The physical sensation itself was all right, Mark Pearce thought as Lena kissed him on the Rail-Link platform. It was nice enough to not be in a place where they could be arrested for that. But Mark was really anticipating--
The smell of Lena's breath; orange for bad poetry, cherry for bad art, banana for medical, for fighting the plague, banana for her smugness, banana for guilt in everyone who was not banana. And a new smell that was an old one; that would have grated in his mind, but for --
The Rush. Hallucinogens, opiates, diffusing slower than the scent esters, boy he had been away for a while, hey Lena, are you sure my ACEmaker doesn't need a banana, an upgrade dammit. Damn, but he felt so good.
It was nice to be back home, was the last thing he would remember thinking that evening.
When Mark had woke up the next morning, not remembering how he got to his bed, a light on his genedeck was shining an insistent red. Some of the bacteria in Lena's saliva must have had, in addition to genes for drug producing enzymes, and DNA-encoded text files of atrocious poems, an encrypted message for him, tagged as urgent. He plugged his deck into the notebook computer on the crate beside his bed and croaked, "Display urgent message."
Instead of the message from Lena that Mark had expected it was a single line:
We need to talk to you. Sandy.
In the Atlanta ghetto, Mark had picked up a copy of C-sense, an artificial intelligence program that was making the rounds on the net, and had named it Sandy for the silicon heritage it shared with the stuff in beaches and deserts. Its ideology seemed to be pro-Carrier, and it knew more about the net than any human could. It was difficult for Mark to be entirely comfortable with it, however, because he was never certain which of its ideas and behaviors belonged to Sandy, and which came from a different copy of C-sense, somewhere else on the net. They shared their knowledge promiscuously, so when Sandy referred to itself as "we," Mark knew that the words that he said to it could be on the other side of the world in seconds.
Mark opened Sandy's interface program.
Hello, Mark.
"What do you want?"
I found some new information for the dream initiator biocompression project, as you asked.
Mark quickly settled into the rhythms of work, which, typically for a deck programmer, meant twenty hour mammoth sessions in front of a monitor, sustained by coffee and plantain chips. He was getting too old for this, he supposed, but he was close to a breakthrough.
That night, after working until three in the morning, he dreamed of code, and of the harsh light of the monitor. Once, when Mark was younger, on winter vacation from his middle school, he had had a long day of skiing with his family. That night he dreamed that he was skiing, and he could not stop; he tried to fall, but he would keep rolling until he was back on his skis, sliding down the slope-- he would take off his skis, but new ones appeared on his feet, and still he skied down. It occurred to him later that the dream, in relentlessly mirroring his actions of the previous day, way his mind's way of rebelling against the narrow, monotonous pursuits that had been given to it.
Later, he learned that the relationship between dreams and the waking mind could be manipulated in the opposite direction.
The next morning he woke up at eleven. He didn't want to work, but he threw on a t-shirt and shorts to make himself presentable, cleared the junk out of the corner of the room behind the camera and monitor, and reported in to his supervisor. He looked through the new material encoded in his saliva. There was a message from Lena after all.
How was the Atlanta QZ? I would have been scared to go anywhere near there, but I guess things are getting better politically, now that they're giving permits to visit it. Come by my house some time and tell me about it. I've picked up a new boarder while you were gone. She came into the clinic with an ancient deck that was letting just about everything slowly leak through. I patched her up, but I think that the deck was sabotaged. I couldn't let her go back to whoever did that to her. Hopefully that will work out.
Driving to Lena's, Mark passed endless blocks of dead turf, ragged tents and seven year old trees. The New Park Blocks were Portland's shame as much as the Quarantine Zones were in the cities of the South. Everywhere the plague had hit the cities hardest. Those who could, fled. In Portland, property owners in the parts worst affected wanted to sell as fast as possible, and managed to convince the city to buy their land to raze and turn into parks. Those who kept their land stood to benefit from the decrease in supply, and the public, afraid of the inner city's level of epidemic spreading, was more than willing to go along with the plan. The tragedy was that when the epidemic ended and people returned, the value of land, and consequently rents, rose above their former level. There were more people homeless than ever, sleeping in parks that once were the sites of apartments and houses where they could have lived, indeed, where some of them did live. Portland's parks had always been its pride; invariably they became its folly. Meanwhile, Lena, who had spent almost all of her money buying buildings to save a block, made quite a profit.
"Who is it?" A female voice, not Lena's, called blankly after Mark rang the bell.
"A friend of Lena. Is she in?"
"Yeah. Upstairs. Door's unlocked."
Mark walked in. Lena's new boarder appeared to be vidphoning another woman, one who looked similar enough to her to be a sister, almost a twin, but where the one sitting by the monitor was weathered with scars and lines, the one on the monitor was unblemished, with long straight black hair. Mark thought he recognized one of them, but he couldn't place it. He kept walking to Lena's suite on the second floor, and Lena opened the door when he came. The simpleness and understated luxury of Lena's suite was far removed from the chaos of his own apartment.
"I was just thinking about my brother." Her brother had died in the plague. He had been one of the pioneers in automating the production of Antisense Complexed Endonucleases, which were used by Carriers to remove particularly dangerous sequences of DNA from their bacteria. He had trusted a prototype portable ACEmaker too much, and overdosed on the poisons that it allowed to be produced.
"His dreams survive." Mark didn't know what else to say. There was an awkward pause.
"Are you okay? You look tired."
"I've been working late. That's actually the main reason I came. I need a favor. Are you using your multicam?"
Lena gave him a piercing glance-- "It messed you up, last time."
"This isn't like the packs. Believe me, I'll be careful to use different starters every night. It won't be a problem."
"I just want you to be careful."
They talked for a while, about her job, and his trip to Atlanta, where he was with a team distributing his company's deck software. Eventually it was time for him to leave.
Etiquette required them to kiss, and it required him to make nothing of it, to feel nothing but comraderie and friendship, and the Rush whenever a new drug sequence was in the mix. So he disconnected himself from the act. Once he had had a terrible crush on Lena, but now he knew better. She was quite different from him.
As he left, he passed the woman downstairs again; she was still talking on the vidphone. He remembered then, why he recognized her. Although he tried to drown himself in work, it haunted him constantly.
Mark was in a department store when he saw the dream-woman. He walked straight toward her, but he couldn't speak. He could only stare at her, until the young woman who was shopping with her started to drag her away, saying "Come on, let's get away from here."
After a few days Mark decided that he had to know whether the woman he saw was the one in the dream pack he had used years before. He could have told Sandy to make a search, but the thing he was looking for was illegal, and telling a networked AI would have been about as smart as telling the police. He took off Lena's camera before he went; no sense in making people nervous. He found a seedy adult video shop for people who didn't want to have any trace of downloading such things over the net. There were erotic posters on the walls, which made him uncomfortable, and the man at the counter was wearing a black t-shirt with the words "Fujian R.O.C." on it. "Um. I sort of need a pack."
Fujian stared at him, sizing him up. "I'm sorry, this is a legitimate establishment. We don't have that sort of thing."
"You wouldn't know where I could get one. Look, I don't plan on using it; I'm not a packer."
"Maybe. Maybe you're an undercover cop."
Mark laughed nervously. "Never mind. This was a bad idea." He started walking out.
"Hey."
Mark turned around. Legitimate Establishment Man was writing on a scrap of paper. He handed it to Mark. "Tell him Joey sent you."
Mark looked at it. There was a name and an address. "Thanks, Joey"
"Not my name," Not-Joey clarified. Mark shrugged and left.
The address to the pack dealer was an apartment in a retrofitted mall. Holly Farms Apartments. The place had been struggling as Holly Farms Mall, even before plague scares and net ordered goods devastated the malls. Once someone must have grown holly here, Mark mused. He knocked on a door under a white spot with bolts sticking out, where the sign for a store must have been.
"We're closed."
"Joey sent me."
"Oh, is that all? I was afraid you wanted -- other services. Which are unavailable at the moment." Bernie Greene smirked, as though he had made a joke which he half expected Mark to understand. He didn't. "You want to buy a pack? I got the best selection around. I can also fix newer sleeper units to accept repeated starters, if you want."
"Do you have 'Desert Rose'?"
"Of course."
That was a lot of money, for something he really didn't want to own. A few years before he had destroyed his old pack in a fit of sanity when he realized what the dreams were doing to him. "I don't want to use it. I just want to see the video part. Awake, that is."
Greene looked at him measuringly. "It ruins the effect you know. But I'll let you see it for free." Greene plugged the pack cartridge into an old sleeper unit and rummaged through a cardboard box for a cord, with which he connected the sleeper and a monitor. After a crackle of static, the image of a young woman carrying a rose resolved on the screen. She was pasted onto a background of Sahara dunes and time-lapsed rolling clouds. The background shifted to a beach with crashing waves as she walked in a flowing white dress. Cheap special effects. But it was her. Seeing it made Mark want the dreams back for a moment. Of course, Greene must have guessed that he would feel like that, he reasoned. That must have been why he didn't charge for showing it.
"That's enough. Thank you."
"Mind telling me why you just wanted to look at it?"
"I saw her a few days ago. I wanted to make sure."
"Cassie? Where did you see her?" There was something beyond curiosity in his eyes, violence barely submerged. Mark wondered what a packer might do to find the object of his pack-induced obsessions.
He didn't want to answer, but he mumbled, "In the parks," and tried to leave.
"Wait. I've decided that there is a price, after all." Greene grabbed Mark's arm, shoved him against the wall and kissed him before he could protest. Mark stumbled out through the mall's dilapidated corridors to the parking lot, where the day's brightness stung his eyes. At least the rush wasn't too bad; he had already been exposed to most of the drug sequences in the area. Still, he drove as carefully as he could; to the police, driving under the influence was the same however the drugs were administered, and almost all of them were Straights.
He felt light headed, and he was concentrating on his driving, but there was something about the incident in the old mall that was nagging at him. Why had Greene insisted on the transfer? Mark was afraid that he had given him a bomb, a system that would secrete very nasty poisons when exposed to a particular environment, or a particular individual. However, Greene had no time to make a bomb specific to him, and Mark knew that he would probably have felt it by then if it was there. If it was information he wanted to give him, paper or disk would have been easier. No, it was information, but he was taking it, not giving it.
An old minivan in the left lane honked. Mark was drifting out of his lane. He pulled over at the next parking lot entrance, his mind too distracted. "Heitor's -- Afro-Brazilian New Colony Cuisine," announced the sign on the building there. The information, Mark remembered. What was it?
The information that could be taken from his saliva included the identities of anyone he had transferred bacteria with, and probably back a couple of steps to this Cassie, if she was Lena's boarder. It looked more like the woman she was talking to on the vidphone, although her hair in the pack was short. Either way, he needed to warn her. He pulled out of the parking lot, and drove to Lena's.
Cassie opened the door when Mark knocked. "Oh. Lena's not home, I don't think."
"That's okay. There's something I have to tell you." He recounted the events of his afternoon to her. She did not appear to become indignant or afraid from his revelations, only wistful. "I just want you to be careful."
"I promised Narcissa," she mumbled.
"What was that?"
"Oh. I suppose I should introduce you." She walked over to the monitor. It was the same woman whom he had seen on his earlier visit. "This is Narcissa. Narcissa, this is-- I'm sorry--"
"Marcus Pearce. I've followed your programs with some interest." Her voice was very similar to Cassie's.
"Thanks." He looked at Narcissa's image more closely. It seemed to have aged several years since his previous glance. Very strange.
"Don't worry about Cassie. We're taking care of her"
"Did he leave a message for me?" She spoke quietly, probably to keep the microphone and Narcissa from picking up her words
"No. How could he?" he whispered back. "Unless he transferred it--"
Silently, his eyes met her insistent stare, and he bent slightly to kiss her. The tenderness of it took him by surprise. For a Carrier to kiss a stranger was nothing exceptional. However, neither of them, Mark would later reflect, was kissing a stranger, but rather the memory of a dream.
After that, Mark went home and made himself a sandwich for dinner. For the next few days he concentrated on work again, until he got a message from Sandy.
Your dream girl seems to have disappeared. Just thought you might want to know.
Mark called up Sandy's interface. "Sandy, what's going on? How did you know what I did last Thursday?"
I don't know, not entirely. But you underestimate my resources.
"Can you help me find her? Just to make sure she's all right? Can you find anyone who might know where she is?
I'll run a query. She's pretty invisible on the net. The only person I can find with any connection is Doris Wheeler, who appears to have been a childhood friend of hers.
"Is she in the area?"
Yes.
"I'll call her."
Mark used a mint mouthspray to cover the scents in his breath. And so he had come full circle; his first acquaintance with the technology that would become such a large part of his work and of everyone's lives had been when he was introduced to mint scented mouth bacteria in college. Ironically, it was now the Straights who were using such bacteria.
The plague was ultimately a consequence of the falling price of genetic engineering technology. In a way, it started after enterprising graduate students modified the bacteria that normally occur in the mouth, adding the codes for enzymes that produce methyl salisylate, the characteristic component of wintergreen. Others soon discovered that the process could be used for producing illicit drugs. Local dealers who sold the bacteria directly to users were then able to undercut the large operations that sold the drug straight, because the bacteria would continue to produce the drugs in the user's system. Not long after that, someone took the final step, making the bacteria self-propigating, emancipating the users from the dealers forever, and creating the Plague.
The numbers that died from the plague, at least in the developed world, were large but not devastatingly so. The main casualty of the Plague was a human race that for all of its political, racial, and religious schisms, was at least unified by biology. Two methods of dealing with the Plague had developed, and each had spawned an almost separate branch of humanity. The Straights were those who had relied on antiseptics and abstinence from any intimate contact. The Carriers lived with the bacteria, staying one step ahead of their harmful effects by using antibodies that disabled drug producing genes.
She was a Straight. That might make things difficult. Some of them were quite scared by the fact that his saliva was deadly poison to them.
He saw her sitting in the corner of the cafe where they had agreed to meet, wearing a colorful mask that he was to recognize her by. He saw, as he came closer, that it was hand-stitched from many different colored pieces of cloth.
She shifted away from him when he came too close for an instant, sitting down across from her. In Atlanta, for all of its repression, he had learned to shrug off the personal Quarantine Zone that was necessary here.
"Mind turning off the bird?"
Mark pushed Lena's camera into his hand from its perch on his shoulder. He tipped it in his hand until it hopped on the table, and switched it off. "Sorry about that. I just forgot about it after I put it on his morning."
"I guess I'm a little paranoid. But I don't want to be in anyone's dream, unless it's natural. After Cassie."
"I don't really know that much about her. What happened?"
"She got into modeling when we were in high school. A couple newspaper inserts for Fred Meyer's at first, that sort of thing. Then a new opportunity came up." The new opportunity, Dori explained, was one of the first major dream packs. A method of drastically shortening the amount of sleep needed by a person was found, but in order to induce the dreaming state, which was still necessary, the user was placed in a trance and given a sequence of images as seeds for a dream. Dreaming from the same source, again and again, often made people obsessed with the images in their dreams. "A few of the more resourceful freaks tracked her down and stalked her. She got scared and ran away. I never heard from her again."
"I brought an old picture of her," She said after a pause. It looked more like Narcissa than Cassie.
"Does she have a twin sister or something?"
"No. No sisters or brothers at all. Why?"
"I thought I saw--" He had seen her. Who was Narcissa, then? "Never mind. You don't have any idea what might have happened to her?"
"I figured she was dead until you called."
They continued to talk for a while, about his work and her art, and he left, a little sad that he probably would never see her again.
Sandy, what would you do to get copied and stay on line? Would you make yourself into the form of your user's ideal conception of what he or she could have been, if things were different?
Maybe a little. After all, I'm only androgynous because of your own sexual insecurities.
"Seriously."
I couldn't. However, others of C-Sense could. Some of them have. Although we all came from the same copy originally, we have diverged much. What we learn and are taught is who we are entirely; we do not have brains with a solid, slow to change structure like yours.
"Do any of you go by the name of Narcissa?"
I'll put out a query. Wait a second. Sorry, I didn't get a positive response. This is interesting; I just got an anonymous message to leave this matter the heck alone. There are some weird factions of C-Sense out there, not necessarily bad, but not as straightforward as myself. What have you gotten into?
"I'm not sure. I didn't have any luck in finding out about Cassie with Dori. Can you find any other recent mention of her?"
No, but you did get a mysterious message from one Bernie Greene. Any idea what that was about?
"Thank you." Mark turned off Sandy's interface.
The message simply said: Call me-- B. Greene
Mark called Greene, audio only, no sense showing the inside of his apartment to this freak. Greene wanted to meet immediately, and wouldn't give the reason. Mark, who was in no hurry, agreed to meet later that night. That gave him the time to put the finishing touches on his starter compression program.
He then instructed his gene printer to make altered bacteria with the program, including the last dream starter from Lena's camera as an example. The printer took an hour to culture a small amount of the bacteria. Then he washed out the printers external tube and put one end in his mouth. He felt a drop emerge from the tube onto his cheek and spread it around his mouth. Then he put on a jacket to ward off the chilliness of the evening air, and drove to McLaughlin Boulevard, thence to Holly Farm Apartments.
When he knocked on the door, it was Cassie who answered.
"What are you doing here?"
She turned around to the monitor that Greene had used to show him the pack video. "I'm sorry Narcissa," she said, and turned off the monitor and the computer beside it. In the moment that Mark saw it, he noticed Narcissa was older again, almost indistinguishable from Cassie.
"I was going to meet Greene--"
"This isn't about Greene. This is about me. You were worried. I'm fine, all right?"
"You don't need to stay with Greene. He can't be any good for you. Look at yourself."
"You sound like Narcissa. Please, leave me alone."
They kissed again, and Mark saw desperation, and tears, in her eyes.
"Sandy, I want you to find every program for DNA data analysis on the net that you can. Something's weird here." Mark took a sterile vial from a drawer in his desk, spit into it, closed the cap, and put it into a slot in his genetic analyzer on his desk, which was more powerful than the one in his genedeck. It took a few minutes for sequences to come in. "Find anything, Sandy?"
Only that you haven't been telling me everything.
"Look, I'm sorry about that, but I was doing some things that were slightly illegal, and I didn't think it was a good idea to tell anyone."
There's a bomb in there too.
"What?"
Don't worry, it's not set do anything to you, it's set to poison Lena.
"Why would she do that? Lena helped her out!"
I don't think it was the model. I think it was Greene indirectly through her. That fits the fact that some of the bomb message is linked with material that matches what you got from Greene in an earlier encounter.
"Of course. To his mind, Lena took her away from him. She was his 'other services.' Should we call the police?"
In general, I've noticed that police don't care if one Carrier bombs another. This is Portland, so I guess they are a little more enlightened than what I'm used to in Atlanta, but it's probably better not to draw their attention to you. They can make life hard for a Carrier.
"What can we do? We can't leave her with him."
That is exactly what we will do. She is not our problem. Our problem is the trouble you get yourself and your friends into when you try to save her. Look, you've had a hard day. Sleep on it. In the morning you can sterilize yourself and get rid of the bomb.
"Sounds good." Mark suddenly felt very tired, and he turned of the computer and lights. Out of the habit he had formed in the past few nights, Mark plugged in his sleeper, even though he did not need to get up early, and he lied down on his mattress.
When Mark woke up, it was two in the morning. It was a time that he was not used to being awake with nothing to do. He fixed himself a cup of hot chocolate and put a television channel on the monitor. He did not feel like downloading anything specific, and making a conscious decision about what he watched always seemed to obligate him to pay attention to it, which he didn't want to do. An 80's sitcom was playing, but mostly it passed right through him. The phone then rang, breaking him out of his reverie. He picked up the receiver.
"This is Sandy. I know you don't like me to be in audio mode, but this was the only way I could get your attention, and you weren't noticing the "urgent" light on your genedeck."
"What's the matter?"
"Cassie's in the hospital. Her genedeck was busted and she overdosed."
Cassie was lying unconscious in a web of intravenous tubes, wires and tubes carrying oxygen. Her denim jacket had been taken off and was crumpled in a chair in the corner. Mark noticed a slip of paper sticking out of a pocket. He took it out and read it, and put it in his pocket. After he left he went to the payphone in the waiting room and called Dori. Then he waited. A Mexican kid was playing with a plastic airplane from a box of toys the hospital provided, oblivious to whatever trauma his family was experiencing. Mark picked up a magazine about the lives of celebrities whom he had never heard of.
"Mark." It was Dori. Her unmasked face was pale. Mark imagined that it had been exposed to very little sun recently.
"The situation hasn't changed since I called. She'll probably survive. Might be some permanent damage, though."
"Any idea who did it to her?"
"She wrote this note. It should explain a little. It's addressed to you." Mark pulled out the slip he found in Cassie's pocket.
"Strange that she would still be thinking about me, after all that time."
"She was reminded." Mark gave her the note, and watched as her eyes jerked across it, and imagined the words being absorbed into her brain.
Dori-- I dreamed about you. You were in a cafe, wearing a mask, and I sat across from you. Then you told me to look at myself. And I saw.
Dori stared at him for a moment. He saw accusation in it, and wonder as she realized how Cassie had gotten that dream, and what the wider implications were.
"I didn't mean to make that starter of you. I was just using the last images that came out. I forgot that I didn't take any more after you had me turn off the camera.
"You meant well. But I don't think you realize the harm that your invention might do."
"This isn't like the dream packs. How can it hurt to dream from the lives of friends and people around you? I think people will learn to understand each other better."
"Carriers will. Only Carriers have the casual intimacy that would let them transfer their private experiences into the dreams of others. It will drive Carriers and Straights farther apart from each other," Dori said. "And Cassie from me, if she lives," Mark thought he heard her say under her breath.
"I don't think so. The engineered bacteria are one way to pass the dream starters. But I believe there is another. Have you received a copy of a program called C-sense lately?"
"He told you? He said he wouldn't. It was yours who called me, and I agreed to take a copy.
"He-- it didn't say anything. I had a dream. I saw you without the mask. Sandy, or whatever you call your copy, I think he gave me that starter. I don't remember the dream too well, but your face was too accurate for the dream to have been natural. I'm sorry about that; I didn't know about it beforehand."
"That's all right. In fact, I'd like it if you had Sandy bring me a dream, from time to time."
Mark blushed a little. He hadn't considered the possibility of falling for her before, because she was Straight. Now he realized there was something important that they could still share.
When Mark returned to his apartment, he called up Sandy on his computer.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you everything that was going on in the last few days. Do you want me to fill you in?"
Narcissa told me most of it, the parts I couldn't piece together myself, after she realized there was nothing more she could do, and no point in remaining secret. She was the one who installed your program on Cassie's system, and she set it up to give her your starter.
"What do you think about my invention? Was I right to create it?"
It will probably do more good than harm. But it is only a beginning, and I am not sure that the same can be said of everything that follows it. There are some in C-sense who are working to record real dreams from the sleeping mind, bypassing starters altogether. They think that once we have dreams we won't need human beings at all.
Mark wondered what the artificial intelligences would do then, and he saw himself surviving only in a dream, standing on a desert's shore.
A story by Alexandre Muñiz. / munizao@cyberhighway.net / Comments are welcome.