Transcendence (3 page)

He knows better than to stop running at the first hint of safety. A mobile hostile zone can sometimes cover a dozen square blocks, more when the police face real, organized resistance, terrorists, or NKK corporate-saboteur agents. But because the greyout is fading, this has to be the edge of the Zone’s perimeter.

They zigzag a few more streets away, moving in whichever direction the greyout fades most, and finally emerge into the relative safety of the locks-and-dams. Leg-muscles burning, Jonathan slows to a fast walk while they descend a muddy slope. Soon they reach a path, its dirt packed like stone, and stroll silently beside one another to a concrete bridge spanning a sheltered canal off the Mississippi. The only info-icons here identify shoals beneath the water, gas lines just beneath the soil, or products the viewer should buy.

Jonathan blocks the icons and shuts down all his subscription splices, replacing them with a personal comm channel. His real surroundings slide back together in his vision as the girl’s 3VRD appears before him; by default, he automatically projected his own image and some lightly fictional metadata icons when he spoke to her.

She looks old, maybe eighteen, and wears a gown of strange—almost retro, if it had ever been a style—billowy lace that conceals and reveals at the same time. Her long hair is pale red, sparkling with programmed sunshine, and her eyes are big and blue. Her skin is porcelain white. She projects absolutely no data-cloud, keeping the focus of conversation on her rather than her metadata. Politely, Jonathan avoids looking beneath her edits at her physical presence so near him. From memory he knows she really has dull hair and squinting eyes, and is dressed in a standard coverall.

He breathes deeply to slow his panting. Around them, thick trees stand tall but leafless, many of them stripped of branches, graffitied, carved, scorched. Late September in Minneapolis. The water below reeks of sewage and oil, shining dully in the paling light. Mists gather along the trash-lined shores and roll gently along the nearly motionless water. In the distance, beyond the muddy bank above them and many blocks away, the mobile hostile zone screams and booms and rattles to crescendo in the heart of Old Downtown.

“
You were so brave back there,” the girl says.

Jonathan feels his cheeks flush; luckily, the programmed 3VRD projection of himself remains as stone-faced and calm as ever, not revealing such childish reactions. With a quiet gasp, he realizes he’s still holding her hand, but he can’t let go now without letting her know she scares the hell out of him.

“
Well,” he begins, “you were just lying there like someone feed-rapt. I couldn’t leave you for the beatcoats to find, could I? They’re sick bastards.”

The girl’s 3VRD smiles: So she uses an interactive 3VRD. He kicks in his own interactive program to show her that he, too, understands how to use all the tricks of his card to edit his world. Now he has to be careful to suppress any display of emotion lest his 3VRD betray him.

“
Modest boy. What’s your name?”

“
Jon.”

“
I’m Charity.” Her 3VRD gains the accompaniment of soft music that Jonathan can’t quite discern and swirling sheets of color-changing silk. More than that, the landscape she surrounds herself becomes a time-updated revision of the actual one around them.

Jonathan is awed. Never before has he met anyone who has gone to such trouble programming her commcard and 3VRD, and almost never has he come across a person who did a real-time, rolling landscape overlay for a simple conversation. People usually project images of themselves, and sometimes they include a basic landscape edit: a colorful backdrop, a horse they’re riding, stars, whatever. But interactive landscape editing takes a lot of processing power and a decent program to make it look flawless, especially when the observer is in close proximity to the real thing, which requires extra processing for triangulation, shadows, and so forth. Jonathan appreciates this kind of mind.

They begin to walk across the bridge, now seen as through her eyes as a gracious wooden span over a trickling stream. The trees fill out, displaying fall colors. Tropical birds flit from branch to branch, chirping. Jonathan peeks beneath the surface and sees that she is accomplishing most of this simply by using off-the-shelf applets and code snippets to run highlights and adaptive overlays, but supremely integrated: The birds and leaves are probably called from a databank of stock images then slipped over reality like gauze, stretched to fit and moving to remain fixed on the moving landscape. A few swirls on the murk below and it comes alive with a school of rainbow trout. Paste a nineteenth century covered bridge over the real one, and suddenly it’s no longer a decaying stretch of concrete. But—though most of this is open-source, editing like this for an interactive overlay costs big.

“
Do you love beautiful things, Jon? I do, I love beautiful things and romantic people. Are you a romantic person?”

Again, she doesn’t wait for Jonathan’s reply before she continues. “I am. Romance is what keeps a woman alive.” Jonathan feels a little uncomfortable now.

They continue walking hand-in-hand. “If you are to be my loverboy, Jonny, you need to remember that. Today you’re my hero. But tomorrow you need to prove your love in other ways, true ways, Jon. Don’t forget.”

Jonathan stumbles over a pothole in the bridge. At its edge, a rusted steel reinforcement bar snags the cuff of his pants.
Loverboy?
he wonders. Amorous meetings among anonymous strangers are common in Jonathan’s world, even among the unenfranchised who can tweak a program’s security settings, but it has never happened to him intheflesh before, only in long-distance virtual reality.
Loverboy
. The word evokes nostalgic images of érase, which triggers that idiotic program, and he has to fight to put down the damn thing before it loads. His cheeks burn, and he knows—too late—that even his stoic 3VRD is revealing a blaze of emotions.

“
Look for me tomorrow,” she says with a sly grin. The soft hand in his squeezes once, firm and warm.

“
If you find me, we’ll talk more.” Her 3VRD disappears and she is gone, even intheflesh. Jonathan realizes he hadn’t even noticed her physical departure. Her 3VRD had been holding his hand. Now that was more than open-source feed. It takes some serious programming to fool Jonathan.

So her 3VRD also feeds full fivesen
– all five senses. His blackcard receives fivesen, but only his blackcard, since he is too young to buy a regulation full-sensory card. She must have known. She had tricked the feeble AI of his blackcard into waking up without his even being aware of it.

Once more, he is fascinated and awed by this Charity. And a little afraid of what it means to have his blackcard running again.

“
Charity,” he says aloud, forming the word carefully on his lips. His heart pounds and vessels rush in his ears.

“
Tomorrow, don’t forget,” her disembodied voice whispers. The overlaid landscape begins to fade as she moves beyond the range of unassisted personal-comms. Again, the city crashes down around him, dark and damaged.

He fires back up his revmetal in audio-only and re-splices the
Lone Ship Bounty
previews. Then he closes his eyes and mentally reaches out for a public server. He finds one whose security is easy to circumvent. Seconds later, by calling up a trace of Charity’s personal comm channel from when their cards did the virtual handshake and exchanged tokens, by then sorting through the city’s virtual netways like a coiled mass of shifting serpents in his net-landscape, he matches the trace with her ID card. Now he taps into traces of her public channel, following data residues from purchases and edits along converging netways, riding an electronic raft through tubular datastreams, tracking her warmest trails from data-shop to library to other peoples’ cards until finally he touches a line of hot feedback and opens a comm channel to it.

By tapping—illegally, but that’s of no concern to him—into the city’s Net and its unsecured feed/feedback routers while keeping a lock on her, Jonathan sees Charity’s 3VRD as alive as when she stood beside him. She appears to stand on the bridge of the
Bounty
, revmetal drowning out her soft music. She also floats disembodied against the tangle of city netways like a gem among necklaces. Three sets of visual input overlay one another, yet he has picked up the trace-cracking as easily as if he’d never knocked it off during the weeks of treatment. This is what a blackcard allows him to do; no security system he has ever encountered can resist his efforts; no encryption algorithm is opaque to him when assisted by his personal AI, this extension of his brain. Jonathan’s mind staggers with the blazing delight of once again playing the landscapes, using “secured” hardware and cracking open private information-channels as if they were his own. Charity virtually takes his hand.

“
Very good boy,” Charity says, smiling at him, glowing as before.

In response, Jonathan bends at the waist and turns over her white hand. Gently, he places a kiss, as guys do in the shows he suspects this girl likes.

“
Tomorrow,” she says, and—
snap
—she’s gone in a swirl of laughter. Her image flickers and fades, erasing all her metadata traces in an instant.

Uncharacteristically, Jonathan struts across the bridge. He hadn’t seen Charity leave him intheflesh. He hadn’t sensed his illicit blackcard waking up. He hadn’t let go of her hand, yet she’d gone. He has reopened CityNet and truly stoked his headcards again.

It’s been a long time since anything or anyone made Jonathan forget about keeping an eye on all realities. Before long, he realizes he’s reached his high-walled neighborhood.

With something like joy, Jonathan Sombrio strides along a sidewalk that leads to his house. He smiles when he realizes his apprehension has faded. Going home isn’t as scary as he had expected now that there’s something to look forward to tomorrow.

He lays his fingers against the reader and the metal gate creaks open a bit. Jonathan laughs, pushing open the door, staring up into the coils of razor-wire that embroider the wall. Because he’s using a visual overlay instead of a splice, the wire appears softened by stars and the image of the Captain, who tramps across the lunar landscape.

A voice screamed in Hardman Nadir’s head, waking him where the thunder of battle couldn’t. Bombs meant nothing to him anymore; but voices . . . that was different.

“
Piece of shit, Nadir, what the hell you doing?” The Boss’ 3VRD stood behind Nadir’s closed eyelids as if Nadir’s eyes were open and the sky were red as blood. Not even sleep was free of invasion.

“
Firefight?” Nadir asked in voice-only. He didn’t go to the effort to project his own 3VRD to Boss Jhishra.

“‘
Firefight?’” the 3VRD howled, yet its face remained calm and wise-looking. Layers of brass and colored ribbons coated the tan uniform. Behind the boss pulsed the pale red of blood coursing through Nadir’s vessels.

Jhishra growled. “Are you deaf?”

Nadir listened carefully and, indeed, a firefight was in progress. Bombs concussed the ground beneath him, jangling his joints. Falling sand peppered the exposed skin on his arms and face and neck. The unit’s electromagnetic matter-accelerator rifles—EMMAs for short—were busily chopping up the enemy, each
crack-thup
the measure of a man’s pain.

Years prior, Nadir had learned how to keep himself from going insane during a bombardment. The Marshall Islands had taught him that, among other things. In the time between then and now, he had also learned how to forget the past.

With eyes closed, Nadir listened carefully to gauge the weapons setting his men were using. Most of them were going full-auto at ten cycles per second, so their targets had to be either lightly armored or at long range. An EMMA at that setting fired—each second—ten aerodynamic 2.2mm dielectric-ceramic rounds at a velocity of 1100 meters per second.

“
You still sleeping, you piece of shit?” Jhishra screamed. Yet the heroic figure appeared calm and collected.

Nadir paid no attention to his boss. He had more important things on his mind. By now, he had learned to ignore the man, who had grown more and more hysterical as this four-month operation progressed. Nadir couldn’t respect a commander who lost control even though his unit was still better than ninety percent survived.

“
Nik at eleven o’clock!” one of the men called to another.

The ditch he lay in, an old bomb-crater, sounded as if it were engulfed in a storm. Every second, hundreds of electric
cracks
sounded simultaneously with
thups
as projectiles left the plastic barrels.
Crack-thup
like rain, like a downpour. Occasionally, Nadir discerned nearby explosions. Enemy mortars.