Headspace Page 9

  I walk two blocks north from the station and twenty years into the future.

  Reszlieville is even more disorienting at night. The buildings shift and shimmer, as though their decision to remain immobile could be altered at any time. The air tastes cleaner, invigorates me. And it’s more than a function of the purifiers filtering contaminants for repurposing: it’s the people themselves, imparting an energy that’s palpable, infectious.

  Even at ten o’clock on a Sunday evening the broad sidewalks are densely packed. People out, revelling in their existence. People laughing. Dancing. Flirting.

  Joggers with sinewy arms and squared-off calves have commandeered the Sküte lanes and navigate through the swarm of transport pods like dolphins through a herd of whales. One guy has left the ground entirely and runs by leaping from the top of one pod to another, using the bulbous surfaces like mobile stepping-stones to stay above the river of traffic.

  I envy them, these people who gladly traded their humanity for something resembling immortality. If they’re having second thoughts, parading around in barely-there clothes and perfect bodies, they don’t show it.

  Maybe they’ve gotten used to the hollow feeling in their heads, to the artificially flavoured sensations, the grape cough-syrup approximations of emotion. Maybe, one day, I will too. Maybe the flashes of anger and intense sorrow will even out and the constant feeling that I’m an impostor in my own head will lift. Maybe the empty buzz of an alcosoft will become normal. It could happen. The approximation of caffeine generated by my brain after a cup of coffee does make my senses crisper, my thoughts ever-so-slightly sharper.

  Maybe everything will become normal again.

  Maybe I’ll eventually feel like me.

  Maybe.

  But not yet. Right now, I’m staring down two days off work, with nothing to do, nothing to dull my thoughts, nothing to distract me from myself.

  Except an illegal shyft jangling in my pocket. Weighing me down like a dirty secret.

  StatUS-ID

  [fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]

  SysDate

  [01:21:12. Friday, January 17, 2059]

  After leaving Shelt’s, I take Dora home. She’s been staying in a room-by-the-day in Cityplace—twenty-seven mid- and high-rise buildings packed into a single city block. With more than forty thousand people calling it home, it’s a good a place as any to remain anonymous while I look into the leads Shelt’s given me.

  She’s quiet on the way there, hood up against the Sküte’s rep-check. I can’t tell what she’s thinking, but I can guess. After what Shelt told us, it’s looking more and more like she isn’t playing some kind of game with me. Someone really is after her. After us.

  She loves me. That much is plain. But she’s a stranger. And I’m still too full of grief and confusion—at Connie’s death, at both of my deaths, at my ruined life—to treat her the way she deserves.

  It makes me an asshole, I know, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

  It’s not my fault I didn’t sync the last time around.

  I mean, it is, but I had nothing to do with it.

  The Sküte wends its way into the condo caverns and pulls up in front of a 40-odd-story building. The glass windows have been haphazardly replaced with opaque swatches of plastic and the exterior looks like some abstract pixel-art mural at maximum magnification. There’s no one outside, all forty thousand people have decided to stay home and avoid the cold.

  The door slides back and the chill winter air instantly drops the cabin temperature thirty degrees. The Sküte’s heaters trickle on but nothing this side of an industrial furnace would be of much use.

  Dora waits a beat then turns to me, her hood still covering her head. “Come up with me.”

  “Look, Dora—”

  “We don’t have to do anything. We can just Bliss or Chill or not, whatever. I just—I don’t want to be alone. And neither do you, if you’re honest with yourself.”

  This has all happened so quickly, and with everything I’ve been hit with over the past few days I can barely tell which end’s up anymore. I don’t want to be alone, but I don’t want to be with anyone else either. I want to be with Connie.

  “I can’t—”

  “I know what you’re going to say,” she says, leaning closer. “You don’t know me. This is all happening so fast and it’s confusing and overwhelming. You just lost Connie. Your parents have given up on you. I know. But we’ve been through this before, you and I. I can help you, if you’d just let me.”

  She could be right. I am unmoored from myself, from who I was two days ago. I know it. I’m different than I was. A whole year has passed since the accident. A whole other me has come and lived and gone. I’ve done things, made decisions, developed relationships, forged enemies. I don’t remember doing them, but I did them. Or at least a version of me did. Thinking about it too long makes me nauseous.

  But where does that leave me now? Do I pick up where he left off, the other me, or do I start over fresh, like none of that ever happened?

  The problem is, although I know I did those other things, lived that other life, I don’t feel any of those things. I never made it to the same place he did. I just can’t jump back in and resume his life. I have to catch up on my own. I have to do this my way.

  I take Dora’s hand and she knows immediately what I’m going to say. Her face hardens, resigned.

  “I understand,” she says, slides over and presses her lips against my cheek, they’re hot on my skin, and she leaves them there a moment longer than a peck. “But I’m not giving up on you. I’ll be here if you need me, when you’re ready.”

  She pulls away, bundles her coat against the cold, slides out of the Sküte and runs into her building

  By the time I get back to the apartment, my head is aching and my eyes feel like they’ve been scoured clean by steel wool. I’m going to need to put Shelt’s cuff on, let it into my head. But not yet. Sleep first.

  I drop the cuff on the coffee table, lay back on the couch and snap off before I’m fully horizontal.

  StatUS-ID

  [a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]

  SysDate

  [03:39:21. Monday, April 15, 2058]

  Snow. Hands. Swings.

  Still-life snapshots flip across the Dwell’s cylindrical surface.

  Fireplace. Blocks. Rings.

  At first I thought they were endless, that someone had spent a lifetime conjuring an unlimited supply of tiny scenes to decorate the face of an illegal shyft.

  Marshmallows. Forest. Wish.

  But I’ve stared long enough to see the cycle repeat.

  Bike. Splash. Kiss.

  I’m now on my third trip around.

  I’ve got the Dwell upright in front of me, the cup of coffee I brewed an hour and a half ago next to it, and my cuff next to that, charged and waiting.

  I take a long swallow from the mug, feel my pulse increase as my Cortex simulates the caffeine buzz.

  The coffee’s cold but I don’t mind. I got used to drinking cold coffee a long time ago. Back in Africa, no thermos, no matter how well insulated, could keep coffee warm during a twelve-hour no-charge watch. And at five in the morning, after ten hours squinting into the monolithic darkness, trying to separate the horizon from the sea of elephant grass without a night scope, when the endless black finally started to bleed from the night, a thermos of cold coffee was better than no coffee at all.

  Base Bush wasn’t much, just a small forward outpost where the jungle stopped and the grass started. It might have been named for the Presidents, but we soon came to understand it had more to do with its remoteness.

  I was there to help keep the drones working. Our eyes in the sky, our lines of communication. Our automated sentries and tactical warbots. But after the satellites were taken out, the drones weren’t much good for long range operations. We were left in the dark, literally and figuratively. Lights-out. No-charge to stay hidden from the small, EM-seeking suicide dron
es the country was lousy with. Zero in on anything more powerful than a wristwatch and explode.

  I spent most of my tour there, in the dark. Days would drag by, but it was always in the sense of a larger context. It was never boring.

  Even when nothing was happening, something always could. Hours spent motionless, hunched over a powered-down autocannon got tedious, but there was always the tension, the perpetual readiness. Things rarely happened, but when they did they happened all at once. The constant stress had its own problems, but the Ibo and Memoraze helped. And off-duty or on a pass, when there was nothing officially to do, we found ways to creatively blow off the tension.

  But here and now? Nothing I’ve ever experienced compares. Even after the conversations Connie and I had, discussing the Digital Life Assurance and what it might be like to live forever as something both more and less than human, even going through the intake process, I still never really considered what it would mean. I didn’t take the time to think about how it would feel. How it would change me. To be completely different than I had been, but still feel exactly the same.

  Tension I can deal with, but this is something else. Something I can’t even put a name to. Maybe that’s what the counselling is supposed to be for.

  If it wasn’t for this memory in my head—this split second of a man’s face before he killed my wife, before he killed me—I’m not sure I’d still be bothering with it all. Probably swallowed a Service bullet already, blown the light right out of my head. But I have a responsibility. The man who murdered Connie is still out there. I have to keep looking for him, no matter what paths I have to follow. No matter what I have to do.

  Then I’ll decide on the bullet.

  I finish the coffee on one long swallow, palm the cuff and affix it to the back of my neck.

  This time, when the green dot swells to blue, I don’t look away.

  StatUS-ID

  [fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]

  SysDate

  [07:44:42. Friday, January 17, 2059]

  The green dot expands and explodes across my vision in fractals of red, blue, and yellow. Like I jammed my thumbs into my eyelids, wrapped my fingers around my skull and clamped down.

  I move to yank the cuff off my neck but stop, force my hands to stay at my sides.

  Relax. Let it happen.

  A thick crystal gong peals in my head. Vibrates my bones. It’s joined in harmony by a second and then, as a third begins, my face peels loose from the world.

  I stumble. The chime continues to reverberate through my skull while the fractals fray at the edges to reveal…somewhere else.

  I snapped the cuff on as soon as I woke up. I was on the couch, lying on my side. Now I’m on my feet. A chorus of quiet voices adds to the hum and as they finish I can see again.

  Directly ahead of me a 180-degree window to my living room hovers in the air, bobbing as if in a slight breeze, one I can’t feel. There’s the ceiling, the couch backrest in my periphery, like my eyes are hooked directly to a wallscreen.

  Except they’re not my eyes.

  My eyes are looking at what my eyes are seeing.

  I look away to quell the vertigo and glance down. I’m wearing a simple white tunic, loose-fitting pants and paper slippers. Like I’m back at Second Skyn. The skybox above is deep azure, cloudless, like in the long dry summer months during the war, but there’s no sun. Light and heat radiates equally from every direction. I don’t cast a shadow.

  The floor is bare. Strips of thin blond bamboo five metres square. It’s squishy but doesn’t give, as though it’s lined with stopsuit material. Surrounding the raised floor, and stretching out in every direction, a jade-green meadow ripples like sunlight at the bottom of a swimming pool. Behind me a wide wooden doorframe juts from the floor. A film of iridescent static shimmers where the doors would be.

  I take a step back and the window to my world races away from me, now half the size it was. In front of it is a ghostly representation of my prone body cranked around ninety degrees, surrounded by a levitating sphere of my living room.

  That’s my body.

  I’ve left my body.

  I flex my knees to lunge forward, throw myself back into myself, claw my way back to reality. But instead, I close my eyes and inhale deeply. My nostrils fill with the smell of lavender and I hold it for a beat.

  Two.

  Three.

  Pressure to exhale never comes. I’m still holding my breath when I hear a voice.

  “Welcome to your Headspace, by Second Skyn,” a woman says, her voice in subtle harmony with itself.

  I whirl around. A figure is materializing from the shimmering surface of the doorway. A female form, pressing outwards, svelte with smooth features. Her face ripples into a smile.

  “My what?” I ask, finally releasing the breath I’d been holding and inhale again, more out of habit than any real need. My voice echoes like I’m in a much smaller place than my eyes tell me.

  “Your Headspace,” she answers. “An infinitely customizable digital playground in your head. You can come to play, to relax, to explore, or to be someone else. From here you can visit the Hereafter or a million unique worlds. It is yours to do with as you please, and it’s with you all the time.” Her lips don’t move. I can’t tell if I’m hearing her with my ears or if her voice is projecting directly into my head. Although, at this point, there’s no distinction. Everything is in my head. My ears are out in the room behind me.

  She waits as if anticipating a response, and when I don’t say anything asks, “Would you like a tour?”

  “Why not?” I say with a shrug.

  “Excellent,” the woman says and steps from the doorway, her body extruding from the film, stretching the glimmery surface until it snaps and she resolves into solid form. As she loses connection to the doorway her oil-slick skin coalesces into a flowing white gown interspersed with microscopic streamers glowing blue and green, like atom-sized shooting stars are raining down her dress.

  Her skin flushes with colour. Lips warm to a coppery red. Hair darkens to ebony. Eyes fade from the swirling purple and turquoise iridescence to a green that matches the faux-grass surrounding us. She strides over to me, her footfalls silent, like she’s walking on a cushion of air. She’s exactly my height, her eyes line up directly with mine.

  “This is your Headspace,” she says sweeping her arm wide to encompass everything around us. The light dims. As I start to wonder if something’s wrong the meadow flickers and the ground rumbles and thick green vines erupt from the grass. Trees grow high overhead in seconds, from tender sprouts to a rainforest canopy in the time it takes to realise it’s happening.

  The jungle grows and thickens until the canopy above is dense with fat, verdant leaves, and broad swooping vines, and the air is heavy with moisture and the clicking and buzzing and trilling of a thousand living creatures. The bamboo floor decays to dirt, erupts with vegetation, grows up my feet and around my legs. The doorway thickens to become a moss-covered stone arch adorned with the worn, chiselled faces of ancient warrior gods. Breaks in the leaves high above allow narrow beams of sunlight to make spears of the ground-hugging mist. It smells like flowers and sweat and decay.

  It feels so real.

  I know it’s all in my head, literally all in my head, but I still have to keep reminding myself.

  The woman pauses for a moment, just long enough I’m ready to start exploring, and gestures again. The leaves turn yellow, then brown, then drop from rotted trunks as an industrial miasma consumes the life-rich jungle air. The vegetation decays until I’m standing on a wide asphalt meridian in the centre of six lanes of rain-slick, night traffic. Boxlike cars, studded with superfluous hoses and yellow and black checkerboard decals whine by, smearing trails of red light in their wake. I can taste the petrochemical exhaust, smell the rain on the warm cement.

  Around me, anonymous pedestrians hidden behind filter-masks clutch newspapers over their heads or shelter under neon-lit umbrellas, obli
vious to monotonous commands of a ‘Don’t Walk’ sign. Buildings wrapped in the logos of long-forgotten corporations stretch up into the uniformly cloudy sky, their spines lit by glowing blue and green streamers. More traffic soars overhead in overcrowded Skylanes. Spotlights dance on the cloud cover.

  The arch has become a video screen. On it a woman with chalk-white skin and dark red lips pops something into her mouth and smiles.

  I spin around, trying to take everything in but nothing stays still, and the lights fade, the buildings crumble and reform into a small room around me. Four walls tacked with movie posters. A narrow bed with a plain green bedspread, matching pillows stacked neatly on top. A tall bookshelf filled by the passage of time.

  Thick paperbacks along the top.

  Thin, flimsy books in the middle.

  And large, hardbacked books with well-worn spines and bold, colourful titles along the high shelves at the bottom.

  A double window looks out onto a long stretch of lawn, a rusted swingset, and a depth of pine-treed forest beyond.

  I know this place.

  Directly ahead is a dark brown door, slightly ajar, the smell of Dad’s Sunday dinner seeping in through the crack. Roast potatoes. Gravy.

  This is my room.

  “Fin,” Mom calls from downstairs, her voice young and strong and full of love. “Get washed up for dinner, hon.”

  My knees buckle and I collapse onto the bed.

  It’s Sunday afternoon. When Mom would be home from the hospital and Dad would give himself the afternoon off to make a big dinner for the three of us. There would be dessert, apple crumble and ice cream, or maybe cake. We’d play a game. Scrabble or Euchre or Crokinole, and then Dad would let me stream a show or two until bed. My favourite day of the week.