Too late, she understood that the catalog with its treasure trove of icons—its stuff—was probably what they’d been after all along. She scrambled up but a heavy boot caught her in the midsection and she sat down hard.
One of them crouched down and shoved a face that looked like the product of a mating between a troll and a gargoyle up close to hers. “Hey, you never heard that expression, be seated?”
She scooted backward, trying to get away. He advanced on her with the rest of them behind him, one holding up her icon cat so she could see that they had taken the whole thing from her.
All but one page that she was still clutching in one hand, so hard that her knuckles hurt, a pain that was real, produced not by the hotsuit but by the way she was clenching her hand in this unreal place, a pain that paled next to the jazzy high-res authenticity of the ‘suit but went deeper, all the way to the bone, to spread up her arm to her shoulder and over her chest.
They are killing me. They are really killing me!
The thought was a scream in her head. What was going on, out there beyond the bounds of the headmount and the neo-exo-nervous system, what was happening out there, how many were out there, why hadn’t she figured there could be more than one, hidden in the air-processing ducts perhaps, with the cooperation of some insider, maybe bored and bitter Miles Mank, or even Pleshette, not bitter, just very bored. Or the two of them, yes, that would be perfect, pretending to be enemies but killing together—one covering the AR while the other one handled things out there.
And if so, what did they have in store for her? Her attackers were grabbing at her, jabbing and poking, laughing at her frightened reactions, their broad, crude faces impossibly ugly, as if cruelty itself had been a model for their formation, a base to elaborate from, a setting from which the morphing dial could be turned. What kind of sad, sick specimen of humanity would pay to be something so horrible—
The employee discount here, she remembered suddenly, was pretty good. She had to admire the boldness, to kill someone again so soon after the last one, and the detective investigating the case, no less! Ideal, though—the partner was too claustrophobic to jump right on the crime scene and they knew it. So by the time someone else, Celestine and DiPietro perhaps, arrived, they’d have jiggered the evidence, massaged the data, and she’d be more grist for the AR urban legend mill. Ya hear about the homicide detective who was killed in AR investigating a murder? Yeah, incredible galloping head-bugs. Yeah, I think it happened in D.C., you know how life is so cheap there—
Now the chief troll-gargoyle was waving around something that looked like a jagged fragment of mirror, poking it at her face. Her rational mind kept telling her that he couldn’t possibly cut her face but her rational mind had shrunk to the size of a quark. The rest of her was buying it, believing it, really really believing it to the point where she could feel the small cuts on her face, the bloody murderous troll had cut her face and in a moment he would cut her throat, by the power of suggestion she would believe her throat was cut and so much for extremo ruptura, that they were all so sure that no one had had since St. Whoever. There just hadn’t been any AR up until now that could compete with the faith of a fanatic saint with stigmata, but now there was, now there was, and let the coroner come in here, let them all come in here and see if the power of their own belief, their galloping head-bugs, let them survive it—
The torn page in her hand suddenly transformed into a claw. She let go with a scream and the claw grabbed her arm, pulled her up off the street, and then pulled her into the air. She screamed again as she felt her feet leave the ground; her inner ear went into the same frenzy it had that one and only time her ex had talked her into riding a roller coaster.
Post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty spread out below her, revealing itself. Exposing itself, she thought, looking at the fires and the bursts of light on the skinny roadways below, and had a short laughing jag. It cut off as she looked up thinking she might get a look at the moon and saw the bizarre pointed head and on either side, the wings that suggested nightmares about bats or things satanic.
She seemed to be dangling in its claws. The way they gripped her around her shoulders and arms should have hurt, but did not, as if there were padding. It flew on smoothly, quickly and no matter how she tried to concentrate on where the real sensation was, her imagination overrode her rational mind—grown to the size of a pea now, perhaps?—and she did feel the wind on her face.
“I was supposed to be a pterodactyl,” said the creature conversationally, “but my designer got carried away.”
“Oh. Really.” Konstantin was amazed at how calm her own voice sounded. But then it wasn’t her own voice, it was Shantih Love’s; she was living a Shantih Love adventure and maybe Shantih Love traveled by mutant pterodactyl regularly. “Are you a device in the game or an employee of the company that licenses the Sitty out to parlors?”
“Now that would be telling,” said the pterodactyl, sounding amused but at the same time a bit stiff, “and I thought you would know already, since you summoned me.”
“You’re an icon?” Konstantin asked.
“You got lucky. I’m a rescue. I make sure you don’t get caught in dead end loops that eat up billable time and don’t deliver much in return. If you must know. If you really need to spoil the effect.”
“Sometimes it’s not such a tragedy to spoil the effect,” Konstantin murmured. “Where are you taking me?”
“The destination is stipulated by your cabfare. And if you don’t mind spoiling the effect that much, why didn’t you just signal for the exit?”
“Well … I think I got sucked into the story and wanted to see how it would come out.”
“A common ailment,” said the pterodactyl wisely. “Do you know about the joke that ends in the punchline, ‘The food here is terrible, and in such small portions’?”
“What?” Konstantin was bewildered.
“Never mind. You’re here.” The wings enfolded her so that she couldn’t see anything at all. Then the darkness lifted and she saw that the creature had set her down right next to the barrier that separated the street from the shore of the Hudson River.
* * *
Just past the barrier was the party that had been invisible to her on the first time through. People spread inward from a very long pier to the barrier itself. If she listened carefully, Konstantin could almost make out bits of conversation that may have been fascinating, if only she could have heard enough.
She sat on the barrier, unsure of what to do next. Take a walk and see if someone came to hijack Shantih Love again? All up and down the street, wrecked vehicles were still burning, somehow never diminishing, the flames shifting but still never really changing. In a place where supposedly anything could happen, did anything happen?
Konstantin looked at the party again. “Redisplay,” she said quietly. “Full mode.”
Guilfoyle Pleshette must have been screaming, she thought as the AR log of Shantih Love’s murder rolled in and settled like fog. Redisplaying a log within a running AR scenario probably doubled the hourly rate and there was no charge account number designated to cover it. But if she were screaming, Konstantin couldn’t hear it. Their respective realities were sound-proof.
But apparently not leak-proof, she thought, touching her sliced throat as the redisplayed Shantih Love appeared in front of her, close enough to touch, close enough for Konstantin to see the flawless texture of that burnished copper/gold skin and the flecks of gold in those custom-made eyes, beautiful but wary.
The redisplayed Shantih Love started the ill-fated walk along the barrier and Konstantin joined in, pacing the image on the right. Her virtual body mirrored Love’s movements such that she had no doubt she was reliving Tomoyuki Iguchi’s walk in almost every detail. Iguchi just hadn’t known his virtual self was going to be hijacked and killed. Which meant he couldn’t know now, and yet the redisplayed Shantih Love seemed more apprehensive than she had remembered. Or was that just the fact that Full Mod
e was letting her see more and see it better than the small flat No Frills images she had viewed in Pleshette’s office?
Beyond the redisplayed view of the shore and the party, she could see the current party-goers turning to look and maybe wonder who the show-off with the deep pockets was, doing a redisplay within a scenario. It was strange and extravagant even for post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, where time and civilization had come to an end and the twilight of the gods was currently in progress. Except judging by the parties she kept coming across, Konstantin thought it might be more like the happy hour of the gods.
And then again, maybe her ex had been right in saying that she couldn’t believe in anything because she had no respect for anything.
A small flood of people detached themselves from the party and ran to join the redisplay, melting in almost seamlessly. There wasn’t time to be discomfited—the vague creature was already on top of the barrier, except it didn’t look terribly vague any more. It looked an awful lot like Miles Mank after six very bad weeks on a binge.
Straddling the barrier a few feet away from him was a tattooed woman watching his every move intently. Konstantin had never seen the character before but she knew just by the posture and the tilt of the head that it had to be a stringer from someplace like Police Blotter. Whether it was the same one from the parlor or a different one from a competing network, she didn’t know and it really didn’t matter anyway.
As if sensing her thoughts, the tattooed woman turned in Konstantin’s direction, smiling speculatively. Konstantin saw the tattoos were in motion, melting and changing. In spite of everything, she took a moment to wonder what the point was.
Then she took a step forward, uncertain of what she meant to do—try to intimidate the stringer into leaving, ask her nicely to back off, promise her exclusive interviews with everyone involved, living or dead, if she’d refrain from broadcasting. But as she moved toward the barrier, the redisplayed Shantih Love took a step back and Konstantin found herself suddenly enveloped by the image.
It seemed as if everything around her took a giant step in every direction at once, including up and down. Then her surroundings refocused sharply. The shaggy creature jumped down and she found herself turning within the redisplayed Shantih Love and running, staggering through the sand, unable to do anything else. Some glitch had merged her program with the redisplay—
Some glitch? Or the panting, sobbing creature behind her? Or even something else completely?
Her heart pounded so hard as she pulled herself up the stony rise to the street that she wondered how many people had sustained heart attacks just imagining that they were moving on a physical level they were incapable of in realtime.
Desperately, she tried to pull out of the redisplayed Shantih Love image but it was like being caught in a powerful magnetic field that worked on flesh—on thoughts, on both. Boxes within boxes, levels within levels, a guy pretending to be Japanese pretending to be a hermaphrodite named Shantih Love, and a cop pretending to be a hermaphrodite named Shantih Love pretending … what?
It took forever to hit the ground and it hurt. She tried to scramble up and cry out for help, but Mank was on her and the blade was in his hands. She had nothing now, no rescue, no icon cat, no help files—
Something flashed in her open hand; she could see it just barely out of register with Love’s redisplayed hand and hope surged through her like an electric current. The difference, the one thing that was different now between her image of Shantih Love and the redisplayed image, the thing that could change what had already gone before … sort of.
But she’d have to call it in the air, and she wasn’t sure she could. When you have a coin with infinity on one side, and Ouroboros on the other, how can you ever really know which side is heads, and which is tails? There wasn’t time to figure it out. As the blade touched her throat, she tore her arm free of the recording’s, hurled the coin at the night sky, and called it.
The word that came out of her mouth was not what she had been expecting, but then, she hadn’t really known what to expect, nor did she recognize it. Whatever it was—the term for the link between alpha and omega, the secret name of Ourobouros, or the nine billionth name of God—it had come with the coin as both property and function, and she could not have called it until now, when somehow, conditions were right.
The knife blade descended, but she was receding from it at the speed of thought and it never reached her.
* * *
Had she receded from it, from that level? Or had all of it receded from her? There was no real way to tell. The only feeling she had now was a sense of acceleration that wasn’t quite flying and wasn’t quite falling. Her inner ear kept wanting to go crazy on her, but something would pull it back from the brink at the last moment, sending thrills through the back of her neck.
Konstantin tried curling into the fetal position, just for the sake of being able to feel her body. There were several moments of uncertainty and disorientation while she tried to locate her extremities. Then abruptly, she found herself seated in an old-fashioned leather chair at a large round table. Across from her was a woman with deep brown skin and long black hair brushed back from her face like a lion’s mane.
Konstantin stared, unable to speak.
“I understand you’ve been looking for me.” The quality of the woman’s voice was like nothing Konstantin had ever known before; it was sound, but translated into several other modes and dimensions, delivered all at once in a way that both enveloped and penetrated. It felt to Konstantin as if the woman’s voice were coming through from the fabric of reality itself, any reality, including that of Konstantin’s own thoughts.
After a while, Konstantin managed to nod. She wasn’t sure how long it had taken her to do that, but it felt as if it had been a very, very long time. Body Sativa didn’t seem to mind. However long something took here was how long it took.
“Things that happen, happen. Some things cannot be breached under pain of the consequences of procedure that is … improper. It is a matter of finding the route. The connection. The connecting matter. Road? Bridge? Tunnel? Or Something Else?”
Something Else was not exactly what Body Sativa had said, but it was the only thing that would come through Konstantin’s ear. She watched as Body Sativa spread her arms over the table, palms outward. It took another unmeasurable period of time for Konstantin’s eyes to adjust, but when they did, she saw that the surface of the table was more like a large video screen, or telescopic window. Or, as was more likely in the land of the Ouroboros coin, both.
Konstantin realized that whatever it was, she was looking at another aerial view of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, every square inch and pixel revealed. Eliot’s etherized patient after all, but prepared on the banquet table, not the operating table. The consumed and the consumers—it just depended what side of the table you were on … didn’t it?
“Look deeper.”
Her point-of-view seemed to fly out from her in the way she had heard out-of-body experiences described, though this was more matter-of-fact than filled with wonder. It zoomed down into the Sitty and the tiny, vein-sized roadways grew into canyons, with cliff-faces made of mirrored glass and carved stone gargoyles, gables, spires, columns, pitted brick splattered with glitter that did not quite obscure the burn marks, the blasted places, the dirty words.
Wreckage in the roadways ignited, the flames rising to form complex shapes, lattices, angles that opened and closed on each other, here and there icons, some of which she recognized. And in other places, ideograms.
There they are, Iguchi, those special places they said you had to be Japanese to find, she thought. Maybe this means we’ve both turned Japanese. For my next magical trick, I will find the egress. The out door.
As if in direct response, her pov flew straight toward a door, which opened at the last moment, admitting her into a split-second of darkness and then into a badly lit room where she saw the person strapped in the chair, sitting forward so that t
he straps pulled taut, but comfortably, in a way that supported more than restrained. The headmount moved slowly upward, the person raising her head to look up.
It was too easy, though, too bizarrely … expectable, Konstantin thought. But then, it was just a story.
Her nerves had become Holy Rollers. Just a story or not, she wasn’t ready to see this. Maybe she wasn’t Japanese enough.
In the next moment, her pov had snapped back like a rubber band and she was looking across the table at Body Sativa again. The woman looked younger now, more like a girl than a grown woman. This post-Apocalyptic stuff was really something. No wonder so many people liked it. It was downright eerie. Like the story of the man who didn’t open his parachute in an AR skydive, or the kid who got his throat cut because he’d gotten his AR throat cut.
Body Sativa seemed amused. “You have the coin. When you’re ready to come back, call it in the air.”
It took an hour for Konstantin to open her mouth and say, “Wait!” Her voice sounded unpleasantly flat in her own ears. “Someone killed—”
“Yes. Someone did. When you’re ready to know, call it in the air.”
She was lying on her back on the road; Shantih Love was walking away, holding his/her sliced flesh together. But when s/he turned around and looked back, the face was unmistakably the creature’s, the ridiculously bendered-out features of Miles Mank, still on a binge.
“Endit,” Konstantin whispered, her voice still sounding funny to her. “Endit, exit, outa here.”
She lay on her back for a very long time before she felt the road transmute into the chair with the restraints. Moving slowly, she undid the clasps on the headmount and was startled to feel someone helping her lift it off her head.
Taliaferro stood over her with the headmount in his hands, which was even more startling, and perhaps the most impossible of everything she had seen. By way of explanation, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a white plastic inhaler. “When I’ve got my anti-claustrophobia medicine, I can do anything.”
The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995 Page 36
