by John Barnes
He makes a face, takes a bite of the taco—she wondered why Señora Herrera had made so many, but clearly Señora Herrera knows more about teenage male appetites than Mary Ann does—and says, “Well, that didn’t sound stupid, it sounded polite. Do you really want to know?”
“Most of the time everyone in the world knows what I’m feeling; what I want to know is what somebody who hasn’t gotten as fucked up as I have feels like. So tell me about yourself, please.”
He shrugs. “It’s going to sound clichéd, because the first thing I feel like saying is that there’s not a lot to tell. And the second thing I feel like saying is that… oh, well, see, I’m down here working at the Tapachula Community College, as a tutor in the pre-engineering curriculum. I’m an engineering student up at U of the Az, but I’m taking this term off. What I do is, I coach local kids who are trying to get ready for engineering school through their science and math classes… only…” His eyes seem to look over her shoulder to somewhere a thousand miles away.
“Only?” she asks, lightly, and part of her notes that there’s something in this scene that Synthi Venture would understand, maybe better than Mary Ann. The boy is certainly handsome—hell, he’s beautiful—and candlelight playing over his delicate, troubled face… this wouldn’t make a bad staging in a documentary about a Romantic poet….
“Only,” he says, finally, “there’s this girl.”
It’s a great story, in Mary Ann’s opinion, and what makes it truly a great story is that this boy is far more sincere than she, or anyone she ever worked with, could be. He really does have a single, burning true love and it’s really the only one he ever expects to have. And he looks so sad… and so beautiful.
Mary Ann prides herself on her intelligence and cynicism, and she’s right about both of them. But one thing she rarely admits to herself is that to really appeal to her audience, Synthi Venture has had to be able to feel the sort of thing they wish they could feel—and that means there was something of Synthi in Mary Ann to start out with, and a great deal more has gotten in. So although she knows it’s dumb and corny, she’s still swept away by the story of this poor kid’s love life, and consequently she does the most seductive thing a human being can do—she looks fascinated.
Jesse sees that and finds himself thinking that she’s an awfully good listener, and the first person who seems to understand about it all, and to feel a little touch of compassion for her—she’s clearly a very nice person who has been made a mess of by the life she’s had to lead. He’s very proud of his ability to forgive her… and hey, in the candlelight, he’s not sure he’s ever seen anyone quite so beautiful. “That’s enough about me, anyway,” he says. “All clichés, just like I said. Um… tomorrow’s my day off. Would you like to do something really dumb, like take a long walk on the beach together?”
“I’d adore it,” she says, and she smiles a deep, secret smile that seems to him to have centuries of pain in it, but a wonderful warmth as well. He realizes they are going to be very good for each other, and says, “Terrific.”
She loves the way he says “Terrific”—it puts her in mind of a couple of guys she went out with in high school—and she knows, suddenly, that they can both be very good for each other.
Louie Tynan has a pilot’s patience for medical officers—which is to say, none at all. And somehow they must sense that, because they always turn up right when things are way too busy already.
He’s been dealing with Dr. Wo for a long time, and sure enough, just when he’s about to take off for the moon, Wo calls him up and says he’s got to be plugged in for a checkup.
Space neurology is a pretty silly subject if you ask Louie—he’s never noticed any difference in what he thinks, only in his muscles and body weight and so forth—but no one is asking him. For an hour, he dutifully thinks of images Dr. Wo suggests, and reports back what he sees when signal comes in through the scalpnet, and generally lets the doc run his whole nervous system through a thorough checkout.
Usually Wo is one of those doctors who thinks “Any questions?” means “goodbye” and “Uh, one question, Doc,” means “run!” But this time, when the checkout is all done and Louie is at last permitted to unplug, Wo stays on the line, and says, “There’s another area that we need to discuss, Colonel Tynan.”
Louie nods. “I’m listening.”
Wo smiles slightly. “If I tell you that it isn’t something you could be grounded for, will you relax and listen carefully?”
Louie’s smile is wider. “Sure, Doc. What is it?”
Wo looks off to the side, as if thinking, and finally says, “You know, of course, that all modern computer systems are deliberately infected with optimizing replicating code—little programs that duplicate themselves as needed, and that modify other programs to improve them. For example, if another program is accomplishing what it does in seventy steps, and the optimizer sees a way to do it in sixty, perhaps because there are several unnecessary moves of data in and out of storage… the optimizer fixes it. Optimizers, of course, also fix each other, so none of us exactly understands how they do what they do. This is all review, yes?”
“It’s all review. And I’m not a computer, Doc.”
“Not yet, anyway. That’s what I’m trying to find a way to explain. The most recent generations of optimizers are no longer stopped by the barriers between operating systems; they are able to translate themselves and infect systems they were never designed for. That feature makes them more useful, obviously, in the global net, since they download themselves into any new machine and clean up its code.
“A couple of years ago we were experimenting with rabbit brains, and we discovered the most advanced of the optimizers could actually cross over into the brain. Where they began to… well—”
“Make the rabbit smarter? Are you telling me that by spending so much time telepresent I’m going to become brighter?”
“To some extent that’s what happened with the three human volunteers who tried it. But there were other effects as well. You might want to be careful—and call me if you notice anything unusual.” Wo takes a long moment to think about it. “For example, they stopped needing to sleep much. One function of sleep is a sort of sorting of the records and straightening out of the memory. Thus with optimizers running in the brain, since the memories stay straight and the records accurate, there’s less need for sleep.”
“You said one function,” Louie noted.
“Well, nature never leaves anything in just a single use for long. If you have to do something all the time, evolution will find ways to make it serve other functions. The immune system is immensely energy-consuming, so your body uses sleep as a time, when you aren’t using energy for much else, to get caught up on immune functions. If it should happen that you’re invaded by those programs, you’ll feel very little need to sleep, but you should still lie down and not move, unhooked from the system, for a few hours each day. Especially in an environment with a certain amount of hard radiation around, where there will be more damaged cells to clean out and where the disease organisms you carry with you are more apt to mutate.”
“Uh, yeah. Will I be able to sleep?”
“Better than ever,” Wo said, permitting himself a tiny smile. “When those programs cross over they optimize everything.” He hesitates for a long moment and then says, “So, again, if you notice anything unusual—even if it doesn’t seem to impair you—give me a call. Any questions?”
“I guess not,” Louie says, and the screen goes blank. Wo has hung up.
For more than a week after it smashes Kingman, the hurricane works its way to the west and north. Whatever world news media may make of its “behavior” and “personality,” it is just an oval of low pressure in the troposphere, fed and sustained by the warmth of the ocean below it, and thus the frequent note from news commentators and XV stars that the hurricane “takes no notice of human beings” is mere theatrics. A hurricane that took notice of human beings would be a different kind o
f thing.
It passes among the islands made famous in the Second World War, and its huge storm surge rolls far up the beaches, dragging many of them into new shapes. There are deaths running into the hundreds in the Carolines and the Marshalls, but coverage drops steadily—XV, like TV before it, thrives on novelty, and when you have seen one “island paradise” destroyed, you’ve seen all of them. This is particularly true because the evident poverty and squalor make it hard for media to portray the place as a paradise (and hence it is less shocking to see its destruction) and the destruction itself tends to happen in the pitch-dark driving wind and rain, where there’s little to see. So on island after island, wind and waves slaughter hundreds and level whole towns, but the coverage falls steadily during that time, by popular demand. An audience that has gotten used to experiencing war and violence through the eyes of the XV stars has been yawning and tuning out the events in the Pacific Islands.
It is not that the drowned people with their ruined houses have brown skin—by 2028, so do many of the audience for XV—but that they are far away, and although it is endlessly repeated that this is the biggest hurricane in human history, you can’t see it being the biggest from anywhere lower than orbit, and down on the ground where the human interest is, it’s just a lot of wind and rain and some big waves. There’s a two-day wonder when Kishima, biggest star on the Japanese XV Adventure Channel, announces that he will be set down by staticopter in the path of the surge and will then surf all the way to land, wherever it may take him, but that too becomes dull as people plugging into him discover only that he is getting tired, that cold water tastes very good to him, and that although he is frightened, he knows that pickup aircraft remain within short range of him.
They know Hurricane Clem is a big story and that there will be trouble if they don’t cover it, but TV and XV alike can’t find a way to make it entertaining.
The edge of Hurricane Clem grazes Saipan at about two in the morning on the night of June 21. Lance, one of the reporters for Extraponet, happens to be there, and he’s looking for any old shelter he can find—his net sent him out into the foul weather to “sample” it, he’s gotten separated from his bodyguards, and now he doesn’t have the foggiest idea where he is. His editor has been trying to get him located by transponder, but the directional antenna needed for the job is hopeless in the high wind. They stay linked, and Lance keeps looking for something he can recognize. He falls twice, and once he’s hit by a small, blowing board; eventually he is crawling, muddy water spraying furiously into his face.
There’s a vivid orange glow ahead, and he manages to wipe his eyes and make it out. “Conrad Hotel,” he reads, out loud.
The editor’s voice in his ear says, “Hah! Now we’ve got you placed.”
“Well, great, get me a taxi or something.”
“Right now nothing’s moving, Lance. You’d better see if you can get in there. The zipline is off its tracks and the roads are washed out between us and you—you’ll have to see if they’ll give you a room.”
“I don’t see a Vacancy sign,” he mutters as he crawls. The water is unbelievably cold around his hands and feet. He thinks he lost a shoe but he’s not sure.
“It’s not really a hotel, it’s an old folks’ home,” the editor replies. “But maybe they’ll let you have a room. They’re bound to like you there, old people experience a lot of XV, and the city directory says they’re mostly Americans anyway.”
When Lance enters the vestibule, the wind and rain stop abruptly; it’s like dragging himself out of a river. He’s gasping like a goldfish, and it takes an effort to haul himself to his feet. He knocks on the door and tries opening it. It swings open easily.
There are about a hundred of them standing there in the lobby; it takes Lance only a second to think the workers must have run off. Two or three of them look startled, as if they recognize him. He closes the door behind himself.
The place is at least a hundred years old, and he can feel the groans of the old building through his feet.
An older man, well-dressed with a jacket and bowtie, approaches him and asks, “Are you with the management here?”
“I’m a reporter,” Lance answers. “Covering all this for Extraponent. I came in to get out of the storm.”
“You won’t be out of it long,” an older lady in jeans and sweater says.
Ignoring her, the man says, “We’ve been trying to figure out whether we can get everyone down into the cellar. It’s not a very deep one but it’s better than up here. There’s at least as many people who won’t come out of their rooms, I’m afraid—we can’t do anything for them—and there’s a bunch on the ground floor who can’t move themselves. We were just about to vote to try to knock down the cellar door and get down there—they left it locked.”
Lance nods. There’s a moaning boom, and the old building shifts slightly. “Uh, I don’t know that I care about democracy. I’ll knock that door down for you.”
They lead him to it. It looks pretty solid, but the frame doesn’t seem to be anything special.
Four hard snap-kicks, like they taught him when he was training for this job, and the door flies open. They all applaud.
The power is still on, so he turns on the light. There is at least a foot of water throughout the basement.
“I don’t know,” one of the women says. She has the kind of piled mop of starched gray hair that Lance has always found particularly unattractive on old ladies. “Looks, like, totally gross.”
“Oh, shut up, Kristin,” the man with her replies, and starts to climb down the wet steps. “Shoes will dry.”
“All right, you’re, like, so grumpy,” she says, following him. They stagger down the steps, holding hands.
Most of the crowd is suspended between fear of the rocking and creaking hotel, and distaste for the flooded basement, Lance realizes; he starts to head down the steps himself. He knows, anyway, that he will—
No engineer would ever bother to analyze what happens next; it’s not a current or an interesting structure, like the Launch Facility was. The principle is simple; irregular surfaces, and surfaces with holes in them, have much more drag than smooth ones. Whether the roof lifts first, or a window breaks, or even just a door flies open, drag increases dramatically.
In a split second, more damage happens, and there are more holes and rough surfaces. In another split of the same second, the force on the building has multiplied many-fold.
The Conrad Hotel goes over sideways like a house of cards, slumping into a pile of lumber. Even Lance does not have time to move clear of it, and he is much the most agile person present. There are screams, thuds, crashes.
He finds himself pinned down in darkness. All around him there are cries and moans. A few people are calling names, most just crying out.
He tries to move his left arm, but it’s broken and numb. His right is pinned to his side. Something too heavy to move is on his chest, and he’s fighting to breathe.
Very slowly, the hole containing his head begins to fill with icy water. As it covers his ears, he loses the sound of people crying out in fear; it is a long time after that when his face is covered, and his last seconds are spent bucking against the intractable grip of the weight on his chest.
The editor gets every bit of it; it’s some of the best XV of the year, he figures. Eight hundred million people experience it live, or in one of the two replays later that day.
Two days later detectives from several XV nets have established that the rotten old retirement hotel was owned by a group of Hawaiian doctors and was in noncompliance with practically every applicable building code. Besides Lance, three hundred old people who had spent their savings to get there from Akron, Bakersfield, or Minot had perished.
Moreover, it turns out to be a small bonanza for the doctors who own it, since building, facilities, and old people are all heavily insured.
But that’s nothing compared to the bonanza it is for XV. Suddenly there are over a thousand suitably g
rieving relatives, and the heaps of gray-haired dead under the rotten hotel, and all of them from the country that created XV and consumes more of it than the rest of the world combined.
Passionet tries to get Synthi Venture to come back from vacation early to cover it. She won’t, but it doesn’t slow them down. Very shortly, Rock and Quaz are there as a team, both missing Synthi acutely, rivals for a new star, Surface O’Malley, their latest marketing of red hair to the Japanese market, doing a sort of recap of The Front Page as they investigate the “doctors’ ring” that maintained the “living hell of the hotel deathtrap.” The audience can feel the Rock’s righteous anger, Quaz’s cold determination to get to the bottom of this and nail the bastards, and Surface’s guts and determination to be part of the team.
Passionet flies in plenty of grieving relatives for Surface O’Malley to interview. She has a warm, tender quality that people open up to, and she’s extremely good at feeling torn between Rock and Quaz; naturally in this kind of story, the affair is doomed, and millions of experiencers weep with her as Rock and Quaz decide that they must not allow a woman to come between them when it is vital to run the story to the ground. (Not before Rock has taken her out to the storm-lashed beach for champagne and a lusty fucking by moonlight, and Quaz has torn her panties from under her lacy dress and had her in a back alley—Quaz having lost the coin toss for who has to be the bad-boy hero.)
Surface O’Malley is a big hit, and best of all from Passionet’s standpoint, she’s not too much like Synthi Venture but she’s enough like her so that they can build up a rivalry; there will be at least a year of catfights to alternate with the individual adventures before the two of them will find each other as best friends.
Meanwhile, Rock and Quaz uncover the vital evidence that Passionet’s detectives found the first day, and wave it in the faces of the Hawaiian doctors, who deny everything and threaten to sue. The men who experience Rock feel once again that they know their way around the world, and that a certain nobility adheres to them; the men (and a few women) who experience Quaz once again feel bitter existential despair, the knowledge that it is a cold and ugly world where every moment of joy is paid for at too high a price, but where a good-enough-for-this-world man like Quaz can take grim satisfaction in making a few of the bastards pay, and in the durable friendship of a guy like Rock—and the pleasures of occasionally knocking off a good piece like Surface.
