The Mind-Riders

by Brian Stableford

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1976, 2012 by Brian Stableford

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was late when I left the studio, and I’d missed the worst of the crowds. I’d also missed the worst of the afternoon stink because the sun was low and there were clouds blowing from the east. Around noon it had been hot enough to cook the garbage in the alleys, but it was cool now and the flies were settling down.

  I walked to the monorail station with my hands in my pockets and my eyes fixed on the ground about ten feet in front of where I was walking. It hadn’t been a great day, and I wasn’t feeling like looking the world in the face. At long last, though, we’d put the knights-in-armor thing to bed. The feelers could move in on Monday and the techs could cut the tape inch by inch into consumer packages. Our part was done, and I had seen the last of all the fancy tinfoil for a good long while. The producer was due for another stroke of self-declared genius, but the one thing you could say for him was that he was inconsistent. Whatever he came up with would be a change.

  Personally, I didn’t even believe that the travesty we’d just done would ever reach the public. Network might have no taste but they were sensitive as hell about clumsy E-tapes, and no matter how hard the feelers worked they’d never make those tin-clad idiots seem remotely human. It was all too absurd.

  So much for chivalry.

  When I got to the station there were ten minutes or so to wait. Twenty or thirty other people were there—almost all Network staff of some sort. They looked bored and tired, and stared at the tracks or the down line platform with a uniform glassiness. Even the ones that were talking didn’t look at one another. The whole scene was completely enervated. It would never be allowed to happen inside a sim. Simulation is far more alive than life.

  I nodded to a couple of techs who worked along with me, on and off. They nodded back and didn’t smile. Keyboard staff spend so much of their time enveloped by the miracle of MiMaC that they no longer know how to communicate with one another. They take off their headsets and switch themselves off right along with their machines.

  But there was one man in the loose knot who saw me and who moved over to stand close to me. His name was Jimmy Schell, and he’d recently moved in across the corridor from me in stack 232. He had a job with Network as a feeler, but they were still testing him out.

  He was excited, which meant he’d dubbed a tape.

  “I thought you’d’ve gone,” he said, without bothering to say hello. He presumed a lot on the fact that we were neighbors, but he was new into cap living and probably hadn’t cottoned on to the disposability of neighbor relations. The turnover is fast.

  “Wrapping up King Arthur,” I muttered, leaving nothing in my tone to suggest that I might welcome his following up that particular line of conversation. I needn’t have bothered. He didn’t want to talk about me.

  He opened his mouth to say something, as if he were in a hell of a rush to pour the words out, but nothing emerged. Jimmy had a stammer—not the kind of stammer which makes you repeat letters or syllables, but the kind which catches you up as you try to form a sound and stops you dead while your face goes red and you look like constipation is killing you. His mind seemed to be prone to the same kind of jamming from time to time. He didn’t live on his thinking. That’s what made him into a potential feeler. Feelers mustn’t think—it gets in the way.

  “—Got a job,” he forced out at last, the G bursting like a little bomb and all the other sounds lurching as they toppled.

  “In the can?” I said, fairly pleasantly—fairly pleased, come to that. I was glad to see the kid getting himself up off the ground. Six months and he could be a household name. I wasn’t likely to do any handling for him, but I could well be playing opposite.

  He was nodding vigorously. “On the Net,” he said. “Next week.”

  “Commercial?” I asked, trying not to let it sound like a dirty word.

  “Beer,” he said. “On a beach. They had me in the sweatbox for—hours. God, it tasted good!”

  “It would,” I said.

  His face clouded slightly, though I hadn’t meant to sound cynical.

  “You think—” he began. He had to stop. He didn’t know what I thought.

  I shook my head. “It’s work,” I said. “It’ll show what you can do. Everybody begins the same way.”

  They have to. Commercials live on naïveté even more than the plastic drama. It takes quite some simplicity of mind to be able to generate wild enthusiasm over some bland crud. It takes a kid who needs to feel good—can’t get through the day without it.

  The people know it’s fake even when it’s honest, of course. They know that sun-bronzed Apollo pouncing about the beach is being puppeted by a bored handler while some callow kid radiates his glamour. But if it’s good, if it feels right, they play the game. They go out and buy the crud. They buy the plastic drama too. It isn’t real but it’s comfortable. It feels okay. Some even prefer it that way—they like the pap and can’t take it straight. Even the addicts of the authentic adrenalin high don’t live on an undiluted diet—it would blow their E-sodden minds.

  So Jimmy was doing a real public service. Keeping the wheels of modern life in motion. He’d be a hit, I was sure. Up like a shooting star. And, by the same token, burned out as fast. Fame kills feelers. It dispels the simplicity of mind, the gaucherie, which is so essential to their ability to radiate good feelings.

  The train came in and I stepped forward reflexively, short-circuiting Jimmy’s next remark even better than his stammer could have. I elbowed my way in through the sliding doors with practiced ease, trying to beat the comptechs to the seats, but it was no good. Standing room only. It wasn’t that late.

  I grabbed a strap and hung hard, making the tendons in my wrist go rigid. As the train accelerated I was thrown back, then had to lean into the movement. Starting like that made some people sick but the monorail had a schedule to keep up, and even these days the trains ran on time. They really used their speed between stops.

  There’s always a big demand for speed between stops.

  Jimmy was behind me, and once we were under way I edged round to face him. He was looking at me as if he expected something. Congratulations, maybe. Or a funny story.

  Anything to keep the word-flow going.

  I grinned at him.

  “I think I did it good,” he said, confidentially.

  “Sure,” I said, nodding. “They give you a hard time?”

  “No. I think they liked it. I didn’t have to go back in the—box.”

  A thirst is a thirst. It wasn’t that they were paying him for, though they’d sweat him up to get it. They were paying him for gladness, for pleasure, for relief—all the things that go into feeling how wonderful a can of beer can be. That’s what they’d be sending out good and strong over the beach scene.

  “You know,” he said, “I thought they’d need lots of—people for a thing like that. But only the guy is real. The rest—” He tailed off, not because his glitch had caught up with him but because he realized he didn’t have to tell me. I’d been in the studio since he was an infant.

  “The girl doesn’t need a handler,” I told him. “She’s what they call a visual cue. She isn’t called upon to move, let alone feel—she just has to be there. The crowds in the fringes—well, they’re just phantoms. Just an illusion—a flicker in the walls of the sim. There’s a general-purpose procedure in the computer to make crowds. They’re just something that has to be vaguely sketched in. Nobody pays them any real attention—they’re always in the background, mentally as well as physically.”

  There was a short pause. Then, in a neut
ral voice, he said, “You don’t handle commercials.” There was a question implied, but he wasn’t sure enough of himself to ask.

  I shook my head. “It’s not my bag,” I said. “I was never into moving suggestively. The body language I talk is made of rougher stuff. I did some heroes when the fashion was for tough parts, but mostly I do bad boys and spares.”

  Spares are characters which aren’t B-linked. They act in the sim but the characters aren’t made available to the vampires so there’s no feeler dubbed in over the action. I can move a sim as well as anyone, but body language is important—a feeler needs a lot of help from his handler, lest the vamp-appeal and the ratings should ever-so-slightly decline. My movements don’t talk feeler language, so I generally get the villain or the mug to hustle around. I don’t mind. Who wants to be a plastic hero?

  “You’re good,” said Jimmy, tentatively.

  “How d’you know?” I asked. Handlers don’t get their names on the credit reels.

  “I know some of the stuff you did,” he said. “I looked it up in records. Some of the shows I used to like best when I was—” This time he gave up, maybe figuring that I could complete the sentence on my own.

  “Why?” I asked. “You want to find out who was living across the way?” I tried not to sound sour about it.

  He nodded, knowing somehow that the words just weren’t going to come for a moment or two. I let silence settle.

  My eyes lingered on Jimmy’s face for just a few seconds before being driven away by embarrassment. It looked like a curious kind of mask. It was the face of a small child blown up to size and pasted on to an adult frame. Jimmy wasn’t tall but he was stocky and solidly built—not the kind of guy an anemic mugger would single out as a natural victim. His wide eyes and his little nose and his all-around cuteness looked slightly grotesque on a body built for wielding a sledgehammer.

  I let my gaze lurch drunkenly to the window, passing over the dull, vacuous creatures who filled the carriage with a faintly offensive aroma of acrylic plastic and cheap deodorant. They wore with absent-minded unanimity the expression of utter boredom, of transit between phases in their lives. They were in the process of translation from context A (work) to context B (home) and they had no script to govern the intermission. It had never occurred to them that these were minutes like any other minutes, to be lived. To them, it was a time to be endured, a time to be waited out with all senses switched off. They sat in suspended animation, their eyes—like mine—extending to stare at the blurred world dragged across the window-frames at two hundred KPH. I couldn’t figure out what made me any different, but I always had the idea haunting me that I ought to be.

  At that kind of speed, there’s nothing solid outside the train. Everything beyond the traveling microcosm becomes liquid, unable to linger long enough on-the retina to form a hard image. At two hundred KPH the world is ultra-soft, dissolving into chaos. The sun flashes from a billion windows, and there seems to be a glittering sea outside, immune from action and change.

  Time, someone used to say, is for spending, not for saving. Or for killing. But today’s people are mean with their time. They can’t pile it up in banks or nursery-rhyme counting-houses but they can staunch its flow, forcing it to clot before they pick the scab and let it go again.

  Sometimes I wonder how the hell they think they’re ever going to collect the interest on their savings.

  “Who do you think will win the fight?” said Jimmy, finding his voice and cutting into my thoughts with it.

  I froze slightly. It was a bad question. But he wasn’t to know that.

  “Herrera,” I said, clipping the syllables.

  “They say Angeli is hot,” he said, rejoicing in the way he was getting his sentences out and failing to pick up the hint.

  “Herrera will win,” I said.

  He must have caught the inflection that time. He knew he’d somehow hit a nerve.

  “You going to watch the—fight?” A fatuous question, hardly worth the agony of the stammer.

  “Aren’t we all?” I replied.

  “Plugged into Herrera?” he said, not stopping himself in time. It was an indelicate question. Not the kind of thing you ask in mixed company. He realized, too late, and I could almost see him asking where the hell his vocal censor had got to. Stammers have no loyalty. I made no move to answer, thinking that maybe to him it was a natural question. Maybe to his generation there was nothing to keep hidden, nothing essentially private and personal about B-linking. He’d grown up with it, had been plugging into the sims ever since he could see and feel on his own account. It wasn’t something that had stolen into his life like some kind of succubus or social disease. And he wasn’t what you might call socially sensitive.

  What can you expect from a novice feeler?

  But to me—and I don’t deny that I’m way behind the times—B-linking was still a vice. It was still something that happened behind closed doors. So far as I was concerned, there was still virtue in not doing it.

  Because he looked confused, and slightly bewildered by the way I’d clammed up, I finally said, “I don’t use the link.”

  “Not for fights?”

  “Not for anything.”

  He suddenly looked away. Perhaps he was angry. After all, the B-link was his career. It was his reason for living. And I’d just dissociated myself from his way of life as if it was something dirty. I wondered how to repair what I’d said.

  Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. For once in his life he’d discovered a crazy thought. He laughed.

  Then he said, “It’s a—good thing there aren’t more of you or I’d be—out a job.”

  “So you would,” I muttered, looking over his head at a wasp circling someone else’s face. The threatened individual was maintaining a sturdy dignity, but a girl with silver eyelids sitting next to him was tensing her jaw and praying hard the insect wouldn’t drift her way.

  Nobody dared swat the thing. They didn’t want to get involved.

  “But hell,” he said, persisting in spite of it all, because he wanted to get it straight in his head, “fights are real.”

  “So’s the murder rate in the suburbs,” I retorted, irrelevantly.

  We braked hard, long before the station, and everyone leaned into the deceleration patiently, as if we were all part of a well-rehearsed dance routine. It almost gives you a sense of belonging to know that inertia takes you all the same way at the same time. No one can buy immunity. That’s equality for you.

  In the station there was a flurry of violent action as those barging their way out squeezed through the gaps between those barging their way in. It was like a clumsy riffle-shuffle where the cards get redistributed fairly comprehensively but suffer agonies in the process. The overall situation didn’t change, and though my wrist was aching I didn’t bother to try for a seat.

  After the nauseating process of getting under way again was over, I dragged up enough breath to say something else.

  “Anyway,” I said, “it’s not real.”

  He didn’t get the point. How could he?

  “Well,” he said, “the—fight’s a sim. But the link’s real. It’s not a—feeler. It’s live.” Then he realized again that he was spilling out the obvious, and went red.

  I shrugged, finally getting rid of the whole sorry question with a meaningless gesture. Sure, the charge that came over the E-link was straight from source. When you hooked into Herrera it was pure Herrera that resonated inside your brain. It was his pleasure, his desperation, his glory. Not a feeler hired to identify with the situation but a real live broadcast of real live emotion. The ultimate triumph of MiMaC. The big kick—what the vampires really lusted for. Real? Well, okay, it was real—that way. But it wasn’t any the less a Network product than Jimmy’s beer commercial. It was a thin, carefully dissected slice of reality. A slice that was saleable. And it was processed and packaged just like anything else Network invested in.

  I didn’t want to talk about the fight. I didn’t wa
nt to hear about it. I didn’t even want to watch it, but there’d be no way I could keep myself away. A snake maybe feels the same way about snake-charmers.

  I searched for something to say to sidetrack the conversation, but I couldn’t find a thing. A blank mind. Jimmy Schell was so remote, in that moment, that he might have been one of those goddam knights-in-armor I’d been puppeting around for days—something that once existed but was no longer comprehensible, a figure carved out of matter but with no relativity. Like the girl in his commercial—a visual cue, a fiction of the holovisual image, pure simulation.

  But he turned the conversation on his own, perhaps in search of a topic where we could establish some kind of rapport. He needed to feel comfortable. He was sensitive to mood and he knew he’d put me in a bad one. He wanted to soothe it over. That, I guess, is what Network calls talent.

  “You lived in the stack for long?” he asked.

  “Nearly twenty years,” I told him.

  “You must’ve had a—lot of neighbors.”

  “They come and they go.”

  Caps are like cells in a honeycomb. For solitaries. Most people don’t stay solitary for long—not in a world where we all practice neurotic togetherness. People come to caps before, after and in between marriages. There are probably only ten or fifteen long-termers in a stack which houses six or eight hundred. I knew one or two in mine, but they were six or eight floors down, and we had nothing in common except staying power. The temps suited me—I had no use for anything enduring and permanent in the way of friendships.

  “—Maybe you don’t generally make—friends,” he said—a weird sentence that could be anything from an indictment to an apology. The fact that he didn’t know what he was getting at himself was signaled by the double hitch.

  I just shrugged.

  The train came in to our station, braking hard all the way. We joined in the squirming contest. I got out easily, but he got stuck. That’s one of the penalties of being short and wide. Human bodies ought to be built for maneuverability in crowds. Evolution has no foresight. I waited for him, and then we flashed our cards and took the elevator down to the Street together.