by Lou Anders
Ken swayed as he looked from me to the computer. His clothes smelled of stale cigarette smoke.
“Whoever thought that philosophy could be useful?” he said sarcastically.
“Whoever designed the program on that disk, I imagine,” I replied sweetly.
Kant 2.0 seemed to do the trick. The composite picture of me and Ken at the top of Ben Nevis was efficiently separated into its component parts and placed in a query folder, along with other files with ambiguous dates. I went through the folder at my leisure, assigning the files to their correct context.
Picture files “Jon Paris.jpg” and “Ken Eiffel Tower.jpg”
have the same date. Merge Yes No?
They had the same date because both files would have been newly created when I copied them across from my old computer. Piece by piece I separated my life back out, disentangling it from the imaginary web in which it had become entangled.
I found it quite therapeutic. Like playing my guitar.
All seemed to return to normal. Until I came home late one evening from college and found a message on the screen.
hi jon gone to mallons with charlotte and najam
back late don't wait up jen xxx
It was from Jenny. There was no doubt about it. She regarded ignoring punctuation or the shift key as a way of demonstrating her refusal to take my work seriously. It was “only writing,” after all.
But what was she playing at, e-mailing me now?
Her number was still on my mobile. I dialed her. She answered on the third ring.
“Jon. What do you want?”
The sound of her voice still hurt, especially when it was twisted into something so suspicious and hostile.
“Me?” I replied. “What do you want? What do you mean, you've gone to Mallon's?”
“Why shouldn't I go to Mallon's?” she said. “It's Charlotte's birthday.” I could hear the sound of a jukebox playing in the background: wine bar jazz, bland saxophones over a Latin clave. The sort of MOR crap I hate. “Anyway,” she snapped, “what's it got to do with you? Are you spying on me?”
“What?” I looked at the computer screen again, just to confirm that I wasn't seeing things. “Spying on you? No. I got your message.”
“What message? Jon, stop pissing me around.”
And at that the line went dead.
I stared at the screen for a while; then I went to close the message down. A prompt appeared on the screen.
Save changes to file? Yes No
After a long moment, I clicked on the Yes button.
I don't think I could name the exact moment I realized I was not living my real life. It was a slow process of comprehension, a picture that gradually took form as the different pieces slotted into place. It was like watching an image downloading from the Internet on a slow connection.
Here there was an e-mail from Jenny telling me that she would meet me at the Tate at seven that night.
Here was confirmation of two tickets to see Chris Smither at the Half Moon in Putney. Two tickets, one for me, one for Ken.
Here was a picture of Jenny and me riding on a boat down the dark stripe of the Thames, late on a warm July evening. London rose up on either bank outlined in red and yellow and white lights. What a delightful scene for a wedding reception. I could see Charlotte in the background, looking beautiful as the bride.
Here was confirmation of a flight to Geneva, and later on there was picture of Ken and me sitting on the terrace of a refuge high in the Italian Alps. Ken was holding up a glass of water to the camera to say “cheers!” His nose was burned red by the sun; he looked happy and healthy and utterly relaxed, and I felt suddenly stifled by the half-empty room in which I sat. South Street was so dull and lifeless compared to the world on my screen. I stared again at Ken, looking so peaceful. When was the last time I had seen him so happy with nothing but a glass of water in his hand?
That was my computer. That was Kant 2.0. It viewed the world through keyboards and scanners and microphones, and built up a pattern of life through causality and time that was as optimized and validated and free from illogicality as was anything else on my computer. My new OS didn't understand about repression and self-destruction and pride and all those other human traits in which Ken and I had steeped our lives. On the screen I could see my PC living out my life for me as it should have been lived, if only I had the courage and the sense to have seized my opportunities as they came along.
And it made me feel sick to my soul to see it, because there, dancing in the pixel light of my dim room, there was no room for excuses or dreams or might-have-beens. That was a picture of my failure in negative, a successful life painted for all to see in twenty-four-bit glory.
Ken rolled up at my house two nights later. It was half past ten; there was still forty minutes’ worth of drinking time left in the pubs, but I guess his money had run out. I offered him a coffee; he accepted it with a decent measure of brandy poured in for luck.
“Ken,” I said. “Why didn't we go and see Chris Smither?”
He sat back on my old sofa, knocking yesterday's newspaper onto the floor, and took a big drink.
“Chris Smither?” His eyes lit up for a moment. “Yeah—he did that cool arrangement of Statesboro Blues. How did that go again?”
He put his mug down on the carpet and began to play air guitar. “Doo dn doo dn dah dah…Wake up Mama, turn your lamp down low…doo dnn…” He shook his head. “I don't know. We just didn't have the time, I suppose.”
He mimed some more, singing to himself. Ken used to play the guitar a lot: he was very good. Way better than me. I pulled my computer chair up so that I was sitting closer to him.
“Why not?” I asked. “Why didn't we have time? It's not like we ever do anything. I spend my evenings sitting here at a computer typing out lesson notes and articles that are never published. What about you?”
“I don't know. I guess I was busy. You know how it is….”
“Busy doing what? Ken, we used to go to a concert at least once a week. You used to love listening to live music.”
“I still do.”
“No you don't. Ken, we'd have been at the concert if you hadn't been ‘too busy.’”
I tapped at the keyboard and brought up the picture of Ken sitting outside the refuge in the Alps, glass of water in his hand.
“Looks good, doesn't it?” I said. He didn't seem surprised to see it. I pressed home my point.
“We'd have taken that holiday if you hadn't decided to stay in the pub and have another drink. That”—I pointed to the PC—“knows the logical thing would have been to put down your beer and come with me to the travel agents.”
“What does it know?” said Ken dismissively.
“That you're an alcoholic.”
The words were out before I could stop them. Ken held my gaze for a lengthening time, and then both our eyes slid back to the computer screen.
“Have you been on the Internet lately?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Just for e-mail. Research, that sort of thing.”
“Have you looked at the news sites?” There was an edge of danger in his voice.
“I prefer to read the papers.” I looked at the tangled mess of yesterdays Guardian being ground into the floor by his restless feet. He stood up suddenly.
“Come here,” he said, walking to my computer.
He opened the web browser and typed in an address at the top: news.bbc.co.uk.
My Internet connection is slow. The words and pictures dropped into place piece by piece, slowly revealing the picture of the world as understood by Kant 2.0.
There were pictures of cities full of gleaming towers.
A classroom full of beaming black children.
A field of tanks, painted in rainbow colors, flowers growing amongst their tracks.
A spaceship sitting on the red rocky surface of Mars.
I turned to Ken.
“That's not true, is it?” I said. “None of it is rea
l.”
“No,” said Ken. “But it could be. If we really wanted it.”
There was another of those deepening silences that seemed to have infected our lives. Eventually, he held out his mug.
“More coffee?” I said.
“Yes. Don't forget the brandy.”
Elizabeth Bear's Jenny Casey trilogy (Hammered, Scardown, Worldwired) has been kicking up quite a storm, enough to put her on my radar even if she hadn't been the 2005 winner of the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Fortunately, due to a fortuitous meeting at Book Expo America, I was able to invite her into Fast Forward and experience her genius firsthand.
It's autoerotic asphyxiation, but nobody's admitting that.
The children get jump ropes or neckties or shoelaces, or they just do it to each other, thumbs under chins buried in baby fat. With childish honesty, they call it the pass-out game, the fainting game, the tingle game. The something-dreaming game, too.
When it's mentioned in the papers, journalists coyly obscure the truth. With Victorian prudishness, they report that the children strangle each other to get “high.” Because society thinks that children that young—nine, ten—aren't supposed to experience erotic sensation. The reality that kids don't always do what they're supposed to—am I the only one who remembers my own confused preadolescent sexuality?—gets disregarded with fantastic regularity.
But the truth is that they do it for the tingle through their veins, the arousal, the light-headedness, and the warmth that floods their immature bodies. Like everything else we do—as individuals, as a species—it's all about sex. And death. Yin and yang. Maybe if we admitted what was going on, we'd have a chance of stopping it before more die.
It's the things we don't talk about that become the monsters under the bed.
The game is autoerotic asphyxiation. You would hope the smart ones wouldn't do it alone, wouldn't do it at all.
But my Tara was as smart as they come.
Tara must have learned the game at the hospital, when she had her implant finalized. It was the cutting edge of therapy, a promising experimental treatment. An FDA trial; she was lucky to be selected.
The implant is a supercomputer the size of the last joint of my thumb, wired into my daughter's brain. Tara has RSD, reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome, a disease resulting in intense, uncontrollable neuralgia. Which is to say, her nerves hurt. Transcendently. All the time.
The implant interrupts the electrical signals that cause the brain to register the sensations. The computing power is quantum, supplied by a Bose-Einstein condensate, and no, I don't know what that means or how it works, any more than I know how a silicon chip works, or a vacuum tube.
What matters is, it worked.
Two weeks after Tara returned to school, I got a phone call from Silkie Mendez's mother. I was still at work; Tara was in after-school enrichment, and her dad was supposed to pick her up. I'd get her after dinner.
It's the real mark of domesticity. You become somebody's mother, somebody's father. A parent, not a person at all.
But at work, I still answered my phone, “Doctor Sanderson.”
“Jillian. It's Valentina. We have to talk.”
You get to know the tone, so-carefully-not-panicking. A mother scared stiff, and fighting with every ounce of rationality to override the brain chemicals and deal with a threat to her child with smarts rather than claws and teeth. “What's wrong?”
Her breath hissed over the pickup on her phone. Cell phone, I thought, and there was noise in the background. Human bustle, an intercom, stark echoes off polished tile. I've been in private practice since my psychiatric residency, but you never forget what a hospital sounds like. “Val, is Silkie okay?”
“She will be,” Val said. The sob caught in her throat and she choked it back. “The doctor says she—Jillian, uh, she'll be fine—”
One thing I'm good at is getting people to talk to me. “Val, just say it. You don't have to soft-pedal, okay?”
I heard her gulp. She sniffled and took a breath, the phone crackling as she pressed it against her hair. “Silkie says Tara taught her how to hang herself.”
First, there's the pressure.
A special kind of pressure, high under Tara's chin, that makes her feel heavy and light all at once. She kneels by the chair and leans across the edge, because if she faints, the chair will roll away and she won't choke.
She's always careful.
After the pressure she gets dizzy, and her vision gets kind of…narrow, dark around the edges. It's hard to breathe, and it feels like there's something stuck in her throat. Prickles run up and down her back, down her arms where the pain used to be, and a warm fluid kind of feeling sloshes around inside her. She slides down, as things get dark, and then she starts to dream.
But not like nighttime dreams. These are special.
When Tara dreams the special way, she hears voices. Well, no, not voices. Not voices exactly. But things. Or sees things. Feels them. It's all jumbled together.
But there's a sky, and she walks out under it. It's not any kind of sky she's seen. It's big and pale, and seems…flat, and very high up. There aren't any clouds, and it looks dusty under the big red sun.
It might be a desert. She's read someplace that deserts have skies like that. And it's not just a picture. Tara can taste it, feel the pebbles under the soles of her shoes, the heat baking off the cracked tarmac. Except the tarmac isn't really tarmac: like it, but chocolate-brown, or maybe that's the dull red dust.
And Tara doesn't think they have people like Albert in the kinds of deserts she'd get to on a plane.
As for Albert, he's a long, segmented being like a giant centipede, though he can't be a centipede because of the inverse square law. Which says that if you breathe through a spiracle, you can't breathe if you get that big. Of course…
…he isn't necessarily an Earth arthropod. And when she watches him, she sees all his segments swelling and relaxing, independent of each other. They each seem to have a top and bottom plate that slide rather than one hard shell like an arthropod would have. So it's more like armor than an exoskeleton. And Albert isn't his real name, of course, but Tara doesn't know his real name, because she can't talk to him.
He has a lot of legs, though, and lots of little fine claws and then two big bulky claws too, like a lobster instead of a crab. He chitters at her, which freaked her out the first few times, and grabs her hand with one knobby manipulator. It's all right. She's already reaching out, too.
I didn't call Tara's father, just arrived to pick her up at the usual time. I'd talk to Tara first, I decided, and then see what I was going to say to Jerry. He's a good guy, works hard, loves his kid.
He panics. You know. Some people do. Tara doesn't, not usually, and so I wanted to talk to her first.
She sat in the back, big enough to be out of a booster seat but not big enough to be safe with the airbags yet. She was hitting a growth spurt, though; it wouldn't be long.
RSD has all sorts of side effects. There are people who think it's psychosomatic, who dismiss it, more or less, as malingering. I got some resistance from my mom and my sister when we decided to go ahead with the surgery, of the she's-just-doing-it-for-attention and she'll-outgrow-it sort.
My Tara was a brave girl, very tough. She broke her arm on the playground a few days after her eighth birthday. I didn't figure out there were other issues until the cast was off and she was still complaining that it hurt. And then, complaining that it hurt more, and the hurt was spreading up her shoulder and down her side. And her right hand was curling into a claw while it took us nine months to get a diagnosis, and another ten months after that to get her into the trial, while she suffered through painkillers and physical therapy.
I watched in the mirror as she wriggled uncomfortably under her shoulder belt and slouched against the door, inspecting bitten fingernails. “How was school?”
“Fine,” she said, turning to look out the window at the night rushing past. It w
as raining slightly, and she had rolled her window down to catch the damp air, trailing her fingers over the edge of the crack.
“Hands in the car, please,” I said as we stopped under a streetlight. I couldn't see in the darkness if her eyes were bloodshot, or if those shadows under her chin were bruises.
Tara pulled her fingers back, sighing. “How was work, Mom?”
“Actually, I got a call from Mrs. Mendez today.”
Her eyes widened as I pulled away from the stop sign. I forced my attention back to the road. “Am I in trouble?”
“You know it's very dangerous, what you taught Silkie to do, don't you?”
“Mom?” A plaintive question, leading, to see how much I knew.
“The fainting game. It's not safe. People die doing that, even grown-ups.” Another stop sign, as she glared at her hands. “Silkie went to the emergency room.”
Tara closed her eyes. “Is she okay?”
“She will be.”
“I'm always careful, Mom—”
“Tara.” I shifted from second to third as we rolled up the dark street and around the corner to our own house, the porch light gleaming expectantly by the stairs, light dappled through the rain-heavy leaves of the maple in the front yard. “I need you to promise me you'll never do that again.”
Her chin set.
Wonderful. Her father's stubborn mouth, thin line of her lips. Her hair was still growing back, so short it curled in flapper ringlets around her ears and on her brow.
“Lots of kids do it. Nobody ever gets hurt.”
“Tara?”
“I can't promise.”
“Tara.” There are kids you can argue with. Tara wasn't one of them. But she could be reasoned with. “Why not?”
“You wouldn't believe me.” And she didn't say it with the petulant defiance you might expect, but simply, reasonably, as an accepted annoyance.