His tone indicated that Trip was an idiot for thinking so. “—we’re just fooling around here. The master’ll go to New York; they’ll dub it in their studio. This is just the playback.”
He turned and switched the sound off, began conferring with his mate at the console. Trip sank back onto the floor. Above him his phantom double silently whirled and crouched within its golden cloud. An analogue; an icon.
“Pretty intense, huh?”
Trip didn’t look up when he heard Leonard behind him. “I’ve seen them before,” he said sullenly. In fact he had only seen an IT recording once, in Dallas, when during a few unchaperoned hours Jerry dragged him to a skin show in Deep Ellum.
“I meant watching yourself.” Leonard scraped the stool across the floor and perched on it. “I think it’s kind of a trip—”
He laughed. “—Trip. I do it whenever I can,” he added confidingly. His eyes were fixed on the singer’s shining twin. “It makes for a pretty amazing fuck.”
Trip felt himself blushing. “Not a fuck, exactly,” Leonard went on in a lower voice, “I mean, with an icon there’s nothing actually there; but—”
His hand moved. Trip froze, terrified that Leonard was going to touch him, but instead Leonard began to stroke his own upper thigh, smoothing the stiff folds in his cracked leather trousers and probing a small rent near his groin. His gaze was fixed on Trip’s doppelgänger, its blank masked face, arms drawing arabesques in the glittering air.
“It’s really beautiful,” Leonard breathed, his tone for once without mockery. A ridiculous anger fought through Trip’s unease.
I’m really beautiful! he thought. “That mask looks stupid,” he lied.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Leonard replied, his voice catching. Trip tried to force himself not to look but failed: he glanced over and saw the outline of Leonard’s swollen cock, a sheen of smooth red skin through the rip in the leather. “People are so obsessed with masks now, I think the mask is what makes it—”
Leonard let his breath out in a shuddering sigh. He stood, crossed the room, walking right through Trip’s double, and crouched beside one of his leather carryalls. Trip closed his eyes.
Go, he ordered himself. They have the recording, what the hell are you still doing here, GO!—
He jumped when someone touched his shoulder.
“Here.” It was Leonard, hand outstretched. In his palm he held two emerald-green capsules. “One’s for you.”
“Wh-what is it?” But he knew what it was.
“IZE.” Leonard lowered himself beside him. “It heightens the whole IT experience—oh for Christ’s sake, don’t look at me like that!”
“I’m not taking it,” Trip said.
“Look, it’s practically legal, approval is pending from the fucking FDA, okay? It’ll just—relax you—”
“I’m not—”
“Look, Trip—you know that everyone who sees this disc is going to be on IZE, right? I mean, who do you think this stuff is for? Don’t you think you should have some fucking idea of what your audience is seeing? Jesus!” Leonard shook his head. “You think this is like Reefer Fucking Madness, right? Well, it’s not—it just relaxes the inhibitors in your brain. So you, like, register the IT stuff as real, get it? You’re watching Macbeth or something, but you no longer have this perceptual curtain drawn between you and what you’re seeing—you’re part of it.”
“No,” Trip repeated. “Look, I better go…”
“Wait.” Leonard grabbed him. “Millions of people are going to see this—hundreds of millions. And this is just a demo, Trip—Agrippa’s going to want you to do more. A lot more. You owe it to them, at least, to have some vague fucking idea of just what it is you’re doing. By the time your single’s out, these are going to be like aspirin—”
He raised his palm, so that Trip could see the ampoules: each emerald cone as long as the first joint of his little finger, with a tiny needlelike projection emerging from the cone’s apex. “It doesn’t make you high or anything,” Leonard explained. Behind him Trip’s analogue froze, then began moving backwards, faster and faster, until it was a golden blur of legs and hands. “It just increases the amount of calcium entering some of your nerve terminals—calcium, right? Not a scary drug—and it boosts the production of gamma-aminobutyric acid, this neurotransmitter that inhibits anxiety and—stuff. And, well, then it helps create these new neural pathways within the various areas of the visual cortex. You get your visual stimuli coming in through the retina, processed through all these neurocellular layers of the visual cortex; but then the stimuli sort of get rerouted into other parts of the brain, like the limbic system. All the inhibitory mechanisms that would normally tell you that this is just like, a video, are overruled. So you get this incredible emotional response to what you’re seeing. It’s like the reverse of this weird thing called blindsight—people who are totally blind, but they can still process visual information because parts of their brain respond to stimuli, even though they’re not aware of it.”
Leonard’s voice grew softer. When Trip looked up he saw that the photographer’s expression was rapt and without guile. “I mean, it’s really very beautiful, how it works—”
“How do you know so much about it?” Trip demanded, but his tone was more curious than hostile.
Leonard shrugged. “Just part of the job.” He smiled, the crimson implant in his tooth glowing. “Look, I told you—it’s not going to make you high or anything like that, you’ll be disappointed if you’re expecting some kind of teenage head-rush. It’s just going to help you integrate better with what you’re watching. Like when you’re hypnotized—you’re not going to do anything you wouldn’t ordinarily do.”
Leonard leaned back, his proffered hand still holding the IZE cones. Trip swallowed. He thought of the blond girl in the planetarium, her head bowed between his legs, her slim body sliding fishlike through his hands and wondered if there was anything he wouldn’t ordinarily do. “I better not,” he said.
“It doesn’t even hurt. Look—”
Leonard pinched one of the cones between thumb and forefinger, held it so that the tip rested against the inner crook of his elbow. Gently he pushed the ampoule against the chiaroscuro of tattoos and raised scars, then squeezed it. Within the cone there was a phosphorescent flash. After a second Leonard pulled the ampoule away and tossed it onto the floor. Trip’s brightly spinning icon raised up on tiptoe above it.
“See?” Leonard murmured. The icon winked out. “Now you—”
He took Trip’s hand and pulled his arm straight. Trip grew rigid. Before he could protest there was a prick at his inner arm. He gasped as warmth suffused his entire body, a rush that started at his gut and spread down through his groin, up through his torso. Heat spread across his face, his skin flushed: but there was no pain, only an almost unbearably heightened awareness of every atom of his being. He could feel each hair upon his body stiffening, pores opening and closing across his cheeks. His hands and feet tingled as though he had thrust them into a swarm of stinging ants, and he realized that he was actually sensing the blood swimming through his extremities, the countless explosive bursts of neurons firing—really feeling them, as though he were an ocean and all the complex systems of his body myriad creatures passing through him in electric waves. He shuddered. The sensation was like a symphony, spangled lights flickering everywhere and warmth flooding his skull until it centered upon his eyes. He blinked, sending glowing orange pinwheels reeling across his field of vision, and mouthed the words Holy cow.