And Alice suggested I try something of this sort. I hope that legitimizes it a little in your eyes, but if not… As Orianna — that’s the young woman’s name — as she says, I’m no longer a cutlet.
I sent the letter coded to our family, and before Mother had a chance to reply, on Orianna’s eighteenth birthday, two days away from our transfer from the Tuamotu to a shuttle to Earth, we dived into her smuggled fantasy sim.
“Better late than never,” Orianna said as we hooked our slates on a private channel, through the ship’s broadband, and linked with each other and with Alice, who was willing and even eager to conduct.
“You haven’t told me what it’s about.”
“It’s a forty-character novel.”
“Text?”
“Calling it a novel means it has a plot, instead of just being landscape. You’re part of a flow. You can move from character to character, but the character imposes — you won’t think like yourself in character, but you can watch. In other words, part of you will know you’re still you. It’s not a whole-life sim.”
“Oh.”
“You can pull out any time, and you can jump, as well.”
“You’ve done this sim before?”
“No,” Orianna said. “That’s why I didn’t want to just slate it. Alice can give us more protection and more detail. If there’s a bug, she can pull us out gently rather than just disconnecting. A discon always gives me a headache.”
It sounded worse and worse. I seriously considered backing out, but looking at Orianna, at her bright-eyed eagerness as she arranged the nano plugs, I felt a sudden burst of youthful shame. If she could do it, I could, too.
“You’ll go into the staging faster than I will,” she said, handing me my cable. “My cable will have to deactivate enhancements and set up cooperation links.”
I placed the cable next to my temple. The tip spread to several centimeters and seized my skin, snaking to get in a position to support its own weight. My arm-hair prickled. This was very like the arrangements for major therapy. Something tickled in my temple: the nano links going in through skin, skull, and cortex, pushing their leads into the proper main lines within the brain.
“What happens if this is jerked loose?” I asked, pushing the cable with a fingertip.
“Nothing. The links dissolve. Abso safe. Old old tech.”
“And if there’s a bug Alice can’t handle?”
“She can reprogram anything in the sim. You just spend a few seconds with Alice while she figures it out.”
That’s right, actually, Alice said within my head.
“Wow,” I said, startled. I had done LitVids with Alice , of course, but a direct link was a very different sensation.
Try talking to me without moving your lips or making a sound.
“Is this — ” Is this right?
Very good. Relax.
Do you approve of this sort of thing?
My entire existence is rather like a sim, Casseia.
I told my mother we’d do this. I don’t know what she’ll think.
I still saw through my eyes. Orianna had put on her cables and closed her eyes. A muscle in her cheek twitched.
“Ready,” she said out loud.
Sim will begin in three seconds.
I closed my eyes. For the first time in my life, I had the sensation of closing my ears, my fingers, my body, as well.
A creator credit icon — three parallel red knife slashes rising from a black ground, representing no artist or corporation I was familiar with — then total darkness.
When I opened my eyes again, I had a new set of memories. In medias res, along with the memories came a new set of concerns, worries, things I knew I had to do.
It was so smooth I hardly felt the shift.
I became Budhara, daughter of the Wahabi Arabian Alliance family Sa’ud, heir to old Earth resource fortunes. I knew somewhere that Budhara had never lived — this was fiction — but it didn’t matter. Her world was real — more real than my own, with the intensity possible in exaggerated art. My part in her life began fifty years in the past, and moved with un-diminished vividness through seven episodes, ending on her deathbed ten years in the future.
There was intrigue, double-dealing, betrayal, sex — though very discreet and not very informative — and there was a great deal of detail about the life of latter-day Wahabis in a world full of doubters. Budhara was not a doubter, but neither did she conform. Her life was not easy. It did not feel easy, and the intensity of her misery at times was mitigated only by my awareness that it would have an end.
Her death was startling in its violence — she was strangled by her lover in a fit of inferiority — but it was no more revelatory than the sex. My body knew it was not dead, just as it knew it was not really having sex.
After, my mind floated in endspace, gray and potent, and I felt Orianna there. She said, “Anybody you saw, you can become. Up to four per session, with a thinker driving.”
“How long have we been in sim?” I asked.
“An hour.”
It had seemed much longer. I could not really guess how long. But I thought we had not met in the sim, and all I could think to say, in the grayness, was, “I thought we were sharing.”
“We did. I was your last husband.”
“Oh.” The flush began. She had switched sexes — she had known me. I found that intensely unsettling. It called so many of my basics into question.
“We can switch to another location, as well… connect with Budhara through western channels. She can become a minor character.”
“I’d like to be her parrot,” I joked.
“That’s outer,” Orianna said, meaning beyond the sim.
“Then I’d like to go Up,” I said, not using the correct term, but it seemed right.
“Surface coming,” Orianna said, guiding me out of the gray. We opened our eyes to the cabin. Being tens of millions of kilometers between worlds seemed boring compared to Budhara’s life.
I whistled softly and rubbed my hands together to assure me this was reality. “I’m not sure I ever want to do that again,” I said.
“Yeah. It’s something sacred the first time, isn’t it? You want to go back so bad. Real seems fake. It gets easier to pull out later, more perspective, otherwise these would have been negged by law years ago. I don’t do lawneg sims.”
“Lawn-egg?” I asked.
“Outlaw. Illegal.”
“Oh.” I still wasn’t thinking clearly. “I didn’t learn much about Earth.”
“The Sa’ud dynasty is pretty withdrawn, isn’t it? Down fortune fanatics, nobody needs their last drops of oil, really top for sim fiction. Budhara’s my favorite, though. I’ve been through two dozen episodes with her. She’s strong, but she knows how to bend. I really enjoy the part where she petitions the Majlis to let her absorb her brothers’ fortunes… after their death in Basra .”
“Admirable,” I said.
“You don’t look happy?”
“I’m just stunned, Orianna.”
“Wrong choice?”
“No,” I said, though it had been an obtuse choice, to say the least. Orianna, despite her sophistication, was still very young, and I had to be reminded of this now and again. “But I was hoping to learn more about mainstream Earth, not the fringes.”