by Eric Brown
Yeah, there’d been good times. He pulled the bonsai tree across the desk and sat with it in his lap. A miniature English oak, its infinitesimal leaves coated with dust. Despite the heat, the pollution, it seemed to be thriving.
He recalled the day the VR-star Vanessa Artois walked into the room, a year ago now. Walked in like a predatory animal and demanded that he find her sister, and left the oak as a gift. It had been his last big case. Kim had been six months gone from his life at the time, Barney likewise - riddled with bullets in a darkened back-alley.
His thoughts were interrupted by the chime of the desk-com. Halliday accepted the call.
A familiar lean, swarthy face stared out, seemingly looking through him.
He leaned forward. ‘Wellman?’ he said, surprised.
‘Halliday,’ the executive said, ‘I hope you can hear me?’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he asked.
Wellman went on, ‘This is a one-way communiqué, by necessity, as I’ll explain later. Please listen.’
Halliday sipped his coffee, wondering what the hell the Cyber-Tech exec might want.
‘Okay,’ Wellman said, ‘this is what’s happening. Any minute now two of my men will come around to your office. They’ll supervise your tanking and you’ll meet me in VR, and I’ll tell you more then.’ He smiled. ‘Apologies for the amateur theatricals, but you’re a very difficult man to track down. You seem to spend most of your time in VR, though I’m gratified to see that you patronise Cyber-Tech.’
‘This is a recording, right?’ Halliday shook his head. ‘I don’t understand, Wellman. Why—?’
But the executive was saying, ‘... done some detective work of my own. I’m concerned that you haven’t taken a case in six months. And you’re spending too much time tanked.’ He paused. ‘I have a job I think you might be interested in. This might just kick-start your career, my friend. And before you tell me where to stick my job, let me tell you that it involves someone who was once close to you. And that’s quite enough for now. I’ll fill you in later.’
The image on the screen vanished, and Halliday was left shaking his head in confusion. Who could he be referring to - someone who was once close to him? Kim? Vanessa Artois?
Why hadn’t Wellman been able to communicate with him in real time? Why the pre-recorded message?
And why the hell hadn’t the bastard the decency to leave him alone?
He looked across the room. The door was locked, the shutter down. The green paint that Kim had so meticulously applied, after insisting that the office needed a make-over to boost its flagging chi, was beginning to peel. The stand of flowers she’d installed in the south-west corner to bring good luck had died months ago. The wind chimes worked still, though, tinkling sporadic melancholy notes in the hot breeze.
He was surprised by the sudden rattle of the door handle as someone tried to enter the office. Then impatient knuckles rapped on the pebbled glass.
He stood and walked around the desk. A sharp pain shot up his left leg, as if he’d strained a muscle while standing. By the time he reached the door he was limping and out of breath.
Two heavies in silver-grey suits stood in the gloom of the landing. They had the build of thugs but the faces of executives, bodies inflated through steroid abuse and skin the unnatural bronze that comes from too much artificial sunlight.
‘Halliday?’
He left the door open and limped back to the desk. He picked up his coffee and watched them as they entered.
They looked around the room, taking in the squalor without comment. When their eyes came to rest on Halliday, he could sense their contempt.
‘Wellman contact you?’ the first guy asked.
Halliday sat back in his chair. ‘What does he want?’
‘That’s between you and him, buddy,’ the heavy said.
The second guy moved to the bedroom. Through the door, Halliday could see him checking the monitor at the head of the jellytank.
What had Wellman said? That his men would supervise his tanking? He smiled to himself: he wouldn’t be doing any more tanking in this unit for another twenty-four hours, sadly.
The heavy stepped from the bedroom, shaking his head. He conferred in a lowered voice with his sidekick, who turned to Halliday.
‘Wellman needs to see you in VR,’ he said. ‘We can’t use your tank, so we’ll have to take you downtown, okay?’
‘And if I don’t want to go?’
The heavies exchanged glances.
‘Look,’ Halliday said. ‘I no longer work in the business. I’ve retired, okay? Tell Wellman to find someone else to do his running around.’
‘Wellman said you’d want this case.’
‘Would I? And why’s that?’
The first guy shook his head. ‘Like I said, that’s between Wellman and you.’
The second guy spoke. ‘Listen, Halliday. Wellman’s ill. He’s dying. Word is he has a matter of weeks. He wants you on the case before he goes.’
Halliday stared at the heavies. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘We’re not his doctors, pal.’
He hesitated, considering. Wellman was dying ... He owed the executive a visit, at the very least.
He stood and moved to the bedroom. He shrugged on his body-holster, then picked up his jacket from the back of the chair beside the bed.
He followed the heavies from the office and locked the door behind him. They’d left their silver Mustang parked in the street. He climbed into the back and sank into the genuine leather seat. The interior was air-conditioned, and the sudden chill after the midday heat sent a shiver across his exposed flesh.
The car started almost without a sound and eased its way through the crowds.
He stared out at the food stalls that lined the street. He saw faces he recognised, stall-holders and street kids and refugees. So many people, he thought. The sight of the packed crowds, so soon after the vastness of the Virginia site, filled him with despair.
The driver craned his neck to look at him in the rear-view mirror. ‘What line of work you in, pal?’
‘Like I said, I’ve retired.’
‘So, whatdid you do?’ the passenger asked.
Halliday ignored the question. He saw the heavies exchange a glance, but his silence had the desired effect. They got the message and quit the interrogation.
It was a while since he’d last ventured further south than 96th Street. As the Mustang wafted down Park Avenue, one of the few private vehicles on the road, he stared out at the families encamped on the sidewalks, homeless refugees who’d fled to the city after the Raleigh and Atlanta meltdowns. There seemed to be as many refugees living rough these days as there had been years ago, despite the government’s routine promise to allocate funds for accommodation.
They turned left, and left again, and headed up Madison Avenue.
He leaned forward. ‘Where’s Wellman?’
In reply, the passenger pointed ahead, indicating a mirror-fronted skyscraper that gave Halliday vertigo merely looking up the length of its towering façade.
‘Hospital?’
‘Private apartments. Wellman has the penthouse.’
Great view, Halliday thought as the Mustang eased into the kerb.
The hot air hit him like the backblast from a jet engine as he climbed from the car and crossed the sidewalk. He was sweating, more from the unaccustomed exertion than the heat, by the time he limped up the steps to the sliding glass doors.
In the arctic chill of the air-conditioned elevator, he rested against the panelling and watched the numbered display as they rose through a hundred floors.
The doors opened onto a carpeted corridor. They stepped from the lift and turned right. The first heavy produced a key-card and swiped open a pair of genuine timber double doors.
They entered a lounge with the floorspace of a basketball court. He was right about the view. Floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides gave a panoramic vista of Manhattan’s crammed, man-made canyons
.
‘Take a seat. Drink?’
Halliday selected a minimalist rocking-chair positioned before a south-west view of Staten Island. ‘Orange juice.’
A minute later the heavy passed him a tall glass of freshly pressed juice. He heard a door open and close. He looked around and saw that he was alone in the room.
He sipped the juice and stared out at the view. He wondered what state Wellman might be in. Pretty bad, if the medics had given him only weeks to live. How old was the Cyber-Tech exec, anyway? Halliday guessed around fifty. Too young to be given a sentence of death.
He tried to analyse his feelings. He’d hardly known Wellman, worked with him for a week eighteen months ago. He was more surprised than shocked that a rich exec was dying of some incurable disease. Death comes to us all, he thought, even the filthy rich.
A door opened. ‘If you care to step this way, Halliday.’
The heavy was standing in the entrance of another room almost as vast as the lounge. Halliday drained his juice and stepped through. The second heavy was kneeling beside a jellytank positioned like a catafalque in the centre of the room.
Halliday looked from the tank to the guy beside him. ‘Where’s Wellman?’
‘Just strip and enter the tank,’ the heavy said. ‘It’s preprogrammed. All you have to do is go through the usual procedure.’ His gaze scanned the length of Halliday’s body. ‘I can see that you’re familiar with VR protocol.’
The heavy at the tank stood and nodded to the first guy. They left the room. Halliday heard the clunk of the lock as a key-card was used on the other side.
So if he was to meet Wellman somewhere in VR, why hadn’t the exec simply communicated with him in realtime?
He undressed and piled his clothes on a nearby chair. Naked and suddenly self-conscious - he imagined the heavies watching him via a hidden camera - he applied the electrodes, pulled on the face-mask and stepped into the jelly. It gave, almost reluctantly, beneath his foot like soft rubber. He sat down and sank slowly into the goo. Fully submerged, he spread his arms and legs and floated free.
His vision blacked out. He soon lost all bodily sensation. He felt a quick heat pass through his head as he made the transition.
He opened his eyes. He was standing in a room identical to the first lounge. He was wearing a default suit, a smart black side-fastening affair, with a crisp white shirt and black laceless shoes. He raised a hand before his face. As far as he could tell, he was here as himself.
And, most amazing of all, he was free of aches and pains. He felt as though he had been lifted from his old body and dropped into a younger, fitter version. Only then did he notice the view through the wraparound window. He no longer looked out over the grey sprawl of twenty-first-century lower Manhattan. The scene showed a rocky terrain of snow and ice, and canted at a rakish angle just above the near horizon was the planet Saturn.
The door through which he’d entered the lounge in the real world opened suddenly, and the man he recognised as Wellman, unchanged in eighteen months, stepped through.
He wore a dark suit, almost funereal in its sombreness, with a blood-red carnation in the button-hole; Halliday wondered if the suit was a macabre comment on the man’s impending demise.
Wellman advanced across the room, hand outstretched. ‘Halliday, it’s good to see you again.’
They shook hands. Wellman had chosen a persona that betrayed no sign of his having aged in the intervening eighteen months, nor of having suffered the ravages of disease.
He gestured to the armchair, and as Halliday sat down Wellman seated himself on a settee opposite. ‘You’re spending a lot of time in VR, Halliday.’
He sensed a note of censure in the executive’s comment. ‘Isn’t that what it’s there for?’
‘Of course, but there are...shall we say drawbacks, to spending so long tanked.’
‘That’s quite something, coming from the head of one of the world’s biggest VR companies. Can I quote you on that?’
Wellman smiled. ‘Only if you quote my full comment,’ he said. ‘I was going to say that there are drawbacks to spending twenty-four hours out of every forty-eight, as you do, in VR without taking the necessary care of yourself when you detank.’
‘Is that why you got me here, to lecture me on my health?’
‘I understand why you took to VR,’ Wellman said. ‘You haven’t had an easy time of it, what with Barney, and then Kim ...’
‘The past’s the past,’ Halliday said, aware of the cliché as soon as he’d said it. ‘There’s nothing we can do to change it.’
‘But you lose yourself in VR in the hope of forgetting the past, no?’
‘That doesn’t work, Wellman. The past is still up here.’ He tapped his head. ‘I use VR because it’s easier than the real world. And I can afford it now.’
Wellman stared at him. ‘Perhaps the question I should be asking you isn’t why you use VR, but why you can’t use the real world.’
Halliday lifted his right hand, looking for an exit decal. He tried his left...
Wellman was shaking his head. ‘You’re not getting away that easily.’
‘What do you want with me, Wellman? Why the hell couldn’t you tell me what you wanted back at the office?’
‘That was impossible.’
‘Why the elaborate charade? The recorded summons, the heavies, all this...?’ He waved at the surrounding space-scape.
What do you think of this site? This is Tethys, a moon of Saturn. I always wanted to travel the solar system.’
‘Wellman...’
The executive stared across at Halliday. ‘Okay, no more games. Did Roberts tell you I was ill?’
‘The heavy?’ Halliday nodded. ‘He said you had a few weeks.’
‘If I’m lucky I’ll see out three weeks, perhaps. Leukaemia. The medics have done all they can.’
‘I thought nowadays...’ Halliday began.
Wellman smiled. ‘Not the form of the disease I’ve contracted. They can cure some patients, but not me.’ He stared across at Wellman without the slightest trace of self-pity. ‘That’s why I couldn’t talk to you directly at your office,’ he said.
Halliday frowned. ‘Because you’re ill?’
‘No, because I’m here, in this site. It’s somewhat special.’
Halliday shook his head. ‘You’ve lost me.’
‘Did you notice what time it was when you tanked?’
Halliday shrugged. ‘Not especially. Around twelve thirty?’
‘Actually it was twelve twenty-seven precisely.’
‘I don’t see—’
‘And when you quit the tank, only a few minutes will have elapsed. Two, three minutes at the most.’
Halliday stared at the executive. He knew what Wellman wanted him to say, so he said it, ‘But I’ve already been in here what, five minutes?’
‘If you remain in this site for one hour, subjective, only fifteen minutes will have elapsed in the real world. That’s why I couldn’t make the link, because of the time difference.’
‘Christ...’ Halliday combed his hand through his hair. ‘That’s why you’re here, right? You said you had a few weeks out there, but in here you’ll be able to live for ...’ He shook his head, the arithmetic beyond him.
Wellman smiled. ‘Maybe two, three subjective months. I’ll live without pain while my body is tanked, pumped full of analgesics and whatever else the medics recommend to keep the meat alive a while longer. Every day in the real world is approximately four in here - or in the other sites I’ve had customised for my use.’
‘I didn’t know this was possible.’
‘We’ve kept it under wraps, Halliday. We know that other companies are working on it, but we’re ahead of the field.’
Halliday pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes, massaging. He looked up and gave a laugh. ‘This’ll revolutionise VR, the way people use it.’
‘The ramifications are manifold,’ Wellman agreed. ‘Business will benefit, o
f course. Think of all the man hours of work done in the real world, which could be accomplished here in minutes. The field of theoretical science will never be the same again. We’re expecting some exponential leaps in research and development when we get the requisite sites up and running.’
‘What about the general user? I mean, I could spend twenty-four hours in a site and be gone from the real world just six hours. I wouldn’t feel so wrecked when I came out.’
Wellman laughed. ‘Think about it, Halliday. What would happen? Users like you would spend twenty-four real-time hours in the tank, and live in a site, or various sites, for four days.’
