Alien Landscapes 2

Collaborators

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta

Some writers like to keep their ideas close to their chest, as if superstitious that the Muse will abandon them if they divulge any secrets. I, on the other hand, love to brainstorm and bounce crazy ideas back and forth with someone who also has a hyperactive imagination. In my career, I have taken on many collaborative projects; as of this writing, I have written novels with Brian Herbert, Doug Beason, Dean Koontz, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, John Betancourt, and my wife Rebecca Moesta, with whom I wrote this story.

Obviously, something’s working there. This story takes the collaboration concept about as far as we could imagine.

Tara held the second cable in her hand as she crept behind her husband in the dim light of the den; but he was already jacked in, impervious to all distractions.

Chandler lay slouched back in his battered college-salvage chair like a marionette with severed strings, his face slack, eyes REMing behind the translucent sheaths of his lids as he wrestled with his commissioned VR art. From his sighs, fidgety spasms, and general restlessness, she could tell he was blocked again.

Chandler always kept his art to himself, reluctant to talk about it until he finished, even when she offered herself as a soundingboard for ideas. But this time Tara would surprise him—or piss him off. Either way, she hoped Chandler would get out from under the creative block that had been smothering him. If she could just help him get over the hump . . .

Without his knowledge, Tara had installed the black-market splitter behind the wall plate. Now she could jack into the same data stream and help him directly, a true meeting of minds.

She stared at the viper-prongs of the cable in her hand, then mounted it in the socket at the base of her skull. Still moving quietly, she pried off the wall plate and squinted to see the bright silver end of the splitter’s input port, a shunt piggybacked onto the main cable. She had never used a splitter before, never even
seen
one. But Fizzwilly had promised it would work.

Chandler’s fingers twitched on the worn maroon fabric of the overstuffed chair, as if searching for something to clench.

By jacking in, Tara could see what was bugging him, help him work through the problem. She had purchased the illegal device from her former friend Fizzwilly, who was technically still on the run. It was still prototype hardware, he said, not completely certified, but that didn’t mean the splitter wasn’t useful. She decided to take the risk, if only to get closer to her husband.

Chandler, unaware of her presence in the dim workroom, continued breathing fast and shallow, butterfly wings in his lungs. His eyes looked sunken, lost in a nest of shadows, and his milky skin seemed paler than usual. His red-gold hair hung lank over the interface cable. In her mind, Tara caught a glimpse of what he would look like as an unhappy middle-aged man.

Before marrying Chandler two years before, Tara had spent plenty of time jacked into virtual environments. Her friends, “the wrong crowd,” had sharpened their claws by rerouting legal shipments to illegal chop-shops, altering financial transactions out to many decimal places. Tara had held herself on the fringe, amusing herself by diddling with her own grades and records at the Virtual University, not because she was unable to complete the classes herself, but because she was impatient to begin doing the “real stuff.” She’d had her heart set on a career as an architect or an archaeologist, not as an electronic scam artist.

But when the heat came down and they all got caught, Tara had been stripped of her degree, barred from ever working as anything higher than a grunt at a sprawling architectural firm, and denied all access to genuine archaeological sites; the others stumbled into jail, and Fizzwilly became a fugitive.

Chandler had saved her, dragged her back onto the straight-and-narrow; and now, with her own future as an architect slammed shut in her face, Tara felt like an outsider watching Chandler’s career explode as he created virtual worlds for purchase by anyone rich enough to own a simulation chamber.

But Tara still knew how to find Fizzwilly, and he had gotten the splitter for her. No questions asked.

Right now Chandler needed her. She plugged the second cable into the splitter.

With a sigh, she felt herself being dragged down, vanishing with a virtual echo into a whirlpool where Chandler was working. She would join him in his mind, in his imaginary universe.

#

In Chandler’s world the rain fell, the flowers bloomed, and exotic birds preened their iridescent plumage.

There, and yet not there, Tara’s ghost image stared at his Eden. Sapphire-winged butterflies danced above brilliant orchids. The trees seemed ready to collapse from the weight of foliage so bright and rich it looked lacquered. Droplets of dew sparkled in the sunlight that penetrated the canopy. The sounds of insects and birds and unseen small animals rustling through the underbrush made the silence deeper. Everything seemed perfect, a paradise.

Tara felt like an intruder.

Chandler’s image stood staring up a tall tree, fingering a thick, ropy vine. He appeared to be deep in thought, perplexed.

“So . . . when exactly is the deadline?” she asked, hoping not to startle him too much.

Chandler whirled, dissolving into static at the edges, then snapping back to focus. “Tara! What are you doing here? How—?”

She pressed her lips together as she worked up her nerve. Chandler had always called that her most endearing expression.

“A splitter. Don’t ask where I got it. I just thought you needed a fresh point of view.” She looked away, then crossed her arms over her small breasts. “Let me help, Chandler. I want to do work that
means something
again!”

Chandler stood frozen in his rain forest, as if trying to put together pieces of an invisible puzzle. “But splitters—”

“They’re perfectly safe,” she said, tossing her black hair over her shoulder in an impatient gesture. “Let’s not go on about it, okay? When is your deadline?”

Chandler took a moment to collect his thoughts. Always before, he had created his own work, done his best job, and then looked for a company to purchase his virtual environment for their holo chambers. But this time he had taken an assignment, following a client’s guidelines rather than his own imagination. Constrained and worried about producing to someone else’s specifications, he had stalled.

“The office complex already has the holo rec room constructed for their execs. Occupancy in less than three weeks. If I’m going to make a reputation—”

“Keep your reputation,” Tara said.

“—as a reliable professional instead of a flaky VR
artiste
,” he waggled his fingers, “I’ve got to deliver as promised. But I want it to be spectacular, not just serviceable. This could be my big break.”

Her ghost went to stand next to his, looking at the details of the thick rain forest. “Then let me help you,” she said again. “I might be able to offer a few suggestions. I can take some of the burden.” She raised her eyebrows. “Why don’t you show me around?”

Chandler gave her the ful virtual tour. He started talking about his work, gradually opening up as he pointed at tall weeds, birds, colorful beetles, exotic fungi. She ducked as a bright red macaw swooped low overhead.

“It’s good—I can’t deny that,” he said. “But it’s missing something, and I can’t figure it. More birds? Different flowers? Right now it’s pretty high on the ‘So What?’ factor. I even tried putting traces of a big fire in the distance to evoke a sense of impending loss and suspense, but you can’t see the smoke unless you go up to canopy level, and that’s an advanced option.”

With his fingertip he selected a cluster of white starlike flowers and moved them to a different location near a weathered old rock. “I’ve got all the details right, accurate down to the individual leaves. And I’m planning to add the other sensory modules: a light warm breeze, dampness in the air, various scents. It’s correct by every measure I can make—but something indefinable just doesn’t work.”

Tara chose her words carefully, speaking one step behind the thoughts forming in her head. “Let me check out my first impression. The part that makes the Eden myth so poignant is not the paradise itself, but paradise
lost
.” Her image gestured at the jungle. “This is too perfect. It needs . . . pathos.”

She reached up to call down the virtual image palette, linking to her old archaeology databases and selected a few images to place in the midst of Chandler’s jungle. The old boulder transformed into a moss-covered idol, worn half-smooth by centuries of wind and rain.

“Step back,” she said, and they zoomed out to observe a larger part of the rain forest. Crumbling ziggurats appeared, tall Mayan pyramids hulking in the jungle, the Temple of the Jaguar, remnants of Tiahuanaco. Vines covered immense carved blocks of dark-gray lava stone while animals and birds nested in the cracks. She included no people, only the mysterious relics of a lost and fallen society.

“The mighty have fallen,” she said. “Nature conquers all with the passage of time. Think of that poem ‘Ozymandias’—nothing left of the great conqueror except for a weathered old statue in the middle of the desert. It’s a sense of loss that tugs at your heart strings.” She stopped speaking, self-conscious, turning to look at him. “So what do you think? Are you mad at me?”

“No, I’m not mad.” His face beamed, no longer a reflection of inexorable middle age, but a return to the boyish exuberance that had drawn her to him a few years ago. “You found the missing ingredient.”

Standing together atop an ancient temple, their ghost images looked out across the lush rainforest.

#

With the success of Chandler’s ‘Lost Rainforest’ virtual ecosystem, clients offered him bigger commissions. Tara watched his confidence building, but he kept searching for the best followup assignment.

Chandler had always been driven, focused on his creations to the exclusion of the rest of the world, including her. Though they had been dating while she was messing around with Fizzwilly and friends in the network, Chandler had remained oblivious to her other activities, accepting her as just another student. After her troubles with the other hackers, he had been an anchor for her, staying by her. He had refused to let Tara give up in despair at the loss of her degree.

For two years Chandler kept telling her that she would work her way up in an architectural firm, that her talent would open doors for her even with the stain on her record. For him, she tolerated an uninteresting job as an underling for a large firm designing nuevo deco special-interest malls, though it had no future she could see.

But she wanted more, a task she could buy into with the same enthusiasm that came so naturally to Chandler. She wanted to share his passion, to sweat blood and enjoy it. . . .

Tara spent the morning jacked in, walking through 3-D wireframe displays of design modifications before submitting them to the review board. Dull work. While waiting for Chandler to come home from his luncheon meeting, Tara had cracked open the sliding balcony door, and a breeze drifted in, curling the vertical blinds.

She disconnected when Chandler came home, draping both wrists over his shoulders and tilting her face up to kiss him. She tasted curry and onions, spicy Indian food. A good sign, she thought; the Bengal Dawn cafe was expensive, not a restaurant chosen casually by disinterested clients.

Tara could tell by the excitement on his face that he had already made up his mind.

“It’s the Grand Canyon,” Chandler blurted. “They want me to recreate the Grand Canyon in ‘all its grandeur.’ Not the
real
canyon, but an idealized and enhanced version, the way it should be. All the strata, all the terrain. And it’s big, very big. Not just a slice of rainforest.”

Tara tried to share his excitement but did not quite understand. “How can you improve on the Grand Canyon?” she asked. “Isn’t the real thing spectacular enough?”

He shook his head, slipped his net-access plaque onto the synthetic marble countertop so he could gesture with his hands. “If they wanted the real thing, they could just set up some beam-splitters and a hologram generator and be done with it. They could even massage out the rimside resorts and the roads and the tourists to make it look pristine.

“They want me to use the real canyon as a foundation, but pump up the grandeur, make it so even the stodgiest urban cynic will gasp in awe at Nature’s majesty. It’s been six years since I hiked down into the canyon, and my own memories are rose-tinted with time.
That’s
the way I want to portray it.”

Chandler held out his hand, tentatively withdrew it in hesitation, then squeezed her own. “Hey, would it be all right if you helped me again? From Day One this time. We can brainstorm with the splitter. . .you can help me shape the project before I blunder down blind alleys.”

Tara felt as if she had been blindsided, but she leaped at the chance. “Sounds better than checking design mods. But I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon. Is that going to be a problem?”

“
I
have,” he said, shaking his head, and gestured to the den, where the splitter hid behind the wall socket. “And I’ll share all the images with you. I can do a direct feed.”

Tara grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the workroom before he could change his mind. “Okay, Chandler, take me to the Grand Canyon.”

In the den workroom, they both affixed cables to their sockets, joined by the splitter. Tara leaned back, closing her dark eyes and letting a numbing swirl of images flood across to her: stark corkscrewing mesas sliced out by erosion, scrub brush, incredible sunsets like pastel fingerpaintings across a huge sky, roiling clumps of thunderheads, close-up strata in ocher and tan and green-gray and vermillion, the muddy violence of the Colorado River, and finally a crisp night full of stars—like the universe crammed into the narrow alley of sky visible up through the canyon’s towering walls.

Her mind simply received the data; over the next day or so she would assimilate it, sort it out, and make sense of Chandler’s memories.