Vicarious

by Paula Stokes

  He starts to shake. “No. Please,” he says. “I have a wife, kids.”

  With the gun still aimed, I reach into the pocket of my hoodie with my right hand and pull out my stun gun. I’m not here to kill anybody. Jesse and I just need to get out of the building without getting any holes punched in us. Electricity crackles as I shock the guard. Once. Twice. Three times, just to be safe. He convulses and then goes limp. He’s still curled in the fetal position when Jesse and I hit the doorway.

  “Give it to me.” Jesse points at the gun still in my hand.

  I hand it over. We run full speed down the escalator, both of us vaulting over the bottom few steps. We head for the front of the building, the soles of our boots pounding like drums on the lobby’s tile floor. I pull in front of Jesse as we reach the exit. My body feels lighter. Frost spews from my parted lips as the glass doors swing shut behind us. Too late, I see the gleam of white where the sidewalk meets the street. It’s a flashlight—the other security guard.

  He sees us and gives chase, screaming things that the night air distorts into meaningless syllables. Jesse and I turn and sprint past two blocks of office buildings. We cross into a small city park, veering off the paved walkway, trying to lose the guard in the trees. I hear the sound of snow crunching behind me. Swearing. Fabric rustling against branches. I push myself to go faster, weaving in and out of the foliage. Jesse and I run six-minute miles. This guy will never keep up with us.

  The cold air stings my lungs as we fly past a playground and a set of cement restrooms. Sirens cut sharp lines of sound across the night. I can’t tell if they’re heading toward or away from us.

  We exit the other side of the park, still running full-speed. We cut across the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant and then Jesse swerves left into an alley. Finally, we’re heading back toward the Lofts. We hurdle trash bags and dodge rusted bicycles half-covered in snow. Behind us, the guard is swearing and grunting as he stumbles along. His voice fades as we pull away.

  But the alley ends and there’s more trouble out on the main street. A kaleidoscope of blue and red. Cops. Real ones. That was fast. I slow long enough to give Jesse a questioning look. Gideon has been known to buy off the police.

  Jesse shakes his head. “We can’t let them catch us.”

  I bite down on my lower lip. I’ve never had a job go quite this wrong. Gideon is normally so meticulous about planning for every contingency. My breath catches in my throat. Darkness plays at the corners of my vision like I’m in danger of losing consciousness. Focus, Winter.

  The cops are coming at us from both directions. We change course again, flinging ourselves around a corner and onto another trash-covered street. The cold metal of the Arch peeks through gaps in the skyline. Jesse stumbles, just slightly, and I pull in front of him.

  “The river,” he mutters.

  Wisps of fog dance around us. I veer toward the waterfront. The cops are boxing us in, but there’s nowhere else we can go. The street ends and we’re on top of the levee, at least fifty feet up. Below, unforgiving cobblestones. Beyond them, the Mississippi River, a thick ribbon of black current.

  Jesse points at an unused railroad bridge, just a little off to the north. I glance over my shoulder. The cops are still coming. Their guns are out. Aimed. We head for the bridge. A chorus of warnings comes from behind, telling us to stop, telling us they’ll shoot. A bullet zings past, but Jesse and I press onward.

  The bridge is falling apart, the wood rotting, the girders caked with rust. Boards groan under my feet as I pick my way forward. In front of me, Jesse steps carefully from one metal tie to the next. I try to copy him, praying the planks won’t give out. I look back. Two cops are waiting at the entrance. They won’t come out here, I think, turning back around. They’re scared. And then I see the haze in front of us light up. Blue and red circles flit like ghosts in the fog.

  They’re not scared. They have us surrounded.

  Jesse reaches under his mask and slips his hearing aid from his ear. “Give me the drive.”

  I fish the flash drive out of my pocket, trying to ignore the cops crouched in my peripheral vision. Jesse slips the electronics into a waterproof pouch and secures the pouch in a zippered pocket. He reaches out for my hand as we step to the edge of the bridge. I look down at the swirling water and go dizzy. My heart thrashes around in my chest, a nightmare monster trying to escape from its closet.

  “Is it too far?” I know the water in the middle of the Mississippi is plenty deep, but jumping from too high means broken bones, or worse.

  “Not if we climb down the girders.” Jesse steps smoothly over the bridge’s railing and begins to descend the side of the truss, the metallic latticework almost invisible against the black of the river.

  I follow him, clinging to the support beams as I gradually lower myself closer to the water. The frosty metal is slick beneath the fingers of my leather gloves. From this height I can see the white froth of the current. My eyes flick to the riverbank and then back to Jesse as I try to calculate where we’ll be able to climb ashore.

  “Stay vertical,” he reminds me. “Hands against your body.”

  “Right,” I say tersely. We’ve done some cliff diving in the past, but nothing that quite compares to this.

  I guess I must still look scared, because Jesse reaches out and squeezes my arm. “Do you trust me?” he asks.

  I nod. There’s no other choice.

  One at a time, we leap from the bridge.

  CHAPTER 5

  I slam into the frigid water and sink deep. Holding my breath, I fight my way back to the surface. Tucking my knees to my chest, I assume the fetal position to maximize my core temperature as the river carries me downstream. I paddle across the current toward the nearest bank, gradually steering myself to the water’s edge. When I drag myself up on the frozen mud, I leap to my feet, ready to start running again. But Jesse is jogging toward me from where he crawled out of the river slightly upstream. He raises his hand in a high five.

  “Are you serious?” My teeth start to chatter as I look back at the bridge. The flashing lights have disappeared. “That was all part of the setup? You could have told me.” I use the fabric of my sleeve to wipe the fetid water from my eyes and then take a couple of deep breaths. I hug my arms to my chest to quell my shivering.

  “If I did, your recording wouldn’t have turned out as good. Gideon wanted to capture the adrenaline of the chase.”

  My recording. Right. My face mask was yanked up and over my head when I hit the river, but my recorder headset is still secured in place. Reaching up, I pull the five-pronged device from my head without even turning it off, twitching as a mild shock races through my body.

  It’s the latest version of Gideon’s tech—a headset that records the sensory neurologic impulses of its wearer. Four of the device’s prongs record neural impulses from different parts of the brain and the fifth sits at the base of the neck and records from the spinal cord. Gideon doesn’t just give you the first-person visual of what it’s like to run from the cops. He gives you what the runner is actually feeling, one firing synapse at a time.

  He sells the recordings at Escape so people can live vicariously through us. For as little as twenty dollars, you can soar through the sky as a hang glider or drive 220 miles an hour in an official Indy 500 race car. You can dance with celebrities at the hottest clubs or hook up with a girl who would never give you the time of day. And now you’ll be able to jump off a bridge into the Mississippi River. It’s about being someone else, someone who does things you would never do. It’s the ultimate in escapism.

  “What about your recording?” I ask wryly. Just once I’d like to be the one with all of the information.

  “Mine are never as good as yours, because of my sight,” Jesse says. “And someone needs to know everything for when there is a real misstep, like with that security guard.” He slips his hearing aid in and then jogs a few yards back toward where he crawled ashore. His voice grows muffled as he
disappears into a thick patch of foliage. “That guy scared the crap out of me.” Jesse reappears with a black garbage bag, knotted at the top.

  “Oh, so he wasn’t in on it?”

  “Even Gideon can’t buy everyone.” Jesse says. “I can’t believe you went for him like that. You could’ve gotten shot.”

  I shrug it off. I guess I was too adrenalized to feel scared. “So what? I’m wearing Kevlar.” I unzip my hoodie as if to prove it. Immediately, I’m seized by another attack of shivering.

  “Not on your face. Gid is going to have a meltdown when he sees that.” Jesse pushes his wet hair back from his forehead and slowly works a knot out of the top of the bag.

  “Maybe he’ll be impressed for once.” I tug the body armor over my head and toss it in the direction of Jesse’s bag before slipping back into my waterlogged hoodie. “You know how he’s always saying the only way to get stronger is to challenge yourself.”

  I’ve been recording Gideon’s Vicarious Sensory Experiences, or ViSEs, for over a year and each job seems to get a little riskier. I started out doing basic adventure stuff, but after I gained some experience, I found myself BASE jumping from national monuments and running from cops. And tonight I got shot at for the first time.

  But it’s just the nature of the business. Once our customers have rock climbed and hang glided, most of them are ready to move on to something bigger and better. ViSEs are legal (even if what we have to do to get them isn’t), but other than that, we’re not much different from the drug dealers who roam the Lofts. If we want to maximize profits, we have to provide what people want.

  Tonight’s mission had two purposes. The police chase and bridge jump were for the visers. The information downloaded was for Gideon. Phantasm is one of the companies that’s been pressuring Gideon to sell his tech. They want to produce mass quantities of playback headsets, widespread distribution of ViSEs online, streaming from multiple platforms. It’s much more than Gideon could accomplish with his current staff, but he’s not even considering it without a behind-the-scenes look at Phantasm’s finances.

  That’s what he says, anyway. Personally, I think he’s digging for company dirt to force them to back off. He’s a control freak and the ViSE tech is his baby. I don’t see him selling.

  A gust of wind wraps its fingers around my middle, and my teeth start chattering again. Jesse pulls a thin gray blanket out of the bag and holds it out in my direction. I cocoon myself, willing the itchy fabric to suck the icy cold water out of my clothes.

  “How much did you have to pay the cops?” I look up at the bridge again.

  “Not much. You just have to know the right guys to approach.” Jesse grins. “Some of them were so eager to shoot live fire that they probably would have paid me. We just have to make sure their license plates aren’t readable on the finished recordings.”

  Easy enough to do with a bit of editing. I try not to stare as Jesse tugs his waterlogged sweatshirt over his head. He’s built like a puma, thick and muscular, the outline of his abs just barely visible in the dim light. He slips on a dry T-shirt and a quilted parka and then starts to unbutton his pants.

  I turn toward the river to give him privacy. There’s something hypnotic about flowing water—the more I look at it, the more it calls to me. I inch closer to the edge of the bank. I imagine diving back in and surrendering to the current. Being swept downstream and swallowed whole.

  I shake my head as if trying to dislodge the morbid thought. Once upon a time there was a girl named Ha Neul who wanted to die, but I am not that girl anymore.

  Jesse taps me on the shoulder. “I’ve got stuff for you too. I don’t want you to freeze to death on the walk home.” He hands me a bundle of gray fleece. Dry clothes would feel good, but I can’t bring myself to strip down here, in the middle of nowhere, especially not in front of him.

  I toss my blanket back into the bag and shove the bundle of clothing under my arm. “Let’s just get out of here. We can edit these and amplify the neural sensations tomorrow.”

  Jesse was right when he said keeping the plan a secret from me would result in a better recording. There’s a natural adrenaline rush involved in running from the cops and jumping off a bridge, but it’s a lot more intense if the recorder is actually afraid. The more Jesse and I train for a ViSE, the less scared we are when we record it, especially if we know it’s all a setup. That’s where Gideon’s neural editor comes in. Natural sensations are the best, but when that isn’t feasible we can modify what the viser feels, to a degree. We can’t change things, like add a bridge jump where one didn’t happen, but we can block certain impulses to obscure license plates, or amplify them to increase sensations like fear or pleasure.

  To us, reality is just raw footage: Unclear. Desultory. Too shocking or not quite shocking enough. It’s ironic that making something more real involves making it less real, but Gideon always says people don’t want real. They want the idea of real, which involves production.

  Jesse and I make our way up the bank of the river and onto the waterfront’s cobblestoned streets. I try to ignore the fabric sticking to my legs and the water dripping from the cuffs of my pants as we head back to the Lofts.

  “You can’t go into the building looking like a drowned rat,” he reminds me when we get close.

  “I’m aware.” I glance around for a private spot to change. The scarlet neon of an all-night Gas ’n’ Go bleeds onto the sidewalk in front of us. Perfect. “Wait here.” I duck into the restroom and slip on Jesse’s gray fleece hoodie and black tear-away warm-up pants, balling my wet clothes under my arm. I roll the waistband twice so his pants don’t hang down over my shoes and then stop to check my reflection in the mirror. My hair is slicked to the sides of my face like a pair of half-drawn curtains and most of my eyeliner has washed off, but at least I don’t look like I’ve been swimming in the river.

  * * *

  When we arrive home, the line to get into Inferno has dwindled down to just a few high school kids still hovering in the cold. I wonder if Rose is in there, recording tonight’s switch party for Gideon to sell. If she is, I’d rather not witness it.

  Jesse and I cut through the lobby and duck into the stairwell. He walks me all the way to the penthouse.

  “I’ll get your clothes back to you soon,” I say. He lives below me, on the seventh floor, which is actually the sixth floor since Gideon had the floors renumbered to skip from three to five when he bought the building. The number four is bad luck in Korean culture.

  “Keep them if you want. They don’t fit anymore.” Jesse pats himself on the stomach.

  I roll my eyes. Jesse complains that he’s gained weight since he left the military, but 99 percent of it is probably muscle. I suspect he’s fishing for a compliment, but I’m not in the mood to be manipulated. “You’re not fat.” I bite back a smile. “You’re just fluffy.”

  He gasps in mock outrage. “You did not just call me fluffy. For that you owe me some of that tea you’re always drinking.”

  I punch in the six-digit code and press my thumb to the sensor that unlocks the penthouse door. “I guess I could, as long as you’re quiet so we don’t wake Gideon.” I slip out of my boots and step into the entry hall.

  Jesse’s body relaxes as he follows me inside and reaches down to unlace and remove his own boots. Just watching him, so comfortable in my personal space, makes me go tense. I hear my sister telling me to just “give him some” as she so delicately put it. Rose wouldn’t have teased a guy and called him fluffy. She would have run her hands up his chest and around his neck and told him his body was perfect. My face reddens. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I were completely uninhibited like she is.

  When Jesse flops down at our kitchen table and looks up at me, this quickly becomes one of those times. His pupils dilate, circles of black swallowing up the hazel of his eyes. Points of wet brown hair cling to the skin of his forehead. He smiles his incongruous perfect smile.

  I turn away and put on a kettl
e of water to heat. Then I quickly gather tea leaves, valerian root, passionflower, and a bit of ginger. I like creating my own flavors with fresh herbs and spices. My fingers fly with the paring knife, peeling and then dicing the ginger into smaller and smaller pieces to avoid looking at Jesse. I lean over the simmering water so he’ll think the color in my cheeks is from the steam.

  “You did amazing tonight.” His voice is low.

  I dump everything into the water and turn around, abandoning the tea to the stove. “You think?”

  “Yeah. I panicked for a second when the gun went off. But you didn’t. I swear you’ve got the reflexes of a cat.”

  I look over at the teakettle. It won’t be done for a while. Jesse shucks off his quilted coat. All he has underneath is a white T-shirt stretched tight across his chest. He might as well be sitting here half-naked.

  He catches me staring and his face lights up. I can read all sorts of things in his grin. What he wants, what he thinks I want. I wish I could throw myself into the kettle and drown, or maybe evaporate into steam. “Rose has faster reflexes than I do.” I don’t even know if this is true. It’s just the first thing that comes to mind, and I want to distract him from whatever he’s thinking.

  “What’s her deal, anyway? Does she actually like all that dancing and stuff?”

  Maybe. “I don’t know. So what if she does?” I ask, a note of defensiveness creeping into my voice. “Are you telling me you never recorded anything provocative?” I know Gideon has multiple sexual ViSEs for sale. I’m sure all of his male recorders have donned headsets and wigs and taken one for the team, so to speak.

  Jesse’s smile fades. “That was a long time ago, and I was desp—”

  I cut him off. “So then why do you get to judge her?”

  “Whoa.” He holds his hands up in surrender. “Not judging anyone. I just know how much you worry about her.”

  “I do.” I’ve never told him this. I didn’t realize it was so obvious.

  “I mean, why let guys paw all over her when she can do cool stuff like us?”