by Pat Cadigan
"Homeboy, if you're not going to do anything more interesting than stagger around, I can't use you."
"Excuse me," he said. "I have to find some people."
They slid out of his field of vision, and his pov floated around a corner and down a long hallway-long? No, just a special-effects distortion. A robot bird-head popped out of a doorway and inspected him curiously for several seconds before a man's face came out from behind it and waved him on. Cam, he realized, another cam. It was like one of those Big Night Out video releases they did in Entertainment, he thought; simulated parties and private clubs and bars. Like an insty-vacation. He became aware of music, a driving, frenzied beat urging him to relax, relax, relax.
At the top of a spiral staircase, he had a sudden clear glimpse of a mass of hair the color of dark honey before it moved away. "Marly?" he asked. He pushed through the warm bodies posed against the twisting, turning railing. Words bounced off him like hail, and he emerged on the next floor feeling slightly worked over.
He made his way down another hall, stopping at every doorway. Some of the rooms were crowded, and some were mostly empty, but Marly wasn't in any of them. The door to the last room was half-open, and he hesitated, almost knocked, and then gave it a push with his foot.
Music rushed over him, big music with lots of different sounds in it. He hung onto the frame, overwhelmed and blinded. Sometime later his vision cleared, and he saw the bed tipped up on its side against the far wall. To make room for the music, he thought. And for the man he now saw kneeling in the center of the floor before a small fire, urging the flames upward with graceful fingers.
A little ways away Caritha was stretched out with her back to him, resting on one elbow, watching. Gabe floated down onto the floor next to her with a rush of relief.
"I knew I'd find you," he said, leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes.
"Shit, what happened to you?" Her voice sounded strange and rough under the music.
"When?" he asked. He wanted to look at her, put an arm around her, but his head was suddenly too heavy to move, his eyes too much trouble to open. He would open them in a minute; there was no point to running a video if you were going to keep your eyes closed.
"Whenever. What'ud you do, get a few refills? How much did you have?"
He managed to get his eyes open to slits. Caritha's voice sounded very strange, as if someone had been messing with the program. The hacker. The hacker who had claimed to be on his side had done something to his program. He struggled to raise his head. The man in the center of the room was burning a musical instrument, he realized, an old electric guitar from the last century, squirting fluid on it and setting a match to it deliberately. Someone was asking him if he was experienced.
"That's not the question," he said. "The question is who's really on your side. Anyone can say they are, but it-it-" He floundered; the thought was suddenly draining away like water down an open pipe.
" 'It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing,' right? That what you're trying to tell me?"
He reached out blindly and found her wrist. "I'm trying to tell you we've been found out. We've got to get away. Where's Marly?"
" 'Found out'? Somebody found something out about you?" A sudden raucous laugh, un-Caritha-like and yet not so out of character. Something was tugging at his mind, trying to get through the jumble of ideas and images and noise; he thought it might be his calendar alarm beeping almost unheard, but no reminder display appeared before him.
"It was Manny," he said faintly. "He found out. Not entirely legally, but I don't know what he's going to do."
"Manny? You mean Rivera?" Another laugh. "Nothing about that character's entirely legal. I could tell you stories."
"You could?" Gabe asked, confused.
"Who knows but that I fucking will."
The man was still burning his guitar. Or burning it again. Static boiled through the figure, and Gabe realized he was looking at a holo of a very old piece of footage.
"There's no time for stories anymore," he said after a bit. "I covered up as much as I could. All he'll find is commercials now, but it'll be a long time before we're all together again." He paused, twining his fingers with hers. So real; he could actually feel the sweat on her palm, the texture of her fingers, the warmth. He tried to remember if new hotsuits with upgraded sensors had been issued. Because the sensations weren't ever this vivid, only good enough, what with the video portion providing power of suggestion, so that your mind would fill in any missing details. Usually, if you surrendered to the illusion. Which you really had to do to make really good video, even commercials…
After a while he realized he'd been talking without knowing it again, and at some length. He blinked at the flames licking up from the guitar.
"I put two LotusLands in you, what you call your mildly hallucinogenic beverages, just to get that fucking pinched look off your face. I don't know how many more they put in you downstairs, but I'd say you're more toxed than you've ever been in your life."
Frowning, he turned to look at her and jumped. It wasn't Caritha.
"You remember anything that happened since you walked in here?" Gina asked him. She waited a moment. "Didn't think so."
Attention, Marly's voice said in his mind. This is not a simulation.
"It's a little late to tell me that," he muttered.
"A little late?" Gina gave a short, humorless laugh. "It's a whole fucking stone-home lot late." Her eyes were dark holes; she was even more toxed than he was, he realized. "We made it easier to be in the sounds and the pictures, and hardly fucking none of it's real anymore. It's a faster, better way to get a real unreal experience. You don't know what I'm talkin' about, do you?"
"I don't know what I'm talking about," he said honestly.
"Good, just as long as we're high enough up in the stupid-sphere for you." A cam poked into the room, took a careful look around, and backed out again. "There now," Gina said. "Valjean's got this running deal-not with me-that he releases all his parties as videos. You can't come here and take a fucking shit but for a fucking audience. He's on the rich-and-famous chips. The folks in Kansas buy them, pop them in their flatscreen consoles or their headmounts, if they even have that shit in Kansas, and go to parties they don't have a chance in hell of ever really going to. And you know what that's from? You know where the fuck they got that idea?"
Gabe shook his head. Whatever was in his system was fading down, a trough between one high and the next. There was a small burning point in the pit of his stomach.
"They used to have these TV shows of kids dancing to music, these flatscreen things in the pre-Jurassic when it was all in black-and-white, and there were maybe two-three networks and two-three channels you could get them on in any city. Kids dancing, just kids dancing to music, and maybe a solo or a group'd come on and lip-synch a hot release. Something like a hundred kids dancing around, and out there in TV land, there'd be maybe a million kids dancing along, pretending they were there."
"Uh-huh," Gabe said politely. He was trying to picture it without really having much idea of what she was talking about.
"It was later that music started to stand for something," she went on suddenly, in a quieter voice. "There were all these ideas, the ideas were in the music, the music was in the ideas. These performers would cut these releases, and they'd say shit like, 'Well, my album's fighting against this' and 'My album's fighting against that.' This was before anyone got the bright idea to do the monster benefits to feed the hungry. You probably don't know what those are. Nobody does that anymore. Now they go get the hungry with cams and they call it, I don't know, 'poverty porn' or 'slum porn,' or I don't know what they call it.
"So they had these albums that were fighting this and fighting that and fighting for some other thing, but what they all really fought in the end was each other, for a place on the old hit parade. Number ten with a bullet, number four with a bullet. They were all so far away from it, see, they were all so f
ucking far away. They'd say something like 'world peace' and they didn't have the first fucking idea of what the world was like. They saved the goddamn whales, and they didn't even fucking live in the fucking world."
She wiped the dreadlocks back from her smooth forehead, digging her fingers into them so hard, Gabe was afraid she was going to tear them away. "Some of that wasn't their fault. There was lots of crazy shit, even before the arena massacre at the Behemoth concert. You old enough to remember that one?"
Gabe tried to think. She waved a hand at him.
"Never mind, they got such killer video on it, you don't have to be old enough, just tune in disaster porn. Watch the Jesus-boy in the army fatigues take out a thousand kids in one sweep, you are there. But there was crazy shit before that, nutsoids with knives, nutsoids with guns, nutsoids with crazy fucking shit for brains, like the guy that took out Lennon."
"Lenin?" he said, puzzled.
"For all it really meant to him, he coulda shot his fucking TV set. And you know, everyone was sorry. I remember my grandmother telling me that, how really fucking awful it was, and fifteen years later they were still squeezing videos out of the guy, like they forgot somebody wiped him out, and it had gone from, like, because they loved him to it not mattering what had happened because they could still get the fucking videos. They cooked up a simulation, a fucking simulation of the man and got it to do interviews and give simulated answers to simulated questions before the estate pulled the plug on that." She focused on him suddenly with a searching expression. "Do you understand a fucking word I'm saying?"
He thought hard. "Well, I know they have to be dead for a hundred and fifty years without a conservatorship before they're in the public domain. But with a conservatorship the time limit's different, and you have to license-"
"I want it to matter," she said. "I want the fucking music and the people to matter. I don't want fucking rock'n'roll porn to go with the med porn and the war porn and the weapons porn and the food porn-shit, it's all porn, goddamn fucking video porn." She gestured at the holo; the guitar was burning again. "They fixed it so he'd live forever. They don't know he woulda lived forever anyway, because when it came outa him, it came outa something real, so it was real. I want it to come out of something real, not some fucking box, I want it to come out of human-fucking-beings, I want it to be something that makes you know you're alive, and not another part of a bunch of fucking pels in a high-res video!"
She rested her forearms on her knees. Gabe touched her shoulder, wanting to offer her something and not having the slightest idea what that could possibly be.
"That's why I'm gonna do it," she said after a moment.
"Do what?" he asked.
"Change for the machines."
He rubbed the side of his face where she had hit him about a hundred years before.
She slapped his leg suddenly, startling him. "And that's where you came in, isn't it." She got up and offered him a hand. "Come on. Take a little walk with me."
He looked at her hand suspiciously.
"I ain't gonna hit you again. That was a fucking accident, I don't know how many more times I have to tell you that."
"It isn't that," he said slowly, gazing at her hand. "It's- well-is it a long walk?"
"Longest walk you ever took." She grabbed him and hauled him up.
The sign came swimming out of the colorful darkness, plain white board with red glow-print, no holos or other tricks: Kutt-Upps (2 Drink Minim.). Gabe stopped where he was and stared up at it. It didn't mean anything to him, and he couldn't figure out why it would pop out of the roiling confusion of his vision.
Gina took hold of his arm. "Don't tell me you got a secret life with med porn, too."
"Oh, if you've seen one tracheotomy, you've seen them all," he said in a blase tone as she urged him forward. The stuff in his system had reasserted itself-either that, or he'd had some more, he didn't really know-and he seemed to be walking through an orchard of stylized, possibly artificial trees with branches like lattices and lightning bolts. Except wasn't there some place down south that did something funny with trees, got them to bear leaves that looked like lace or something? Big tourist attraction.
At the same time the street looked like a long, dark tunnel, and he couldn't really see the ground, so for all he knew, the next step could be right into some yawning pit, or the step after that, or the step after that. Gina seemed pretty confident that it was solid ground all the way.
Then he realized he was in a long, dark tunnel sloping upward, and he kept ducking his head, thinking the ceiling was very low. But Gina kept pulling him along, and he was thinking that she had been right, it was the longest walk he'd ever taken, when he stepped into an explosion of light and sound.
She had both arms around him from behind, steering him through the chaos. A transparent blimp the size of a watermelon was sailing toward him, diverting up over his head at the last moment. He stopped to watch it; tiny dots of light danced over the side, spelling out MORE DRUGS. He laughed a little and leaned back against Gina, putting his hands over hers. "I don't think so," he murmured. Gina said something, but not to him. It didn't matter; he was enjoying the feel of her arms around him. He had forgotten exactly how good it felt, for real, not in a hotsuit.
Your whole body's a hotsuit, said Caritha's voice in his mind.
That would make his brain the headmount, he thought dreamily, and looked around. In another part of the room, on a raised platform, a woman was holding a strange piece of machinery that looked like the bastard offspring of a shovel and a keyboard and screaming something at the top of her lungs. Periodically she slammed the wide part of the machine down on the stage. After the third time he started seeing sparks flying up from the point of impact.
Yah, his body was the hotsuit, and his brain was the head-mount, but the program seemed to have gone a little crazy.
MORE DRUGS.
He understood percussionist right away, but it took him a while to grab the idea that her last name was Something. The gold tone of her skin had a stronger yellow in it than Catherine's, but on her it looked good. On her it was Something. She wasn't impressed with his Something jokes, but she didn't hit him with the sticks, either. She tortured the table with them.
Maybe he needed some sticks, he thought. He could have used them in Manny's office. Bing, bang, bap, flip-flip, tap. She wouldn't let him handle them, so he used his fingers, trying to find a way through her rhythm. A little later she told him he'd made a game try, and if he wanted to get into music, she could show him the way. But right then Gina lifted him out of the chair by the back of his neck, and he could only watch the table recede in the distance. The sticks tapped good-bye before a sudden glittering population fell into the space between him and them, blotting them out. He must be leaving.
– -
He had gone away for a little while, but there was a dim recording in his mind of a blimp, a far more vivid memory of a yellow gold woman with dancing sticks, and somewhere in there a brick wall with snakes crawling on it-or was that a brick floor? A brick ceiling?-and now here he was in the open night air and someone was saying, "AR is a big, big concept. Wraps around a lotta stuff. A whole lotta stuff."
His vision cleared again, and he was looking at a monitor screen running in split-mode, with what might have been identical sets of figures scrolling up either side at different rates.
"On the right here," the voice went on, "are the readings for the area under normal conditions, when there'd be nobody here. On the left are the real readings that we're intercepting on the way to the security-system sensors-"
Marly's voice spoke casually in his head. Try to say that five times real fast. No, not her voice, just his own, he decided. Suddenly he no longer wanted to disown his thoughts and stick false names on them. He didn't have to do that right now, he didn't have to cut pieces of himself off and dress them up in masks and costumes to keep himself company-
"-tents and purposes a facade simulation at the poin
t of input to the security system, where we alter the readings, change the figures going in to be those you'd get if there was nobody here. See, there's air pressure, wind velocity-now the sound and vision's trickier because we have to get between what the cams see and hear and what they tell the system they see and hear. So we run a real facade simulation there in a loop. That's the fooler loop. You just have to sit on top of it and make sure nothing gets jiggled out of place-"
He drifted away again, unsure if he was moving physically. It felt as though he might be. The lights and colors were shot through with large pockets of darkness, and he couldn't seem to get oriented.
"Yah, well, we're all corks on this ocean." A kid raised up from the synthesizer he had been bending over. "I've got a real feel for the sound of guitars, myself. All kinds. I don't need anybody else. Hear me, and you'd swear you were hearing four-five people-"
Someone interrupted him. He shoved a hand at Gabe, and Gabe took it. "Remember me," he said, pumping Gabe's hand up and down. "My name's Dexter, and I'm a whole fucking group in one body, I swear I am. Tell her that. Please? Tell her."
Gabe nodded, dazed, and wandered off. A whole fucking group in one body. He could sympathize. That wasn't really so hard. Just pull them out and make them into individuals, the group, make good guys and bad guys and stick them in a simulation, and you'd never have to be alone-
Deadline ‹ month.
The memory was a fist in the face. He knew just how a fist in the face felt, too; if he ever had to program a hotsuit with facial coverage for a fast shot to the head, he was ready. What he ought to do now, he thought, was take a blow to the stomach and then program that into one of his commercials and persuade Manny to test-drive it 'suited up. Wouldn't that give old Manny a surprise, would that just give him something to think over? It wouldn't actually hurt him, it would just be unpleasant. After all, it wasn't like the hotsuit was anything but skin-deep.