She pursed painted lips and blew him a dramatic kiss with a noisy smack. “Be here now,” she said. “Smell my neck. I’m trying a new aroma this week—Fantasius Trinity. Do you like it?”

  Zen poked his nostrils forward and inhaled. “Nice.” He had noticed her enticing fragrance all along, but now it seemed overwhelming, a heavy, flowery musk. All his sensations were heightened, his awareness intensified, his skin tingly like an itch that needed a good scratch, and in his preoccupation with this emergent sensorium, the boisterous background noise seemed to dissipate for a moment into a purr of soft static. “Thanks, I think I’m starting to feel better.”

  “Good.” Nancy pressed out a slow and calming sigh. “We’ll continue with this line of therapy.” She pulled out a tray from the wall beside his head and selected a foil-wrapped cube. “Here, try this.” She cracked the seal with a pink fingernail and offered it forward.

  Zen took the cube and sniffed—something fruity, somewhat acidic. He began to peel back the foil covering. “What is it?”

  “Apple.” Nurse Nancy smiled with expectancy. “The natural Way promotes bodily health and homeopathic balance. We embrace physical and social systems in defiance of ubiquitous digital life. That’s our creed. And taste is the most transcendent of all natural senses.”

  Zen popped the food in his mouth and tested it with his tongue—cool and mushy, tart and tangy. “Wow!”

  Nancy thrust her palms out like an excited youngster. “I know, right?”

  Zen bobbed his head as he chewed. “That’s very unusual.”

  “Try to be mindful of the experience of taste. Focus your attention with me, okay?” She poked through her tray and selected another morsel, cracked the seal. “This one is good, and very expensive. Tangerine.”

  “That’s a citrus,” Zen said.

  Nancy nodded. “It grows on trees. Have you ever seen a tree?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Zen said as he sampled the new taste, thankful finally for the opportunity to show some expertise. “They have hard trunks, leafy branches. Trees are awesome.”

  Nancy studied him happily. ::You are such a muscular hunk.::

  Zen frowned as he saw a clear image of himself in the mirror of her mind’s eye. His brown skin and bulky shoulders seemed foreign in this place.

  Nancy ducked her gaze to her tray as though caught in an impropriety. “Sorry, that wasn’t very professional. I know you must fight gravity all the time. I have great respect for your native culture.”

  “No, that’s fine.” Zen waved an arm in dismissal. “I’m thankful for your help. You’re an exhilarating woman. What else do you have?”

  “Oh, I have everything,” she said as she peered through her collection. “The indulgence of taste brings us back to our true animal nature. Humans are creatures of flesh, wonderful miracles of biological complexity. We’re not just data on the wings of light. We have a natural heritage of sensuality.”

  Zen tasted cubes of curried chicken and smoked salmon alternated by raspberry candies and mango fruit, with Nurse Nancy hovering weightless above his lap, feeding him ceremonially by hand and telling stories of gastronomical delight. Finally he held up a halt sign to show his limit.

  “Well, I have been talking your earbug off, and you’re so shy. Tell me something about food on Bali. What’s the best-kept secret of culinary delight? What do you serve to impress the ladies?”

  Zen thought for a moment. “Well, you take the skin off a chicken, and cook it separately with oil and spices—terrion, tamil, and ginseng, whatever you have in supply. Then you drape it back over the roasted carcass when you serve. It’s like a flavoured parchment.”

  Nancy scrunched up her nose with incredulity. “Really? Skin soaked in animal fat?”

  “Yeah, natural grease and fat. It’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac.”

  “Wow, that’s peculiar. I love it! Tell me about religion on Bali. I’ve heard wondrous things. Is it true that cults arose from stranded colonists eating hallucinogenic mushrooms in the deep caves?”

  “Uh, no, that would be a variant sect for sure. Bali is a big planet with lots of different outposts, but all denominations serve the desert god Kiva.”

  “Do they still use mushrooms as a sacrament?”

  “Some shamans do, I suppose, on rare occasions. The fungus is generally smoked among the darker segments of society—not officially recognized. Kiva is not a god of ceremonies and performance. He lives in the hearts of his people and brings seasons of refreshment.”

  “That just blows my mind. I love it. Do you cavort around fires burning free oxygen?”

  Zen chuckled. “Most people have geothermal power nowadays, but we still have campfires during winter festivals when it’s cold at night. Children sit in a circle around the flames and sing songs of lore. The adults stay up and party till dawn with dancing and music.”

  “Oh, my God, you’re everything we dream about in the Way!” Nancy eyes were wide beacons of awe. “You tower upright on dry land with open sky above your head, the king of all creatures. Have you ever caught a live animal and killed it for food?”

  “I have,” Zen said, “but it’s not as nice as you imagine.”

  “Amazing,” Nancy Stavos gushed. “Try this one last thing for dessert.” She selected a dark bean from her tray and crushed it between her teeth. She bent forward as she chewed and placed her lips on his in a slurpy kiss. Her tongue probed in his mouth and swirled a wondrous taste inside him, a pungent mix like peppermint and cinnamon, acrid and insistent on his tastebuds. Her perverse sensuality overwhelmed Zen like a tidal wave of eroticism, and time seemed to stretch as she lingered with shocking intimacy, swirling a minty blessing on his palate. Finally she released him and smacked her lips with relish.

  Zen
gasped and sucked a breath. “What is it?”

  “Juva ben,” she said. “It’s a recreational antipsychotic. You’ll need it to sleep the first night. Don’t worry. I’ll help you along. Would you like a drink?”

  His tongue tingled with spice, swollen with exotic chemicals, and he swallowed with difficulty. “Do you have honey mead?”

  Nancy laughed. “No, nothing fermented. Just allkool, white or dark.”

  “White would be fine.”

  “Anything to mix? I have cherry, lime, lemon, um …” She thumbed through a selection of tiny pouches. “… sunrise, pear, margarita …”

  “Lemon would be great.” His voice sounded far away and foreign, buzzy with a change in atmospheric pressure. “That was weird.”

  “I know, right?” She tore open a pouch with her teeth and dumped it into a plastic bottle of clear liquid, shook it like a maraca. “Open up.” She was brushing weight on his thighs now, hovering sideways above him with a prominent red cross bulging out toward his face. She squirted lemon liquor on his tongue, succulent and sweet, and his throat burned pleasantly with alcohol as he swallowed.

  “A little sedation will take the edge off the juva ben,” Nancy said. “You had me worried for a while there, but I think you’re over the hump. Stay in this moment. You’re doing great.” She tipped the remaining allkool into her mouth, tossed the empty container in the open drawer, and began to unbutton her uniform. She pulled off thin cellulose and floated her shirt away. No bra, and why bother with no gravity to drag her down? “I’m so glad they chose me to monitor your transition. I really like you.”

  A sudden flurry of peripheral images framed his view of her, and a babble of noise erupted in his ear—two immersions of one manifold are regularly homotopic if and only if they have the same total curvature—proof that any ratio better than a constant can never be achieved by a polynominal time algorithm—

  “Don’t go back, Zen. I’m here for you. Focus your attention.” Nancy took his hands and placed his palms against her nipples. Her skin felt warm and soft, but his body seemed to be moving down a vortex at great speed, a flashback of recent momentum in the tunnels, a rush of strange sensation. He felt dizzy and sweaty with exuberance, and his vision seemed to zoom in and out of focus, his depth of perception on a yo-yo string. All he could trust for sure were the luscious globes of flesh in his face. He kneaded them with delicacy.

  “That’s good,” Nancy murmured as she wiggled against his thighs. “This is natural reality. Concentrate on the tactile sensation. I know you Bali boys are good with your hands.”

  —elegant body of work sure to manifest in your midbrain—

  “You’re pretty good yourself,” he said with a dry slur. His voice seemed to come from great distance, across desert dunes of shifting sands and improbable horizons.

  After a few moments of tenderness, Nancy kicked off her sandals and slid out of her pants with gymnastic efficiency, fluid and graceful, poised and comfortable in her weightless world. Her naked body was shorn bare like polished calcite crystal that had never seen the sun, a statue of loveliness from a wet dream far away. She rested her palms on Zen’s shoulders and bent to kiss him again, her mouth rich with juva ben and her teasing tongue delightful. Her lips moved from his mouth to his cheek to his ear and moaned with pleasure as his hands found soft purchase between her legs and began the performance magic he knew so well from home. He fondled the gateway to her soul with a gentle massage, and the sound of her murmurs lingered in a blur of psychedelic sensation, rising and falling like a kite sailing in the wind, up and away, up and away.

  “I am so horny,” she said and thrust her hips against his busy fingers. “I think I’m going to climax.” She shuddered with a spasm of quiet release and went limp in his embrace. “Wow, everything they say about Bali boys is true!”

  They closed their eyes and drifted together, and the gentle sound of Nancy’s breathing was like a rustling tree branch in the wind on the terraced gardens of Keokapul.

  —the multilayer feedforward architecture gives neural networks the potential to be universal approximators among continuous functions on compact subsets of Rn under mild assumptions of activation function—A kaleidoscope of data began to play in Zen’s mind, a prismatic unfolding of a mechanical flower with leaves like blades of broken glass. He studied the mental image with a strange detachment, passive in blissful observation and finally unafraid of the V-net. It seemed that he could watch without perplexity, and choose where to place his attention among the myriad channels of inquiry. He could see a vast library of information, a mountain of evidence, the complete summary of human collective experience and the final, timeless obliteration of self.

  Nancy snorted back to wakefulness. “Oh, I zoned out, sorry.” She shook her head and brushed shaggy blonde hair back from her forehead. “That was wonderful, Zen. What can I do for you? I mean, is it my turn?”

  —this method of reducing high-order derivatives to combinatorics is used extensively in quantum field theory to reduce arbitrary products of creation and annihilation operators to mathematically manageable sums—Zen blinked away V-net visions to focus on her pretty face, her cheeks rosy with enthusiasm and her azure eyes bright with promise. “Well, that’s the way we do it back home on Bali.”

  Nurse Nancy floated up from his lap and reached to tug at his waistband. Zen shifted to help her as she pulled off his cellulose pants, and he flexed blood into his penis for presentation. “Wow,” she said, “that is something! Is that what gravity does? And so wild and unshaven.” She flicked her eyes to his face. “I mean, it’s great, you know. So natural.” The stress in her voice sounded hoarse with desire, and Zen felt mutual emergence of passion as she hovered above him with a gaze of adoration. She seemed like a primeval woman, iconic in beauty, and time seemed to slow to a lazy, graceful river of abandon. “Let me show you how we do it where I come from,” she said as slid her buxom body down onto him.

  SIX

  Bubbly fog filled Zen’s brain when he woke. A gnawing hunger coiled in his stomach like a vile and guilty serpent as he struggled to piece together remembrance out of a hazy landscape of drunken bliss. He peered over the armrest of his launch couch to see Nurse Nancy’s bare foot dangling from a couch facing opposite on the mirror side of the double room. He listened to the gentle purr of her sleeping respiration. So that much was true.

  Panic welled in his chest as his situation came into stark focus—by all the saints of Kiva! What had he done? What would Simara think? How could he face her after sleeping with another woman? He was supposed to be in a relationship! He was supposed to be pretending marriage! He looked around at the decorative tapestries and trappings of femininity, wondering how he might find his way back to his assigned quarters, feeling adultery like a great weight of pressure.

  “Help login,” he said as he touched his pinkie finger to his earlobe. “Help mode. Where am I?”

  Level 7, #33, residence of Nancy Stavos—limited precognition in clinical studies—followed by increased humidity throughout the Southern Beach district—a conjecture first proved independently by observing that Laurent polynomials and their constants satisfy strict recursion relations—all these perplexing voices and strange ideas! Where did they come from? His consciousness seemed to have expanded while he slept. An inner world with vast parameters had grown up around him, borderless realms of information extending out into space itself.

  ::Can you hear me, Zen?:: Simara’s voice sounded rich in his mind like a pillar of stability in a jungle of background chatter.

  “Simara, is that you?”

  ::Yes, I’m here. Did you get a brain implant?::

  “No, just an earbug, but I seem to be having trouble with the filters. Are you okay?”

  ::I’m locked in a launch couch on the troopship Adam’s Inspiration. We’re boosting for Cromeus in three hours! My stepfather went missing, and they’re trying to pin a murder rap on my ass.:: The blunt energy of her V-net voice was shocking co
mpared to the careful articulation of her spoken words. This was Simara unleashed and angry as hell—surely proof of her innocence!

  “I heard some of the details from legal authorities. They threatened me, but haven’t pressed any charges. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

  Static sounded in his ear, an untranslatable exhalation. ::Probably not. But it’s great to hear your voice. I was worried that we wouldn’t get an opportunity to say goodbye.:: —powerful counter-clockwise rotation in the Aspian Sea is creating a type 2 tropical hurricane with high levels of precipitation along the eastern seaboard north of New Jerusalem—toward understanding the nature of primitive aboriginal religion—simple elegance of the cosmological theory betrays a scarcity of detail—

  “I’m coming after you, Simara. I’ll buy a ticket for the flight.”

  ::No, you won’t. Don’t be silly. We don’t have to pretend partnership any longer. You’ve got all the money from the salvage. Go home and be rich.:: —humidity will reach a low of 20 today across the landlocked basin—of course she never should have looked inside the emerald castle—

  Zen choked on a pain of sorrow in his throat. He couldn’t bear the thought that she didn’t want him, that she might refuse him. “I can’t give up on you—on us. You mean too much to me.”

  ::Don’t lie to yourself, Zen. I know you’re sleeping with Nurse Stavos. You’re looking at her fat ass right now.::—the theory of celestial guidance for internal chakra has fallen gradually into disrepute—real progress demands a rise above the genetic blueprint, a qualitative leap in genomic architecture—

  His spine clamped up like a vice, a steel trap closing on his heart. He looked over at Nancy’s dangling bare foot. Was there any point in denying the truth? “How do you know that?”

  ::Your earbug has digital positioning, of course. What do you think? Anyway, she was broadcasting her conquest the whole time, the pervy girl. Not on a public channel, but I’m omnidroid, remember? I see everything.::—an apple a day keeps the doctor away—