Enter and exit Drama

Some three hours after Sam’s ferry across the bay, one of the later ferries was underway, almost equally crowded with commuters and shoppers. Drama looked down on the ship from a vantage point in the near-barren hills. He was seeing it as a telling commentary on his own life. Unaware that his stash buddy had been on the grimy, once-white, boat, some time before. Drama was too far gone onto signs, portents, and huge panoramas of almost graspable insight to think about other people’s timetables, right now.

It was synchronicity, of course - it must be that. Not Synchronicity Inc. Just the wild variety, the magic happenstance that brought things together when your head was attuned.

Just like that time the stallholder gave me that peach, gratis. Maybe unsaleable, who knows. One side bruised and rotting, one ripe and sweet. Some old variety of peach. Big farmers would have nothing to do with them, but these organic ‘ponics guys were hot on preserving, bruiseability and all. Drama had been eyeing the fruit stall hungrily, his means of payment left behind, god knows where. (Stripped off on the beach the night before, with most of his other clothes, in fact.) An act of kindness, costing nothing to anyone, implying no commitment, no obligation. Just an alternative to tossing the peach away, creating a little shared pleasure. Drama had savoured it, licking the warm juice from his lips. He could still almost recall the taste. What a peach! Life is made by little kindnesses, worth nothing to the giver. Life is a half-mouldy peach. He had savoured the meaningfulness. Of course, being high had helped, but it hadn’t stopped the moment being etched on his consciousness. Like a bruise on a peach. He could stroke the memory now, in all its furriness.

The ferry too was become a crystallising symbol. Achingly resonant, for a mind craving resonance. Ghosts and wisps of mist, and emerging from them a grey smear on the water, a boatload of people crossing the new bay.

A bay that was nature’s answer to human power, so some people – Drama included - thought. People moving from their transient archipelago to the city. And the city itself was retreating. Crawling back up the hills, away from the rising tides. Abandoning its waterfronts, the citizens uprooted themselves and their shells, moving like the arms of a slow-scuttling crab. Me too, my hold on the past eroded. Abandoning so much. Surfing a tide of debris, while life tears itself up by the roots.

The symbolism was slippery in rushes of resonance, a sense of connectedness and of disconnection. Not worth pursuing further. He spent an undefined time gazing, half-unfocused, at the ferry, before it came back to him how he was here, in this place, in this state. Coming down, strung out soon. Soon he would remember how he got here, the meeting with Deal that had precipitated this.

How much earlier would have been too much effort to work out, but it had been near dawn. Drama had been working the deal with Deal. Deal had adopted the generic term for agents in his trade as his own identity, even to law enforcement officials. He’d changed his name officially. This made life confusing for those trying to reach him, just as he wanted. Along with wanting them to think that he had more to hide than he really did. Most of what he plied was no longer illegal, except under IP and consumer law, but there was still a cachet in having access to the illicit. And with civil litigation having displaced narcotics law as the main hindrance to his line of business, some smoke and mirrors about who or what you were dealing with could be a great help. A smart lawyer had already used it to good effect, arguing that the john should have been well warned about the quality of the goods likely to be on offer. He cited the failure of a masochist to win claims for scarring at a decidedly tacky House of Whiplash,

Plenty smoke and mirrors. You had to be an intimate, like Drama - whatever that meant in practice - to be sure at any time when you were connecting with Deal. Especially online. There were agents that looked like Deal, some of them quite autonomous, some franchised out, he said. Deal himself might be mediated through all sorts of avatars, many of them based on great historical figures like Owsley, Superspade, Mr Nice… Never Palmer Eldritch though…..

No doubt that this was the man though. White skin, like an albino, but no pink eyes. Face from Mexico or somewhere further south. Lined, weatherbeaten. Straw hat, black suit, blues shoes, and a maddening melange of hip twentieth century argot and accents, gleaned from too many old movies. More smoke and mirrors though – his erratic use of obscure slang meant you often couldn’t hold down what he was saying. But the guy had some sort of charisma, he could get you to nod in agreement even as you tried to figure out just what you were letting yourself in for.

This very early morning, Deal had been unusually reticent about what he held, compelling about what it wasn’t.

- JJ-180 man, the real thing. None of your designer duds, none of your virtual vacua. Just what the Dick dug. Not packaged in a pill, too twentieth that. I can get Can-D, Chew-Z, D itself too, all from space too. But you get what you came for, round here, with this Deal, and this what you after, yeah?

Round here was a stadium on the South Hills. Preserved by popular demand from the explosion of dwellings that was sweeping the slopes as the lowlands sank. A few people slept out here, but too many homeless and the cops moved in and cleared them all out for a few months.

Later in the day, amateurs would jog, skate, board round the tracks. Here and there, a few early risers or late sleepers were exercising. A few revellers and vagrants sprawled on the stands, barely visible in the growing half-light. Drama and Deal crouched, as if sheltering from the sun that was just rising red. They were under a gaudy sun umbrella, sipping from cans. Deal may have been playing a space cowboy shaman with mannerisms to match. But his eyes were wary - when not turning on persuasive charm or fox mysticism.

- And the deal? Viral, pyramid or what?

- Mixture as specified, man. You taste, you come back for your friends.

- Satisfaction guaranteed?

- JJ-180, Drama man, the real thing.

- It lets you step through time?

- You transcend time, man. I know - been here before, done this before. Could produce proof, but not necessary. Seen that too, too many times.

- Yeah but Deal, how the spam can it? How can it work, a pill, a popper, whatever it is? How can a chemical, even a virus, do a time machine job? Don’t you have to have lots of equipment, a starship at warp speed maybe?

- It works man. Believe me it works. You use it, you see how it works, you know how it works.

- Tell me how –

- Can’t tell, man, you got to see for yourself, feel for yourself.

- And for you? What’s in it?

- You’ll come back. I know that too. They can cure any addiction, yeah, but this you’ll want to share. You’ll see.

- And for you?

Drama had a reality rush Deal had seemed to him nothing but a show, an act, no more than a parody of a flip marketing program. But suddenly there were depths, nuances he’d not appreciated, at least not for a long time. Behind the overacting was sincerity, even passion. Drama was not just sparring, role-playing with the man. He was feeding into the essence of the man, a holy man. Who stood before him like a figure out of time, an archetype of a priest unknown. A sanyasson in blue sude shoes.

Deal’s eyes gazed at the ground, then back into Drama’s. epiphany. Liminality. Did I hear that?

- I don’t want to die, not yet. On this time line I die. Maybe if enough of you ‘heads mess with the line, I live.

Drama was taken aback. What have I just heard? What kind of line is this? How many sorts of lines are there? Lines of powder, lines of power, fine lines, drawn lines… What are lines, anyway? A sudden wave of anxiety struck him. Deal’s human, but deep black, eyes were deeply intense, burning into him. Is Deal seriously deranged, not just putting on a show? With an effort Drama spoke, consciously of a rasping quality.

- So you know so much, when and where do I drop?

- Man, you already done it.

That was a flourish, not a line. Like a fistful of lines waved in the air, their patterns imprinting and fading slowly from red to green. Deal was receding, his back – how had he turned round so suddenly? – disappearing up the steps between the rows of seats. Drama had heard his voice one moment, a handshake away. He could still hear it, conjured up loud and clear in his memory. But the figure had almost disappeared at the top of the stairs, now, into the rising sun. Drama squinted, but couldn’t make him out.

Smaller than the can Drama held in his hand: a can that, if you looked at it right, was

- as large as one of those ancient cooling towers

- as luminous as a holo screen

- a line made plastique flesh

- as neat a vector as he could ever have imagined.

If the letters on the side would just stay still – when did animated script start appearing on cans, was this some new trend? – would they say JJ-180? Or was that a U at the beginning? Was that a B and not an 8…?

He stood, brushing against the sun umbrella. Unsteady, impossibly far above the feet he tried to place gingerly one after the other. He seemed to succeed, he was moving unsteadily, upwards. After a while, his attention was caught by the clatter of a can falling on the boards - and walking reverted to an automatic habit,. The stadium was crystal clear in the dawnlight, a real stadium, not a cutout, not a stage set, not a simulation. Its materiality, its truth, asserted itself behind the dust and shimmer.

Edges were sharp and precise, volumes packed with energy. Not just the buildings, the hills, the air itself. And all of them – solids, processes, the air – were occupying and unfolding their own extended spaces, stretched across moments and millennia. Even these timelines were acquiring solidity, something he felt he’d always been dimly aware of without knowing it. More than the persistence of memory, more than the afterglow left by a flaring perception.

It was all contained in his vision, like this can still in the palm of his hand. What can was it that had dropped then?

What is this? JJ-180 in deed… ingested,

Deep in his awareness, his thoughts echoed: in jest… (So, part of him registered, word play is part of this trip,

not the flippant gaming of Ben and his faux- intellectual buddies,

more burrowing after buried meanings,

crawling out of the links between words.

He wouldn’t let himself be enchanted here yet, there was something else to figure out before the rush blew it away…)

JJ-180 in deed

- but not just a quantity of chemical mutating into other chemicals in the body,

not just an engineered virus inscribing something into his cells.

This was a quality, more than a molecular message. It was like a lifted lid (and his skull did feel very light); like suddenly tuning into a frequency that communicated vast riches through a whole new sense…

Yet there was something tugging at the periphery of his vision, something that was crumpling and folding itself more and more intensely. Something to do with time itself. Some of the stuff time is made of? At first he could do no more than guess at its nature as he stumbled up the stairs. Then, as a small crowd of kids started to press past him, and then faded away, as the morning light darkened and returned, he let himself soar into the rush. Steering with the lightest of touches, as the hours lost their anchors.

The stuff of time became easy, slippery, in his hands. He tried to haul himself as if on a rope. Drama sought a compass point. In the pool of deepest regrets, a ripple grew into a wave. A child trying to scoop water, he sought to shape it, to build with it, to remake his life.

Drama walked like a car on auto, hardly aware of the terrain he stumbled through. In parallel, he moved within memories, taking and reshaping them.

Milena.

entangling pains, wounds underhealed. But if he tightened his grip on time – if he remembered richly enough, he could be there. That night before her death, when they had met on the way back from a concert. He sank into the memory.

And later that morning, much less time having passed than he had experienced, Drama found himself sitting on a pile of masonry, looking down on the bay, watching the commuter ferry, steering its way through the hulks and drowned rooftops of the bay’s margins. He might have found a commentary on his experience in almost anything. But this was supernaturally apt. Or so he thought, as he continued to quest among the shards of memory.

Sam at work

Sam moved the bonzai out of the way, improving his perspectives on the viewspace. When the desk had called him, it had already begun setting up his own interfaces. He’d slotted in some holos, so favourite scenes and events already hovered in strategic locations. Music was rolling, loud for him, inaudible a metre away.

Ben’s PuzzleKid of the Day floated into view. An old quiz show title or tabloid headline, apparently. “Take it away, Brain power”. Mental could be psychic…. Moved out, then: dislocated? disengaged? Ah, displaced… Psychic K Displaced… Psycho Kinetically Displaced? Or Psycho Kinetic Displacement? The latter sounded better.

Psycho Kinetic Displacement. He spoke it aloud, and was rewarded with applause, and a new high score. This was some speed; either the puzzles were getting easier, or the ferry had really washed that bleariness away.

He entered the phrase “Previously Known as Death” into a translation string, and reluctantly abandoned the game for the time being.

To work. Sam slipped the card he’d prepared in the small hours, into its slot. It took a few seconds to configure the new data into the system. As it did, the face of Lincoln materialised in the visual field created by the monitor, rendered in beautiful detail and depth. Looking in the prime of his life, in a country garden perhaps, before war and Washington. He was seated in front of a background of flowing velvet waterfalls, , and occasionally flakes of what looked like snowflake-sized clouds. He seemed to like it, so what the hell.

As soon as the configuration was complete, Sam activated the accelerator icon. The foot image depressed the archaic pedal image, the icon surged away from the screen, and Lincoln’s face contorted, restored itself, displayed a succession of tics and grimaces, and relaxed again. Monitors round the edges of the display showed his mental state to have flared into awareness, rapidly settling into what looked like a tranquil geniality. The waterfall continued to plunge its velvet into infinity. The icon zoomed back, to float just above the main image, and Lincoln stared out quizzically at Sam, for all the world like a colleague making a conference call.

Lincoln could see Sam - after a fashion. Enough for facial recognition. Precise vision was not necessary, and there was no point in wasting time or money on setting up more than the basic (and effectively free) recognition software and equipment. The sensorimotor fields of Lincoln’s model were deliberately underdeveloped, too. This meant that he ran little risk of suffering boredom from a low level of external stimulus. The waterfall was enough to keep him nicely alert, that was the theory. Lincoln’s capacities could easily be augmented once the basics of personality and intellect were right. And it was important to avoid the depressive tendencies of the original. A little emotional dampening was certainly in order, Sam and Ben had agreed on that at the outset. But the more positive swings were worth keeping.

This Lincoln knew who and where he was, what he was, who Sam was. He remembered their last interactions, to the extent this was compatible with last night’s reprogramming. He had more or less several months of this new life to look back on. Which he did with some awe, and a surprising lack of gratitude or resentment. As if this was just how it always was.

Sam felt, too, that Lincoln treated him with just a hint of condescension. He’d never mentioned anything about pigmentation (or hairstyle for that matter), and had been studiously silent when he’d been informed about America’s more recent ethnic history. Maybe he’s condescending with everyone – just a result of his position. But Sam suspected that the Lincoln was being courteous and had not really wrestled with his obsolete – never grounded – assumptions. And then he knew he was being observed by at least one of those people.

He also knew that he was to be tested again today. He didn’t know why, and didn’t seem to have given much thought to the issue. Actually, Sam told himself, as he had thought several times before, this is a symptom of the basic problem. A lack of natural curiosity, of his original’s eclectic interests. This should have been emergent from the basic cognitive engineering. Something is holding it back – or the soul we need here is going to take a different approach altogether.

The Lincoln would rise to the challenge of the tests, to the best of his considerable ability. His cognitive, motivational and ethical fields were highly elaborate. Being stretched in tests seemed to be just what he needed to thrive.

Thirty minutes later, it was clear that even this was not enough. He was eager, yes, he responded rapidly and articulately to Sam’s questions and prompts. He’d assimilated the new programming perfectly. He had made the marginal adjustments to his memory that this required. On subjects that the historic Lincoln had experienced, he was almost perfect. He could do more than demonstrate factual knowledge, than relate to past events the way that Lincoln-1 had. He could do more than even come up with famous aphorisms and insights, and novel ones that seemed to Sam just as good. He could interrelate these areas of knowledge in new ways, to consider eventualities that he’d never encountered in real history. He seemed lucid, sanguine and wise, just as required.

But dull. Basically, dull, like an old uncle you’d almost forgotten you had. Where it came to assimilating material about the late nineteenth, the twentieth and especially the twenty first century, he drew a blank. He didn’t seem able to confront the changed social circumstances, the transformed politics and ethics, the technology that gave him his own current existence. Facts he could amass, they’d filter through cognitive fields. Sam had taken him through the documentary downloads, the standard bank of questions, the scenarios. But to no avail. The Lincoln stayed genial, furrowed his brow and tried to help. But his own efforts to grasp the new circumstances were half-hearted, his investigations stereotyped and repetitive. He can’t learn, not in the true sense of the word.

What was worse, he didn’t even seem aware of the extent of his non-comprehension. He didn’t want to know, to learn about modernity. He retreated into routines of thought. Repeating himself for all the world like the senile oldsters of yesteryear. Sam had seen enough of them in a documentary about the conquest of ageing to last even an extended lifetime.

“Sorry, old friend” said Sam, with self-consciously sentimentality, and closed him down. The Lincoln waved farewell and walked off into the distance – the point of view shifted to display a sparsely populated rural arcadia, a nice touch from Sally down at graphics. Waterfall and copses. Again, there was that irritating optical anomaly, just before he disappeared from view – as if he’d been enveloped by brightness. And again, Sam made a mental note to himself to look into this further. Little things like this were often early symptoms of deep programming bugs. Or equally often, of minor glitches in the rendering software. Even commercial holos were full of them – clock blemishes to movie buffs, holo holes to ordinary viewers.

Sam reviewed the session logs as they scrolled past. He agreed that they captured both the continuing successes and failures. They didn’t capture his increasing despair. Sam mailed Ben to request a consultation. He poured a coffee, and fiddled with the background music and his chair. Time to review some alternative approaches.