Tea From an Empty Cup

by Cadigan, Pat

  ‘A child?’ Body Sativa’s amused smile was also skeptical. ‘There are no children in here.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ Konstantin sighed. ‘After all, everything you’re told in here is a lie, right? So that must be a lie, too.’

  ‘Philosophers’ Corner is halfway down the block from Beginners’ Cafe, and you don’t even need to pay extra to be in the Sitty to go to either one of them,’ Body Sativa said briskly. ‘Look, dear-friend, if you have some information for me, you can deposit it down there, in the bottom of this monitor unit –’ the TV screen bulged slightly as Body Sativa leaned forward and looked down, at the outside of the TV case; a small slot glowed brightly. ‘I’ll look at it – I assume it’s footage? – and if you leave your email address, you’ll hear from me in a day, possibly less. If I know anything, I’ll tell you. The truth, that is; the truth you use out there.’

  ‘Well, the truth would be a nice change in routine,’ Konstantin said cheerfully. ‘But an even better thing would be if you would agree to meet me out there yourself. In person.’

  ‘I didn’t witness anything in person. Be a good dear-friend and settle for email. I wouldn’t even give you that much, except that a study of your movements this session indicates that you are everything you say, and I’d be less than responsible if I didn’t give you what you ask. You’re so completely … ignorant … of how things are done here that if I don’t help you, you’re liable to get hurt very badly.’

  ‘Well, that’s something else I wanted to talk to you about,’ Konstantin said quickly. ‘This Shantih Love/Tom Iguchi person wasn’t the only one who turned up dead out there. There are seven other people –’

  ‘Email,’ Body Sativa said firmly. ‘And now, you really should be going. The tribal wars module isn’t strictly ornamental.’ Then she reached out of the TV screen and pressed a button in the upper right-hand corner of the console. The screen went dark. Konstantin got up and tried pressing the button herself but nothing happened. Wearily she asked the cat for instructions on how to transfer a copy of the footage of Shantih Love’s AR murder to the slot Body Sativa had showed her. Email was better than nothing, she supposed, and then it occurred to her that it was probably even better than AR. Email was traceable.

  It didn’t occur to her that it wasn’t necessary to ride all the way down to the ground floor in the elevator to get out.

  She walked out of the building into the middle of a riot.

  The werewolves were gone, but the formerly empty piazza was now full of people running, screaming, chasing each other, hurling furniture and other heavy objects from broken-out windows in the building, possibly from midair for all she knew. Wrecked cars had been overturned and set on fire. But then, perhaps that actually counted as new home construction for the salamander population, she thought, feeling dazed and anxious as she look around for some clear route of escape.

  Escape. Good one, Einstein. Try ‘exit.’ She felt like a complete idiot. It was no wonder that Body Sativa didn’t want to have anything to do with her. She wasn’t just unaccelerated, she was stupid. The whole venture was no better than a reckless prank. She couldn’t get into the spirit of it even for the sake of information-gathering on behalf of some poor murdered kid. And walking around disguised as the victim – the more she thought about it, the more it seemed like an act of desecration. Better just to hope for useful information via email from Body Sativa, though she doubted there would be any. This had nothing to do with anyone’s life, not anyone’s real life. So how could it have anything to do with a kid’s real death? Or seven other real deaths?

  She stepped out of the relative shelter of the lobby just as a Molotov cocktail sailed over her head and shattered on the building above her, making a perfect wave circle of flame. The effect of the heat was so realistic she could have sworn her face was flushed. She put an arm up defensively and turned away.

  It took her all of a second to register the blow followed by the impact of her body on the piazza. The punch in her upper chest had been so abrupt and powerful that her legs had flown out from under her and she’d hit the pavement on her back. It hurt, as badly as the real thing would have. She thought she had run into one of the rioters and the program had authenticated the logical result. But then a half-circle of grinning faces appeared above her as she tried to sit up and catch her breath and she couldn’t believe it. Of all the damned things that could go on in this ridiculous scenario and she would go and trigger one of the least imaginative.

  Before she could ask for the icon cat, they hauled her to her feet and began shoving her around so that she rebounded from one into another like a pinball. Still breathless, she tried to get a good look at them but they were pushing her around too quickly. The Molotov cocktail had ignited something and she could see others, some human and some not quite, watching in the firelight as her attackers played with her.

  There had to be something in the icon cat that would help, she thought, something for protection, self-defense, something. Too bad she hadn’t thought of that sooner and used some precautions. She could imagine Body Sativa laughing at her. Ignorant … ignorant. You thought you were safe because you were here under false pretenses. Surprise, dear-friend, we’re all here under false pretenses.

  They were shoving her around harder now, slapping and punching, and the pain was only too real. Never mind the technical specs of the sensation delivery system – this was too authentic. She wondered if Tomoyuki Iguchi had had some kind of masochistic streak that he had indulged as Shantih Love –

  And suddenly she wasn’t sure that it wasn’t happening for real. Maybe Shantih Love hadn’t been able to tell the difference there on the shore of the Hudson River, not until it was too late and he couldn’t feel how the real blood was flowing along with the virtual, even though he could see, perhaps until the moment of his death, the virtual attacker who had come to hijack his persona. But why?

  A leg kicked out as she stumbled sideways and she went down again. One of her attackers started to pull her up; she twisted away and fumbled the iconcat out onto the ground where she could see it.

  This time, it didn’t pause for animal imagery. The book fell open to a fierce and cartoony picture of a monster that she somehow knew was a talisman of protection. Just as she grabbed for it, her attackers tore it away from her.

  Too late, she understood that the catalog with its treasure trove of icons – its stuff – was what they’d been after all along. She scrambled up but a heavy boot caught her in the midsection and she sat down hard.

  Someone crouched down and shoved a face that looked like the product of an unfortunate mating between a troll and a gargoyle up close to hers. ‘Hey, you never heard that expression, be seated?’

  She scooted backward, trying to get away. He advanced on her with the others behind him, one holding up her icon cat so she could see that they had taken the whole thing from her.

  All, that was, except for one page that she was still clutching in one hand, so hard that her knuckles hurt. Another pain that was real, produced by the way she was clenching her hand in this unreal place, a pain that paled next to the jazzy high-res authenticity of the ’suit but went deeper, all the way down to the level where what remained of the reptile senses sorted real from unreal.

  They are killing me. They are really killing me!

  The thought was a screaming in her head. What was going on, out there beyond the bounds of the headmount and the neo-exo-nervous system, what was happening out there, how many were out there, why hadn’t she figured there could be more than one in on the murder, someone else hidden in the air-processing ducts, perhaps, with the cooperation of some insider, maybe bored Tim Mezzer or bitter Miles Mank, or even Pleshette, not bored or bitter, just plain crazy. Or all of them together, Mank and Pleshette pretending to hate each other out there. Or maybe they did hate each other out there but not in here.

  In here. Where the employee discount was pretty good. What arrogance and contempt, to kill someone so
soon after the last one, and the detective investigating the case, no less! Ideal, though – the partner was too claustrophobic to jump right on the crime scene and they knew it, so by the time someone else, Celestine and DiPietro perhaps, arrived, they’d have jiggered the evidence, massaged the data, and Celestine and DiPietro would be too busy trying to impress the stringer from Police Blotter to notice or care that she had become so much more grist for the AR urban legend mill. Ya hear about the homicide detective who was killed in AR investigating a murder? Yeah, incredible galloping head-bugs, she was crazier ’n a sackful of assholes. Happened in D.C., of course. Life is so cheap there, it’s a whole different world –

  Now the chief troll-gargoyle was waving around something that looked like a jagged fragment of a mirror, poking it at her face. Her rational mind kept telling her that he couldn’t possibly cut her but her rational mind had shrunk to the size of a quark. The rest of her was believing it the way a Pentecostal convert believed the touch of an omnipotent God made you speak in tongues, believed it to the point where she could feel the small cuts on her face. The bloody and murderous troll had cut her face and in a moment he would cut her throat, by the power of suggestion she would believe her throat was cut and so much for extremo ruptura being the sole province of St. Whoever. There just hadn’t been any AR up until now that could compete with the faith of a fanatic saint with stigmata, but now there was, now there was. Let the coroner come now, let them all come and see if the power of their own belief and their own galloping head-bugs would allow them to survive –

  The torn page in her hand transformed into a larger hand. She tried to let go with a scream but the hand seemed to swallow hers. The face of the gargoyle snapped out of focus and became the big, soft features of Taliaferro. The scream that escaped her now was one of total surprise, pure reaction to the one thing she had expected least of all.

  Panting, she looked around. Celestine had thrown herself over her legs while DiPietro had her other arm and most of her upper body. Behind them, Pleshette and Mank were staring at her wide-eyed and Tim Mezzer was yawning with a hand over his mouth. And behind them, standing on a chair, the stringer from Police Blotter was filming, filming, filming.

  ‘Okay,’ Konstantin said, letting out a long breath. ‘Are you guys trying to give me a heart attack?’

  ‘She can see us,’ Taliaferro said. ‘Let her up.’

  They stepped away from her and she saw that they had peeled most of the hotsuit off her. The headmount was lying on the floor, shattered. ‘Taliaferro, don’t make me ask what happened like some clod from a bad action movie – Taliaferro?’

  ‘Over here.’ He was out in the hallway, standing well free of the doorway. ‘You don’t really expect me to stand in there?’

  ‘In –’ she realized he was talking about the tiny cubicle. ‘Okay,’ she said again. ‘What did happen?’

  ‘You were screaming,’ said Pleshette, her tone all but lascivious. ‘You were screaming and screaming and you wouldn’t stop. I was keeping an eye on you, you know, and I saw you getting attacked. Then they took your icon cat –’

  ‘Yes, the one with all your stuff in it,’ Konstantin said, feeling embarrassed in spite of everything.

  ‘You can’t get it back,’ Pleshette said, as if Konstantin had offered.

  Konstantin shook her head, not quite believing that Pleshette was really giving her a hard time about AR stuff. It wasn’t stuff. It wasn’t even a lack of stuff. What was wrong with this stupid woman, with all the stupid people in there, especially stupid people who would hurt you – kill you – for the sake of a cache of items that didn’t exist?

  Because they had been going to kill her, she thought. They’d been going to use her own perceptions against her to do it. She could still feel the places where they had hit her, the pain was still there, throbbing dully. Tomorrow, she’d be one big bruise.

  She shook her head again. ‘What about high-speed access?’ she said, dazed.

  ‘We don’t have that here,’ Pleshette said quickly.

  ‘Then where would I go to get it?’

  There was a long pause. ‘High-speed access, that’s, that’s just a –’ Pleshette paused again to swallow. ‘It’s one of those fairy stories AR junkies tell each other. Somebody went online amped once and claimed that they got everything all speeded up and used less billable time. But that’s, you know, don’t we all wish.’

  ‘Yes, don’t we. Except video parlor managers,’ Konstantin said. ‘Less billable time, that wouldn’t be such good news around here, would it.’ She eased herself out of the chair but when she stood up, her legs buckled. Celestine and DiPietro caught her, one under each arm. She would have appreciated their solicitude more if they hadn’t turned her toward the stringer.

  ‘Beginners always underestimate the effects of abrupt-disconnect shock,’ Miles Mank said importantly.

  She felt her left hand cramp and realized she was still clenching it tight. In her mind’s eye, she saw the image of the coin she had been given, the loop of infinity on one side, Ouroboros on the other. Half expecting to find the coin stuck to her flesh, she tried to unfold her fingers, but they wouldn’t move. She had to have several hours of electrical and tactile massage to loosen the knots that had seized various muscles all over her body, including her hand. When it did finally open, like a late-blooming flower – or maybe, Konstantin thought, a hand-puppet of a flower – there was nothing there at all, and nothing up her sleeve.

  EMPTY CUP [V]

  It hadn’t surprised Yuki that she had not won the lottery. The only answer she had received from the ticket had been a straight, technical explanation.

  Unacceptable – does not fit criteria for acceptance

  Simulated – synthetic, artificial, fake, counterfeit meant to deceive by passing as real

  Person – human being, or character meant to be the equivalent of a human being

  Non-Human Manipulated – moved, activated, set in motion by a force other than a human being, possibly a character meant to be the equivalent of a human being

  Standing there on the street with winged gang members soaring overhead, occasionally dive-bombing her in an attempt to make her stampede or at least duck (she didn’t oblige them), she felt a fatigue that surpassed any other tiredness or exhaustion she’d ever experienced. Sick of you, she thought, staring up at a winged thug balanced on a crumbling ledge. He was staring right back at her. She shouldn’t have been able to tell because he was so far away, but that was AR for you – all the information you didn’t need and more. And sometimes less, too, she’d thought, looking down at the lottery ticket. Sick of you.

  A vehicle that looked like a cross between a tank and a double-decker touring bus overturned in front of her, spilling out a mess of people with weapons grafted directly onto their bodies. They all rolled expertly to their feet and ran off in all directions, several of them brushing her roughly as they passed. Yuki imagined they were supposed to look frightening and deadly with their built-in killing machinery but they only suggested an ill-advised laboratory experiment that had escaped from its vat and multiplied. And for all she knew, that was the scenario they were all acting out. Gang Wars in Post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, starring various crimes against nature. Strictly for entertainment value of course, for those of you whose idea of entertainment is to be frightened, intimidated, or even beaten up. Sick of you. Sick of you, time to go. She moved her eyes along the periphery of her visual field, waiting for the exit menu to pop up. Nothing happened.

  Well, that was okay, too. Joy Flower might be determined to keep her in here, for whatever hinky-kinky reasons, but the bitch couldn’t force her to do anything. She walked past the overturned tank-bus, which had started to burn, and sat down in the middle of the street, waiting for something to fall on her, run her over, or otherwise end her stupid adventure and get her fired. Wherever Tom was, he would just have to find some other way to act out his strange needs. She was done. It wasn’t worth it. Sick of you.
>
  ‘Sick of you,’ she announced to the sky, hoping Joy Flower could hear her. ‘Sick of you. And sick of me, too.’

  Whether Joy Flower heard her or not, the winged thug on the ledge had. He adjusted his diving posture and she knew he was aiming right for her.

  There was no transition. She was standing at the open hatch of an airplane tens of thousands of feet up, hanging on with both hands. Someone’s foot was in the small of her back. Her stomach dropped and rebounded in terror, and her fingers tightened their grip. The pressure against her back increased slightly and her body bowed outward.

  Not that you could die, of course, she thought, staring down at the patchwork landscape passing underneath, partly veiled by thin, ragged clouds. You couldn’t die from this sort of thing. And if it happened over and over and over, you might even get inured to it and conquer your fear. And then again, maybe you wouldn’t. How many times would it have to happen before you knew one way or another, and what would be left of your mind when it was over?

  And while we were at it, what was that bit about Joy Flower not being able to force her to do anything?

  Had she only been thinking, or had someone been whispering to her, a tiny voice bypassing the roaring of both the wind and her own hammering heart? Cold air freeze-scalded her face, ripped the moisture from her eyes, drove spikes of pain through her temples. This, too, was part of the sensuous AR experience; enjoy.

  She made herself look up into the crystal blue of the sky. And just suppose, she thought, that instead of falling down, you fell up, at high speed. At a higher speed, say, than falling down, a higher speed than anyone could follow.

  And what if no one knew? What if you let anyone who might be watching see your body tumbling down through the cloudy air, plunging toward earth in the typical splayed and helpless position, a human starfish. Was that possible?