Tea From an Empty Cup

by Cadigan, Pat

  She let them all fall into the icon catalog, which she zipped back into the vest pocket. Maybe she would even think quickly enough to use some of them.

  That’s really why you don’t like AR, isn’t it – because you can’t usually think fast enough to get a decent run out of it.

  She tried to shove the thought away. AR was for people who were too scared to take chances in real life, and anyone with any sense knew that. AR was for people like Tom Iguchi, who would rather pursue a nonexistent Grail through an imaginary world than try to sustain a real life in a real place, where things sometimes took years to develop rather than nanoseconds, and where you couldn’t save your place, rewind, and re-do a sequence when you goofed up.

  Which begs the question, why are you bothering with him?

  ‘Oh, who wants to know?’ she muttered aloud, and then winced with alarm. Getting twitchy already. She picked up the map and touched the Hot Link.

  Yuki stood in the middle of a wide, six-lane street, squinting out over a body of water in the late afternoon sun. Shiny particles in the broken, ruined pavement sparkled and glittered, as if the streets of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty were paved with crushed diamonds. Perhaps they were, or at least this one was. It was also studded with clumps of car and building wreckage that made her think of teepees. Otherwise, there were no signs of any kind of life.

  So was this it – the big, bad Sitty? Where was all the post-Apocalyptic glamour everybody was always raving about? Or was modern life so absurdist now that abandoned ruins from the last century were the bleeding edge of this-minute fashion?

  The sun seemed to be stuck where it was in the sky, later than afternoon but not twilight yet. She looked around and then jumped, startled – a skinny kid, maybe eleven years old, had materialized on her right. He was grimy in a way that suggested repeated showers wouldn’t have helped and his peculiar silvery-grey hair had been cut at various times in various places with various cutting implements. The expression on his face was nothing like a child’s and it wasn’t just the very light blue eyes. Their hue was so pale that they were actually more tinged than truly blue.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked as he studied her with one hand to his chin. Like a little old man, Yuki thought. There was a flicker; he was holding a butterfly knife so that she could see the reflection of Tom’s wide eyes in the blade. One of them suddenly closed in a sly wink and her mouth dropped.

  ‘You don’t remember your old buddy Nick the Schick? What’s the matter, Iggy, you on drugs?’ The boy lowered the knife, frowning. ‘Are you Iggy?’

  ‘Do I look like Iggy?’ Yuki asked him, trying to sound lofty instead of spooked.

  ‘Just like him,’ said Nick the Schick. ‘But you sure don’t act like him. And you don’t smell like him, either.’

  ‘Smell?’ Yuki tilted her head, skeptical. ‘You can smell me in here?’

  ‘You pay extra, but it’s always worth it. But I don’t pay extra to be around someone who keeps saying shit like “in here” or “out there.” I don’t come here to get my illusion ruined.’

  ‘And where do you go for that?’

  Nick the Schick stuck out his tongue and licked the flat of the blade. ‘I could show you, but what would be in it for me?’ He tossed the knife into the air with a flick of his wrist. It spun around and came down to land handle-first on the back of his hand. A moment later he snatched it away, as if he thought she might try to take it; the movement was quick, but not so quick that she didn’t see an ornate logo reading SCHICK on the ice blue handle. He started to make another movement but she put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Save it. I saw the handle on that thing. Where would little pokes like you be without the subsidies?’ To her own ears she sounded more bitter than sarcastic.

  He pulled away from her, swaying and nodding his head to some rhythm that only he could hear. ‘What about it? They don’t make me sing and dance over it, I just give good value and get good icon. No different than if I was top chop in the shop.’

  ‘You’re a walking ad.’

  ‘Icon,’ the Schick insisted. He twirled the knife one-handed, passing it through his fingers with a dexterity that was no doubt part of the package. If the right advertiser got ahold of you, you could do pretty well in AR. Although they only approached you if you were already pretty good anyway. Potentiate. She remembered that from an old course on jargon. Got to be a good potentiator. ‘Someday you could check in here and find the Nick the Schick icon is the one everyone wants for their cat.’

  ‘What will be you be an icon for?’

  He hooted laughter up at the sky. ‘What do you mean, what for? Who wouldn’t want to be an icon?’

  ‘I don’t mean why. I mean, for what. What would I get from you if you were an icon?’

  The kid hesitated for what felt like a very long time. ‘Ack-sess,’ he said finally. ‘Big ack-sess.’

  ‘Access to what?’

  ‘The soon-to-be-legendary Nick the Schick level. What else?’ The kid made a complicated flourish with the knife, drawing a shiny chrome line that hung in the air for a few moments before twinkling out of existence.

  ‘Nice effect,’ Yuki said sincerely. ‘But what’s on this soon-to-be-legendary Nick the Schick level?’

  ‘Nothing. Yet. But someday, it could be the next level everyone’ll want to go to.’ He gestured at her with the knife. ‘That the highest speed you can get on your rig today?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why? What’s the big deal over high speed?’

  The boy held up his left hand, palm outward. ‘Can you see this?’ An impossibly colorful animated cobra reared up on the boy’s skin. A moment later, the flat, hooded head lunged forward out of plane and stopped a few centimeters short of her nose.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I can see that.’

  ‘Well, you can’t at low speed. The faster you go, the more you know.’

  ‘Sounds fancy,’ Yuki said. ‘So how does someone go fast in here?’

  ‘If you’re gonna try to tell me that you didn’t get no hot shot before you came in here, I’m gonna let me cobra bite you.’ The cobra snapped back into his palm. She thought of the sting at the back of her neck. All right, she had understood that was some kind of injection, and she had figured it would be some kind of stimulant. But she didn’t feel terribly speedy.

  ‘They say you get going fast enough, you can find the Out Door. Somebody said they thought you did that.’ He took on a studiedly casual air. ‘So, how about it? Can you get higher? Did you do it already? Did you get anything new when you did?’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to buy that information?’ Yuki asked him.

  He laughed. ‘Okay. You’re Iggy. Or an acceptable replacement.’

  Acceptable replacement. The words echoed in her mind. What eleven-year-old talked like that? None, of course. Kids couldn’t access this kind of AR … could they? Yuki felt a vague nausea pass through her like a warning sign. ‘How’d you decide that?’

  The boy snorted and then stared at her incredulously. ‘You really don’t know what you’re doing.’

  ‘So? When has that stopped anyone from doing anything, any time, anywhere?’

  ‘You just pricked a destination on a map, right?’ He nodded, answering his own question. ‘Sure. Still got the map?’

  Yuki shrugged, adjusting the vest importantly.

  ‘Well, take it out, I’m not gonna steal it. It won’t work for me, it’s keyed to you.’

  ‘Oh.’ Yuki took the map out and unfolded it, holding it at waist level so they could both look at it.

  ‘Yeah, you just pricked on location. You didn’t specify anything else – time of day, mode, module. I mean, the default module is General if you don’t choose one, but there’s no defaults for time and mode, you have to set those. So where you are now is the sample set.’

  She nodded. ‘Okay. I didn’t know.’ She looked at him sideways. ‘What’s your excuse?’

  ‘I was about to go party and I saw you pop in, so I wa
ited to see what you were gonna do. I thought you were Iggy.’

  ‘Iguchi Tomoyuki. In other words.’

  ‘Yeah. So, what’s the take-up with this? You’re a real Jap and he wasn’t?’

  She found his kidney on the first try. ‘This time, I’ll pretend you hiccuped after the first syllable of “Japanese” so I didn’t hear the rest of the word. But just this time.’

  He rubbed his lower back. ‘You know, there’s plenty that disable the pain option on my hotsuit. I coulda. I don’t come in here to get hurt the way some of ’em do.’

  ‘How generous of you, to take such a chance. Of course, if you happen to hurt someone whose pain option isn’t disabled, your ’suit automatically restores yours at the same level and allows you to share the sensation immediately. Everyone knows that. How stupid did you think I was?’

  The kid shrugged and twirled his knife again. They came to another cross street, where the wreckage of two cars, sans wheels, stood on end, leaning against each other in an impossibly balanced A-shape. Yuki stifled a laugh. ‘The ruins of one civilization become the ornaments of the next.’

  Nick the Schick gave her a wary look. ‘You are most definitely not Iggy. That shit would never occur to him.’ Pause. ‘Well, I don’t think it would, anyway.’ He went over to the abandoned building on the diagonal corner from them, stood on tiptoe to reach as high as he could, and drove the knife into the dirty stone.

  The knife went through easily; the kid sawed his way down from the top of his reach to a point about a foot from the ground, and then took the cut sideways for a couple of yards. Then he reached down and pulled up the corner he had just cut in the wall as if it were a piece of paper. In the roughly triangular space that had opened, Yuki could see pavement shining wetly, reflecting nighttime neon colors. ‘Care to use my entrance?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, stepping forward. He put one leg through the hole so that he was straddling both sides, holding the flap of building up for her.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ he said smugly. ‘Just in case.’

  She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting – music, lights, colors, a one-million-piece marching symphony orchestra conducted by a giant purple rabbit – even just a one-note chime signaling a change in status or location. Instead the passage from one area to another was so uneventful, it threw her completely off balance. She staggered back and hit the wall with her shoulder blades. It was brick on this side and the impact made her wince; it felt more real than any other wall she had ever met.

  ‘Watch the vertigo,’ she heard the kid tell her, his voice faint as if he were already far away from her. She started to push herself away from the wall and found two strong arms encircling her neck and shoulders from behind. She looked down; the arms had the brick-and-mortar texture of the wall they had come out of, though they felt like living, hard-muscled flesh.

  ‘And what’s your hurry, Bright Eyes?’ said a gravelly voice close to her ear.

  ‘Let go,’ she said, wincing. The brick-textured skin scraped like sandpaper.

  ‘Where’s your ticket for admission?’ There was a gargled laugh. ‘Everybody wants to come in here, love-lady, but that’s just not allowed.’

  The kid reappeared, balancing the knife point down on his index finger again. What a show-off, she thought, irritated. ‘You do have a ticket, don’t you, Iggy?’

  She worked the catalog out of her vest pocket and opened it up. The card that said Admit One: All Hours floated up in front of her face, flashing on and off with a new message: WELCOME TO WAXX24. Ash would kill her if he ever found out, Yuki thought, trying not to feel smug in spite of everything. Ash would kill her and then die himself. One of the brick hands plucked the card out of the air.

  ‘And now, a tip for the conscientious doorman,’ rasped the wall into her ear, sending a wave of chilly goose bumps over the back of her neck. ‘The conscientious doorman who keeps all that wretched refuse from the golden door. The conscientious doorman would be me.’

  Nick the Schick flipped his knife into the air, where it made several full revolutions in slo-mo before sliding down through the air to rest its point on his index finger again. ‘Sorry, but you got to give it a token from your cat.’

  ‘Did you know this would happen?’ Yuki managed to choke out.

  The kid smiled. ‘Guess you’re pretty green after all. Don’t worry, you buy it back on the black market.’

  She wanted to ask what would happen if she refused this generous offer, except she couldn’t seem to get enough breath for it. The catalog pages flipped; the transportation token levitated off a page, told her Bye-bye! in a squeaky little voice, and disappeared into the brick hand. The hand patted her on the head good-naturedly and let her go.

  Yuki moved quickly out of reach, but nothing came after her. The wall was just a wall again; there was no outline or pattern that suggested arms or any other body parts. ‘It took one of my travel tokens,’ she complained to the kid, who was still laughing at her. ‘What in hell does a goddam brick wall want with a travel token?’ She waited; the kid laughed some more. ‘Well?’

  ‘Maybe it’s gonna become a travel agent?’ the Schick offered with a giggle.

  She moved away from him and consulted the map. ‘Okay, where am I now? Where is this Waxx24 place?’ But she had forgotten the kid as soon as she had opened the map again. It had changed – it looked as though some sort of overlay had been added to give it more detail. She was on a side street near the six-lane highway paralleling the shore, not far from where she had entered at first, on the abandoned street under the stalled sun. But the street was no longer abandoned and there was no sun at all in the black sky. For all she knew, there never had been one here. But it wasn’t just the unending night that made everything look out of whack.

  There was something funny with movement here, movement and perception. She looked up at a vintage neon-tube sign formed into a green palm tree next to a fuchsia ankh. When she turned away, both tree and ankh bled streams of color across her field of vision.

  ‘Hey.’ A sharp poke in her kidney. ‘Are you still here, or did you already ass-end to a new level of existence? And if you did, why didn’t you take your old friend Nick the Schick, without whom you wouldn’t have been able to find the hottest club level in the universe in the first place?’

  She ignored the kid and looked down at herself. Tom’s body was unhurt; there was just a little brick powder on his sleeves. She brushed it away, dusted off her gloved hands, and glared at the wall. ‘Stupid,’ she whispered, meaning herself. The only way anything happened to you here was if you let it; she knew that as well as the most addicted die-hard AR fanatic knew it. Allowing yourself to be fooled into buying the illusion was a big sign of even bigger weakness. You looked out for yourself here because nobody else would, and judging from what bits Tom had told her, and what she had seen, nobody did.

  She turned to say something to the kid but he was gone. Down at the end of the street, where it opened onto the defunct road, she could see a burning clump of wreckage and a lot of foot traffic, not all of it human, or even humanoid. She moved down the alley, willing herself to stroll casually, as if she did this all the time. A little ways from the corner, some movement on her right caught her eye. She dared a quick glance and then jumped, startled.

  Across the street, her reflection in the grimy, streaked store window stared back at her. Or rather, Tom’s reflection. She didn’t think she would ever get used to seeing someone else’s reflection. Even the expression on the face was all wrong; it didn’t look anywhere near as frightened as she actually felt.

  Reflection? She moved one hand toward her lapel. In the filthy glass, one hand also moved toward the lapel except that it didn’t do it quite at the same moment. It wasn’t much of a delay. Less than a second. Less than half a second, less than half a half a second, and probably even less than that. Yes, she was very sure it was less than a mere one-sixteenth of one second. In the outside world where she would have much preferred t
o be at the moment, a delay so minuscule would have gone completely unnoticed. But she was in here now and something had pumped up her senses to a range several levels of magnitude beyond what should have been possible. Even in here, she realized with a minor chill.

  She turned to face the glass directly, drew herself up, and made a formal bow. The reflection did exactly the same in the fast glimpse she had as she bent forward. At the lowest point of the bow, she lifted her head very slightly and looked. The image in the window was also sneaking a look, with the difference that the face was grinning broadly at her.

  Yuki jumped back with a cry. It was as if a giant, cold fist had clutched her stomach. Tom’s reflection laughed and shook its head, moving both hands in front of itself in a negating gesture. Telling her not to be afraid, she supposed, feeling foolish but at the same time, still shaky. Images, she kept telling herself, all images, light dancing on the retina, producing illusions with the help of that unregenerate old collaborator the brain. Easy to say, even easy to think, but it didn’t make certain things any less startling to see before you, even when you knew the mechanics of everything that was going on.

  Tom’s reflection was still laughing as it straightened up and walked toward her.

  If it walks out of the glass into the street, Yuki thought, I’ll drop down dead.

  But the image went only as far as it would have been able to go if it had been a real person standing on the other side of a window. It beckoned to her, the grin turning sheepish. Yuki looked around to see if anyone else was catching this, but she was still alone. Cautiously, she approached the glass, still watching for some sign that the image could burst out of its medium, and stopped a yard away, ready to run.