Will McIntosh - Love Minus Eighty

Veronika took a step away, feeling foolish. “I’m sorry.” She wanted to go, wanted to escape this man’s angry glare, but her feet wouldn’t move. He was going to jump . How could she walk away from another human being, knowing he was going to kill himself? She held her ground. “If I was the one standing where you are—and that’s not totally inconceivable—I would hope someone would care enough to try to stop me, even if I didn’t want them to.”

“Well, that’s beautiful. Why don’t you go write a book of beautiful platitudes?” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “Look, I’ve thought this through very carefully, and I’m at peace with it. Every moment you stay here, you’re just stretching this out for me. So please, I appreciate your good intentions, but give me my privacy.”

She’d known this was going to be hard, but this was hard in a way she’d never anticipated.

“I can’t,” she said.

A screen popped up, out over the water a dozen feet from them. It was a middle-aged woman with raccoon-eye tattoos. She didn’t say anything, just hung there, watching.

The man glanced over his shoulder, noticed the screen, just as another popped up. And another. Rubberneckers. Someone passing on the bridge must have alerted her friends.

The man looked back at Veronika as a dozen more screens popped into existence. “You’ve made my last few minutes on this planet even more intolerable than they would otherwise have been. Thanks a lot.”

Then he turned and jumped.

An icy, paralytic shock filled Veronika as the screens shifted as one to face the river so they could watch the man plummet. Veronika was left staring at the thin slices of the tops of the screens—a hundred of them now—her mouth still cranked open to beg the man to stop, to wait, to think about how beautiful the world was, if you could just get out of your own head.

The screens began to disappear. The show was over.

Her paralysis finally lifted, Veronika ran, her breath coming in tight gulps that threatened to turn into sobs as she avoided looking between the slats, afraid she might catch a glimpse of the man floating on the river, the man she’d been speaking to just a few seconds earlier. She didn’t ever want to set foot on this bridge again. While she ran, she sent a message to Nathan. She needed to see him, needed his confidence. Only he could convince her she hadn’t just done an awful, unforgivable thing.

People glided by on the sidewalk. Rob could feel a slight breeze as each passed. He felt like a big, dopey lunk, plodding along in his Low Town shoes. The two hundred dollars he’d gotten for his gliders didn’t help the Winter cause much, but Rob could imagine what people would think if he glided by in High Town shoes while claiming that he was taking a vow of poverty to make reparations for what he’d done. He wasn’t afraid to admit it: part of his reason for doing this was to redeem himself in the eyes of his friends and family. It wasn’t the only reason, or even the primary reason, but it was part of the reason.

As he walked, he kept reaching back to massage his neck. It ached, sent bolts of pain into his shoulders if he turned his head too quickly. Spending ten-hour shifts bent over discarded electronics was wreaking havoc on his back and neck. His fingertips were finally developing calluses, so at least he was past the point of walking around with raw, bleeding fingers.

Club Aishiteru wasn’t hard to find. The entrance was raucous, pulsing, brightly colored—like a silk-gloved fist that grabbed you and tried to pull you inside.

They wouldn’t let Rob in without a system, so he had to rent one. He watched ninety precious dollars roll off his bank balance, on top of sixty for the cover charge. He sure hoped this guy Nathan showed up. He hadn’t sounded eager to meet.

It was a cheap system, and since it wasn’t custom-fit nor did it have a body-adaptive function, it hung from his arms like an old man’s sagging skin.

Then Rob had to create at least a minimal profile before the greeter would let him in. Did he want kids, or have any that he knew of? Was he interested in women of any ethnic mix? If not, he had to specify the maximum tolerable percentage of whatever ethnicities he found undesirable in a mate. Then he had to report his own ethnic makeup (fifty-four percent Asian, twenty-eight Anglo, eighteen Latino, not that it was anyone’s damned business).

As he passed through the checkpoint into the bar, his height and weight (evidently he’d lost nearly twenty pounds since the accident) were measured and added to his profile automatically. Rob was surprised they didn’t insist he drop his pants so they could measure the length of his dick.

A singles meetup was not the sort of place Rob would have preferred to meet, but Nathan had made it clear that if Rob wanted to talk to him, this was where he’d be. It was difficult to tell how big the place was, because the walls had been replaced with visual links to sister bars in other cities, which gave the impression that it stretched out almost to infinity in every direction. The idea was if you saw someone interesting in one of the other bars, you could pop over remotely and say hello.

People visiting remotely weren’t in screens—they were here in full head-to-toe, three-dimensional virtual splendor. This was a private business, so the public regulations that required people to use screens so they wouldn’t be confused with live bodies didn’t apply. And it was confusing. Most of the nearby patrons were zombies—virtual images their owners weren’t monitoring. They were completely still, expressions frozen on unblinking faces. Evidently people set up in multiple locations so they could be seen, and waited for someone to approach them.

Scanning the bar, Rob spotted Nathan talking with a virtual woman. Rob hung back and watched, waiting for the conversation to finish. Nathan had a Mediterranean look, with pretty, long-lashed eyes and a three-hundred-dollar haircut, complete with stylish white highlights. Rob fumbled with his unfamiliar system, called up the profile of the woman Nathan was talking to, curious about what kind of woman Nathan went for. Ms. Petra Knox. Twenty-eight, compared to Nathan’s (Rob called up his profile) thirty-eight. She was a transportation analyst (whatever that was), didn’t want kids, an atheist from a Methodist family. Ratingsmart certified her attractiveness at eight point nine, FaceN at eight point seven.

The ratings firms used highly scientific programs to arrive at their ratings, but Rob was sure the programs missed important aspects of beauty they couldn’t teach a computer to recognize. There was no way Petra Knox was more beautiful than Winter West. Petra looked like a thousand other beautiful women; she had an elegant face, perfect cheekbones, a long neck. She was perfect to the point that she looked artificial. Even dead and frozen, Winter’s face was so much more expressive. When Winter smiled, the lines that formed around her mouth, and the way she seemed to show far too many teeth, made her look warm and real and unique. Also, Winter was more cute than classically beautiful, and from what Rob could tell, the programs never awarded a “cute” woman a score approaching nine, no matter how achingly cute she was. Higher scores were only for women with aristocratic faces, faces that indicated superior breeding, but did nothing to make the heart skip a beat.

Petra Knox’s screen finally swiveled away from Nathan, and Nathan immediately turned and headed toward Rob. Either he’d spotted Rob watching him, or had set up a facial-recognition program to alert him when Rob showed up.

Nathan extended a hand as he approached. “How did you get my name again? You said you were a friend of Winter’s?” He looked to be carrying on at least two remote conversations, maybe three, while speaking to Rob. His style was impressive; Rob didn’t even recognize the vocal rhythm he was using, and his fingers worked the air so deftly Rob could almost see the virtual keyboard he was working, in lieu of working directly on his system.