Tea From an Empty Cup

by Cadigan, Pat

  ‘Oh, for cryin’ out,’ said Tom’s image. ‘What’s your snarl?’

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked him.

  ‘Now, who do I look like?’

  ‘Nobody,’ she snapped.

  Tom’s image put a hand over its heart. Or heart area. ‘You cut me with that one, Yuki. You cut me bad. And after all we’ve meant to each other.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘Tom Iguchi is missing and presumed dead. In here.’

  ‘But not in here, not through the old looking-glass.’ The image gestured behind him. ‘And for that matter, not where you are, either. You’re Tom now.’

  ‘Not really. Everyone who knows him knows I’m not. Who are you?’

  The image moved an inch or two closer to the glass. ‘It’s me, Yuki. It is me, it’s Tom.’

  The voice had sobered, the teasing note gone from it. ‘Really?’ she asked, warily.

  He nodded. ‘Well, not really. But it is me.’

  Yuki glowered at him. ‘I’ll take a hammer to this thing. Then where will you be?’

  ‘You don’t have a hammer. The best you can do is a travel icon and a couple of lottery tickets. Listen to me, I don’t have much time here. I’m piggy-backing for the moment and it won’t be long before someone notices the extra energy expenditure isn’t balanced.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Yuki asked. ‘And where are you?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly.’

  Yuki was exasperated. ‘How can you not know?’

  ‘I don’t know that, either. But I need your help to get out of here all the same.’

  ‘But you don’t know where it is. Where you are.’

  ‘No.’

  She blew out a breath of mock relief. ‘Okay. I was just checking. For a minute I was afraid that it might make sense.’

  ‘Do you know anything about Old Japan?’ Tom asked her suddenly, all but blurting it out. ‘True Japan, I mean.’

  Yuki looked up briefly. The stretch of dark sky above her was completely devoid of stars. Of course. ‘What has that got to do with anything?’

  ‘They’re bringing Japan back. That’s what they say they’re doing, anyway.’

  She laughed. ‘Who’s “they”? Any relation to “them”?’

  Tom’s hands pressed hard against the glass; his palms whitened. ‘I swear, if I could reach you, I’d shake you till your brains rattled, even if you do look like me on a good day.’

  Yuki brushed imaginary lint off her shoulder. ‘I’m sure that would help a lot.’

  ‘Just listen. I have a catalog hidden under the name Shantih Love.’

  ‘Is that the name of the catalog?’ Yuki asked him.

  ‘No. It’s one of my avatars in here.’

  She laughed again. ‘And what are you in here, some kind of Bombay elephant demigod?’

  ‘It’s the name I had when I was murdered.’

  ‘You haven’t been murdered. You’re here, with me. Like me and my shadow.’

  Tom beckoned to her and she moved closer to the glass. ‘Listen, will you? Things got serious. It was just supposed to be a game, that’s all it was ever supposed to be. The tokens, the icons, that was all supposed to be just status crap, like having someone on the door of one of those clubs Ash is always going to –’

  ‘They have them in here, too,’ Yuki said.

  He seemed not to have heard her. ‘– just game stuff, that’s all. Performance art at the very most. Flash the icons, claim you’re fast, claim you’re the new buzz and you can show them how to shoot the curl. And they let you, because it’s all true and they’re never gonna let you out. Someone’s gotten to like it there, and it isn’t you.’ He stopped and shrugged. ‘I sold Shantih Love off. I scraped up enough residue so the buyer could get my name and wear it under the Shantih Love form. It got him killed. In here and out there.’

  Yuki sighed. ‘Are you plundering old scenarios and trying to sell them to cinemas again?’

  ‘I’m not telling you a scenario, this isn’t cinema. It’s real, goddammit.’

  ‘Big talk for a reflection.’

  ‘Stop it. You don’t know. You’re running around in here on high speed and you don’t have the faintest idea of what you’ve flashed into.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me, then?’ She crossed her arms – his arms? – and in the glass, she saw Tom start to follow her movement. Then he caught himself and pushed his arms straight down by his sides, looking annoyed.

  ‘You don’t know how fast you’re going, do you? You’re running real hot, Yuki, and I got to tell you, you can’t do that forever. It ages you. You can age twenty years here in one night. They let you have my appearance because they know you’re full Japanese. She sent you in here –’

  ‘She who?’ asked Yuki.

  ‘Joy Flower. Who else?’ Tom’s mouth curved down bitterly and she felt her own mouth copy his expression without her willing it, and without her being able to stop it. ‘You want to know all about that, the world’s best kept secret? Yes, I was one of Joy’s Boyz, and yes, I liked it, and yes, she used me. Because I was full Japanese.’

  ‘Really,’ Yuki said. ‘I thought she used you because you were male.’

  He laughed. ‘In here, you can get better than anything out there. Nobody really cares about sex anymore, Yuki –’

  Speak for yourself, she thought bitterly.

  ‘– no one cares about ecstasy, drugs, or going to heaven. But everyone – every-fucking-body-and-soul – wants god-hood.’

  Yuki shook her head slightly, puzzled.

  ‘Power, dammit. Power. Power to do. Power over. Over ideas, over thoughts, over all living things.’

  Yuki waited. ‘And?’ she prompted finally.

  ‘What do you mean, and?’ he fairly shouted. ‘And the sun set slowly in the west. And the Red Death held sway over all. And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat. Except people like you and me, we get –’

  In the next moment, Tom was gone and she was staring at a regular-style reflection. Or as regular-style as a reflection in Artificial Reality could be, considering it wasn’t really a reflection of something that wasn’t really there in the first place. Or was it? Maybe reflections were sort-of reflections, subroutines dumbed-clown to the point of the AR version of an autonomic reflex –

  She shook her head again. Sometimes thinking was like struggling through a briar patch, getting caught on every little sticker and thorn, and having to disengage each one individually. Curbing her impatience, she stood in front of the glass and tried to will Tom to come back. Could he still see her from where he was now? Or had he not actually left and was just mimicking her movements with an almost supernatural precision?

  She moved closer so that her nose would have been pressed against the glass, or nearly so, and looked herself in the eyes. Or looked Tom’s eyes in the eyes. Artificial eyes; after staring into them for almost a minute, she stepped back. The longer she gazed into them, the more lifeless they seemed, as if the humanity were draining out. But draining out of what? The reflection? The illusion that was causing the reflection? Or the person observing it – namely, herself?

  Maybe she shouldn’t try to know that one if she wanted to remain intact, she thought uneasily.

  She became aware, then, that a strange silence had fallen over her, as if all sound had been damped down and obliterated. Someone listening? She looked up.

  An enormous chrome flying saucer was hovering above the alley. Yuki’s mouth dropped open. Now she could sense something that she could describe to herself only as the opposite of sound waves, and it was definitely coming from the thing overhead. As she stared at it, a ring of bright lights lit up in a circle around the bottom centerpoint of the saucer. The lights moved separately, sending long cones of light in all directions. Yuki watched, wondering if this was only more Sitty flash or some other traveler’s idea of a tour bus.

  The silence seemed to suck hard at her and then it was gone. The saucer was moving on, toward the trafficway, where pe
ople were shouting and screaming in delight at the thing’s approach. Some impulse made Yuki trot along under it, pacing it, and one of the spotlights moved with her, lighting the area directly in front of her.

  Coming out of the alley, she could see that the UFO was larger than she had thought. The crowd that had gathered, stretching up and down the trafficway as far as the eye could see, spilling onto the beach and into the water, covered nearly as much area on the ground as the saucer did in the air. The chrome hull reflected far fewer people than appeared on the street, however. Was there really that much filler on the street, or were only the elite reflected in a flying saucer hull? If so, what kind of elite did you have to be?

  Yuki walked in a slow zigzag, trying to see if the saucer reflected her, too, but she just couldn’t seem to find herself – or Tom’s image, rather – anywhere along the chrome. Maybe the distortion was too extreme for her to see herself. And if she did, would she see Tom signal her, as she had seen him do before? Or did his abrupt disappearance mean that he couldn’t appear safely even as a reflection?

  But come on, how safe or unsafe was AR in the first place? What kind of danger could anyone possibly be in? Aside from suffering from racing thoughts –

  She concentrated on moving farther into the crowd, making her way through the virtual bodies and trying to keep an eye on the saucer. She had a sense of something about to happen. The atmosphere seemed to thrum with it.

  Nice effect – wonder how they do it, she thought, and then tried to be at least slightly abashed at her own cynicism. Tom used to tell her she was far too cynical to enjoy the illusions of AR even as mere entertainment.

  I feel sorry for you cynics, he would say. Because cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

  Maybe so, Tom, but if you don’t know your own price, how can you be sure of your values? She would always laugh when she said it, so he wouldn’t know how much that price-of-everything-value-of-nothing crack stung her.

  There was a sudden roar on the other side of the crowd; a large midnight-blue woman was levitating toward the saucer. No, not levitating – the saucer was pulling her up to it. She spread her arms and shook her overdone mass of white hair joyfully. When she reached the saucer, she passed directly through the chrome and vanished.

  Yuki waited, standing perfectly still, for one of the spotlights to fall on her. If they were looking for her, or Tom, or both, then she would make it as easy as possible for them and get it over with.

  But no pull came, even though the spotlights swept over her and even paused on her upturned face briefly, not just once but several times. After a bit, she got bored and turned away to try forging a path out of the crowd and on to somewhere else. Wasn’t she supposed to be in Waxx24 anyway? If this was it, it was neither clever nor exciting. She would have to tell Ash that he wasn’t missing anything, that he was better off frequenting the real club. At least there you could buy drinks.

  And it was as if her thought of Ash had flipped a switch somewhere because suddenly, there he was, just a little over an arm’s length away from her. She knew him immediately, there was no mistaking his appearance. Same old Ash – fancy eyes, a cloud of pale-gold, fairy-tale hair, clothes from one of the Romance designers, a fluffy shirt and satin trousers, soft boots. If you listened closely, you could probably hear hearts breaking all over the Sitty. It was the sort of thing that must have reinforced his vanity, to make him come here looking exactly as he did in –

  But of course he looked just as he did out there. The realization was a wordless thump that she could not quite characterize as a shock, and yet felt like more than mere surprise to her. Ash looked like Ash because he was out there. He wasn’t in AR with her. He was at the actual, physical club and somehow, so was she. By projection, or something they wouldn’t call projection but probably was. Whoever they were.

  She moved quickly to stand directly in front of him and understood right away that he couldn’t see her, was totally unaware of her presence. But obviously he could see the saucer – he was standing there and not only gazing up at it but waving both arms over his head, signaling, begging it to take him. Just like a lot of other club-goers, she saw.

  So how the hell did this virtual club thing work? Was Waxx24 more of a level than a location in here? And how could she make contact with Ash, was it even possible?

  She pulled out the catalog and removed one of the lottery tickets. It had electric pink question marks printed over a background of bright metallic blue, with a gold-flake circle in the center. ‘Tell me how to communicate with someone out there who is visible to me in here.’

  The lottery ticket made a throat-clearing noise. ‘Must be in the form of a question,’ a male voice admonished her.

  Yuki groaned. ‘How can I contact someone out there visible to me in here?’

  There was a brief pause. ‘Touch the gold circle and see what you’ve won!’ said a different and much happier male voice.

  She did so and a pink balloon sprang up in front of her like a severely overstuffed jack-in-the-box.

  Saw someone you LIKED? Want to know MORE? Making contact is SIMPLE, EASY, and FUN!!!! First, signal your choice by placing one hand on your target’s shoulder, just as if you were going to turn her or him around to talk to you! You will see A VERY SPECIAL EFFECT, which alerts the LUCKY TARGET that she or he has been CHOSEN BY ONE OF THE ELITE!!!! There will follow a short wait while your target is prepared for contact, assuming consent has been given (and why wouldn’t it!!!!). You’ll meet your new friend in a PRIVATE CHAT BOOTH and what goes on in there is no concern of ANYONE’S!!!! We only urge you to observe SAFE practices and UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES GIVE ANYONE, no matter how dreamy or attractive, your PERSONAL ID CODE or YOUR PASSWORD!!!! Right? Right!!!! Best of luck – and remember, book early and EXTEND THE RUSH!!!!!

  Yuki shook her head. Wow!!!! Thanks!!!! She moved closer to Ash and made to touch him on the shoulder.

  She couldn’t feel him at all, but it didn’t matter. Evidently she had done it right. A long stream of what looked like a river, or footage of a river, shot out from his shoulder. Ash’s face lit up with a joy Yuki associated only with children or lunatics. Grinning ecstatically, he watched as it circled them once and shot upward to the saucer overhead. He raised his face to it and Yuki was startled to see there were tears in his eyes. Thank you, he mouthed, raising his arms like a gospel singer in full voice. Yuki wasn’t sure whether it was the proximity or the fact that Ash was her particular choice, but now she could feel the effect of the levitation ray or whatever it was plucking Ash off the ground and into the air. His dangling feet sailed past her virtual nose and she understood that whatever had ahold of him was highly stimulating in the pleasantest way. Waxx24 certainly looked after its elite custom. They were making sure her lucky chosen friend stayed feeling lucky, chosen, happy, and receptive.

  ‘Yuck,’ she said aloud, but quietly. Being a prude was, as she had been told again and again by various people, including Ash, not something she should advertise widely. Of course, the fact that she was at odds with everyone else, especially Ash, as to what constituted prudery was always skipped over, so she had given up, accepted the fact that by standards she couldn’t seem to escape or alter she was a raving, flaming prude and left it at that. But now she was going to have to deal with a highly stirred-up Ash, and she could only hope that the sight of Tom’s face, coupled with the revelation that she was behind the image would serve as a cold shower for him.

  The person behind Ash, a tall, husky black woman in a very old-fashioned gangster-style zoot suit from the last century, looked up at the saucer and tipped her fedora as she, too, began to lift into the air. Yuki looked around; there was no one that she could see near the woman. The elite invisible to each other? Strange, she thought; also strange that there had been no sign of the VERY SPECIAL EFFECTS!!!! that had accompanied her choosing Ash. And while she was wondering this and that, why was she down on the street instead of up in the saucer? Was she g
oing to be airlifted too? When? What the hell was going on? And if the elite really were invisible to each other, how was it she and Nick the Schick –

  She was standing in a small room no larger than a closet, furnished with one small round table and two efficient padded chairs. She sat down and took out the map. A new overlay had been added to tell her that she was now on the saucer. Or that the saucer was now included on her level. The notations seemed to hint at both without confirming one way or the other. She put the map down on the table and ran her hands over the back of the chair. Lots of padding there; good, comfortable padding under smooth, cool cloth. Did they have virtual upholsterers in AR, she wondered, and if so, what kind of training did that require? And did they have virtual upholstery testers as well, people whose job it was to go around feeling the furniture, sitting on it, standing on it, using it any and every way imaginable to check for that authenticity of sensation that made every tactile impression more vivid than it could ever be out there, more real than real.

  Ash would probably like that job. Or any job like it. AR designer, AR tester. Maybe tester more than designer. Like the sort of thing you dreamed about when you were a kid, consumer tester for Toyz U Krave, or whatever the company was called. Or not like it, really, the same thing exactly, just different props.

  Sensations more real than real. She was beginning to understand why Ash and Tom spent so much time in AR. The more time you spent in a rig like this, the paler reality must seem when you came out of it. She had never spent a whole lot of time in AR in the past, other than the occasional amusement park expedition with friends. Ride a roller coaster – safely. Drive in a demolition derby – safely. Parachute out of an airplane – safely. Jump out of an airplane without a parachute and fly like a bird – safely. There were more constructive kinds of things, like overcoming phobias, but that was basically an amusement park installation with an enormous medical bill attached.