Futures Near and Far (25 page)

o0o

I woke up slowly, through a haze of pain. The odor of
antiseptic and bleached bed linens wormed through the gauze and bandages
covering my nose. My bloated tongue pressed uncomfortably against the stumps of
my teeth. I recognized the pinch of an IV tube feeding into my left arm. Wires
held my lower jaw together.

I opened my eyes. Dad rose from a chair beside the hospital
bed and leaned over me. In the far corner sat a pasty-skinned, gray-haired man
I didn’t recognize.

“Kaiser Hospital,” my father explained. “You’ve been
unconscious about eighteen hours.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. The woozy feeling had to be from
the painkillers, I decided. Whatever they had me on, it wasn’t enough.

“Mongo?” I mumbled. Between the wired jaw, the swollen lips,
and mashed tongue, I sounded like Jabba the Hutt
without subtitles. The old man was first to understand.

“Your father was napping in his bedroom. The noise woke him,” the stranger said. His voice tickled my
memory. Maybe one of the hoarse old senior citizens from the physical
therapy clinic?

“I shot him in the ass,” Dad said.

I blinked, wondering if this was the same man who had raised
me. “
You
had a gun?”

“I’ve had one since
Desert Storm. I never said violence didn’t have a purpose.”

Live and learn. “He’s . . . alive?” I
mumbled. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

“Of course,” Dad replied. “In jail, booked for assault,
battery, and attempted murder. You won’t have to worry about him. He’ll serve
time, then he’ll be deported back to Peru. He’ll never be local enough to do
this again.”

“And
wuko
has already banned him from
tournament play forever, upon my prompting,” said the old man.

Now I knew where I’d heard the man’s voice before. “
Sensei
?”

“Yes.” Mr. Callahan climbed laboriously out of his chair,
straightening up with arthritic awkwardness.

It was really him. He’d come all the way from San Francisco
to my Sacramento home. I didn’t know which to feel: I was startled to see just
how old and bent his real body was, even though I’d heard about it from veteran
students. And I was damn proud that I mattered enough to deserve a bedside
visit.

“Looks like I still have to work on that upper block,” I
tried to joke.

The grandmaster smiled,
reached out a gnarled hand, and squeezed my elbow. “Just get back into
the tournament circuit as soon as you can. Think of this incident . . .
as a challenge.”

His usual advice. I tried to grin.
“Hai
 . . .
sensei
 . . .
”
I murmured, and sank back into a
morphine haze.

o0o

Mr. Callahan had left by the time I next awoke. I didn’t
hear from him during the weeks that followed. By the end of my convalescence,
the memory of the visit had paled, vividness drained behind the ordeal of pain
and drugs. It resembled more a dream than something that had actually happened.

When my surrogate finally materialized at his headquarters
dojo
, the grandmaster just pointed to my
regular place in the line, as if I were just another student who had been
attending all along. During warm-ups, basic exercises, and partner drills, he
focussed on other pupils. There were, after all, plenty of them to focus on. As
usual, the night’s class filled the room; in fact the walls had been expanded
to accommodate a heavy attendance. Richard Callahan’s reputation drew hundreds,
perhaps thousands of potential students. Not only was
vr
karate a big prize money affair these days, but
vr
dojo
s
eliminated the constrictions of classroom size and the hassles of commuting. A
student still needed to live within the radius of the local node to participate
in partner exercises such as sparring, because bouncing data off satellites
introduced too much delay into reaction times, but others who were content to
restrict themselves to observation and individual exercise could attend from
anywhere in the hemisphere. Callahan kept the group at a manageable size only by restricting attendance to the cream
of the crop recommended by lesser instructors. That’s how I’d gotten in,
back when I was fifteen.

I had never felt so invisible. Sure, there were a lot of
people, but this night of all others, I had expected a word or two, a nod, a
“Welcome back.” The other students expected it as well. They cast sideways
glances from me to
sensei
and back,
anticipating interaction. None came. Finally the class completed a long session
of kata and sat down to rest.

Callahan was pretending to be an inscrutable Oriental. It
was a role he played regularly. His surrogate body was as freckled and
red-headed as his Irish surname would indicate, but like many of the original
generation of great American players from the 1960’s, he wore the legacy of his
direct study under traditional Japanese and Okinawan experts. Those old farts
never gave anyone a break. They marched like God in front of their students,
all aloofness, hardness, and discipline, even if they liked you. Maybe especially if they liked you. Right
then, I didn’t know what was lurking inside the grandmaster’s head.

“Jiyu kumite,”
Callahan announced, signalling the beginning
of the sparring section of class. Tonight’s session would be freestyle
combat. Unlike
shiai
— competitive
sparring — there would be no declared winners or losers, no points taken. The
object was to show off a diversity of karate technique. The best performance
was that which demonstrated artistry and a balanced repertoire.

Yet because the venue was an integrated virtuality, contact
would still be hard. Killing and maiming might occur. This possibility kept us
on our toes. It gave us the attitude Callahan wanted us to have — gave us a
opportunity to practice
bushido
, the
way of the warrior.

I submerged into that alertness. I kept my breathing steady, synchronized with my heartbeat. Warmth radiated
from my skin, stoked by the fires in the muscles beneath. Rivulets of sweat
travelled down my torso. Except for the lack of odor, my surrogate felt more
like me than my real body. At times, while at rest, I could feel featheriness
in my legs as if my real body somatic sensations were written atop the
simulation as on a palimpsest. But not tonight. Tonight I was
there
.

Mr. Callahan looked down the long line of practitioners
local enough to spar. Often during freestyle, he would simply divide these students
in two equal groups and everyone would fight simultaneously. Tonight he
selected his favorite alternative: He picked just one pair at a time, leaving
the rest of us to serve as an audience.

I licked my lips as two of my
dojo
-mates faced each other. I wanted to be out there.

The pair danced around for most of their session, coming
away intact save for bruised forearms. The second match followed just the
opposite pattern — one partner got the drop on the other immediately, and
proceeded to batter him severely, though Callahan had them pause twice and
restart. The third pair charged at each other so enthusiastically they both
were logged off by the pain threshold override.

Abruptly the crowd vanished from my view. The moment I’d
been waiting for had arrived. The only figures I could see on the floor were
Mr. Callahan and, facing me, an opponent. I couldn’t identify the latter — his
appearance was a composite of average
Caucasian features, which was probably how I looked to him.

The headquarters
dojo
master program had temporarily
disguised us. Callahan believed that students would have difficulty attacking
friends and classmates with proper vigor unless identities were secret. Only
the grandmaster and the audience saw who was who, and the latter, invisible and
inaudible, could only reveal what they knew after the
kumite
session had ended. I didn’t yet know whether I was facing,
for example, my pal Keith Nakayama or that asshole
ni dan
from Oakland.

The grandmaster gave the commands. At last.

As always, I seized the initiative. My opponent faded back,
avoiding a front kick, so I drew back my hand to strike—

The other guy started to cock his own fist. Without
intending to, I hurried my punch. It glanced off the player’s chin, rendered
meaningless by my overreaction. Simultaneously, his counterstrike hit me hard
in the ribs.

I backed away. My opponent pressed, narrowly missing with a
roundhouse kick, partially connecting with a face punch, and landing a stout
kick to my midsection that I handled only because I tensed my abdomen correctly
at the last moment.

My momentum was gone. I fought hard and made my partner earn
every gain, but the match felt wrong. I should’ve been dominant. I should’ve
been shaping the give-and-take. I always did that. All too soon Callahan
yelled,
“Yame!”

I limped to my starting place, nursing a swollen cheek, sore
ribs, and a lacerated shin. My opponent was bleeding a little from one nostril,
but seemed otherwise untouched.

The grandmaster excused us. The
dojo
master program cycled us off. Reappearing two seconds later in
a refreshed surrogate along the sidelines, I saw from the reaction of my
dojo
-mates that my opponent had been
Mark Evanoff, a player I barely knew. The man was an undistinguished student
who competed at C level in tournaments — a good
karateka
, but not the sort I had ever had problems with before.

I hadn’t “lost.” That term didn’t apply to freestyle. Nor did I regret that Evanoff had done so well;
he’d earned it. Yet I had never come
away from a match so devastated.

I turned to Callahan. The
grandmaster met my glance with a
neutral expression that could have meant anything, then called up the
next pair of partners. Back to the routine of the class.

I put on a mask of indifference, acting by rote until the
last sparring session was done and everyone lined up to bow to the
Shomen
, to the grandmaster, and to each
other. As was his habit, Callahan logged off as soon as the closing ceremony
was over. As soon as was practical, I followed suit.

The yellow and green status lights of my
vr
deck and the stale odor of the
cologne I’d put on that morning greeted me as I became aware of my all-too-real
bedroom. I remained in my chair, straps snug, neural jack connected, staring
out my tiny window that
almost
allowed me to see the state capitol.

Almost was the key word. I could almost walk normally. I
could almost get by without people directing their stares at my empty pant
legs.

And now, in the one place where I had still been as complete
and perfect as anyone else, I no longer measured up.

o0o

“I can’t help you,” said Dr. Lavin. “The condition has nothing to do with the surrogate or the interface.
The reflex is buried in your brain and in your spinal trunk nerves.”

I’d expected as much, but I’d wanted to hear it from a
vr
specialist. By this point, no straw was too thin to grasp. Nothing had improved
since that first workout. Whenever I sparred, I flinched.

I wasn’t afraid to step out on the floor. I still had all the courage I’d ever had. The problem was below
the level of conscious manipulation. As Dr. Lavin had so depressingly confirmed, my neurons remembered the beating Mongo
had given me. I couldn’t just shake off that psychic legacy the way I
could repair a wiped-out surrogate.

“We’re able to erase fatigue or pain or tissue damage in a
surrogate because those experiences are entirely part of the simulation. The programming automatically negates those
parts of the construct each time you log off.” Behind his bottle-bottom glasses
Lavin’s eyes blinked exuberantly. The man was one of those intense, wiry
engineering types who once given a start on his favorite subject could hold
forth for hours. “Of course, the surrogate does learn. Your deck performs an
on-going analysis of data in order to preserve gains. That’s how you develop
stamina and coordination and strength.
If
this reflex of yours was a flaw recorded somewhere in the heuristic net, I
could probably find and purge it. At the very least, we could reconfigure the
surrogate as it was the day before the attack. You’d lose some of its accumulated
customization, but you’d still have everything up to that point.”

He sighed. “I work in an industry that seems to make anything possible. That’s a chimera, my boy.
We can send all sorts of input along an existing nervous system, we can
trick the brain into establishing a whole second set of somatic feedback loops
in order to operate a surrogate — as long as the simulated body is a close
analog of the real one — but we can’t recreate the nervous system itself. If we
could do that, you wouldn’t be tied to that wheelchair and
vr
deck. We’d be able to fashion you
into a cyborg with legs as good as any you were ever born with.”

The technical details obviously fascinated Lavin. Lost in
his expounding, he didn’t understand what all this meant in human terms, what
it meant to me. This slight effect, this involuntary tic, changed everything.

Fearless, they had nicknamed me. And it had been true. I’d
always attacked full-out. It was reckless, maybe, but it allowed me to dominate
players of better technical skill. My boneheaded confidence was my secret
weapon. So what if a surrogate was obliterated? I could be back a minute later,
ready to go again. My subconscious had accepted that.

Now when a partner made a move against me, flashbacks of
Mongo’s fists would pop up — not so much the
actual image as my reaction, my recollection of cringing. With that sort
of handicap, I could never win tournaments. At my level of expertise, there was
no room for distraction. My competitive
career had just been aborted.