Walking the Virtch

Illustration by Dell Harris

Everything I know about flying I learned from Superman. Take three steps, extend your arms, push off with your toes. It’s so natural, so easy, I’m surprised nobody thought of it before some early twentieth century comic hacks.

I netted somewhere that when Superman first launched the Real, little kids would tie towels around their necks and jump off the roofs of buildings. This was out in the Real, connect? Of course, the todds went flat mode. See, they thought it was the cape that let him fly? I could have told them. It’s not the cape, it’s the body language. The wiring is there in the human brain. You’ve just got to call the subroutine and do it.

Everybody flies in the Virtch. I guess they didn’t connect that early on, when the Virtch was just a flash in someone’s pan, and a few kludges in a laboratory somewhere. They figured everyone would be walking around the Virtch like regular old Real-morts. They should have vizzed at dreams. People have always flown in their dreams, like they’d been doing it all their lives, like they were born to fly. Maybe it’s a womb thing, but they say all healthy humans fly.

But healthy is the operative word. When the Virtch started to come online big, the Brains found out that everybody wanted to fly, but not everyone could. Hey, the Virtch program was there, but some people were inhibited. Almost everyone flies when they’re a todd, but back then they figured most people “grew out of it.” But what was really happening was everyone’s head was getting screwed up. Maybe in the Real it didn’t show, but their pans weren’t quite straight, and in the Virtch, it was plain for everyone to gog. So people got straight quick. The pshrinks worked mass bandwidth for a few years, because everyone wanted to do the Virtch, and everyone wanted to fly. And the world lived happily ever after.

But gog my theory. There’s flying, and then there’s flying. Most people fly the Virtch with a prop. Not a propeller; a gimmick, a crutch. Like, some people use skis, or a surfboard, or skates, or a sled. They never gogged Superman like I did. They think their pan is straight, but they don’t know the true channel. They’re almost as bad as those ancient todds with the towels around their neck. Like I said, there’s flying, and then there’s flying.

Yeah, I’m kind of an arrogant ass about it, but I don’t fly the Virtch standing on a board. I don’t have to pretend my feet are on the ground when they aren’t. Three steps, arms out, push with toes. That’s how long I was grounded. Three seconds, max. Crash, I’d have virtched into the sky, but the programs don’t work that way. You start grounded out, then make for the sky. I think the software was designed by board addicts. Afraid to start with their feet off the ground. Crash ’em, I thought. Still do. Even when I walk the Virtch, I start from the sky. But that’s getting ahead of the gog.

The First Time. Yeah, there had to be a first time. I’d had a hard day in the Real. I broker seafood extracts, mostly with the Japanblock Corp-Lords and the rest of the Pacific rim. You probably never gogged the business before, but we turn three trillion Commons a year in the Pacific trade alone. The stuff shows up in just about everything you eat, perfumes, sublimscents for adverts, and even the nose-phone of your Virtch-glove. It’s a tough biz, even for the Real, fast and cutthroat. I’m good at what I do. It’s like flying, except flying boosts, and the Real-biz tears you down.

So, I came home after turning 260 percent profit on eight-point-five-million Common, in only six hours. Good deal, but I was crashed. I nuked a shrimp-noodle bowl, pulled a cold-caff from the fridge, downloaded without tasting it, skinned on the glove, and Virtched it.

I needed to fly, bad. I did the thing, pushed off with my toes, and I was airborne. I went skydiving in the Real, once. Scared the crash out of me but it was great. Nothing like the Virtch though. Yeah, the clouds are there, and the feeling of height and infinite space. But skydiving is cold, and the wind tears at you, and your stomach is trying to come out your mouth.

But the Virtch is always comfortable. The air is like a warm bath, and the wind strokes your body like a lover’s fingers. You can shoot through the sky like a bullet, or float like a balloon. You can go as high as you want, and you can always breathe even if you head out into space. You fling though a sea of pastel-colored clouds a hundred miles deep, each with its own smell: orange, or honey, or fresh-mowed grass.

If that’s not enough, you look for the towering, black anvil of a thunderhead, and ride the updrafts, plummet with the hailstones, or dance with the lightning. Even in the middle of the thunderhead, there is just the hint of a chill, and the wind will clutch and toss, but never batter.

It started one day when Jace, Laddo, Buc and me were storm chasing. The three of them are all free-flyers like me, so we used to zoom together a lot. We spent hours chasing each other through the big anvils, riding the jet streams in tight formation. But that day, even as I chased the bolts between clouds and gogged a curtain of dancing Saint Elmo’s fire ten thousand feet tall, it wasn’t enough.

I peeled off the group and headed out without a word. They waved good-bye, but I didn’t wave back. I whipped myself into a fast barrel roll and blazed out of the thundercloud like a powerdrill. Above, the purple edge of space gogged down like the eye of Allah, and below, the ground spread out like a fuzzy green carpet, so far down that the details were lost in the haze. I jackknifed my body like a diver and headed straight down. I must have been 20K meters off the deck, and it wasn’t coming up fast enough to suit me. I posed myself faster, gogging in my mind that I was an arrow; a rocket, blazing toward the ground on a tail of flame. The ground was growing visibly closer now. I could gog more and more details: the blue varicose vein of a river, dark green scabs of forest, square patches of cultivated fields, jagged scars of roads, and occasional buildings like pockmarks.

I picked from my pan something I once gogged about people falling in dreams; that if they hit the bottom, they’ll die of fright, and I wondered if that’s how it happens in the Virtch. I’d never heard of it happening, but who’d be off their pan enough to try? So that’s when I think I’m crazy enough to try. I posed like a knife, trying for a little more speed.

I saw the ground coming up at me and wondered what would happen. Would I crater? Would I flat mode? This was the Virtch. What happens when the unstoppable force wangs the immovable object?

I saw the ground coming up at me and admired the programming on the trees and rivers and buildings. As I spun I caught glimpses of oaks and alder, rapids bubbling over rocks, stucco and marble. A few people like to hug the deck when they fly. They like the sensation of speed it gives them. Somebody went to a lot of trouble for people who gog everything in a blur.

What happens when the unstoppable force wangs the immovable object? I’ll tell you. The rules change. One second I’m maching down out of the sky like a meteor, then the next, it’s like I hit a wall of syrup. I pose like a razor, but it’s no good, I touch the ground like a snowflake.

So, I sat curled up on the ground, face buried in my knees, my pan totally crashed. What the crash was I doing? What the crash was wrong with me? Was I trying to die?

But after a while, I glommed that dying isn’t my channel. What is was that my spiritual buffer was empty. The Real was—well, the Real wasn’t real. I’d lived in the Virtch since I was sixteen, when my mom gratefully bought me my first glove, a bottom-of-the-line Sony model with no spensors and only a one-K nose phone. But I was glad to have it, and she was glad to have me out of the way. No more dragging her back from the Virtch (we lived in a one bedroom shack, but she had a high-end Apple glove with all the options) for any of that silly kid crash. Jodd had a new babysitter now, and mom cut her time in the Real back to a min. She did her nine to three at the bank, gloved in, and was gone.

I never really knew my mom before, and I hardly saw her after. I tried to find her in the Virtch one time. Yeah, that’s not supposed to be possible unless the person wants you to find them, but I was a smart kid, and I did a little Virtch-jacking in my time. So I jacked my mom’s coords from the master-map and tracked her down.

She was in a cloud villa of a private-sky, but if you’ve already jacked the master-map, getting into a private-sky is nothing. So I found her in the villa doing this group thing with a flock of studs and bims. She looked different in the Virtch. If I hadn’t had my jack, I wouldn’t have recognized her. I still looked like my Real mode back then. I knew you could look like anybody you wanted to in the Virtch, but I figured it was just one of those things other people do.

So she looks up from what she’s doing. She’s this beautiful bim, looks not much older than me, and she’s naked and her skin is shining from some kind of oil. And she looks at me, and of course she recognizes me. Her eyes get wide and angry, and she points at me and yells, “Get out!” Then she looks down at herself and flickers into pink smoke as she Virtches out.

And some of the studs and bims who weren’t too distracted noticed, and were looking at me. Then somebody far away called my name, the Virtch went black, something invisible hit me, and I felt myself falling. And the hood of my glove gets pulled off, and there’s my mother, still wearing the wrinkled gray skin of her glove, just jacked out from the rest of the machine. Her face was red, her eyes all narrow, showing the lines there, and she’s yelling at me, pushing me. She picks up my glove console and throws it at me. I duck, and the box bull’s-eyes a stain on the wall behind me, breaking open like a melon, exposed guts falling to the floor.

I can see her in my pan now. I can see her like she’s standing right in front of me. But I can’t hear what she’s saying. I feel like, if I concentrate hard enough, I might be able to read the words on her thin, dry lips, but I can’t hear her. But I can smell the apartment, the dust, the mildew in the window frames, the sour smell of ripe garbage. I can see the anger and indifference on her face. I can see the lines of coming age there. I can see the smoky blue light from the one window, and the black scab that was the building across the alley. I knew then and I know now that, for my mom, I was the Real, and for her, the Real was unbearable.

I moved out of her place the next day, and in with my friends Laddo, Buc, and Pax from school. We were all Virtch-jackers back then. They helped me patch up my glove console. In a week, the longest week of my life, I was back in the Virtch, with a new job, a whole new life in the Real, for what it mattered. Actually, it mattered a whole lot. You have to eat in the Real, pay the rent, and upgrade your glove. The rig my mom had was nice. Mine was going to be better, I promised myself.

We lived fast, hard, and dangerous, jacking the Virtch for pay. They say the couple that Virtch together stay together, but a lot of couple-contracts Virtch on their own, and their ess-oh’s will pay to tab on what they do there. So we gogged them on the sly, like old-time private-eyes used to do in the Real, and recorded their affairs for their lady or man to playback later. It didn’t pay that much, and the risk was high, but we were kids and didn’t know any better. After eighteen months, Pax saved enough to get his own place. Two months after that he was busted for Virtch jacking. He got ten years at hard labor. All he gogs now are rocks, I guess.

Laddo, Buc, and I legaled up real fast after that. We broke up in the Real. I don’t even know what they’re doing any more. But I still see them in the Virtch, and sometimes we fly together. I grew up a lot in the next few years. I did the school thing and the job thing. But I lived in the Virtch.

So there I was, sitting on the ground, doing the “what does it all mean,” thing. I was curled up with my arms over my face, my eyes closed, and for a while I wasn’t in the Real, and I wasn’t in the Virtch. I was just in me. It was a strange place.

You know how you change channels in the Virtch? You make for a sky door and fly through, and you’re in an intersection, a little chunk of sky with doors all around, and then you go through another door, and there you are in another channel; another sky. People don’t linger at intersections. They don’t think about them. They take them for granted. But they’re the passages between all things in the Virtch. Without them, you’d be stuck in one sky, with no place to go.

So, there I was, face buried in my arms, knees to my chest, eyes closed, in my own dark little intersection, surrounded by doors, not just to the Real and the Virtch, but other worlds I’d never glommed before. Trouble was, it was too dark to see what was beyond the doors. That’s when I smelled one.

It wasn’t like the sweet smells of a pastel cloud, or the ozone of a thunderhead, or the musky perfume of a cloud villa. It had as much in common with those things as the Virtch did with watching a vid in flat mode. It was sweet and salty and sour and musty and a thousand other things at once. I’d glommed some power programs in the Virtch, but they were mostly for eyes and ears—cheap thrills. I groped for the door in the darkness and flew through. I opened my eyes.

I was sitting in a bed of dead leaves in a forest clearing. The trees that had gogged like bumps on a rug from the air towered all around me, rocking gently in the breeze. The Sun shown through the limbs, stenciling shifting patterns of light and dark on the ground. The sky was blue, and the pastel clouds and the sky villas were nowhere to be seen. Through some local piece of programming, a few wispy clouds moved slowly, colored only shades of white and gray. It was a beautiful piece of Virtch work, some of the best I’d ever seen. And it was here on the ground, where nobody would ever see it.

I stood up and brushed leaves off my butt. I looked at the sky. One, two, three, extend, and push. I’d have been back in my sky again. That was when it started. A path led off down a gentle hillside. Somewhere down among the trees, I could hear running water. It sounded inviting. I walked the Virtch.

The path wound slowly down the hill, around fallen trees and outcroppings of rocks. I’d lived all my life in the city, and I’d never seen anything this wild. Every few yards uncovered a new wonder: squirrels chattering and jumping from limb to limb, mushrooms pushing up through the forest floor like a metropolis of tiny buildings, red and blue birds soaring and wheeling between the trees, the strange calls of animals I didn’t glom echoing between the hillsides.

At last I found myself looking down on a waterfall that tumbled over dark rocks three meters down into a deep, oval, pool. The water was so clear that you could count the rocks on the bottom. It looked inviting. On an impulse, I reached down and tested the water with my fingers. I had expected it to be as warm as bath water. It was cold. Not unbearably so, but the sensation was uncharacteristically harsh for the Virtch, enough so that I hesitated. The water still looked good.

I usually wear a jumpsuit in the Virtch, so I reached for the clasps. I could have derezzed the suit in a second by pulling up a console, but like I said, I’m a kind of Virtch snob. I keep the experience as pure as I can. So, I tossed my jumpsuit and slippers onto a rock next to the waterfall, but they derezzed as soon as they hit the ground, an interesting bit of programming. I could get them back by calling up a console, but it was strange. I guessed that the designer of this place valued the purity of their experience too, but they gogged purity differently than I did.

There was a rock sticking out next to the falls that seemed made for diving. I stepped out on it, feeling the Sun-heated stone under my bare feet, watching the water boiling at the bottom of the falls, it was a convincing illusion. Three steps forward, arms extended, push off with the toes. But differently, willing your body out and down rather than up, cutting a smooth arc through the air. I hit water so hard it took the breath out of me, so cold it wouldn’t let me take any more in. You can’t drown in virtual water, of course. I could have sat on the bottom all day if I’d wanted to (though it would have been pretty crashing cold!). But the illusion was so good that I held my breath until I broke the surface, gasping with lungs that didn’t want to work.

When they finally did start to work again, I was laughing, loudly, uncontrolled, and without glomming why. I rolled over on my back and paddled toward the shore, enjoying the blue sky and the clouds, and the occasional interruption of a bird flying by. After a while, there was a whoosh, a Dopplered yell, and a couple of sky skiers mached over, trimming the tree tops and seeing nothing but blurs. It was then I realized, this is what happens when you hit the bottom. You find what’s hidden there.

After a while I climbed out of the pool and sun dried on a flat rock by the water. Then I pulled up a console to bring back my clothes. It was then I noticed the clock on the fan-shaped control panel floating in the air in front of me—2:38 a.m.! I had a sales meeting in the Real the next day. Noting the coords of the waterfall, I Virtched out and started peeling off my glove.

As I was getting ready for bed, I noticed the message indicator on the bedside console. I played back a flat mode vid from Laddo. I hadn’t heard from Laddo in the Real in years. He’d been worried about the way I’d bugged out of the thunderhead and not come back. He said he’d even considered seeing if he could still hack the master map and track me down, but decided not to. “We’re not kids any more, Jodd,” he said. “Couldn’t take the risk.” He laughed at me from the screen. “Could end up breaking rocks with old Pax.”

It was then I glommed what was wrong with growing up. You forget how to take risks. I thought about the ground rushing up at me, not knowing what would happen when I hit, and smiled. Sure it was a stupid thing to have done, but I’d felt more alive than I had in a long time.

Laddo ended his message with a request to call him when I got back to the Real. My finger hovered over the call icon on the console for a few seconds, then I tumbled into bed without pressing it. What was I going to tell him? That I was walking the Virtch? If he was worried about me now, that would really crash his pan. I needed my rest. I pulled up the covers, fell asleep quickly, and dreamed about flying.

It got to be a habit, walking the Virtch. Each night I came back and explored a little more of the private channel I’d discovered, bootlegged under somebody else’s sky. I didn’t see much of my friends in the clouds any more. I thought about telling them what I’d found, inviting them down. But like I said, there’s a taboo about walking the Virtch, and they were purists, just like me. I figured they wouldn’t understand. Crash, I admit it. I was shamed.

But when you find a great thing, you want somebody to share it with. That’s why I was so jazzed to find Emily. I just wished she was as glad to be found. It happened one day when I was hiking down out of the high hills, back toward the waterfall and swimming pool. I was walking down the by then familiar path, when I heard singing. Not birds this time, but a woman’s voice. It was a sweet voice, singing some old song, the kind with a melody. I came out of the trees, and there she was sitting on the diving rock. She was tall, and blonde, wearing a tan colored jumper that belted at the waist. She was beautiful—you expect that in the Virtch—but the voice had to be hers. Lots of people use voice mod programs, but they all sound terrible singing anything but buzz-rock. This was her real voice for sure. I stood quietly, listening, being very quiet so as not to interrupt. She just sat there, swinging her legs and gogging off at the horizon for a while. Then she pulled up a console in the air in front of her. Not a little home-ent console like mine, but a big programmer’s console with a sketch pad and utility keyball. She diddled the keyball for a minute, and a new hill rezzed in on the horizon.

“You programmed all this!” I said it before I had a chance to think about it.

She gasped, and her head spun around, fanning out her long, straight hair. Her eyes flashed from fear, to surprise, to anger. “What do you mean, sneaking up on me like that!”

I smiled at her. I was so amazed at her reaction that I didn’t even think to be embarrassed that I was walking. “I was just gogging your work, here. It’s beautiful.”

So I stepped toward her, but in a second she’s on her feet, and though she’s dressed, she half turns away like she’s trying to cover herself. “This is my place, you pervert!” And then she Virtches out, and I’m standing there by myself.

A few seconds later the landscape I’d grown to love is gone, too. It rezzes out, and in its place is a parody. The rocks are brown polygons stacked up like a kid’s blocks, the pool a featureless blue oval, the trees indistinct green blobs on brown columns, the waterfall like a conveyer belt covered with glitter, running endlessly down into the bland surface of the pool. Yet, it would all look the same from a cloud villa. It was then that I glommed just how much of this place had been her. It was then that I knew just how much I’d lost.

I didn’t do the Virtch at all for three days, the longest break since my mom threw me out. Instead, I vegged in front of my main screen and watched flat mode vids, drank too much, and generally got crashed. Finally, I decided to give the Virtch another try.

After I Virtched in, it didn’t take me long to find Laddo and Jace. Buc rezzed in to say “hi,” but he was spending a month on Mars for the Japanblock Corp he worked for, and the time delay was too long to fly the Virtch with us. So the three of us chased some storms, did some sky-games, and cruised some cloud villas we knew. It felt like I hadn’t gogged them for a long time, and I came pretty close to enjoying myself. But as the evening wound down, and it was just me and Laddo floating in the lounge of a cloud villa nursing a couple of beers, he started quizzing me as to where I’d been.

Turns out he’d finally gotten curious enough to hack the master map the night before, and found out I hadn’t been in the Virtch for at least forty-eight hours. “Are you sick, Jodd?

Never known you to miss a day in the Virtch. You find a woman?”

I didn’t want to talk about it, but I figured it might be the only way to shut him up. “Yeah, I found a woman, and lost her, all at the same time. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Is this in the Real or the Virtch, Jodd? Probably in the Virtch, I’m guessing.” He took a swig of his beer and laughed. “Got to be careful about the Virtch, Jodd. It’s good for most things including a quick, no hassles roll. But never love in the Virtch, Jodd. You never glom what you’re dealing with.”

I knocked my bottle off the table and it spun across the room before derezzing. I knew it was actually making a puddle on my living room floor somewhere, but there’s no litter in the Virtch. So, I said, “I know exactly what I’m dealing with, Laddo, and I don’t want to talk about it!” And I Virtched out before he could say anything else.

The comm rang a minute or so later, and I erased the message without listening to it. I was cleaning up the spilled beer when it rang again. I dumped the mess in the kitchenette, and started to erase the second message, then decided, what the crash, I should hear Laddo out. The message wasn’t from Laddo.

The message was voice-only, but I would have glommed that voice anywhere. She said, “Jodd, this is Emily, from the Virtch. I hacked the master map to find your name and number, pretty easy in my line of business. I’m sorry about what I said, but the Park has been my secret for years, and you’re the first person to ever find it. I was just—crash—like you caught me with my pants down. Look, you can walk there any time you want. I’m glad you like it. Maybe I’ll see you there sometime. Maybe—” She hesitated, and I silently wished her on. “I’ll be there tomorrow night at six thirty, if you want to be there.”

Of course I wanted to be there!

Time in the Real never went quickly for me, but that next day at work was the longest one I can ever remember. I could hardly get my glove on, my hands were shaking so bad. I was fifteen minutes early. So was she.

Things were good. She showed me the programs for deer and rabbits that she was working on. I found out we’d gone to the same school as kids, and that she’d once dated Pax (but she hadn’t known he was in prison). She told me how she’d gotten her job as a Virtch programmer, how she’d been assigned to the worst job in the shop: designing land forms, and how she’d come to love the job. Nobody ever came down to the ground. It was her private place, and she took her work home and programmed after hours. She’d been perfecting the Park, as she’d named it, on her own time, every evening, for years. I told her how beautiful I thought it was. We made love in the waterfall.

Laddo had told me never to fall in love in the Virtch, but I fell hard. I spent every evening in the Park with Emily, talking, making love, even helping her work on the Park. I couldn’t program worth crash, but I’d critique what she’d done, and help her refine and debug things. It went on for a month, until a serpent came to the garden. His name was Laddo.

Emily and I were sunning on the diving rock when Laddo dropped out of the cloudless sky. Emily pulled up a console as soon as she spotted him, and had rezzed up clothes for us by the time he hovered in front of us. His feet never touched the ground.

He was smirking as he looked at us, me standing on the diving rock, Emily half-hiding behind me. “I knew you had problems, Jodd, but I never figured you for a walker. Did the bim talk you into it?”

“Her nym is Emily, Laddo, and she didn’t talk me into anything.” I suddenly glommed that I was looking up at him. I thought about flying up, to meet him eye-to-eye, but I didn’t. I almost wished Emily would rez out so I could face him alone, but she didn’t. It was the two of us, caught where we didn’t want to be caught. Laddo laughed. “I hacked the master map again, Jodd, hopefully for the last time. I’ve put my neck on the line for you enough. Now ditch the bim, fly on up here, and we’ll forget this ever happened. I won’t even tell Jace or Buc.”

“I’m not ditching anyone, Laddo. It’s none of your business, I like it here. Walking’s not so bad once you get used to it.”

Laddo shook his head slowly. “Oh, mon, you’re ditching me and Buc and Jace. You’re ditching the sky, Jodd. Last chance. I know a good shrink you could see.”

I didn’t hesitate. “No.”

He laughed. “She’s just a Virtch-bim, Jodd. Have you ever seen her in the Real? Do you even know her number? Everything’s different in the Real.” He looked, waiting for me to react. I just stood there. “Crash.” He spit in the pool and zoomed for the sky like a missile.

I turned to Emily, not knowing what to say. She looked at me sadly, her Virtch program so well written that I glommed her every shade of emotion. She smiled softly, but her eyes were still sad. “He’s right,” she said, “you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. This is a wonderful dream, but it’s just a dream.” She kissed me on the cheek, and then rezzed out.

Laddo was right about another thing. I didn’t have her number.

But when I skinned out of my glove, there was a message waiting. That’s how I ended up here, in the Real, in old Central Park. Nobody much comes here any more, what with the Virtch and all. It is a beautiful day. The clouds are even better than Emily’s, but I know she’s working on it. I spread a blanket in the grass and wait. I’m afraid. I’m half an hour early.

Fifteen minutes before the agreed time, I see a woman walking towards me. She is shorter than my dream, smaller about the chest, larger about the hips. Her hair is blonde, but it barely reaches her shoulders, and there are bangs in front. Her eyes are green rather than blue, and her nose turns up, just a little too far. She has freckles, and her lips crinkle when she smiles.

And she is smiling, and I am smiling at her. She is perfect. I can’t wait. I have to go meet her. I stand up on the blanket, take three steps forward, extend my arms, push off with my toes, and I fly.