by David Brin
Emily interrupted the feed and removed her Window lenses, popping them out like coins into a beggar’s cupped hand. What was she begging for, except to be left alone?
* * *
A month passed. Emily wore her CWs at work and removed them immediately afterwards. Poison ran through her feed and she never looked at it anymore. She could not create another. Each individual was allowed one identity, their own true name. Everything attached to it, flowed to it. What if she read what the poisoners said about her and became what they believed she was?
But what she never expected—the thing that hurt most—was pity. The latest wave to crest across her feed. Generous villagers, grownups, expressing charity, chiding the chiders.
—leave her alone, can’t you see she’s not all there?–
—look, she’s refused to take even mild anxiolytics. That’s dumb, but it’s part of the syndrome, clinging to depression like an addict–
—did you watch that compilation about her mother? How sad! You bullies better back off, or we can look closer at YOU—
Trend lines shifted. The decent villagers were winning … and their pity hurt worse than anything, hurling Emily even deeper into a pit.
She rumbled home on the rail, one among her neighbors, in the middle of the world but separated from it. The train rocked and swayed. Faces stared under jaundiced light, eyes seeing what she did not see, their feeds active. A young man in a black sweater sat on the seat across the aisle, watching her—her, not his feed. Emily couldn’t interpret his expression. But Emily never could interpret expressions, the nuances, could never complete the translation, never answer the question: what is he thinking? This man appeared unhealthy, too thin, weak, taking shallow, consciously measured breaths.
Her stop slid into place outside the train and halted. The doors opened. Emily stood up. The man’s gaze followed her. What did he imagine he knew about her? “Yes,” Emily said as she passed him, “I’m that awful, awful person. Doesn’t that make you happy?”
“I don’t think you’re awful. I’m—”
But she stepped onto the platform and quickly walked along the body of the train, back toward the stairs to the street level. The train hummed out of the station. Following after it, a hot breath of air adjusted Emily’s blouse, flipped her bangs—a mother’s invisible hand fussing with her appearance.
Behind her, someone wheezed, “Slow down, please wait.”
Emily looked back. The sickly man in the black sweater was walking toward her, breathing with difficulty, something in his hand. Of course she knew who he was. He and his brother looked very much alike. Did it mean there was nothing she could do, no separation she could effect? Was this the beginning, would they now follow her out of her feed and into the real world of her every day aloneness? If true, she couldn’t bear it. Emily fled up the stairs and home to her apartment.
* * *
She stood in her kitchen, the Nardil container in her hand. Why hadn’t she returned the pills to Dr. Schafer, as she had intended, or thrown them away? “Why don’t I ever know which is what?” Emily asked the empty room. Maybe she did know. Hadn’t she read somewhere, a blink-link off her feed, about the idea that conscious decisions were illusions and all one’s true decisions formulated under the surface, where something that was you but not you sorted reality? What if the not-you was part of a lot of other not-yous inhabiting the unconscious, and so it was your neighbors all over again, a community, or a mob—and a mob of Emilys within, the cavewoman, the terrified child, the presapient animal, the mourning daughter—and they had all decided that, yes, keep the Nardil and by all means use it.
By all means take it. Take all of it.
When she had said no to the prescription, Dr. Schafer told her she might want it, if not today, then some day. “Pay attention to the dosage,” he had said. Dr. Schafer’s risk assessment, his evaluation and session notes, were available to the greater medical establishment. Key words flagged, authorizing deeper investigation of risk factors, “harm to oneself or others,” the details of her treatment collated like so many 1040s, itemized deduction declarations, and W-2s. Finally, a human assessor, not unlike Dr. Schafer himself, reviewed the information (if a human ever did review it) and directed the prescription be filled “in the interests of the individual and the society at large,” as they liked to put it.
At least no one would make her actually swallow the Nardil; that was up to Emily.
She struggled with the cap, scattering pills across the counter like seeds. Twenty seeds for her eternal garden. Emily stared at the pills, her breathing gone shallow with dread, her lungs ready to betray her, as she had betrayed Alvaro before everyone turned on her.
A musical tone sounded through the apartment—someone pressing the button next to her name outside the building’s lobby door. The chimes sounded again, like a prod, like a finger poking her shoulder. Was she supposed to let them decide for her?
Angry, Emily swept the pills into the sink and washed them down the drain.
On the screen in the living room the man in the black sweater gazed back at her. “Hello?” he said, sounding out of breath. “Emily Vega?”
She didn’t expect to reply, but apparently the words had already been selected. She managed to twist them to her advantage even as they blurted past her lips. “It didn’t work. I washed them all down the drain. All of them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“You left your keypad on the train.”
“My—?”
He held up something that might have been Emily’s device, though it was hard to tell, just as it was hard to tell whether this man was Alvaro Samano, though she had been positive, or nearly positive, only minutes ago. She checked her pockets, looked around the room, but didn’t see her keypad. “I’m coming down.”
The man in the black sweater stood on the porch outside her building. Emily opened the door as he was triggering a medical inhaler into his mouth. He put it back in his pocket, looking sheepish. “Asthma,” he said.
“You’re not who I thought you were.”
“I couldn’t catch up to you, and you didn’t respond to messages. I guess you couldn’t without this.” He held out her device. “I knew who you were, so I searched your address and routed it. My name’s Caleb.”
Emily accepted the device and turned it over in her hands.
The neighbor in the black sweater, Caleb, frowned. “I’m sorry, did I interrupt something?”
“No, you didn’t interrupt anything. I did.”
He looked puzzled. There were so many of them in the world, so many puzzled people. They flailed at each other, told each other who they thought they were supposed to be, every interaction a validating performance entangled in a safety net of crisscrossing feeds, not even suspecting they had fallen off the high wire, or were afraid to climb for it in the first place. But not Emily, finally not Emily. She was alone, balancing across the sky, where you had to be a little crazy.
She preferred it that way, didn’t she? Preferred to be alone?
Later she found one Nardil, one capsule that hadn’t gone down the drain. She held it in the palm of her hand, and asked herself the question again.
“Progress” often comes
at a cost.
INSISTENCE OF VISION
DAVID BRIN
She’s pretty enough. Plump in that I-don’t-give-a-damn kind of way.
And un-blurred. I can see her. That makes all the difference.
“Did you just visit the Dodeco Exhibit?” I ask while she drinks from a public fountain.
Seems a likely guess. Her sleeveless pixelshirt shimmers with geometric shapes that flow and intersect with many-petaled flowers, shifting red to blue and emitting a low audible rhythm to match. She must have image-copied one of the theme works on display in the museum, just up a nearby flight of granite steps, where I glimpse crowds of folks—both blurred and visible—visiting the exhibition.
Wiping her mouth with the back of one hand, she glances up-down across my face, making a visible choice. Answering with a faint smile.
“Yeah, the deGornays are farky-impressive. A breakthrough in fractalart.”
Gazing at me without suspicion, she’s bare-eyed—a pair of simple digispectacles hang unused from her neck. The aiware looks kinda retro, like granny glasses—clear augment-lenses glinting in sunlight, here at the edge of Freedom Park. But the key feature is this.
She’s not wearing them. Not at the moment. I have a chance.
“There’s nobody better’n deGornay,” I counter, trying to match the with-it tone of her subgeneration. Navigating with a few tooth clicks and blink commands, I’ve already used my own specs to sift-search, grabbing a conversational tip about neomod art.
“But I really like Tasselhoff. She’s farknotic.”
“You-say?” The girl notches an eyebrow, perhaps suspecting my use of a spec-prompt. After all, we’re unevenly augmented at the moment. I worry she’s about to lift her own pair … but no. She continues to stare bare, cocking her head in mock defiance.
“You do realize Tasselhoff cheats? She ai-tunes the cadence of her artwork to sync with the viewer’s neural wave! Some say it’s not even legal.”
Gosh. Bright, educated and passionately opinionated. I am drawn, partly by the danger.
Several blurs pass nearby, then a visible couple. The man, garbed in penguinlike attire, sidles in to use the drinking fountain. So many people—it gives me an idea.
“I agree about the neural cheat, but Tasselhoff does offer a unique … say, it’s awful crowded here. Are you walking somewhere? I was strolling by the park.”
Ambiguous. Whichever way she’s heading, that’s my direction too.
Brief hesitation. Her hand touches the granny glasses. I keep smiling. Please don’t. Please don’t.
The hand drops. Eyes remain uncovered, bare-brave, open to the world and just the world.
She nods. “Sure. I can take the long way. I’m Jayann.”
“Sigismund,” I answer. We shake in the new, quasiroman fashion, more sanitary, hands not contacting hands but lightly squeezing each others’ wrists.
“Sigismund. Really?”
“Cannot tell a lie.” I laugh and so does she, unaware how literal I’m being.
I can’t lie. Or rather, I can. But it’s not allowed.
She doesn’t notice what happens next, but I do. As we both turn to leave the museum steps, I glimpse the penguin-garbed man staring at me through his pair of augmented reality specs. He frowns. Appears to mumble something …
… before he and his wife abruptly vanish from clear sight, becoming blurs.
* * *
Walking together now, Jayann and I are chatting and flirting amiably. Our path skirts the edge of Freedom Park. Babbling inanely about trends in art, we stay to the right as joggers pound along, most of them visible but some blurred. Just vague clouds of color—Collision-Avoidance Yellow—that even my damned-limited specs can see. I hear them all, of course—barefoot or shod, blurred or un-blurred—pounding along the trail, panting like their ancestors, hunting across primeval savannah.
I offer a comparison of deGornay to Kavanaugh, deliberately naive, so she’ll lecture for a while as we skirt a realm of leafy lanes. Specs don’t work in there. No augmentations at all. That’s why it’s Freedom Park. Few would expect to find a cursed creature like me right here at the edge of what—for me—is dangerous ground. And that’s why I come.
To my left the nearby street and city roar with stimulus, both real and virtual, every building overlaid with metadata or uberinfo. I can fine-tune my specs to an extent. Omit adverts, for example. Though my tools are limited, even primitive. And half the buildings are just solid blocks of prison gray to me.
My walls.
No matter, I’m concentrating on what Jayann says. Actually, it’s very interesting! Her art-enthusiasm is catching. Even a bit endearing. Mostly listening, I only have to comment now and then.
Soon, I hear piping voices and glance back, stepping aside for a cluster of maybe twenty child-sized blurs—little clouds of chatter, giggles and gossip, pitter-pattering along the gravel. Shepherded by two adults—one of them a clot of vagueness, the other unedited and brave. Visible as a lanky-dark young man—my specs even reveal an ID-tag—his name and public profile.
Wow. Just like in better times, before the change. Before I lost the power that everyone around me takes for granted.
Godlike omniscience.
“Well, I have get back to work,” Jayann says. “I’ll shortcut through here.” She indicates a tree-lined path, clearly inviting me to come along.
“What do you do?” I ask, diverting the subject. I take two steps, following her. Already there’s a drop in spec resolution. I daren’t go much farther.
“I work in sales. But studying art history so I can teach. You?”
“Used to teach. Now I help a public service agency.”
“Volunteer work? That’s farky and sweet.” She smiles. Though backing down the path, she’s starting to grow fuzzy. I’d better talk fast.
“But I manage to come here—to the park and museum—every Tuesday, same time, like clockwork.”
And there it is. Totally lame and stunningly old-fashioned, but maybe that will intrigue her.
It even seems so! She grins.
“Okay, Mister Mysterious Sigismund. Maybe I’ll bump into you again, some Tuesday.”
I sigh inwardly. It’s all I could hope for. A chance.
Then hope crashes. She grabs her specs.
“Wait. Just to be sure, let me drop filters and give you my—”
“Say, is that a bed of gladiolas? This early?” I ask, purposely stepping past Jayann, walking down the path, counting steps and memorizing it as best I can. The park’s e-interference grows more intense. Then, abruptly, my specs cut off completely. I’m blind. But it’s worth it if she follows. If that prevents her from looking at me through augmented reality.
I keep walking, several more paces, toward the memorized flower bed. Bending over, I take off the now-useless aiware, pretending to look. Without specs, I’m even more blind—not even static, just blackness. But I chatter on, as if able to see bare-eyed, hoping she followed me down here, where specs don’t work.
“You know, they remind me of that deGornay—”
“Bastard!”
A pair of fists hammer my back, then a hard-driven foot slams into my knee from behind, sending me tumbling, crashing into the shrubbery. Pain mixes with humiliated disappointment. And even worse …
… my specs are gone! I grope for them.
“How dare you!” She continues screaming. “You … you liar!”
My left hand probes among the crumpled flowers, searching.
“I … I never lied, Jayann.”
“What were you planning? To get all my info, my address, to break in and murder me?”
“My crimes weren’t violent. Look them up. Please, Jayann.…”
“Don’t you dare speak my name! What are you doing?”
“My specs. Please help me find them. Without them…”
“You mean these?” A rustling sound. Turning toward it.
“I can’t see without them.”
“So I’ve heard.” Her voice drips with irony and anger. “Instead of prison, take convicts and blind them. Let ’em only see what special specs deliver to the brain. No possible victims, or children, or anyone who chooses not to let a criminal watch them.”
“Yes, but—”
“You stole from me that right!”
Against better judgment, I argue.
“You could have looked … with specs … seen my warning marks…”
She howls incoherent fury and I know it was not wise to argue. I may not have lied, but I did divert attention. Used flirtation and charm. Acted like a regular man. I envision her there on the path, clutching my specs, shaking them. “I ought to smash these!”
“Please give them to me, Jayann … and guide me back to the street. I’ll never bother you again, I swear.…”
Probably, she’s a fine person, under normal circumstances. I try to sympathize with her sense of betrayal. But the rage that pummels into me seems extreme, for a social offense … charming a young woman into talking to me, bare-eyed, for a while. Mea culpa, I would pay for it. But did I deserve a pounding with fists? Her demeaning shouts?
A crunching sound. My specs, getting smashed. And God knows what’s next.
Making a best guess, I run. Gravel stays underfoot for eight good steps, then gives way to grass, so I correct, meeting path again …
… before tripping over someone’s outstretched leg and sprawling face-first. My chin stings and I spit dust. “Jayann.… I’m sorry!”
“Not half as sorry as you’re—”
I leap up, stagger forward again. There was a gentle slope down from the street, I recall. And now I hear the panting of joggers. Traffic sounds beyond. With that bearing, I run again.
No more hope of getting my specs back or reporting for work. My sole thought is to reach the sidewalk … then just sit down at the curb, pathetic and still. A harmless blind man. Word will reach my probation officer. Ellie will come get me. Lecture me. Berate me. Possibly impose punishment. Though it’s all recorded and I swear, I don’t think I committed any actual—
Traffic noise is louder. Joggers curse as they weave around me. How I wish I could see even blurs.
Someone plants a hand against my back and shoves. Stumbling off an unseen curb, I hear brakes squeal. Then deeper darkness falls.
* * *
Eventually, all kinds of pain grow dull. Lying in a hospital bed, still blind while docs rewire some new prison spectacles around skull damage, I listen as Ellie explains about how lucky I am. What a fool I was. How close I came to breaking several rules and lengthening my sentence. To losing my life.
“I know. People over-react when they spec you’re a felon. Too many blur themselves automatically. You feel like a pariah. So, would you prefer some awful prison cell? The savagery of prison life? At least now you can work. Pay taxes. Live among us.”