keep coming back.” Every month, he wrote out an actual hard-copy paper check, payment for the firmness-overlay maintenance, and every month it came bouncing back with a form letter about the service having been discontinued, thanks for your patronage, be sure and try our other fine enhanced experiential products, blah and more blah.
“Oh?” Mentioning something about money had perked up the cube bunny’s interest.
“This late in the game,” groused McNihil, “you’d think companies could get their billing straight.” He shook his head. “For a while there, I was putting the money away in another account, until I finally figured, screw it, might as well spend it.” That’d been right after he’d gotten bounced off the Collection Agency’s operatives list, and things had gotten tight as an anaconda’s rectum before he’d lined up another paying gig. “They sort it out and want their money, they can come and get it. Fat chance, though.”
The girl didn’t know what he was talking about. She was still fascinated,childlike, by his eyes, peering into them and trying to see what she couldn’t.
“When you look at me,” said the cube bunny after a moment. “What do you see?”
“Another world.”
If not a better one, then at least more to his liking.
I’ve gotten used to it
, McNihil told himself. Like a dream that you know you’re dreaming, but don’t want to wake up from.
For a few seconds, he let the limits of his vision expand beyond the girl sitting in front of him—the tough little, soft little Lupino clone, one of the compensating gifts that his eyes bestowed on him—and out past the gray walls of the shabby apartment. Past the unlit hallways and the faint smells of dog-bottle alcohol and sweating bedsheets that seeped out from under the doors, and out into the night’s alleys and cracked sidewalks, with their pools of streetlamp glow that didn’t reach from one to the other, that left patches of darkness stitched with buzzing neon above the steps of basement gin mills that you descended like marching into one’s grave.
The world in the shabby apartment, that smelled like burnt coffee and suspicion, and the one outside that McNihil saw—it was real enough for him. That the cube bunny, and everyone else, didn’t see it made no difference.
“You kinda see me, though,” decided the cube bunny. “I mean, I’m real—I’m really here—and you can see that. So that’s a help.”
“Sure is.” That was the difference between what he’d had done and all those old-fashioned total-environment simulations, that unsubtle virtual bunk that simply substituted one gross set of cooked-up sensory feed for what came in unassisted from the real world. The problem with those sim arrangements, and the reason they’d died a quick, merciful death on the consumer market even before the bandwidth and nerve-receptor bugs could be worked out, was that nobody could get any work done with them. Not in the real world, at least.
Whereas the thin-film insertion surgery that he’d paid for—and gotten; McNihil still didn’t regret it—was basically a businessman’s product. He supposed that some of the execs that had been standing around the corpse probably had accessible over-layers inside their own eyes. Controlled by the muscles of the eye socket, the interplay of the rectus lateralis and the superior and inferior oblique muscles, pullingand distorting the spheres of aqueous humor—not to focusing on nearer or farther objects, but activating one inserted layer or another, switching the perceived world into translucent spreadsheets or databases floating above the hard objects of people and other real things.
“That’s how it works for them,” said McNihil. He’d told the cube bunny all about it, as he’d gotten up and poured himself the remainder of the coffee in the pot. He stood leaning against the side of the kitchen doorway, sipping the lukewarm, kerosenelike fluid. “Strictly
“Oh?” Mentioning something about money had perked up the cube bunny’s interest.
“This late in the game,” groused McNihil, “you’d think companies could get their billing straight.” He shook his head. “For a while there, I was putting the money away in another account, until I finally figured, screw it, might as well spend it.” That’d been right after he’d gotten bounced off the Collection Agency’s operatives list, and things had gotten tight as an anaconda’s rectum before he’d lined up another paying gig. “They sort it out and want their money, they can come and get it. Fat chance, though.”
The girl didn’t know what he was talking about. She was still fascinated,childlike, by his eyes, peering into them and trying to see what she couldn’t.
“When you look at me,” said the cube bunny after a moment. “What do you see?”
“Another world.”
If not a better one, then at least more to his liking.
I’ve gotten used to it
, McNihil told himself. Like a dream that you know you’re dreaming, but don’t want to wake up from.
For a few seconds, he let the limits of his vision expand beyond the girl sitting in front of him—the tough little, soft little Lupino clone, one of the compensating gifts that his eyes bestowed on him—and out past the gray walls of the shabby apartment. Past the unlit hallways and the faint smells of dog-bottle alcohol and sweating bedsheets that seeped out from under the doors, and out into the night’s alleys and cracked sidewalks, with their pools of streetlamp glow that didn’t reach from one to the other, that left patches of darkness stitched with buzzing neon above the steps of basement gin mills that you descended like marching into one’s grave.
The world in the shabby apartment, that smelled like burnt coffee and suspicion, and the one outside that McNihil saw—it was real enough for him. That the cube bunny, and everyone else, didn’t see it made no difference.
“You kinda see me, though,” decided the cube bunny. “I mean, I’m real—I’m really here—and you can see that. So that’s a help.”
“Sure is.” That was the difference between what he’d had done and all those old-fashioned total-environment simulations, that unsubtle virtual bunk that simply substituted one gross set of cooked-up sensory feed for what came in unassisted from the real world. The problem with those sim arrangements, and the reason they’d died a quick, merciful death on the consumer market even before the bandwidth and nerve-receptor bugs could be worked out, was that nobody could get any work done with them. Not in the real world, at least.
Whereas the thin-film insertion surgery that he’d paid for—and gotten; McNihil still didn’t regret it—was basically a businessman’s product. He supposed that some of the execs that had been standing around the corpse probably had accessible over-layers inside their own eyes. Controlled by the muscles of the eye socket, the interplay of the rectus lateralis and the superior and inferior oblique muscles, pullingand distorting the spheres of aqueous humor—not to focusing on nearer or farther objects, but activating one inserted layer or another, switching the perceived world into translucent spreadsheets or databases floating above the hard objects of people and other real things.
“That’s how it works for them,” said McNihil. He’d told the cube bunny all about it, as he’d gotten up and poured himself the remainder of the coffee in the pot. He stood leaning against the side of the kitchen doorway, sipping the lukewarm, kerosenelike fluid. “Strictly
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