The man with the guitar was to her left, sitting cross-legged at the place where the platform ended and the tunnel began. His head was tilted back against the wall and his eyes were closed, so that he seemed to be in a state of deep concentration as he played. Konstantin wondered if he were going to sing, and then wondered exactly what kind of strange kick a person could get from spending billable time in AR alone in a vacant subway station, playing a musical instrument for nobody.
None, she decided. “Resume,” she said, staring at the guitar player. “Empty subway, downtown.”
The pages flipped again and stopped to show her a bottlecap. CREAM SODA. It fell out of the book onto the tile floor at her feet. Down by the tunnel, the guitar-player paused and turned to smile at her. The lights changed, becoming just a bit warmer in color as the legend NOW ENTERING NEXT HIGHER LEVEL ran along the bottom of her vision like a late-breaking item on Police Blotter.
People were all over the platform, standing in groups, sitting on the turnstiles, grouping together down on the tracks, picking their way over the rails and ties to the opposite platform, where there were even more people. At first, she saw only the same types she had seen on the shore in Shantih Love’s AR log, but after awhile, she discovered that if she didn’t look directly at people too quickly, a good many of them had somehow metamorphosed into characters far more original and indecipherable.
If there even were that many people, she thought, remembering the strange guy in white face and the gang that hadn’t really existed. Maybe some of these people were carrying phantoms with them for company. If you could be your own gang in AR, was that another example of AR stuff?
A seven-foot-tall woman whose long, thick, auburn hair seemed to have a life of its own looked down at her through opera glasses. “What sort of a creature are you?” she asked in a booming contralto.
“I think I’ve forgotten,” Konstantin said and then winced, squirming. The ’suit was reminding her now that it was full-coverage and that Shantih Love would have responded to this woman. It was like a nightmare. Her ex might have laughed at her and told her that was no less than what she deserved for stealing someone else’s life.
I didn’t steal it. He lost it and I found it.
Yeah. Finders, weepers.
Konstantin wasn’t sure if it were worse to have an imaginary argument with an ex after a break-up than it was to have the break-up argument, but she was fairly sure it was completely counter-productive to have it both on billable AR time and during a murder investigation. If that was what this really was, and not just a massive waste of time all around.
“Do you know Body Sativa?” she asked the tall woman.
“Yes.” The woman gazed at her a moment longer and walked away. The people down on the tracks were dancing now to something that sounded like the rhythmic smashing of glass on metal. Konstantin hopped down off the platform onto the tracks and walked among them, keeping her gaze downward so that she could see them change in her peripheral vision. Most of the people down here seemed to be affecting what her ex had called rough and shoddy sugar-plum. Konstantin had to admit to herself she found the look appealing, in a rough and shoddy way.
She looked down at the ankle-length gown Shantih Love had preferred. In this light, it seemed to have more of a red tone, much more than she had thought. Even stranger was the texture—it looked like velvet but it felt like sandpaper, at least on the outside. Inside, the feeling was all but non-existent; the hotsuit was full-coverage but not so complete in the detailing that she felt the gown swinging and brushing against her ankles. For that, she supposed, you had to have some kind of custom job.
But at least she never tripped on the hem, Konstantin thought as she moved among the dancers, still holding the map. The display had not changed, even after she had gained access to this level, where all the people were, so either Body Sativa was here, or there was something wrong with the map.
Getting someone’s attention to find out, however, seemed to be another one of those tricks she hadn’t learned yet. Down on the tracks, anyway. The people dancing there weren’t just ignoring her, they seemed honestly unaware of her, as if she were invisible. Which would seem to indicate she had found another level within a level. Levels within levels and boxes within boxes. Was there any purpose to it, she wondered—any real purpose other than to intrigue people into spending more billable hours solving the puzzle.
The guitar player, she saw, was still sitting in the same place, and it looked as if he were still playing as well, though it was impossible to hear anything except the smash-clang everyone around her was dancing to. She made her way through the group over to where the guitar-player was. The platform was about as high as her nose. She tried boosting herself up but couldn’t get enough leverage.
“Stay,” said the guitar-player, eyes closed. “I can see and hear you fine where you are.”
“Good,” said Konstantin. “Tell me, if I look past you, will you change into someone else, too?”
“It’s all in what you can perceive,” he said, smiling. Then, while she was looking directly at him, he morphed from a plump, balding young guy to an angular middle-aged man with very long, straight steel-grey hair. He still didn’t open his eyes. “You’d be surprised how few turns of the morphing dial that took.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “Do you know Body Sativa?”
“Know her, or know of her?”
“Know her. Personally, or casually.” She paused. “And have you seen her in here recently?”
He tilted his head, his closed eyes moving back and forth beneath his eyelids, as if he were dreaming, while his fingers played over guitar strings that appeared no thicker than spidersilk. Konstantin realized she couldn’t hear the music coming from the guitar, but she could feel it surround her, not unpleasantly, and then disintegrate. “I was a dolphin in a previous incarnation,” he said after a bit.
“Why did you change?”
“We all have to, sooner or later. I would have thought you’d know that as well as anyone. What were you before you passed on to your present manifestation?”
Konstantin barely hesitated. “A homicide detective.”
“Ah. That accounts for the interrogation.” He chuckled. “You know, the idea is to go on to something different, not just do the same thing behind a new mask.”
Words to live by, Konstantin thought. Perhaps she could print them on a card and send it to her ex. She smiled. “That’s pretty good for a guitar-playing land dolphin.”
He stopped playing and pulled something out of the hole in the center of the instrument. “Here,” he said, leaning forward and holding it out to her; it looked like a playing card. “You’re not necessarily smarter than the last one who had your face, but the quality of your ignorance is an improvement.”
“It is? How?” Konstantin asked, taking the card from him.
“You might actually learn something.”
She studied the card, trying to see it clearly, except the image on it kept shifting, melting, changing. It looked like it might be some kind of Oriental ideogram. “What is this?” she asked.
“Cab fare,” he said.
“Cab fare? In a subway station?”
“Trains aren’t running tonight. Or didn’t you notice?” He laughed.
She looked down at her map again. The display still hadn’t changed. “I was supposed to find somebody I needed here. My map says she’s still here.”
The guitar player shook his head. “Sorry, you misunderstood. There’s a locator utility here, for help in finding someone in the Sitty. That’s what your map says is here.” He shrugged. “There are locator utilities in all the subway stations.”
Konstantin managed not to groan. “Where?”
“Somewhere. It’s all in what you perceive.”
“You’re a big help.”
“I am. If you get it figured, you have cabfare to get to wherever it is you need to go.”
Cabfare, Konstantin thought. Cabfare. Did it
include tip, she wondered, or was that what the coin was for? She looked down at it in her other hand.
The man stopped playing. “When did you get that?”
“Just now. Upstairs. Outside.” Konstantin closed her fist around it again. “Why?”
“Because even in here, certain things are perishable. Like milk, or cut flowers.”
“Or people with cut throats?” Konstantin added.
He smiled. “No, you may have noticed that death doesn’t have to put a crimp in your party plans. On the other hand, it’s not generally an accepted practice to start out dead. If you want to be dead, custom dictates that you die here.”
“Here in the subway, or here in AR?”
“It’s all in what you perceive.”
He was going to say that once too often, Konstantin thought unhappily. “What about this coin?” she asked him. “Were you telling me just now that it’s going to expire?”
“Conditions,” he said after a moment. “It’s the conditions under which it would be … effective. Conditions won’t last.”
“More words to live by,” Konstantin muttered to herself. “I want to find the locator utility. How do I do that?”
“You have only to ask.”
Konstantin frowned. “Who should I ask?”
“Me.”
She hesitated. “All right. How do I find the locator utility.”
“You have only to ask,” he said again serenely, fingers picking at the strings of the guitar again.
“I just did,” Konstantin said impatiently. “How—” She cut off. “No. Where is Body Sativa?”
The guitar player jerked his chin at her, still with his eyes closed. “Hail a cab, and when you’re asked where you want to go, give the driver that.”
Konstantin looked at the card again. The ideogram was still shifting. Suddenly she felt very tired and bored. “Are you sure this’ll do it?”
“Oh, yeah. That’ll take you right to her.”
“It’s that simple.”
The guitar-player nodded. “It’s that simple.”
“Strange, nothing else in here seems to be.”
“What you want is simple. All you had to do was state it in the proper place at the proper moment. In the proper form, of course. That’s just elementary programming.”
“Programming,” Konstantin said, giving a short, not terribly merry laugh. “I should have known. You’re the locator utility and the help utility, aren’t you?”
“That’s about what it comes down to,” he said agreeably.
“And I had only to ask.”
“Because it’s what you want that’s simple. You just want to meet up with another player so I gave you a tracer. Obviously you’re not the usual Shantih Love, or even the usual player. The usual players don’t want anything so simple. The usual players come down here looking for the secret subroutine to the Next Big Scene, or even the mythical out door. Then my job becomes something different. Then my job is to give them something that will stimulate a little thrill here and there, play to their curiosities and their fondest wishes and desires.”
“And make them spend more billable hours,” Konstantin said.
“The more hours people spend in here doing complicated things, the more interesting the Sitty becomes.”
“Why don’t you just tell people that, instead of playing to their wish-fulfillment fantasies about finding the egress or the secret subroutine to post-Apocalyptic Peoria, or wherever?”
“First of all, it’s not my job to volunteer information. It’s my job to answer questions. And I can only answer with what I know. I don’t know that there’s an egress … but I don’t know that there isn’t. I can’t prove there isn’t, I’m a utility. I wasn’t created to determine whether my universe is finite or not.”
I’m talking philosophy with a utility, Konstantin thought. “But surely you know whether there are secret subroutines?”
“If they’re secret, they certainly wouldn’t tell me. I’d tell anyone who asked and then they wouldn’t be secret any more.”
“All right,” Konstantin said slowly. “Have there ever been any secret subroutines in the Sitty that you’ve found out about?”
“Some players have claimed to have accessed them.”
“Were they telling the truth?”
“I’m not a lie detector.”
“Wouldn’t matter if you were, would it. Because it’s all lies in here. Or all truth.”
He went on playing, still with his eyes closed. Konstantin supposed he was the AR equivalent of blind justice—blind information. Which was probably much more accurate, all told.
“Have you ever met Shantih Love before?” she asked and then added quickly, “I mean, have you ever met a player named Shantih Love before I came in here?”
“I don’t really meet anyone. I have everyone’s name.”
Konstantin thought for a moment. “Has anyone ever asked you to locate Shantih Love?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have to. There’s no reason to.”
“But if you can put a tracer on someone’s location for another player, isn’t there some record of that? Some, uh, trace?”
“Only while the tracer’s active. But that record would be kept elsewhere in the system. You know, if you’re so interested, there are schools you can go to to learn all about how AR works.”
“I thought you didn’t volunteer information,” Konstantin said suspiciously.
“You call that information?”
She laughed in spite of herself. “You’re right. Thanks for the cabfare.” She started to walk away and then paused. “Where’s the best place to get a cab in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right.” She sighed resignedly. “Where’s the nearest I can find a cab?”
“I don’t know. Cabs aren’t players.”
Konstantin nodded. She should have known, she thought.
* * *
She came up out of the subway into the middle of a riot.
Where the streets had been deserted before they were now full of people running, screaming, chasing each other, hurling furniture and other heavy objects from sixth and seventh story windows, from rooftops, from mid-air for all she knew.
Level access, she realized. When she had accessed the new level in the subway station, she had stayed there. If she went back to Times Square now, it wouldn’t be deserted this time. Anxiously, she looked around for some clear route of escape, and then wondered if there really was any—maybe the riot was Sittywide, what with everything being post-Apocalyptic.
She sighed. What she should really do, she thought, was exit. This wasn’t her kind of interest, she couldn’t get into the spirit of it even for the sake of information-gathering on behalf of some poor murdered kid. And walking around disguised as the victim—the more she thought about it, the more it seemed like an act of grave-robbing, desecration. Better just to leave word in a number of message centers and hope that Body Sativa, or someone who knew her, would get in touch, and if so, that there would be some useful information to be gained. From her experience here, though, she didn’t think that there would be. This had nothing to do with anyone’s life, not anyone’s real life. So how could it have anything to do with a kid’s death? Or with seven other deaths?
Coincidences by way of statistical incidence? Her ex had always said that statistics bred coincidences. Konstantin wondered if familiarity breeding contempt was a coincidence as well.
A Molotov cocktail sailed over her head and shattered on a nearby brick wall, making a perfect wave circle of flames. The effect of the heat was so realistic she could have sworn her face was flushed. She put an arm up defensively and turned away—
It took her all of a second to register the blow followed by the impact of her body on the street; the punch in her upper chest had been so abrupt and powerful that her legs had flown out from under her and she’d
hit the ground on her back. It hurt, as badly as the real thing would have. She thought she had run into one of the rioters and the program had authenticated the logical result. But then a half-circle of grinning faces appeared above her as she tried to sit up and catch her breath, and she couldn’t believe it. Of all the damned things that could go on in this ridiculous scenario and she would go and trigger one of the least imaginative.
Before she could ask for the icon cat, they hauled her to her feet and began shoving her around so that she rebounded from one into another like a pinball in a very small machine. Still breathless, she tried to get a good look at them but they were pushing her around too quickly. The Molotov cocktail had ignited something and she could see others, some people and some not quite, watching in the firelight as her attackers played with her.
There had to be something in the icon cat that would help, she thought, something for protection, self-defense, something. Too bad, she realized, that she hadn’t thought of that sooner and used some precautions.
They were shoving her around harder now, their hands slapping, punching, pummeling and the pain was only too real. In a situation like this, it was hard to remember that the sensation was all artificial, delivered via select stimulation of certain nerves in a certain way, coupled with elements that contributed to the power of suggestion. This was too authentic; she wondered if Tomoyuki Iguchi had had some kind of masochistic streak that he had indulged as Shantih Love—
And suddenly, she wasn’t sure that it wasn’t happening for real. Maybe Shantih Love hadn’t been able to tell the difference there on the shore of the Hudson River, not until it was too late and he couldn’t feel how the real blood was flowing along with the virtual, even though he could see, perhaps until the moment of his death, the virtual attacker who had come to hijack his persona. But why.
A leg kicked out as she stumbled sideways and she went down again. One of her attackers started to pull her up; she twisted away and fumbled the icon cat out onto the ground where she could see it.
It fell open to a fierce image that looked somehow a bit cartoony at the same time. She had a vague idea that it was a talisman of protection and grabbed for it, just as her attackers bellowed in triumph and tore the icon cat away from her.
The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995 Page 35
