Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

  He knew her name and a few salient details. She was a dole gypsy, no fixed address, lived by the docks, slept with friends or in the lightless nooks of aibot factories or, weather permitting, under a tent on the beach. She earned no money and subsisted on her dole annuities, but—and this was among his first impressions of her—she wore brightly dyed clothing and gaudy flecks of expensive jewelry, and maybe that should have told him something, but it didn't.

  Gordo had been coming to Doletown every day for more than a month, searching for her. He didn't pretend to be anything but a modestly wealthy artist slumming among the willfully unemployed. Every morning he rose from a dreamless sleep and left his neat, expensive apartment to ride down the columnar deeps of the city to Doletown. He didn't mention her name there—he dared not be that obvious—but he made friends quickly among the would-be and has-been aesthetes who comprised so large a percentage of the Doletown population, and he kept his ears open. He dropped his own name by way of a calling card. “I'm Gordo Fisk,” he would say, extending his hand, and the response might be a raised eyebrow of recognition or envy or scorn. Yes, that Gordo Fisk. The transrepresentationalist. Briefly famous, yes. Though that was fading.

  Apart from her name, all he really knew about her was that she had visited the Bonnuit Sleep Clinic in the early spring of 2110—three years ago now. Because he couldn't name her directly, he discreetly mentioned the Bonnuit instead. It turned out a lot of Doletown types had visited the Bonnuit in the past, not because they had trouble sleeping but because the clinic was conveniently located and had sponsored a research program that ran until late last year. The clinic would pay volunteers a generous tithe just for sleeping in a monitored bed with devices attached to their craniums. A noninvasive night's work and a nice way to pick up pocket change when the free food, shelter, and consumer chits guaranteed by the Rationalization seemed not quite sufficient.

  So her name eventually came up in conversation. Her name was Iris Seawright, and before too long Gordo found himself on a beach where the salt air smelled rank and the concrete bastions of wave/tide power stations rode the blue horizon like floating castles. It was late in the day, and a casual group of dole gypsies had assembled to build a bonfire. They stacked driftwood and flotsam while public-safety aibots flitted overhead with motherly concern. In the light of the setting sun, the flying aibots looked like seabirds made of amethyst or amber.

  Iris Seawright came out of a green hempen tent, shielding her eyes, and Gordo, still meters away, knew at once that he had found her. She had been described to him, of course, but he suspected he would have known her anyway. She was everything he had imagined but more specific—somehow, more incarnate. She wasn't remarkably tall or short. Her face was elfin and sun-browned. She wore gauzy fabrics that flag-danced in the breeze from the ocean, and her golden hair was tied with a ribbon and dangled carelessly down her back. Her rings sparkled. So did her eyes.

  Gordo's heart did double beats as he tried to maintain his calm. This, after all, was what he had been searching for for so long. This, or some sense of his own authenticity.

  Three years ago, Gordo had gone to the Bonnuit Clinic to confess a shameful secret and to seek a cure.

  The physician he saw that day was one Dr. DuBois, a man his own age. Dr. DuBois welcomed him into one of the interview rooms attached to the clinic's luxurious main atrium. The Bonnuit Clinic catered expensively to the worried well. The Rationalization guaranteed medical care to anyone who needed it, but if you wanted a human physician—not one of those competent but affectless or obsequious aibots who staffed the curbside hospitals—you had to pay money for the privilege. Perversely, the most expensive of these facilities specialized in the most trivial non-life-threatening complaints. See a machine for appendicitis: see a human being for your soul. Or so people said, up on the sunlight levels of the city.

  Gordo's complaint was not physical, exactly, but neither was it wholly spiritual. Now that he had screwed up the courage to come here, he found it enormously difficult to confess.

  “Your sleep is disturbed,” Dr. DuBois said encouragingly.

  “Yes…well…in a way.”

  “Are you reluctant to confide in me? Believe me, Mr. Fisk, there's nothing to be apologetic about. I see people every day—people who share your problem, I'm sure, if you'll only explain to me what it is. Can't fall asleep? Medication doesn't work for you? Nightmares? Existential discomfort?”

  For any of those problems he would have consulted an aibot physician or neurologist. But there were some things you simply didn't want to say to a machine. That delicacy of feeling was no doubt what kept Dr. DuBois in business.

  “I don't dream,” Gordo said, almost choking on the words.

  The doctor betrayed no disapproval or disgust. Why would he? Gordo's shame was specific to himself: to his situation, his history.

  “Most likely you do dream,” DuBois said congenially, “and simply don't remember having done so. Dreams are elusive, Mr. Fisk. Slippery by nature. They're seldom what we expect.”

  “I don't dream, or I don't remember my dreams—it's all the same—though I truly believe I don't dream at all, Dr. DuBois; that's what it feels like, although I can't prove it.”

  “That must be disturbing. Even so, I have patients who might envy you. They suffer terribly from nightmares.”

  Dr. DuBois was being even-handed, injecting a sense of proportion. Gordo shrugged. He would have welcomed a nightmare. He would have thrown a party for it.

  “Well,” Dr. DuBois said, “we can certainly work with you, Mr. Fisk, identify the problem and address it, but before we begin may I ask why you find this dreamlessness so particularly troubling?”

  “I'm an artist.”

  The doctor's eyebrows rose. “Fisk? I'm thinking of the Fisks who created the Mt. Merapi Series—but surely you're too young—”

  “Tomas Fisk was my father.” And Arcela Fisk was his mother, he might have added. Both were responsible for the Mt. Merapi installation, not to mention dozens of other less-grandiose works of static art.

  Gordo had been apprenticed into the static arts since childhood, had willingly and eagerly accepted the role of heir-apparent that had been thrust upon him by his parents and, when they retired, by their eager public following. But he was thirty years old now, and to this point he had produced only workmanlike and undistinguished public installations, commissioned by businesses and municipalities more interested in his marketable name than in the final product. Like his parents Gordo was a transrepresentationalist, but his work had gathered only tepid applause, and his status within the movement was fragile. He had overheard himself being dismissed at gallery openings and sophisticated parties.

  Worse than that, though—or at the root of it—was this inability to dream. He had been raised in a household and in a community that valued all things invisible or mysterious in human nature: things the aibots (presumably) didn't share. Visions, eccentricity, madness of the nonviolent sort, hallucinatory journeys, dream quests—dreams! His parents had discussed their dreams in minute detail at the breakfast table. As a child Gordo had willingly and eagerly joined in these conversations, and his mother and father had praised the vividness and gaudiness of his youthful fantasies. But the dreams dried up when he hit puberty, and Gordo had been reduced to silence or embarrassing fiction. He could not bring himself to say, “I don't dream anymore; my nights are black, seamless oceans of nothingness; I lie unconscious for eight hours and wake knowing I've slept; but I no longer dream.” He could hardly admit it to himself, even now. It would have been like confessing that he was hollow inside, an empty vessel from which all visionary content had been drained.

  He explained this to Dr. DuBois while blushing and studying the floor.

  Dr. DuBois appeared to give the issue somber thought. Then he said, “Thank you for your frankness. I understand now. We'll work up your case, Mr. Fisk, and we'll find out what's gone wrong. And then we'll fix it.”

  Gordo liked the
sound of that.

  He observed Iris Seawright surreptitiously as he circled the bonfire, not wanting to spook her, not wanting their meeting to seem anything but natural. Night fell while he watched her, and there was the sound of waves lapping the littoral, the tide offering up bits and pieces of the world as it had been before the population decline and the Rationalization—wasteful plastic things, salt-bleached jugs and bottles like the pallid carcasses of extinct crabs. Public-safety aibots still flitted prissily overhead, keeping watch to make sure the flames didn't spread, dodging sparks that whirled up from the burning driftwood. There was conversation and singing, and Gordo saw couples and threesomes vanishing behind a concrete tidal wall to make love in the sandy darkness. Iris, he was pleased to see, listened to the music, chatted with friends, but essentially kept to herself. There was a certain singleness about her.

  She finally settled on a log a comfortable distance from the fire, her face an intoxicating patchwork of firelight and moonshadow, among a group of people with whom Gordo had recently made friends. He drifted that way and nodded at the familiar faces. Before long he was introduced to her. Gordo Fisk, Iris Seawright. Pleased to meet you. The chorus of biographical data: Gordo is an artist. A successful artist. Lives up in the sunlight levels, a transrepresentationalist, maybe you've heard of him.

  Iris, who had not yet pronounced more than a sentence, cocked her perfect head at him and said, “No. Name's not familiar.”

  “Iris don't follow the arts,” someone else chimed in. “Iris's one of the original originals.”

  “Pure dole gypsy,” a second voice said.

  “Does as she wills.”

  “A free spirit.”

  “Goes where the wind blows.”

  Et cetera. Gordo ignored all these incantations, because Iris was smiling at him now. She patted the log beside her, and he sat down, entranced.

  He had known she would be beautiful.

  Of course there had been no guarantee of that. As Dr. DuBois had once said, “She could be anyone.” The code on her file had indicated her gender but nothing else. She could have been a child. She could have been an old woman stooped and angled by the years. She could have been monstrously ugly. There was no telling.

  But Gordo had known, in some inexplicably powerful way, that she would be beautiful. He remembered something his father had often said (imperially, as he said most things, pronouncing a great truth): “If there is no such thing as a beautiful dream, Gordo, there can be no such thing as a beautiful mind.”

  So he had known that her mind, at least, would be beautiful. But he had suspected the rest of her would be, too. He had anticipated the youth and lightness of her, the fearlessness of her gaze, even the wrinkles of curiosity and (perhaps) joy at the corners of her eyes.

  He put those things out of his thoughts, however, and simply talked to her—small talk, the only kind of talk available to strangers; the weather, the night, the stars; while he memorized the look of her and while she likewise checked him out, one moment meeting his eyes with her own, the next looking at his shoes or his clothing or away into the night and the sea. Her voice was light and musical, her vocabulary simple, her grammar and syntax uncomplex. Her hands moved when she spoke, illustrating her sentences like twin trained birds.

  He had known, he had known.

  Cautiously, not wanting to push anything but conscious of the connection he had already made, he asked her to dinner the following night. She said yes, that might be nice. Come around about evening tomorrow, she said.

  “Where?” he said.

  “Oh, here. I'll be here somewhere. I'll look for you,” she said.

  Dr. DuBois had performed an intricate test on Gordo to determine the cause of his anoeiric fugue—his dreamlessness. What happened was, Gordo went to the Bonnuit Clinic at an appointed hour, was helmeted with neurological inductors of the latest and subtlest kind, was given a hypnagogic potion to make him sleep, and was installed in a monitoring bed while he waited for the drug to affect him. He asked whether the drug would make him dream: he had experimented with other substances reputed to have that effect, but they had done nothing for him.

  “No,” Dr. DuBois said, “this is only to put you to sleep, and to compress the equivalent of an eight-hour night into half that time—it does nothing to foster or inhibit REM states. How do you feel so far?”

  “Well—sleepy,” Gordo admitted. His limbs had grown heavy, and he found himself listlessly uninterested in his body, the doctor, the room, his senses, anything at all. Dr. DuBois said reassuring things, and soon Gordo slept: the only evidence of which was, he woke again.

  “No dreams,” he reported.

  He had slept the regulation four hours under the influence of the drug. Dr. DuBois had meanwhile interviewed patients, gone for lunch, written the introduction to a journal article, and returned to Gordo's bedside. “We'll see about that,” he said.

  They adjourned to a consultation room where DuBois was already running a collation of the session's results. Numbers scrolled down the screen of the doctor's analytical engine, followed by something that interested Gordo more: a patchwork of elementary colors, chiefly gray, blue, black, separating and reconjoining like oil on water.

  Dr. DuBois studied these results. The sequence seemed to run no more than a minute. Dr. DuBois ran it twice, frowning.

  Gordo said, “What is that?”

  “Your four hours of sleep. From the inside. The devices you wore on your head monitored your brain activity. They're extremely subtle machines, Mr. Fisk. They can register the discharge or inhibition of a single neuron, the ebb and flow of an entire alphabet of neurotransmitters, the activity or inactivity of individual synapses and ion channels. They know where these events happen in the brain and what they signify in macroscopic and behavioral terms. They can distinguish between rage and pain, laughter and grief, love and hate. All these things and a thousand more are condensed into numbers and represented schematically in compressed time.”

  “Transrepresented,” Gordo said, because this was what the transrepresentational movement in the arts was all about: taking real-world data and making beautiful abstractions of it.

  “In a sense,” Dr. DuBois agreed, “in a sense.”

  “And it can tell when I'm dreaming?”

  The doctor hesitated a long moment. “Yes.”

  “And was I?”

  Another pause. “No.”

  Gordo was unsurprised.

  “But this is only an isolated test,” Dr. DuBois said. “You didn't dream this time. Most patients do, but in your case—well—”

  Gordo watched the colors evolve and dissolve on the screen. “So what does a dream look like, if this isn't one?”

  “Here—I can show you an example, if you like.”

  He rooted through his desk for a file folder to which a slip of digital memory was attached and fed the slip into a port of the analytical engine. The screen immediately flushed with pearlescent filigree, with subtle paisleys and exfoliating neon fractals.

  Gordo watched, wide-eyed. Then he glanced at the file folder. On it was written an identity code: YFL-500.

  Gordo arrived at the beach at the appointed hour, but the wind was chilly and carried a periodic, stuttering drizzle—he was afraid she wouldn't show up. He waited under a sheltering abutment as the time came and the time passed. At sea, under veils of rain, aibot cargo ships drifted like gray windowless cities. Gordo had abandoned all but the faintest hope and was about to head back to the intracity lifts when he spotted a swirl of magenta behind the curve of a retaining wall: her cape. He ran to her, grinning and shivering.

  “You're wet,” she said, and he said, “I'll be all right. Thank you for coming. I was hoping you would. Are you hungry? Where do you want to eat?”

  “You pick. Somewhere nice.”

  Somewhere uptown, she meant. Somewhere she couldn't afford to go without exhausting her dole allowance. Well, that was a reasonable request. He meant to show her a good time. So
he folded his rain cape back into its pack and took her up the lifts to a premium mallway in which there was an Ethiopian-style restaurant he had discovered last year. The restaurant was quiet and dark and staffed entirely by human beings. Most menial food chores (like menial chores of every other kind) were customarily performed by aibots, so the waitstaff here were almost certainly paid fabulous wages for lending that last touch of biologique to the all-organic ambiance. And that premium was reflected in the prices on the menu, at which Iris's eyes widened prettily. Gordo didn't mind. He was happy to give her this; she deserved it—though he could not let his adulation show, for it might lead her to suspect his motives. His motives were as pure as arctic ice—well, relatively pure—but it wouldn't do to reveal them too soon. Might scare her away.

  He asked her about her life.

  She had been born into a large family somewhere south of Eugene, Oregon, she said, and they had all been content to subsist on the dole. The automation of the economy, the Entrepreneurial Expert System that guided and governed machine/machine production and exchange, had enabled an idyllic childhood. No one lacked for food, shelter, and an income large enough to allow that individual to function as a consumer (and thus a perceptible unit in the global calculus of economic intercourse). Iris was educated—she could read and write English—but she had never been any kind of scholar, and her spiritual life, she said, consisted of a deep need not to linger too long in any single place. “I like to move around,” she said.

  “It's true what they said about you at the beach, then. Free spirit.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” She shrugged. “Whatever that means.”

  Gordo was not in the least disappointed that Iris wasn't an intellectual or an artist. Better that she wasn't, perhaps. Any trace of self-consciousness would have marred her perfect authenticity. After all, it wasn't the content of her mind he had come to love. It was the raw fecundity of it.