Remote Control

by Stephen White

  The brass knob yielded easily to the pressure of her fingers. The long room in front of her ran the width of the building and was awash in shadows, lit only by the lights of the Mall that filtered in through thin curtains that had been pulled across the big windows. She remembered leaning out the window to wave good-bye to Lauren. The curtains hadn’t been pulled then. Emma walked quickly to the windows and lowered herself to the deep sill. She pulled her knees to her chest and gazed down at the crowd, soothed by the presence of dozens of pedestrians strolling below.

  Behind her she heard a noise—an electronic “click”—and she yelped involuntarily. She jumped up and turned toward the sound, reflexively pulling Ethan’s robe tight at her throat.

  Across the room, in the corner, just off the edge of the big Heriz, Ethan Han reclined in one of the room’s many sling chairs. This chair was covered with bright orange canvas. Ethan’s eyes were half-closed, as though he were dozing. The big cart of electronics that Emma had last seen at the dinner party hovered behind him. He was wearing the collar and headset that Diane had modeled during the demonstration.

  At first, the setting struck Emma as clinical, as though Ethan were a patient hooked up in a hospital suite twenty years in the future. In seconds, however, the scene began to feel quite different.

  Besides the collar, Ethan wore little else. His thin, muscled chest was bare, as were his legs. At first she thought he was completely naked but he was actually wearing a pair of nylon shorts. They were the color of dirty copper and seemed almost to disappear against his skin.

  She whispered, “Ethan, are you okay?”

  When Ethan smiled, the corners of his mouth didn’t actually turn up as much as they widened. That happened now. She took it that he was happy to see her.

  He said, “Shhhh.”

  “You startled me, you should have said something. I’ve been looking all over for you. I couldn’t find you.” Despite the fact that her anxiety hadn’t entirely dissipated, she felt the surge of different tensions.

  “I was enjoying watching you against the windows.” His smile deepened. “You look lovely.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “What are doing with that equipment? Is someone coming over again?” God, she hoped not. Not tonight, she wasn’t up for it.

  The monitor on the cart caught her eye. She realized that the animated figure floating in a lazy S-shape in the middle of the screen was Ethan.

  Both Ethan and his cartoonlike image were perfectly still.

  “I’m working,” he said. “Collecting some auditory data to check some code enhancements.”

  “The Beethoven?”

  “Yes. The Beethoven.”

  “The machine records sound, too? I thought it just recorded movement.”

  “Not sound exactly. It records activity on neural pathways. What it’s recording are my neural responses to sound.”

  “But it will record all your movements, too?”

  “Yes, it’s recording all my movements.” He raised an arm and waved. In real time, the computer-generated figure did the same. Ethan was confident enough about his technology that he didn’t even bother to turn his head and look at the monitor.

  Emma did.

  “All of your movements?”

  Ethan wasn’t quick enough to catch her meaning.

  “There are some technical parameters—thresholds, really—that are limiting. But for all practical purposes, yes, it records all of them.”

  “If I got close to you—really close to you—would it record my movements as well?”

  “Not unless you were wearing a collar, too.” He looked closely at her. “I could arrange that.”

  “Oh, thanks for the offer, but I’ve just washed my hair,” she teased, running the fingers of one hand across her head. “Without wearing your little torture devices, though, no matter what I do, I stay invisible to the machine?”

  “You would like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Emma didn’t notice that his answer was not responsive to her question. She swallowed involuntarily. “Yeah, I fantasize about being invisible, Ethan. Usually, I feel absolutely on display.” She raised her eyebrows. “And sometimes I fantasize other things, too.”

  “You had a bath?” he said.

  “Yes, it was nice. I used your blow-dryer and I borrowed your robe.” She fingered the lapel.

  “I can see that.”

  This has to be the slowest dance I’ve ever danced, Emma thought. The tension in the room was electric. For her, the mood was erotic and seductive in a way she couldn’t remember feeling since her daddy died. Not even with Pico.

  What about Ethan? What was this dance like for him? She could only guess; reading his moods the past couple of weeks seemed as impossible to her as understanding the code on the monitors in his laboratory.

  She wondered if Ethan’s machine would graphically represent his erection. If it did, she decided, she wanted a copy of the CD to play at home on her laptop. That would be technology she could understand. She smiled at the thought, felt an enticing chill run down her spine to her buttocks and her groin.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied, stepping forward. She was moving as involuntarily, it seemed to her, as Ethan’s computer likeness.

  The butterfly chair on which Ethan sat was nothing but canvas on an iron frame. Simple in design. She decided she could work with it.

  A step away from him, she stopped. She knelt, her knees on the soft edge of the rug.

  The toes of his right foot loosely graced the crimson yarn of the carpet. With her fingertips, she lifted his foot and it seemed to float up to her as though it were levitating. She raised her eyes and saw every movement of Ethan’s mirrored on the monitor. The S-shaped figure now had a bend at one knee.

  But she was nowhere to be seen.

  God. I am invisible. She felt a rush of power, a force that felt primal.

  Ethan’s foot had a high arch. She kissed the top of his foot, above that arch, holding her lips there until his flesh and her mouth were the same temperature. Then she moved and did it again, this time down near his toes. She flicked her tongue into the slit between his second and third toes.

  She held it there, waiting to be told to stop.

  She thought she heard a sound, something in the no-man’s-land between a whimper and a moan.

  She took his large toe into her mouth and caressed its shape with her tongue. She bit lightly on the soft pad in front of the nail.

  Minutes later she floated deftly from the right foot to the left. It seemed to rise to her lips itself, as though it couldn’t stand to wait its turn.

  She loved the soft noises he was making and hoped that the sounds wouldn’t stop. She hoped that the machinery would record them, too.

  His shorts came off before her robe opened.

  Dusk became night before her robe opened.

  Beethoven boomed before her robe opened.

  She had never felt so ready.

  She had never felt so good at anything.

  Afterward they lay naked, intertwined against the orange canvas sling of the butterfly chair. Ethan’s digitalized form hung pretzeled above their heads like an apparition, the high resolution of the monitor revealing even the small detail of his chest as it rose with the deep breaths of recovery.

  His coloring was dark, hair black and fine, skin the hue of wet earth. Emma was fair, her complexion and her coloring all neutral, the product of six generations of Protestant blending.

  Behind them, the computer continued to hum. Voices, mostly happy, intruded from the Mall below. Beethoven clicked off.

  She smelled of bath soap, he of sweat.

  “Hello,” she said after a while, eager to renew some contact with him, her voice husky and low from sex.

  “Yes,” he replied, “hello to you, too.”

  “That was good.”

  “No. That was great.” She felt him hesitate as though choosing his words with care. He ran his index finger d
own the valley between her breasts. The finger came back moist. He tasted it, licking the salt from her.

  Minutes passed and the room, to Emma, seemed to grow larger and larger, the windows bigger, the light more intense, the curtains more transparent. These were not new feelings for her. Often she felt circumstances around her evolve in ways that increased her feelings of vulnerability. The phenomenon had started days after her father’s murder and was yet to stop.

  She nodded toward the cart behind them. “If you play that tape back, I can watch you move exactly as you did as I made love to you, right?”

  He chuckled. She had never heard him chuckle before and it froze her attention.

  “What? What’s so funny, Ethan?”

  “Just a minute, I need my hand.”

  She leaned forward and he pulled his right arm out from beneath her body. With both hands free he unstrapped the collar from his head and neck and placed them on the floor next to the chair.

  Emma looked up at the monitor. The dull golden glow of the previous program dissolved into a scene of a wave crashing over and over. Ethan had disappeared.

  She mimed a frown, running a hand over his abdomen, below his navel. “Oooh. I think that I’m going to miss that little guy. So tell me, what was so funny before?”

  “The ‘machine,’ as you call it, has much more sophisticated capabilities than I’ve let on. To understand what it can do, you need to conceptualize it in a different way. It’s designed to record many things, not merely movement.” She felt his pulse quicken against her, and wondered if he were again becoming aroused.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t talk about this comfortably. Almost no one knows what this equipment can do. Sometimes I’m not even sure I know what it can do. It’s a scientific frontier. Technologically, this is virgin territory.”

  “What do you mean you’re not sure what it can do? You designed it, right?”

  “This stays here? You and me, that’s it? No one else hears this?”

  “Trade secrets, huh? Great, of course. I won’t tell anyone.”

  He caressed her cheek with his finger, high, near her temple. “If you could experience anything on the face of this earth, any experience that some other human being has experienced but that you haven’t, what would it be? I’m talking about something you would love to do but because you don’t have the prior experience, or the training, or the intelligence, or the opportunity, or the money—or maybe simply the courage—to do it on your own, you haven’t ever done it, and probably never will.”

  “What? Is that thing like a time machine? It will take me someplace else if I want it to?” She wondered if he was playing with her.

  “Literally, no. Figuratively, yes. You would actually never even have to leave this room or the present time to take advantage of this technology.”

  “You said this is secret, right?” She was tantalized, but felt wary, too. “That goes for you, too, then. If I start spewing out my dreams, you don’t tell anyone? I don’t hear about this in the tabloids next week?” He nodded. “Okay, then, here’s my secret, an easy one. Since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to be an astronaut, to feel what it’s like to be weightless.”

  He smiled. “With that intro, I was expecting something a little more perverted. Your fantasy is great. It’s a wonderful desire. And with this technology, I can fulfill it. I can give you that experience. Not today, not tomorrow. Maybe next year, maybe not. But soon. Soon, I can make you an astronaut.”

  “What do you mean? With this machine?” She looked at the innocuous-looking computer equipment on the cart.

  “Yes, with this machine.”

  “Ethan, tell me. What on earth are you talking about? What does it do? I thought it just turned live action into computer animation.” She raised herself up on her arm to look him in the eye.

  “This technology—let me try to explain.” He reached to the floor and picked up the collar and helmet. “In here, in the collar, there are exquisitely sensitive devices capable of recording neural transmissions. The signals are simply electrochemical charges that run along nerves—wires. At the brain-stem level—at the top of the spinal column—all the neural signals carrying messages from the body to the brain come together.”

  He gave the collar a little shake. “After the sensors deliver the neural impulses, the computer,” he reached back and tapped the processor on the cart, “separates the signals, digitizes them, isolates them into tracks, and decodes them for storage and, later, playback.

  “The end result,” he ran his teeth over his lower lip, “is that now I’m capable of recording the actual sensory experience of an individual human being in much the same way and with much the same clarity that a compact disc records sound, or a digital camera records a visual event.”

  Emma was stunned. “The demonstration you did the other night? That’s just a small part of it, then?”

  He closed his eyes briefly. She wondered if he was planning on answering her.

  Finally, he said, “The visual representation software is really just a toy, something concrete I decided to use to impress the investors. It has some potential uses, but I doubt that they are either lucrative or earth-shattering in any humanitarian sense. Believe me, it’s a tiny piece of all this. I don’t want people to know the extent of what I’ve done until I’m ready to proceed.”

  “Who knows? Does Raoul?”

  “I can tell from his questions that he suspects I’m stretching something, but no, he doesn’t know the parameters. So far, only J.P. and, now, you. My brother, my family, have a general sense of it.”

  Her mind was stuck on the examples he had given. “But what’s the equipment actually designed for? Other than entertainment-type things—pretending to be an astronaut? What can it do?”

  “A million practical uses. I’m guessing I’ve thought of maybe one percent. Think of paraplegics. Or amputees, like my brother. It will grant the disabled access to experiences that they otherwise could never dream of having again. Think of pediatrics. A doctor who can’t get a young patient to describe symptoms will be able to actually record those very symptoms and play them back for himself or herself and then know exactly what it is their patient is feeling.”

  Emma struggled to understand what she was hearing. It felt as though she were trying to grasp the edge of a cloud. “I don’t get it. How does this differ from virtual reality?”

  “Because this experience is not ‘virtual’ reality; it is reality. It’s not a ‘created experience’ meant to trick the senses; it’s an actual experience. I’m not talking about simulating experience for you, I’m talking about playing back what has already actually been experienced by someone else. What is recorded by the equipment is an individual’s actual sensory experience of an event. What they sensed, what they felt, how their body responded to everything. Everything. Anything.”

  She could tell that Ethan knew she didn’t understand.

  “Do you want to try sushi without having to go out to a restaurant? Buy the cuisine software. I’ll be able to do a complete repertoire of world cuisines on a single disc. Right now only the rich can afford to drink old Bordeaux or Burgundy. Soon, it will be at your library for you to taste at any time. It will all be available on tape from BiModal. Taste the old vintages through Robert Parker’s lips. Hear opera through Pavarotti’s ears. I will provide all that.”

  The reality of what he was saying hit Emma like a truck. She stared up at the equipment cart as though she had just discovered a video camera hidden in her bedroom.

  “What about just now, what exactly did you just record?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve never done this…before while wearing the sensors. So I don’t know what’s on the disc. I thought I was recording my responses to a Beethoven symphony.”

  “But what do you think you actually recorded?”

  He hesitated.

  She pulled as far away from him as the chair would allow.

  “Ethan, did you just record u
s screwing? If I’m hearing you right, you can play back what we just did for yourself and get off again and again and again anytime you want?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know what I have on that disc, Emma. But, yes, it’s likely that I may have been able to record my experience of making love to you. The key words are ‘my experience’ and ‘you.’ This technology is personal. This technology is intimate. That’s not just sex on that tape. That’s us making love. If I succeeded in recording what just happened, what is on that disc is exactly what it’s like for me to make love with you. I find that thought wonderful.”

  She felt a rising nausea and sense of vulnerability. She jumped up from the chair and grabbed the robe from the rug. “Erase it. Right now. This feels absolutely pornographic.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Erase the damn tape, Ethan. I don’t want there to be a tape of someone having sex with me. Two years from now is someone going to be able to rent this at Blockbuster? Or maybe just download it over the Web?”

  She threw his shorts at him.

  “Erase it!”

  She saw the reluctance in his eyes: He didn’t want to erase the disc.

  He said, “This wasn’t just someone having sex with you, Emma. It was me, it was us.”

  “I don’t care. You did not ask my permission to record this. I didn’t volunteer to model for your camera. And I want it erased, right now.”

  “You don’t have to raise your voice. I didn’t trick you. Sex tonight was your idea, not mine.”

  “Ethan, please. I don’t regret the sex. But you should have warned me about the equipment, right away. It wasn’t fair.”

  “You’re overreacting. I don’t even have the capacity to play back most of the tracks I’m recording, yet. So far, motion-in-space is my cleanest track. The monitor image, you know?”

  “But you will, won’t you, someday soon? You’ll figure out how to play it all back?” She felt defenseless and unnaturally cold, and hugged herself around the chest.

  “Yes, I’m confident that I will.”

  “When?” Her voice was small.

  “There are a few technical challenges remaining.”