I looked around at the interior of the narrow electric car. “There’s nowhere to sit up here except my lap.”
“Tempting as that offer is,” she said, “I think I’ll make my own accommodations.” The right door of the car shimmered and receded, and a new seat ballooned into the extra space. The car flickered a little as it morphed, but when she was finished, I couldn’t find the line where real car ended and illusion began.
I looked away, disquieted that my reality could be changed so easily. “Aren’t my intrusion lockouts good for anything?” I asked.
“Oh, they’re good enough to keep you safe from the general rabble.”
“But not enough to make me safe from you?”
She clucked her tongue at me. “Girl, that’s not a software problem.”
At that moment a car passed us on the highway, which, in Kazakhstan, was a rare enough event to command my full attention.
“Why are you doing that?” she asked softly.
“Doing what?”
“Looking away every time I look over at you.”
“I am not,” I said irritably. “I’m trying to drive, that’s all.”
“Oh, yeah? What color are my eyes?”
“Mirabara, I don’t even know what color my eyes are.”
“All right, then, what color’s my hair?”
“Black.”
“You just guessed that because you know I’m Japanese.”
“Do you have any idea how many blondes there are in Japan now?”
“Quit changing the subject and look at me.”
It really was a beautiful day. Apriclass="underline" time to start cleaning. That insulation would have to come out of the windows. And the bathroom was really disgraceful—
“Pull over!” Keishi was shouting.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“You blacked out, that’s what. Now pull over before you get yourself killed.”
“I feel fine,” I said resentfully, but I stopped the car by the side of the road.
“Maybe too fine? Maybe drank a little too much nanojuice?”
“You saw me. I drank exactly what the telltale said. When exactly did this alleged blackout happen?”
“Right after you turned around to look at me. I think I’m insulted.”
“Very funny,” I said, but I looked down into my lap. I was beginning to suspect what had gone wrong.
There are two ways of creating a virtual image. If you want, you can send video to the optic nerve, but that takes a lot of bandwidth. If all telepresence worked that way, we’d have sixty channels instead of six thousand. So most channels barely send any video at all. I saw a demo once in which they patched some soap-opera channel through a video screen, and all you could see was a few pale ghosts swimming in static. It looks solid to you because your implants secrete what cameras call “down,” which makes your brain, well, gullible—“lowers your thresholds,” I think is the phrase. No, I don’t know what thresholds they’re talking about, either. They say it’s like the way dreams work, if that means anything to you.
To make sure you see what you’re meant to see instead of just dreaming at random, the moistware sends signals to some gizmos called neuromodulators, that sit in the part of your brain that recognizes things. And the neuromodulators guide your mind, as it amplifies the patterns it’s being fed.
This is not an exact science. Sometimes the mind will amplify a purely random pattern in the static, or make the right pattern into the wrong thing. That’s why on the low-bandwidth channels, you sometimes get misrecognitions. The camera sees the Prime Minister, and you see your Uncle Vanya. The camera sees her first love, and you see yours. In a case like mine this presents certain problems, as you can imagine.
Now, News One does go out in full video, precisely because they don’t want Mr. Yablokov to turn into Dyadya Vanya during a speech. So while I’m transmitting, my nanos secrete “up,” which somehow makes my eyes work harder so you get a better signal. Sometimes a new screener will give me too much up, and I’ll go agnosic—look at things and not know what they are. But Keishi was coming in through my imagination chip’s feeble Net-link, and that is a very low-bandwidth connection, lower than even the most obscure channels. To get an image that way, I’d need a lot more down than I was used to. Since I’m a camera, the bugs would keep the down corralled in certain parts of my brain, which explained why I could still more or less drive; but my visual cortex must have been swimming in the stuff. Any moment now, the road might turn into a river, the grass into seaweed, the sheep into shellfish. Small wonder if I mistook Keishi for someone else.
Unless. What if it wasn’t a misrecognition? What if she was?
I glanced at her, minutely so she might not notice. I could have seen her for no more than a fraction of a second, and yet I felt my mind skid—with a moment of panic, like slipping on ice—back to the thought of the insulation in the windows. And this thought, which had gone through my mind a hundred times and was familiar to it, brought on a pulse of nausea: as on those mornings when the throat forgets all previous intimacy with the toothbrush and, gagging, rejects it.
You’re wrong, I told myself forcefully. She is Keishi Mirabara, a screener, a stranger, and not what you think.
But if she was?
“Turn around,” she said. “Let me take a look at your pupils.”
“I said, I’m all right. I’m just a little tired, that’s all.”
She leaned toward me; I twisted away. Finally she drew back and frowned. “I think I see the problem.” For a time, silence. Then she said, “It’s okay, you can turn around now.”
“What did you do?” I said, not moving.
“Told your nanobugs to clean the fatigue products out of your system. It’ll keep you a few hours. There’s a long-term solution— called sleeping. You should ask the Net about it.”
I suspected that the excuse of fatigue was as much a lie in her mouth as in mine. But having advanced the explanation myself, I could hardly deny it now. Slitting my eyes, as though that could protect me from the sight, I turned toward her—
And felt waves of relief. (“There now,” she said, “that’s better.”) She was twenty years too young to be her—to be one of them—to be what I had thought. Maybe I really was tired, and imagining things. Or maybe it was too much down. And she really was alarmingly beautiful; maybe it was only that.
No, wait. Strike that. I took a second look: she was indifferently pretty, perhaps, but taken for all in all, she was far too much Central Casting’s idea of the Japanese Black emigre to attract anyone but the shallow. You know the type—young, overeager, and a little bit more fashionable than it is fashionable to be. She even had the statutory name-you’ve-never-heard-before. If this were a vid, first we’d have the history lesson about how the Unanimous Army stranded thousands of American Blacks in Japan, and then she’d start telling me how she tried to get to Africa but they turned her away at the border because she wasn’t pure enough of blood. Though, come to think of it, she looked as if she might have been; the East had left few traces in her face, except to lighten it. She could easily pass for an African.
“Well, don’t bother thanking me,” she said as I pulled back out onto the road.
“Thank you,” I said with exaggerated courtesy. “Now will you please tell me what the devil News One thought they were doing sending me an NCG to go live? I could have been eaten up out there.”
“What’s an NCG?”
“New College Graduate,” I said. “You know, a redshirt. Cannon fodder.”
Keishi gestured at the car she had refashioned. “Have you ever had a screener before who could do this?”