Holy Fire

by Bruce Sterling

  Mercedes looked wounded. “Of course I have to put it in the dossier. I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t keep up my dossiers.” She fed a hissing gush of bubbles into the mineral water. “Mia, you’ve known me for fifteen years. You can trust me. Civil-support people love it when their clients talk. What else are we here for?”

  Mia leaned forward, propping her elbows on the table. “I knew this man seventy years ago,” she said. “He was my boyfriend then. He kept telling me today that we haven’t changed, but of course we’ve changed. We’ve changed beyond recognition. He’s consumed himself. And me—seventy years ago, I was a young woman. I was a girl, I was his girl. I’m not a girl anymore. Nowadays I’m someone who used to be a woman.”

  “That’s kind of an odd way to put it.”

  “It’s the truth. I’m not his woman, I haven’t been anyone’s woman for a long time. I don’t have lovers. I don’t love anyone. I don’t look after anyone. I don’t kiss anyone, I don’t hug anyone, I don’t cheer anyone up. I don’t have a family. I don’t have hot flashes, I don’t have monthlies. I’m a postsexual person, I’m a postwomanly person. I’m a crone. I’m a late-twenty-first-century techno-crone.”

  “You look like a woman to me.”

  “I dress like a woman. That’s all very calculated and deliberate.”

  “I know what you mean,” Mercedes admitted. “I’m sixty-five. Pretty much past it. Not too sorry to see it go. Being a woman—the really hard part of womanhood—it’s not the sort of life you’d wish on a friend.”

  “It was very wearing,” Mia said. “He was very polite about it, but just being near him exhausted me. The worst part was that there’s no clean break between me and my earlier life. My romantic life, my sexual life. I could remember how exciting it had been. How flattering. Being pursued by some large energetic insistent good-looking boy. How it felt when I let him catch me. The mnemonic made it all a lot worse.”

  “Most people would say that clean breaks are bad for you. That you have to come to terms with that aspect of your former life, and integrate it so you can put it to rest and get beyond it.”

  Therapeutic suggestions irritated Mia in direct ratio to their tact. “I did have to come to terms with my earlier life today. I’m not a bit happier for it.”

  “Are you sorry he’s dying? Are you grieving?”

  “I’m a little sorry.” Mia sipped the mineral water. “I wouldn’t call this grief. It’s too thin for grief.” The water felt good. Very simple things conveyed most of the pleasure in her life. “I wept some today. It felt really bad to cry. I haven’t wept in five years.” She touched her swollen eyes. “It feels like there’s membrane damage.”

  “Was there a bequest?”

  “No,” Mia lied smoothly.

  “There’s always some kind of bequest,” Mercedes prodded.

  Mia paused. “There was one, but I refused it. He had a postcanine dog.”

  “I knew it,” Mercedes said. “It’s the pet, or the house. If they die really young, then maybe they worry about their kid. People never invite you to a deathbed scene unless they want you to tidy up for them somehow.”

  “Maybe they just want you to tidy up, Mercedes.”

  Mercedes shrugged. “I tidy up. Tidiness is my life.” Mercedes was always very patient. “I can see there’s something else you want to get off your chest. What is it?”

  “Nothing, not really anything.”

  “You just don’t want to tell me yet, Mia. You might as well tell me about it now. While you’re still in the mood.”

  Mia stared at her. “You don’t have to tidy me up quite so thoroughly. I’m perfectly all right. I had a shock, but I’m not going to do anything strange.”

  “You shouldn’t say things like that, Mia. The situation is very strange. The world is extremely strange now. You live all alone and you don’t have people you can trust to advise you and prop you up. Except for your work, you’re not fulfilling any social roles. You could go off-kilter real easily.”

  “When have you ever known me to go off-kilter?”

  “Mia, you’re smarter than me, and you’re older than me, and you’re a lot richer than I am, but you’re not the only person like you in the world. I know a lot of people just like you. People like you are brittle.”

  Mercedes waved her blue-jacketed arm around the apartment. “This stuff you’ve been calling your life all these years, this isn’t normality. It isn’t safety, either. It’s just routine. Routine is not normality. You’re not allowed any so-called normality. There’s no such thing as a genuine normality for a ninety-four-year-old posthuman being. Life extension is just not a natural state of affairs, and it’s never going to be natural, and you can’t ever make it natural. That’s your reality. My reality too. And that’s why the polity sends me around here twice a week. To look around and tidy up and listen to you.”

  Mia said nothing.

  “Go on and be that way,” Mercedes told her. “I’m very sorry you had a hard time today. A friend’s death can hit us harder than we think. Even dull people can’t keep the same routine forever, and you’re not dull. You’re just very guarded, and very possessive of an old-fashioned emotional privacy that no one really needs nowadays.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement.”

  Mercedes looked at her solemnly. The silence stretched. Mercedes was not deceived. No woman could be a heroine to her maid.

  “By the way,” Mercedes said at last, “that nasty strain of fungus is back in your bathroom. Where have you been walking?”

  “I walk for exercise,” Mia said. “I just drift around town. I don’t keep track.”

  “Try leaving your shoes outside the door for a while, okay? And don’t take long showers. That Coccidioides is hell.”

  “Okay. I’ll do that.”

  “I have to leave now,” Mercedes said, getting up. “I’ve got another round to do. But you call me if you need anything. Call me anytime. Don’t be embarrassed to call. Being called is good for me.”

  “Okay, Officer,” Mia said. Mercedes made a face, collected her gear, and left.

  Martin Warshaw was put to rest on the afternoon of the twenty-first, out in the old mass grave in Palo Alto. The day was bright and clear and the sprawling grounds of the former plague site had never looked greener, calmer, or more contemplative. Mia recognized no one at the ceremony. No one took the trouble to recognize her.

  The nineteen elderly people who attended the ceremony were all very much of a type. Hollywood people had never been afraid of the knife. The Beautiful People had always been particularly eager to seize on any artifice of youth. Fifty years ago, people of this sort had been medical pioneers. Now they were genuinely and irretrievably old. Their primitive techniques, the biomedical cutting edge during the 2030s and 2040s, were hopelessly dated and crude. Now they truly looked the role of pioneers: very scarred and tired and hardscrabble.

  Attendants opened the hinged white lid of the emulsifier, took the thin shroud from Martin’s wasted, puckered body, and slid him, with reverent care, feetfirst into the seething gel. The scanners set to work, Martin’s final official medical imaging. Gentle ultrasonics shook the body apart, and when the high-speed rotors began to churn, the emulsifier’s ornamental flowerbeds trembled a bit. Autopsy samplers caught up bits of the soup, analyzed genetic damage, surveyed the corpse’s populations of resident bacteria, hunted down and cataloged every subsymptomatic viral infection and prion infestation, and publicly nailed down the cause of death (self-administered neural depressant) with utter cybernetic certainty. All the data was neatly and publicly filed on the net.

  Someone—Mia never discovered who—had asked a Catholic priest to say a few words. The young priest was very eager, and meant well. He was very exalted on entheogens, so filled with fiery inspiration that he was scarcely able to speak. When the priest finished his transcendant rant, he formally blessed the gel. The tiny crowd drifted from the site in twos and threes.

  A necropolitan
engraved Martin’s portrait, name, and dates onto the emulsifier’s cream white wall. Martin Warshaw (1999–2095) had become a colored patch the size of the palm of Mia’s hand, neatly ranked beside three hundred and eighty-nine other people, the previous occupants of this device. Mia tarried, gazing across the bright rows of funereal photoengravings. The sweet presence of all these human faces made it seem almost a kindly machine, a machine that meant well.

  Mia summoned a taxi at the edge of the cemetery grounds. While she waited, she spotted a fawn-colored dog skulking in the oleanders. The dog wore no clothing and displayed no particular signs of intelligence. She stared at the dog as she waited for her taxi, but when she tried to approach him, the dog vanished into the bushes. She felt vaguely foolish once the dog had gone. Large brown dogs were common enough.

  Mia left the taxi at the tube station, ducked under the conduit-riddled Californian earth, and emerged at the Public Telepresence Point at Coit Tower. Telegraph Hill was her favorite site when she was away from San Francisco. Whenever she traveled she’d link back to this site periodically, for a restorative taste of Bay Area urban sensory access. Mia had done telepresence to sites in cities all over the world, but she never fell in love with cities unless she could walk them. San Francisco was one of the world’s great walking cities. That was why she lived in San Francisco. That, and a great deal of habit. She set out on foot.

  On the Embarcadero, Mia sipped a hot frappé in a crowded and noisy tourist café. She wondered glumly what her former husband would have thought of the day’s events. What he might have thought of Warshaw’s final ceremonies. Martin Warshaw had been the only genuine rival that Daniel had ever had. Would there have been some lingering trace of male jealousy there, maybe some slight satisfaction? Mia wondered if her former husband kept her in mind anymore—or if he ever thought coherently about anything or anyone at all. Daniel was in a very strange space in northern Idaho, a space beyond real possibility of contact. Mia could have called her daughter, Chloe, in Djakarta, but there was no comfort in that. Chloe would only pick at her batik and utter harangues about turns of the wheel and spiritual authenticity.

  A long stroll toward Fisherman’s Wharf—Mia had managed not to think about work all day, and that was a novelty for her and, in its own way, a great accomplishment—and she arrived at her destination, a metal-clad two-story town house. A weathered redwood sign in an overgrown hedge identified the place as a for-profit netsite. Mia paid to get through the door, and once inside the cavernous building she slid a cashcard into a clock.

  The proprietor ambled up. He was a lanky old gentleman, well into his second century, all knees and elbows, with a sharp beak of a nose, two absurdly large and efficient hearing aids, and a shapeless fisherman’s cap. The fisherman’s cap was an affectation, since Mr. Stuart’s scaly, corrugated skin had not seen prolonged daylight in decades. He wore a short-sleeved bile green shirt and a pair of oil-stained trousers, their belt loops hung with fold-out multitools on little metal lanyards.

  Mia had not visited this netsite in thirty-seven years. The town house had been extensively rebuilt: floors and walls knocked out, windows bricked over, outer walls copper clad to reduce stray emissions. Still, Mia was unsurprised to discover the very same owner, still in the very same business, at the very same locale, and wearing what seemed to be the very same clothing. Mr. Stuart had always impressed her as the sort of man who could easily outlast a mere building.

  Stuart himself looked much the same, although his nose and ears had swollen visibly in the past few decades. Growth hormone treatments and steroid adjustments were one of the more sensible and low-key life-extension strategies. Men’s noses and ears tended to swell quite a bit under that regime of treatment. Something to do with male steroids and progressive ossification in the cartilage.

  Mia looked the place over. Gray sound-absorption baffles hung from the ceiling, beneath colored spaghetti tangles of power cables and fiber optics. The metal rafters were alive with twittering flocks of brown sparrows.

  The floor held a bizarre collection of network access machines. The western end of Stuart’s barn contained brand-new netlinks, many with the frazzled look of prototypes. The eastern end was jammed with collectors’ items, specialized relics from the past hundred and twenty years of virtual space manipulation. Mr. Stuart had always specialized in media that were either dying or struggling to be born.

  The walls were smorgasbords of crates and buckets of electronics parts. Stuart’s creaky cleaning-robot was gamely wandering about, meticulously dusting the other machines. There was a requisite sandbox for the droppings of the domesticated birds. The lighting in the place was, as always, dreadful.

  “I thought you were going to put in windows,” Mia said.

  “Real soon now,” Stuart told her, slitting his eyes. “Who needs windows anyway? A netsite is a window.”

  “What are you running here that can handle a gestural passtouch and get me into a memory palace set up back in the sixties?”

  “That depends on your setup, but all life depends on the setup,” Stuart said. Stuart had a pronounced taste for aphorisms. “Tell me about the initial parameters and the hardware it’s on.”

  “I can’t tell you anything about that.”

  Stuart shrugged gnomically. “You may be here quite a while, then. You want my advice, try it the simple way first. Plug a touchslate into one of those foveal curtain units and see if you can just bring up the palace right in front of you.”

  “You think that might work?”

  “It might. You might try it out on spex if you want more …” Stuart paused portentously. “Discretion.”

  “Do you charge more for discretion, Mr. Stuart? I’m rather interested in discretion.”

  “I charge just to enter my building,” Stuart said. “That’s sufficiently outrageous for most folks.” Someone yelled a long question at him from the new machines at the western end of the building—something about “naming trees” and “defuzzification.” Stuart whipped his leathery neck around like an owl. “Read the manual!” he shouted. He turned to Mia again. “Kids … Where were we, ma’am?”

  “Mia.”

  “What?”

  “There is no manual!” the boy screamed in reply.

  “Mia, M-I-A,” Mia said patiently.

  “Oh,” Stuart said, tapping one hearing aid. “Nice to have you in the shop, Maya. Don’t mind the kids here, they get a little rowdy sometimes.”

  “I’ll try the curtain unit and the slate, please.”

  “I’ll check you in,” said Stuart.

  Discretion was the sole advantage of obsolete hardware. Obsolete hardware was so bafflingly out-of-date as to be basically unpoliceable. Modern virtuality standards were far tidier, sturdier, and more sensible than the primitive, frazzled, often dangerous junk from the rest of the century. Modern data archives were astonishingly free, accessible, and open. But there were hundreds of obsolescent formats, and vast backwaters of obsolescent data, that were accessible only on machines no longer manufactured or supported. Machines of this sort could only be used by hobbyist fanatics—or by people so old that they had learned to use these machines decades ago and had never abandoned them.

  Stuart gave Mia a battered touchslate and a virtuality jewel case. Mia retired to the netsite’s bathroom, with its pedestal sinks and mirrors. She washed her hands.

  Mia clicked open the jewelry case, took its two featherlight earring phones, and cuffed them deftly onto her ears. She dabbed the little beauty-mark microphone to the corner of her upper lip. She carefully glued the false lashes to her eyelids. Each lash would monitor the shape of her eyeball, and therefore the direction of her gaze.

  Mia opened the hinged lid of a glove font and dipped both her hands, up to the wrists, into a thick bath of hot adhesive plastic. She pulled her hands out, and waved them to cool and congeal.

  The gloves crackled on her fingers as they cured and set. Mia worked her finger joints, then clenched her fists, meth
odically. The plastic surface of the gloves split like drying mud into hundreds of tiny platelets. She then dipped her gloves into a second tank, then pulled free. Thin, conductive veins of wetly glittering organic circuitry dried swiftly among the cracks.

  When her gloves were nicely done, Mia pulled a wrist-fan from a slot below the basin. She cracked the fan against her forearm to activate it, then opened it around her left wrist and buttoned it shut. The rainbow-tinted fabric stiffened nicely. When she had opened and buttoned her second wrist-fan, she had two large visual membranes the size of dinner plates radiating from the ends of her arms.

  The plastic gloves came alive as their circuitry met and meshed with the undersides of the wrist-fans. Mia worked her fingers again. The wrist-fans swiftly mapped out the shape of the gloves, making themselves thoroughly familiar with the size, shape, and movements of her hands.

  The fans went opaque. Her hands vanished from sight. Then the image of her hands reappeared, cleverly mapped and simulated onto the outer surfaces of the wrist-fans. Reality vanished at the rim of the fans, and Mia saw virtual images of both her hands extended into twin circles of blue void.

  Tucking the touchslate under one arm, Mia left the bathroom and walked to her chosen curtain unit. She stepped inside and shut and sealed the curtain behind her. The fabric stiffened with a sudden top-to-bottom shudder, and the machine woke itself around her. The stiff curtain fabric turned a uniform shade of cerulean. Much more of reality vanished, and Mia stood suspended in a swimming sky blue virtuality. Immersive virtuality—except, of course, for the solid floor beneath her feet, and the ceiling overhead, an insect-elbowed mess of remote locators, tracking devices, and recording equipment.

  The fabric curtain was woven from glass fiber, thousands of hair-thin multicolored fiber-optic scan-lines. Following the cues from her false eyelashes, the curtain wall lit up and displayed its imagery wherever Mia’s eyesight happened to rest. Wherever her gaze moved and fell, the curtain was always ahead of her, instantly illuminated, rendering its imagery in a fraction of a second, so that the woven illusion looked seamless, and surrounded her.