Asimov's SF, June 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  A ten-year-old daughter was sitting beside Mary, sharing a threadbare couch.

  The girl asked her mother what she believed. Was the universe really so empty and cold? And was this the way it would always be?

  Quietly, her mother said, “I think that's basically true, yes."

  The girl looked saddened.

  But then Mary patted her daughter on the back of a hand, smiling with confidence. “But dear, I also believe this,” she said. “Life is an invasion wherever it shows itself. It is relentless and it is tireless, and it conquers every little place where living is possible. And before the universe ends, all the good homes will know the sounds of wet breathing and the singing of glorious songs."

  Copyright © 2006 Robert Reed

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  * * *

  The Ninth Part of Desire

  by Matthew Johnson

  Matthew Johnson teaches high school English, drama, and history, and lives in Ottawa, Ontario, with his wife Megan and his cat Shmokey. He has sold stories to On Spec, Space and Time, Deathgrip: Exit Laughing, and Time for Bedlam, and he is working on a novel. Matthew's first story for Asimov's shows us a future where designer emotions can be inhaled, and reveals what is real and what is only an illusion.

  The top note was rage, a shallow monoamine layer of blind fury. Not bad, Raf thought. It didn't have the staged, teeth grit quality most angers had. The bottom note was fear, chilling and lingering; an organic absolute, it was rich and deep, a nice juxtaposition with the synthetic anger. The dry out ... The dry-out note was desire. He wanted—he didn't know what he wanted; to do something, have something, be something. He simply wanted.

  He keyed for a palate-cleanser of calm, as much to control his own emotions as the ones he had just consumed. Emotions often felt different in full hookup than on a touche, and it was too early in the development to know if the effect would even be consistent. Still ... His mind buzzing, Raf quickly shelved his work and locked up the office. He grabbed a celebratory Eat-More bar from the vending machine in the hall, started for home.

  The TV was on when he opened the door, the sound of an overwrought love scene coming from the living room. Raf stood in the doorway for a moment, listening. The scene ended, and there was a pause; then an expressionless voice asked, “What emotion were you just seeing: anger or love?"

  There was a beep, then another pause, and the voice said, “Anger is incorrect. The correct answer is love. Would you like to try again?” Another beep sounded and Raf went into the living room.

  She was on the couch, and, for a moment, Raf thought—as he did once or twice a week—that she was back, really back; her eyes were alive as she saw him, her posture open. Then Raf saw the dreamlink hooked to the back of her head flashing green, and reality set in once again.

  There was nothing whatsoever wrong with Naomi's mind: like most people with Prospero's Disease she was able to remember, once she had been trained to, that you were supposed to be happy when your husband came home. It was just that for her that meant selecting happy from the menu in front of her and receiving a five-minute burst of emotifiers to simulate the feeling. Raf knew exactly how happy she was. He had designed the juice himself.

  “Hey, honey,” he said, trying to hold onto that first feeling. “I think you can quit now."

  Naomi nodded, switched off the interactive board in her lap. “Okay,” she said, as indiscriminately happy about that as about Raf being home.

  “How's it going?” Raf asked.

  “My day's score was 57 percent right."

  Jesus, Raf thought, three years of therapy and her odds of recognizing an emotion were just slightly better than chance. At least she was happy about it. With emotifiers and training, a patient with Prospero's Disease could live a life that looked almost normal: they could feel the appropriate emotions for most situations they were likely to encounter. But they could not choose what to feel; they could not want to do anything. A Prospero's patient could die of thirst, or starve, without ever wanting a drink or a meal.

  “I've got some good news,” Raf said, sitting down next to Naomi on the couch.

  “That's great,” she said, her voice a single cheery note.

  “I think I've found it. I really think I have, this time,” he said.

  She was looking at him intently, and Raf realized the five minute burst of happiness had worn off; she was trying to read his expression, know what to trigger next, as she had been trained to do. He gave an extra-wide grin to signal her, and her dreamlink flashed green as she keyed for happiness again.

  “That's great,” she said.

  * * * *

  She had magnetic eyes. They were green, and flashed like lightning when she smiled; it was an effort for Raf to look down at her nametag. NAOMI MARTIN, it said, MILNE NEURO-T beneath. It was stuck onto a burgundy blouse, low-cut but respectable, worn over a knee length black skirt, black tights beneath. They were part of a clutch of people, all talking, but Raf could feel the group vectoring around her.

  “That was a pretty good paper,” she was saying, and it took Raf a moment to realize she was talking to him. “That fight-or-flight absolute you guys extracted is going to wind up in a lot of dreams."

  He felt himself blushing, wished he could take something to stop it. “It was the whole team's work. I was just picked to present it."

  “Modest, too. Not bad for a grad student. You must have offers coming in from every direction.” She gave him a wicked grin. “Job offers, I mean."

  Raf smiled back weakly. “Oh—well—you're at Milne? Is that a good place to work?"

  “It's okay,” she said. “I like living here. I've just started on contract—mostly worked freelance so far. I'm a tester, not a designer."

  That made sense: to be a tester you had to be able to feel things more strongly, more acutely than regular people, distinguish between different shades of fear or excitement. It was natural that someone like that would draw people into her orbit. “What brings you here, then? I mean—” he ran a hand over his forehead, sweeping away hair and sweat—"this isn't exactly excitement city."

  She shrugged then smiled again, and he knew how it felt to be a deer in the headlights. “Mostly just a few days away from the office—but I do like to know both sides of the business,” she said. “It's kind of crazy the way we do it—you guys do your work in the lab, we use our ‘noses’ to tell you what you've made, and somehow we're supposed to put it all together."

  “I never thought about it that way,” Raf said. That was just the business: people like him could develop the raw emotions, either extracting them from organics or synthesizing them chemically, but they needed testers like her to balance them, give them the subtlety real human feelings had.

  “Well, you're not trained to,” she said. “They teach you to think and expect us to feel. I mean, you study emotions for years—how often do they tell you to feel them?"

  “We're not supposed to—” he stammered.

  Naomi held up a hand. “I know, I know—and we're not supposed to know how the technical end works. I have to twist arms just to get you labcoats to talk to me."

  Raf smiled weakly. “You don't have to twist my arm,” he said.

  She reached out, touched his arm lightly. “No, I don't, do I?” she said. “Guess I'm lucky I got to you before they ruined you. While you're still able to feel."

  They had been leaning close to hear one another over the crowd; suddenly Raf realized how near her face was to his. “I, I guess,” he said, desperately thinking of ways to keep the conversation from ending. “So what are you working on now?"

  Her eyes lit up once again, and he knew then that he would do anything to be able to see that spark every day. “We just started testing a new juice: working name's Blue Ribbon. The top note's an expectation-actuality mix, then an absolute of adrenaline, and a touch of runner's high for the dry-out. The idea is that all together they make a feeling of accomplishment, like when you do something impor
tant."

  “That sounds sort of baroque,” he said.

  Her face darkened. “Well, it is my job,” she said.

  “No, no—I just mean it seems like a pretty complicated emotion to have to simulate—I guess Prospero's patients deserve the whole spectrum, though."

  “Oh,” she said, laughed. He wondered if he would ever get used to the way her moods changed from dark to light and back again, in the space of moments; part and parcel of being a tester, he supposed, to feel everything so strongly. “It's not for therapeutic use. I don't really handle that stuff."

  “I didn't know Milne did recreationals."

  “We don't sell them, we make them and contract to secondary vendors.That's the bulk of our business, though we don't make a lot of noise about it. You've probably felt a few—ever dream Risk Factor?"

  He nodded. It was a classic: the adrenaline from the final escape, surfing the avalanche, had left him rattled the whole next day. “Sure."

  “That was Epiphany. One of mine."

  “Wow,” he said. “I didn't even know—"

  “It was enhanced? That's the idea."

  The lights overhead flashed twice: the next lecture was about to start. “I, I guess we should go back in,” Raf said.

  Naomi gave a small, sly smile. “Do you want to?"

  Raf glanced at the people shuffling back into the lecture hall. “No,” he said, his heart beating faster. “Not really."

  “Come on, then,” she said. Her eyes flashed again. “Let's go live a little."

  * * * *

  Raf keyed RECORD on his clipboard, spoke into the mike set in the top left corner. “Clinical trial of Alpha six, April seventh."

  On the other side of the glass three men and two women sat at a white counter. For recreationals—the bulk of his work—they used testers, but for anything therapeutic a blind study was needed to get FDEA approval. In front of each of the subjects was an inset mike and a green button: each of them had been instructed to press the button if they wanted anything, though without the juice the concept of “wanting” was entirely abstract to them.

  There had been eight ingredients on the touche that had started it all: a combination of amino acids, monoamines, peptides, and hormones that somehow added up to anger, fear, and desire. Each of the Alpha series had a slightly different mix, in hopes of finding one where the desire predominated. So far there had only been two in which it had been present at all.

  “Starting drip, Alpha Six,” Jeremy's voice said behind him. He had a postage-stamp degree and looked like he slept in his car, but Jeremy did his job well enough.

  Raf kept an eye on the five subjects sitting at the counter. They had the empty stares characteristic of Prospero's patients; each of them had been trained to blink six times a minute to moisten their eyes, creating a sight-echo that disturbed him whenever he saw two or more of them together.

  Suddenly number one reached out, pressed the green button. “Does this work?” his voice said over the intercom, panicked.

  Raf pressed the TALK button. “Yes, it does,” he said, his stomach fluttering. “What can I do for you?"

  “Uh, can I get a sandwich?"

  Raf lifted his hand, palm turned behind him, and Jeremy high-fived it perfunctorily. “Sure. What kind do you want?"

  “Um—I guess—” Number one's breathing began to get ragged, his jaw stiffening.

  “His readings just jumped,” Jeremy said.

  “Never mind. Just get me out of here,” the subject said in a rising pitch.

  “Hang on,” Raf said. If he took any of them out it ended the session, and so far only one had responded to this mix.

  “Check out number four,” Jeremy said quietly.

  Raf turned to see the man second from the right flexing and unflexing his fingers, then drumming them against the counter in increasing anxiety. He was fidgeting in his seat, too, trying to move further away from number five without getting closer to number three. That being impossible, he gave number five a shove. Number five's eyes flashed with fear as she fell to the ground.

  “I'm shutting it down,” Jeremy said.

  “Okay.” He shook his head. “We've got it. That's two different mixes where we have clear desire. We just need to find the right balance—get the negatives lower, the fear especially."

  Jeremy had stopped the drip, given the subjects a cleanser to flush out the longer-lasting hormones and peptides, and they were reverting to their former state; even number five, who had been pushed off her seat by number four, showed no interest in getting back up. “We need it,” he said. “The two juices with desire were the ones where the negatives were strongest."

  Raf shut his eyes, tried not to remember the look on Naomi's face when she had fallen off her chair. “We'll find the balance,” he said. “We've got what we need. Now it's just a technical problem."

  * * * *

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Milne Neuro-T is proud to present its signature emotion for the coming season—from designers Raphael Parnati and Naomi Martin—Go!"

  Beaming, Raf looked over at Naomi, saw the grin tight on her face. He raised an eyebrow, trying to catch her eye; when he did, she shot him a glance that said not now.

  Below the long stage, Milne employees were handing out touches with samples of the new product to journalists and dreamcasters. Evan Meyer, the lab's director, was fielding questions, tossed a few to Raf; perhaps sensing Naomi's mood, he left her alone. When the press conference broke up, he put a hand on Raf's shoulder.

  “A little more enthusiasm from you two would help,” Meyer said quietly. He was a big man, with a build like a grizzly, brown hair curled tight against his head. “You're the stars, remember."

  “Sorry, Evan,” Raf said. Naomi had already stood up and left the stage. “She's probably just tired. I'll talk to her about it."

  Meyer nodded, clearly relieved; being stern did not come naturally to him. “Everything all right with you two?"

  “Sure, sure. Why, are you going to tell me business and pleasure don't mix?"

  “I might,” Meyer said, laughed. “But then, I used to say designers and testers didn't mix, so what do I know?"

  Raf found Naomi backstage, drinking a coffee. There was no doubt she was tired: work on Go had been more than usually frantic near the end, and the closer they got to deadline the more the balance of work weighed on her. “You all right?” he asked.

  She took a sip from her coffee, bit the cup lightly and worried at the styrofoam. “Yeah. Sure. Just your basic fatigue plus your basic work anxiety."

  “Come on, did you hear the buzz out there? Go is a solid hit."

  She spat the plastic fragment she had chewed off her cup onto the floor. “God, you even talk like one of them now."

  “I don't mean it like that,” Raf said, feeling himself flushing: them was the word they always used to describe the suits, the marketing people, the ones who had said testers and designers shouldn't work together. The ones they had proven wrong. “I just mean we've got nothing to be anxious about. Sure there's pressure, topping ourselves every time—"

  “Topping ourselves? Is that what you think we've been doing?"

  Raf forced himself to hold in his first response. Now that he knew what this was about, he also knew there was no settling it. Their first project together, Mono No Aware, was still Naomi's favorite: a delicate mix of awe and sadness inspired by Murasaki's Tale of Genji, it was the juice that had proved a tester and designer working together could produce emotions of unheard-of subtlety and power. While it had been a critical success, though, Mono No Aware had not sold well, and Raf and Naomi, though given greater resources and liberties, had been steered into more profitable areas.

  “Yes,” Raf said, keeping his voice low to be unheard by the stagehands and gofers passing by. “You know we have. Go is a lot simpler, a lot cleaner than Overdrive.” In fact Overdrive was the one he was most proud of, an emotion that had previously only existed in fiction—that last burst of determin
ation a superhero uses to overcome his foe. Technically, though, there was no doubt Go was more accomplished, achieving its effect with just fourteen ingredients where Overdrive had needed twenty-three. “Anyway, all of this was following your lead. You knew the business a lot better than me."

  Naomi took another sip of coffee, frowned, put down the cup. “You're right,” she said. “You know what? I picked up Tale of Genji the other day, re-read the most touching parts.” She shrugged. “Nothing."

  “What do you mean?"

  She looked at him—right at him, for the first time since they had started talking—but the fire he had hoped for was not in her eyes. “I mean I felt nothing, not even a memory of the feeling we wanted MNA to reproduce. So I took a dose and there it was, every cherry blossom about to fall breaking my heart; but, without the juice, nothing."

  He reached out to hold her, drew her close. “It's okay,” he said. “You were right the first time. You're just tired."

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe—maybe we should take a vacation. Go somewhere, do something real."

  “Sure.” Raf closed his eyes, felt her warmth in his arms, her head leaning against his shoulder. “Something real. Sounds nice."

  * * * *

  Solvents in the air burned Raf's nose as the security door slid open. He had not been in an extraction lab in years, but the smell still brought him instantly back to the seventeen hours a day he used to spend distilling an absolute of aggression from the brains of Siamese fighting fish. It took a hundred kilograms of cloned fish brains to make a liter of absolute, a long process whose every step required human supervision.

  “Raf!” a voice called. “It's been a long time since we've seen you down here."

  He turned to see Mireille Theroux, the head of the facility, heading down the walkway toward him. She had been on the same team he had, as grad students, but had taken the hard-tech route, eventually winding up in charge of distillation and extraction at Milne. She was a short, dark-haired woman who always managed to look perfectly put-together despite being surrounded by caustic chemicals, replacing the standard lab coat with an immaculate white suit and a pair of Chanel glasses. Somehow, the smell of her perfume rose over the chemicals in the air.