"Well, you don't want to be late for dinner," said Suma with a teasing edge.
Raymond smiled and looked at the floor.
"I'll see you at eight," said Anya.
The pair left. Raymond returned to his "work". He had actually already finished fixing the problems from Bento's last test, and he was now busy putting together a map of the building's security system. He was not yet sure how things would unfold, but he expected to have to dupe the system sooner or later. Delight lay around every corner; the system's components were few and out-dated. He could trace a path from the lab's server room to the loading dock that passed only eight Eyes-and-Ears units, all ten-year-old models feeding their weakly-encrypted output directly to a single network node. Crack that node and nearly all of the building's sensory data was under his control. The node was on a secure, isolated network, but he had had agents in that network since his second week on the team. The only other security devices he could find were the DynaKey door-locks, alarms on all first-floor windows, and a log of the motion-detectors that controlled lighting and climate throughout the building's common areas. Once one was past the voice- and face-recognition devices at the entrances to the building, there was remarkably little security. Over the next few evenings, he would send out his favorite robot, Passe-Partout—a small monkey-like robot already a familiar sight around the lab—to create spatial maps of every area monitored by the Eyes-and-Ears units. Once he had the spatial maps, he would be able to insert whatever false images and sounds he wanted. "This is gonna be a joke," he said to himself.
But what exactly was "this"? He had only a vague plan in mind. He imagined uploading himself into an NBC, then having one of his robots carry the NBC down to the loading dock and load it into his waiting motor home. Then the robot would reactivate the NBC within the motor home. If the upload were good and the reactivation successful, he would hit the road in the motor home. It would drive him to his Minnesota bunker, where a robot would move his NBC in the basement. The bunker would be his home as long as necessary. The identity of Raymond Quan would be flagged as dead and therefore no longer of interest to the police. He would assume the legal identity of Ivar Svensson, who technically owned the motor home and the bunker. Ivar Svensson was a fictitious citizen of Minnesota—an identity Raymond purchased on the black market a few years back, as part of his money laundering scheme. Raymond Quan would be dead to the world and Ivar Svensson would come to life, a wealthy young hermit living unseen in a high-tech compound in the north woods. The highpoints of the plan were clear enough, but the details were a blur, a snowstorm of unknowns from which he wanted to take shelter.
His wrist relay vibrated, and his desk speakers made the call of a cuckoo-clock. It was 7:30, time to head to Anya's. He put on his biking jacket, a matte black windbreaker, and pulled up the hood, which was outfitted with audio input/output devices and a lightweight safety framework that served as a bike helmet. "Jack," he said—even his jacket had a persona. "Armenia." Armenian sacred choral music started to play softly within his hood. He double-checked the security on all of the personal devices in his office, then made his way through the hallways and front lobby to the bike storage room. He stepped up to his bike, the only one left in the rack, and placed his hands on the handlebar grips. The bike recognized his fingerprints and unlocked its locks, retracting them into its brushed alloy frame. He walked the bike out of the building, automatic doors sliding open at his approach.
Once outside, the choral music grew louder, his jacket automatically compensating for the noises of the wind and the ground and air traffic. He paused for a moment to look up Anya's address on his wrist relay. He expected the ride from the North Campus lab to Anya's apartment, west of Main Street, to take him about twenty minutes, without engaging the bike's motors. He got the bike rolling and smoothly swung his leg over, pedaled hard to build up speed, and headed toward the bike path to Central Campus.
Raymond sped along the bike path, through a rare stand of old trees that had survived the university's never-ending expansion. He emerged at the foot of Medical Campus Hill, the Huron River to his right. On this side of the river, towering above low residential buildings, stood the funky, organically-shaped Arbology—Ann Arbor's famous communistic arcology. It was a largely self-sustaining community of over fifteen hundred, built in the 40s, a diverse haven for urban farmers, co-op fanatics, environmentalists, Quakers, professors, art and architecture students, medical students, and enlightened capitalists. Raymond had originally figured Anya for an Arbology dweller. It seemed like just the right combination of radical and rational for her. As it turned out, she lived in a sleepy old neighborhood, ten minutes' walk west of Ann Arbor's quaint, lovingly preserved downtown—not far from the church garden where they had kissed.
There was a time when he would have balked at the thought of travelling twenty minutes to see someone whom he could reach almost instantly in virtual space. It was when he first came to the brick-and-mortar University of Michigan, five years before, that he learned to appreciate travelling through physical space, especially under his own power. He discovered something beautiful in the ability of his body to carry him across town, and he found this exercise to be more satisfying than running or biking in a v-chamber—even a good one. And now that he planned to upload, he felt he should savor the primitive richness of his organic life while it lasted.
By the time he reached Anya's neighborhood, he felt thoroughly invigorated. He imagined uploaded life being like this, only better. Uploaded, he would live in a world of his own creation. In Nurania, he could minimize the distractions and annoyances so abundant in reality prime and bring clean, personalized design to even the most mundane details of his life—and he would never have to leave it. He could live within it without the ever-present sense that it was false, that he would have to leave the v-chamber eventually, to eat or shower or use the bathroom. His mind raced with images of himself on an airboard, surfing the winds of Nurania's slammer season. He pondered the possibility of opening Nurania to the Net, allowing others into his home world. For so many years, he had lived with the nagging sense that he would never be able to finish creating the world. But, once uploaded, he would be able to work on it as much as he wanted, for as long as it took. His creations would truly become his life. Best of all, he fantasized about meeting Anya in cyberspace, the two of them in a secret relationship.
Raymond found Anya's address. She was in the ground floor of an old two-story home, carved up into apartments long ago. Raymond carried his bike up onto the wide front porch and checked the unit numbers. Anya's was the right-hand unit. He glanced at what he guessed to be her front window: warm incandescent light shown through sheer white curtains.
As he was locking up his bike, it hit him for the first time that as a digital life-form, essentially immortal, it would be awful to watch mortal Anya age and die. It could be twenty years or more before uploading became publicly accessible, if it ever did; and, even if it were available, she might choose not to do it. And what if she weren't satisfied with a lover whom she could only reach in v-space? He rang her doorbell, not wanting to think about it. A flesh-and-blood woman, wouldn't she want a flesh-and-blood lover? His upload would be exile. Thoughts of kidnapping her and forcing her to upload were flitting through his mind when she opened the door.
"Hey. Come on in."
It was a cozy one-bedroom apartment, awkwardly modified here and there to accommodate new technologies. Just inside the door, Raymond noticed a stack of empty delivery crates, ready for return. Like most people, she had all of her groceries delivered to her home by robotic carts, accepted into her entryway by a robotic security system.
Raymond stepped into the living room and was greeted with the smell of garlic and cooking meat. He found himself immediately put at ease. He felt as though he had entered a homey embrace—the space had such warmth. The richly stained wood floors and trim had a reddish-golden glow in the low warm lamplight. The decorations were mostly antiques—fr
amed prints of works by Miro and Matisse, brightly colored art glass, a Calder mobile that hung from the ceiling, slowly spinning. Her v-chamber, a fairly new Panasonic, stood mostly out of view behind a three-paneled shoji screen.
"Go ahead and hang your coat up," said Anya, gesturing toward the line of coat hooks on the wall. She headed back to the kitchen. "I hope you're hungry," she called back to him. "I'm making a roast. And potato leek soup."
A roast—what a beautiful woman. She does things like cook roasts and make soup.
Again he was filled with the desire to savor the pleasures available to him as an organic life-form. Time with Anya made him aware of his deprived sensual experience, made him want to enjoy the details of the natural world for fear that they would not be the same in simulated form. And what could be more primitively pleasurable than eating the flesh of a cow—an actual cow? Anya was the key to a worldview Raymond had never really imagined. He found that the idea of eating roasted meat conjured a very basic sense of success within him. A very masculine notion of success. And it wasn't just the food, he realized. It was the thought of being served animal flesh prepared by a woman. A gene-job, sure, but a beautiful woman very much of this world. A real woman, with a heart that pumped blood through her body, a creature subject to the natural laws of the universe—with gravity to contend with, cells to nourish, and the chaotic damages of time to face.
Raymond thought he might be the first person ever to appreciate reality in just this way. He inhaled deeply, conceptualizing the flow of fluid air into his nostrils, beef molecules riding along and pairing with his olfactory receptors, receptors assembled during his gestation according to the instructions contained within his own DNA. He watched Anya walking back and forth in the kitchen and visualized her skeleton, held together by soft tissue, propelled by muscles controlled by her brain. Her bones would go on existing after the brain died. They might even end up buried in soil, to be broken back down into the basic building blocks of organic life. He imagined the skeletons of billions of women, buried all around the world. Bones, the remnants of matter that had been arranged into life—an arrangement that could only hold together for so long in the face of entropy. Then he imagined electrons and photons racing through a computer, duplicating the flow of information that crackled at a turtle's pace through the human brain, the electrons and photons merely representations of the complexity that is intelligence. He believed as Bob did that organic life was merely a vehicle of complexity, and digital life was the next step in the evolution of that complexity. And he was on the cutting edge, entering into a world that he believed was already populated by intelligent life—artificial life, complex automata, and the handful of animals that they had uploaded in the lab.
Raymond dropped into an armchair, pushing Anya's swing-arm reading display off to the side. He looked up at a high shelf across the room. The shelf, stained to match the trim, ran from one end of the room to the other, and was filled from end to end with books. Worn and darkened, they added character to the room.
"Do you ever read your books?" he called to her.
"Sometimes." She was busy in the kitchen, chopping and tasting, cleaning up, getting plates and glasses down from the cupboard. "Sometimes I tell my computer to shut everything down, and I light an oil lamp and some candles, and read a book. It feels good. It's like I've withdrawn from society for an evening, like I'm out of the system—alone."
Raymond wandered restlessly into the kitchen, and leaned against the door frame.
"It's good to feel alone sometimes," continued Anya. "Truly alone." She opened the oven, stabbed a thermometer in the sizzling roast, and checked the readout. "Ten more minutes," she announced. "Do you want to start with a glass of Cava?"
"Cava? What's that?"
"It's basically Spanish Champagne."
"Sure, that sounds great."
Anya took a small glass bottle of Cava out of the fridge. "I found this shop that sells Cava in antique-style glass bottles. It's so much more romantic than a temperature-controlled canister." She peeled off the foil wrapper and slowly, expertly popped the cork, shouting, "Voila!" Raymond smiled and looked on with admiration. At the same time, he felt a vague discomfort, as though drawn into a dance, the steps of which he didn't know.
"Funny, I suppose," said Anya, as she poured out two glasses, "to be celebrating on the eve of such lousy news, but what the hell." She handed him a glass, then held her own up to toast, and he followed suit. "To the enjoyment of life, wherever it takes you." They tinked their glasses together. "And," she added with a smirk, "to my victory in getting Raymond Quan to come to dinner. Now drink up, because I have a special wine for dinner."
Raymond drank a mouthful of the Cava and found it to be very pleasant. Tingly and sweet at first, then a bit puckery, in a way that left him wanting more.
Anya set her glass down and tended to the pot of soup that sat steaming on her stovetop. "So... can you believe this ESW decision?"
"I know," said Raymond. "Although, I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise. People are so full of themselves."
Anya turned and nodded in agreement, but the look on her face told him she hadn't followed his line of thinking at all.
"People," said Raymond, struggling to identify the path to his conclusion, "have this concept that natural is good, and that humans shouldn't interfere with nature. As if we're outsiders. Religious people, especially—the whole idea that some willful, all-powerful being created the universe and inserted us into it, and there are rules about what we should or shouldn't do. I don't know—I'm not very good at explaining myself."
He wished he hadn't opened his mouth. It was immensely frustrating—he had such convictions on the topic, yet his ideas crumbled when he endeavored to express them.
"No, no," said Anya, "I see what you mean. People protect the sanctity of humanness as if it were inherently good. They're full of themselves—I see what you're saying. I think it's a self-defense mechanism. Whenever we approach a change that could redefine us, we put on the brakes. It's unfamiliar territory, and the unfamiliar scares us."
"Not me," blurted Raymond. He stopped himself. He wanted to say he would upload today if he could. Instead, he left it at that, standing awkwardly at the edge of the precipice he had just created.
"Oh really?" asked Anya. "What about... what about at La Sevillana? Wasn't that a little fear of the unfamiliar?"
"No, that was just..." Raymond trailed off, hesitant to speak his mind. He had the growing sense that his private thoughts didn't stand up well to exposure. But Anya gave him a provocative raised eyebrow, spurring him on. "That's just a part of society where I don't fit in."
"Don't fit in?" questioned Anya. "Or do you just need someone to invite you in?" Raymond didn't answer, and she was quick to move on. "But, generally speaking, people are afraid of the unfamiliar. I just wish they could deal with it some other way. People were reluctant to accept genetic engineering. Even by the time I was born, my parents were quiet about their decision to have me genetically altered."
Raymond feigned a look of surprise. "Wow. I guess that explains how you got to be so beautiful." The intention had been to flatter, but upon utterance the words sounded silly, possibly even insulting.
"Actually," responded Anya, "the genetic alterations were mostly health-related." She gave no indication of being either flattered or ruffled. She opened the oven and checked the roast.
"Just a few more minutes." She turned off the heat under the soup and took up her glass.
"Suma and I were talking about what will happen if the project loses funding. Have you given any thought to what you would do?"
Raymond wanted to spill everything he knew, to impress her. "I don't know." He thought about saying he would join an anti-Naturalist group, but it seemed too flip. He glanced at his wrist relay, to be sure he hadn't missed any new information regarding the progress of the Illinois State Police or Arnold Murray.
"You probably don't have to worry about it," said Any
a. "Lord knows Bob would love to get rid of me. But you, with all the systems you've put together, all your cool tools—I would be surprised if Bob let you go. Even if you are the youngest. I would think Tim would go first—you could program circles around him, and he hasn't been on the team much longer than you."
"Tim's not that bad," said Raymond, taking the opportunity to come off as big-hearted. "He just has a hard time focusing on work. He has no discipline."
Anya leaned against the counter, drink in hand, and looked at Raymond, shaking her head. "Whatever the reason, he does a quarter as much work as you."
"I bet Bob would go strictly according to seniority," said Raymond. It was easy to come across as sage when he already knew Bob's plans. "Besides... sometimes I get the feeling Bob doesn't much care for me."
"Well, I can't see why not," said Anya, jumping to his defense. "You work like a dog for him—you're at the lab late all the time. You've come up with all sorts of innovations." She drained her glass, set it on the counter, and stepped over to where Raymond stood. She faced him straight on, and she squared his shirt across his shoulders. "You make toys for the uploaded animals, you create their worlds. You're sensitive, and shy, and sweet. I certainly can't see what's not to like." She trailed her right hand down his chest, then gave him a playful little shove. "Now, go sit down, and I'll bring out dinner."
Raymond smiled. His chest felt warm where she had touched it. Through his dreamy entranced state, he conjured the presence of mind to offer to help, but she refused.
He sat down at her two-person dining table and watched as she laid out the meal she had prepared, explaining it as she went: standing rib roast, from a range-fed cow, topped with peppercorns and served in its own juice; whole kernel corn drenched in real butter; a salad of pickled asparagus, artichoke hearts, hearts of palm, avocado, and roasted red pepper; two bowls of buttery, garlicky, potato-leek soup, garnished with fresh parsley; and hunks of torn baguette, for dipping in the soup. She even had a canister of Spanish Rioja, from which she filled two fine crystal glasses. When she brought salt and pepper shakers to the table, she found there was barely room for them.
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