Asimov's SF, April-May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Two foxes!” he called out again.

  A man in a brown raincoat glanced at Richard quizzically but didn't bother to look where he was pointing. You didn't have to look at Richard for very long to realize there was something odd about him. His anorak was several sizes too big. His hair was lank. He had two days’ growth of stubble on his chin. He had no bug eyes.

  “Two foxes!”

  No one else took any notice. A sense of weariness and desolation swept over Richard. They were all so busy with their bugs, that was the problem, talking to people far away about things that he couldn't really understand, no matter how hard he tried.

  Then he noticed that Jenny was some way ahead of him—he could see her umbrella bobbing along above the crowds: pink with white polka dots—and he ran to catch up. He liked the feeling of being near her. She made him feel warm.

  “Jenny,” he said to himself, “Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.”

  And once again he laughed with pleasure, showing his gap teeth.

  “Jenny, Penny, Henny,” he said out loud.

  * * * *

  “Zero, the only yogurt with less than one tenth of a calorie per serving...”

  Jenny walked quickly, checking through in her mind the things she still needed to do before tomorrow. Ben would get cross with her if she ended up having to run around looking for things at the last minute. He hated disorder. He hated inefficiency of any kind. She herself was a very successful p.a. and spent all of her working days doing pretty well nothing but imposing order. But for some reason Ben made her feel bumbling and incompetent.

  “Fateful Summer, the heartrending story of doomed love in the shadow of a global war...”

  Jenny's bug eye provider knew she was twenty-eight, single and a member of the “aspirant middle-upper clerico-professional” class—and it knew from her purchasing record that she liked low fat yogurt and middle-brow novels—so it told her many times each day about interesting new diet products and exciting new books, as well as about all the other things that aspirant middle-upper clerico-professionals were known to like or be concerned about.

  “Is one pound a day so very much to pay for life-long security...?”

  “Single, childless, and fancy-free? The best time to think about school fees! Talk to School Plan. Because life's too short...”

  * * * *

  But if Jenny was “aspirant middle-upper clerico-professional,” what was Richard? He wasn't even a typical member of the “chronically unemployed/unemployable welfare claimant” class—a low-income class that nevertheless, in aggregate, constituted a distinct and lucrative market—for he'd been adopted at the age of one and grown up in a well-to-do professional family, and had never associated with other claimants who lived apart from the population at large in social housing projects. In fact, since he had no bug eyes, no computer, no phone, and no credit card, there was hardly enough of a trace of him out in the public domain on which to base a valid class evaluation.

  Richard was an isolate, a one-off. He had been a strange introverted child who his adoptive parents had never entirely learned to love. He'd left them at seventeen and now had very little contact with them, though they had bought him his little flat in Guildford, and his mother still sent money and food parcels.

  * * * *

  Three young men in suits came by, walking briskly and overtaking first Richard and then Jenny. They worked in the City as commodity traders. They'd all got bugs on, and they were using the setting called LCV—or Local Consensual View—which allowed bug eye wearers to retransmit the signals they were receiving on an open channel, so that others in their immediate vicinity could pick them up. This enabled all three of the young men to banter with a fourth young commodity trader called Freddy who wasn't physically present.

  “Freddy, you stupid fuck. Is it true you lost 90K in one hour yesterday?”

  “Freddy you stupid fuck,” muttered Richard under his breath, storing away for later examination this strange and utterly bewildering combination of affection and abuse.

  “Freddy you stupid fuck,” he said out loud.

  He laughed. One of the young men turned round and glared at him.

  * * * *

  Richard couldn't see Freddy, of course, or hear his reply. But Jenny, out of momentary curiosity, blinked on LCV in her bugs to get a look at him. (This was the principle behind the bug eye boom: the one who isn't there is always more interesting than the one who is.)

  “Yeah, I lost 90K,” Freddy was saying. “But last week I netted fifty mill. Being a decent trader's about taking risks, my children. Watch Uncle Freddy and learn.”

  So he was just a boastful little boy in a suit like his friends, Jenny concluded, glancing at the clock on her tool bar, then blinking up the internet to check the train times. Options were offered down the left hand side of her field of vision. She blinked first the “travel information” folder, and then “rail.” A window appeared, inviting her to name the start and end points of her proposed journey. She mumbled the names of the stations, blinked, and was given details of the next two trains. It seemed she was cutting it a bit fine, so she paid for a ticket as she walked—it only took four blinks—and walked a little faster.

  Suddenly a famous TV show host called Johnny Lamb was right in front of her. His famous catchphrase was “Come on in.” Now he invited her to “come on in” to a chain store right behind him that specialized in fashion accessories. Jenny smiled. Shops had only recently taken to using LCV to advertise to passers-by and it was still a novelty to see these virtual beings appearing in front of you in the street. She walked right through Johnny Lamb, blinking LCV off again as she did so.

  * * * *

  Richard, of course, had no means of knowing that Johnny Lamb was there at all, but he noticed Jenny's increase in speed and hurried to match it. They were almost at the station. He felt in his pocket for his ticket—his cardboard off-peak return ticket paid for with cash—and entered the station concourse.

  Two police officers called Kenneth and Chastity were waiting below the departures board. They wore heavy-duty bug eyes with specially hardened surfaces, night vision, and access to encrypted personal security data, and they were watching for illegals in the crowd.

  ID cards contained tiny transmitters that could be located by sensors mounted in streets and public places. A recent innovation linked these sensors directly to police bug eyes, so that Ken's and Chas's bugs saw little green haloes over the heads of people who had valid ID and giant red arrows above people who didn't—illegal immigrants, for instance, or escaped prisoners. The amusing thing was that the illegals hadn't yet cottoned on to this. It was rather entertaining to watch them trying to slip unnoticed through the crowd, with one of those red arrows bouncing up and down over their heads all the while.

  Jenny (of course) had a halo. Richard had a yellow question mark. It indicated that he was carrying a valid ID card but that he'd either got a criminal record or a record of ID problems of some sort, and therefore should be questioned if he was behaving suspiciously in any way.

  Well, he was behaving suspiciously, thought Constable Kenneth Wright, nudging his partner. The man didn't even have a set of bugs!

  “What kind of Neanderthal goes around with a bare face these days?” he said.

  It was almost obscene.

  Chas nodded grimly and pulled up Richard's file by looking straight at the amber question mark above his head and double-blinking.

  “Mental health issues. Diagnosed schizophrenic. Detained in hospital three times. Cautioned two years ago for failing to carry an ID card,” she read from the file.

  Not the crime of the century, as even she would reluctantly have to admit.

  “Probably left his card at home on principle,” Ken said with a sigh. “Probably some stupid nutty principle. Probably the same reason why he doesn't wear bugs. No need to pull him up, Chas. He's got his card on him today.”

  Chastity found Ken's attitude very lax. This was not a perfect world, of cou
rse—one had to accept that there were liberals in it, and bleeding hearts, and human rights lawyers—but why let potential troublemakers walk on by when you were perfectly entitled to haul them up, ask them questions and, at the very least, let them know you were watching them?

  “Excuse me, Mr. Pegg,” she said, stepping forward. (She loved the way this new technology let you have people's names before you'd even spoken to them: it put them on the back foot straight away.) “Would you mind telling me why you aren't wearing bug eyes?”

  Richard blinked at her, glancing anxiously round at the receding figure of Jenny, who he might never see again.

  Why didn't he wear bugs? It was hard to explain. He only knew that if he possessed bugs he would drown in them.

  “There isn't a law that people have to wear them, is there?” he muttered, glancing again at Jenny with her pink polka dot umbrella, who, cruelly, was getting onto the very same train that Richard would normally travel on.

  Chastity didn't like his tone one bit.

  “Maybe not yet,” she said, “but there soon will be, like carrying an ID. And while we're on that subject, I'd like to see your...”

  But here her colleague nudged her. Away across the concourse, a big red arrow was jiggling into view, pointing down at a young man from Malawi called Gladstone Muluzi, whose visa had expired the previous week.

  “Bingo!” breathed Chas.

  “Gotcha!” hissed Ken.

  “Can I go then?” interrupted Richard, glancing longingly across at the sacred train that now contained the sweet and gentle Jenny.

  “Oh, off you go,” Chas snapped at him without shifting her gaze from her prey.

  * * * *

  Richard ran for the train and climbed on just before the sliding doors locked shut. Then he barged through three carriages looking for Jenny, stepping over suitcases and pushing rudely past people stowing their possessions on the luggage rack. He upset several of them, because it didn't occur to him to say “excuse me” or “sorry.”

  But who cared? Not Richard. He didn't notice the reaction he was getting. There was Jenny, that was the important thing, there was Jenny sitting all on her own in a set of facing seats. Richard approached her and, with beating heart, spoke to her for the very first time.

  “Are these seats free?”

  * * * *

  “Yes. They are,” said Jenny.

  Her voice was like music. He laughed. Jenny gave a small clipped smile and looked away, reading him as odd but harmless, wondering why he wasn't wearing bugs and noticing with distaste the faint sour smell on him of slept-in clothes. Her older brother was autistic so she was used to oddness, and her feelings toward Richard were not unfriendly ones, as many people's might have been. But all the same she didn't want the bother of thinking about him just now. And she could have done without the whiff.

  Then the train began to move and she glanced at the opacity icon on her toolbar and blinked it up to 80 percent. Out on the street she'd kept opacity low to let her negotiate traffic safely and avoid walking into other people. But now it was the train driver's job to watch the way ahead. Jenny no longer needed reality and could reduce accordingly its net contribution to the nervous signals reaching her visual cortex. Now, objects and people in the physical world were thin and ghostlike. It was the bug world that was solid and real.

  “Shame you can't shut out smell as well as vision,” she thought, glancing at Richard and screwing up her nose.

  Richard, incongruously, laughed, and Jenny glanced at him, or at the dim ghost of him she could see with 20 percent of her vision, and wondered what it was that had amused him. He wasn't looking at her. It was something he'd seen outside the window. This struck her as endearing somehow, and she smiled.

  To varying degrees—75 percent, 90 percent—almost everyone in the carriage, having settled in their seats, had made a similar adjustment to the opacity of their bug eyes. A soft tide of voices rose up from passengers calling husbands and wives and children and friends to tell them they were on their way.

  But Jenny looked at the clock on her status bar.

  “Ben will be calling soon,” she thought. “Best not to call anyone else until then, or he won't be able to get through.”

  Ben had a bit of a short fuse when it came to things like not being able to get through.

  So she blinked up mail instead and sent a quick message to her boss.

  “Remember to talk to Mr. Jackson in Data Services before the staff meeting!” she reminded him.

  It was already in his diary, but he'd grown so used to being reminded about everything that he often forgot to look. Imposing order, she did it all day. But when it came to Ben she felt like a fool.

  Around the carriage the tide of voices receded as, one by one, calls came to a conclusion and passengers settled down into their own bug-eye worlds. Some watched bug TV. Some read bug newspapers and bug books. A Canadian student picked up on a game of bug chess she was playing with a bug friend across the Atlantic. A young boy from Woking played a bug shoot-'em-up game. A woman lawyer with red hair had a look at the balance on her bug bank account. An insurance broker surfed bug porn, having first double checked that his LCV was properly switched off. (He'd had an embarrassing experience last week with a group of leering schoolboys.)

  * * * *

  Outside the window a building site passed by, lit by icy halogen spotlights. Diggers and cranes were still at work and would be through the night.

  “UCF London,” read giant banners all round the site. “Building the Dream.”

  It was a new kind of bug transmitter station, one of a ring around the city, which would create the new Urban Consensual Field. When it was done, every bug-wearer in London could inhabit a kind of virtual city—or one of several virtual cities—superimposed upon the city of brick and stone.

  There would be ghosts in the Tower of London; there would be writing in the sky; there would be virtual bobbies on every corner.... The past would be made visible; the future would rise like a phoenix from the concrete and tarmac of now; and people could, if they wanted, safely stay at home and send out their digital avatars to walk the city streets.

  * * * *

  The door at the end of the carriage slid open. A ticket inspector entered. His rail company bug eyes showed giant tickets hovering above every passenger in the carriage except one and he could see at a glance that every one of these tickets was in order. Only Richard had an empty space above his head. The inspector came to look at his piece of cardboard.

  “Forget your bugs today, sir?” he inquired pleasantly, feeling in his pocket for his little-used clippers.

  * * * *

  Jenny jumped slightly, startled by the inspector's voice. She had been vaguely aware of him entering the carriage, but he had been a barely visible presence, remote, out there, like a parent moving late at night on the landing outside the bedroom of a sleepy child. So she had quite forgotten him and gone back into her bug dream without noticing him coming close.

  Not just for Jenny, but for almost everyone in it the carriage, with its white lights and its blue seats and its aluminum luggage racks, was now no more than a hazy dream. As to the used car lots and crumbling factory units that were flitting by in the dark outside, they were too insubstantial to make out at all with bugs set anything above 70 percent.

  Richard was alone in the atomic world, the world of matter and space.

  * * * *

  “One day they won't see it at all,” Richard thought. “It'll just be me that keeps it going.”

  He laughed.

  “One day aliens will invade the earth, and only I will be able to see them. Like I see the foxes and those mice that run around under the trains. Like I saw that deer.”

  That was a powerful memory. One night he'd woken at 2 AM feeling a need to go to the window of his little bedroom and look outside. The street had been empty, the traffic lights changing from red to yellow to green and back again, secretly, privately, as if signaling to themselves
.

  But a white deer had come trotting down the middle of the road: a pure white stag, with great branching antlers, trotting past the convenience store with its ads for bug card top-ups, past the silent pub, past the shop that sold discounted greeting cards and remaindered books, past the darkened laundromat. It had trotted past them and on, round the corner and out of his sight again.

  A solitary car came by straight afterward, way too fast, screeching its brakes round the corner, shooting across a red light and roaring off in the opposite direction to the deer. And then silence returned again, and nothing moved at all except the traffic lights, shifting every few minutes from green to yellow to red and back again.

  “It had a rider on its back,” Richard said out loud in the railway carriage, suddenly remembering this fact. “It had a....”

  Then he stopped, for Jenny had looked at him and smiled.

  * * * *

  It was a lovely smile, even when partially obscured by bug eyes. It was a smile of tenderness and delight.

  Richard laughed his gap-toothed laugh.

  “Hello sweetheart!” whispered Jenny to the 3D image of her boyfriend Ben, suspended in the space where Richard was sitting. “Have you had a good day, darling? I am so looking forward to spending this time with you!”

  Of course Richard couldn't see Ben frown back at her and tell her he hoped she wasn't going to be silly and girly and go over the top about everything.

  * * * *

  After she'd hung up, Jenny turned opacity right up to ninety-five and watched the new fly-on-the-wall documentary called Janey about the daily life of a young secretary like herself.

  “Just remember I'm on national TV,” Janey was saying to her boyfriend Ray. “All over the country people are watching me on their bugs. So now tell me the truth. Are you really going to commit?”

  According to a recent poll, nine million out of eleven million bug viewers agreed that Ray wasn't good enough for her, but tragically, heroically, crazily, she stayed with him anyway.