by J L Aarne
They get payment out of the way first, then Delilah loops an arm through his when he offers it to her and leads him through an arched doorway into a long hallway of rooms with red doors to the fifth one on the left. Inside, he takes a seat in the high-backed chair in the middle of the room and it automatically adjusts until he is reclined comfortably.
Delilah loads the vials of sunshine into the VR interface. The drug is a glittering yellow fluid, a compound of potent hallucinogens and stimulants that aid the dream experience. Some of it is plant-based like iboga and khat, but each cook does it their own way. The sunshine Delilah uses taken by itself provides a feeling of intense euphoria and creative introspection. The drug will be administered in constant small doses until Aarom unplugs.
The port is in the back of his neck at the base of his skull, a small hole that his hair easily hides. In those with functioning interface chips, the port is installed close to the place where the thousands of nanofibers connecting the chip to the central nervous system link into the brain. The port bypasses them to the cerebral cortex. Aarom’s chip has been dead so long that his body long ago absorbed the irrelevant fibers. There is no moment of interference from the chip as Delilah plugs him in. As the spike slides into the port and she twists to lock it in place, there is a distinctly sexual thrill of stimulated nerves that rushes from his scalp, down his spine and through his entire body. Aarom gasps and gives an involuntary shudder.
“Now, before we begin, am I to assume that you would like to go solo?” Delilah asks.
Some people like to share fantasies and allow for others to jump in. There is even a shared VR program in the Iniquity computer mainframe that consists of a basic virtual world where people can go. There are some who use such programs to hold clandestine meetings. Aarom knows about it, but he’s never done it. He has his own fantasies.
“You know what I want,” he says.
Delilah nods. She does; he is predictable that way. She types something on the crystal screen, selects the program and settings and asks, “Boost or spike?”
“Boost,” Aarom says. “Set the alarm for five hours.”
She grins. “You got it, sugar.”
“Do you have a book file for a novel called Fahrenheit 451?” he asks.
Delilah does a search of their archives, but she shakes her head no. Aarom didn’t expect her to have it, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. Banned books are almost as hard to find on file as they are on paper. Harder sometimes, depending on the book.
“Okay, never mind,” he says.
“I can try to find it for next time if you want,” she offers.
“I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to. It’s okay.”
“All right. Ready?”
He nods.
Delilah begins the program and the first dose of sunshine hits his mind like a summer day. She turns out the lights and leaves and Aarom closes his eyes as the dark room dissolves in his vision.
When he opens them again, he is fourteen and sitting at the island counter in the house where Jonathan grew up. It’s right down the road from the house where Aarom grew up. Jonathan’s sitting across from him and they’re eating popsicles, the kind that fizz on their tongues as they melt. Aarom’s is blue raspberry and Jonathan’s is cherry and their mouths are brightly dyed from the food coloring. Jonathan grins and sticks his violently red tongue out at him. It makes something flutter down low in Aarom’s stomach. Aarom pokes his own neon blue tongue out. They compare and laugh about it.
Jonathan’s father is at work and his mother works from home. She’s pacing in the living room, talking to people hundreds of miles away on crystal monitor screens. She calls it a conference, but every so often, they hear her voice rise and it sounds more like an argument is in the making.
Jonathan snags the sleeve of Aarom’s shirt and nods toward the back door for him to follow him outside. They feed the last of their popsicles to Jonathan’s dogs, golden retrievers named Buttercup and Bart, and the dogs follow them through the field in the back of the house for a while before they lose interest and run ahead.
They don’t run too far ahead though. The monorail track passes through on the other side of the back fence and the low, constant electromagnetic pulse along the track unsettles them. They won’t go near it. No trains have passed yet today, but Jonathan watches them and he says there will be one along soon.
They walk along the track picking up pebbles and pinging them off the steel. The ground here has high iron content and sometimes a bit of quartz with a vein through it hits the magnet and comes shooting back toward them. They’ve made a game out of finding pebbles with pyrite in them to skip them along the ground near the track. They shoot off the track and sometimes pop like firecrackers from the electricity.
The dogs bark as the train approaches. There is no sound or vibration in the ground beneath them; it glides smooth and fast with barely a hiss of noise to alert anything in its path. Instead, the magnetic field around the rail gets stronger and when Jonathan and Aarom look at each other, their hair is standing out from their heads like they’re about to be struck by lightning.
Jonathan touches Aarom’s hair, which is longer than his own and standing up all over like tentacles on a creature in an alien movie. He lets his fingers hover over it and static sparks in Aarom’s hair and on Jonathan’s fingers.
“Here, put these in your ears,” Jonathan says. He passes Aarom a pair of bright orange earplugs.
Aarom puts them in and claps his hands over his ears for good measure.
They stay fifteen feet back from the track as the first glint of light on metal appears in the distance out in the field. The dogs have retreated to the house, where the walls and windows are insulated against loud sounds. The train makes no noise from a distance and doesn’t disturb the earth with its vibrations, but the silver bullet monorail trains are faster than most airplanes; they go so fast that they breach the sound barrier sometimes.
Jonathan puts earplugs in his own ears and they stand together in the tall grass behind his house watching the speck of silver grow bigger as the train draws closer. It’s a tiny, distant thing like a maggot. It grows as it hurtles toward them; a worm, a streamlined caterpillar, a glittering snake, and it’s rushing toward them at three hundred miles per hour. Their skin prickles as the fine hairs all over their body stand at attention.
Aarom starts to back up as the train gets closer and Jonathan follows him. He’s smiling his easy, eager smile and Aarom’s watching him more than the train as the monorail streams past them. The train is long and sleek and polished to a mirror shine. They see themselves reflected in the smooth side, standing in the field of grass, the house behind them, the little copse of trees where they play off to the left, Jonathan’s mother watching them and the train through the back window. Then the last car rushes by and the train is leaving, slithering through the countryside, around the hills, over the bridge, away into the city.
Jonathan takes the plugs from his ears and he’s laughing. Aarom wonders why he can’t hear it, then remembers and takes the plugs from his own ears.
“I saw the boom knock a bird right out of the sky once,” Jonathan’s saying. “Did I tell you?”
He has told him, but Aarom shakes his head no. “What kind of bird?”
“A crow, I think,” Jonathan says. He picks up a stick and pokes at the rocks and pebbles as they walk along the track. “It was on the other side of the field. Knocked it right out.”
“Did it die?”
“No. It woke up and flew away.”
They walk down the track until they’re in the trees. Then they race each other down the hillside until they’re shaded beneath the apple trees. There are apples on the branches, but they’re small, unripe things. They climb the trees and talk about school and people they know and their mothers and Aarom’s grandmother, who is visiting on Sunday and Jonathan’s dog, who keeps running off, probably to chase after the Thompson’s Border collie. Squirrels scold them for a while. Cicadas buzz in their lo
ud, rhythmic way off and on.
Jonathan finds an apple that’s big enough it should be ripe even if it’s still green and takes a bite out of it. He makes a face, spits it out and tosses it away into the tall grass.
Around 2:00 p.m. they’re lying on their backs in the grass watching the clouds pass by. Jonathan’s mother is listening to rock music in the house just over the hill and it reaches them like the buzzing of bees. The sun is warm on their skin, the whole world smells like grass and apples and Jonathan’s propped up beside Aarom on his elbows. He’s smiling.
Aarom remembers that day. In the VR, it’s always a little different depending on his mood, but it’s always mostly the same, too. He remembers looking at Jonathan, his open, beautiful face, his smiling mouth, and wanting to kiss him. He had never consciously wanted to do that before.
He remembers not kissing him then and sits up to lean over and kiss him. Jonathan is still smiling when their mouths touch and Aarom is sure that’s right. The kiss is nice. It’s slow and warm and tastes like sour apples.
When he breaks the kiss, Aarom lies back in the grass with a sigh, smiling as well.
“What did you do that for?” Jonathan asks.
“I just wanted to,” Aarom tells him. “So I thought I should.”
“Oh. Okay,” Jonathan says.
“Thank you,” Aarom says.
“For what?”
“For letting me.”
Jonathan leans over him and kisses his cheek. “You’re sweet.”
Jonathan sometimes tells him that, though Aarom doesn’t really understand it. He does not consider himself to be sweet and Jonathan is the only one to have ever told him so.
They doze in the grass listening to bees in the trees pollinating the blossoms and digging at the punctures in the unripe apples. The chirring of the cicadas makes Aarom’s throat tickle. Bart the dog finds them and when he can’t get them to play fetch, he rolls in the grass and falls asleep between them.
Aarom comes awake when the beeping alarm on his watch goes off. He doesn’t remember having a watch, but he knows what it is. His time is up.
Jonathan has fallen asleep beside him and Bart’s tail wags when Aarom sits up, tickling Jonathan’s face. He waves at it until the dog shifts his butt away from him. Aarom watches it for a minute and smiles, then gets reluctantly up from the ground and walks away toward the nearest apple tree.
Symbols are important to the dreaming mind and VR programmers have learned to utilize this. Like a doorway, a symbolic act can take a person from one place to another in the fantasy or to another one completely. Aarom picks a green apple from a low hanging branch and takes a bite. His mouth fills with the grassy tang flavor of the fruit.
He swallows and opens his eyes in the dark room where Delilah left him five hours ago. The field behind Jonathan’s house and the monorail track is fifty miles away and sixteen years in the past. Since then, they have both gone to school, had jobs, relationships, friends and life altering experiences. Jonathan still smiles more than most people, but sometimes Aarom isn’t sure how happy he really is. He knows he himself is not, though he also knows that he used to be.
He didn’t kiss Jonathan then; he still hasn’t and he does regret it. There are a million little reasons and no reason at all why he should never have kissed Jonathan. Life happened. It happened to them both, caught them by surprise and then one thing and another and there were no shared kisses and now there will never be any shared kisses.
Aarom sits there in the chair, still plugged in but disconnected, staring at the wall in front of him. There’s a vintage poster on the wall he’s looked at a thousand times before. It reads “YOU ARE HERE” in bright red text. He can’t see it now in the dark but he sees it in his mind and, unlike some people who frequent this place—the spikers; those addicts with their brains slowly melting under the weight of questioning their reality—he does not find the statement particularly comforting.
YOU ARE HERE.
He doesn’t want to be. He would rather be there. He’s been plugging for years, since even before he became a prophet, and it still crushes him every single time he has to leave. It’s the nature of his fantasies. Most people who plug in do it for the thrill or the escape, to achieve something outrageously unbelievable or unattainable. They spike so they can feel immortal, fifty or a hundred years passing just so they can wake up in the chair only an hour older than when they went under. They boost to pass the time, filling empty hours and days with something fun or exotic or pleasurable they can’t get from the real world. Aarom does it to remember and relive the ordinary, happy days. For one chance to take back the mistake of not stealing a kiss. Then another chance and another.
The door opens and a young man enters the room. He has the piebald hair and pale grey eyes that are all the rage right now and he smiles at Aarom with his perfect white teeth and his full, pouting lips better suited to the face of a girl and walks around the chair to unplug him.
“Miss Rosewood is with another client,” he says. “She sent me to take care of you. I’m not so bad though.”
“That’s fine. Thank you,” Aarom says. He stands and tries to shake the lingering surreal sensation that has followed him out of the boost.
The young man tosses Aarom a warm, damp towel and Aarom uses it to wipe his face. He’s been sweating while he was under. It’s the sunshine, not the VR that does it. It’s left him feeling a little lightheaded and dehydrated, too.
“I’m Ben,” the man says. “You okay? You want some water?” Aarom nods and he gives him a bottle of water from a little cooler beneath the counter. “Must have been an exciting one.”
Because Aarom looks like someone who just base jumped into the mouth of a volcano. Aarom doesn’t have to see himself to know it. He smiles. “It was a memory. From my childhood.”
“Huh,” Ben says. “Well, okay. I hope you enjoyed your experience.”
Aarom leaves and walks along the street listening to faint strains of incomprehensible music from an apartment overhead. Somewhere, a community service announcement says something about the drinking water that he doesn’t quite catch. He passes others, like him and not like him, on their way to work or home or to score their first fix of the day. Most of them do not make eye contact. Those who do, their eyes pass over him without interest, which is just the way he likes it. Cars pass him on the left, whooshing by almost silently, their windshields reflecting back glimpses of the cloudless sky.
VR in accelerated time, called spiking, is more disorienting when first unplugged than boosting in real time, but it still takes a few minutes to adjust. Aarom used to spike, but he hasn’t done it in years. Like most young people new to virtual reality, he hadn’t paid any attention to the warnings about brain damage and addiction. The last time had been shortly after he became a prophet. He unplugged to find a week of short-term memories gone and a whole lifetime of unlived moments wiped away. After Sabra introduced himself for the second time, he filled in as much of the missing week as he knew, but Aarom stopped him when he started to tell him about his other life. Those weren’t real memories. They never happened.
He sometimes wonders, like when he sees Chief of Police Marion Flowers’s face on a poster and feels like he knows him, but it’s not worth it in the end.
The VR fantasy world, even when boosting in real time, is not restful either. The experience keeps the mind awake. Aarom needs sleep. He’s still a little dazed for a while after he leaves, but he’s shaking it. He crosses the street at the corner, passes beneath the shadows of dark, dingy, inconspicuous buildings and starts toward home.
4.
The promise to visit Jonathan weighs on him for several days until Aarom can’t stand it anymore and goes to see him.
He goes during the day. He changes out of his dark prophet’s clothes into something that will not draw unwanted attention. Plain shirt, pants, shoes, no overly bright colors but nothing too drab so as to be remarkable by its lack of style. He puts on a long coat,
wears deflector lenses in his eyes and a proxy chip on his hand under a strip of cosmetic tape, takes false identification and hails a taxi magnacar a few blocks from his building.
The taxi’s scanner accepts the proxy chip and thanks Mr. Lawrence Martin for his patronage. It’s a driverless car. It leaves him on the sidewalk half a mile from Jonathan’s house and Aarom walks. The sidewalks are usually bare of pedestrians in this part of the city as there are no shops or businesses nearby, but there are three people walking with him. One, an older woman in her 80s walks a small, fuzzy dog on a leash on the other side of the street. Another is a teenage girl with her calico hair in spikes, pink earphones trailing their wires from a port at the base of her skull, bobbing her head to the beat of the music in her head. The last is a young man, less than twenty, walking a few feet ahead of Aarom, hands stuffed in the pockets of his pinstriped pants, head down.
Aarom is watching his back as the young man ahead of him walks when he suddenly turns and steps down off the sidewalk into the street. He doesn’t look either way, but lunges into the oncoming traffic. The cars whiz past him, swerving to avoid him, but a bus is approaching and he claws at the air as he tries to propel himself forward, fighting the compulsion transmitted from the chip through his brain and body that is trying to force him back out of danger.
The Destiny Machine is not clairvoyant for all of its great power, but the chip implant serves as an interface between the human host and the machine, so the machine knows what the young man intends to do moments after he decides to do it. It was created to save and preserve life and it does this at all costs. Aarom watches as the young man continues to try throwing himself into oncoming traffic, but his arms and legs refuse to obey him. Like a marionette, he is pulled back and his movements become jerky and erratic. Finally he sits down hard on the asphalt.
“I’m not supposed to be here!” he shrieks. “Let… me… GO! Please! I can’t—! I’m not—! I’m not real! I can’t be here! I’m not supposed to be here!”
Aarom stops walking and stands on the sidewalk. The other two, the old woman and the young one, hurry to him as traffic swerves to avoid the man, some of the cars slowing to a crawl as their passengers peer out at the drama unfolding in the median. As the young man has been compelled to stop, to cease the actions which threaten his life, the two women are compelled, whether they actually care or not, to assist him. If Aarom still had an operational chip, he too would have no choice but to run out into the road now that traffic has stopped to help him.
