Multireal (9 page)

Jara and the boy walked arm in arm across the lounge, past
columns of wriggling goldfish and green cushions nestled on the backs
of porpoises. They saw twosomes and threesomes and moresomes of all
genders and orientations flirting away the time between encounters.
Jara noticed a trio of four-breasted mermaids rubbing fins. Geronimo
goggled appreciatively at a woman who must have been three meters
tall, locked in a passionate kiss with a man whose dangling equipment
looked equal to the task. There were no fewer than three Len Bordas in
the room. One of them had two heads.

They followed the data beacon around a long curved corridor,
threading their way through gossiping bystanders. Geronimo was
humming one of his atonal Dregs of Nitro songs. Finally, they reached
a nondescript door and opened it to find an even more nondescript
room. A low queen bed, a nightstand. Mirrors.

"What, you want this?" said the youth with a sneer.

"I thought I'd let you pick," said Jara.

"Oh," replied Geronimo, grinning goofily. "I get it. Well, lemme
think for a minute...."

Don't think too hard, Jara glowered silently. You might damage something.

Geronimo flipped through a number of exotic environments Amazonian jungle, Arabian harem, something called "The Twelve
Rings of Zarquatt"-and finally settled on a pleasure den whose every
surface was coated with black leather. Jara let out a small noise of exasperation. This was exactly the same motif Geronimo had selected for
their last two encounters. Jara could already tell that this afternoon's
tryst would solve nothing. That knife was wedged much too deep for
a neophyte like Geronimo to reach.

The Natch look-alike was hopping on one foot, struggling to
remove his pants. Jara thought about cutting her connection to the
network right then and there, but decided to stay. She had paid good
Vault credits for this room.

Jara had figured that three weeks away from Natch would cool her passion. She was wrong.

It's the eternal paradox of love, the drudge Kristella Krodor had
written recently. When he's at arm's length he's too far, but when he's in your
arms he's too near. Jara was ashamed to admit she read such tripe.

But the idea of using the Sigh as a therapeutic tool hadn't come
from Kristella Krodor. It had come from an unexpected source: Bonneth, companion to her fellow apprentice Merri.

Jara had decided to open up to Merri a few nights after the demo at
Andra Pradesh. As the fiefcorp's channel manager and resident
truthteller, Merri spent hours every day in Natch's presence too, and
sexual orientation was no barrier to the entrepreneur's charms. She would
have to understand what Jara was going through, on some level. But Jara
never got the chance to find out. Moments after Jara multied to her
apartment, Merri rushed off to resolve some unexpected emergency with
her beloved Creed Objectivv, leaving Jara and Bonneth alone.

The analyst felt as if she barely knew Merri, much less her quiet
companion. But suddenly Jara found everything spilling out in one long, torturous flood. The proctor who took advantage of her, the two
decades of professional frustration, the gullible years as Lucas Sentinel's
apprentice, the stabbing desire for Natch that would not go away.

Bonneth listened intently from her well-padded chair. I think I
know how you feel, she said. Wanting something you just can't have, not being
able to let go. She raised her arms feebly and made a gesture at her brittle
frame, twisted in what looked like a very uncomfortable position. Bonneth had Mai-Lo Syndrome, one of those rare instances of genetic engineering gone awry. The bones in her arms and legs were fragile as
eggshells, beyond even the skill of bio/logics to repair.

When you've got multi and SeeNaRee and powered exoskeletons, it's not
such a handicap, continued Bonneth. But I'll admit ... sometimes I just
have to know. Late at night, after I've repeated all those Dr. Plugenpatch statistics to myself a million times ... I just need to know what it's like, even for
a couple of hours, and then I can go on again.

So how do you do that? Jara asked.

That's easy, said Bonneth, with an impish smile. The Sigh.

Jara hardly knew where to start. She had taken plenty of practice
laps around the shallow end of the Sigh when she was a teenager. But
back then her options were limited by the boundaries of her parents'
L-PRACG: no partners over eighteen, no extreme stuff. Now suddenly
she was free to explore the three hundred thousand channels running
on Sigh protocols-free to dive deep and explore the crevices and
trenches, the scabrous surfaces, free to coax the hidden pearls from
their shells. Most channels simply connected people of similar interests. There were other channels that specialized in every perversion
humanity had dreamt up in the last hundred thousand years. Adventurous souls could dally with automated pleasure bots that had survived the long Darwinian slog through the competitive market of
sexual programming. When the pleasure bots grew tiresome, there
were channels that circumvented bodily mechanics altogether and
delivered massive unadulterated doses of endorphins.

But how to exorcise this obsession with Natch? It wasn't as easy as
it sounded.

The Sigh was not restrained by the same limits as the multi network, so it was simple enough to plaster someone else's face on your
partner and be done with it. But while this subterfuge might suffice
for the man living down the street or the faintly glimpsed woman on
the tube, the illusion simply didn't work for an intimate acquaintance.
Call it a failure of technology or psychology; virtual simulacra just
could not fool the discerning human brain.

Enter the Doppelganger channel.

Jara found a series of intriguing promos featuring celebrity impostors of stars like Juan Nguyen and Jeannie Q. Christina, all with
ridiculously mundane names and occupations. I'm Lester James, hoverbird repair technician, said an Angel Palmero look-alike. And I've been
searching for you on Doppelganger.

It was a simple system. Point the interface to the Data Sea profile
of your lust object. Doppelganger proceeds to track down his unwitting twins spread throughout human space. Each twin is presented
with an invitation to meet. Given a pool of sixty billion people to
choose from, the odds were high that someone would accept the invitation. Frequently that someone was looking for a person just like you,
which gave the arrangement a nice symmetry. The closer the match,
the higher the fee.

Jara had fired off a Vault credit authorization to Doppelganger,
along with a video of Natch at his most beautiful and solipsistic. Two
days later, Doppelganger had led her to Geronimo.

The relationship worked very nicely for a week or so. Geronimo
tried to fulfill Jara's fantasy of bedding her boss, and Jara tried to fulfill Geronimo's fantasy of bedding ... who? A neighbor, a co-worker,
some woman who had caught his eye in a Beijing night club? Jara
didn't know and didn't care. This was the Sigh, after all, where mutual
fulfillment was the decorum and questions were bad form.

Then that week turned into two and rounded the corner heading
for three. Now, here she lay, thirty-seven minutes after her arrival in
this leather SeeNaRee, and Geronimo was gone. Jara still had twenty
minutes left on the account, and an additional two hours until the next
fiefcorp meeting. She decided to loaf for a while.

Jara hated to chastise Bonneth for bad advice, but it was becoming
pretty clear that this form of therapy just wasn't working. There was
something intensely sexual about Natch. Yet he kept that virility
under such iron control that Jara could not even tap into it through
fantasy. What would Natch be like if he vented his passions in the bedroom? What if there were no bio/logic fiefcorps, no Primo's ratings, no
MultiReal to distract him? Easier to imagine a bird without wings or
a fish that could not swim.

The closer Jara got to possessing the fiefcorp master, the more he
seemed to edge away. Achieving his lifetime goal of topping the
Primo's bio/logic investment guide should have loosened him up a
little, given him a sense of accomplishment. But instead, the entrepreneur was retreating farther and farther inside his shell.

How long would his sanity last?

It needed to last a while. Jara no longer had the consolation that
this would all be over in eleven months when her apprenticeship
expired. She had chosen to sign on to another apprenticeship, serving a
brand-new company in a wholly untested market. Another few years
wrestling with this peculiar crossbreed of loathing and lust.

Meanwhile, Horvil was out there somewhere. Sweet, innocent
Horvil, who had opened up his heart on the floor of the Surina Center
for Historic Appreciation while a thousand Council troops marched
through the courtyard. They had managed to avoid being confined
alone ever since. Jara could honestly say she had never thought of
Horvil in a romantic light, and had no idea what to do. Her feelings
were as easy to decipher as cuneiform.

Confused, emotionally knotted, exhausted, Jara finally logged off the Sigh and waited for the mediocrity of the real world to seep in
again. There was a name for the haze of a mind switching between
multi connections; why wasn't there a word for the postcoital letdown
of logging off the Sigh?

Jara sat up in bed and looked at her still-white walls. In the living
room sat the pitiful arrangement of daisies she had blown an inappropriately large chunk of her fiefcorp stipend on. She arose, walked into
the breakfast nook, and had the building brew her up some hot nitro.

When did you lose yourself? the analyst asked her reflection in the
window.

Was it at Andra Pradesh, when Len Borda's troops were swooping
all around her? Or further back, when she had threatened to quit the
fiefcorp after Natch's little black code stunt? Maybe there wasn't a
single moment. Maybe it was a gradual eroding of self, a twenty-year
process that had started long before she ever heard of Natch or Horvil.
Everything that had happened in her adult life felt like one attenuated
chain reaction to that moment in the hive when her proctor had settled his hand on her thigh, a few centimeters higher than propriety
dictated, and Jara had tried to convince herself that she liked it there.

7

The familiar sight of his tenement curving around a Shenandoah
hilltop put a smile on Natch's face that not even black code could dim.
Natch had never felt a sentimental attachment to any of the places he
had called home; he remembered walking out of the hive for initiation
with barely a backward glance. But he had never savored the unique
flavor of returning to a place he had fought to defend either.

The front doors swished open to greet him. Natch stepped into the
atrium and nearly collided with Horvil.

The engineer's chubby face instantly sparked into a grin. "You're
back!" he cried, folding the fiefcorp master into a bear hug. Natch
could feel a turgid programming bar pressed against his back. The distinct smell of peanut butter drifted through the air.