Virtual Light

15. In 1015

There was a product called Kil’Z that Rydell had gotten to know at the Academy. It smelled, but faintly, of some ancient hair-tonic, flowery and cool, and you used it in situations where considerable bodily fluids had been spilled. It was an anti-viral agent, capable of nuking HIV’s throughout Crimean-Congo, Mokola fever, Tarzana Dengue, and the Kansas City flu.

He smelled it now, as the IntenSecure man used a blackanodyzed passkey to open the door into 1015.

“We’ll be sure to lock it up when we go” Warbaby said, touching the brim of his hat with his index finger. The IntenSecure man hesitated, then said, “Yessir. Anything else you want?”

“No” Warbaby said, and went into the room, Freddie on his heels. Rydell decided the thing for him to do was follow them in. He did, closing the door in the IntenSecure man’s face. Dark. The curtains drawn. Smell of Kil’Z. The lights came on. Freddie’s hand on the switch. Warbaby staring at a lighter patch of the brick-colored carpet, the place where the bed must’ve been.

Rydell glanced around. Old-fashioned, expensive-looking. Clubby, sort of. The walls covered in some kind of shiny, white-and-green striped stuff like silk. Polished wooden furniture. Chairs upholstered mossy green. A big brass lamp with a dark green shade. A faded old picture in a fat gilt frame. Rydell went over for a closer look. A horse pulling a kind of two-wheeled wagon-thing, just a little seat there, with a bearded man in a hat like Abe Lincoln. “Currier & Ives” it said. Rydell wondered which one was the horse. Then he saw a round, brownish-purple splotch of dried blood on the glass. It had crackled up, the way mud does in a summer creek bed, but tiny. Hadn’t had any of that Kil’Z on it, either, by the look of it. He stepped back.

Freddie, in his big shorts and the shirt with the pictures of pistols, had settled into one of the green chairs and was opening his laptop. Rydell watched him reel out a little black cable and pop it into the jack beside the telephone. He wondered if Freddie’s legs got cold, wearing shorts up here in November. He’d noticed that some black people were so far into fashion, they’d wear clothes like there wasn’t any such thing as weather.

Warbaby just stared at the place where the bed had been, looking sad as ever. “Well?” he said.

“I’m gettin‘ it, I’m gettin’ it” Freddie said, twiddling a little ball on his laptop.

Warbaby grunted. Watching him, it looked to Rydell as though the lenses of his black-framed glasses winked black for a second. Trick of the light. Then Rydell got this funny feeling, because Warbaby just looked right through him, his traveling gaze fixed on some moving something so keenly that Rydell himself was turning to look—at nothing.

He looked back at Warbaby. Warbaby’s cane came up, pointing at the space where the bed would have been, then swung back down to the carpet. Warbaby sighed.

“Want the site-data from SFPD now?” Freddie asked.

Warbaby grunted. His eyes were darting from side to side. Rydell thought of tv documentaries about voodoo, the priests’ eyes rolling when the gods got into them.

Freddie twirled the trackball under his finger. “Prints, hair, skin-flakes… You know what a hotel room is.”

Rydell couldn’t stand it. He stepped in front of Warbaby and looked him in the eye. “What the hell you doing?”

Warbaby saw him. Gave him a slow sad smile and removed his glasses. Took a big, navy blue silk handkerchief from the side pocket of his long coat and polished the glasses. He handed them to Rydell. “Put them on.”

Rydell looked down at the glasses and saw that the lenses were black now.

“Go on” Warbaby said.

Rydell noticed the weight as he slid them on. Pitch black. Then there was a stutter of soft fuzzy ball-lightning, like what you saw when you rubbed your eyes in the dark, and he was looking at Warbaby. Just behind Warbaby, hung on some invisible wall, were words, numbers, bright yellow. They came into focus as he looked at them, somehow losing Warbaby, and he saw that they were forensic stats.

“Or” Freddie said, “you can just be here now—”

And the bed was back, sodden with blood, the man’s soft, heavy corpse splayed out like a frog. That thing beneath his chin, blue-black, bulbous.

Rydell’s stomach heaved, bile rose in his throat, and then a naked woman rolled up from another bed, in a different room, her hair like silver in some impossible moonlight– Rydell yanked the glasses off. Freddie lay back in the chair, shaking with silent laughter, his laptop across his knees. “Man” he managed, “you oughta seen the look you had! Put parta the guy’s porno on there from Arkady’s evidence report…”

“Freddie” Warbaby said, “are you all that anxious to be looking for work?”

“Nossir, Mr. Warbaby.”

“I can be hard, Freddie. You know that.”

“Yessir.” Freddie sounded worried now.

“A man died in this room. Someone bent over him on this bed” he gestured at the bed that wasn’t there, “cut him a new smile, and pulled his tongue out through it. That isn’t a casual homicide. You don’t learn those kinds of tricks with anatomy from watching television, Freddie.” He held out his hand to Rydell. Rydell gave him the glasses. Their lenses were black again.

Freddie swallowed. “Yessir, Mr. Warbaby. Sorry.”

“How’d you do that?” Rydell asked.

Warbaby wiped the glasses again and put them back on. They were clear now. “There are drivers in the frames and lenses. They affect the nerves directly.”

“It’s a virtual light display” Freddie said, eager to change the subject. “Anything can be digitized, you can see it there.”

“Telepresence” Rydell said.

“Naw” Freddie said, “that’s light. That’s photons coming out and hitting on your eye. This doesn’t work like that. Mr. Warbaby walks around and looks at stuff, he can see the data-feed at the same time. You put those glasses on a man doesn’t have eyes, optic nerve’s okay, he can see the input. That’s why they built the first ones. For blind people.”

Rydell went to the drapes, pulled them apart, looked down into some night street in this other city. People walking there, a few.

“Freddie” Warbaby said, “flip me that Washington girl off the decrypted IntenSecure feed. The one works for Allied Messenger Service.”

Freddie nodded, did something with his computer.

“Yes” Warbaby said, gazing at something only he could see, “it’s possible. Entirely possible. Rydell” and he removed the glasses, “you have a look.” Rydell let the drapes fall back, went to Warbaby, took the glasses, put them on. Somehow he felt it would be a mistake to hesitate, even if it meant having to look at the dead guy again.

Black into color into full face and profile of this girl. Fingerprints. Image of her right retina blown up to the size of her head. Stats. WASHINGTON, CHEVETTE-MARIE … Big gray eyes, long straight nose, a little grin for the camera. Dark hair cut short and spikey, except for this crazy ponytail stuck up from the crown of her head.

“Well” Warbaby asked, “what do you think?”

Rydell couldn’t figure what he was being asked. Finally he just said “Cute.”

He heard Freddie snort, like that was a dumb thing to say.

But Warbaby said “Good. That way you remember.”

Sammy Sal lost her, where Bryant stuttered out in that jackstraw tumble of concrete tank-traps. Big as he was, he had no equal when it came to riding tight; he could take turns that just weren’t possible; he could bongo and pull a three-sixty if he had to, and Chevette had seen him do it on a bet. But she had a good idea where she’d find him.

She looked up, just as she whipped between the first of the slabs, and the bridge seemed to look down at her, its eyes all torches and neon. She’d seen pictures of what it had looked like, before, when they drove cars back and forth on it all day, but she’d never quite believed them. The bridge was what it was, and somehow always had been. Refuge, weirdness, where she slept, home to however many and all their dreams.

She skidded past a fish-wagon, losing traction in shaved ice, in gray guts the gulls would fight over in the morning. The fish man yelled something after her, but she didn’t catch it.

She rode on, between stalls and stands and the evening’s commerce, looking for Sammy Sal.

Found him where she thought she would, leaning on his bars beside an espresso wagon, not even breathing hard. A Mongolian girl with cheekbones like honey-coated chisels was running him a cup. Chevette bopped the particle-brakes and slid in beside him.

“Thought I’d have time for a short one” he said, reaching for the tiny cup.

Her legs ached with trying to keep up with him. “You better” she said, with a glance toward the bridge, then she gestured to the girl to run her one. She watched the steaming puck of brown grounds thumped out, the fresh scoop, the quick short tamp. The girl swung the handle up and twisted the basket back into the machine.