I never really knew my mom before, and I hardly saw her after. I tried to find her in the Virtch one time. Yeah, that’s not supposed to be possible unless the person wants you to find them, but I was a smart kid, and I did a little Virtch-jacking in my time. So I jacked my mom’s coords from the master-map and tracked her down.
She was in a cloud villa of a private-sky, but if you’ve already jacked the master-map, getting into a private-sky is nothing. So I found her in the villa doing this group thing with a flock of studs and bims. She looked different in the Virtch. If I hadn’t had my jack, I wouldn’t have recognized her. I still looked like my Real mode back then. I knew you could look like anybody you wanted to in the Virtch, but I figured it was just one of those things other people do.
So she looks up from what she’s doing. She’s this beautiful bim, looks not much older than me, and she’s naked and her skin is shining from some kind of oil. And she looks at me, and of course she recognizes me. Her eyes get wide and angry, and she points at me and yells, “Get out!” Then she looks down at herself and flickers into pink smoke as she Virtches out.
And some of the studs and bims who weren’t too distracted noticed, and were looking at me. Then somebody far away called my name, the Virtch went black, something invisible hit me, and I felt myself falling. And the hood of my glove gets pulled off, and there’s my mother, still wearing the wrinkled gray skin of her glove, just jacked out from the rest of the machine. Her face was red, her eyes all narrow, showing the lines there, and she’s yelling at me, pushing me. She picks up my glove console and throws it at me. I duck, and the box bull’s-eyes a stain on the wall behind me, breaking open like a melon, exposed guts falling to the floor.
I can see her in my pan now. I can see her like she’s standing right in front of me. But I can’t hear what she’s saying. I feel like, if I concentrate hard enough, I might be able to read the words on her thin, dry lips, but I can’t hear her. But I can smell the apartment, the dust, the mildew in the window frames, the sour smell of ripe garbage. I can see the anger and indifference on her face. I can see the lines of coming age there. I can see the smoky blue light from the one window, and the black scab that was the building across the alley. I knew then and I know now that, for my mom, I was the Real, and for her, the Real was unbearable.
I moved out of her place the next day, and in with my friends Laddo, Buc, and Pax from school. We were all Virtch-jackers back then. They helped me patch up my glove console. In a week, the longest week of my life, I was back in the Virtch, with a new job, a whole new life in the Real, for what it mattered. Actually, it mattered a whole lot. You have to eat in the Real, pay the rent, and upgrade your glove. The rig my mom had was nice. Mine was going to be better, I promised myself.
We lived fast, hard, and dangerous, jacking the Virtch for pay. They say the couple that Virtch together stay together, but a lot of couple-contracts Virtch on their own, and their ess-oh’s will pay to tab on what they do there. So we gogged them on the sly, like old-time private-eyes used to do in the Real, and recorded their affairs for their lady or man to playback later. It didn’t pay that much, and the risk was high, but we were kids and didn’t know any better. After eighteen months, Pax saved enough to get his own place. Two months after that he was busted for Virtch jacking. He got ten years at hard labor. All he gogs now are rocks, I guess.
Laddo, Buc, and I legaled up real fast after that. We broke up in the Real. I don’t even know what they’re doing any more. But I still see them in the Virtch, and sometimes we fly together. I grew up a lot in the next few years. I did the school thing and the job thing. But I lived in the Virtch.
So there I was, sitting on the ground, doing the “what does it all mean,” thing. I was curled up with my arms over my face, my eyes closed, and for a while I wasn’t in the Real, and I wasn’t in the Virtch. I was just in me. It was a strange place.
You know how you change channels in the Virtch? You make for a sky door and fly through, and you’re in an intersection, a little chunk of sky with doors all around, and then you go through another door, and there you are in another channel; another sky. People don’t linger at intersections. They don’t think about them. They take them for granted. But they’re the passages between all things in the Virtch. Without them, you’d be stuck in one sky, with no place to go.
So, there I was, face buried in my arms, knees to my chest, eyes closed, in my own dark little intersection, surrounded by doors, not just to the Real and the Virtch, but other worlds I’d never glommed before. Trouble was, it was too dark to see what was beyond the doors. That’s when I smelled one.
It wasn’t like the sweet smells of a pastel cloud, or the ozone of a thunderhead, or the musky perfume of a cloud villa. It had as much in common with those things as the Virtch did with watching a vid in flat mode. It was sweet and salty and sour and musty and a thousand other things at once. I’d glommed some power programs in the Virtch, but they were mostly for eyes and ears—cheap thrills. I groped for the door in the darkness and flew through. I opened my eyes.
I was sitting in a bed of dead leaves in a forest clearing. The trees that had gogged like bumps on a rug from the air towered all around me, rocking gently in the breeze. The Sun shown through the limbs, stenciling shifting patterns of light and dark on the ground. The sky was blue, and the pastel clouds and the sky villas were nowhere to be seen. Through some local piece of programming, a few wispy clouds moved slowly, colored only shades of white and gray. It was a beautiful piece of Virtch work, some of the best I’d ever seen. And it was here on the ground, where nobody would ever see it.
I stood up and brushed leaves off my butt. I looked at the sky. One, two, three, extend, and push. I’d have been back in my sky again. That was when it started. A path led off down a gentle hillside. Somewhere down among the trees, I could hear running water. It sounded inviting. I walked the Virtch.
The path wound slowly down the hill, around fallen trees and outcroppings of rocks. I’d lived all my life in the city, and I’d never seen anything this wild. Every few yards uncovered a new wonder: squirrels chattering and jumping from limb to limb, mushrooms pushing up through the forest floor like a metropolis of tiny buildings, red and blue birds soaring and wheeling between the trees, the strange calls of animals I didn’t glom echoing between the hillsides.
At last I found myself looking down on a waterfall that tumbled over dark rocks three meters down into a deep, oval, pool. The water was so clear that you could count the rocks on the bottom. It looked inviting. On an impulse, I reached down and tested the water with my fingers. I had expected it to be as warm as bath water. It was cold. Not unbearably so, but the sensation was uncharacteristically harsh for the Virtch, enough so that I hesitated. The water still looked good.
I usually wear a jumpsuit in the Virtch, so I reached for the clasps. I could have derezzed the suit in a second by pulling up a console, but like I said, I’m a kind of Virtch snob. I keep the experience as pure as I can. So, I tossed my jumpsuit and slippers onto a rock next to the waterfall, but they derezzed as soon as they hit the ground, an interesting bit of programming. I could get them back by calling up a console, but it was strange. I guessed that the designer of this place valued the purity of their experience too, but they gogged purity differently than I did.