John Barnes - Mother of Storms

She slides her big, eye-covering glasses up her nose, scratches all over (nothing like the privacy of mid-ocean), and resolves not to think about Louie again for a while. Maybe she’ll think about a couple of papers she’s been noodling on… it’s about time to get her plate warmed up over on the non-profit side of the table, because if you’re going to freelance as a scientist, you’ve got to keep the other scientists saying that you’re a real one. Not paying his non-profit dues is exactly how poor old Henry Pauliss got stuck in government.

Then again, she hasn’t done accounts in a while, and it may be time to do a little private-sector systems design or algorithmics and make some cash. There are a couple of add-on gadgets she’d like for MyBoat and she still hasn’t paid off her last purchases from the cadcam shop in Tanzania. Anyway, she’s been goofing off for weeks, not doing much more than experiencing romance wedges, sunbathing, and fishing. It’s her third trip around the world on MyBoat , and this time she just went straight from Zanzibar to Singapore without bothering about landfalls… she’s begun to admit to herself that once you’ve seen this particular planet a few times, there may be plenty of unvisited places left, but there’s a discouraging sensation that all you’re doing is filling in the holes.

Well, now, wasn’t that what made Louie so attractive in the first place? Be honest , Carla … he was one of eight people who’d been to another planet. Not that he talked about it much, and the thing that seemed to impress him most was “how alone it was”—nearest thing to poetry she’d ever heard out of that man.

She raises up on her elbows and looks over her body, chuckling a little. You wouldn’t think anything quite this thick and muscular—she was a weight lifter in college, and she’s run to fat a bit since—would have gotten the attention of the Assistant Mission Commander for Martian Operations; god knew there were a lot of eager little tight bodies ready for him when he got back, but no, less than two years after his return, there he was on top of Carla Schwarz, Girl Scientist.

Carla’s mother pegged the trouble two hours after she met Louie: “Both of you want somebody to take care of, and both of you would rather die than be taken care of.”

It looks like Mom was right about whether the marriage would work out, because here Carla is: MyBoat , with room only for her and her work, does not seem small to her, and there Louie is—come to think of it, he may be passing overhead right now for all she knows—tending watch solo on the USA’s last space station. They’ve got a date for “five good dinners and a lot of time in bed” next time he hits dirt and she’s near a port; that might be a year or two from now, but neither of them is in any hurry.

Maybe she’ll treat herself to calling Louie later this evening. He usually seems glad of the conversation when she does, and it’s been a few weeks.

So much for the resolution not to think about him.

The phone tied to her wrist rings. It’s Henry Pauliss, and the news is pretty astonishing; at least she won’t have to decide what to do with her time for the next few weeks.

When XV was introduced in 2006, it was denounced roundly for being even more attention-absorbing than television. It was also praised highly because it allowed anyone to have the experience instantly of knowing how to do a thing and of doing it. You could plug a kid from the urban ghetto into the head of an engineer, give him a sense of the pleasure that came with finding a successful design for a turbine blade, and the pure joy of holding the actual object in his hand, fresh from the cadcam shop, then dump him back into the classroom and say “And that’s why you want to learn math.” You could take a fat, shy, laughable nebbish and give him the experience of being physically beautiful and confident, then haul him out and say “This can all be yours, really yours, if you’ll get to the gym and the personality development courses.”

You could take a psychopath with no empathy and give him the experience of being a victim. That was the experiment that revealed the flaw.

Legally it took them some years to get cleared to try it on a prisoner. The first time, it was merely the accident that an XV reporter had been raped, mutilated, and left for dead while the recorder was running. Many experts confidently predicted that if habitual violent criminals were exposed to that tape, and really understood what they were doing to their victims, they would stop doing it.

In fact, once they had felt the terror and pain themselves, inflicting it on others gave them more of a thrill than ever. It was the effect they had been hoping they were having. One former model prisoner became so excited by the XV tape that he raped an unarmed male guard on his way back to his cell block.

The human race’s great past cynics, everyone from Lao-tzu through Ben Jonson to Simone de Beauvoir, could have told them this would happen, but cynicism is a sensible, civilized view. To live in the midst of endless violence one must have sacred principles with which to endorse the violence. By the end of the twentieth century, the most brutal in human history, there were only idealists left. Even when forced-memory extraction and vicarious rapefor-hire emerged, XV, like all other information channels, had become effectively impossible to censor. Technology—and the cravings of thousands of proselytizers of all stripes—forbade it.

Berlina Jameson is having a bad day. Charlie, the idiot station manager, gave up on yelling at her, which was good, but then he got Candice, the station owner, to get on the phone and yell at her, which was discouraging, especially since it’s all the same yell—she’s not going to get time off, or expense money, or anything at all for “this insane idea.”

She doesn’t want to quit the job, because her resignation will instantly hit the public databases, and Berlina is extremely close to the edge on credit, so they’ll be all over her if she quits her fourth job in three years.

Yet the idea itself is so, so sweet. She hears the familiar voices in her head again, even as Candice goes on at her…

“This is Edward R. Murrow reporting from London. Another raid by German bombers, in greater numbers than we’ve seen before…”

“This is Walter Cronkite, from Houston. Tonight if all goes well men will land on the moon…”

“Wendy Lou Bartnick reporting—I’m about four miles from the glowing crater that used to be Port au Prince. The only light is from the blazing sky—there is no electricity and no sign of a headlight other than my own…”

These tapes all play in her head, as they have played on her audio and video systems for more than half her life, so often that she can recite them word by word, frame by frame. A lot of younger kids brag that they can experience XV without needing goggles and muffs to shut out the real world, that they can live real and virtual simultaneously. Berlina figures she can go them one better—she can get television and radio in her head, all the great broadcasts of the last ninety years, followed by the seductive murmur of one more opener:

“This is Berlina Jameson, reporting from—”

Her name right up there with Murrow, Shirer, Sevareid, Cronkite, Donaldson, Walters, Bartnick….

She does her best to forget that Bartnick is not old, but has already been forced into retirement, only a few years after the Port au Prince newscast made her an anchor for CNN. XV wiped out television news.

Nor did anyone cross over. XV is everything the old news wasn’t. That guy who was deservedly fired for getting hysterical about the Hindenburg blowing up would have received a big whacking raise if he’d been on XV. XV is about feeling it in your glands… glands start pumping place gets jumping, the Dance Channel… don’t see it be it, Extraponet… news you can dance to, Passionet.