A voice startled me.
“Do you think,” said the dark-haired tourist who I thought was inanimate earlier, “that their civilization was doomed because they lived on a double planet?” I hadn’t heard her come into the room. She had never spoken before.
Like many of the tourists, she didn’t wear shoes. Many of them say they want an authentic experience, but they won’t play the part. Her hands were clasped behind her back as she studied the lander below. “I mean, what other species grew up with a monstrosity of a moon like this in their sky? Do you think they felt how it tugged them around?”
She didn’t look at me as she waited for an answer.
“They wouldn’t sense the gravity. It would just be a part of what they knew.” I wondered why she had been silent for so long and why she decided to speak now.
“But it would be huge in their sky. Look at the planet itself.” She glanced up. The home world, its features obscured by the opaque atmosphere, half in the sun and half dark, hovered above. “When they lived on the surface, the air was clear, you said. Wouldn’t they see the moon? Wouldn’t they fear that it would crush them?”
“The moon wouldn’t be as large to them as the planet is to us, but it’s true they would see it. Maybe having a goal so visible drew them into space. It might have caused them to develop technologies before they could handle them.”
She let her gaze wander across the landscape. As I said, the personality behind the shell was more interesting than the shell. Whoever animated this one had layers. “I would be afraid. As I slept, I would feel the moon, bigger than anything in the night. It would be bright, wouldn’t it, like another sun?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. I haven’t seen the moon from a distance.”
She sat on the floor so that she could see the landing site between her spread legs, a surprisingly graceful move for a tourist, but then I remembered she’d had weeks more practice than the rest of them. In fact, after me, she would be the most experienced person at the observatory in her skin shell. She pressed her hands against the smooth surface. “Were they a species that made myths? Did they have explanations for their moon, before they began exploring space, I mean? Many species worshipped their sun when they were young. Maybe they worshipped their sun and their moon, or maybe some of them believed in the god of one but not the other. There could have been wars. What if they came to the moon because they hoped to find a god, and when they didn’t they had no reason to live?”
I wanted suddenly to sit beside her. My normal presentation didn’t cover this material. They were the questions I thought about. “We know some about them, but not what you are asking. The artifacts don’t tell us everything.”
Two more tourists came into the room, two of the male shells. One held the other’s arm. “We were experimenting with durability,” said the first, supporting the weight of the other’s arm in his hands.
“The digits break,” said the second. “And they hurt! It still hurts! Must be a flaw in the design. If the system is damaged, you should get the signal and then be able to turn it off. I’m very uncomfortable!”
“He’s never had an endoskeleton. I told him the little things could snap, but he put them in the door anyway,” said the first one apologetically.
Two of the man’s fingers were bent backwards unnaturally. The knuckles were swollen and purple.
I thought that I was lucky he hadn’t destroyed the shell entirely. On the last tour, a tourist entered an airlock without protection and opened it. When I talked to the angry guest remotely an hour later to explain that he’d lost his damage deposit, he complained that he shouldn’t be responsible for a unit too fragile for a change in environmental conditions. He also complained about the pain. “I was so distracted that I almost stayed with it until it expired. I’ll have to have the experience wiped. Very traumatic,” he said bitterly.
I said to the man with the broken fingers, “We can load you into an undamaged shell.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m going to try the other gender. I understand the experience is different.”
They left, headed for the decanter center where he would transfer his consciousness to an empty shell.
The woman on the floor laughed, an utterance tourists didn’t handle well. “I talked to him earlier. He was mad because they wouldn’t rent him two shells at the same time so he could have sex with himself. I’ll bet he didn’t break his fingers in a door.”
I shook my head, a gesture I’d seen in one of the historical records. I realized she wouldn’t know what it meant. “What a waste. You’d think he could get whatever weird simulated interactions with himself he wanted, without renting real shells.”
She leaned forward, almost folding herself in half on the floor. “I can always tell when it’s a simulation.”
Thirty feet below, every pebble cast a long shadow. Shadows filled the footprints too, shallow as they were. She was right. If this were a simulation, I’d feel the falseness of the information. My senses would bump against the experience. Tech folks called it “perceptional dissonance,” the distance between what the simulation is feeding to your consciousness and what your sensory organs are not telling you. Most beings don’t notice the dissonance, or they don’t care, but, for purists, the real experience is worth the tiny improvement.
“I was here yesterday, before the tour.” She pressed the side of her face against the floor. It would be cool and smooth. “I thought I saw something move next to the lander. That’s why I decided to talk to you.”
My skin prickled, a reaction I’d never felt in this body. “What do you mean?”
“I thought I saw someone in a space suit. Its head was encased. The image only lasted a second.” She sat up, then stood, running her hands up and down her arms. “These shells send so much information. When I touch myself, why do I feel it both with my hand and my skin? It’s redundant. I took a shower my first day; I thought I would fall unconscious with the overload. There were so many sensations, touch, taste, feel, sound, sight. How could these creatures think with their bodies signaling them about everything?”
I’d forgotten what my training days in the shell had been like. Most of the tourists reveled in the sensations—not that these bodies were the most sensitive in the universe. Few rivaled them though.
“Sleep scares me,” she said, “even when I’m tired. In sleep, the shell sends me signals. Strange images. Emotions.”
“Dreams.”
“I know. The orientation mentioned them, but experiencing them is different.”
I wondered if it was possible that she was new to body porting. Veteran tourists didn’t comment on this level of being in the shells, and veterans wouldn’t stay in the same shell for an extended period. Other shells provided as many or more variations, although none of them combined them like these did. “If you go back to your room, I can send you a drug that will tone down the sensory system. You can build to full engagement gradually.”