Love in the Time of Connectivity
The first time I met Kali her Proxy was wearing a bone through its nose, a necklace of rat skulls, mirrored sunglasses, and nothing else. We were at the Cabaret Sauvignon in the Paris Muse and she scorched me for an obscure violation of the Tannen Protocol--using a male pronoun in a designated Safe Zone. Big fucking deal.
She pinged me about a week later with a half-assed apology. Said she'd been a little hard on me but my politics were dim and somebody had to show me the light of day. I pinged her back saying yeah, she'd been a little hard-on, all right. We went back and forth like that a few times, each iteration producing more heat and less light, until she broke it off.
"And your Cockatoo looks like shit," she said. "You've got Moiré patterns up the yin-yang."
A cheap shot. The Cockatoo was one of my favorite Proxies, a seven-foot parrot with feathers so iridescent green they bled, leaving glowing, chartreuse trails even on a Mitsushita. The Moiré was a visualization artifact--I'd been using a cheap, Malaysian volume rendering algorithm. But I didn't think it was that bad.
Fuck the shareware fee, I thought.
After that, wherever I went on the Web, it seemed like she was always on the periphery of my radar. A Tapioca Buckshot concert. An interactive lecture series on Roger Corman, everybody wearing cheesy-looking rubber lizard Proxies. Ten Forward in the Trek Muse. We'd probably always hung at a lot of the same Sites, but I just started noticing her after we tangled.
I gave her a wide berth until one evening at the Sauvignon I saw her get stuck in an Event Loop with a pair of Libertarian automata. They were wearing Jehovah's Witness Proxies--cheap suits, horn-rimmed glasses, skinny black ties--and they had her cornered near the back of the club. You could say they were AI's, but you'd only be half right. Low-level Structs under a fairly convincing Proxy shell, if you engaged them at all they'd lock onto your port and spin the same five or six megs of retrograde, crypto-anarchist spew at you, over and over again. They were easy enough to subvert, but you had to know the interrupt sequence.
Kali had on a huge, white rabbit with a checkerboard vest. A pocket watch the size of a Frisbee dangled from a gold chain at her waist. Her shoulders were hunched in a defensive posture and her nose was twitching a mile a minute.
The Structs were really going at it.
"--if you agree that the only role government can possibly have is to ensure the primacy of the individual over--"
"--don't pay taxes. Schools, roads, hospitals all can be funded by private citizens if--"
The exchange was starting to draw a bit of a crowd. Victim identification. Almost everybody had been sucked in by one of those pestilent little automata at one time or another and they were enjoying Kali's discomfort.
I was too, but I was starting to feel a little sorry for her.
"--can you be so stupid as to think that government--"
"--if everybody owned a small tactical device, then--"
Enough. I coded up a Worm with the interrupt sequence and fired it off. The Structs disappeared in a soundless flash of white light.
There was a round of applause, then the crowd started breaking up. Kali just stood there looking stunned. I walked up to her.
"Thanks for the Control Cee," she said. Her myopic, button eyes were moist.
"No problem," I said. "Happens to everybody once in a while." I was wearing my Conan and I couldn't help but preen a bit.
She shook her head. "Yeah, but I ought to know better."
I shrugged. "Yeah, well ... see you around." I started to turn away.
"Wait--"
I turned back to face her. "Yes?"
If it's possible for a fuzzy, pink rabbit the size of a Barcalounger to look both contrite and provocative at the same time, she managed.
"What's your hurry?"
We started seeing a lot of each other. We roamed the Web together, exploring little, out-of-the-way Sites as well as the bustling, urban Nodes. There was one place in the Lunar Muse we particularly liked, a bar with a great view of the Sea of Tranquility. It didn't matter to us that NASA had been sold off piecemeal to the Chinese to re-boot the Social Security bankroll after Bushgate--this was better than the real thing.
After about a month of seeing each other nearly every day, we decided to go Vox.
I sat in the big chair in my study, clutching the plastic receiver to my chest. Everything around me had that odd, shimmering clarity things get when you've been online a lot. And I'd been online a lot. My catheter hurt like hell, probably a low-level infection. I rubbed a speck of crust out of the corner of my eye.
The phone hummed at me. I made sure the vid was off--I wasn't quite ready for that--and brought the receiver to my ear.
"Hello?"
"Conan?" Her voice sounded like spring water on green stone, like a warm wind caressing the strings of a golden harp.
I hung up.
She found me in the Sauvignon at a table near the back. She was wearing the Proxy she had on the first time I saw her. The skulls rattled against her chest as she stormed towards me.
"What the fuck was that all about?" she asked.
I shrugged. "I'm sorry. I just got, I don't know, nervous all of a sudden."
Her expression softened, but she wasn't going to let me off that easy.
"Look, I need to know that it's really me you're interested in, not this--" She spread her arm out in a vague, inclusive gesture. The skulls tinkled. "--this illusion."
"Of course it's you I'm interested in," I said. "How can I prove it to you?"
A pink nubbin of tongue peeked out from between her perfect teeth. She smiled.
"There's a cluster of Locked Rooms a little ways down the Pipe from here."
I smiled back. "What are we waiting for?"
Things really shifted into high gear after that. For the next few weeks, I don't think we were apart at all except to sleep, and even then we were on standby.
We tried Vox again and this time I didn't panic. It was kind of nice, actually. At first. But the novelty wore off quickly--it seemed like we had so many more avenues of expression available to us online. Kali insisted, though. She said it was for 'balance.'
It was during one of our Vox interactions that she suggested we go f2f.
I felt the blood drain from my cheeks. The background hiss on the phone line roared at me like frying bacon.
"Face to face?" I asked. "Why?"
I knew the answer, though.
"--need to know that it's really me you're interested in." I mouthed the words along with her. I was glad we were Vox-only.
So I caught the shuttle up the Corridor to Greater Boston and hopped a puddle-jumper to the Sturbridge Mall. They'd glassed over the whole town, but the Colonial feel was still intact. I walked over a covered bridge to the edge of the Commons and staked out an outside table at Ye Olde Cappuccino Mille.
I ordered a doppio alto low-fat decaf latté and a hazelnut-ginger-fennel biscotti from the tronbot. I was nervous. What if we didn't have anything to say to each other? What if she was ugly?
I didn't have long to wait.
Kali came sauntering up the cobbled street and heads turned to follow her. She was easily the most beautiful woman I'd ever laid eyes on. Long blond hair, green eyes, a perfect, heart-shaped face.
She walked right up to my table and stood there with her hands on her hips, smiling down at me. She was wearing spray-on jeans and a Parisian half-shirt that exposed her left nipple. There was a gold ring through it and I wanted to reach out and give it a gentle tug. Plenty of time for that later.
"Hello, Conan," she said.
"Hello, Kali," I replied.
Behind her, the sky rippled faintly in a shimmering Moiré.
)
In these nineteen stories, Marcus maps out possible futures and theoretical pasts, crisscrossing reality with fantasy, and weaving intricate storylines in the process. His characters are frightened and fragile, facing brave new worlds whilst retaining their humanity. If you want to know what the future really looks like, then look here.
