The Reality Plague

by Doug Welch

  “Nice buns,” Liv's sleepy voice said.

  He paused midway through dressing and looked at her. “What? Do you really think so?”

  “Yeah. You've got a nice body, Jake. Not like those ridiculous cartoons on the net. I really like your blue eyes.”

  “They're gray.”

  “Not when you're aroused.”

  “Well, I've got to admit. You've got a sexy body too.”

  “What? No, I'm too skinny.”

  “No Liv. You're a beautiful human woman, and the sight of you naked is the most powerful sight in the world.”

  She looked at his naked hips. “That looks like it might be fun to play with.”

  “Oh? You think?” He moved toward her.

  “I think we had better end this conversation.” She rose, grabbed her clothes and ran into the bathroom.

  After a while she emerged, fully clothed, and moved to the kitchen. “You left the commode seat up.”

  “Huh? So what?”

  “So… nothing – forget it.”

  He didn't have any idea what she was complaining about, and he decided not to pursue it.

  Liv returned with a food package. “Let's eat and then we can talk about what to do.”

  They ate silently, sitting on the floor. Periodically, Jake glanced at her and occasionally their eyes would make contact, eliciting a smile, or nose wrinkle on Liv's part. He watched each small mannerism, the delicate way she selected a morsel of food with her fingers, a grimace when one of the packages proved difficult to open, and the grace with which she moved her arms and legs. Jake feared it couldn't last, and the thought that she would be gone caused a heavy feeling in his chest. “Liv isn't there any possibility that we could just stay together? I mean, couldn't we find a place together?”

  “Jake – No. No, it's impossible. I have to leave, and as much as I may want to be with you, you must live here in the city. Forget you saw me. It's too dangerous for you.”

  “Why's it dangerous for me and not for you?”

  “I'm – special. I can't explain why, but you'll have to trust me. I can't stay here and you can't follow me where I'm going.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “Look, Jake, after a few days, if your AI is not turned back on, the net will become – ah – concerned. Yes – concerned. It will try to locate you to make sure you're all right. It will send a human operative to question you. How you respond is very important, because your answers can cause bad things to happen. If I am here, the bad things will become catastrophic things, much worse than you can imagine. I need to leave before the net gets suspicious.”

  “Is that why you're homeless?”

  “Partly. I can't be anywhere a net-connected AI can find me.”

  “How do you plan to get out of the city?”

  “I don't know. I made a mistake in coming here, I couldn't complete what I planned to do, and now I know this is futile.”

  Jake brooded. To have this opportunity, and immediately lose it caused unbearable pain. He had to find a way to remain with her. “At least, you can rest up and recover your strength. That's something. How long can you stay?”

  “Not long, it's probably too late, your AI knows I'm here.”

  “Alice? She's shut down.”

  “It's recording all of our movements, our conversation, and anything we do that's net related. As soon as you turn it back on, that information will immediately become part of the net-AI.”

  “You mean Alice is eavesdropping?”

  “You could say that, but it can't think about it, until you reactivate it. I'll wipe it before I leave.”

  “You can do that? What are you, some kind of super-hacker?”

  She laughed. “No, just a human woman who knows a lot about these kinds of things.”

  “OK. I have an idea. If you plan to leave the city, you need to know how to do it. Why don't we leave the cube, and find a route out. We can start in the tube train. Take it as far as it will go, out of L.A., then walk as far as we can.”

  She hesitated, biting on her lower lip. “I don't know – let me think about it.” Liv lapsed into silence.

  With no interface to the net, Jake experienced crushing boredom while he waited for her to decide. If he could activate Alice she would provide companionship, comfort, and even sex if he needed it. Without his AI he wouldn't survive. His dependence upon a machine unnerved him a lot. He looked in the corner at Liv, who stared at the floor. She represented a seductively-attractive alternative.

  Liv stirred. She seemed to have come to a decision and adopted a resigned look. “Let's go Jake. It's worth a try. But I need to wipe your AI first.”

  They left the cube after Liv worked with the AI, taking two blankets to put on the train seats. In addition, each of them carried two packets of food. Liv assured him that they could find water during their trip and they walked out of the tower down to the underground. Jake didn't have any idea which direction led out of the city, so he let Liv choose.

  They rode in silence on either side of the compartment as the train flashed past station after station. Jake wondered when they would reach the end. It seemed like less than an hour before the train finally slowed and slid to a stop. He didn't know what to expect. Would it be more of the city? Where were they? They exited the compartment, and rode the escalator to the surface. They stepped out onto a sidewalk, and he looked up and down the wide street that it bordered. Buildings lined it into the visible distance. They looked different from the towers that housed his cube and the offices where he worked. They weren't as tall, and they were obviously in poor condition. The fronts had a drab sameness. Filth fouled the windows to such an extent it made it nearly impossible to see the interiors and thousands of birds perched on every surface or flew endlessly around the structures.

  He waited. “Which direction do you want to try?”

  “Which way was the train moving when we got off?”

  “It think – That way,” he pointed to the right. “It's hard to tell. We got turned in the underground. I guess one way is as good as the next.”

  “OK, to the right then.”

  They began to walk along the buildings. Jake left ample space between himself and Liv, but stayed close enough to assist her in case of trouble. Wind blew through the alleys, occasionally creating whistling and moaning sounds and their footsteps echoed along the street. Even in the deserted streets of the inner city, the noises of equipment and ventilation fans broke the silence. Here, no sound but the wind, the cries of the birds, and the echoes of their footsteps greeted them. He started to become uneasy by the unusual setting. Some of the buildings appeared damaged, windows broken and not repaired, doors forced open. Something or someone had caused it, but where were the people? He peered into one of the broken windows and saw dusty clothing on racks. The fashions indicated that the garments dated more than ten years ago. The owners must have died from the plague. As they moved down the sidewalk, the damage grew worse and his sense of danger increased.

  Liv stopped in front of a building that once housed a grocery store. “I don't like this, maybe we should go back.”

  “I know what you mean, but if you're going to leave the city, this is the way you'll have to come. How did you get to L.A. in the first place?”

  “I took the intercontinental bullet train.”

  “Well why don't you ride it out of the city?”

  “It's too dangerous, it's not working very well, and I nearly got caught.”

  “Caught? Caught by whom?”

  Liv looked down the street avoiding Jake's gaze. “I can't –”

  Crap! “Wait! Don't tell me, I know. – You can't talk about it.”

  “I told you Jake, that there were some things I couldn't explain. It doesn't matter. When I left the bullet train station, I became lost, and I haven't any idea how to find it again. L.A. is bigger than I imagined it.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  She became silent and introspective. The
n she glanced down the street. “Let's give it a little more time and if we haven't reached the outskirts, we'll turn around and head back to the cube.”

  He shrugged. “You lead, I'll follow.”

  Liv continued down the sidewalk. They walked for another hour without finding a way out, just more of the same dilapidated and filthy buildings.

  As they walked Jake examined the complex feelings that Liv had aroused in him. He stared as he watched her hips swing, and realized that he felt oddly protective toward her despite the fact that she seemed more self assured than he did. At the same time she irritated him with her stubborn refusal to reveal any detail about herself, like he was an innocent who would expire from the revelation that she existed. It insulted the male-generated image of his omnipotence and emasculated him. I want her and I can’t have her. She frustrates me and attracts me. Am I falling in love with her? It had been so long since he had felt human skin and arms and lips caressing him, holding him, and signifying love that he just couldn’t know. Are we losing our capacity for love? Is the net destroying that very last vestige of our humanity? What happened on the net was sex, pure and simple. Just a way to find contact where there was none. In no way could it be equated to love. He knew love. He had felt it from his parents, brother and his first encounter with Shelly. I finally remembered her name. I would have married her in another world.

  Periodically they encountered a cross street. At one of the intersections, Jake thought that he spotted a discontinuity a few blocks away to their left. “What's that?” He pointed down the street.

  Liv shielded her eyes with her hand. “I don't know. It looks different. Let's go that way.”

  They turned at the intersection, and a few blocks down the street they saw it. At the end of the block, the street became an uninhabited road, a road that stretched into the far horizon. The city simply ended. It didn't die out and become sparse, it just ended. Jake remembered as a boy, living with his parents that the outlying areas of L.A. consisted of suburbs. They apparently had vanished. It looked as though a giant hand had plucked out all the buildings beyond a certain point, revealing vacant land, as far as the eye could see. They gazed around in amazement, scanning the horizon. Jake realized now, that they had walked parallel to the edge of the city all along. If at any time at an intersection, they had turned left, they would have run into it.

  They walked down the road a little distance out into the vast emptiness. As his senses became accustomed to the sight, Jake realized that the demarcation between the vacant land and the city varied considerably, not quite uniform, more like a fractal. It didn't matter, in the distance, the eye could not discern the difference and it looked straight as a ruler. He also noticed the land didn't lie fallow. Bordering the city, he saw green stripes, evidence of agriculture. Faint clouds of dust billowed out, likely from the activities of automated farm equipment used for cultivation. Jake had heard the reports before of the massive effort required to feed the population, but that had only been net-news. Here he stared at the results of that project.

  “It's a giant farm. It's where our food comes from.”

  Liv nodded. “The AI's must have done this as part of the food production effort. Optimal use of the land and living space. But the city is dying like an organism at the fringes. The center will be the last to go.”

  The thought saddened him, but Liv had a point. The evidence of the city's decay lay behind them. “Liv? Look down there,” he pointed a distance down the geometrically straight roadway. “I think I see something. Do you see it?”

  She stared in the direction he indicated. “Yes, a slight clump by the road. Let's go check it out.”

  He felt tired. They had just walked further than he had in years, but he didn't want to reveal weakness in front of Liv. “I don't know. It looks pretty far away.”

  “If we get too far and haven't reached it, we can turn back.” She started walking.

  Jake hesitated, and then followed her. They walked for a few miles before they could identify the object. He called out, “it's a tree. What's one, lone tree doing in the middle of all of this?”

  Liv stopped and waited for him to catch up. “I don't know. How does it get water?”

  “The government built desalinization plants long ago and some of the water comes from the north. L.A. is dry country, so they must use drip irrigation. These crops will die if the water-producing facilities fail.”

  Liv didn't respond at first, but then she gestured down the road. “Let's see what kind of tree grows in the middle of nowhere.”

  They continued on. The tree grew, revealing its huge girth and expanse of foliage. Soon Jake could see that its branches sagged, burdened by some kind of fruit. As they got closer, he could discern the color and shape of the fruit. “They're plums! It's a plum-tree!”

  They ran the remaining distance to the tree and entered the shade of its branches. Jake stared in amazement and delight. “Plums. I haven't seen real plums since I was a kid.” He grabbed one and bit into its flesh. “Mumm, delicious! God, that's soo good!”

  He saw juice dribbling down Liv's chin. She rolled her eyes with obvious pleasure, and finished the fruit down to the seed. “That's the difference between the net and reality, Jake. The neuromechs mimic the world to an amazing degree, but they can never get it quite right. This – this is reality.” She pointed to the tree.

  They sat beneath the plum-tree as close as they dared, gorging themselves on the fruit. The sun lowered toward the horizon.

  “Liv, with you here, at this place, at this time, this feels like a first date, and I think it's the best date of my life.”

  “I wouldn't know. I never had much time for dates or sex, just my work. But if this is what a date is like, I'm sorry I missed out on it.”

  “What work did you do?”

  She remained silent for a while. “God, Jake, I hate repeating this, but I can't tell you.”

  He suddenly felt angry and his mood evaporated. “I think we need to head back to the cube.” He rose from the dirt and angrily brushed his clothes.

  “Jake, I'm sorry I don't want to hurt you, I never want to hurt you. You're my only friend. Maybe I should go now. Staying with you will only make it harder.”

  Her words caused his stomach to roil with anxiety. “No! – No, you need to prepare for this. I'll load you with all the food I have. After all, it's only one plum-tree in the middle of nowhere. You can't live on plums.” His smile hid his sadness.

  “OK, one more night, and I'll leave in the morning.” She rose to follow him.

  As they walked to the roadway, Jake heard a mechanical clanking sound coming from his left. He looked down the road, and spied a vehicle coming toward them. It appeared a large, three-wheeled conveyance. Surprisingly, there was human driver. He stopped, waiting, while the machine approached them. It was an old, antique, rusty farm tractor. “I wonder what he wants?”

  “I wonder where he came from?” Liv said.

  The tractor stopped a safe distance from them. The occupant did not speak. He just looked at them. Jake became uncomfortable under his stare. “Hi! We're just looking – looking at the tree. It's beautiful.”

  He didn't reply.

  “Nice meeting you, we'll be going now.” He beckoned for Liv to follow him.

  She didn't move. “Where are you from?”

  The young sandy-haired driver studied her. After a moment, he spoke. “You folks from the city?”

  Liv walked toward the tractor. “Yes but I'm trying to leave it. Find somewhere else to live. Do you know of a place?”

  “Maybe. Maybe if you don't have the plague.”

  “I don't. Is there anywhere we can talk?”

  “Could be. His brown eyes glanced to Jake. How about your friend?”

  “He needs to stay here. He can't leave the city.”

  Jake panicked. He moved to stand in front of her. “Liv you don't know this guy. He could be dangerous. He could harbor the plague. I had a feeling back in the cit
y. There's something strange about this. Let's go back.”

  “Wait, Jake, this could be important. More important than you know. Wait a while.” She walked around him and addressed the man sitting in the tractor. “Do you have the plague?”

  He laughed. “No. None of us have it. We never got it.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I 'spec cause we didn't live in the city. Use'd t' be migrant workers. Picked crops. That is, 'til the machines started doin' it. We eat OK though. Steal from the fields, from the city. Lots of food out there.” He pointed to the farm land.

  “Aren't you connected to the net?” Liv asked.

  “You kiddin'? Couldn't afford it on a crop picker's pay. Naw, we ain't connected. None of us are.”

  Liv became obviously excited. “Listen, Jake, I've got to go talk to these people. You need to stay here. I promise. I'll be back.”

  The thought that she might not return, brought tightness and pain to Jake's throat and chest. He wanted to grab her and prevent her from leaving, but knew he couldn't touch her. “You promise?”

  There were tears in her eyes. “Jake, if what I suspect is right, we may never have to leave each other again. This is bigger than you or me or… us. It involves the whole human race. I have to go with these people.”

  Reluctantly, he nodded. “I'll wait for you here, under the tree.”

  “I'll be back.” She stared at him a long time, as though she tried to memorize him. “I promise, Jake, I'll be back.” She turned to the man who waited on the tractor. “Can you give me a ride?”

  “Sure. Hop in the trailer. We still want to keep our distance though, Least 'til we know you better.”

  She walked to the trailer and climbed over the side. “See you in a little while, Jake.”

  He watched as the tractor vanished down the road, and then walked back to sit under the plum-tree.

  Chapter 4

  Parting