Mother of Storms by John Barnes

Oafishness, Quaz, out of here before she woke up; one thing she never does on offtime is sleep—Synthi gets to do all of that, or rather, as the net shrink explained to her, she falls asleep as Synthi, dreams as Mary Ann, wakes up as Synthi, but gets paid for being Synthi the whole time. Quite a deal.
    She goes into the bathroom to wash her face, hoping that will kill the last of the tears this time. It doesn’t. It hasn’t for a few days. Instead, they seem to flow more freely now, as if they will just keep running for the rest of her life.
    Well, what did you expect, Mary Ann? Or Synthi? Whoever you are now? She asks the question to the image in the mirror and is no longer sure whether she is speaking aloud or not. You spend most of your time being someone else, how are you supposed to know what she’s crying about?
    She turns on the hot water in the sunken tub, then calls room service and orders a huge breakfast that she isn’t sure she’ll eat: eggs, corned beef hash, potatoes, all the plain food that she never eats as Synthi Venture, who takes her experiencers on trips into the exotic world of wealth and power that they will never see, and therefore eats mostly foods they’ve heard about but couldn’t afford or wouldn’t be able to prepare.
    As the tub fills, she pulls out her reader and scans through her personal
library for something she’d like to read. Another and not surprising difference between them is that Mary Ann reads.
    She’s almost cheerful as she settles into the great masses of bubbles and reads the scene at the inn in Bree; by now she knows The Lord of the Rings so thoroughly she can open it anywhere she likes and just read as much as she wants. It may be a waste of time, but it’s her time to waste and this is what she wants. There’s a stack of history books, and a big collection of theatre reviews that follow her around, things she keeps meaning to read, things she used to like, but for the last few months all she’s wanted on her offtime has been The Lord of the Rings, The Once and Future King, and The Picture of Dorian Gray . Each of which she has read at least ten times.
    In another hour or two, she can call Karen at work.
    There’s a knock at the door and she bellows “Come in!” The bellhop wheels the table in, and she tells him to bring it into the bathroom; this seems to make him a bit nervous, and she realizes he’s probably been experiencing via Rock, Stride, or Quaz, the Passionet reporters she usually works with, and thus has had the experience of being very sophisticated and knowing exactly what to do with this particular naked body in all sorts of exotic settings. The Point Barrow Marriott is not exactly the sophistication center of the universe; the possibility of having Synthi herself, sudsy and naked, demanding breakfast from him, must not have occurred to him.
    He’s averting his eyes; it’s almost funny. “I’m under all these bubbles,” she calls out. “You can see my sweaty face and soggy hair but that’s about it.”
    “Still feels weird,” he says, moving the food and coffee to where she can reach it.
    “I bet it does.” Then on impulse she adds, “My real name is Mary Ann Waterhouse, nobody is recording this, I like to read old books that nobody ever reads anymore, and every time I listen to Haydn’s The Creation I get tears in my eyes.”
    He steps back as if he’s afraid she might bite his leg. She remembers what it was like, when she had a regular job, to have mysterious strangers around who might be able to fire her. “It’s okay, when you tell people you served me breakfast, just say I’m a regular person, and use a couple of those things as examples to prove we talked.” She reaches for her purse—risking exposing a breast, but he’s being so careful not to look—and tips him much more than she should. “Who do you experience?” she asks. “Rock?”
    He laughs, a funny nervous laugh. “Yeah.”
    “Well, if you want more of me, he