There was a rock sticking out next to the falls that seemed made for diving. I stepped out on it, feeling the Sun-heated stone under my bare feet, watching the water boiling at the bottom of the falls, it was a convincing illusion. Three steps forward, arms extended, push off with the toes. But differently, willing your body out and down rather than up, cutting a smooth arc through the air. I hit water so hard it took the breath out of me, so cold it wouldn’t let me take any more in. You can’t drown in virtual water, of course. I could have sat on the bottom all day if I’d wanted to (though it would have been pretty crashing cold!). But the illusion was so good that I held my breath until I broke the surface, gasping with lungs that didn’t want to work.
When they finally did start to work again, I was laughing, loudly, uncontrolled, and without glomming why. I rolled over on my back and paddled toward the shore, enjoying the blue sky and the clouds, and the occasional interruption of a bird flying by. After a while, there was a whoosh, a Dopplered yell, and a couple of sky skiers mached over, trimming the tree tops and seeing nothing but blurs. It was then I realized, this is what happens when you hit the bottom. You find what’s hidden there.
After a while I climbed out of the pool and sun dried on a flat rock by the water. Then I pulled up a console to bring back my clothes. It was then I noticed the clock on the fan-shaped control panel floating in the air in front of me—2:38 a.m.! I had a sales meeting in the Real the next day. Noting the coords of the waterfall, I Virtched out and started peeling off my glove.
As I was getting ready for bed, I noticed the message indicator on the bedside console. I played back a flat mode vid from Laddo. I hadn’t heard from Laddo in the Real in years. He’d been worried about the way I’d bugged out of the thunderhead and not come back. He said he’d even considered seeing if he could still hack the master map and track me down, but decided not to. “We’re not kids any more, Jodd,” he said. “Couldn’t take the risk.” He laughed at me from the screen. “Could end up breaking rocks with old Pax.”
It was then I glommed what was wrong with growing up. You forget how to take risks. I thought about the ground rushing up at me, not knowing what would happen when I hit, and smiled. Sure it was a stupid thing to have done, but I’d felt more alive than I had in a long time.
Laddo ended his message with a request to call him when I got back to the Real. My finger hovered over the call icon on the console for a few seconds, then I tumbled into bed without pressing it. What was I going to tell him? That I was walking the Virtch? If he was worried about me now, that would really crash his pan. I needed my rest. I pulled up the covers, fell asleep quickly, and dreamed about flying.
It got to be a habit, walking the Virtch. Each night I came back and explored a little more of the private channel I’d discovered, bootlegged under somebody else’s sky. I didn’t see much of my friends in the clouds any more. I thought about telling them what I’d found, inviting them down. But like I said, there’s a taboo about walking the Virtch, and they were purists, just like me. I figured they wouldn’t understand. Crash, I admit it. I was shamed.
But when you find a great thing, you want somebody to share it with. That’s why I was so jazzed to find Emily. I just wished she was as glad to be found. It happened one day when I was hiking down out of the high hills, back toward the waterfall and swimming pool. I was walking down the by then familiar path, when I heard singing. Not birds this time, but a woman’s voice. It was a sweet voice, singing some old song, the kind with a melody. I came out of the trees, and there she was sitting on the diving rock. She was tall, and blonde, wearing a tan colored jumper that belted at the waist. She was beautiful—you expect that in the Virtch—but the voice had to be hers. Lots of people use voice mod programs, but they all sound terrible singing anything but buzz-rock. This was her real voice for sure. I stood quietly, listening, being very quiet so as not to interrupt. She just sat there, swinging her legs and gogging off at the horizon for a while. Then she pulled up a console in the air in front of her. Not a little home-ent console like mine, but a big programmer’s console with a sketch pad and utility keyball. She diddled the keyball for a minute, and a new hill rezzed in on the horizon.
“You programmed all this!” I said it before I had a chance to think about it.
She gasped, and her head spun around, fanning out her long, straight hair. Her eyes flashed from fear, to surprise, to anger. “What do you mean, sneaking up on me like that!”
I smiled at her. I was so amazed at her reaction that I didn’t even think to be embarrassed that I was walking. “I was just gogging your work, here. It’s beautiful.”
So I stepped toward her, but in a second she’s on her feet, and though she’s dressed, she half turns away like she’s trying to cover herself. “This is my place, you pervert!” And then she Virtches out, and I’m standing there by myself.
A few seconds later the landscape I’d grown to love is gone, too. It rezzes out, and in its place is a parody. The rocks are brown polygons stacked up like a kid’s blocks, the pool a featureless blue oval, the trees indistinct green blobs on brown columns, the waterfall like a conveyer belt covered with glitter, running endlessly down into the bland surface of the pool. Yet, it would all look the same from a cloud villa. It was then that I glommed just how much of this place had been her. It was then that I knew just how much I’d lost.
I didn’t do the Virtch at all for three days, the longest break since my mom threw me out. Instead, I vegged in front of my main screen and watched flat mode vids, drank too much, and generally got crashed. Finally, I decided to give the Virtch another try.
After I Virtched in, it didn’t take me long to find Laddo and Jace. Buc rezzed in to say “hi,” but he was spending a month on Mars for the Japanblock Corp he worked for, and the time delay was too long to fly the Virtch with us. So the three of us chased some storms, did some sky-games, and cruised some cloud villas we knew. It felt like I hadn’t gogged them for a long time, and I came pretty close to enjoying myself. But as the evening wound down, and it was just me and Laddo floating in the lounge of a cloud villa nursing a couple of beers, he started quizzing me as to where I’d been.
Turns out he’d finally gotten curious enough to hack the master map the night before, and found out I hadn’t been in the Virtch for at least forty-eight hours. “Are you sick, Jodd?
Never known you to miss a day in the Virtch. You find a woman?”
I didn’t want to talk about it, but I figured it might be the only way to shut him up. “Yeah, I found a woman, and lost her, all at the same time. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Is this in the Real or the Virtch, Jodd? Probably in the Virtch, I’m guessing.” He took a swig of his beer and laughed. “Got to be careful about the Virtch, Jodd. It’s good for most things including a quick, no hassles roll. But never love in the Virtch, Jodd. You never glom what you’re dealing with.”
I knocked my bottle off the table and it spun across the room before derezzing. I knew it was actually making a puddle on my living room floor somewhere, but there’s no litter in the Virtch. So, I said, “I know exactly what I’m dealing with, Laddo, and I don’t want to talk about it!” And I Virtched out before he could say anything else.
The comm rang a minute or so later, and I erased the message without listening to it. I was cleaning up the spilled beer when it rang again. I dumped the mess in the kitchenette, and started to erase the second message, then decided, what the crash, I should hear Laddo out. The message wasn’t from Laddo.