city blues 02 - angel city blues (35 page)

Of course if I had godlike digital abilities, I could override the SCAPE signals to my sensory cortex, and take back command of my brain and body.

And that thought causes a tiny echo in my subconscious.

I remember a snippet from my conversation with Tommy. Something about how certain people can learn to exercise voluntary muscle control under SCAPE stimulus.

What had he said? Most people don’t ever get the hang of it, but a few SCAPE users have figured out the trick.

Okay. Fine. If there’s a trick to it, I can learn. Apparently I’m going to have plenty of time on my hands.

CHAPTER 29

My body is lost in space and time. It’s out there somewhere. I can remember what it looks like. I can remember what it feels like. I can remember the taste of my mouth, and that little twinge I get beneath my left shoulder blade when I push myself too hard. But I’ve lost track of the thread that ties my consciousness to my flesh. After a lifetime of having my muscles respond instantly to my commands, I simply cannot connect.

There’s a way to do this. There has to be. Stroke victims manage it. They teach their brains to reclaim damaged neural pathways, or to make new pathways. I’m fairly certain that people with cybernetic limbs and implants have to go through the same general process. The human nervous system is not designed to interface with artificial hardware. The brain has to find connections, or build them.

So I know that this is doable. I just don’t know how to begin.

Stroke victims and people with implants have resources to draw on. Therapists to coach them, guide them through special exercises—physical and mental. There are therapeutic robots, purpose-built software, and doubtless many other aids that I’ve never heard of.

I have none of these things. I don’t know any of the techniques, and there is no one to guide me.

I spend about an hour trying to reach out through the ether with my thoughts, and reestablish contact with my right hand. But the hand is too far away. I can’t find it.

The gulf that separates me from my flesh is too wide to bridge.

It gradually dawns on me that this last thought may be the root of my continuing disconnect. I’ve been allowing myself to think of the SCAPE construct as another place, as though I’d been spirited away to an artificial world in some unimaginably remote location.

But it isn’t remote. And the construct I’ve been inhabiting isn’t another world. It isn’t even another place.

Everything is occurring within my brain. Inside of me. In the gray neural matter that resides in my skull.

I have not been transported out of my body to the endless beach. I’m still inside my body. I haven’t gone anywhere.

I lay down on the imaginary sand, assuming the posture of my actual body on the table.

I close my eyes and lie in darkness, blocking out all false visual inputs.

There are two sets of sensory signals entering my brain. The weaker set comes from my actual physical senses. The odor of the room where I’m being held. The pressure of the table’s surface against my spine, the back of my head, the backs of my arms and legs. The temperature differential between the table top and my body. The constriction of the straps that hold me to the table. The motion of air currents across the tactile sensors in my skin. The red-tinged glow of the bright overhead lights penetrating the thin membranes of my eyelids.

All of these signals are flooding into my brain right now. They’ve never stopped, because the human body never ceases in its quest to perceive and evaluate the world. These signals, these real sensory messages, are currently being drowned out by the more powerful artificial signals of the SCAPE software.

But weaker or not, the real signals are still coming in. Maybe I can pick them out over the torrent of bogus SCAPE messages, like straining to hear a friend speak at a concert where the volume is cranked up to the roof. You want to hear what your friend has to say, so you focus on his words, letting your brain listen past the louder sounds of the over-amplified music.

I don’t try to ignore the SCAPE construct. That would be impossible; its signal strength is simply too high. Instead, I concentrate on finding the weaker signals. The real ones.

I’m not in some far away non-place. I’m right here, in this strange and unknown room—feeling the straps that bind me—hearing the sound of my own breathing—smelling the air…

And I
was
smelling the air. There was a chemical odor in my nostrils, a whiff of some kind of industrial cleaning solvent, barely perceptible alongside the powerful sea spray aroma of the SCAPE beach. My first glimmer of contact with reality.

This was working! This was…

…gone.

I’m back on the beach, lying in the sand, smelling nothing but the virtual salt air of the virtual night. I scramble desperately to recapture the mindset, find that fragile tendril of connection before it slips away.

I waste ten or fifteen minutes trying to force my way into reality through sheer power of will. It’s no use. I’m stuck in this other world.

No! There
is
no other world. There is only reality. No beach. No Christmas ornament moon. Just me in all my naked glory, lying strapped to a table.

I relax, eyes closed, and allow my nose to explore the air. Not forcing anything. Feeling the slow movement of breath through my nostrils. Allowing myself to acknowledge the pervasive aroma of the salt wind, but broadening the bandwidth of my olfactory senses to take in that other odor. That barely discernable trace of cleaning solvent.

There it…

…was, hovering at the lower limit of my detection threshold. It was almost (but not quite) imperceptible against the olfactive static of its more powerful SCAPE counterpart.

I laid there for an unmeasured period of time, slowly and deliberately widening the receptivity of my other senses. I allowed the imitative SCAPE stimuli to continue registering, while reaching past them for the much subtler cues coming from my actual sensory organs.

The coolness of the virtual sand still found its way through the fabric of my virtual clothing, but the less insistent impressions of the table top began to gradually attract my notice. The tactile pressures were feeble but unmistakable. The surface of the table was colder and more unyielding than the soil of the imaginary beach.

I left things at that for a while, not yet wanting to push my luck by moving too quickly. Letting myself recognize the scents and feelings of the room around me, and accept these inputs as anchor points in reality.

When I was ready, I opened my eyes into a weird sort of double-vision. The dark sky of the SCAPE construct, overlaid by ghostly images of a ceiling hung with bright lights.

My brain was parsing inputs from two completely different sensory planes. One insubstantial and true. The other persuasive and false. In the false plane, my body was comfortable and satisfied. In the real plane, I was ravenously hungry and I needed to piss like the proverbial racehorse.

The sense of dueling realities was more than unsettling; it was nauseating, and it was giving me the mother of all headaches. Well, I wouldn’t have to deal with it for very long.

I looked down the length of my body, seeing my clothed form on the darkened beach, faintly overlapped by the image of my nakedness under brilliant light. I searched the faint but real image, concentrating on the straps holding me to the table.

As I hoped, they were not actual restraints. They were safety straps. The kind used on hospital gurneys to keep incapacitated patients in place during transport. No locked cuffs, and not even separate straps for individual limbs. A strap at chest level, covering my upper arms. Another at the waist, covering my wrists. A third at knee level, to keep my legs in place.

They were cinched down pretty tight. It took me about fifteen seconds of determined effort to wriggle my right hand free. I lost some skin in the process, but I didn’t stop to examine my strap burns.

I reached up, found the tangle of hardware taped to my scalp, and began peeling off components as quickly as my fingers could locate them. The SCAPE headset—as a one piece unit—came away quickly, taking my dueling sensory planes with it. I was back in the here and now.

The tape took hair with it. I didn’t care. I didn’t stop until the last electrode pad was gone from my head.

Then I paused to get my bearings and do some reconnaissance.

A quick look around revealed a smallish room, maybe three meters by five, with scarred walls of white plastic and a mesh metal floor. A storage room, possibly. Sometimes used to house heavy portable equipment, if the dings in the wall panels were anything to judge by.

I froze when I spotted a man sitting in a chair by the door. Broad shoulders. Dark suit. Asian features. The kind of guy who probably knows forty-seven ways to kill you with a folded candy wrapper.

I relaxed as my ears detected the soft rhythm of his snores. Apparently, the excitement of guarding an unconscious body had been too much for him.

That was fine by me. He was welcome to sleep as long as he wanted. In fact, the longer, the better.

I made a concerted effort to be quiet as I located the cinch points for the straps.

Ninety second later, I slid silently off the table and stood on the floor grating in my bare feet, my knees a bit wobbly from prolonged disuse.

My guard snorted, shifted position slightly, and resumed snoring.

Good boy.

I thought briefly about slipping out of the room, and leaving him to guard an empty table. I discarded this plan quickly. I had no idea what was outside that door, and I wasn’t ready to go exploring dressed only in my skin.

Instead, I began a rapid scan of the room, looking for anything that might be useful. It didn’t take long to confirm that there were not a lot of options. My arsenal included such formidable items as: a table with safety straps, a SCAPE deck and headset, a Magic Mirror with sensor net, a few meters of connective wiring, a half-used roll of surgical tape, and no clothes. There was also a napping guard, and the chair he was currently occupying.

Some of the wires seemed like they might be strong enough to serve as a garrote, should I want to take the guard out of the equation. But I had no desire to murder a complete stranger, and I doubted very much that he would sit quietly while I choked off his air supply with a length of electrical conductor.

If this were an old Mike Hammer vid, the room would contain some conveniently sized and shaped blunt instrument, with which our intrepid hero could whack the guard into concussed stupor with a single perfectly-aimed blow. Unfortunately, there was no such object, and I knew from experience that it usually takes a period of prolonged bludgeoning to produce the desired effect. Again, not something the guard would endure silently. Not to mention the fact that he really
might
be able to kill me with a folded candy wrapper.

I looked around the room again, hoping that I had missed something useful on my first inspection. No luck.

Then my eyes lit on the SCAPE headset again, and I got a wonderfully nasty idea.

I repositioned the SCAPE deck a couple of meters away from the guard’s chair, careful to set the unit down quietly. The status light was still on, telling me that the software was doing its thing, happily generating all the bogus neural stimuli that anyone could want.

I held the headset in one hand, and positioned it carefully in the air a few centimeters above the head of my sleeping jailer. When I was sure I had the alignment correct, I brought my hand down quickly, shoving the headset onto the man’s scalp—pressing down to hold it in place in case he struggled.