Getting Real

Pablo Ramirez ambled along the streets of East Los Angeles. He was looking for work, looking for love, looking for drugs, looking for whatever the hell he could find. He knew too well he didn’t have much now.

For that matter, neither did East L.A.—or any other part of the huge, sprawling city. Somebody online had called Los Angeles a town with a fine future behind it. Like so many jokes with too much truth in them, that one had spread virally. It must have, if a loser like Pablo had heard it.

He almost tripped on cracked concrete. Nobody’d fixed these sidewalks for a long, long time. A line of shopfronts were boarded up. The ones that weren’t had signs in Spanish, English, Chinese, Hindi, Korean....

You could still find anybody from anywhere in Los Angeles. Anybody who was poor and didn’t have the sense to go someplace else, anyhow. No, Los Angeles wasn’t much different from anywhere else in the United States these days.

Swarms of bicycles and pedicabs executed intricate dances on the streets. The asphalt between the sidewalks was in crappy shape, too. A few hydrogen- and electric-powered cars tried to pick their way through the people-powered traffic. The drivers leaned on their horns. Not that it did them much good—bicyclists and pedicab operators grabbed horn tones off the Net the way everybody else grabbed ring tones. And little tiny speakers could make a hell of a lot of noise.

Speaking of noise ... Pablo stared in mixed awe and horror. Damned if that wasn’t a genuine, no-shit, chrome-dripping Harley hog thundering up the road toward him. Hydrocarbon fumes belched from the monster’s tailpipe. School and the Net and TV and vidgames and priests and even most avatars declared adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere was a crime or a sin or both at once. But oh my God! Wasn’t that Harley awesome? Everybody on the sidewalks—whites, goldens, several shades of browns, blacks—stopped in her or his tracks to gape at the motorcycle. The black dude on it grinned from under his gleaming Fritz hat. Just to add to the general effect, he’d dyed his beard in red, white, and blue stripes. He’d also chromed the metalwork on the folding-stock AK slung on his back.

Two cops walked toward and then past Pablo. Their helmets gave much more serious protection than the cycle jockey’s brain bucket. They wore full body armor under their urban-camo tunics, too. And the minichain guns they carried could chew up that ancient AK and spit it out.

Cops were the enemy till proved otherwise. They knew it, too—why else travel in threes? Two of them were white. The power structure still worked the way it always had.

All the same, what the taller white guy said to his partners was exactly—exactly!—what Pablo was thinking: “Man, that is one fuckin’ amazing ride!”

“Bet your ass,” agreed the cop who wasn’t white. He was an Indian—brown variety, not red.

A woman screeched. A guy took off with her purse. He ran like an Olympic sprinter marinated in steroids. The woman pounded after him in hot but hopeless pursuit.

“Hold it right there, dipshit!” the Indian cop yelled, raising his piece.

If he opened up with that mother, he could depopulate a block’s worth of jam-packed sidewalk—with no guarantee he’d take out the purse snatcher. Nobody in his right mind would start shooting under conditions like that. Of course, who in his right mind wanted to be a cop?

Pablo wasn’t the only one making that street-smart calculation. Oh, no, baby—not even close! People of all different colors screamed and ducked and scattered and got the hell out of there. Pablo did his best to disappear like an avatar. He ducked around corners and ended up in a little maze of side streets he was liable to need GPS to escape from.

He looked around. Somebody sitting under a dying tree looked back—or, more likely, just looked through him—with dead eyes. A fat Hispanic woman and an even fatter red Indian gal passed a bottle of wine back and forth and giggled. It wasn’t even 1100 yet, but they’d already got the morning off to a hell of a start. A pack of brown Indian kids played field hockey in the street ... or maybe they just got off on whaling one another with sticks.

And then an avatar appeared out of nowhere in front of Pablo, as avatars had a way of doing. This one was an improbably beautiful, impossibly stacked Hispanic girl—woman. Definitely woman. Her perfume promised everything, or whatever was bigger than everything.

Her smile ... How could you not almost come in your jeans if a woman like that smiled at you that way? And her voice ... A voice like that should’ve been illegal. It sure as hell was immoral.

“English?” she purred seductively. “O español?”

“Uh, either way.” Pablo’s voice was hoarse. The answer came out in English.

“Okay, big boy.” The avatar used English, too. She definitely left you dissatisfied with the local talent. Hell, she made you think the local talent wasn’t talent. “Wanna get ... Real?”

“Oh, man! Do I ever!” Pablo exclaimed.

She came up to him. She took his hand. The way she touched him ... Jesus! He’d had lays he wouldn’t remember like this. He hoped she’d kiss him, too. Instead, she winked. And then she winked out, like a suddenly snuffed candle flame.

Pablo looked down at his astonished palm. The little green square of cardboardy stuff there was real. Better yet—it was Real.

He’d been waiting for a chance like this. Waiting? He’d been praying for a chance like this. In L.A., he was nothing. He was nobody, and he had zero chance of turning into somebody. Almost zero chance. He could have won the lottery. Or he could have got Real.

And now he had. His smile spread almost as wide as the avatar’s, even if he was nowhere near so pretty. He knew what to do. Who didn’t? He touched the cardboardy square to the side of his head, just above and in front of his right ear. Smiling still, he slowly crumpled to the sidewalk.

Lieutenant Shapur Razmara’s cell rang. He grabbed it off the desk. “Razmara. LAPD,” he said, and listened to an excited civilian, transferred to him from the front desk. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed when the civilian paused. He was a Shiite Muslim, but not what anybody would call devout. “What’s your address at that location, ma’am?”

“It’s 2527 Ganahl, Officer,” the woman answer. “There was one of those ... those things, and then it went away again, and then he fell over.”

“Avatars,” Razmara said absently. He was a stocky, swarthy man with a thick pelt of black hair and an equally luxuriant black mustache, both just starting to show gray.

“Things,” the woman ... agreed? “You people better hurry up, before something else happens to the poor, stupid yock.”

“We’re on our way, ma’am,” Razmara assured her, and rang off. He checked the big flatscreen monitor on his desk to find out where the devil 2527 Ganahl was exactly. Then he stuck a DNA kit in the inside pocket of his microfiber blazer. He caught the eye of the sergeant whose desk sat next to his. “Ready to roll, Stas? Sounds like another case of Real.”

“Wait one.” Anastasios Kyriades finished dictating a paragraph. Then he stood up. His mustache was even bushier than the lieutenant’s, but he had only a little hair fringing a shiny bald pate.

Razmara muttered to himself. Cell phones. Computers. DNA kits. That stuff was all very twenty-first-century. Which, in the year 2117 of the Common Era, did them how much good? Some, yeah. But not enough. Nowhere near enough.

They hurried out to the black-and-white. “How much of a charge does it have?” Kyriades asked, heading for the driver’s-side door.

“Enough to get us there,” Razmara said. “Probably enough to get us back.”

“Great.”

Before either one of them could slide into the cop car, an avatar popped up in front of them. Shapur Razmara hadn’t seen this one. He would have remembered her. If he’d ever had a wet dream about an Asian woman ... He shook his head. His wet dreams were nowhere near this hot.

She looked from him to Sergeant Kyriades and back again. Then she shook her head in what might have been scorn or pity or both at once. “You poor sorry assholes,” she said in a voice like sin dipped in honey. A split second later, she was gone.

“Fuck,” Kyriades said wearily. “How do they do that shit, anyway?”

“If I knew...” Razmara shook his head and spread his hands. When you banged into avatars and Real and all that other stuff, banged into ‘em headlong and full throttle, cell phones and computers and DNA kits started looking like mighty small potatoes.

“Well, we gotta try,” Stas said as he got in.

“Uh-huh.” Razmara buckled his seat belt. Away they went.

The dragon studied Pablo with topaz eyes full of ancient evil. “You shall not have my hoard,” it hissed, each word sounding individually scorched.

“That’s what you think, Charlie.” Pablo took a step forward. He could feel the way the soft leather of his boots gripped his feet and his calves. He could feel the slight scratchiness of his heavy wool breeches against his legs, and the soft smoothness of his sapphire silk tunic.

And he could feel the weight of the sword on his left hip. His hand dropped to the hilt. The dragonhide in which it was wrapped was rough against his fingers. His neck muscles tensed against the weight of his helmet.

“Flee now, while you still have the chance,” the dragon warned. It smelled of brimstone and serpent and terror.

Pablo’s heart thuttered inside his chest; he could distinctly feel each beat. He looked around—quickly, so the dragon didn’t strike while he was distracted. No, no one else had come up the trail through the dark woods with him. A breeze blew fallen elm and oak leaves across the path.

He drew the sword. All the light in the neighborhood seemed to focus on the blade. “You’re the one who’d better run,” he growled. Brandishing that shining weapon was the most natural thing in the world. “I’ve got your number, man, and you know it.”

“Even fate yields to fire,” the dragon said. It opened its mouth wide. Its breath smelled like five sacks of groceries forgotten for two weeks in a locked car in the middle of August. And then the flame flowed forth. Whoever’d invented napalm back in the old days must have been thinking of dragons.

But nothing stopped napalm. When the sword with the dragonhide hilt smote the dragonfire, it magically transformed the flames to harmless mist. The dragon’s hoarse, guttural shriek of despair almost deafened Pablo.

He thrust home. He could feel the point piercing the hard scales of the dragon’s belly. He could feel it probing for the monster’s heart. And, as he’d felt his own heart pound, he felt the dragon’s stop. The creature tried to curse him, but died with the words still unspoken. That was good, because curses here were as Real as everything else.

Dragon blood steaming and smoking on the sword, Pablo pressed past the bend in the path to find out how big a hoard the great worm had had. Gold: coins and chains and rings and armlets. Silver: more coins, and bowls and spoons and a mighty drinking horn half as tall as a man. Jewels: some set into gold and silver, others simply sparkling alone, rubies and emeralds and sapphires and diamonds. A king’s ransom? It was the ransom of a continent full of kings. And it was Pablo’s, all Pablo’s.

He’d pretty much expected that kind of stuff. What he hadn’t expected was that the dragon’s hoard also included the most gorgeous redhead he’d ever seen. All she wore was her hair, which fell nearly to her waist.

“My hero!” she cried in a voice like bells, and cast herself into his arms.

From then on, matters proceeded rapidly. They lay down together. He thrust home. He could feel everything that happened after that, too. Oh, could he ever!

Shapur Razmara stared down in tired disgust at the guy lying on the sidewalk with a little square of green cardboard plastered to the side of his head and a shit-eating grin plastered all over his face. “Another one,” he said, in exactly the tone of voice he would have used to count cowflops at a fertilizer factory.

“Fuckin’ dingleberry,” Sergeant Kyriades agreed. “Let’s get Real.” He sounded about ready to york on his shoes.

“More and more of these stupid...” Razmara’s voice trailed off. Even though he was a cop with twenty years on the job, he couldn’t think of anything vile enough to call them. He wanted to spit into this unconscious punk’s face—not that that would have accomplished anything except to win him a disciplinary hearing, and not that the punk would even have noticed.

“We go through the motions?” Kyriades asked resignedly.

“Got a better idea, Stas?” Razmara said.

“They don’t pay me enough to have ideas,” his partner answered.

“Oh, yeah, like I’m so goddamn rich.” Razmara snorted. “Twenty million a month and all the acid-blockers I can pop. Hot damn!” Twenty million dollars a month and you could pick two out of three from child support, rent, and food. You couldn’t have ‘em all—he’d found that out again and again, the hard way.

“More’n I bring in,” Kyriades said. Which was true, but he’d managed to stay married. Not for the first time, Lieutenant Razmara wondered how. Sure as hell wasn’t his looks.

That was a worry for another day. “Gather up the goods,” Razmara said.

“Right.” The sergeant nodded. Persians and Greeks—they’d only been fighting for 2,500 years. But Razmara and Kyriades got on fine. And, since they were both white men whose first language was English, they counted for Anglos in Los Angeles. A Muslim Anglo? An Orthodox one? Why not? There were plenty of Jewish “Anglos” in L.A., but mostly on the West Side.

Kyriades pulled a plastic evidence bag and a tweezer out of his jacket pocket. He used the tweezer to capture the green square—you didn’t want to touch it barehanded. The LAPD had found out about that—again, the hard way. Along with the rest of the United States, the LAPD was finding out about all kinds of things the hard way these days.

“So we’ll take it back to the lab, right?” Kyriades said, carefully stashing the little square in the evidence bag.

“Sure.” Razmara nodded. “What else? Gotta follow procedures.” His great-granddad would have talked the same way about following the Koran. Stas’ great-grandfather, no doubt, would have yattered about the Bible the same way. To them in the old days, and to the lieutenant now, Holy Writ was Holy Writ. If you didn’t follow procedures (or the Koran, or the Bible—check one), Bad Things Would Happen.

Well, Bad Things were already happening. Getting Real, for instance.

“So we’ll take the fucking thing back to the lab,” Kyriades repeated. “And the gals in the white coats will do whatever the hell they do, right? And then they’ll tell us the same thing those sorry suckers tell us every goddamn time.” His baritone rasp—he sounded like a three-pack-a-day guy, though he wasn’t—went falsetto: “‘We can’t analyze what’s in it. We’ve got no clue how it fucks up the assholes who use it.’ Shit.” The last word was in his usual tones again.

“Yeah, yeah.” Shapur Razmara had heard it all before. Hell, he’d said it all before. It was all true. Saying it didn’t do a thousand dollars’ worth of good. The LAPD was screwed. The whole country was screwed, and had been for years. Just the same ... “You have a better idea, Sherlock?”

“I already told you, they don’t pay me enough for that.”

“You tell me all kinds of crap,” Razmara said. “You expect me to keep it sorted out, too?”

“Ahh, your mama,” Kyriades retorted. They grinned at each other. You had to get on with your partner pretty well to be able to give him that kind of grief. Kyriades stirred the Realie with his toe. “We oughta call the meat wagon for this guy.”

“What we oughta do is let him lay there, let his little pals rifle his pockets and maybe smash in his dumb fuckin’ head.” But duty won. Razmara went over to the car and called for an ambulance. “There. Happy now?”

“If I am, how come my face don’t know it?”

Kyriades might have gone on singing that song for some time. He might have, but he didn’t, because a different avatar appeared in front of him and Razmara. Razmara’s service revolver was in his hand before he quite knew how it got there. The avatar—a bare-chested guy, definitely hunky—threw back his head and laughed. Then he threw his arms wide in invitation. “Go ahead, man. Shoot me. Stun me. Whatever gets you off.”

“Bite me,” Razmara said. Talking back to avatars went against doctrine, but sometimes they pissed you off so much you couldn’t help yourself. If he did shoot this one, the bullet would go on through as if the thing were so much air. If he yanked out his stun gun instead, he would be stunning nothing.

But an avatar could touch him. An avatar could hand out things if he wanted to ... things like little cardboard squares, for instance.

How? The cop didn’t know. The LAPD crime lab sure as hell didn’t. Nobody in the USA did.

“Wanna ... get Real?” the avatar asked, holding out a little blue square and a little yellow one.

“No,” Razmara said stonily.

“Fuck off and die,” Kyriades explained.

The avatar only laughed some more. “Shoveling shit against the tide,” he said, and winked out of existence. Shapur wished he would have thought the thing was wrong.

Hu Zhiaoxing dressed with meticulous care for his conference with the American diplomats. As befitted a country living in the past, the United States preferred—indeed, insisted on—formalwear of long-outmoded style. And so Third Minister Hu had had to learn such archaic skills as tying shoelaces and knotting a cravat. That wasn’t quite a hangman’s knot, even if it felt like one with the pale blue shirt’s collar button buttoned. He wondered why people in bygone days had insisted on such uncomfortable clothes.

“Ready, Minister?” his aide asked. Wang Zemin didn’t have to worry about putting on a silly outfit before he went and explained the facts of life to the Americans. He was wearing a pullover with a sensibly loose neckline, elasticated pants, and memory-foam slip-on shoes.

“I suppose so,” Hu said resignedly. The jacket with lapels he shrugged on wasn’t particularly bad to wear. It just looked stupid. Well, no help for it. He grabbed his briefcase—one more bit of flummery. “Yes, let’s go.”

From the harbor at Avalon, Minister Hu could see the American mainland on the eastern horizon. China had taken Catalina and the other Channel Islands a generation earlier, after the USA—again!—found itself unable to pay its bills. Avalon had been a pretty little town before the transfer of sovereignty: Hu had seen old pictures. In his admittedly biased opinion, it was prettier now.

As they got into the boat, Wang Zemin said, “A pity you can’t do this by avatar, and spare the annoyance of real travel.”

“If I’m not there in the flesh, the Americans will think we’re insulting them.” Minister Hu rephrased that for greater precision: “Looking down our noses at them.”

“Well, so what? We do look down our noses at them,” Wang said. “If they want to think so, fine. As for insulting them ... The trouble with them is, they still think these are the old days, when they knew everything worth knowing and could throw their weight around as much as they pleased. It’s not like that any more.”

“No. It’s not,” Hu Zhiaoxing agreed. “But they still have their pride.”

“They have more of it than they know what to do with,” his aide said. “Why else would you have to go see them in person? Why else would you have to speak English when you do? The whole world uses Mandarin these days. The whole world—except for them. They need to get Real.”

He touched a button. The boat sprang away from the pier. It would cross the forty-odd kilometers—twenty-six miles, an ancient song called the distance, and the Americans still clung to their cumbersome old measurements—in little more than half an hour.

Seabirds squawked in the sky, though they soon fell behind the boat. Unless you were a birder, which Hu wasn’t, the gulls and cormorants and pelicans on this side of the Pacific looked pretty much like the ones far to the west.

An honor guard awaited the minister and his aide when they got to the harbor at San Pedro. The men looked tough and capable. Their uniforms and weapons ... As charitably as he could, Hu thought, China has better.

A white man in a suit much like his came forward and held out his hand. “How do you do, sir?” he said in English. “I’m Brett Hill, the protocol chief.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Minister Hu said. He shook hands—one more old-fashioned ritual you had to endure with Americans. “But I understood I was to meet with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of the DEA?”

“Oh, yes, sir!” Hill had a broad, eager, friendly smile of the sort the minister instinctively distrusted. “They’re waiting for you not far from here. We have a car to take you to the hotel.”

He gestured. The large, muscular car was an American model. Hu Zhiaoxing sighed to himself. If the officials weren’t far away, the machine would probably get him there without breaking down. Wang Zemin’s expression was eloquent. He didn’t say anything. Neither did Hu. He just nodded. The things I do for my country, he thought.

Smiling still, the protocol chief led them to the Saturn. The honor guard presented arms when the Chinese walked past. One man’s hand twisted for a moment as he gripped the stock of his minichain. Only a Realie would have used that gesture. Hu’s face betrayed nothing. Neither did Wang’s. The aide didn’t mind showing what he thought of the American government. Getting an ordinary soldier in trouble was a different story.

The car idled roughly. Its shocks left something to be desired. Brett Hill plainly thought it was state of the art. Minister Hu didn’t waste time educating him. Life was too short. Hill also plainly took potholes for granted. A raised eyebrow from Hu passed a message to his aide. He’s only an American. He doesn’t know any better. Wang gave back an almost imperceptible nod of his own.

They’d cleaned up the Marriott—it was indeed near the harbor—so it almost came up to Chinese standards. That only made the neighborhood around the place seem more blighted by comparison.

In the conference room where the American dignitaries waited, Hu declined ice water. He accepted tea. Drug residues in a small cup wouldn’t be too bad, and boiling ought to kill the germs. Wang Zemin drank nothing at all.

Secretary of State Jackson was short and plump and black. Secretary of Defense Berkowitz was short and thin and white. Secretary of the DEA Kojima was short and potbellied (but not really plump) and, by his looks, no more than a quarter Asian. Both Hu and Wang were five or six centimeters taller than any of them—and taller than Brett Hill, too, for that matter. Better nutrition when we were growing up, Hu thought.

But that had nothing to do with the price of rice. “As you requested, gentlemen, I am here,” he said. “What can I do for you today?”

“You’ve got to stop selling your poison in our towns!” Kojima burst out.

“It isn’t poison,” Hu said. “Besides, very often we don’t sell it. We give it away. How can anyone possibly object to that?”

“Pushers have been saying ‘The first one’s free’ as long as there’ve been drugs.” Contempt dripped from the DEA chief’s voice. “‘Wanna ... get Real?’“ He contrived to make the question sound obscene.

Patiently, Hu Zhiaoxing said, “You seem to be laboring under a mistaken impression. Getting Real has nothing to do with drugs. It’s a matter of metastimulation of specific brain regions.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me,” the Secretary of Defense whispered to the Secretary of State. Hu knew he wasn’t supposed to hear that, but he did. China had technical leads in more areas than the Americans realized, and those leads were wider than the Americans thought.

“How do you produce this, uh, metastimulation?” Jackson asked.

“We have ways,” Hu answered. “I could not tell you myself. I am not an artisan shaping that particular form of knowledge.”

“It’s got to stop,” Kojima said. “Do you have any idea how much productivity we’re losing because people would rather get Real than work or do anything else?”

“Don’t you think that should be a warning to you, Mr. Secretary?” Hu said.

“Huh? What do you mean?” Kojima didn’t impress the Chinese as being either very polite or very bright.

“If your citizens had lives that were more worth living, getting Real would not seem so enjoyable to them,” Hu Zhiaoxing replied.

All three American Cabinet officials glared at him. “It’s your fault that we don’t,” Secretary of State Jackson said bitterly.

“My fault?” Minister Hu pointed at his own chest, then shook his head. “I am sorry, sir, but I must reject the imputation.”

“Not your fault personally. I didn’t mean that,” Jackson said. “Your country’s fault.”

“What did China do?” Hu answered his own question before any of the Americans could: “China collected the debts the United States owed her. No one forced the United States to contract those debts—and many others. You did it of your own free will.”

“And then you broke us. And you left us broke,” Jackson said.

Hu couldn’t help shrugging. “I would say you did it to yourselves. I would also say you resent us for going on to discover new fields of knowledge after you could no longer stay in that game yourselves.”

“Damn right we do,” Berkowitz muttered. Again, Hu wasn’t supposed to hear. Again, he did. This time, though, the Secretary of Defense went on to speak directly to the Chinese minister: “We’re sick and tired of you pushing us around, and we aren’t going to take it any more. You say you won’t stop ramming getting Real down our throat?”

“Our position is that we are merely supplying a demand,” Hu replied. “Only your unfortunate inability to offer your consumers anything nearly so interesting and exciting causes your resentment of it. Jealousy, I must say, is not an appropriate motive for foreign policy.”

Berkowitz breathed hard through his nose. And a long, ugly nose it was, too, at least to someone with Hu’s standards. “This is not a matter of jealousy. This is a matter of national security. Security, nothing—this is a matter of national survival. If you think you can make people in this country not give a damn about anything except getting Real—”

You’re right, Hu Zhiaoxing thought irreverently.

But that wasn’t where the American Secretary of Defense was going. “If that’s what you think, you’ve got another think coming.”

An old song had lyrics something like that, a song from the days when the United States really was the world power it still imagined itself to be. “What precisely are you driving at, sir?” Hu asked.

The Secretary of State responded before the Secretary of Defense could: “If you don’t quit pushing Real in the USA, that can only mean war between your country and mine.”

All three Americans looked stern and determined, as if they were playing parts in a thriller from a director who didn’t know what the devil he was doing. Wang Zemin ... giggled. The Americans gaped at him. Minister Hu sent him a reproachful glance—that wasn’t how you were supposed to play the game. Which didn’t mean the Third Minister didn’t feel like giggling himself.

“I must tell you, Mr. Jackson, that that would be ... inadvisable,” he said.

“You think you can do whatever you please here, and it doesn’t come with a price,” Jackson said. “But that’s not the way things work. We can protect our borders.”

“You can try ... sir,” Minister Hu said coolly.

“We can—and we will,” Secretary of State Jackson said.

“You have been warned,” Secretary of Defense Berkowitz added.

“If you think you can go on corrupting us and humiliating us, we just have to show you how totally wrong you are,” Secretary of the DEA Kojima declared. “And I mean totally.”

After that, nobody on either side seemed to see much point to saying anything else. The Chinese diplomat and his aide went back to the Saturn. It carried them to the harbor without falling apart. They boarded their little boat. Wang Zemin steered it back to Avalon. He laughed most of the way there.

Pablo opened his eyes. He closed them again as fast as he could. But when he opened them a second time, nothing had changed. This wasn’t Real. This, goddammit to hell, was real. And it was that particularly depressing part of reality called jail.

He looked around the holding tank. A couple of Hispanic guys like him. Three or four brown Indian guys. A couple of black guys. A couple of skinny but dangerous-looking Asian guys—if they didn’t have shanks stashed somewhere, he would have been amazed. And a couple of white guys: one who seemed scared shitless, the other looking as if he’d been carved from granite—a fuck of a lot of granite. Regardless of how buff he was, he wouldn’t last long if he acted stupid. If enough guys jumped on you, you could really be made of granite and you’d break anyway.

One of the Indians lit a cigarette. Most of the time, Pablo thought tobacco smoke was gross. Piled on top of all the other stinks here, it didn’t seem so bad.

The massive white guy scowled at Pablo from two of the coldest, nastiest gray eyes ever. The LEDs in the ceiling lights gleamed off the dude’s shaved head. “So—you’re awake, huh?” he rumbled in a voice like boulders crashing together.

If this was real, Pablo wanted Real. Oh, man, he really wanted Real. He wished that sweet-talking avatar would show up so he could forget all about this. Hey, it could happen, even in jail. The cops wished they could stop avatars. Wishing didn’t do them any good, either.

And Pablo still had to answer the mountain of toned meat. “No, man,” he said, “but I figure I’ll wake up pretty soon, you know?”

“Huh?” The white guy blinked. Pablo hadn’t been a hundred percent sure he could—snakes never did. Then he decided it was funny. His laugh sounded like kettledrums. “Comedian, are you?”

Right. And then you wake up, Pablo thought. But that was the trouble. Pablo had woken up. What a bringdown. He reminded himself he needed to answer again. “Sure, man. Me and the dragon.”

He threw it out at random. Besides, the dragon was dead, and this dude hadn’t got Real with him anyway. With that carcass, the white guy looked more likely to be into something like HGH 3.0 than avatars and everything that went with them. The more fool him. That redhead ... Remembering her made you want to forget all the genuine local girls.

You couldn’t always tell by looks. The hard-muscled white guy proved that. When the fingers on his right hand twisted a particular way, Pablo damn near fell over. “Dude!” he said. “You got some? You got some here? How’d you do that?”

“Talent, man,” the other guy answered smugly. He turned out to have it stashed in the waistband of his jeans. It wasn’t the kind of shit mechanical bloodhounds could find, the way they sniffed out crank or Superoxy or coke nuevo. Pablo happily pressed a little cardboardy square to his temple. Even more happily, he forgot real and got Real.

The only way the jailer could have been more bored would have been to die day before yesterday. He stopped in front of the holding tank. “Ramirez, Pablo!” he sang out. “Come forward for your hearing.”

Nobody came forward. One of the men in the cell pointed to a guy who was lying there not looking at anything under this sun. “I think that is him,” the prisoner said in a singsong Indian accent.

Ramirez wasn’t the only one who’d ridden the express away from the material world, either. The bastard who looked like an murderball frontman was down for the count, too.

“Well, fuck me.” The jailer wasn’t bored any more—he was pissed off instead. “How’d they get the shit? Where’d it come from?”

Nobody said a word. The conscious assholes in the holding tank all radiated ignorance and innocence. As far as they were concerned, the mothers who’d got Real must’ve picked up their shit a mile beyond the moon. The jailer swore in weary resignation. Maybe the surveillance video would show something.

“You sorry suckers,” the jailer told the conscious prisoners. “It could be you next time.”

He knew that was a mistake as soon as he said it. Too late, of course. You always realized shit like that too late. None of the losers in the cell let out a peep, even now. But every goddamn one of them looked like he wanted it to be him next time.

Pounding the crap out of Catalina and the other Channel Islands should have been a piece of cake. After all, the islands were within artillery range of the American mainland. By rights, even cruise missiles should have been overkill. Manned fighters should have been ridiculously over the top.

“Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” Major Dmitri Gomez muttered as he climbed into the cockpit of his F-27 at Edwards Air Force base, up in the high-desert country north of L.A. Things had a way of going wrong when the United States tangled with China. If that weren’t true, the damned Chinese wouldn’t hold the Channel Islands in the first place. Their casinos in Avalon wouldn’t be draining trillions of dollars out of an American economy that couldn’t begin to afford it. Vampires, that’s what they were, sucking what little was left of the USA’s blood right on out of it.

As for getting Real ... Major Gomez muttered to himself. He hoped the armorers and techs who serviced the Strike Peregrine didn’t waste their off-duty time with little squares of brightly colored cardboardy stuff. He hoped, yeah, but he wouldn’t have bet more than a grand on it. And you couldn’t buy a cup of coffee for a thousand bucks.

One of the noncoms on the ground gave him a thumbs-up. Gomez returned the gesture from the cockpit. Hagopian was a good guy. The Air Force needed more like him. What it needed and what it had were two different critters.

Methodically, Gomez went over the preflight checklist with the F-27’s AI. The USA’s latest air-superiority fighter had started coming off the assembly line back in the 2050s. It had been a worldbeater back then. Ever since, it had got upgrades to the weaponry and the avionics and to its stealthiness. It was a much more capable warplane now than it had been when it was new.

But was it capable enough to go up against all the goodies the Chinese could throw at it? The last time American fighter-bombers tried to plaster the Channel Islands, hardly any of them came back. Gomez’s Strike Peregrine carried some Ukrainian biocores the USA hadn’t known about during the last skirmish. Now if only China had stood still...

“Check completed. All systems green. Aircraft ready for takeoff,” the AI told Dmitri. The voice was female and highly competent—it was as if you were getting a clean bill of health from a doctor.

“Another stupid mission. You know you’re toast.” That was a female voice, too—a female voice right out of a porn vid. The F-27’s cockpit emphatically did not have room for two. It barely had room for one. The avatar that materialized there solved the problem by sitting on Gomez’s lap and wiggling. He could feel her, too. It was like ... having a girl sit on your lap and wiggle. It was distracting as hell, or maybe a skosh worse than that.

Dmitri didn’t understand how avatars worked. Nobody on the American mainland—except maybe a few Chinese spies—did. They violated most of the known laws of physics. Which proved ... what, exactly? That Americans didn’t know enough laws of physics, it looked like, and some of the ones they thought they did know weren’t so.

“Get lost,” Gomez told the avatar.

“You’re cute,” she answered. “Wanna get ... Real?”

“No! Jesus Christ, no!” Wouldn’t that be just what he needed?—getting doped out of his skull when he was supposed to be flying a combat mission. Even the hottest Ukrainian biocores couldn’t save a plane from a fucked-up pilot.

The avatar pouted. “Spoilsport,” she said, and winked out. Dmitri breathed an enormous sigh of relief. It wasn’t just that he could see the HUD again, though that sure didn’t hurt. But if avatars could show up in fighter cockpits, where couldn’t they?

Anywhere?

A dozen F-27s roared down the airstrip. They sprang into the cool night sky one after another. With afterburner and strap-on rocket packs, a Strike Peregrine could climb to the edge of space. They’d be making this attack run at treetop height, maybe lower. That would keep Chinese radar from picking them up.

Of course, their updated stealth materials were supposed to do the same thing. Engineers claimed an F-27 had a radar profile about the size of a starling’s. Dmitri wasn’t sure he believed that—how many starlings could break Mach 1 in low-level flight? Still, the profile had to be pretty goddamn small. In that case, why was everybody so tight-assed about staying low, low, low?

Or maybe the question should have been, why didn’t the F-27s that hit the Channel Islands the last time come back to Edwards? Maybe the Chinese weren’t using radar. If they weren’t, whatever they used instead worked even better.

Dmitri tried to shove that cheery thought out of his mind. He’d just about succeeded when the avatar appeared in the cockpit again.

It had to be impossible, even though it was happening. He knew that made no sense. But nothing made any sense. He was doing umpty-hundred knots and jinking like a butterfly with turbofans. No projection could get in here, let alone stay in here. No way, nohow.

Except the avatar did. “Wanna ... get Real?”

“No!” he yelled again. Laughing one hell of a sexy laugh, the avatar reached under his flight helmet—which should have been impossible squared—and put something on his right temple. “No!” he screamed one more time. He couldn’t see the little cardboard square, but you didn’t need to see everything, did you? Nope. Some things, you could take on faith.

He was a great horned owl, gliding over the landscape looking for mice. He could feel the wind whistling through his flight feathers, feel his powerful breast muscles work, wingbeat after effortless wingbeat. His eyes drank in even the tiniest sip of light. When he turned his head, he could almost—almost—twist it straight back. Every so often, he did. What a cool way to check six, he thought ... owlishly.

His ears, though, his ears were really something. If you could imagine hearing in color, in high definition ... He’d never imagined anything like that before. But then, he’d never been an owl before. Had he?

Somewhere down below, a mouse scurried. Those incredible ears picked it up first. Then he got it on visual, and banked toward it. The ground swelled up as he extended his talons. They can run, he thought, but they can’t hide.

Shapur Razmara was doing paperwork. The cop was cussing under his breath as he did it, too. This was the twenty-second century, for crying out loud. When were people going to get the flying cars and the vacations on Venus and the paperwork that did itself ? How long had the bullshit artists been promising all that good stuff ? And how much had they delivered?

“Venus, my ass,” he muttered. He would have liked a vacation anywhere. Tijuana, for instance. Fat chance, with the dollar so weak against the peso. More people were sneaking across the border from the USA to Mexico than the other way around. One more sign the country was really and truly fucked up.

And, of course, there was a war on. The TV and the Net and the blogosphere were all screaming their stupid heads off. They were promising America would kick China into the middle of next week. Lieutenant Razmara had no time to waste on such crap. He figured that, if you did have time to waste on such crap, it had to be because you weren’t doing your job.

Explosions in the distance? Jet planes roaring by six inches above the roof ? Well, yeah. There was a war on. As long as nothing blew up right across the street, Razmara figured he wouldn’t get his knickers in a twist.

Then, after a scream of engine noise that made his fillings dance the fandango, something did blow up across the street. The cop shop shook as if somebody’d kicked it into the middle of next week. The lights went out. So did the AC. In East Los Angeles in the middle of summer, that was even more important. Cops and clericals swore antiphonally.

After a pause, and then a pause on the pause, emergency lights came on. “Move to the stairways!” a loud recorded voice commanded. “Exit the facility in an orderly fashion!”

Move to the stairways? Razmara wondered, even as he did it. Los Angeles was crowded, sure, but that crowded? Well, no. Just somebody talking like a bureaucrat instead of a human being.

He exited the facility in an orderly fashion, too. Then he stopped dead and said, “Aw, fuck!”

A fighter plane’s tail stuck out of the roof of what had been a Korean takeout place: the perfect business to put across the street from a police station. It wasn’t perfect any more, not unless perfectly wrecked counted. The takeout joint and the plane both burned like billy-be-damned. Every so often, something would blow up—something off the plane, Razmara presumed.

Stas Kyriades came up beside him to watch the fireworks. “So much for the bul kalbi,” Kyriades said mournfully.

“No shit, Jackson!” Razmara agreed.

Something else blew up. A secretary maybe twenty feet from the two cops screeched and went down, clutching her leg. Somebody stooped beside her and started giving first aid. “You know, we’re lucky,” Kyriades said.

“Some luck!” Razmara rolled his eyes.

“We are, man,” the sergeant insisted. “Honest to God. Think about it—another split second, and that sumbitch hits the station instead of the Korean place. Then we all go up in smoke.”

“Urk,” Razmara said—he hadn’t thought of that. He wished like hell Stas hadn’t, either. “Thanks a lot, pal. Now when I do the instant replay inside my head...”

“Yeah, I know.” Kyriades nodded, the firelight from across the street shining off his big bald dome. “Me, too.”

“Damn!” One of the Chinese sergeants in a tent outside of Avalon stubbed out his cigarette in disgust.

“What’s the matter?” asked the captain in charge of the company.

“I had ‘em. I had ‘em dead to rights, and I missed,” the sergeant said. His superior made an impatient noise. Grudgingly—miserable nosy officers!—the sergeant explained: “I had the fighter pilot netted pretty as you please. I wanted to fly him into the police station and take out the Americans who were working against the getting Real complex.”

“And you missed?” the captain said.

“Afraid so, sir. I’m still picking up the police officials.” The sergeant hated to admit it. The small-prick bastard with the four little stars on his shoulder boards would probably put it in his fitness report, and then he’d be stuck with it forever.

The captain rubbed his chin. “But you did take out the fighter plane and the pilot?”

“Oh, yes, sir!” the sergeant said. “No doubt of it.”

“All right. That will do,” the captain said. “The other would have been nice, but you did what you had to do.”

“Thank you, sir!” the sergeant exclaimed in glad surprise. Maybe a human being lurked inside the small-prick bastard. Maybe. Who would have believed it?

“The police officials are a worry for another day. Probably for another department, too.” Human being or not, the captain still enjoyed pointing out the obvious. That was part of what made him a small-prick bastard. He also liked to hear himself talk, which sure didn’t help. He went on, “If the pilot had got close enough, he might have endangered us. After all, a savage with a bow and arrow can endanger a chaingun crew if he gets close enough.”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said resignedly. None of the American fighter planes had got close enough to Catalina or the other Channel Islands to endanger them. This whole unit—captain, sergeant, and everybody else, right down to the cooks—would have landed in big trouble if any of them had.

Reeducation? the sergeant thought. He shivered, though the night was mild. No thanks!

Snow swirled around Pablo. It had lain on the ground for a while; it had a crust, and crunched under his felt boots at every step. The air was cold. Each breath felt like inhaling creme de menthe. Somewhere up ahead, the enemy lurked. They’d be tough. They always were.

This time, though, Pablo had a trusty comrade at his side. The tall, gray-eyed barbarian swaggered along as if he owned this valley. He carried a massive battle axe. His shoulders seemed too wide to fit inside his wolfskin coat. Like all the men of his clan, he shaved his head. A fox-fur cap kept him from losing precious warmth through his scalp.

The barbarian pointed toward a stand of snow-dappled firs ahead. In their perfect conical symmetry, they reminded Pablo of oversized Christmas trees. (Christmas trees? Just for a moment, the world seemed to waver around Pablo. Then he got Real again. External references and doubts vanished together.)

“They’ll be in there,” the massive axeman growled.

Pablo nodded. “They will.” He drew the blade that had drunk a dragon’s heartblood. “Let’s go get ‘em.”

“Indeed,” his companion said. “For great glory and great reward await us once we triumph. If we triumph. The fight will be hard.”

“They always are,” Pablo said. (The world wavered again. Had he been in fights against these foes before? This terrain seemed new to him. And yet ... He shook his head. Whatever the submerged maybe-memory was, it wasn’t Real—and if it wasn’t Real, it didn’t matter.)

Then the dwarves burst from the wood, howling their harsh battle hymns. Some had the features of black men, some of whites, and some of men with yellow skins. All were hideous. The big shaven-headed man by Pablo roared laughter. “May the gods smite me if those little warts don’t put me in mind of the ministers in a kingdom I left not long ago,” he said.

Jackson. Berkowitz. Kojima. The names rose unbidden in Pablo’s mind. Again, they might have blown in on a chilly breeze from another world. Stupid square must not be right where it oughta go. That thought also came out of nowhere. And it went right back to nowhere a moment later, for he was fighting for his life.

The dwarves might be little. They might be ugly. But they were fast and mean and brave. If they could have chopped his companion and him into cat’s-meat, they would have done it.

But they couldn’t. Gushing gore splashed the snow. Butchered body parts bounced. Pablo took a nasty cut on the forearm. He felt that as he felt everything else—it was all Real, of course. Still, it troubled him less than it might have, for battle fury filled him.

He and his comrade-in-arms worked a fearful, fearsome slaughter on the dwarves. At last, their foes had had more than flesh and blood could bear. They fled, shrieking in terror and throwing away swords and spears so they could run faster.

“Pretty good, friend,” the big man panted. His axehead was all over blood. He had a gash on one cheek; a dark wet patch on his trouser leg marked another. Both wounds would be annoying. Neither was anything worse.

“You ain’t bad, neither,” Pablo said.

They plunged into the fir forest. Who could say what kind of treasures the dwarves held? Who could guess how many women they’d stolen from human lands to serve their lusts and, later, to serve as the main course in their foul feasts? Who could imagined how overjoyed those women would be at rescue?

The treasures were splendid. Some of the women were better, much better, than splendid. Overjoyed didn’t begin to describe how glad they were. Furs and fires meant the snow all around didn’t matter one bit. And every single thing Pablo did felt Real.

Jamming and spoofing gear filled the USS Rumsfeld. The hovercraft was designed to do one thing and one thing only: get in quick, tear the holy hell out of the target, and then get out again. One of Hillary Griffith’s shipmates said, “Fat lot of good jamming and spoofing did the real Rumsfeld.”

“Who was he?” Hillary asked. She’d been born not long before the turn of the century. The ship was way older than she was. It was probably older than the grizzled CPO doing the talking, too. As far as Hillary was concerned, that made it ancient.

“He was the clown who sucked us into Iraq,” the chief answered.

“Oh. Which time?” she asked—anything that had happened before she was born was as one with Nineveh and Tyre, as far as she was concerned.

“Um, the second one ... I think.” That the CPO wasn’t sure made her feel better. He waved to the bank of sensors she monitored. “You sing out like Timberlake if anything looks even a little bit weird. Even a little, hear?”

“Will do, Chief,” Hillary promised. And she would, too. Her one and only personal, irreplaceable ass was on the line, same as everybody else’s.

Goosed hard, the Rumsfeld could make sixty-three knots. The captain was goosing the hovercraft extra hard. Shoot and scoot. That was what she had to do. If she didn’t, she’d never see Long Beach again.

Hillary’s gaze flicked from one dial to another, restless and random as a hummingbird buzzing a blooming hibiscus. Most of the sensors were passive: they warned if somebody else’s search beams went by. Chances were the skipper would turn on the active sensors only after he knew the enemy had already detected the Rumsfeld. Yes, they could see farther and in more detail than their passive counterparts. But they also shouted Here I am! Here I am! at the top of their electronic lungs.

She just hoped the passive detectors could pick up everything the Chinese would throw at them. People said they used electronic and acoustic bands American gear couldn’t find. People said some of the bands they used weren’t electronic or acoustic at all. Then again, people came out with all kinds of bullshit. If you had any sense, you bozo-filtered most of it.

But she did worry about why neither the military nor the media said more about the American air strikes against the Channel Islands. There’d been all that hot video of the Strike Peregrines taking off. Anybody could see they were loaded for bear. All those bombs and missiles hanging down ... And they would have had Wild Weasels flying cover missions for them, to make sure the enemy couldn’t detect them till too late.

Much fanfare about the takeoffs. Not word one about what the F-27s had done. Hillary might be young, but she hadn’t come to town on a turnip truck. She could see what the likely answer there was. She didn’t like it, not for beans, but she could see it.

Well, if the planes hadn’t done the job, the Rumsfeld would just have to. Hillary reached out and patted the displays in front of her. A ship could carry a much more comprehensive electronics suite than an airplane. They had the most up-to-date gadgets the USA could manufacture or buy. Of course they’d get through.

Not getting through was too grim to be worth thinking about.

None of the displays had so much as hiccuped when the 105mm gun in the forward turret started banging away. “The fuck—?” Hillary said. They weren’t close to Catalina yet. As far as she could tell, they were alone on the Pacific. So why was that 105 firing, for Chrissake? Had somebody flipped out? That would be just what they needed!

“Battle stations!” the intercom shouted. The horn call that went with the words started—but then cut out. But the displays still had power. What a weird glitch, Hillary thought.

She didn’t have to move. Her battle station was right here. That was the good news. The bad news was, she was stuck monitoring display screens and she couldn’t see one goddamn thing besides them. If it hit the fan, she wouldn’t know till it all landed on her.

The engines slowed. By the way they sounded, they went into full emergency stop. Something had hit the fan, damned if it hadn’t.

“Anything on the threat displays?” The skipper’s voice came out of a brass speaking tube, not the intercom. You needed backups, but....

“No, sir.” Hillary shouted her answer up the tube. “Uh, sir—what’s going on?”

“We’re about to run into a giant brick wall that just sprang up out of nowhere,” the skipper answered.

“That’s impossible, sir,” Hillary said.

“Yeah. I know,” the captain said bleakly. The Rumsfeld smashed into the wall a split second later.

Hillary was wearing a seat belt. When you went into combat, you never could tell what would happen. She ended up on the deck anyway. She didn’t go face-first into the screens. That was something, but not enough, not when she ended up clutching one wrist with the other hand. Was it broken? If it wasn’t, it might as well have been—it sure hurt enough.

She heard running feet in the corridor. “Did we get the abandon-ship order?” she called.

“We’re sinking,” the other sailor answered. “If you want to hang around, be my guest.”

Deciding they wouldn’t court-martial her or keelhaul her or whatever the hell, Hillary went up to the main deck. The Rumsfeld was built light—she was made for boogying. The bow looked exactly as if it had run into a brick wall at high speed. It was all smashed in, in other words.

But where was the wall? Yeah, it was night out there, but Hillary thought she would have seen a brick wall big enough to smash in a warship’s bow. All she saw were a whale of a lot of ocean and a million stars overhead.

“Boy, are we gonna have fun explaining this one,” a sailor said gloomily.

“That fuckin’ wall was there,” another sailor insisted.

“Where’s it at now?” the first swabbie asked. The second didn’t answer.

Shipmates helped Hillary into a life raft. She couldn’t have made it alone, not with only one good hand. They started the one-lung engine and headed east, toward the mainland. Maybe they’d get there. Maybe a Chinese patrol would pick them up before they could. Maybe they’d run into another brick wall. Hillary had no idea. She hardly cared. All she knew for sure was, they weren’t going to shell Catalina. Behind her, the Rumsfeld quietly sank.

When Pablo came back to the real world in the jailhouse infirmary, two cops were glaring at him. They couldn’t have been anything else. Sure as hell, the one with hair asked, “Was it you or your buddy who smuggled in that shit?”

“I don’t got to talk to you, man.” Pablo had been jugged before. He knew the rules.

“We’ve got it on video,” the bald cop warned.

“Terrific. You got it on video. Then you don’t need to ask me no dumbass questions.”

“You come clean with us, maybe we don’t hang a sentence enhancement on you. Drugs in jail—could double your stretch.” That was the one with hair again. They were trying to whipsaw him.

They were trying hard. The bald guy added, “Drugs in jail in time of war. That’s a sentence enhancement, too. A big one.”

Was it? Pablo had never been in jail in time of war before. His bullshit detector went off just the same. “Getting Real—that ain’t no drug,” he said. “It’s ... different, like.”

“It’s illegal,” the cop with hair said implacably. “And it comes from China. You use that shit, it’s ... treason, like.” He did a wickedly good job of mimicking the way Pablo talked.

“Oh, yeah? How come you never busted nobody for treason before on account of he got Real?” Sure as hell, Pablo’s BS detector was pinging like crazy.

“You aren’t listening, baka boy—there’s a war on now,” the bald cop said. “Besides, you may as well come clean with us. Eckener’s already trying to pin everything on you.”

Eckener? Pablo needed a few seconds to realize that had to be the big dude with the mean eyes. He hadn’t had a name for him till now. “That lying fuck!” he burst out. Then his brains really kicked in. “Besides, if you got the video, you already know he’s a lying fuck.”

The cops looked at each other. They’d figured he was too dumb or too wasted to see that. But Pablo’s mama didn’t raise any dummies. And you weren’t wasted when you came back from getting Real. Disgusted, maybe, the way Pablo was now, but not wasted. His brains could work just fine.

Wearily, the cop with hair asked, “Why do you do it, Ramirez?”

“Why do I do what, man?” Pablo wouldn’t make things easy for him. That was more a matter of principle than anything else.

Even more wearily, the cop spelled it out in words of one syllable: “Why do you get Real?”

“Ever done it?” As long as Pablo answered one question with another, he wouldn’t spill anything that mattered—not that he had much to spill.

After the cops looked at each other again, they both shook their heads. “We’ve got real lives we like,” the bald one said. The one with hair nodded.

Pablo just laughed. “Like that’s got anything to do with anything. I like real life okay, too. But getting Real—it’s better.” Okay, he was talking to them. He was talking, period. What the hell, though? It wasn’t like they wouldn’t already have heard this shit plenty of times from other people.

“Better how?” asked the cop with hair.

“Just ... better, man. Realer.” Pablo laughed some more. “Yeah. It’s Realer than real, it’s more interesting than what happens just every day. I mean, I don’t hardly never kill no dragons strollin’ down Whittier Boulevard, you know? I don’t save no beautiful girls who screw me till I can’t stand up no more, neither. Do you?”

“Sure. Every day,” the cop answered, deadpan.

“Twice on Sundays,” his bald partner added.

Smart guys. He might’ve known they’d be smart guys. They were cops, weren’t they? But, now that Pablo’d started talking, he didn’t want to shut up. “And everything that happens when you’re Real—it’s Real, like. Ordinary times, you don’t notice half of what’s going on. What the ground feels like under your feet. What your clothes feel like against your skin. What the air smells like. What the air tastes like.”

“In L.A., you don’t want to know stuff like that,” the cop with hair said.

“Yeah, you do,” Pablo insisted. “When you eat, you taste food, too. And when you’re with a girl ... Wow!” He shivered at the ecstatic intensity of some of his memories. They felt more genuine than anything that had actually happened to him. And if a memory felt genuine, wasn’t it genuine? A memory wasn’t a thing; it was the calling back to life of a gone thing. He couldn’t find a way to put that into words. He did say, “When you’re ... here, man, it’s like you’re only half alive. The wrong half, too.”

He waited for the cops to hammer away at him some more. But they just got up and walked out of the infirmary. A little later, two blank-faced guards marched him to a cell of his own. No bunkmate. No getting Real, not unless an avatar showed up out of nowhere. He was stuck with the world as it actually was. In nothing flat, he was bored out of his skull.

Hu Zhiaoxing arranged a video hookup with the American dignitaries. When you were at war, you didn’t meet face to face unless one side was giving up. Hu thought that was a stupid rule, but it was the one the Americans played by.

“By now,” he said, “you will have seen that your attacks cannot harm us. They have cost you casualties and damage, but here I stay in Avalon, as safe and comfortable as if you had never started your foolish war.”

“You can’t talk to us that way!” the American Secretary of Defense raged. “You have no right!” The glowers from Secretary Jackson and Secretary Kojima said they agreed with Berkowitz.

Agreeing didn’t make them right. Minister Hu gave back a sweet, sad smile. “Centuries ago, my ancestors said the same thing to Western envoys. And Western gunboats and cannons and rifles, weapons we could not match, taught my ancestors that might makes right.”

“Just what they deserved, too!” Jackson exclaimed. This time, Berkowitz and Kojima nodded like bobbleheads. They might be the USA’s top officials, but they showed no understanding of history. Well, that had been an American failing for a long time.

One of many—and the Americans also showed no understanding that failings had a price. Hu Zhiaoxing’s voice hardened: “If you settle now—if you concede that we may distribute Real squares and other such artifacts within your borders as we see fit, if you agree that Chinese citizens arrested in the USA will be tried in Chinese courts to ensure fairness, and if you pay a moderate indemnity for disturbing the peace—we will end the unfortunate hostilities on these mild and gentle terms.”

“We’ll see you in hell first!” Kojima shouted. “You have to keep that poison out of our country, and we’ll keep fighting till you do!” By their savage expressions, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense supported the Secretary of the DEA.

That was too bad—for them, and for their country. “Are you sure this is your last word?” Hu asked, genuine concern in his voice. He liked Americans. He admired what America had been. That its own people refused to realize it no longer was what it had been saddened him. One more failing that had a price. “Please reconsider,” he urged. “If things go on, a time will come when I have to speak of terms once more. At that time, my government won’t let me be so generous. We will have had to do more, and so we will require more from you.”

“The President’s told the American people we’re going to win,” Jackson said. “We won’t back down. We can’t back down. It won’t be long before you’re singing a different tune.”

Ironically, what first occurred to Third Minister Hu was a passage from the Christian Bible: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Well, if they didn’t know, they would have to find out. “I am afraid I see no point to carrying this conversation any further at the moment,” he said sadly, breaking the connection.

He had to fight the impulse to go into the next room and wash his hands.

Lieutenant Razmara was dictating a report into the transcriber in the middle of the afternoon when the cop shop lost power again. This time, no fighter jet had crashed across the street. Quietly and without any fuss, things just stopped working. “Crap,” he said—he hadn’t saved for a while, so he was out a couple of pages’ worth of work.

Other officers offered their detailed opinions of the situation. Most of them sounded as thrilled as he was. Some seemed even more delighted.

Windows still worked, anyhow—he could see. He pulled out his cell phone to see if he could find out how long the outage would last. But the screen stayed blank when he thumbed the ON button. “Crap!” he said again, this time with feeling. Hadn’t he charged the stupid thing last night? He knew damn well he had.

So how come it wasn’t working, then? A rising tide of profanity from desks all over the office told him his wasn’t the only dead cell, either—not even close. The station was unusual in still having landlines. It had them for the same reason it had emergency lights and backup generators: to keep it going if something went kaflooie.

When Razmara picked up the landline on his desk, all he got was silence. Come to think of it, the emergency lights hadn’t come on this time. The backup generators weren’t generating, either. For all he knew, they’d degenerated since the last time anybody bothered to inspect them.

Stas Kyriades ambled over to his desk. “I don’t like it that everything electric is out,” the sergeant said.

“Neither do I—not even slightly,” Razmara said. “I wish I could think of something that might make that happen.”

An avatar appeared in the middle of the office. It had to be an avatar. He didn’t think a woman with bright blue hair and bright red eyes, wearing a hot-pink Victorian-era dress, complete with bustle, could have just walked in without anybody noticing. It was L.A., so you couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, but all the same....

“If you can get out of town, you’d better do it.” The avatar had a raspy baritone voice that suggested thirty years of cheap cigars. What was going on with that? Either a programming glitch or a Chinese with a one twisted sense of humor. The avatar looked around and nodded. “Yeah, you’d better bail. Your dumbshit government’s really screwed the pooch, and L.A.’s gonna pay for it. I know that sucks, but life sucks sometimes. You’ve got”—the avatar glanced down at a wristwatch she/he/it wasn’t wearing—”two hours. Two and a half, tops.”

“Why are you telling us?” Razmara said, at the same time as somebody else was asking, “Why should we believe you?”

“Well, if you want to believe your own stupid, fucked-up people, you can do that. But you’ll be sorry,” the avatar said. “I mean, if your own people had all their shit in one bag, you wouldn’t’ve lost power here, right? Right.”

“How can we go anywhere if all the power’s out?” Stas Kyriades called.

The avatar shrugged. “Unicycle? Horse? Elephant? Feet? All kinds of ways, sucker. Hey! Who wants to get Real?” Without waiting for an answer, the thing started throwing little cardboard squares all over the office. Then it thumbed its nose and vanished.

One of the squares, a bright blue one—about the color of the avatar’s hair—landed on Shapur Razmara’s desk. He stared at it as if it were an Ebola bomb or a vest-pocket nuke. “Waddaya think we oughta do?” Kyriades asked.

Razmara’s chair squeaked when he pushed it back from the desk. “Get the hell out of here.” He headed for the stairs.

The sergeant followed him. “What if this is all bullshit? What if we’re freaking on account of nothing?”

“Then how come the power’s out—the power and our phones?” Razmara asked. “If they want to can my sorry ass for cowardice, they can do that. I’ll get another job. I can’t get another ass.”

“Yeah...” Kyriades followed him down the stairs, too. He tried his cell again. It remained resolutely dead. “Shit. Wish I could call Sophie.”

“Maybe she’ll get an avatar, too,” Razmara said, wishing he had somebody who mattered that much to him.

“Yeah...” Kyriades said again, sounding surprised. “Maybe she will.”

Out on the street, all the cars and trucks, hydrogen and electric alike, were dead. So was an ancient gasoline-burner. Some drivers were peering under the hood. One gal was kicking her machine. That made as much sense as anything else, and did as much good.

“Which way do we go?” Kyriades asked.

“They gotta come from the coast,” Razmara answered. “So if we head north, like toward Pasadena, we’re moving away from ‘em, anyhow. Maybe that’ll do some good, maybe it won’t. But it looks like the best shot to me.”

“Makes sense.” The other cop paused. “But when you see an avatar like that one, you start wondering how much sense making sense makes.”

“Right,” Razmara said. “C’mon.”

Before long—right about the time Razmara’s feet started to hurt—they walked past a bike shop. Actually, instead of walking past, they walked in. A million dollars later, they rode away on two cheap bicycles. Razmara would have liked to know what time it was, but his cell stayed out. Kyriades had a wristwatch ... which was also out. They started getting scared then. The only people in L.A. who knew what time it was were antiques freaks with windup clocks and watches. And...

“I’m glad I’m not on the operating table right now,” Razmara said. Kyriades made a horrible face. They both pedaled harder.

Well, they tried to. Bikes were nimble critters, but traffic still bit the big one. They were riding past Caltech when Kyriades looked back over his shoulder. “Oh, fuck,” he said, and hit the brakes. Razmara was glad for an excuse to stop. Both out-of-shape, middle-aged cops were sweating like pigs.

Then Razmara looked back over his shoulder. “Jesus Christ!” he said once more. Yeah, he was assimilated. Better to assimilate than never. Or something like that.

What looked like an almost-clear dome had been plopped down onto L.A. Not an inversion layer. More like a Pyrex bowl you’d nuke veggies in. God’s Pyrex bowl, upside down on top of Los Angeles. God must’ve been an even bigger dude than Razmara figured. The leading edge of the bowl-thing was like eight blocks behind them. “Wanna go back and find out what that is?” Kyriades asked.

“Your mother!” Razmara squeeped.

And that was even before lightning started lashing inside the bowl.

Sergeant Chang’s superiors had told him the advance under the dome would be a piece of cake. Any sergeant worth his boots knows his superiors are commonly full of crap. Not this time, though.

Here and there, American soldiers in San Pedro fired at the Chinese patrol. So did more than a few American civilians. His superiors had warned that America let civilians freely own guns. Chang Guoliang hadn’t wanted to believe it—it struck him as insane—but it seemed to be true.

But he didn’t have to worry about ordinary firearms. Reactive metareality armor swatted bullets away before they got within thirty centimeters of his hide. It was the same technology that generated avatars—Chang knew that much. How it worked ... he neither knew nor cared. Till the government conscripted him, he’d worked on his parents’ farm in Qinhai Province: almost the exact middle of nowhere. He thought he might make the army a career. He lived a lot better now than he had before the draft got him.

A tongue of fire licked out from a house and engulfed a Chinese soldier. The fancy armor was no damn good against flamethrowers. The poor bastard went up like a moth in a torch. How he screamed!—but, mercifully, not for long.

The Chinese soldiers blasted the house with grenades and energy beams. A defiant minichain burst and another snarl from the flamethrower answered them. This one didn’t fry anybody. It just let them know the enemy was still in business.

“If that’s how they want it...” Chang’s platoon commander said. The young lieutenant sent the address higher up the chain of command.

He didn’t have to wait long. Lightning cracked down from the lid the Chinese had slapped over most of Los Angeles. Chang Guoliang had to look away from that white-violet brilliance. When he looked back, not much was left of the house.

“That’ll fix ‘em!” Satisfaction filled Lieutenant Liu’s voice.

Chang nodded. He thought so, too. He was amazed when a couple of U.S. soldiers staggered from the wreckage. The Chinese let one of them surrender. The other was dumb enough to keep wearing the flamethrower’s fuel and propellant tanks on his back. Hands up or not, he didn’t come very far before he got shot down like a mad dog.

Lieutenant Liu said not a word about that, even if it went against regulations. They would have done the same thing to a fellow carrying nerve-gas grenades. If you fought with the wrong kind of weapons, you took your chances. That rule was older than regulations—old as war, probably.

The Chinese patrol, one of many, pressed ahead under the dome, deeper into Los Angeles. No, the round-eyes didn’t have anything that could stop them, or even slow them down very much.

After the Pyrex lid went over most of Los Angeles, Lieutenant Razmara’s phone started working again. He could call anywhere he wanted to—as long as he didn’t want to call anybody stuck under the lid. Since he didn’t want to call anybody who wasn’t, what good did a working phone do him? Well, he could find out what time it was again. Oh, boy!

Sergeant Kyriades’ worries were more urgent than his own. “Can’t get through, God damn it to hell,” Kyriades snarled, and shoved the phone back into his pocket.

“Sorry, Stas,” Razmara said. He wished he cared about somebody enough to go half nuts when he couldn’t talk to her. Once upon a time, he had. Once upon a time, Ande (short for Andromeda—her dad was an enthusiastic amateur astronomer) had cared for him that way, too. Then ... she hadn’t. Which ended up expensive and heartbreaking and a bunch of other things he didn’t want to think about right now.

He and Kyriades and a bunch of other people who’d got out of L.A. sat under the trees in a Pasadena park. It wasn’t an official refugee camp yet, but by all the signs it would be pretty damn quick. A guy was walking around eyeing the setup and talking into his laptop. If he wasn’t some kind of official, Shapur Razmara had never set eyes on one.

Or maybe he was a spy for China. But why would the Chinese need one, here or anywhere around L.A.? They were kicking the snot out of the USA, same as they had the last time the two countries tangled.

A squadron of fighter jets had fired missiles at the lid. Some bounced off and smashed. Some blew up when they hit. None wrecked it. It wasn’t really made of Pyrex after all. Too bad.

Then a plane had flown straight into the lid. Razmara hoped like hell it was a drone, but he didn’t think so. It looked like the rest of the fighters. And it made one amazing fireball when it hit. That was all it did, though. Only this and nothing more? Where did that come from? An old poem he’d heard somewhere. He could have Googled it and found out what, but he didn’t care enough.

Tanks rumbled past the park, heading south toward the lid. So their electrical systems worked here, too, did they? Razmara wished them luck, there inside his head. And he figured they’d need it. What were they going to do that a fighter plane couldn’t?

To his surprise, Kyriades had an answer when he asked that out loud. “I’ll tell you what,” the other cop said. “They’re gonna show that the Army is just as fucking stupid as the Air Force.”

Nothing Razmara had imagined came as close to making sense as that did. He nodded mournfully. A little later on, the tanks’ cannons boomed, one after another. Razmara supposed the blams that followed hard on the heels of the booms were cannon shells ricocheting off the lid.

There were no noises that put him in mind of a million tons of breaking glass. The lid wouldn’t really be made of Pyrex. It probably wasn’t really there at all—except that it kept out things like missiles and fighter planes and cannon shells. Oh, yeah, and electricity some kind of way.

How? He had no idea. The wild tribesmen who charged white men’s machine guns way back when wouldn’t have known how those worked, either. Which didn’t keep those poor bastards from dying by carload lots. And also didn’t keep the shoe from being on the other foot now.

He nudged Kyriades. “How’s it feel to be a wog, Stas?”

“Huh?” Stas didn’t get it. Well, he would. Pretty soon, the whole country would.

Wang Zemin nodded to Hu Zhiaoxing. “Here comes the Americans’ boat, Minister.”

“Yes, I see it,” Hu said. The boat came up from the southeast, from Laguna Beach: the closest port that hadn’t gone under the Chinese lid. Now that the Americans were asking for terms, they had to come to him.

The boat flew a large white flag and a much smaller Stars and Stripes. A breeze from the ocean ruffled Hu’s hair, just a little, as he waited for the boat to tie up in Avalon and for the dignitaries to climb the gangplank and come up onto the pier. The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of the DEA all hung their heads. They’d just got their noses rubbed in a nasty truth. No matter how mighty their nation had been in the old days, no matter how glorious its history, it couldn’t compete any more.

“Why are you here, gentlemen?” Third Minister Hu made himself sound like a stern master dressing down naughty schoolboys.

None of the Americans wanted to come out with it. The Secretary of State was the senior man, so the unpalatable duty fell to him. Unpalatable indeed—Jackson spoke as if each word tasted bad: “We want to know what we have to do so you’ll end the war.”

“The war the United States started.” Hu folded his arms and waited.

Miserably, Jackson nodded. “The war the United States started,” he choked out.

Hu Zhiaoxing could have taken them to a conference room and sat down with them and talked things over. Instead, he gestured to his aide. Wang Zemin quickly fetched him a chair. He sat down, and left the three Americans standing in front of him. “First, the United States will place no further restrictions on Chinese distribution, by sale or gift, of the entertainment known as getting Real. All criminal and civil penalties against it will also be declared null and void.”

“Entertainment?” Kojima exploded. “That horrible, vicious, corrupting, addictive shit? We ought to—”

“We accept,” Berkowitz broke in. Jackson nodded again. The Secretaries of State and Defense could at least recognize things when they got hit over the head. The Secretary of the DEA didn’t seem to need to get Real to be delusional.

“Very good,” Hu said. “Next, China will take a ninety-nine year lease on the ports of San Pedro and Long Beach, to the borders indicated on this map”—he handed the Americans a printout—”the payment for the lease to be one dollar a year.” In other words, nothing: the smallest U.S. coin was a little aluminum piece worth ten dollars. But the humiliation was a lesson in itself.

Jackson spluttered: “These are our busiest West Coast ports! Some of the busiest ports in the world!”

“I know.” Minister Hu smiled politely. “Would you rather we go on with the war?”

“We accept,” Berkowitz repeated. No, he wasn’t altogether blind.

“Excellent. I hoped you would,” Hu said. “Third, there shall be no tariff barriers on exports from this new territory to the United States. China reserves the right to impose duties on products imported from the United States to the new territory.”

“You’re screwing us coming and going!” Berkowitz blurted.

“We did not start the war. You did,” Hu reminded him. “And, because you did, China imposes on the United States an indemnity of twenty trillion dollars, to be paid in gold or petroleum or uranium or a hard currency to be agreed upon, said indemnity to be completely discharged within ten years.”

“We haven’t got it,” Jackson said bleakly.

“In that case, you will get it.” Hu prided himself on his command of idiomatic English. “Failure to pay will result in more territorial or economic sanctions.” He could also be remorselessly precise.

“This is a very harsh peace, and a most unjust one,” Secretary of State Jackson said.

“My government does not think so. Neither do I. I warned you to quit sooner, but you would not listen.” Hu gestured to Wang Zemin, who handed him two copies of the agreement. He turned back to the Americans. “Here is the text, in English and Chinese. In case of doubt, the Chinese version is authoritative.” He signed both copies, then held them out to Jackson. Glumly, the Secretary of State added his signature and kept one copy for his government.

“You’re gloating now, because you think getting Real is only putting the screws to us,” Kojima said in a low, furious voice. “But just you wait. It’ll bite you in the ass, too. You’ll see.”

Hu Zhiaoxing yawned in his face. “I assure you, we have more enjoyable amusements than that. Good day, gentlemen.” His tone said he hoped he never saw them again. And he did.

Spotlights blazed down on Pablo. There seemed to be a thousand, in a hundred coruscating colors. He looked out toward the seats, but the glare of the spots kept him from seeing a goddamn thing.

He didn’t care. The shrill squeals told him the crowd was hot and ready. He picked up his axe and started to play. God, how they roared! But he was a god himself, god of thunder and lightning, god of thrusting hips and flying fingers, god of lust and sex, god of cell lights and sinsemilla, god of everything that mattered if you were a guy and you hadn’t seen thirty yet.

He was good. He was the best. Would they have laid out a million bucks apiece for a ticket if he were anything less? Not fuckin’ likely! He made it wail. He made it scream. He made the girls scream, too. He made ‘em scream without even touching ‘em. How hot was that? There they were, creaming their panties by the thousands in the seats, by the millions in front of their TVs, by the hundreds of millions tomorrow when the vids hit the Net.

If anything was better than sex, this was it. Not just fame, but the rush of fame. Knowing you made the girls wanna squirm, wanna do the old up-and-down, the old in-and-out ... Knowing you made ‘em wanna do it with you...

And if nothing was better than sex, there was always after the show. He couldn’t give everything he had to all the girls he wanted. John Henry the Steel-Driving Man couldn’t give it to all the girls Pablo the Guitar God wanted. But he could sure as hell pick and choose from all the girls who wanted to give him everything they had. And he could go pretty goddamn good even if he couldn’t nail ‘em all.

Blonde, brunette, redhead? Big tits, round ass, long legs? English or Spanish? White, brown, black, Asian? Here, there, or the other place? Sweet or sassy? He’d have plenty of choices. That was part of the perks of being Pablo the Guitar God.

He finished his first number. More screams rained down on him, along with frenzied applause. “Thank you! Thank you very much!” he said, and the amps made his words fill the arena. He waved—and got more cheers. He grinned—and the big screens behind him showed his shining front teeth even to the poor fools way up top in Row ZZ. “Boy, this feels good!”

It felt better than good, as a matter of fact. It felt Real....

Not without regret, Pablo opened his eyes. No, nobody’d hauled him off to jail while he was under this time. Nobody would have, any which way. Not any more. He’d got Real in his own apartment. Here he was, lying on his own bed.

But he could have got Real on a street corner, and they wouldn’t have busted him. It was all of a sudden legal. With lots of things, that would have taken half the fun—more than half—away. Not with getting Real. It was too good for anything to mess up, just like sex....

A slow, reminiscent smile spread across his face. “Pablo the Guitar God,” he murmured, and then, “Yeah, baby!” He remembered all the stuff he’d done after the show, and the babes he’d done it with. When you got Real, you remembered everything afterwards. That was part of what made it so totally awesome.

He’d never gone down this particular road before. His Real brain usually spun different kinds of fantasies. Not that he was complaining. Oh, man, no! He wondered why you sometimes went one way, sometimes another. Was somebody, something steering you? Or did you do it all yourself, there inside the universe between your ears?

“Jeez, who cares?” he muttered.

When he got Real, he was a deadly swordsman. Did that turn him into a fencer in the mundane world? He shrugged. He’d never had the faintest interest in finding out. If you turned into a killer whale when you got Real, it didn’t mean you could stay underwater for twenty minutes at a stretch unless you had scuba gear. More than one dumbshit had drowned proving stuff like that.

Guitar god, though ... He sorta knew how to play, but only sorta. He got out of bed and assumed the position for air guitar. He tried it out. Was he faster and better than he’d ever been before? Had getting Real turned a key some kind of way? He wasn’t sure, but he thought so. And if it had...

If it had, he needed to find out with a no-shit axe, not a pretend one. He needed to do it in a hurry, too. If you were terrific with a sword, who gave a rat’s ass? But Pablo the Guitar God could have every bit as much fun in plain old ordinary L.A. as he could when he got Real. And how could you beat that? Simple, man—you couldn’t. No fuckin’ way.

Hu Zhiaoxing let out a long sigh of relief. The stupid Americans had kicked up another fuss, and he’d handled it. The big wheels in Beijing couldn’t piss and moan about the job he’d done, not with a foothold on the mainland and the unchallenged right to spread getting Real as widely as China pleased.

So his next posting wouldn’t be as mayor in some dusty town in Xinjiang Uygur. It wouldn’t be as a camp administrator up on the Kolyma, either. China found the gold mines by the Arctic Ocean to be as useful for disposing of unreliables as the USSR had back in the twentieth century. Running them was necessary work, but not work Hu wanted.

Right this minute, he wanted no work at all. He wanted to relax. He’d damn well earned the right. And so he would.

Getting Real ... As he had with the Secretary of the DEA, he snorted his contempt. That was fine if you liked loud noises and primary colors. Fine for Americans, in other words. But there were better ways, if you had the taste to appreciate them.

He lit the spirit lamp on the low table in his Avalon apartment. He lay on a couch in front of the lamp, his head resting on a hard pillow of leather-colored bamboo. Everything he needed was within easy reach.

With the sharp end of the brass dipper, he twirled up some of the sticky mass above the dish and, still twirling to make sure it didn’t fall off, he began to roast it over the lamp. Every motion had the smoothness of long practice. He didn’t want the mass to dry out too much—or, worse, to burn. Then he’d have to start again from scratch.

Every so often, he took it off the lamp and rolled it on the flat bowl of his long-stemmed pipe. When it was ready, he heated the center of the bowl and the dipper to stick the seed-sized mass just above the hole there.

Time to smoke. With the end of the stem in his mouth, he put the bowl above the lamp. As soon as the pellet started to frizzle, he inhaled deeply, three or four times. Opium smoke filled his lungs.

“Ahhh!” he said at last. The smoke flowed out through his nose and mouth as tranquillity flowed through him. Tranquil was better, ever so much better, than Real. Nodding at that transcendent truth, Minister Hu slowly began to prepare another pellet.