She misses Berlin more than ever. She’s been in four American states and two Pacificanadian provinces—
The Ma, the Ny, the Wa,
The Bic, the Nid, the Pa,
Last the Az and now the Ab,
as she likes to chant it to herself. She figures she can’t go anywhere else because nowhere rhymes with Ab.
As the little car winds its way up the mountains to Banff, a furious spring snowstorm pours over the windshield and away behind her into the night. At least she doesn’t have to try to keep the car on the road herself. She flips over to XV, looking for a really neutral reporter and never finding one; for one awful instant her hand stops on Passionet and she is experiencing Synthi Venture. She finds herself snuggled in the rock-hard protective arm of Quaz, who is escorting Synthi these days, out in the howling blizzard of Point Barrow, preparatory to going inside, having wonderful sex in front of a fireplace, running back to Rock (with whom she is triangling) and having Rock explain meteorology to her.
The horrible thing is, she thinks as she switches to Extraponet, which has a reporter riding a UN overflight of the Arctic Ocean, nobody cares anymore that Synthi has read the script in advance; they
want
to know what’s going to happen next, they
like
Synthi describing experiences to herself before she has them.
The plane carrying the Extraponet reporter comes over a pressure ridge. A huge flare of gas reaches miles into the sky dead ahead. Deliberate roller-coaster effect, Berlina sneers. They must have known it was there and arranged to fly in low to surprise people.
The plane veers to the side, well short of the flare. The viewpoint reporter is in a forward bubble, and the pilot hasn’t told him much. As they circle the immense gas flare, the polar ice below a brilliant shimmer of gold, amber, and yellow, she gets the basic information she wanted—the flaring operation isn’t going to take care of the problem, and everyone knows it.
This XV reporter is usually on the environmental beat, to judge by his thoughts, and Berlina thankfully absorbs the basics—greenhouse gas, more of it than anyone would have thought possible, spring the worst time for it, White House and New York reports much too circumspect, so it’s worse than they’re saying … .
XV is a bit like being there, i concedes, and a bit like being more knowledgeable than you really are, but what it’s really like is like waking up where the news is happening with a bad case of amnesia and a brainwashing team trying to force a viewpoint on you.
She clicks off and tosses down her scalpnet, muffs, and goggles. The snow outside is beginning to glow, which means the sun is just beginning to peek over the Rockies. Still, it’s three hours till she would normally go to bed, and by that time everything can be hurled into the car, and she can sleep on the way, getting caught up on rest for the days ahead while the Alaska Highway rolls under the tires at three hundred kilometers per hour.
“Never mind,” she says. “Once I remind people what
real
news was like, XV will be dead as the town crier, or newspapers.”
Synthi, you are not plugged into real life anymore,
Mary Ann Waterhouse is thinking to herself. She has finally been allowed to switch out from the net for a few blissful hours, the jack in her head no longer plugged to receive Synthi’s every quivering passion, and though her head has an ache no aspirin can touch, and her whole body is bruised and sore, she’s so relieved to have ten hours off that tears are running down her face.
Mary Ann always tries to remind herself that she is the same old girl, just re-engineered into what a lot of women want to look like (which was pretty much what a lot of men want them to look like), just made rich beyond her dreams, just with this other little personality installed, but right now she looks in the mirror and
misses
herself.
She had a pretty good body—turned a lot of heads—before they gave her the cartoon-character breasts, before they sewed her already-shapely butt into an impossible curve, before they microzapped every bit of fat from her legs and put artificial sheathing like an internal girdle into her stomach.
Not to mention the monthly injections that turn her hair flame-red from its natural straw-blonde.
“I used to just be pretty. I kind of liked that,” she says to herself, out
loud, and
dammit
. She’s crying again. This has been happening for at least the first hour every time she goes off line, for the last couple of months, and she’s pretty sure it is not supposed to. Offtime is precious. She doesn’t want to waste it this way.
There’s no one to call. She has no brothers or sisters, her father disappeared when she was six, her mother is dead, and she hasn’t had a real boyfriend since three months before Passionet hired her and invented Synthi.
There is nobody to call or talk to except Karen, whom she used to work with in the Data Pattern Pool. When Mary Ann got picked at the audition, they swore they’d stay friends, and they really have done a pretty good job of it, considering she could buy Karen’s apartment building every month and never notice, and that Karen has admitted, shyly, that nowadays all her offtime is spent living in Synthi’s head. But it’s only six A.M. in Chicago, and Karen has to work in the morning (they talked about having her work for Mary Ann, as a personal assistant or something, but both of them had the common sense to see that would have destroyed the friendship, and probably Karen with it).
She hasn’t told Karen about the crying jags yet. She knows that Karen will be a little hurt that she’s kept it back.
Well.
She’s up early, and at least they got His Oafishness, Quaz, out of here before she woke up; one thing she never does on offtime is sleep—Synthi gets to do all of that, or rather, as the net shrink explained to her, she falls asleep as Synthi, dreams as Mary Ann, wakes up as Synthi, but gets paid for being Synthi the whole time. Quite a deal.
She goes into the bathroom to wash her face, hoping that will kill the last of the tears this time. It doesn’t. It hasn’t for a few days. Instead, they seem to flow more freely now, as if they will just keep running for the rest of her life.
Well, what did you expect, Mary Ann? Or Synthi? Whoever you are now?
She asks the question to the image in the mirror and is no longer sure whether she is speaking aloud or not.
You spend most of your time being someone else, how are you supposed to know what she’s crying about?
She turns on the hot water in the sunken tub, then calls room service and orders a huge breakfast that she isn’t sure she’ll eat: eggs, corned beef hash, potatoes, all the plain food that she never eats as Synthi Venture, who takes her experiencers on trips into the exotic world of wealth and power that they will never see, and therefore eats mostly foods they’ve heard about but couldn’t afford or wouldn’t be able to prepare.
As the tub fills, she pulls out her reader and scans through her personal
library for something she’d like to read. Another and not surprising difference between them is that Mary Ann reads.
She’s almost cheerful as she settles into the great masses of bubbles and reads the scene at the inn in Bree; by now she knows
The Lord of the Rings
so thoroughly she can open it anywhere she likes and just read as much as she wants. It may be a waste of time, but it’s her time to waste and this is what she wants. There’s a stack of history books, and a big collection of theatre reviews that follow her around, things she keeps meaning to read, things she used to like, but for the last few months all she’s wanted on her offtime has been
The Lord of the Rings, The Once and Future King,
and
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. Each of which she has read at least ten times.
In another hour or two, she can call Karen at work.
There’s a knock at the door and she bellows “Come in!” The bellhop wheels the table in, and she tells him to bring it into the bathroom; this seems to make him a bit nervous, and she realizes he’s probably been experiencing via Rock, Stride, or Quaz, the Passionet reporters she usually works with, and thus has had the experience of being very sophisticated and knowing exactly what to do with this particular naked body in all sorts of exotic settings. The Point Barrow Marriott is not exactly the sophistication center of the universe; the possibility of having Synthi herself, sudsy and naked, demanding breakfast from him, must not have occurred to him.
He’s averting his eyes; it’s almost funny. “I’m under all these bubbles,” she calls out. “You can see my sweaty face and soggy hair but that’s about it.”
“Still feels weird,” he says, moving the food and coffee to where she can reach it.
“I bet it does.” Then on impulse she adds, “My real name is Mary Ann Waterhouse, nobody is recording this, I like to read old books that nobody ever reads anymore, and every time I listen to Haydn’s
The Creation
I get tears in my eyes.”
He steps back as if he’s afraid she might bite his leg. She remembers what it was like, when she had a regular job, to have mysterious strangers around who might be able to fire her. “It’s okay, when you tell people you served me breakfast, just say I’m a regular person, and use a couple of those things as examples to prove we talked.” She reaches for her purse—risking exposing a breast, but he’s being so careful not to look—and tips him much more than she should. “Who do you experience?” she asks. “Rock?”
He laughs, a funny nervous laugh. “Yeah.”
“Well, if you want more of me, he and I will be paired for a few weeks starting tonight. Quaz is leaving for another assignment.”
“Thanks, I’ll remember that. Um … can I ask … is there one you like better?”
According to Passionet, this is the question she must never answer, but here she is trying to have some kind of conversation with an ordinary experiencer, and now that she thinks of it, it’s also the most natural question in the world. Still, she temporizes … . “Like in what way?”
“Oh, um—” He blushes almost purple. Clearly he did mean that way.
“Well, uh, let’s see. Quaz is very well-informed. Stride is kind of the bad boy of the lot, and he’s rude, but—well, he’s really hot when we’re, you know. He knows a lot about being satisfying. Rock … well, he’s a very warm, down-to-earth kind of guy. I guess there’s more affection there than the other two.”
The bellhop’s eyes are full of gratitude.
“That’s important to you—the being likable part, isn’t it?” Mary Ann asks, hoping to keep the puzzlement out of her voice. “Being likable,” after all, is a pretty basic set of acting tricks, ever since Petrokin developed the Sincere Mode Technique twenty years ago.
“Yeah. I mean, I’d like to be as smart as Quaz, or as—uh, you know—as Stride, but it’s that kind of warm feeling that Rock has around him that … oh, well. I guess you know what I mean. I’d rather have people like me than anything else.” He smiles a little. The way he smiles—quite unconsciously, she’s sure—is a not-quite-right (because it’s just a bit exaggerated) copy of Rock’s Sincere Mode smile.
They talk for another minute or so, and she explains that yes, she really did get to be Synthi Venture just by going to the right audition, but she had six years of acting school before that, and she waited a lot of tables, played in a lot of Equity Showcases, and did a lot of data patterning before she got the break. It’s a nice story, happens to be true, and who knows, maybe he’ll get famous and tell it.
After he goes, she realizes that she is going to eat the whole huge breakfast. It’s not quite as perfect as a big breakfast used to be at three in the morning when they’d just closed and struck a Showcase
Uncle Vanya,
in a café full of theatre people and Lefties and random street lunatics, but it’s still pretty good, and it isn’t any of the overpriced, overseasoned weird stuff Synthi eats. She finishes breakfast without reading more, and gives herself a good scrub all over. Two hours of her time off are now gone as she towels off.
She looks at herself in the full-length mirror, and damn if she isn’t going to cry again. One problem with XV is that it comes at the experiencer through a thick curtain of emotional gauze; that’s why a melodramatic character like Synthi comes through more clearly, and why newspom, with its acute physical pain and terror, is such a big seller. So there, in the mirror,
is the evidence of the “lovemaking” with Quaz the night before. Big blotchy bruises on the perfectly shaped breasts and long scratches from his nails—practically his claws—on her thighs and belly. They gave her a pain block, like they always do, but it doesn’t override the memory of having her jaw forced painfully wide open and him biting her tongue till she bled.
Of course, the experiencers got something much less intense, and they never knew … or did they? She looks more closely, under the bruises and scrapes, touching where she can feel her soreness like an echo through the pain blocks, and she sees the fine little lines the laser leaves, sees that where a healthy woman with big breasts would have a bit of extra skin, her armpits have been fitted with something that works like a tiny accordion, that the skin where they take marks and scars off her breasts twice a year is a kind of raw, callused pink—she can’t even feel her own long thumbnail scraping it, and her trim and tidy labia show all kinds of scar tissue.