Virtually True (12 page)

Wrist-top peeps. De Bris calling.

“Hello, True.” True sees his friend’s eyes widen. “What happened to your face? You look like hell.”

“Somebody didn’t like what I reported.”

“If you’re covering the theater, you might consider giving more favorable reviews. You look awful.”

“Thanks.”

“Why don’t you alter your image through the telelink? That way no one will know you’ve been beaten up.”

“Why should I?”

De Bris is flummoxed. “I don’t know. Just a habit, I guess. Look. I’ve some information for you.”

“I’d say shoot, but given where I live, just tell me.”

“Right after we got off the phone, I was performing an autopsy on a guy who died on the operating table.”

“So?”

De Bris plunks himself in the forehead with his palm, as if True’s brain is denser than rush-hour traffic. “You used to be a lot sharper.”

“Spare me the critique.”

“Okay, okay. These days, it’s standard OR procedure to use microcameras, so I was actually able to pull one out before it could dissolve.”

True’s interest is piqued.

“And sure enough,” de Bris continues, “it was beginning to degrade, but I extracted enough to run some tests. It’s some pretty amazing stuff, True. Durable as all hell. I mean, you couldn’t crush it with a twenty-ton reactor or melt it with a supernova. Fuck. Even a nuclear explosion might not do it. But like Sampson being vulnerable to scissors, phaseplast has an Achilles’ heel.”

“Historical figures, mixed metaphors, what’s next?”

De Bris ignores him. “I analyzed the molecular structure. Know what I found?”

“That TNT dissolves phaseplast?”

“No, uh, well, yeah. That, and certain elements in blood. How did you know?”

“Educated guess. I’m pretty sure the shell of that missile was phaseplast. Nothing else fits.”

“I agree.”

“This helps narrow the search. But I’d imagine there’s a lot of this stuff lying around.”

“No. I called MedTekton. Turns out an old medical school friend of mine works for them. She told me some stuff, strictly confidential, so it’s on background. Okay?”

“Go ahead.”

“This company’s jonesing for secrecy, keeps tracks of every device it sends out. Employees sign secrecy oaths. Hospitals failing to keep track of every single microcamera are cut off. Can’t get them. Since insurance companies demand they be used, and MedTekton is the sole manufacturer, they get away with it. As far as she knows, the company’s lost track of maybe ten of these cameras in five years.”

“Not enough to construct a missile shell with.”

“Right.”

“Is it possible someone reverse-engineered one of them, figured out how to make phaseplast that way?”

“Nope.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“Whoever designed this stuff attached an extra molecule to it. Makes analysis impossible. As soon as I started to reverse-engineer, the molecule ran wild and the plastic disintegrated.”

“I take it there’s no more phaseplast.”

“All gone.”

“That means MedTekton must be supplying phaseplast directly to some weapons manufacturer. But to whom?”

De Bris blows his nose. “Damn allergies. Did you know that all those genetically altered fruits and vegetables they’ve cultivated have spawned whole new viruses and microbes? Everybody I know is sick. The government says its tests don’t show any correlation. Bureaucratic fuckers!” He sniffles. “I’ve got to go. I’ve already done enough work for you for one day.”

True’s absorbed in thought. There’s only one way to find out where phaseplast is ending up, and that means tripping through Cyberia. There are many risks, none more so than tipping off MedTekton. Why is he subjecting himself to this? It’s suicide, and there are waves of ways of accomplishing that. Heroes—the ultimate sacrificials; unrequited lovers, loners too, passing notes soaked in self-pity; the condemned, their free will eradicated by illness or internal strife, who orchestrate their own destruction. True’s moons are aligned with theirs. When he admitted to Aslam he wasn’t the person he once was, it was the last time, perhaps, he was honest with himself.

No. Nothing is worth going back there. Aslam never believed in justice anyway. Whatever that computer model calculated is wrong. True’s staying put in reality, where things are as they seem. No way he’ll risk dying in the limitless expanse of virtual worlds. If he has to die, he wants it to be a tangible death. A searing laser wound, an explosion, a missile, a knife slicing skin.

True lets his home entertainment system carry him away. He lies down on his couch and program surfs—game shows, talk shows, dramas, re-runs, re-reruns, news, sports, commercials, commercials, commercials, more re-runs, re-runs, re-runs—never settling on one show long enough to get hooked. The evening is husked away. Now it’s 1 a.m. And True’s able to pull away from entertainment’s grasp. He switches on the news, skims international, American national, Luzonian local. But he doesn’t see any of the stories he filmed earlier. Nothing on the refugee camp or raffling virginity.

True checks his messages. One from Rush beeped in hours ago.

“Why don’t you ever pick up, dammit? You’re really in deep shit now. Get over here ten sharp in the a.m. This order’s not just coming from me, but from the network board. I should have never listened to you. You fucked up—
again
—and I bet you don’t even know how. You’re a disgrace, Ailey, a disgrace to fucking test tube technology.”

True’s screen turns to icy static.

What
did
he do? The last few days have sucked precious moments from his life—Aslam’s death, the afternoon at the morgue, Bong Bong’s assault and battery, and now he’s about to lose his job, left to face an idle life at home, living off government largesse, plugged into the virtual void to stem the tide of boredom.

He decides to act professional to the end. Turns on the latest earthquake news. “Live from what’s left of Tokyo.” Reiner’s image and voice clear and strong. But True detects exhaustion, which even phony backdrops and digitized enhancements can’t cover. Reiner announces she’s going to interview an aid worker: Eden Sakura.

True watches the interview, and when it’s over, cues it up, watches it again. And again. Over and over until her words are etched into his memory.

He freeze-frames her, staring, studying Sakura. Her aqua-emerald eyes, tiger’s eye hair. Age sits well, only rounds out her features, imbuing her with wisdom and magic.

True sits by the screen, touching it, tracing her face with his fingers, reaching out to her, his wife.

CHAPTER 8

Seeing Eden has disconcerted True, brought him back to the good old bad days of commitment. It was Eden who introduced him to the most interpersonal of virtual reality worlds. She was a researcher for an American R & D firm and True was a known samurai of hyperspace. It was logical for Eden to seek him out as a technical consultant.

True once knew a woman whose sense of direction was so keen she could, in a city she’d never before visited, effortlessly find her way, using buildings as reference points, made possible by a mere glance at an aerial postcard. This was how True functioned in the narrow void separating life and information. He couldn’t explain his sharp sense of virtual-direction: it was innate—you might as well have asked him how he breathes. Instinct, body chemistry, luck of the DNA draw?

Eden’s software programs overwhelmed him, and as he floated though these virtual worlds, pedaling through software designed to react with mere words, nuances of speech or thoughts, the program extrapolated from these clues a whole universe. The software learned from him, produced tailor-made worlds that, in time, grew more vivid.

True remembers flipping through aching beauty, skies layered with crystalline stars, his body touched by wisps of energy, his eyes filled with brilliant colors, patterns. Able to interact with fantastical people, shoot up strands of a virtual net, skim along with the notes from Charlie Parker’s saxophone, negotiate chord changes, his hair whipped by wind, scream up a melodic mountaintop, glide to the bottom on a flurry of notes. In space, inside time, flowing through a cerebral vortex of melody.

Flashback
. Blink.
Flashback
. He’s working with Eden, the neutral blue walls of her lab suffocating.

“Intense, huh?”  She’s seen it all, sees it all, watches True’s virtual activities through a monitor. “The most intense trip.”

“Ever. Ever.” True’s gasping, grasping.

“I’ve never seen one so intense. True. You are intense.”

“True.”

“Your pulse is too quick. Your body temperature is forty-one centigrade. You have to come down.”

“No body. Nobody.” True remembers now.

“What do you remember?”

“You read my mind.”

“I listened to your words. You want to make love to me.”

“Yes.”

Then Eden’s voice, far away this time, calling to him from somewhere inside. “True, you have to let go, you have to come back to reality. You’ll burn out. I’m unhooking you.”

“No! No!”

“You’re going supernova!”

“N-o—”

              True

                     lies

                         in a puddle of his own body water, hyperventilating, a helmet squeezing his ears against his head. The room is dark, the floors coated with crumbs and dirt, the air stale. He rips off the VR helmet, flings it violently to the side.

Eden’s holding a plastic drinking straw. “This is the last straw, True. I mean it.” She curves over him and True glimpses a nipple, or a birthmark, can’t take his eyes off her breasts. Soft, pillowy, pure and white and fragrant like freshly scented sheets.

“See something you like, mister?”

“This, this here is the last straw?” He grasps it in his hand. “Meaning you won’t stand for any more of this? Or is this just the last straw in the apartment?”

“It’s a game.” She straddles his chest as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to be doing. “And I love games.” Takes his hand, kisses his fingers, rubs them along supple lips. “You dreamed of this, of me. I saw it.”

Her body heats when they kiss, her skin bathwater rosy. Peels her dress away, revealing Eden, the side not her intellect. Sensuous. Magnetic. Electric, eclectic. They love into tomorrow’s morning.

After he’s not sure it wasn’t a virtual adventure in reality. Soon their limbs, minds, and hearts intertwined. They shared residence. Married. Carried on with careers. But True began to spend more time in the witches’ brew Eden concocted, and their marriage fragmented. He could not give up floating freely through paradise, even when Eden threatened to leave him, then did. And as True’s mind and creativity withered, he found himself even less able to separate reality from synthetic reality.

One moment he was lazing through space, rolling in freshly mowed grass, the next he was being suspended by the network for absenteeism. Eden slammed the door, leaving the shambles of his life in shambles. True was walking through a tangy-scented garden. Surfing a killer wave in Hawaii. Making love to Eden, lips brushing, but Eden was gone now, had left him, and now it was not Eden but another woman, her skin creamy chocolate. He pulled her hair, and beads and bangles splattered rain on a tin shanty roof and he was in bed under that roof with her, thrusting, driving his pelvis into her, trying to hurt her, to inflict pain because she left him.