Jake realized, somewhat to his disappointment, that the experience wasn’t so very different from a VR “ride,” and that his familiarity with such rides, although limited, was determining the oddly qualified and carefully muffled ter-ror of his responses.

  I’m so out of touch with reality that I can’t even grasp it anymore, he thought. This is what it’s come to. I’m going to die, and it’s just another virtual experience.

  “Do you have any idea how many people you’re inconveniencing, Mr.

  O’Callaghan?” the tamarin asked, in a censorious manner that was certainly no reflection of Jake’s personality.

  “Sure do” Conor said, enthusiastically. “Putting a roadblock across a twelve-lane superhighway is one hell of an operation. Snarls up twenty, maybe twenty-five thousand vehicles. Last lot of fines bankrupted me—from now on, I’m dying on credit!”

  “They’ll put you under house arrest,” Jake said, wonderingly. “You’ll never be able to go out again, ever.”

  “Depends how good their locks are,” Conor replied.

  “I’ve been a cracker since I was so high. Takes solid walls and heavy bolts to keep me inside—software won’t do it. Nice day trip, hey?” Jake laughed, feeling a strange wave of relief pass through him as the car was forced back into the empty outer lanes. There was now a solid wall of robotrucks to their right, and nothing ahead of them for at least a kil-ometer. As the wave passed, though, Jake began to eye the barrier protecting the grassy median, wondering just how crazy the old man was.

  He turned in his seat. The pursuing police cars were coming up fast.

  Conor began to jiggle the wheel from side to side so that the car veered from one empty lane to another. The pursuers’ safety mechanisms held them back; they couldn’t overtake unless he left them an adequate gap, and he was a very good judge of adequate gaps.

  “I strongly advise you to slow down, sir,” the tamarin said, leaping back onto Jake’s shoulder and then slipping down behind the seats. It was taking protective action; it had seen the roadblock that was looming up ahead of them.

  Conor didn’t slow down. He just drove full tilt at the roadblock.

  The distance separating the car from the block disappeared with terrifying fluidity, and Jake felt his heart— his weak, unstable heart—pounding in his chest like an earth-breaking drill of a type he hadn’t seen in fifty years. The terror inside him back-flipped out of its virtual mode and became suddenly, overwhelmingly forceful. It was mortal terror now; he knew that they were going to crash, that the car and the whole damn world were going to be torn apart.

  The only thing he didn’t know was why.

  In spite of his authentic terror, that was the thought that seized hold of him as they hurtled toward the barrier: Why is the crazy man doing this?

  Because he knows that he won’t die, or because he hopes that he might?

  Conor had obviously done this before. For him, it was just a joyride, just a day out—but it was Jake’s first time, and he had never been in a crash of any kind. As the barrier hurtled toward them like the black horizon of death itself, Jake’s poor heart leaped and lurched and tried with all its pathetic might to explode.

  He never felt the impact. He saw it, but he never felt a thing.

  Jake woke up in his own bed, feeling dreadful.

  Sam was stationed to the right, Doreen to the left. Sam was pale, exhausted, and anxious; Doreen was flushed, agitated, and solicitous. It didn’t take long for their tender inquiries to give way to harsh recriminations.

  “You could have been killed,” Sam said. “You very nearly were.”

  “The car had safety features,” Jake muttered. “Crazy Conor bypassed all the software checks, but the hardware was still in place.”

  “That’s not the point,” Sam persisted. “You had a major heart attack, Dad. If there hadn’t been an ambulance waiting behind the barrier, you’d be stone dead. As it is, you might have lost five or ten years. It wasn’t trivial, Dad— nothing is, at your age.”

  No, Jake thought. At my age, nothing is.

  “Where did you think you were going, Jake?” Doreen wanted to know.

  She was fussing over him, fluffing the pillows, checking the many wires and catheters which connected various parts of his prone body to the house physician, reading the various displays which were monitoring his all-too-frail flesh. Somehow, she gave the impression of being in her element—which was odd, given her actual vocation.

  They’ve got me where they want me now, he thought, uncharitably.

  “Nowhere,” he said out loud.

  “Well,” said Sam, “you nearly made it. You won’t be going out again for quite some time. Fortunately, that lunatic you were with won’t be going out for the rest of his life. Why on earth did you hitch a ride with a maniac like that?”

  “He offered,” Jake said. “Where’s the tamarin?” They had both been bending over him, but now they straightened up like twin pillars. He felt as if he were somehow suspended between them and drawn unnaturally taut.

  “The monkey didn’t have a belt or an airbag,” Sam said, reluctantly. “It must have tried to use the back of your seat as a cushion. It would have been okay if only the back seat hadn’t been sheared from its moorings.

  That’s why your back hurts—you bruised several verte-brae. The monkey was caught and crushed. There was nothing the medical team could do.”

  “I’m sorry,” Doreen was quick to say, as if someone might have suspected her of being glad if she hadn’t said it.

  “Oh shit,” said Jake.

  The silence was hard to bear, but not as hard to bear as the things they were too diplomatic to say out loud. Things like it was only a kind of robot, not really alive at all; or you can get another one if you want; or, it was your own stupid fault you stupid, senile old fool. He noticed, for the first time, that his back really was in a bad way. He’d be walking stiffly for some time, if and when he was able to get up again.

  He tried to twist himself around so that he could look at the monitors that were collating an objective record of his distress, but his spine wouldn’t tolerate the torque and the displays were too high up on the wall.

  “It’s my data,” he said, sourly. “I ought to be able to read it.”

  “You can,” Doreen told him, in matronly fashion. “All you have to do is put the VR helmet on. It’ll put a full display right before your eyes. You can watch your insides churning away through a fleet of internal cameras if you want to.”

  Suddenly, it didn’t seem like such a good idea.

  “No charges have been filed against you,” Sam said, obviously thinking that there was safer conversational ground in that direction, “but we had to extradite you from Mexico as an illegal alien. There’s a certain irony in that, I suppose.”

  “I didn’t even know we were heading south,” Jake told him, bitterly. “I guess I’ll be forgetting which way’s up next. But I can still die with a clean sheet. You can put that on my tombstone if you like. Here lies Jake, died with a clean sheet. Better set up a spy-eye so you can look out of your window at it any time you like. Show your kid, if you ever get around to having one. One’s still the ration, I suppose, for all right-thinking immortals?” He didn’t add We could’ve had two, if we’d wanted to. It was true; he and Martha could have, if they hadn’t had a conscience about Third World overcrowding. Nobody had known way back then that the next generation wouldn’t have to bother with dying, or that the surplus personnel of the Third World would simply come and set up house in the interstices of the First.

  “Don’t be like that, Dad,” Sam said. His voice was light, but he meant it.

  “I am like that,” Jake retorted, stubbornly. “Always was, always will be.”

  Doreen finally had to get back to work; however uncertain they might be, the world’s futures still had to be bought and sold. Sam stayed for a while longer.

  “You had a bad shock, I guess,” Sam said.

  “Let that be a lesson to me,” Jake countered. “It’s dangerous out there, what with all these crazy old people. A man can lose his best friend as easy as snapping his fingers.”

  “Was the monkey really your best friend?” Sam asked, skeptically—displaying a perspicacity of which even the tamarin’s clever biochip might have been incapable.

  “No,” Jake admitted. “I’ve spent too much time with smart machines to start grieving for one. It’s not like los-ing Martha was, not in a million years. Don’t say I won’t miss him, mind. Hard to find people I have that much in common with.”

  “Doesn’t it get a little claustrophobic, talking all the time with an echo?”

  “About as claustrophobic as a cell on Death Row with a million windows and a doorway to a thousand virtual worlds. Okay, so he wasn’t really as smart as he sounded—who is?”

  “You never used to call it he when it was alive,” Sam observed. “You never even gave it a name.”

  “Maybe they ought to make them with sexual organs,” Jake said. “Just for decoration, of course. It’d be easier to give them names if they were one thing or the other. It’d be easier to think of them as real animals. I mean, that’s the idea, isn’t it? We’re supposed to be able to think of them as real animals, just like us. That way, we really might be able to make friends with them, the way we sometimes can with one another.”

  “Someone called from the Village,” Sam told him. “Saw the news, wanted to know if you were okay. Name of Peterson. Was he a friend?”

  “Not really.”

  “Good of him to call, though.”

  “Not really.”

  Sam sat down on the bed and looked his father right in the eye. “If you want to die, Dad, you can” he said, very soberly. “It’s easy enough. If you want to live and get nothing out of it, that’s even easier. It must be hell, having fallen through a trapdoor that was sealed and made safe a few years after it caught you. I ask the same question, you know: Why you? I hear the same answer: Why any-body? Whenever it came along, someone was bound to miss out: a whole generation. I won’t try to fan the flames by saying that they might still discover a way to undo damage already done, although they might. All I’ll say is that I’d feel a lot happier and a lot prouder if my father was one of the guys who did his level best to make the most of the time he had, even though he’d lost almost everything that made what he had seem worth having. But then, I always was a selfish little toad, wasn’t I?

  Comes of being an only child, I guess. In the future, there’ll only be only children. What a world, hey?”

  Jake said nothing, because there was nothing he could say that wouldn’t make him seem like an old fool. He wriggled and writhed a bit, knowing that the physician would read it as a sign of increasing discomfort and up the endorphin input. He figured that it was time to float for a while, and to feel sensibly detached.

  “I’ll come in and see how you are in a little while,” Sam said. “Doreen’ll pop in and out when she can. You want peace and quiet and all those wires out, you’ll have to recover. Okay?”

  “Sure,” said Jake. “I’ll be fine. Back on my feet in no time.”

  “I’ve moved the window nearer the bed,” Sam pointed out, as he paused in the doorway, “so you can see out.”

  “Thanks,” Jake said, lukewarmly.

  At first, he turned away from the window, and even shut his eyes for a while, but he couldn’t go to sleep. In the end, he turned back again, to face the reconfigured wall. Beyond the imaginary windowpane, snow was gen-tly falling on a meadow.

  After watching the scene for a few tedious minutes, Jake found the remote control and switched off the snow. Then he switched off the meadow. Idly, he started surfing through the channels.

  Worlds came and went, each one flaring up in a blaze of light and then dying. Some of them were here and now, others elsewhere and anywhere, in the present or the dis-tant past or possible futures or pasts that might have been but never were. Jake couldn’t tell the real ones from the unreal at this sort of pace; they were all whirled in to-gether, all part and parcel of the same infinitely confused and infinitely confusing whole.

  What an old fool I am, Jake thought, trying to go anywhere and nowhere on the highway, when all the anywheres and nowheres anyone could ever want to see are right outside my window. But he knew, even as he thought it, that the window was really a wall, just like the one Central Traffic Control had thrown across the highway: a wall to keep him from getting out, no matter how fast or how far he decided to go.

  He could see everything—a world of infinite possibility, full of people, young and old—but he couldn’t actually go there. He wriggled around a bit, to remind the invisible physician’s programs that he was still there, still in distress.

  It could be worse, he reminded himself, sternly. It could be a great deal worse, and a man my age should be wise enough to count his blessings. At least I have a son, and a home, and a few more heartbeats to count— and I have a window right next to my bed.

  He waited, numbly, for the brave words to take effect. He was sure that they would, if he only gave them enough time and cajoled enough endorphins from the systems hidden in the wall. They had to. What else was there to take comfort from but words, shaped and given life by bravery?

  By slow degrees, the caress of the clean sheets on his bruised and careworn skin became breathtakingly and luxuriously soft. Somehow, it reminded him of Martha, of fine sand warmed and glittered by the sun, and of the tenderness of youth.

  For the moment, at least, it was something he didn’t want to lose.

 

 

  Brian Stableford, Out of Touch

 

 

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