Before They Were Giants (5 page)

The last you saw of her was a giant ant, giving you the finger.

~ * ~

Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown called Judy’s Jungle. It was a massive console in cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into the slot bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a Swiss orbital spa, trampolining through twenty-meter perihelions with a sixteen-year-old
Vogue
model—heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was simpler to buy a gun than a hot bath.

He was in New York with forged papers a year later, when two leading firms had the first portable decks in major department stores in time for Christmas. The ASP porn theaters that had boomed briefly in California never recovered.

Holography went too, and the block-wide Fuller domes that had been the holo temples of Parker’s childhood became multilevel supermarkets, or housed dusty amusement arcades where you still might find the old consoles, under faded neon pulsing APPARENT SENSORY PERCEPTION through a blue haze of cigarette smoke.

Now Parker is thirty and writes continuity for broadcast ASP, programming the eye movements of the industry’s human cameras.

~ * ~

The brown-out continues.

In the bedroom, Parker prods the brushed-aluminum face of his Sendai Sleep-Master. Its pilot light flickers, then lapses into darkness. Coffee in hand, he crosses the carpet to the closet he emptied the day before. The flashlight’s beam probes the bare shelves for evidence of love, finding a broken leather sandal strap, an ASP cassette, and a postcard. The postcard is a white light reflection hologram of a rose.

At the kitchen sink, he feeds the sandal strap to the disposal unit. Sluggish in the brown-out, it complains, but swallows and digests. Holding it carefully between thumb and forefinger, he lowers the hologram toward the hidden rotating jaws. The unit emits a thin scream as steel teeth slash laminated plastic and the rose is shredded into a thousand fragments.

Later he sits on the unmade bed, smoking. Her cassette is in the deck ready for playback. Some women’s tapes disorient him, but he doubts this is the reason he now hesitates to start the machine.

Roughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to comfortably assimilate the subjective body picture of the opposite sex. Over the years some broadcast ASP stars have become increasingly androgynous in an attempt to capture this segment of the audience.

But Angela’s own tapes have never intimidated him before. (But what if she has recorded a lover?) No, that can’t be it—it’s simply that the cassette is an entirely unknown quantity.

~ * ~

When Parker was fifteen, his parents indentured him to the American subsidiary of a Japanese plastics combine. At the time, he felt fortunate; the ratio of applicants to indentured trainees was enormous. For three years he lived with his cadre in a dormitory, singing the company hymns in formation each morning and usually managing to go over the compound fence at least once a month for girls or the holodrome.

The indenture would have terminated on his twentieth birthday, leaving him eligible for full employee status. A week before his nineteenth birthday, with two stolen credit cards and a change of clothes, he went over the fence for the last time. He arrived in California three days before the chaotic New Secessionist regime collapsed. In San Francisco, warring splinter groups hit and ran in the streets. One or another of four different “provisional” city governments had done such an efficient job of stockpiling food that almost none was available at street level.

Parker spent the last night of the revolution in a burned-out Tucson suburb, making love to a thin teenager from New Jersey who explained the finer points of her horoscope between bouts of almost silent weeping that seemed to have nothing at all to do with anything he did or said. Years later he realized that he no longer had any idea of his original motive in breaking his indenture.

~ * ~

The first three quarters of the cassette had been erased; you punch yourself fast-forward through a static haze of wiped tape, where taste and scent blur into a single channel. The audio input is white sound—the no-sound of the first dark sea . . . (Prolonged input from wiped tape can induce hypnagogic hallucination.)

~ * ~

Parker crouched in the roadside New Mexico brush at midnight, watching a tank burn on the highway. Flame lit the broken white line he had followed from Tucson. The explosion had been visible two miles away, a white sheet of heat lighting that had turned the pale branches of a bare tree against the night sky into a photographic negative of themselves: carbon branches against magnesium sky.

Many of the refugees were armed.

Texas owed the shantytowns that steamed in the warm Gulf rains to the uneasy neutrality she had maintained in the face of the Coast’s attempted secession.

The towns were built of plywood, cardboard, plastic sheets that billowed in the wind, and the bodies of dead vehicles. They had names like Jump City and Sugaree, and loosely defined governments and territories that shifted constantly in the covert winds of a black-market economy.

Federal and state troops sent in to sweep the outlaw towns seldom found anything. But after each search a few men would fail to report back. Some had sold their weapons and burned their uniforms, and others had come too close to the contraband they had been sent to find.

After three months, Parker wanted out, but goods were the only safe passage through the army cordons. His chance came only by accident: Late one afternoon, skirting the pall of greasy cooking smoke that hung low over the Jungle, he stumbled and nearly fell on the body of a woman in a dry creek bed. Flies rose up in an angry cloud, then settled again, ignoring him. She had a leather jacket, and at night Parker was usually cold. He began to search the creek bed for a length of brushwood.

In the jacket’s back, just below her left shoulder blade, was a round hole that would have admitted the shaft of a pencil. The jacket’s lining had been red once, but now it was black, stiff and shining with dried blood. With the jacket swaying on the end of his stick, he went looking for water.

He never washed the jacket; in its left pocket he found nearly an ounce of cocaine, carefully wrapped in plastic and surgical tape. The right pocket held fifteen ampules of Megacillin-D and a ten-inch horn-handled switchblade. The antibiotic was worth twice its weight in cocaine.

He drove the knife hilt-deep into a rotten stump passed over by the Jungle’s wood-gatherers and hung the jacket there, the flies circling it as he walked away.

That night, in a bar with a corrugated iron roof, waiting for one of the “lawyers” who worked passages through the cordon, he tried his first ASP machine. It was huge, all chrome and neon, and the owner was very proud of it; he had helped hijack the truck himself.

If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift in the paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift away from the Lascaux/ Gutenberg tradition of a pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this newer technology, with its promise of discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction of the full range of sensory perception?

—Rosebuck and Pierhal,

Recent American History: A Systems View.

~ * ~

Fast forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape—

—into her body. European sunlight. Streets of a strange city.

Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust...

—and the smell of dust.

Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasn’t met you yet; you’re hardly out of Texas) at the gray monument, the horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl up and circle—

—and static takes love’s body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isn’t there. And the tape ends.

~ * ~

The inducer’s light is burning now.

Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram that has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know—stolen credit cards—a burned-out suburb—planetary conjunctions of a stranger—a tank burning on a highway—a flat packet of drugs—a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.

Thinking: We’re each other’s fragments, and was it always this way? That instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape—is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there?

She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was the black face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.

But each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered, but delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that might mean.

~ * ~

William Gibson

n 1999,
The Guardian
called William Gibson “probably the most important novelist of the past two decades.” The undisputed father of the cyberpunk genre, having inspiring legions of authors, artists, and musicians from U2 to Sonic Youth, Gibson also teamed up with Bruce Sterling to help found steampunk with
The Difference Engine,
which remains the genre’s best-known work. His debut novel,
Neuromancer,
was the first ever to win science fiction’s “triple crown”—the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards—and by 2007 had sold more than 6.5 million copies, as well as been named one of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923 by
Time
magazine. He has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and awarded numerous honorary doctorates.

Yet to call William Gibson a science fiction author, or an author at all, is to fundamentally miss the point. Though prose is his medium, Gibson is a cultural lightning rod. Like many of the authors in this collection, he can be credited with predicting any number of modern conventions (such as the rise of reality television). Yet Gibson did not merely predict. Instead, the wild imagination and tremendous popularity of his work at a crucial time in the development of the Internet and Internet culture ran so deep as to make the jump from prediction to causation, in fact shaping the very future he sought to envision. Terms like
cyberspace, netsurfing, jacking in, ICE,
and
neural implants,
as well as concepts from cybersex and online environments to meatpuppets and the matrix—all were initially introduced by Gibson. In envisioning the Internet and the information age, he gave us a language and iconography with which to express ourselves, and the digital world we know is a direct outgrowth of his art.

And he did it all without a modem or email address, on a typewriter from 1927.

In “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” the first story he ever finished, Gibson’s now-famous themes are already firmly in place, a dystopia of sprawling high-tech slums and recorded stimulus. But no one, least of all Gibson, could ever have predicted the indelible mark his tentative efforts would leave on modern society.

Looking back, what do you think still works well in this story? Why?

This was not only the first story I published, but the first I completed. I literally hadn’t yet learned how to move a character through simple narrative space. That resulted in the invention of the memory-recording technology, but it also forced me to work with the character’s interiority. The capacity for written depiction of character-interiority is what distinguishes prose fiction from plays, screenplays, etc. So my lack of skill forced me to the core of prose, so to speak.

What I’m most aware of when look over this today is the hyper-specific focus on objects. I don’t know what that’s about. It’s still a characteristic of my writing. I just don’t know any other way to do it.

If you were writing this today, what would you do differently? What are the story’s weaknesses, and how would you change them?