by Tad Williams
Sam and Orlando sat on the Rivendell balcony another half an hour, talking about all manner of things, even sharing a few jokes, but Orlando continued to feel something awkward in his friend’s behavior. It touched Orlando with something he had never expected to feel around Sam Fredericks; it took him long minutes to recognize it as fear. He was almost terrified by the idea that she might not want to be here with him, that their friendship had finally become no more than an obligation.
They had wandered back to the subject of the network. To his surprise, she seemed to think he was the one who needed cheering up. “It’s still an amazing job you have—the ranger for a whole universe. All those worlds, your responsibility.”
“Three hundred and ninety-eight at the moment, but a few others have just temporarily collapsed and they’ll cycle back on again. That’s like a quarter of what there used to be, but Sellars just switched a bunch of them off because they were too scanny, too violent or creepy or criminal.”
“I know, Orlando. I was at that meeting, too.”
“Are you sure you’re okay, Sam? You seem … I don’t know, sad.” He looked her up and down. “And now that I think about it, you haven’t changed sims in like a year’s worth of visits.”
“So? Jeez, Gardiner, you’re the one who wants everyone to dress up all elfy-welfy here.”
“I don’t mean the clothes.” He almost told her about Beezle’s version of Rivendell chic, but he could not get past what was suddenly bothering him. “Sam, what’s going on? Is there a reason you won’t change your sim? You must have something more up-to-date you use for remotes and friendlines and all back home.”
She shrugged—she was doing it a lot—but would not meet his eyes. “Yeah. But what does it matter? I thought you were my friend, Orlando. Is it really that important to see if … if my boobs have grown since the last time you saw me?”
He flinched. “You think that’s why I want to see the real you?”
“No. I don’t know. What’s your problem?”
He swallowed down the anger, mostly because it scared him to be angry at her. There were times when it felt like his friendship with Salome Fredericks was the only thing that kept him connected to the world he had been forced to leave behind. His parents were different—they were his parents, for God’s sake, and always would be—and the other survivors of the Otherland network would always be his friends as well, but Sam … “Damn it, Fredericks, don’t you get it? You’re … you’re part of me.”
“Thanks a lot.” Despite the mocking words, she looked more unhappy than angry. “All my life I wanted to be something important, but part of the great Orlando Gardiner? I never even hoped … !”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it. Fenfen, I mean you’re in my … okay, you’re in my heart, even though that sounds utterly drooly. You’re why I still feel like I’m a living person when, well, we both know I’m not.”
Now she was the one to flinch, but some kind of wall still loomed between them. “What does that have to do with my sim? When you first met me, you thought I was a boy!”
“But this is different, Sam.” He hesitated, then put his hand on her arm. The world’s most powerful simulation engine made it feel just as it was supposed to feel, the warm skin on her wrist, the velvety folds of her sleeve over muscle and tendon and bone. “I know I’m never going to grow up, not in the normal way. I may not have a real body anymore, but that doesn’t mean I expect everyone else to play with me forever here in the Peter Pan Playground. Look at me, Sam.” He knew it was mostly guilt that kept her eyes on him, but just now he was willing to use whatever he had. “If you hide things from me, especially the normal stuff, because you think I can’t take it—well, that’s the worst thing I can think of. I was a cripple my whole life. Having progeria wasn’t just knowing I was going to die young, it was having every single person who saw me for the first time look at me and then look away real fast, like I was some kind of horrible human car accident. Even the decent ones who tried to treat me like anyone else … well, let’s just say it was obvious they were working at it. I don’t want to be pitied ever again, Sam.”
She looked miserable and ashamed. “I still don’t understand, Orlando. What does that have to do with my sim?”
“You don’t want me to see the way you look now, but it’s not because you’ve got a zit or something and you’re embarrassed. It’s because you know you look different, that you’re growing or changing or whatever. Tell me I’m wrong. Jeez, Fredericks, I’ve been living on this network almost three years, do you think I expect things not to change? It’s not going to hurt me. But if you can’t show me, then … well, it’s like you don’t trust our friendship. Like we can only be the kind of kid-buddies we used to be back in the Middle Country game.”
She looked at him with something of the familiar Sam in her expression again, amused even though she was irritated. “Same old Gardiner. You still know everything.” She took a long breath. “Okay, you want to see how I look now? Fine.” For a moment her Rivendell-self froze as she reselected her appearance, the new information passing through the series of blind relays that kept the very private Otherland network isolated from the real-world net. Then, suddenly, like a hardcopy picture dropped onto the top of a stack, Sam’s image changed. “Satisfied?”
“You don’t look that different,” he said, but it wasn’t really true. She was an inch or two taller, but also more curved and womanly—she had wider hips that the elven breeches only emphasized. The Sam he had known had been a greyhound-slender athlete. She also had a length to her face that he hadn’t seen before. She was really lovely, and not just because she was the Sam he loved. He also realized he hadn’t told the truth about something else: Seeing her suddenly a year older, seventeen instead of sixteen, did hurt. It hurt like hell. “Thanks.”
“Oh, Orlando, I’m sorry. I’m being utterly jacked. It’s not that, it’s not any of that.” She slumped on the bench, leaned forward until she could rest her elbows on her knees. She had stopped meeting his eye again. “It’s just … I’m seeing somebody.”
For a moment he didn’t understand what she meant, thought she was still talking about sims and images. “Oh. Is it … serious?”
“I don’t know. Yeah, I guess. We’ve been going around together for a couple of months.”
Orlando took a breath. “Well, I hope it works out. Fenfen, Frederico, is that what’s been bothering you all day? We’ve been past that jealousy stuff for a long time.” In part, he had to admit, because Sam had made it clear from the beginning of their real friendship, after he knew she was a girl and she knew about his illness, that although she loved him as much as he loved her, it was never going to be the romantic kind. Which was just as well, he had decided, because what they had was going to last their whole life and not be messed up by sex.
He often wondered if real, living teenagers told themselves the same kind of pathetic lies he did.
“I don’t know, it just … scares me. Sometimes I feel like …” She shook her head. “Like I’m not a very good friend for you. To you,” she amended hurriedly. “I don’t see you as often as I should. You must think I’m terrible.”
He laughed, surprised. “It never even occurred to me. You know, Sam, no offense, but it’s not like when you’re not here I just sit around waiting for your next visit. Two days ago I was dodging arrows in Edo while a bunch of warlords tried to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate. The week before I spent a few days with Captain Nemo exploring some undersea ruins.”
“So … so you’re okay? With everything? Not bored or … or lonely?”
He gave her arm another squeeze before letting go. The elves were singing again in the Hall of Fire, a meditation on the light of the Two Trees. The voices seemed almost to belong to the valley itself, to the night and the forest and the river singing together. “Bored? Not when I consider the alternatives. No, don’t fret about me, Frederico—I always have places to go, things to do, and people to see. Why, I m
ust be the happiest dead boy in the whole wide world.”
It wasn’t really so much that Sam was dating someone that was bothering him, he thought as he got ready to connect to his parents’ house, or even that she’d kept it a secret for a while. In fact, now that he thought of it, he still didn’t know if her new soulmate was male or female. Sam had always been funny that way, not wanting to talk about those sort of things, irritated by questions, as if Orlando might think differently about her if she ever clarified her gender and sexual issues. No, it wasn’t so much that she was dating someone, or even that she was growing up. He loved her, he really, truly did, and he wanted her to have a happy life no matter what. Instead, it was the sudden worry that he might not be growing up himself, as he had always assumed he was, however weird his situation. He felt a chill and wondered whether he was becoming irrelevant to everything, not just to Sam, whether despite the fact that years were passing for him in Make-Believe Land just as they did for her in the real world, his experiences here might not be the same as growing up at all.
Maybe you have to be real to do it. Maybe you have to do real things, make a fool of yourself at a party, trip and skin your knee, fall in love, or just … just … have a heartbeat. Maybe I’ll never really change. I’ll be like one of the sims—a sim of a fourteen-year-old kid. Forever. He pushed away the sickening thought. He had enough to deal with right now: Tonight was Family Night, which was hard enough to get through at the best of times.
It didn’t really seem fair, being dead and still having to go home for visits. Not that he didn’t love Conrad and Vivien. In fact, it was because he loved them so much that it could be so difficult.
He took a deep breath, in a metaphorical sort of a way—he felt as if he was taking a deep breath, anyway—and as he did so, he remembered that his mother and father apparently had a surprise for him tonight. They had asked him to connect to a different location in the house for his visit instead of the wallscreen. “Well, actually, it’s really Conrad’s surprise,” his mother had explained. She had smiled, but she hadn’t seemed entirely pleased with whatever it was going to be. Orlando had seen that expression before: she had worn it when Conrad had given him the bike for his eleventh birthday. Anyone, even Orlando himself, could have told his father that his bones were too brittle and his muscles too weak even to think of riding a bicycle, but Conrad Gardiner had insisted that his son should have every chance to be normal.
When Orlando had become more or less bedridden in the last year, they had finally got rid of it to make more room in the garage for medical equipment, spare filters, and oxygen pods. He had never ridden it, of course.
As he made the connection, Orlando wondered why he couldn’t just join them through the wallscreen, as usual. He liked doing that, because it felt no different than an ordinary kid-to-parents call, as though he were simply away at school in a different state instead of living in what was functionally a different universe.
Maybe Conrad swapped in the old screen for one of those deep-field things. He was talking a while back about investing in one of the solid-crystal ones.
The connection opened and he was looking at his parents, who looked back at him. His mother was teary-eyed, as she always was when they first saw each other. His father was beaming with what looked like pride. But there was also something unusual about the way they both appeared; it took him a moment to process what it was.
I’m looking through a different imager, he decided. I guessed right—it’s a new screen. But if his parents had indeed bought a new unit, he suddenly realized, they had installed it in the dining room instead of the living room: He could see the old oak sideboard behind their heads, with the poster of the French can-can dancers next to it that had hung on the wall there for years.
“Hi. What’s up—new screen?” Without thinking, he raised his hand to blow his mom a kiss as he always did—yes, it was embarrassing, but you had to do things differently when you couldn’t actually touch—and something shadowy rushed toward him. Even after years without a real body, he could not help flinching a little. The new thing stopped and hung in his view in the same way a simulated hand would.
It was a hand, but not being simulated on his end. Instead, it seemed to be looming in front of his parent’s screen and thus effectively hanging in front of his eyes, a weird-looking, smooth, maroon hand made of what appeared to be shiny plasteel. Half-forgetting his bodiless state, he reached out to touch it. The hand reached out too, extending away from his viewpoint, just as if it were his own hand, responding to his thoughts. Fascinated and troubled as he began to catch on, he tried to make the fingers wiggle as he would with one of his own simulated hands. The fingers wiggled. But these fingers weren’t on one of his sims, and weren’t even in the network—they were in Conrad and Vivien’s dining room in the real world.
“What the hell is this?”
“Do you like it?” His father was nodding, the way he used to nod when someone was trying out his home-brewed beers, back when they had still had visitors.
Well, that’s one thing, Orlando thought. Now that I’m gone, at least they can have people over again. “Like it? What is it? Some kind of robot arm attached to the new screen?”
“It’s not a new screen, it’s a whole body. So you can, you know, be here. Inside the house with us. Whenever you want.”
Orlando had discovered the other arm. He flexed it, held the two hands up together, then looked down. The viewpoint swiveled, showed him the cylindrical, beet-colored torso, the jointed legs. “A … body?”
“I should have thought of it before,” his father said. “I don’t know why I didn’t—your software agent used to have that little body with all the mechanical legs so it could crawl around the house, remember? I looked around until I found something that seemed like it would work. It’s a remote figure they use for certain kinds of reconnaissance operations—I think it was built for Antarctica originally, maybe military or something. I found a collector and bought it. I had to get different feet put on it—it sort of had hands at the end of the legs.” He was clearly a little nervous: when he was nervous, he babbled. “Better for climbing and moving on ice or something. I’m surprised they weren’t skis or tractor-treads or maybe …”
“Conrad,” Vivien said, “that’s enough. I don’t want to hear about hands on legs. It’s … disturbing.” She darted a quick look at Orlando, who was more than a little stunned.
“What … what am I looking out of?”
“The face,” his father said. “Well, it should be, but we’ll have to change what you’re putting out from your end. I didn’t want to spoil the surprise, so right now there’s a whole little Orlando standing there in the face-screen.”
“I’m still trying to figure this out. You mean, I’m supposed to … move around in this?”
“Sure, go ahead!” Conrad was delighted by the question. “Walk! You can go anywhere in the house!”
“He doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to,” said his mother.
Orlando flexed his muscles, or performed the mental actions that flexed muscles in the real world and the better virtual worlds. The cartoon fingers reached out and gripped the tabletop. He put his feet under him and stood; the point of view rose, not altogether steadily. Now that he was listening for it, he could hear the faint wet hiss of fibromotors bunching and relaxing.
“Do you need some help?”
“No, Conrad. I’ll be okay.” He got up and took a few swaying steps, then stopped to look down at the feet—they were huge ovals, like Mickey Mouse shoes. It was strange to be in a body as clumsy as this: His Otherland network bodies all responded exactly as though they were his own, and made him stronger, faster, and far more nimble than he had ever been in real life.
He hadn’t been in the bathroom since his death. It was interesting, even strangely touching, to have movement around his old house restored to him, but he wasn’t certain about any of this. He looked at his reflection in the mirror, the strange stick-fi
gure shape of the thing. The screen in the faceplate showed Orlando’s full-body sim, so that he looked like one of those giant Japanese robot-monsters with a human controller rattling around inside its head. He scaled his sim’s output so that only the face appeared, and suddenly, even though it wasn’t his real face, not by a long shot—no one including Orlando himself had seen that since his physical body had been cremated—it made the whole thing more real and also far more disturbing.
Is this what they want for me? This … thing? He knew that Conrad meant well, that his parents were only trying to find a way to make his continued presence in their lives more real, more physical, but he didn’t know if he could stand to live for even short periods as this stalking, plasticized scarecrow.
He looked at the face he used with his parents, a teenage face appropriate to his age, made with help from various police forensic illustration nodes, scaled up from scans of his own skull and incorporating features from both his mother and his father. Not even a real face to begin with. The face of the kid they should have had, he thought. Stuck on this thing, now, like a lollipop on a stick.
Orlando did his best. He sat through dinner and tried to concentrate as his parents told him things about friends and relatives, about their jobs and the small annoyances of life in security-walled Crown Heights Community, but he felt even more like an alien than he usually did. The servo-muscles on the body were clumsy and the tactors less advanced than what he was used to: He knocked over his mother’s glass twice and almost tipped the table over when he stood up at the end of the meal.
“I’m going to have to make it an early night,” he said.
“Are you all right?” his mother asked. “You seem sort of down.”
“I’m fine, I’ve just got a meeting to go to at the Drones Club.”
“That’s that 1920s English place you told us about?” Conrad asked. “That must be interesting. Didn’t you say there was a war there?”
