The Starry Rift Part 38

I've got to do something, I think.

We all know how lucky we are. There aren't any wars anymore. There's no permanent death. n.o.body has to get old if they don't want to. There's no poverty, except for a few people who deliberately go off to live without material possessions and eat weeds, and they don't count. There are diseases, but even if one of them kills you, they'll bring you back.

Our elders have solved all the big problems. The only things left for us to care about are fashion, celebrity, and consumerism.

And the pursuit of knowledge, if that's the sort of thing that appeals to you. The problem being that you'll have to do a few hundred years of catching up before the elders will pay you any attention.

We can change bodies if we like. You lie down in a pool of shallow warm water that's thick with tiny little microscopic nan.o.bots, and the bots swim into your body and swarm right to your brain, where they record everything-every thought, every memory, every reflex, everything that makes up your self and soul. And then all this information is transferred into another body that's been built to your own specifications by another few billion nan.o.bots, and once a lot of safety checks are made, you bound out of bed happy in your new body, and your old body is disa.s.sembled and the ingredients recycled.

Unless you want something unusual, the basic procedure costs less than a bicycle. Bicycles have moving mechanical parts that have to be a.s.sembled by hand or by a machine. The nan.o.bots do everything automatically and are powered by, basically, sugar.

Our custom brains are smart. We don't have to deal with stupid people or the messes they cause. We do have to cope with a bunch of hypercritical geniuses nitpicking us to death, but at least that's better than having a bunch of morons with guns shooting at us, which is what people in history seemed to have to deal with all the time.

Within certain limits our bodies look like whatever we want. Everyone is beautiful, everyone is healthy, everyone is intelligent. That's the norm.

But where, you might wonder, does that leave you? Who are you, exactly?

What I mean is, how do you find out that you're you and not one of a bunch of equally talented, equally attractive, equally artificial them s?

How do you find out that you're a person, and not some kind of incredibly sophisticated biological robot?

You find out by exploring different options, and by encountering challenges and overcoming them. Or not overcoming them, as the case may be.

You learn who you are by making friends, because one way of finding out who you are is by figuring out who your friends think you are.

Your friends can be the kind you meet in the flesh. If you live in the Bay Area, like me, there are eight or nine thousand people under the age of twenty, so odds are you'll find some that are compatible.

You can make the kind of friends you only meet electronically, through shared interests or just by hanging around in electric forums.

Or you can work out who you are by watching someone else grow up and struggle with the same problems.

If you're my age or a little younger, odds are that someone else would be me.

I check out the messages that have been flooding in since the last flashcast. The artificial intelligence in my comm unit has already sorted them into broad categories: * I'd take the money.

* I wouldn't take the money.

* I wouldn't take the money, and if you did, you're evil.

* I hate Kimmie.

* I hate you.

* Gorillas are lame.

* I'm a reporter and I'd like an interview.

* I built the hut, so now what?

* I'd really like a date, and here's my video and contact information.

Some of those last videos are very stimulating. Stimulating or not, they all get a polite but negative response. Meeting girls is not a problem for me.

And in any case, I can't get Kimmie out of my head. The messages from reporters I file till later. All they want to talk about is Kimmie anyway.

I pick a representative sample of the rest of the messages and make a flashcast of them. I give some a personal reply. The whole point of flashcasts is that they create a community between the subject and the viewer, and so even the ones who don't like me get their say, and sometimes I'll respond with something like, "Well if that's the reason you hate me, you'll probably like Joss Mackenzie, go check out his flashes, I think he's still a snake," or "Sounds like you and the girl in the previous message should be friends."

When they hate me, I don't hate them back. Not publicly, anyway. That's not who I am.

(Publicly.) After the flashcast, I take one of my cla.s.ses. I'm sixteen and should finish college in a year and a half. I don't personally attend cla.s.s very often, because then the cla.s.s fills up with people who want to watch me instead of the teacher, so instead I use a headset to project myself into a virtual cla.s.s.

The cla.s.s is Media and Society, and the professor is Dr. Granger, who I don't like. He's got a young, seamless face and wavy gray hair like sculpted concrete, and he paces up and down and gestures like a ham actor as he orates for his audience.

That's not why I don't like him, though that's probably bad enough. When he found out I was taking his cla.s.s, he opened up the flashcast to anyone, not just those who had signed up for his cla.s.s. He knows this is his chance to be famous, and he's not about to miss it. If he realizes how pathetic it is that he, a man in his nineties, is leaching off the fame of his sixteen-year-old student, he has shown no sign of it.

"The chief characteristic of modern media," Granger says, "is the existence of near-instantaneous feedback." He's dressed very stylishly today, with a charcoal-gray turtleneck and a blazer and a white silk scarf that he's somehow forgotten to take off when he entered the lecture hall, and that ripples when he walks. Awareness of a worldwide audience has upgraded his wardrobe.

"The reaction of the audience can be viewed by the performers immediately after the performance-sometimes during it. So while performers have always taken their audience into account-always judged their performance and its effects with regard to the public- there is now a special urgency involved. A worldwide consensus on a given performance can be reached before the performance is even over."

I know what the consensus on Dr. Granger's performance is. The Demographic despises him. I wonder if he knows it.

"For those the audience chooses to condemn," he says, "the penalty is oblivion. For those to whom the audience grants its favor, instant fame is possible. But continuing fame depends on continuing positive feedback. Performers have to take their audience into account every minute, and the good ones, like all good performers, antic.i.p.ate what their audience wants and find a way to give it to them. But now more than ever a performer has to be careful not to alienate their core demographic."

There's the d.a.m.n Demographic again, I think.

He turns to me. "Sanson," he says, "do you keep your audience in mind when you're making a flashcast?"

He's always using me in cla.s.s as an example, another reason I don't like him.

At the moment, however, I purely hate him, because he's asked one of those questions for which there's no good answer. If I say I worry about what the audience thinks, then I'm not my own person. But if I say that I don't care what the audience thinks, the Demographic will get mad at me for saying that they don't matter.

"I'm not a performer," I say. "I'm not any kind of actor at all. I just do stuff."

"But still you present programs with yourself as the focus," Granger says. "You perform in that sense. So I wonder if you concern yourself with what your audience is going to say after each flashcast."

I feel a little flutter of unease.

"I respect their opinions," I say. "But that still comes afterward. We can all have a big discussion later on, but when something's going on, the only people I'm interacting with is my pack."

Dr. Granger gives me a big smile. "Aren't you worried about losing your audience?"

Eight percent, I think.

Let me tell you what it's like. When I was eight my parents took me on a vacation to the Middle East, and we went to the Dead Sea and I took a swim. The water is so dense with salt that it holds you up, and you just lie there with the hot sun shining down on you in the warm water, as if it were the most comfortable mattress in the world, and you know that no matter what happens, you'll never drown.

That what it's like to have the Demographic on your side. There's this outpouring of interest and friendship and love, and they respond to everything you do. There's a whole community there to help you. Anytime you want a friend, a friend is there. If you want information, someone will give it to you. If anyone offers you disrespect, you don't have to respond-the Demographic leads the charge on your behalf, and you can stay above the fight.

You just float there, in that warm salt water, with the sun shining down, and you'll never drown as long as the Demographic is behind you.

Am I worried about losing that?

I'd be crazy not to.

"It's like any other kind of friendship," I tell Dr. Granger. "There's feedback there, too. But if friends respect each other, they won't tell each other what to do."

Doctor Granger gives a nod.

"You'd better hope they're your friends, then, hadn't you?"

I think of Kimmie and feel a knife of terror slice into me.

She stopped loving me. What happens if everyone else stops loving me, too?

I do some other work and then catch Kimmie's next flash, in which she goes shopping with a couple of her friends. She's wearing big hoop earrings and a wraparound spider-silk skirt, sandals, and a loose-fitting cotton tank with flowery embroidery.

Next, I think, she'll be wearing a headscarf.

She's still wearing the color threads in her hair, the ones that match the color shifts going on in her eyes. It's a subtle style, and not the sort of thing people would notice at once. I'd only spotted it because I viewed her flash more than once.

Once I viddied it, though, I recognized it as a statement as clear as a tattoo. Her flashes weren't just a kind of personal electronic diary she was sharing with whoever chose to view them; she had greater ambitions.

Picking such a subtle style meant that she hoped people would notice, only not right away. She was hoping that the whole hair-eyes thing would start small and s...o...b..ll and become a craze, and that before a few weeks were out, hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of kids would have their hair and eyes in synch.

And after that, after she'd set a major trend, Kimmie was hoping those millions of kids would turn to her for the latest in style, that they would watch her breathlessly for clues as to what to wear, or what music to listen to, or who to be.

That was why I'd suggested that my viewers send Kimmie a note telling her they liked what she'd done with her eyes. It was my way of telling her, Hey, Kimmie, you're busted.

It was my way of saying that I know she's trying to be me.

I watch as Kimmie walks through shops and looks at clothes and laughs with her friends. She's bouncy and sort of flirting with the cameras.

I feel sick as I remember how she used to flirt with me. She never loved me, I think. She just wanted to be around someone who could teach her to be famous.

"Sanson would have liked this," she says, holding up a flirty top. Then she shrugged and put it back on the rack.

Her friends giggle. "That style's so over," she says.

Given up on subtlety, have you? I think.

Kimmie nods. "I saw Sanson's mother wearing something like this, once, except it was blue."

"Leave my mother out of it," I tell the video.

She touches her friend's arm. "Sanson and his mother are so cute together," she says. "They're really close. He takes her advice on everything."

I snarl and throw a pillow at the holographic image. Lasers burn Kimmie's image across the crumpled pillowcase.

If there's one thing the Demographic isn't going to want to hear, it's that I depend on the advice of a 140-year-old parent.

Kimmie has declared war. And I don't know how I'm going to fight back-as my dad said, I can't respond directly without giving her more credence than she deserves.

And besides, what am I going to say? That I hate my mother?

I don't need a bucket of hot coals. I need a cannon.

Next day we have the semifinals in our gorillaball league. We chose a field half a kilometer long, with a three-story munic.i.p.al office building in the middle, plus a row of stores and two groves of pine trees. The six goals were in hard-to-reach places that would involve a lot of climbing.

The Samurai arrive with angry designs shaved into their fur, arrows and snakes and snarling animals-I wish I'd thought of that, actually. Shaved into each of their backs are the words WE LOVE KIMMIE.

They've got a lot of nerve, considering that they're only playing gorillaball in the first place because they're in my Demographic.

Before the game starts, the Samurai get in a circle and start chanting, "Sanson is a sellout!"

It goes on for what seems like hours while we stand around and can't think of any way to respond. Eventually Errol starts shouting "Play or forfeit!" and the rest of us pick up the chant, but it's far too late. Our fighting spirit has already drained into the dirt, and we look like a gang of lames to our worldwide audience.

The Samurai stomp us. They've practiced a lot, and they have some moves we haven't encountered, and they play rough. The final score is 16-5, a complete rout, and by the end we're dusty and bruised and angry. I'm limping because a couple of the Samurai body-checked me off a building and I didn't catch myself in time. We leave with the Sanson is a sellout chant echoing in our ears.

And I'm still stuck in the gorilla body till the league finals, which are next week.

I decide it's all Kimmie's fault.

There's a lot of silence in the pool area after the game. I shave an area of my calf and slap on an a.n.a.lgesic patch. Hardly anyone is watching anymore, so I ask everyone to turn off their cameras, and we groom each other listlessly.

When I ask Lisa into my office, I run all the detectors that are supposed to make certain that no one is eavesdropping. I don't want anyone to know what I'm planning.

"Kimmie's attacking me in her flashcasts," I say. "And I can't respond to what she's doing, because that would give her more credit than she deserves."

"Okay," Lisa says. "I can see that." She sits on one of the three-legged stools and rubs a bruised shoulder. "All you have to do is wait, though, because sooner or later she's going to make a mistake."

"No," I say. "I want to be able to respond-but I don't want anyone to know it's me."

She looks uneasy. "You want me to make a flashcast attacking her?"

"No," I say. "I don't want anyone in the pack to do it, because then it'll look like I'm just telling them what to say."

Lisa is relieved.

"I want to do it myself," I say.

She stares at me. Though our bodies are hulking gorilloids, our faces are a lot more human, so that there's room for brains behind the forehead and so that people can understand us when we talk, but that also means that we have a nearly full range of human expression. I look at Lisa and I know that she's looking at me with calculation.

"I want to create a false ident.i.ty," I say. "I want to be somebody else when I start talking about Kimmie."

Lisa considers this. "What exactly do you want to do?"

"I want to create an artificial personality, one who makes flash-casts of his own. Maybe he could be based on Mars or somewhere even farther out." I grin at her. "Anatole says you're good at this kind of thing."

"Maybe I am," Lisa says, "but nothing I do is going to be foolproof."