Tea From an Empty Cup

by Cadigan, Pat

  ‘Avatar of both, but yeah, that’s about what it comes down to,’ he said agreeably.

  ‘And I had only to ask.’

  ‘Because what you want is simple. You just want to meet up with another player, so I gave you a tracer. Obviously you’re not the usual Shantih Love, or even a usual player. The usual players don’t want anything so simple. The usual players come down here to look for the secret subroutine to the Next Big Scene, or even the mythical Out Door. Then my job becomes something different. Then my job is to give them something that will stimulate a little thrill here and there, play to their curiosities and their fondest wishes and desires, without actually promising anything impossible to deliver.’

  ‘But still making them spend more billable hours.’

  ‘The more hours people spend in here doing complicated things, the more interesting the Sitty becomes. For everyone.’

  ‘Why don’t you just tell people that, then? Instead of playing to their wish-fulfillment fantasies about finding the egress on the secret subroutine to post-Apocalyptic Peoria, or wherever?’

  ‘It’s not my job to explain the business plan. It’s my job to answer questions. I can only answer with what I know. I don’t know there’s an egress – but I don’t know that there isn’t. I can’t prove there isn’t. I’m a utility avatar, I wasn’t created to determine whether my universe is finite or not.’

  I’m talking philosophy with a utility, Konstantin thought, unsure whether to be amazed or disgusted. ‘But surely you know whether there are secret subroutines?’

  ‘If they’re secret, they certainly wouldn’t tell me. I would tell anyone who asked. That’s my job. Then they wouldn’t be secret anymore.’

  ‘All right.’ Konstantin took a slow breath, trying to think. ‘Have there ever been any secret subroutines in the Sitty that you’ve found out about? Or been told about?’ she added quickly.

  ‘Some players claimed to have accessed them.’

  ‘Were they telling the truth?’

  ‘I’m not a lie detector.’

  ‘Wouldn’t matter if you were, would it? Because it’s all lies in here. Or all truth. Or all in what you perceive.’

  He went on playing, eyes still closed. Konstantin supposed he was the AR version of blind justice – blind information. Which was probably much more accurate, all told.

  ‘Have you ever met Shantih Love before?’ she asked, and then added quickly, ‘I mean, have you ever met a player named Shantih Love before I came in here?’

  ‘I don’t really meet anyone. I have everyone’s name.’

  ‘Then has anyone else ever asked you to locate Body Sativa?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  Konstantin was nonplussed. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t have to. There’s no reason to.

  ‘But if you can put a tracer on someone’s location for another player, isn’t there some record of that? Some, uh, trace?’

  ‘Only while the tracer’s active. But that record would be kept elsewhere in the system. You know, if you’re so interested, there are schools you can go to to learn all about how AR works.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t volunteer information,’ Konstantin said suspiciously.

  ‘You call that information?’

  She laughed in spite of herself. ‘You’re right. Thanks for the cab fare.’ She started to walk away and then paused. ‘Where’s the best place to get a cab in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘All right, then, where’s the nearest cab?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ His smile widened. ‘Cabs aren’t players.’

  Sighing in resignation, Konstantin nodded. She should have known.

  EMPTY CUP [IV]

  ‘It’s the risk you run with any amphetamine-based drug,’ the woman was saying reasonably. There was something wrong with her, but Yuki couldn’t tell if it was the woman herself or a problem with her own vision. Her sight was distorted, but so was the woman. She was too big in some places, too small in others. Either that, or too close here and too far there. But then, Yuki thought, that was what you got when you crouched in a far corner of the ceiling and spied on people.

  She didn’t know how she had managed to get herself up in the far corner of the ceiling, and she didn’t know how – or if – she would manage to get down again. At the moment, she wasn’t sure that she even wanted to. Being up in the corner of the ceiling like this felt good. A light, tingly sensation was dancing all over her, as if she were immersed in an effervescent bath of lighter-than-air champagne. Whoever had managed to package this feeling and deliver it through a hot-suit deserved to get rich, she thought.

  ‘If you have amphetamines, you have a big potential for paranoia,’ the woman said, ‘and paranoia will escalate in a remarkably short period of time anyway. Put it on fast-forward the way you do and before you know it, Kennedy’s dead and Marilyn’s on the moon.’

  A second woman, just out of her range of vision, made a small, throaty noise that might have been intended to indicate amusement. ‘Does everyone in your profession have such colorful turns of phrase?’

  Yuki knew that voice. That was Joy Flower. Joy Flower, who didn’t have a very good sense of humor. Yuki tried to look in her direction and found her vision going in and out of focus before it finally picked her out of a jumble of background noise. Which couldn’t make sense anywhere but up here in this corner of the ceiling.

  Joy Flower’s mouth was moving and various kinds of things were coming out of it, things she could almost see but not quite. Sounds, Yuki thought, sounds that had to have been coded as something else to reach her way up where she was, but that had missed being decoded. If she had access to the decoding device, she would no doubt be able to see what the shapes were before hearing them. Now, that was some real synesthesia. Ash had bragged about getting hold of some drug that let him smell music and hear rainbows but she could blow him away with this one. Hey, Ash, she could say, did you ever see what somebody’s laugh looked like? She could get him with that one the next time he showed up in the saucer –

  She began to feel very tired and drowsy. Now what? she wondered uncertainly. Would she fall down from the ceiling and land on the floor with a thump, alerting Joy Flower and the woman talking to her that she had been eavesdropping – literally? Or could Joy Flower have put her up there deliberately, did they think she was unconscious or incapable of understanding?

  She tried to feel her body and couldn’t. Was that because she wasn’t sleeping naked, or because she was? Her drowsiness receded a little as she tried to spread her awareness out to where her fingers and toes might be. Start by wiggling a finger, trace the feeling back. Try to remember what it felt like to decide to move your foot.

  Nothing happened. No sense of her body would come to her in any way.

  Breathe, she commanded herself. Breathe in. Breathe out.

  If her chest was rising and falling, if her lungs were filling and emptying somewhere, she had somehow been cut off from the feeling.

  They cut off my head and it floated up to the ceiling like a balloon. Because they only wanted me for my body.

  She imagined her balloon head bobbing gently against the ceiling, pushed by faint air currents from the ventilation system. Her vision swung down sharply and she found her body directly below her, spread out on a futon. In the hotsuit, the form Ash had likened to a daikon radish looked more naked to her than it would have had it been completely nude. She felt a surge of affection for it, for all the pleasure she had taken for granted and recognized now as being part of corporeal existence. If she and her body were ever reunited, she would tear Ash a new one – a new Ash-hole, she thought with a mental chuckle – for speaking of her body as being less than beautiful. I have done the best I could with what talents and skills and good intentions I had, Mr Beautiful. You can tell me I’m mistaken about some things, or that I’m wasting my time over Tom. But don’t tell me I’m the wrong shape.

  O
kay, but you have lost your head.

  Well, that was true. Where her head should have been was some kind of shiny, vaguely head-shaped machine trailing a lot of wires into a sort of cupboard on the futon frame. It must have been taking care of her body while her head was away, she thought. That made sense. Only …

  Only what was taking care of her head in lieu of her body?

  ‘It’s finished purging her blood,’ Joy Flower said. ‘All clean, ready to start over.’

  ‘Already? That didn’t take long.’

  ‘She’s a very small person. Physically. Also very clean to begin with.’ Joy Flower gave a small, genteel laugh. ‘You’re used to those big bruisers of mine, with two liters worth of drug in every liter of blood.’

  Yuki thought about her very small, very clean body, wondered if it would ever move again. There was a faint rustling noise.

  ‘She’s not conscious?’

  ‘If she is, she won’t remember,’ Joy Flower said. ‘I’m putting her back in, as of right now. Injection –’

  If her head had been a balloon before, now it was a stone. It plummeted toward her body, toward the machine connected to her body, in a fall so long, she fell asleep waiting for the impact.

  ‘They’ve got no shortage of people who want to wear,’ said Tom. ‘But there just aren’t enough people who want to be worn. As a sensation, it’s pretty horrible. You’ll do anything to get rid of it, right?’

  She was trying to wake up but sleep kept pulling her down into its comfortable depths. If she had known AR was this sensual, she’d have dived in long ago, she thought. There was no such thing as a minor sensation in AR; every feeling was realized in a way that was utterly complete, no aspect neglected. Because it was customized, measured out to order for your senses alone, in your hotsuit.

  ‘Well, maybe not your senses alone,’ Tom said. ‘Did you ever know someone who really hated their body? Their body. Not too grammatical, but then, the situation’s not too grammatical, either. Some people do, they hate their bodies.’

  She was sitting by the side of a long, gently winding highway that disappeared into vague countryside in either direction. Across from her stood every person who had ever ventured into AR for any period of time, pioneers and mere fad-followers alike, and all of them wearing Tom’s appearance so that it seemed to be only a special effect lining the side of the highway. Spectacular, to be sure, all these Toms as far as the eye could see, and even farther than that. But strictly ornamental. Right, Tom?

  They all gave her the okay sign. She nodded. Yes, okay. Now, which shell was the pea under? She squinted in the sunlight. His lovely white ice-cream suit glowed so brightly under the bare sun that she was having a hard time seeing the expression on his face. Or their face.

  ‘You’re not supposed to feel anything,’ a million Tom voices said, speaking softly and gently so she wouldn’t be overwhelmed and washed away by a deluge of sound. ‘But there’s some kind of bounce or echo. Or maybe it’s just that there’s no such thing as an intelligent suit of clothes.’

  ‘If there were,’ she said lazily, ‘it wouldn’t let anyone put it on.’

  ‘Exactly,’ the Toms said in harmonious unison. She had the idea that he or they wanted to speak more to her, but her eyes, or rather her vision, was getting heavy. She had thought she was already asleep. Could you get tired in a dream and sleep within your sleep? And if you did, what would you dream then?

  ‘When you awake,’ Tom whispered, ‘you will remember everything.’

  The cyborg was at least eight feet tall. It had a frosted crystal skullcap and chrome filament eyebrows. One eye was more or less normal; the other was steel mesh, punctuated here and there by tiny capacitors or sensors like multicolored Indian beads. There were areas on the high cheekbones where the skin and muscle had been excised to allow the metal skull to show and a window in its chest for the anatomically fascinated to watch the innards at work. One lung had been collapsed, or possibly removed altogether, so that the heart could be viewed more easily. Yuki thought it looked sloppy and a bit out of rhythm. The problem was that human organs just never appeared as efficient and neat as machinery did.

  She looked around to see if there were any other cyborgs on the pier tonight, or whenever this was. It was always night in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, so she wasn’t sure if it was ever a different night, or whether all nights remained one night. Whatever the case, the cyborgs were out in force, and no two were alike. She looked down at herself, afraid she would see that she, too, was part metal, but she was still wearing Tom’s appearance, at least on the parts she could see. I probably make a better Tom than he does, she thought.

  ‘You’re lost, aren’t you?’ said the cyborg.

  Yuki recoiled from a passing individual who was wearing all of the internal organs on the outside of a plastic-and-metal frame. ‘Isn’t the brine and humidity bad for you guys?’

  ‘Oh. You may be much more lost than I can help you with.’ The cyborg sounded alarmed.

  ‘Relax,’ Yuki said. ‘I was trying to make a joke.’

  ‘So was I.’

  ‘Oh.’ She laughed a little. ‘Sorry. I hadn’t expected subtlety here.’

  ‘What were you expecting?’ The cyborg sounded genuinely interested.

  Yuki thought for a moment. ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’

  ‘Ah, but will it know you? What are you doing here, anyway? This is the Cyborg Club.’

  ‘Really.’ Cyborgs were gathering on the pier like seagulls anticipating the arrival of a fishing fleet. Expectation all but hummed in the air. ‘I thought I was in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty.’

  The cyborg buffed his stainless-steel left hand on his left buttock and admired the result. Yuki wondered if that was why he was wearing chamois trousers. ‘Well, yes. This is the post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty chapter of the Cyborg Club.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I was looking for Waxx24.’ She watched two cyborgs comparing eyes and then deciding to trade. It gave her a sympathetic pain in her own corresponding eye socket.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ the cyborg said, starting to sound impatient. ‘We’re the post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty chapter of Waxx24’s Cyborg Club.’

  ‘Oh. And I used to think doing all that set and subset homework in math was a silly waste of time.’ She was starting to get that surreal feeling again.

  ‘So, does this mean that you don’t want to join?’ He actually sounded a little bit sad.

  ‘You could say that,’ she said. ‘I really don’t understand how I ended up here.’

  ‘And I suppose that means an organ donation is out of the question.’

  ‘You could have my tonsils,’ Yuki offered. ‘Or my appendix. I never throw anything away.’

  ‘Those aren’t organs. The club could use some good liver stock, or kidneys. Lungs. Stuff like that.’

  Yuki shook her head. ‘Try again.’

  ‘Well, we wouldn’t take them. We’d clone them. Then you could keep yours and we’d get something new.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable,’ Yuki said, frowning. ‘But why don’t you just – well, you know, order this stuff from inventory?’

  ‘Now, what fun is that?’ said the cyborg in a kindly, jocular tone. ‘Just ordering from inventory is too easy. We like a challenge here.’

  ‘That’s a big challenge, waiting for someone to take a wrong turn onto your part of the Sitty and then trying to talk them out of an organ or two.’

  ‘Oh, this is just where we gather before we spread out on our nightly scavenger hunt. Maybe I’ll see you on whatever level you like to call your own. If you happen to see anything hydraulic with gears attached, think of me.’ He pushed his hip at her and gave it a slap with his shiny hand. ‘I need a new one of these. I’ll make it worth your while.’

  ‘How?’ asked Yuki skeptically. ‘I’m not a cyborg and I don’t want any liver.’

  The cyborg stepped back and gave her a thoughtful up-and-down. ‘And that’s just how I’d describe you, too.
But some things have universal appeal, n’est ce-pas?’

  ‘N’est ce-pas,’ she agreed, and enjoyed seeing him wince. ‘If I were to find a hip worthy of you, how do I let you know?’

  He produced a business card. ‘Any telephone should accept it. Provided you’re in a place where they allow phones.’

  She took the card from him, hiding her reluctance. It was a plain chrome rectangle, a pocket mirror, but when she looked at it, she saw the cyborg’s face instead of her own. She could tell that it was his turn to enjoy seeing her wince, but she tucked it up her sleeve, figuring it would find its way to her catalog. ‘What will happen if I call you?’ she asked, but he was moving away from her, ambling down the pier. He didn’t look as if he really needed a new hip, and she couldn’t figure out why a cyborg or anyone else would need such a thing in AR. Maybe it was some kind of weird parts one-upmanship.

  As she stood there watching the cyborgs drift around each other, the population increased at least threefold – suddenly, there were many more people all around her, all over the pier and around it, wading in the water or walking on the surface. Show-offs, she thought. She could still see the cyborgs among them, and only some seemed aware of the crowds of noncyborgs; most weren’t.

  At the same time, her mind rearranged; it was as if every thought, every idea, every concept had shattered and reassembled in the space of some impossibly short fraction of a second, and the new structures were superior, at least for the purpose of her thought process, which was more focused. And faster.

  Definitely faster, she thought, turning away from the pier, and looked up at the night sky, wondering if the saucer would be showing up again.

  Wondering if Tom would be showing up again.

  Her mind seemed to stumble. She had all but forgotten him, at least for a few minutes. Hard to see how she could, though, seeing as how she was him. On the outside, that was. Perhaps she should get business cards like the cyborg’s: Have you seen me lately? Do I turn up in places you wouldn’t expect to find me – like your mirror? If so, call me immediately!