The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  She tapped the screen for his vitals so she could note the exact time of death in the archiver. Then she just stared at the figures on the screen, tapping the stylus mindlessly on the desk.

  Shantih Love, the specs told her, had shuffled off all mortal coils, artificial and otherwise, just ten minutes into his four-hour-and-twenty-minute romp in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty. It didn’t say how he had managed to go on with his romp after he had died. She supposed that was too much to ask.

  * * *

  Shantih Love and the kid powering him/her had both had their throats cut, but for Shantih Love the wound had not been fatal. Disgusting and gory, even uncomfortable, but not fatal.

  Konstantin watched the screen intently as the sequence faded in. In the middle of a glitter-encrusted cityscape at dusk, the androgyne made his/her way toward some kind of noisy party or tribal gathering on the rubble-strewn shore of the Hudson River. The rubble was also encrusted with glitter; more glitter twinkled on the glass of the silent storefronts on the other side of a broad, four-lane divided thoroughfare partially blocked by occasional islands of wreckage. As Shantih Love swept off the sidewalk—ankle-length purple robe flowing gracefully with every step—and crossed the ruined street, one of the wrecks ignited, lighting up the semidark. Shantih Love barely glanced at it and kept going, toward the gathering on the shore; Konstantin could hear music and, under that, the white noise of many voices in conversation. What could they possibly have to talk about, she wondered; was it anything more profound than what you’d hear at any other party in any other reality with any other people? And if it were, why did it occur only in the reality of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty?

  Shantih Love abruptly looked back in such a way that s/he seemed to be looking directly out of the screen into her eyes. The expression on the unique face seemed somehow both questioning and confident. Konstantin steered the detached perspective from behind Shantih Love around his/her right side, passing in front of the androgyne and moving to the left side, tracking him/ her as s/he walked toward the multitude on the shore.

  A figure suddenly popped up from behind the low concrete barrier running between the street and the river. Shantih Love stopped for a few moments, uncertainty troubling his/her smooth forehead. Konstantin tried adjusting the screen controls to see the figure better in the gathering darkness but, maddeningly, she couldn’t seem to get anything more definite than a fuzzy, blurry silhouette, definitely human-like but otherwise unidentifiable as young or old, male, female, both or neither, friendly or hostile.

  The shape climbed over the barrier to the street side just as Shantih Love slipped over it to the shore. The ground here was soft sand and Shantih Love had trouble walking in it. The fuzzy shape paced him/her on the other side of the wall and Konstantin got the idea that it was saying something, but nothing came up on audio. Shantih Love didn’t answer, didn’t even look in its direction again as s/he moved in long strides toward the crowd, which extended from the water’s edge up to a break in the barrier and into the road.

  The perspective had slipped back behind Shantih Love. Konstantin tapped the forward button rapidly; now she seemed to be perched on Shantih Love’s right shoulder. The gathering on the beach appeared to be nothing more than a ragged, disorganized cocktail party, the sort of thing her ex had loved to attend. Konstantin was disappointed. Was this really all anyone in AR could think of doing?

  Shantih Love whirled suddenly; after a one-second delay, the perspective followed. Konstantin felt a wave of dizziness and the images on the screen went out of focus.

  When the focus cleared, Konstantin saw that the figure was standing on top of the barrier, poised to jump. Shantih Love backed away, turned, and began stumbling through the party crowd, bumping into various people, some less distinct than others. Konstantin didn’t have to shift the perspective around to know that the creature was chasing the androgyne. Now the pov seemed to be a few inches in front of the creature’s face; she had a few fast glimpses of bandage-wrapped arms and hands with an indeterminate number of fingers as it staggered into the party after Love.

  The pov began to shake and streak, as if it were embedded in the pursuing creature’s body. Frustrated, Konstantin pounded on the forward key, but the pov didn’t budge. Someone had preordered the pov to this position, she realized. But whether it was the murdered kid who had done it or just the formatting she couldn’t tell.

  Worse, now that she was in the party crowd, almost every attendee was either so vague as to be maddeningly unidentifiable, or so much a broad type—barbarian, vampire, wild-child, homunculus—that anonymity was just as assured.

  Shantih Love broke through the other side of the crowd two seconds before she did, and ran heavily toward a stony rise leading to the sidewalk. S/he scrambled up it on all fours, a heartbeat ahead of the pursuer.

  Love vaulted the low barrier and ran along the middle of the street, looking eagerly at each wreck. There were more wrecks here, some ablaze, some not. Something moved inside each one, even those that were burning. Konstantin realized she was probably alone in finding that remarkable; living in a bonfire was probably the height of AR chic.

  She tried pushing the pov ahead again and gained several feet. Shantih Love looked over his/her shoulder, seemingly right at the pov. The androgyne’s expression was panic and dismay; in the next moment, s/he fell.

  The pov somersaulted; there was a flash of broken pavement, followed by a brief panorama of the sky, a flip and a close-up of the androgyne’s profile just as the pursuer pushed his/her chin up with one rag-wrapped hand. Perfect skin stretched taut; the blade flashed and disappeared as it turned sideways to slash through flesh, tendon, blood vessels, bone.

  The blood flew against the pov and dripped downward, like gory drops of rain on a window. Konstantin winced and pressed to try to erase the blood trails; nothing happened.

  Shantih Love coughed and gargled at the sky, not trying to twist away from the bandaged hand that still held his/her chin. Blood pulsed upward in an exaggerated display of blood spurting from a major artery. The creature pushed Love’s face to one side, away from the camera, and bent its head to drink.

  Konstantin had seen similar kinds of things before in videos, including the so-called killer video that had supposedly been circulating underground (whatever that meant these days) and had turned out to be so blatantly phony that the perpetrators should have gone down for fraud.

  But where the blood spilled in that and numerous other videos had looked more like cherry syrup or tomato puree, this looked real enough to make Konstantin gag. She put a hand over her mouth as she froze the screen and turned away, trying to breathe deeply and slowly through her nose, willing her nausea to fade. At the same time, she was surprised at herself. Her squeamish streak was usually conveniently dormant; in twelve years as a detective, she had seen enough real-time blood and gore that she could say she was somewhat hardened. Shantih Love’s real-time counterpart—secret identity? veneer person?—had certainly bled enough to make anyone choke.

  But there was something about this—the blood or the noises coming from Shantih Love, the sound of the creature drinking so greedily. Or maybe just the sight of such realistic blood activating the memory of that smell in the cubicle, that overpowering stench; that smell and the sight of the dead kid stripped of everything, skinned like an animal.

  She collected herself and tried jabbing fast-forward to get through the vampiric sequence as quickly as possible. It only made everything more grotesque, so she took it back to normal just at the point where both the creature and the blood vanished completely.

  Startled, Konstantin rewound and ran it again in slo-mo, just to make sure she’d seen it right. She had; it wasn’t a fast fade-out or the twinkling deliquescence so favored by beginning cinematography students, but a genuine popper which usually happened by way of a real-time equipment failure or power-out. Common wisdom had it that the jump from AR to real-time in such an event was so abrupt as to produce extreme rea
ctions of an undesirable nature—vertigo, projectile vomiting, fainting, or, worse, all three, which could be fatal if you happened to be alone.

  Or a slashed throat, if you happened to be not alone with the wrong person, Konstantin thought, trying to rub the furrows out of her brow.

  She repeated the sequence once more, and then again in slo-mo, watching the blood disappear right along with the creature, leaving Shantih Love behind. Konstantin called up the record of the kid’s vitals and found that, as she had expected, they had quit registering at the moment the blood had disappeared.

  Konstantin took her finger off the pause button and let the action go forward. On the screen, the Shantih Love character sat up, its elegant fingers feeling the ragged edges and flaps of skin where its throat had been cut, mild annoyance deepening the few lines in its face. As Konstantin watched it trying to pinch the edges of skin together, she was aware that she was now thinking of the kid’s AR persona as a thing rather than a human.

  Presumed “it” until proven human? Konstantin frowned. So what was driving it now, anyway—a robot, or a very human hijacker?

  She could watch video for the next three hours and see if anything would become clearer to her; instead, she decided to talk to people she was reasonably sure were human before taking in any more adventures of a dead kid’s false pretending to be alive in a city pretending to be dead.

  * * *

  If the office had seemed cramped before, Miles Mank made it look even smaller by taking up at least half of it. When it became obvious that he actually knew next to nothing, Konstantin tried to get rid of him quickly, but he kept finding conversational hooks that would get her attention and then lead her along to some meaningless and boring point, at which he wouldn’t so much conclude as change the subject and do it all over again. She was finally able to convince him that he was desperately needed at the parking lot to help sort out the clientele with her bewildered partner. Then she prayed that Taliaferro wouldn’t use a similar excuse to send him back to her. She still didn’t like his eyes.

  The first of the other two employees was a silver-haired kid named Tim Mezzer, who was about the same age as the murder victim. He had the vaguely puzzled, preoccupied look of ex-addicts who had detoxed recently by having their blood cleansed. Officially, it was a fast way out of an expensive jones. In fact, it made the high better on relapse.

  “How long have you worked here?” Konstantin asked him.

  “Three days.” He sounded bored.

  “And what do you do?” she prodded when he didn’t say anything more.

  “Oh, I’m a specialist,” he said, even more bored. “I specialize in picking up everybody’s smelly ‘suit when they’re done and get ’em cleaned.” Mezzer put a plump elbow on the desk and leaned forward. “Tell the truth—you’d kill to have a job like that instead of the boring shit you do.”

  Konstantin wasn’t sure he was really being sarcastic. “Sometimes. Did you know the victim?”

  “Dunno. What was his name?”

  “Shantih Love.”

  Mezzer grunted. “Good label. Must have cost him to come up with one that good. Sounds a little like an expensive female whore-assassin, but still pretty good. Someday I’ll be rich enough to be able to afford a tailormade label.”

  Konstantin was only half-listening while she prodded the archiver for the victim’s reference file. “Ah, here we are. Real name is—” she stopped. “Well, that can’t be right.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” Mezzer yawned. “What’s it say?”

  “Tomoyuki Iguchi,” Konstantin said slowly, as if she had to sound out each syllable.

  “Ha. Sounds like he was working on turning Japanese in a serious way.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for post-Apocalyptic Tokyo, of course.” Mezzer sighed. “What else?”

  “There’s a post-Apocalyptic Tokyo now?” Konstantin asked suspiciously.

  “Not yet.” Mezzer’s sigh became a yawn. “Coming soon. Supposed to be the next big hot spot. They say it’s gonna make the Sitty look like Sunday in Nebraska, with these parts you can access only if you’re Japanese, or a convincing simulation. It’s the one everybody’s been waiting for.”

  Konstantin wondered if he knew that something very like it had already come and gone a good many years before either of them had been born. “How about you?” she asked him. “Is it the one you’ve been waiting for?”

  “I don’t know from Japanese. I’m an Ellay boy. Got all those gorgeous celebs you can beat up in street gangs. But the bubble-up on this is, there’s some kinda secret coming-attraction subroutines for post-Apocalyptic Tokyo buried in the Noo Yawk, Hong Kong, and Ellay scenes and no non-Japanese can crack them. If they’re really there. Shantih Love musta thought they were.”

  “But why would he take two fake names?” Konstantin wondered, more to herself.

  “Told you—he was trying to turn Japanese. He wanted anyone who stripped his label to find his Japanese name underneath and take him for that. Invite him into the special Japan area.” Mezzer put his head back as if he were going to bay at the moon and yawned once again. “Or he was getting that crazy-head. You know, where you start thinking it’s real in there and fake out here, or you can’t tell the difference. You need to talk to Body. Body’ll know. Body’s probably the only one who’d know for sure.”

  “What body?”

  “Body Sativa. Body knows more about the top ten ARs than anyone else, real or not.”

  Konstantin felt her mouth twitch. “Don’t you mean Cannabis Sativa?” she asked sarcastically.

  Mezzer blinked at her in surprise. “Get off. Cannibal’s her mother. She’s good, but Body’s the real Big Dipper.” He smiled. “Pretty win, actually, that somebody like you’ud know about Cannibal Sativa. Were you goin’ in to talk to her?”

  Konstantin didn’t know what to say.

  “Go see Body, I swear she’s the one you want. I’ll give you some icons you can use in there. Real insider icons, not what they junk you up with in the help files.”

  “Thanks,” Konstantin said doubtfully. “But I think I fell down about a mile back. If he was turning Japanese, as you put it, why would he call himself Shantih Love?”

  Mezzer blinked. “Well, because he was tryin’ to be a Japanese guy named Shantih Love.” He frowned at her. “You just don’t ever go in AR, do you?”

  * * *

  “Can’t add to that,” said the other employee cheerfully. She was an older woman named Howard Ruth with natural salt-and-pepper hair and lines in a soft face untouched by chemicals or surgery. Konstantin found her comforting to look at. “Body Sativa’s the best tip you’re gonna get. You’ll go through that whole bunch in the lot down the street and you won’t hear anything more helpful.” She sat back, crossing her left ankle over her right knee.

  “Body Sativa wouldn’t happen to be in that group, by any chance?”

  Howard Ruth shrugged. “Doubt it. This is just another reception site on an AR network. Considering the sophisticated moves Body makes, she’s most likely on from some singleton station, and that could be anywhere.”

  “Come on,” said Konstantin irritably, “even I know everyone online has an origin code.”

  Howard Ruth’s smile was sunny. “You haven’t played any games lately, have you?”

  Konstantin was thinking the woman should talk to her ex. “Online? No.”

  “No,” agreed the woman, “because if you had, you’d know that netgaming isn’t considered official net communication or transaction, so it’s not governed by FCC or FDSA regulations. Get on, pick a name or buy a permanent label, stay as long as you like—or can afford—and log out when you’ve had enough. Netgaming is one hundred percent elective, so anything goes—no guidelines, no censorship, no crimes against persons. You can’t file a complaint against anyone for assault, harassment, fraud, or anything like that.”

  Konstantin sighed. “I didn’t know this. Why not?”

  “You didn’t have
to.” Howard Ruth laughed. “Look, officer—”

  “Lieutenant.”

  “Sure, lieutenant. Unless you netgame regular, you won’t know any of this. You ever hear about the case years back where a guy used an origin line to track down a woman in realtime and kill her?”

  “No,” said Konstantin with some alarm. “Where did this happen?”

  “Oh, back east somewhere. D.C., I think, or some place like that. Life is so cheap there, you know. Anyway, what happened was, back when they had origin lines in gaming, this guy got mad at this woman, somehow found her by way of her origin line, and boom—lights out. That was one of the first cases of that gameplayer’s madness where someone could prove it could be a real danger offline. After that, there was a court ruling that since gaming was strictly recreational, gamers were entitled to complete privacy if they wanted. No origin line. Kinda the same thing for fraud and advertising.”

  Konstantin felt her interest, which had started to wane with the utterance D.C., come alive again. “What?”

  “Guy ran a game-within-a-game on someone. I can’t remember exactly what it was—beachfront in Kansas, diamond mines in Peru, hot stocks about to blow. Anyhow, the party of the second part got the idea it was all backed up in realtime and did this financial transfer to the party of the first part, who promptly logged out and went south. Party of the second part hollers Thief! and what do you know but the police catch this salesperson of the year. Who then claims that it was all a game and he thought the money was just a gift.”

  “And?” said Konstantin.

  “And that’s a wrap. Grand jury won’t even indict, on grounds of extreme gullibility. As in, ‘You were in artificial reality, you fool, what did you expect?’ Personally, I think they were both suffering from a touch of the galloping headbugs.”

  Konstantin was troubled. “And that decision stood?”