Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

  “She's younger than you, she's not of your station in life. She's a dole gypsy, and I don't have a firm address for her. But I can describe her.”

  Gordo said, “I imagine she's beautiful.”

  “Not bad-looking.”

  “Hair short? Hair long?”

  “Long, and tied down her back. At least when she came in here three years ago to sell us a dream.”

  “But even if I find her, that doesn't solve our problem.”

  “Ideally, you won't just find her. You'll befriend her. Grow close to her. Close enough that you can arrange the recording of another dream, or two, or more.”

  “Convince her to come and see you, you mean?”

  “No, no—as I said, I want no direct connection with this. But the gear that records nocturnal brain activity needn't be as bulky as what we use here. In fact, I've prototyped some much stealthier inductive devices. Things you could install in a pillow, say, or a bed frame.”

  “And record her dreams without her knowledge? Isn't that a criminal act?”

  “I've never heard of such a prosecution. Define it any way you want, Mr. Fisk. Do it, or don't do it. All I'm saying is, I can supply you the technology. And her name. Don't you at least want to know her name?”

  By the second round of drinks Iris had shed her diaphanous blouse and put her feet up on Gordo's mahogany living-room table. The table was an antique. Antiques, like therapy, could not be manufactured by aibots. It was a costly table. Gordo thought her feet looked just fine, resting there. Exquisite, he thought, those feet. Small, pale, flawless. Also not manufactured by aibots.

  “This has been nice, Gordo,” she said. “I mean really nice. Thank you.”

  Gordo sipped his drink and thought it might be going to his head, possibly because he was tired. Or he was tired because the drink was going to his head. Or something. He tried to assemble his thoughts. She seemed inclined to stay: should he record her dreams tonight? (If they slept at all.) Or wait for another night, presuming there would be another night? Prospects seemed bright. Maybe better to forget about Dr. DuBois's spyware for now. Make love for the sake of making love. For the sake of her perfection.

  No, not perfection. Perfection was not what he wanted or expected. If anything, Gordo thought, Iris Seawright seemed a little simple-minded, or at least not well educated. But she ran deep. He knew that: he had seen what was inside her. He had built a monument to her long before he'd ever met her.

  She nestled into his shoulder and put her hand on his thigh.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “A little woozy,” he said.

  “Yeah. That's how it starts.”

  “What starts?”

  She ignored the question and stood up. Gordo remained seated. Getting up didn't seem like a good idea, somehow.

  “What would you say is the most valuable small thing you own, Gordo?”

  “Valuable?”

  “On the resale market. Small thing. Not, like, real estate. Something you have in the apartment. Something portable.”

  Gordo wondered what the point of this was but found himself answering, again, honestly: “The Fibonacci seashell,” he said. “After that…I suppose the psalter on the mantel. It's silver and it's very old. Other things…some of the furniture…”

  “Smaller than furniture,” Iris said, and she was putting her blouse back on, looking curiously businesslike, unaffected by the drink (though why a mere two glasses of wine should have taken him so strongly he failed to understand)….

  He opened his mouth and answered her questions in detail, as if she were an insurance adjuster; then she said, “And do you have a bag, a backpack, anything like that?”

  He answered that question too. She was almost unbearably beautiful, Gordo thought, moving around the apartment methodically, gathering up his possessions and tucking them into his old camping pack. He didn't want to close his eyes, because he might not be able to will them open again. He realized he had been drugged.

  He said, “What did you give me?”

  “Relax,” Iris said. “It's the same stuff they give you to make you sleep at the Bonnuit Clinic. Bunch of us from the beach used to go there to sell dreams. And rip off a dose or two when the docs weren't looking.”

  “You gave me a drug? So you could steal my things?”

  “I don't think of it as theft,” Iris said.

  “What?”

  “Royalties,” she said.

  Gordo was silent for what might have been a minute or an hour. His thoughts were becoming incoherent. Finally he said, “How did you know?”

  “Well, you don't have to be a genius to draw a conclusion. YFL-500 was the code they put on my file at the clinic.”

  “You have…a good memory.”

  “‘Nearly eidetic.’ A teacher told me that once. Then she told me what ‘eidetic’ meant. She said if I cared at all about schoolwork I could be a great scholar. But remembering isn't the same as understanding.”

  “Maybe that's why. Why you dream so vividly.”

  “Maybe.” She shrugged. “So that was really my dream, huh? Made into art. Wow.”

  Gordo nodded groggily. Wow. He watched as she stuffed the Fibonacci seashell, his father's legacy to him, into the backpack. “No point stealing that,” he said. “Everything's microtagged. And that piece is well known. If you put it on auction—”

  “Who said anything about stealing? It's a gift, right, Gordo?”

  “No,” he said helplessly.

  “Well, then, report it. We'll go to court. But I might have to mention YFL-500, and the clinic, and that doctor you must be paying off. Motive and all that.”

  Gordo would have slumped deeper into the sofa, had that been possible.

  “Don't worry,” she said. “You'll sleep soon. Before you do, though, Gordo, I have to ask: why me? Couldn't you steal someone else's dream?”

  “Not as good. I tried.”

  “Or a dream of your own? Oh—right. You don't dream.” Gordo considered that statement, and she mistook his expression for misery. “Don't be so fucking hard on yourself. You do okay. Data's just data, right?”

  She had seemed beautiful. She was beautiful. He could not dispel the illusion. She possessed not just a superficial but a profound beauty. A beauty invisible. He had believed in it. He had believed in it fiercely. It had seemed so real.

  He closed his eyes.

  “Sleep, baby,” Iris said. “Maybe this time you'll dream.”

  “But I did.” Even with his eyes closed he could see her. The vision of her. The vision he had made, though it did not entirely fit her: it was, he realized, a transrepresentation, a very fine one, delicate and beautiful, and he was sorry to lose it, but it was slipping away now, lost in morning light.

  “I did,” he said, or tried to say. “I dreamed,” he said into her absence. “I dreamed of you.”

  Widely acknowledged as one of the best of the new British hard SF writers, Justina Robson expertly mixes vanguard speculations with achingly personal concerns, melding hard science with warm emotion better than anyone else working today. Science and sexuality, nanotech and neurosis, action and anxiety—she takes us from the depths of her humanity to the heights of the stars. The New York Times recently praised Robson for “the exquisite precision and thoughtfulness of her writing,” a characteristic that is always in evidence, even (especially) when she is at her most playful. Here, fun and heartache mix in equal measures in a tale set in the aftermath of her novel Mappa Mundi, when the software of the human mind is too easily updated.

  The eternal youth and optimism, the always-forwards energy of the Girl Hero makes her feel lethargic whenever she stops for coffee at her favorite bookstore. She is living in a Base Reality not unlike Prime, the original reality old Earthers used to share before Mappa Mundi, except it has fifty more shades of pink and no word for “hate.” Her reality is called Rose Tint, and it was the one relatively mild hacker virus she was glad to catch. Of course, she would thi
nk that about it now….

  The Girl Hero feels there is something missing about herself, but she cannot name it. She has always felt this way, since she was tiny at her father's knee. He showed her a fly that had landed on the back of his hand. She looked closely, marveling at how small it was, how neat, how industrious as it cleaned its pretty glass wings. She remembers how he smashed it flat with his other hand. He was so fast. He had the reflexes of ten men, and he was a Hero, too.

  Oh, one other thing that is missing about her is her name…a bout of flu stole it from her when she was in her teens, not so long ago. She keeps it written on the inside of her wrist in indelible ink that she rewrites every three days. She doesn't look at it much. Only when someone asks. The coffee barista has his name written on a badge: Marvin.

  “Thank you, Marvin,” she says as she takes her drink. The establishment is guaranteed clean. Little tablet boxes of Mappacode are sold at the counter, but they don't come under the Infection Bill: too minor, too common, and not particularly useful—they offer mnemonic upgrades for popular music charts, fashion, current affairs, and the stock markets so you can always have something to say and know what to buy. The information is stored somehow in proteins that only unfurl when they reach the right places in the brain—the places where Mappaware has created ports for them. They are inert otherwise, and when they have delivered the goods they break up into amino acids and provide spare nutrition. The Girl Hero takes a Mode one and pops it with the first steaming sip of espresso.

  The Girl Hero picks at the cardboard band around her coffee cup and goes to take a seat in the window. She is dismayed to learn from the Modey that tweed pencil skirts are in. They are the worst kind of skirt for kicking. She sips and looks around her and wonders for the millionth time if she should save her money and risk a remodel. But she doesn't know what to do if she isn't a Hero. A Hero wouldn't. The preference is disturbing—would she really like it if she hadn't agreed to this job at the careers’ meeting? Too late to wonder. It was a road not taken. She will never know who…(she looks at the inside of her wrist)…Rebecca might have been if she had chosen some different option. She hopes that Rebecca would have wanted to be a Hero anyway.

  In the eternal present moment of the Hero's world Rebecca waits, waits, waits for her assignment without anxiety or hope. On other faces she sees various expressions of emotions that fit a task: executives focused and intent on work, an artist dreaming as he stares into nowhere through the wall opposite him, girls bent to their schoolwork rising and falling in the perfectly timed bursts of concentration and relaxation that allow them maximum efficiency in their learning and their fun. They are like seals at play, bobbing in and out of the water. Their chat and laughter rises like bubbles, thinks the Girl Hero, and she feels a twinge of envy, though she had her time and doesn't want it back.

  A man in a dark suit as unmemorable as yesterday's news glides past and casually leaves his magazine on her table. She knows him for an Attaché, a man from the ministry who delivers duties to her kind, and that the magazine is a job offer in the eternal post-Mappa economy of the fight against the Cartomancers. She needs a job. She wants to move out of her mother's house.

  On page fifty-nine her secret message awaits her. It is typed on tissue paper and all the “o”s are offset, which means it is a mission of the most extreme danger and highest importance. How typical, she thinks, that these things should come together. She rubs some hand cream into her knuckles to hide the thick, dry calluses from years of smashing her fists into concrete walls.

  The message instructs her to take a journey to Pointe-Noire, in Congo. It is a place riddled with Cartoxins and the illegal breeding pens of the black market traders who design animals of exquisite savagery and intelligence for the use of the criminal underworld. Most of them will be remapped for various tasks, and they will not know mercy, fear, or any debilitating survival instinct. Once there she will go to a jungle compound and find a certain man and kill him. He is a bad man. She does not know his crimes, but they are probably something to do with writing or disseminating rogue viruses and/or Maps, because these are now the only crimes there are in the absence of what used to be known as Free Will. It is sure that if he were not so bad he would not be hiding out in such a place in the hopes that nobody would dare to follow. The vestiges of her sympathy for desperate men with missions for mankind are not stirred.

  She folds the tissue paper and puts it in her handbag. She goes to the bathroom and has to queue. The bathroom is located in the Self-Help section of the bookstore. The Girl Hero has no need for this. She is slightly mystified by the titles, and by the need of books in a world where everything can be eaten. She does not like to look at them. They seem to ask questions of her, and when her back is turned they whisper like schoolchildren.

  As she is washing her hands the Girl Hero feels an unpleasant feeling. It is like something scattering inside. She imagines she is made from swarms of rats that have just noticed a terrible thing and are running, running, running for their lives. She often feels this. It is doubt. It comes along after a certain time period when she has had nothing heroic to do. She puts the lid on the toilet down and sits there, taking up someone else's pee time as she gets out a vanity mirror from her handbag and opens it up. One half of the clamshell is an ordinary mirror. The other half has its own face, a kind of pixie that looks exactly like the Girl Hero. It came with the job. She suspects it is a transmitter device that talks directly to her Mappaware to sort out glitches. If she were more dedicated to keeping her appearance groomed than she is, possibly it would deal with her doubts for her.

  “Mirror, mirror,” says the Girl Hero, and need say no more.

  “You want to go,” says the mirror. “And you will.” It always says this. The Girl Hero finds it very reassuring. She always asks. Her real question has not yet been answered and she doesn't bother to say it, but the mirror replies all the same, “He is not the one.”

  She closes the mirror and puts it away, satisfied that its prophecies are correct. Despite her bad feeling, this encounter will not be the last. She will not die today. A Girl Hero always trusts her mirror.

  The Girl Hero goes shopping for a tweed pencil skirt and knee-high boots with heels. On her way to the airport she stops to text her mother that she will be home late, do not save any dinner, she will get some at the takeaway. Her mother is a Perky Waitress and will be satisfied with this latchkey message, not curious, not alarmed; she might bring home plastic boxes filled with peach pie and put them on the countertop for…Rebecca…to find when she comes in. Peach pie tastes of sweet, fulfilling safety and sleep. Two bites would be enough.

  At the check-in desk she sees another Girl Hero, but one with a robot dog companion. She feels a sudden pang of envy and wants to introduce herself, to ask something that brims to her lips with urgent importance, though it can't make itself into words without a listener…but the other Hero is in a hurry. She runs off towards a departure gate with a flip of curly brown hair over the top of her practical backpack and grabs up her ammunition clips from the security guard without breaking stride. Her robot dog races beside her.

  The Girl Hero…Rebecca…has no weapons to check. She deals only in kung fu. Her handbag is very small, just big enough for makeup, the mirror, and her phone. She looks up the price of robot dogs while she waits to board her flight. They are expensive. She thinks a real one would be better, but of course there is a problem with quarantine and the endless inoculations. She couldn't possibly afford one. Robots cannot catch diseases, so they are immune to all but the most specific and local of memetic assaults. A robot is much better, but the Girl Hero imagines a warm body, soft fur, regular breathing in a real rib cage moving under her hands, and brown eyes looking at her with unconditional love.

  On the flight a man is seated beside her. He makes small talk about her job with the unconscious impulses of all businesspeople. She tells him she is a secretary, which is true, when she is not being a Hero. He sells virtual
real estate. He shows her one of the communities he administers: a condo by the sea, to let, all mod cons, barely the cost of a sandwich per month and unlimited online access. He is persuasive, but Heroes are not easily sold. She declines. Her feet swell uncomfortably in the boots. She takes a limousine from the airport to her hotel, where she has a room already booked for her by the ministry.

  Pointe-Noire is a township with only a small centre adequately defended and habitable. Beyond the line of automatic fire lie teeming swarms of wildlife so bestial and savage, so tightly packed, that every moment of their existence is a matter of do or die. They are the testbed of Hellmemes and other horrors cooked up in the mobile Cartomancy sweatshops that creak and grind through the jungle; metal behemoths covered in solar panels and electrical deterrents.

  Beyond the hotel perimeter fence it is still night but will soon be day. In that blue hour there is a slight lull in the slaughter and terror as sleepy creatures of dark trade places with waking creatures of light.

  The Girl Hero hires a personal jetcar and lands a few miles from town, close to the house where He lives, this criminal, or whatever he is. Her little capsule glides down within his ranch home's Sphere of Influence—a forcefield of protection maintained by a mini reactor. There are no monsters inside, but two muddy fields of marsh grass and the foot-high remains of stripped trees lie between her and the buildings. She regrets the boots now.

  Outside the house there are fences and inside the fences are real dogs, mastiffs with serial killers’ eyes. The Girl Hero walks to the gate, pulling her boot heels free of the mud with every step, thinking the leather will be ruined. She does not feel like strangling a dog. Her inner world has become the gray blank place she associates with Heroism. It is familiar and strangely disappointing. She doesn't know what she was expecting from a life devoted to exacting justice and defending the world from evil, but this was not it. Beyond the forcefield at her back the dawn chorus of howls, screams, roars, and whimpers greets the veteran sun.