by Rich Horton
I didn’t handle it well. I was in trouble at the university. I was drinking. I wasn’t maintaining my citizenship status. With Rose gone, I realized slowly how much my life had come to revolve around her.
No matter how she felt about me, I knew she loved the river-edge promenade, bordered by weeping willows and her namesake flowers. Those willows were yellow as I walked the path now, long leaves clinging to their trailing branches. The last few roses hadn’t yet fallen to the frost, but the flowers looked sparse, dwarfed by the memory of summer’s blossoms.
The scent was even different now than it had been at the height of summer. Crisper, thin. The change was probably volunteer work; I didn’t think the city budget would stretch to skinning unique seasonal scents for the rose gardens. I knew Rose was older than I, no matter how her skin looked, because she used to say that when she was a girl, individual cultivars of roses had different odors, so walking around a rose garden was a tapestry of scents. Real roses probably still did that.
I didn’t know if I’d ever smelled them.
Other people walked the path—all skins. The city charged your palm chip just to get through the gate. I didn’t begrudge the debit. It wasn’t as if I was ever going to get to pay it off. Or as if I was every going to get to come back here. This was a last hurrah.
I edited out the others. I wanted to be alone, and if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. That was good, because I knew I didn’t look happy, and the last thing I wanted was some random stranger reading my emotional signature and coming over to offer well-meaning advice.
Since this was my last time, I thought about jumping skins—running up the charges, seeing some of the other ways the river promenade could look—fantasyland, or Rio, or a moon colony. Rose and I had done that when we first started coming here, but it turned out we both preferred the naturalist view. With seasons.
We’d met in winter. I supposed it was fitting that I lost her—and everything else that mattered—in the fall.
Everything changed at midnight.
Not my midnight, as if honoring the mystical claptrap in some dead fairy tale. But about the dinner hour, which would be midnight Greenwich Standard Time—honoring the mystical claptrap of a dead empire, instead. I suppose you have to draw the line somewhere. The world is full of the markers of abandoned empires, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Great Wall of China, from the remnants of the one in Arizona to the remnants of the one in Berlin.
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.
I was thinking about that poem as I crossed Henderson—with the light: I knew somebody who jaywalked and got hit by an unskinned vehicle. The driver got jail time for manslaughter, but that doesn’t bring back the dead. It was a gorgeous October evening, the sun just setting and the trees still full of leaves in all shades of gold and orange. I barely noticed them, or the cool breeze as I waited, rocking nervously from foot to foot on the cobblestones.
I was meeting my friend Numair at Gary’s Olympic Pizza and I was running a little late, so he was already waiting for me in our usual corner booth. He’d ordered beers and garlic bread. They waited on the tabletop, the beers shedding rings of moisture into paper napkins.
I slid onto the hard bench opposite him, trying to hide the apprehension souring my gut. The vinyl was artistically cracked and the rough edges caught on my jeans. It wasn’t Numair making me so anxious. It was finances. I shouldn’t be here, by rights—I knew I couldn’t afford even pizza and beer—but I needed to see him. If anything could clear my head, it was Numair.
One of the things I liked about Numair is how unpretentious he was. I didn’t skin heavily—not like some people, who wandered through underwater seascapes full of sentient octopuses or dressed up as dragons and pretended they live in Elfland—but he was so down to earth I’d have bet his default skin looked just like him. He was a big guy, strapping and barrel-bodied, with curly dark brown hair that was going gray at the temples. And he liked his garlic bread.
So it was extra-nice that there were still two pieces left when I pulled the plate over.
“Hey, Charlie,” he said.
“Hey, Numair.” Garlic bread crunched between my teeth, butter and olive oil dripping down my chin. I swiped at it with a napkin. I didn’t recognize the beer, dark and malty, although I drank off a third of it making sure. “What’s the brew?”
“Trois Draggonnes.” He shrugged. “Microbrew license out of . . . Shreveport.com, I think? Cheers.”
“Here’s mud in your eye,” I answered, and drained the glass.
He sipped his more moderately and put it back on the napkin. “You sounded upset.”
I nodded. Gary’s was an old-style place, and a real-looking waitress came by about thirty seconds later and replaced my beer. I didn’t know if she was an employee or a sim, but she was good at her job. The pizza showed up almost instantly after that, balanced on a metal tripod with a plastic spatula for serving. Greek-style, with flecks of green oregano visible in the sweet, oozing sauce. I always got the same thing: meatball, spinach, garlic, mushrooms. Delicious. I’d never asked Numair what he was eating.
The smell turned my stomach.
“I may not be around much for a while.” I stuffed the rest of the garlic bread into my mouth to make room. And buy time. “This is embarrassing—”
“Hey.” He paused with a slice in midair, perfect strings of mozzarella stretching twelve inches from pie to spatula. They glistened. The booth creaked when he shifted. “This is me.”
“Right. I’ve got financial trouble. Bigtime.”
He put the slice down on his plate and offered me the spatula. I waved it away. The smell was bad enough. Belatedly, I turned it off. Might as well use the filters as long as I had them. The beer still looked appealing, though, and I drank a little more.
“Okay,” he said. “How bigtime?”
The beer tasted like humiliation and soap suds. “Tax trouble. I’m going to lose everything,” I said. “All assets, all the virtuals. I thought I could pay it down, you know—but then I got dropped by the U., and there wasn’t a replacement income stream. As soon as they catch up with me—” I thought of Rose, to whom Numair had introduced me. They’d been Friday-night gaming buddies, until she’d vanished without a word. I’d kept meaning to look her up offline and check in, but . . . It was easier to let her go than know for certain she’d dumped me. Amazing how easy it was to lose track of people when they didn’t show up at the usual places and times. “I got registered mail this morning. They’re pulling my taxpayer I.D. I’ll be as gone as Rose. Except I came to say goodbye before I ditched you.”
He blinked. Now it was his turn to set the pizza down and push the plate away with his fingertips. “Rose died,” he said.
I rubbed the back of my neck. It didn’t ease the sudden nauseating tightness in my gut as all that bitterness converted to something sharp and horrible. “Died? Died died?”
“Died and was cremated. Her family’s not linked, so I only heard because she and Bill went to school together, and he caught a link for her memorial service on some network site. You didn’t know?”
I blinked at him.
He shook his head. “Stupid question. If you knew— Anyway. I guess you’ve tried everything, so I’ll save the stupid advice.”
“Thank you.” I hope he picked up from my tone how fervently glad I was. Nothing like netfriends to pile on with the incredibly obvious—or incredibly crackpot—advice when you’re in a pickle. “So anyway—”
“Give me your offline contact info?” He held up his phone and I sent it over. It was a pleasantry. I knew what the odds were that I’d ever hear from him. And it wasn’t like I could keep my apartment without a tax identification number.
However good his intentions.
Right then, a quarter of the way around the planet, midnight tolled. And I fell out of the skin.
It was sharp and sudden, as somewhere a line of code went into effect and the last few online chits in my account were
levied. I blinked twice, trying to shake the dizziness that accompanied the abrupt transition, eyes now scratchy and dry.
Numair was still there in the booth across from me. It was weird seeing him there, unskinned. I’d been right about his unpretentiousness: he looked pretty much as he’d always done—maybe a little more unkempt—though his clothes were different.
Since he was skinned, I knew I’d dropped right out of his filters. I might as well not exist anymore. And Gary’s Olympic, unlike Numair, had really suffered in the transition.
The pizza that congealed on the table before me was fake cheese, lumpy and dry looking. Healthier than the gooey pie my filters had been providing a moment before, but gray and depressing. I was suddenly glad I hadn’t been chewing on it when the transition hit.
The grimy floor was scattered with napkins. The waitress was real, go figure, but a shadow of her buxom virtual self—no, she was a guy, I realized. Maybe working in drag brought in better tips? Or maybe the skin was a uniform. I’d never know.
And there was me.
I was not as comfortable with myself as Numair. I didn’t skin heavily, as I said—just tuning. But my skins did make me a hair taller, a hair younger. My hair . . . a hair brighter. And so on. With them gone, I was skinny and undersized in a track suit that bagged at the shoulders and ass.
Falling into myself stung.
I reached out left-handed for my beer, since Numair was going to get stuck for the tab anyway. It was pale yellow and tasted of dish soap. So maybe the off flavor in the second glass had been something other than my misery. Whatever.
I chugged it and got out.
The glass door was dirty, one broken pane repaired with duct tape. On the way in, it had been spotless and decorated with blue and white decal maps of Greece. I pushed it open with the tips of my fingers and moved on.
Outside, the street lay dark and dank. Uncollected garbage humped against the curb. Some of it smelled organic, rotten. A real violation of the composting laws. Maybe they didn’t get enforced as much against businesses. I picked my way across broken cement to the corner and waited there.
There were more people on the street than there had been. Or maybe they’d been there all along, just skinned out. You could tell who was wearing filters by the way they moved—backs straight, enjoying the evening. The rest of us shuffled, heads bowed. Trying not to see too much. The evening I walked through was full of bad smells and crumbling buildings that looked to be mostly held together by graffiti.
“Aw, crap.”
The light changed. I crossed. Of course, I couldn’t get a taxi home, or even a bus. Skinned-in drivers would never see me, and my chips were cancelled. I wouldn’t get through a chip-locked door to take the tube.
I wondered how the poor got around. I guessed I’d be finding out.
I didn’t know my way home.
I was used to the guidance my skins gave me, the subtle recognition cues. All I was getting now was the cold wind cutting through a windbreaker that wasn’t warm enough for the job I expected it to do, and a pair of sore feet. Everything stank. Everything was dirty. There were steel bars on every window and chip locks on every door.
I’d known that intellectually, but it had never really sunk in before what a bleak urban landscape that made for. Straggling trees lined unmaintained streets, and at every corner I picked my way through drifts of rubbish. I knew there wasn’t a lot of money for upkeep of infrastructure, and what there was had to be assigned to critical projects. But it didn’t matter; you could always drop a skin over anything that needed a little cosmetic help.
Sure, I’d seen news stories. But it was one thing to vid it and another to wade through it.
About fifteen minutes after I’d realized how lost I was, I also realized somebody was following me. Nobody bothers the skinned: an instantaneous, direct voice and vid line to police services meant Patrol guardian-bots could be at our sides in seconds. It was a desperate criminal who’d tackle one of us. One of them. But that was another service I couldn’t pay for, along with a pleasanter reality and access to mass transit.
I wasn’t skinned anymore, and I bet anybody following me could tell. Of course, I didn’t have any credit, either—or any cash. I guessed unskinned folks still used cash, palm-sized magnetic cards with swipe strips. A lot of places wouldn’t take it anymore. But if you didn’t have accounts or a working palm chip, what else were you going to do?
Well, if you were the guy behind me, apparently the answer was, take it from somebody else.
I was short and I was skinny, but living skinned kept me in pretty good shape. There were all kinds of built-in workout programs, after all, so clever that you hardly even noticed they were healthy. And skinning food kept the blood pressure down no matter how many greasy pizzas you enjoyed.
My pursuer was two thirds of a block back. I waited until I’d put a corner between me and him. As soon as I lost sight of him, I broke into a run.
It was a pretty good run, too. I was wearing my Toesers, because I liked them, and if they were skinned nobody could tell how dumb they looked. Also, they were comfortable. And supposedly scientifically designed for natural running posture, so you landed on the ball of your foot and didn’t make a thump with every stride. Breath coming fast, feet scissoring—I turned at the first corner I came to, then quickly turned again.
Unskinned folks looked up in surprise as I pelted past. One made a grab for me, and another one shouted something after, but I was already gone. And then I was on a side street all by myself, running down a narrow path kicked in the piles of trash.
Maybe this was an even more desolate street, and maybe most of the lights were burned out, but I kept on running. It felt good, all of a sudden, like positive action. Like something I could do other than wallowing. Like progress.
It kept on feeling like progress all the way down to the river’s edge. And then, as I stopped beside a hole snipped-and-bent in the chain link, it felt like a very bad idea instead.
The river was a sewer. When I’d been here before—okay, not down here under the bridge, but on the bank above—it had been all sunshine and rolling blue water. What I saw now was floating milk jugs and what I smelled was a sour, fecal carrion stench.
I put a hand out to the fence, the wire gritty, greasy where my fingers touched. It dented when I leaned on it, but I needed it to bear my weight up. A stitch burned in my side, and every breath of air scoured my lungs. I didn’t know if that was from running, or because the air was bad. But it was the same air I’d been breathing all along. The filters didn’t change the outside world. Just our perceptions of it. So how could the air choke me now when before, I breathed it perfectly well?
Shouts behind me suggested that maybe my earlier pursuer had friends. Or that my flight had drawn attention. I was in shadow—but the yellow track suit wasn’t anyone’s idea of good camouflage.
Gravel crunched and turned under my feet. I pushed the top of the bent chain triangle up and ducked through, into the moist darkness under the bridge.
Things moved in the night. Rats, I imagined, but some sounded bigger than rats. What else could live in this filth? I imagined feral dogs, stray cats—companion animals abandoned to make their own fate. Would they attack something as large as a man?
If they did, how would I fight them?
I groped along the bridge abutment, feeling with my toes for a stick. The old stones swept down low, the arch broad and flat. I kept my hand up to keep from hitting my head on an invisible buttress. The masonry was slick with paint and damp, mortar crumbling to the touch. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, but light concentrated by the oily river reflected up, and I could see the stones of the bridge’s underside clearly.
I crept into that dank, ruinous beauty until the flicker of lights against the chain fence told me that my pursuers had found me, and they had come in force. My chest squeezed, stomach flipping in apprehension. I crouched down, tucked myself into the lowest part of the arch, and
fumbled out my phone.
“Police,” I said. Even if my contract had been cancelled, that should work. I’d heard somewhere that any phone can always dial emergency. And there it was, a distant buzz, and then a calm voice answering.
“Emergency services. Your taxpayer identification number, please?”
My voice stuck in my throat. I’d never been asked that before. But then, I’d never been calling from an unskinned phone before. Without thinking, I rattled off the fourteen digits of my old number, the one that had been revoked. I held my breath afterward. Maybe the change hadn’t propagated yet. Maybe—
“That number is not valid,” the operator said.
“Look,” I whispered, “I’m in a dispute with Revenue Services. It’s all going to be sorted out, I’m sure, but right now I’m about to be mugged—”
“I’m sorry,” said the consummate professional on the other end of the line. “Emergency services are for taxpayers only.”
Before I could protest, the line went dead. Leaving me crouched alone in the dark, with a glowing phone pressed to my ear. Not for long, however: in less than a second, the dazzle of flashlight beams found me. Instinctively, I ducked my head and covered my eyes—with the hand with the phone.
“Well hey. What’s this?” The voice was deceptively pleasant, that seductive mildness employed by schoolyard bullies since first Romulus beat up Remus. The flashlight didn’t waver from my eyes.
I flinched. I didn’t answer. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t have a voice.
I tried to find the part of myself that managed unruly students and lecture-hall hecklers, but it had vanished along with my credit accounts and the protection of the police. I ducked further, squinting around my hand, but he was just a shadow through the glare of his light. At least three other lights surrounded him.
He plucked the phone from my hand with a sharp twist that stabbed pain through my wrist. I snatched the hand back.
