Variations in Dreampaint
by Marc Stiegler
Illustration by Janet Aulisio
I wiped the perspiration from my forehead again, scratched my beard, and stood patiently at my little flower stand. I watched the crowd, seeing if anyone recognized me… seeing if I could find him. I was not worried that I wouldn’t recognize him; I knew him too well to miss him, though we had never met. I had never even seen his photo.
I was more worried that someone in the crowd would recognize me. It had happened once, ten years before, despite my garish clothing, and the DreamPaint 1010HR sunglasses I wore. Occasional recognition was inevitable, if your face had appeared on every magazine cover from Time to Byte to Forbes; if you were the only man to be compared to both Bill Gates and Michael Milken in the same breath. Fortunately, being the wealthiest man alive not only made me recognizable, but it also made correcting the problem straightforward: the lucky lady who’d spotted me ten years earlier now inhabited the only Swiss chalet on the Great Barrier Reef, and she did not want to lose it.
It was 11:45 A.M. I couldn’t tell if today was the day that my nineteen-year ritual would end. Part of me hoped it would; part of me, a dark part, hoped it would not.
As usual, as I stood sweating at my flower stand, I daydreamed of the joyful way the tragedy had begun, the moment when my wealth, and my flower stand, became inevitable parts of a future history I would have to write, alone.
I bent low, so I could get my head down to the open car window. “Thanks, Chris, see you in the conference,” I said, and waved her on so she could catch a parking spot close by, rather than farther away from Moscone Center.
“Sure, Eric. Get done with these guys soon, so you can get in on the real action, OK?” Chris said before shifting the car back into gear.
“Wait!” I said with the urgent sincerity I had practiced faking for years. I reached behind her ear. “Got it,” I said, handing her the pink rose I seemingly pulled from behind her ear.
Chris just rolled her eyes. “Don’t you ever tire of silly magic tricks? Couldn’t you at least learn a new one?” She started to pull away, and stopped one last time. “By the way, we’re having a special midnight bull session tomorrow night.”
“Goodness. The Virtuality Con is having a special bull session tomorrow night, too. At 11 P.M.”
“Well, Eric, that’s cool, but you better leave their party at midnight and come to ours. Everybody who’s anybody will be there. Including someone you’ve wanted to meet. Someone very special.” Her eyes laughed at me.
As she left, I straightened up to my full height—at 6’ 7’’, that meant a lot of straightening, and I was used to people staring at me as I did it.
I’d been a starter on the Stanford basketball team for one semester. But then one Saturday night a drunk driver veered into my lane, and I didn’t dodge fast enough. Shea, my girlfriend, never came out of her coma. I was lucky, only getting my right knee banged up. Permanently.
I grieved for Shea, but it was the knee that ruined me. My whole future, my whole purpose—to play in the NBA—was wiped out. I was getting good grades in school, but I was empty.
I don’t know what would have happened to me if it hadn’t been for the guy on the white mountain bike. He was the VP of some company in Palo Alto, and he rode his bike to work from his home in Redwood City every day, cutting across the Stanford campus. Anyway, he stopped next to me one day while I was admiring the palm trees by the campus center; he wanted to admire them too. We started talking, pretty uneasily at first: we were very different kinds of people, the jock and the nerd. But he told me about the work he was doing, and he told me about virtual reality—not the weirdo stories typical in the news, but explaining its underlying value, why it would make the world a better place. Eventually he told me about nanotechnology, too. And he got me hooked.
I never would have guessed I could fit in with the nerds and the hackers, but looking back now I guess I was always a nerd at heart. I switched from not having a major to chemistry. I took up virtual world construction as a hobby, and the development of molecular tips for Scanning Tunneling Microscopes as a plan for a career.
Which left me in a quandary the year the Foresight Institute put on the Nanotechnology Conference in the Moscone Center North on the same weekend that the VRML Standards Committee put on the Virtuality Conference in Moscone South. Unable to decide which to attend, I tried to attend both. That was how I’d wound up being dropped off at the Virtuality Conference by Chris O’Keefe, who was organizing the Nanotechnology Conference.
I walked into the building. The registration lines were to the right, but I already had my badge thanks to Linda Scharansky, another friend who was helping organize the VR con. I snapped it on and strolled over to the display of events, at the base of the stairs leading to the mezzanine.
Despite the staccato clatter of background noise in the hall, I heard a remarkably distinct sound: the sound of happy feet, dancing down the steps behind me. I couldn’t help turning to see who projected such joy and laughter. I only caught a glimpse of her before she crashed into me.
She was too tall to be of faerie blood, too silly with her arms flying wildly to be a goddess, too surprised at being caught in my arms to be an angel. But as I lifted her bodily off the floor and put her carefully back down, she felt and looked like all three to me. My heart beat just a little faster. I hadn’t really been involved with anyone since Shea, but…
I smiled at her, my most open, winning smile. She smiled back, a bit dazed. For a moment a huge warmth suffused her face, then disappeared. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m not used to steps and staircases.”
“So you’re from Kansas, then, where everything’s flat,” I said, in a weak effort at a joke.
She laughed uncertainly. “No, actually, I’m from Berkeley,” she replied. She stared at me for a moment, so analytically it stopped my next foolish response dead in my mouth. She continued, “You wouldn’t believe how much you look like my boyfriend.”
Suddenly all my thoughts of love, romance, and sex, not necessarily in that order, were smashed. “Does your boyfriend play basketball?” I asked.
She looked away. “Gary’s dead,” she explained. She smiled half-heartedly. “Besides, they don’t play basketball anymore.”
No basketball in Berkeley? I should have questioned it—but the thought suffocated beneath the wave of new hope that thrilled me, since she was unattached. Sure, it was a shame her boyfriend had died; I guess I would have preferred he was OK for her sake, but it did mean I had a chance.
“I’m sorry,” I said, with reasonable sincerity.
“It’s OK. It’s not your fault. At least, it’s probably not very much your fault,” she finished rather mysteriously. “What’s your name?” she asked rather pointedly.
“Eric, Eric Rinaldi,” I said.
Her face fell, like she had expected me to be someone famous, then brightened like I had passed a test. “I’m Karly. Nice to meet you, Eric. Sorry I ran you down. Gotta motor,” she finished.
It was now or never. “Karly, wait!” I cried. “You have to let me buy you dinner. Meet me right here, at 6 P.M.”
She paused in lonely reflection. In the end, my resemblance to her beau probably made the difference. “OK.” She turned to leave again.
“One last thing,” I said rapidly. “This is a stupid question, but I have to ask. Are those VR glasses you’ve got there?” I pointed at the sunglasses she had propped on her forehead, glasses that were just a little too thick, glasses I thought I saw lit up on the inside when she first turned away.