John Barnes - Mother of Storms

XV is a bit like being there, i concedes, and a bit like being more knowledgeable than you really are, but what it’s really like is like waking up where the news is happening with a bad case of amnesia and a brainwashing team trying to force a viewpoint on you.

She clicks off and tosses down her scalpnet, muffs, and goggles. The snow outside is beginning to glow, which means the sun is just beginning to peek over the Rockies. Still, it’s three hours till she would normally go to bed, and by that time everything can be hurled into the car, and she can sleep on the way, getting caught up on rest for the days ahead while the Alaska Highway rolls under the tires at three hundred kilometers per hour.

“Never mind,” she says. “Once I remind people what real news was like, XV will be dead as the town crier, or newspapers.”

Synthi, you are not plugged into real life anymore, Mary Ann Waterhouse is thinking to herself. She has finally been allowed to switch out from the net for a few blissful hours, the jack in her head no longer plugged to receive Synthi’s every quivering passion, and though her head has an ache no aspirin can touch, and her whole body is bruised and sore, she’s so relieved to have ten hours off that tears are running down her face.

Mary Ann always tries to remind herself that she is the same old girl, just re-engineered into what a lot of women want to look like (which was pretty much what a lot of men want them to look like), just made rich beyond her dreams, just with this other little personality installed, but right now she looks in the mirror and misses herself.

She had a pretty good body—turned a lot of heads—before they gave her the cartoon-character breasts, before they sewed her already-shapely butt into an impossible curve, before they microzapped every bit of fat from her legs and put artificial sheathing like an internal girdle into her stomach.

Not to mention the monthly injections that turn her hair flame-red from its natural straw-blonde.

“I used to just be pretty. I kind of liked that,” she says to herself, out loud, and dammit . She’s crying again. This has been happening for at least the first hour every time she goes off line, for the last couple of months, and she’s pretty sure it is not supposed to. Offtime is precious. She doesn’t want to waste it this way.

There’s no one to call. She has no brothers or sisters, her father disappeared when she was six, her mother is dead, and she hasn’t had a real boyfriend since three months before Passionet hired her and invented Synthi.

There is nobody to call or talk to except Karen, whom she used to work with in the Data Pattern Pool. When Mary Ann got picked at the audition, they swore they’d stay friends, and they really have done a pretty good job of it, considering she could buy Karen’s apartment building every month and never notice, and that Karen has admitted, shyly, that nowadays all her offtime is spent living in Synthi’s head. But it’s only six A.M. in Chicago, and Karen has to work in the morning (they talked about having her work for Mary Ann, as a personal assistant or something, but both of them had the common sense to see that would have destroyed the friendship, and probably Karen with it).

She hasn’t told Karen about the crying jags yet. She knows that Karen will be a little hurt that she’s kept it back.

Well.

She’s up early, and at least they got His 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 and I will be paired for a few weeks starting tonight. Quaz is leaving for another assignment.”

“Thanks, I’ll remember that. Um… can I ask… is there one you like better?”

According to Passionet, this is the question she must never answer, but here she is trying to have some kind of conversation with an ordinary experiencer, and now that she thinks of it, it’s also the most natural question in the world. Still, she temporizes…. “Like in what way?”