Versim (16 page)

“You’re no Voxyprog lackey. Who do you work for?”

“EA.”

“Thought so. So you and the Vox are working together like good buddies? When did that start happening?” Before she could answer, he asked, “Did you reset her?”

“No time.” She reached up and touched his cheek. “It’s true what they say about you …”

“I never fail to please.”

She snaked her fingers under his shirt to caress his Skinsuit. “We’re dampened, of course.” She opened her mouth and breathed deep. She was definitely on something.

He nodded, his HUD clearly showing no viewers or riders of any type were watching. “I can see that.” He extricated himself from her, but only slightly. “What does my contract have to do with EA trying to kill a host? They’re forcing me to wake her one way or another.”

She looked like she might try to dissemble. Instead, she raised her eyebrows, as if it didn’t matter now if she told him. “That’s been the plan all along, Specialist Cole. It’s just taken this long for all the players to be organized. That’s all I know. They put you under their thumb so that you would do what was necessary, no matter what. You’re contract to do as requested is now about that moment Director Preston entered your life.”

“EA made me sign that contract to keep my promise because of her?”

“She’s had plans for you since the beginning?”

Hark saw it all come into focus. Hark was a pet project of Miesha Preston’s. “And EA’s backing her.”

 
“You’re on script. Now, stay on script.”

“Why? I’ll destroy the entire V.”

She moved close now, pressing her pelvis against his, wrapping one leg around his. “We know.”

“Will you do something for me?” he asked, exasperated.

“For you?” She ran her hand up his abdominals. “Anything.”

“Tell them to evacuate. I told the Vox, but they laughed at me.”

She grinned as if he’d asked her to turn to gold. “Of course.”

He snatched her hand away and with his other grabbed her chin. “I’m serious. Tell me you’ll do it.”

She slapped him hard, as if she were performing. But she wasn’t, which meant she liked that sort of thing. He let the sting linger.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I promise I’ll give them your message. Now show me why you’re so special,
Specialist
Cole, so a girl can go back with a story. You’re safe for a few hours, at least, now. Specialist Paratore is out of the picture, and you’ve dispatched those two goons. I was sent as a cursory gesture to try. But I failed too.” She winked.

He kissed her and lifted her off the ground and considered taking a few minutes for some critical stress release. Instead, he hoped a kiss would make a big enough impression so that she’d deliver his message. Then he set her down leaving her with a smile.

25

He tried to ignore the lost opportunity up stairs as he checked that his Blaster and Kit were in the bag on Frankie’s back. Celia re-wrapped a wide-brimmed sunhat with a shawl to cover the sides of her face, while glaring at him. The lobby was busy, as usual. The lavender perfume of the EA agent sent to awaken Celia also still lingered. He could feel the soft skin of her neck against his.

One more fan who might help …

He led his small crew into a bright, summer morning. They were assaulted by the sounds and smells of the city in a wash of life that made all three pause. He guessed they probably only had a few hours before Miesha’s and Ervé’s non-standard narrative insertions began to surface. Only a few hours for him to convince Miesha to change her mind before he had to make some hard decisions.

“Where we going?” Frankie asked. He grinned now, as happy as can be, his brain obviously purring with the proper lubrication.
 

Binda eyed Hark, as if she suspected what he’d done in those ten minutes he’d been upstairs. Even though she was wrong, her frown was on display for everyone to see.

Celia kept quiet about what she’d seen before she’d rushed out of the room. The violence was enough to reinforce the seriousness of her situation. And she’d been silent ever since. She looked at Hark once, as if he were the killer she should fear.

Those two thugs he’d dispatched had also been Voxyprog employees, so they’d have the best care. And since they were only immersed for a few minutes, their cognitive architecture would be intact. But each had stared death in the face. It was rumored that no matter how well the technicians scrubbed you, a part of that experience lingered. Death in-V, some say, is so real that one can never truly come back from it. The immediacy of knowing you will be destroyed shakes people to their cores. The existential immediacy cannot be erased. Hark had never died, not once, in a Rend-V. And he didn’t plan to start today.

“So?” Frankie said.

“The Mediaplex.”

“Sweet!”
 

Even Binda lightened with the sort of half smile that said she wasn’t finished sulking.

Celia snorted and began walking north. “I know where it is.” Hark had expected her to at least demand an explanation.

He let the others start walking. He trailed behind them a few steps, his HUD scanning for potential threats. Hark could read in Celia’s downcast eyes that she was slowly awakening to the reality of her situation. But she would take the final steps alone, parachute in a tense hand. The Mediaplex would be his best leverage. If the authorities wanted to ignore him, then he’d stick the truth in everyone’s faces and force them to act.
 

A few blocks away, they crossed Broadway and headed east toward Sixth Avenue. The bobbing heads of pedestrian traffic were still as dense as in Times Square, but the shift away from entertainment to business establishments allowed a subtle diminishment of sensory assault.
 

Hark walked slowly, relieved he had some time to kill before making his move. Hark wanted to wait until Celia was more awake before going to the Mediaplex. This provided ample opportunity for his conscience to shake a rattle inside his head. Without Magdalena, he continued an endless dialog with himself.

When you going to retire from all this killing, bud?
Retire before you die in-V?

He had been asking himself this question for the last twenty-five years. Twenty-five years of constant activity in the Rend-Vs—longer than any other continually working specialist without a death scrub on his sheet.
 

You were only allowed to die three times, the absolute ceiling for someone to come out sane. He had experienced close calls, but never seen the lights go out, as they say. Still, on lonely missions, or long ones, or when forced to make the hard decisions that ended someone’s life, he would stop and ask himself why he didn’t retire.
 

Krista said that with his skills he could transition to the Inspector Corps or use them to understanding narrative in a variety of other ways. Twenty-five years was a long time. And retirement wasn’t permanent. Take time off, he chided himself. Choose a Rend-V, one of the private productions run for employees and celebrities. Tend your garden. Read a book or two. Write a novel in secret.

Frankie stopped at a street vendor to buy a fruit drink in a glass container with a round, metal top that made a
popping
sound when it came off. Celia and Binda were actually speaking politely to each other. Hark could hear both their voices through the din. Celia was asking what Binda’s “story” was, with no idea how ironic the question was. We’re all characters in a grand drama, he wanted to remind them … that could end in a day or two.

Hark ran a finger over the back of his hand, bare because his suit had retreated up his arm and under the sleeve. He checked his neck. The buttons of his funky, wide-collared shirt were all the way to the top, as if he were a disco librarian. He smoothed out the fabric of his denim pants. He was just like everyone else in the city.

Alive
, as Krista would remind him.

They began walking again, four individuals swallowed in a sea of others. Hark enjoyed the old-world feel of these pre-Rupture environments. He could understand why Binda had come. Life was simpler,
realer
, if that were possible.
 

He paused before a wide glass window of a first-floor retailer. Rows of analog books dominated the window display. These were multicolored objects with crisp paper inside them and actual bindings. Each one was a ticket to prison in his world. Or used to be. Only collectors and fetishists had them now. Novels were responsible for the spread of bleedover. Books, the great evil. The original mechanism to manipulate a mind. The generators of the unreal. Crucibles of sorcery.

The others stopped, as well.

Frankie saw Hark staring and giggled. “Want to go inside and pick up a trashy romance novel? Maybe one with Fabio on the cover?”

Hark chuckled at that tiny bit of versim minutiae. Some Sersavant narrative expert had dropped the buff, long-haired model, Fabio Lanzoni, into this world. Hark knew who he was because he’d seen the cover model on a few of his sister’s illegal texts. She loved novels too. They would have shared a smile over Frankie’s well-timed quip.

“I think that’s exactly what you want,” Hark said, opening the door. “You’d probably like a poster of him for your bedroom.”

“What?” Frankie said, a look of mock confusion crossing his face. “I like ladies, dude.”
 

“I wouldn’t mind browsing,” Binda said.

Celia hurried in first, probably to find an empty corner where she could hide.

“Stay with her,” Hark said to Frankie. “And give me that.”

He grabbed the bag and slung it over a shoulder.

“I’m on it,” Frankie said, and raced after Celia. “On it like a magnet.”

Binda grinned at Hark. “You hooked on forbidden knowledge, Mr. Specialist?”

“Aren’t we all?”

Binda entered the bookstore and headed for the new releases.

Hark breathed in the old smell that always accompanied new books, something the hackers had been very careful to code for narrative junkies like him. Many of them visited retros for the simple experience of browsing in a bookstore. In fact, Hark could bet there were a number of live immersed customers here, some awake, some asleep, enjoying themselves in such a way that was impossible in the present. Most books in here were coded elements taken from reality and given new life—legal life. Fiction dominated, of course. But he knew some books had been generated within the V. Constructed or immersed persons had written the texts, had them published, and presented them within the rendered world. His sister valued these texts as unique arenas of bleedover lore. She claimed the miraculous happened because of such objects.
 

Hark wandered, at home among the aisles, each one with a placard defining the genre: Science Fiction and Fantasy were lumped together. Horror had its own small area. Mystery and Romance competed for its own aisle. True Crime, Westerns, Military Fiction, even Gay and Lesbian—they all had designated shelf space.
 

He stepped out of the way of a large woman with a basket full of books.
 

She eyed him as if she recognized him. But she said nothing. Breaking versim could get you yanked. She stopped in the Romance section, dove down to Paranormal, and began perusing books with salacious covers of beautiful beasts with fangs and claws, all of whom looked ready to get busy on the first date.

After this … job, Hark told himself, I’m going retire. I want to watch all the old
Star Treks
, from episode one, all the way through. From the Original Series, to
Next Generation
, to the
Enterprise
. All of them in a marathon session. Maybe try my hand at writing some science fiction, or maybe some epic poetry. Go back to the source from where it all began. Channel my inner Virgil:
Arms, and the man, I sing …

He interrupted his recital before a large wall of mainstream novels. These were granted the title of Fiction, as if they didn’t dare adhere to any type of specific genre-like rules. That was bullshit, of course. Many of them focused on their themes in ways that could be structurally and conceptually mapped. For a mundane world full of middle-class domestic scenarios to even exist, V-Theory demanded this rigor.
 

Hark ran his fingers along the different spines. He wanted time away from his current life to try his hand at one of these, but maybe with a bit of the fun stuff from the wilder genres. The huge teams who put together the dramas of the Rend-Vs numbered in the thousands. Those were just the composers (not writers, a label that was never used, except as slang). You still had producers, tech support, the programming teams of hackers, the hosts, etc., and, of course, the directors.
 

But in each one of these actual, physical books—written with just words—were the germs that opened the minds of the psychics who would later host such worlds for others to experience. People like Celia, he reminded himself, and me, and Krista, all with minds forever altered because of the power of narrative over our lives. As a top-ranking specialist, Hark was an acknowledged expert imagineer. His mind was a thing of beauty. The cognitive architecture that allowed hosts to render worlds or specialists to immerse over and over again made him a prized commodity. He’d been an actor for too long.
 

One writer was all it took to create a novel.

One novel was all it took to start a revolution.

Hark felt his hearts beat harder in his chest. Usually Magdalena would douse him with something to take the edge off. But, he wasn’t wearing his Kit on his back (that would look too weird in a retro Rend-V), and he wasn’t in the mood to call up the proper menu to find the proper command to give himself a shot from his internal synth glands. Too many things to remember.
 

This was no game, no training mission, no fun in the sun. He needed to be sharp.

He’d made a promise. He’d been contracted to keep it. And now he had to.

Duty, Hark, duty, he reminded himself. Without it … you’re an asshole who kills to entertain. Think about books after you’re done. And everyone goes to sleep happy, knowing they’ll wake up the next morning. Then you can think about the books you love to read and what they do for you. Your mind is especially wired to appreciate them. After this job, you can settle down and enjoy yourself.