Welcome to the Greenhouse (28 page)

1

Sometimes getting out of the house means actually getting up and putting on old clothes and checking and double-checking your things before leaving. Yes, the wallpaper screens are sleeping, the coffee maker is unplugged, the window is locked.

Don’t forget to turn off the cats!

Walk out the door and along the long quiet hallway. Hurry down the flights of stairs from the top floor to the ground floor and dip into the shopping mall. Do some random zigzagging through maybe a dozen people buying things they don’t want to have delivered.

Get on a bus.

Go to the airport.

Be a hero.

Ilse hadn’t actually asked Tyler to come to Phoenix, but he could read between the lines. Her grandmother had died. None of her friends around the world knew what to say. They posted nice comments on her blog and gave her virtual hugs wherever they ran into her.

Tyler didn’t know what to say either, but then it hit him that the thing to do was to just show up in the flesh and be there for whatever use she might make of him. It was a huge gesture. Their friends were all abuzz over it.

“Grams left me her recipe and the Secret Ingredient for her fish cakes,” Ilse told them.

Tyler knew the story. Ilse’s grandmother had liked to think she was famous for her fish cakes. She made them on very special occasions. Ilse had only tasted them a few times, the last time being ten years ago at her wedding. Neither the marriage nor the taste of the fish cakes had lasted long. She remembered the big deal her grandmother had made of them and the way everyone was very polite about it. There was always an undercurrent of resentment toward seniors, but Grams had been able to rise above that. She simply didn’t allow Ancestor Resentment to exist in her world. I am no Ancestor, she’d say, I’m alive.

But now she wasn’t, and Tyler was both in Phoenix and on his way to Phoenix. The Phoenix he was in was the city in the game
Still Burning.
The Phoenix he was approaching was in Arizona. He supposed both places were really about the people who had stayed behind in Arizona or who had returned after the Great Migration north. The average temperature in the Southwest had only risen about eight degrees in the last fifty years, but that was enough to make a huge, sprawling, water-hungry city in the desert unworkable.

They had met when Tyler first logged into
Still Burning.
Ilse had been an old hand. She had killed him. He had killed her. One thing had led to another. Now three years later, they were best friends— pals, lovers, comrades in arms who rode the deserted freeways on jet skateboards and evaded evil Sheriffs and fought giant Scorpions together.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“Yes, I do,” he said.

Both cities of Phoenix were quite real, but the emphasis changed as Tyler moved from his apartment in Eugene, Oregon, toward the desert city where he would rescue Ilse from grief and heat and carry her away to cool safety.

Eugene was organized around a dozen small shopping malls. Tyler’s apartment was on the fourth and top floor of a building on the north side of the Jefferson Street Mall. His window looked out on greenery he seldom visited. He had just over five hundred square feet of space. There was a main room where he slept on a deep foam futon and supplemented his energy allowance on the exercise/generator bike, a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a smaller room where he had installed 3-D monitor wallpaper on all four walls. Motion sensors tracked his slightest movements.

Inside that room, Tyler was like a brain in a skull—his little you, the classic homunculus, never mind that that was not really how brains worked, in his head, the mind, the soul of the bigger, wider, far-ranging Tyler who looked out into worlds from his wallpaper screens and heard things from many speakers and felt them through vibrating devices that were only getting better every day. Taste and smell were still weak, not because they couldn’t be done but because they were not really worth it. You could eat things while you were in the room, and you could smell things if you brought things with you to smell, but that was largely a waste of time, he thought, and a mess. It was difficult to switch among smells, so to hell with it. He worked and socialized and goofed off in that room. It was his portal to the rest of the Multiverse. Tyler was a man of his times, a multiperson. Modern people were packages made up of all the people they were in all the worlds they inhabited. Most people worked and shopped near the places they lived. A large percentage seldom left their homes. As the warm seasons got longer and longer, people came to understand that almost everything could be done in electronic worlds. “Meatings” were vaguely distasteful to most. The more you stayed inside, the more the planet liked you.

But now Tyler had impulsively run off into the world of meat which was a very dangerous place since there were few do-overs and no ultimate reset. His mobile devices sucked in comparison to his room of wallpaper screens, but he was trying not to be a jerk about it by grumbling too much. Ilse was doing her best to encourage him as he moved toward her. They were having dinner at her favorite Mexican restaurant in
Still Burning.
Ilse was obviously trying to distract him from the grim reality of the airport since a Mexican restaurant was prime territory to attract a Sheriff and provoke a running gun battle over your Papers.

Tyler also faced an Airport Official, a woman who seemed amazed anyone would want to go anywhere, much less Arizona. Her desk was a restaurant table on the left side where Ilse sat. Scattered throughout the restaurant were friends from around the planet who had popped in to see what was what with Ilse and Tyler and the Secret Ingredient. Tyler dipped into their comments almost without noticing he was doing it.

Someone thought the Secret Ingredient had to be hoarded cans of edible tuna.

Or even salmon!

“She made me promise to keep making those famous fish cakes,” Ilse told everyone.

“Purpose of your trip?” the airport woman asked.

“A death in the family,” Tyler said.

“She would have liked it that you considered her family,” Ilse said.

The airport woman said, “I don’t see that you have family in Arizona.”

“In another world,” Tyler said.

The airport woman gave him a sharp look like he was trying to make her life more difficult. “You should have entered that fact in your profile. Are you allergic to any medications?”

“Not that I know of,” Tyler said. She was asking just to point out his laziness in not maintaining his profile since his entire medical history was right there in front of her.

She quickly finished confirming his travel information. “Walk that way.” She pointed at a sign that said Security Checkpoint.

A guy dressed as an old prospector, a Lost Dutchman, a few tables over was talking about how Ilse should sell all of that canned fish, pay off the house, and retire with a nice piece of change.

His dinner date thought Tyler was a gold digger. “Why would he move the meat all the way to Arizona if he doesn’t expect to strike it rich?”

“Will she wait until he gets there to see what the Secret Ingredient is?”

“She certainly should, since he’s killing windmills for her.”

Tyler undressed and threw his clothes in a recycle barrel.

People in the Mexican restaurant whistled and hooted and threw money at him. The money winked out in flames or turned to butterflies before it reached him.

Tyler followed painted arrows through another door to a small room where he was met by a man in white and a security guard with an automatic weapon. Tyler assessed the gun critically. He had used such a weapon on giant bugs more than once.

The man in white gave him a very thorough body search. When he got to the top he made an exasperated sound and asked, “Didn’t you read all the instructions?”

“What?”

“Remove your augs,” the man said.

Tyler’s mobile consisted of molded ear buds with a thin wire running from ear to ear behind his head. Images were projected to contact lenses. He hadn’t realized that he would have to remove them. “You can’t mean I’ll be cut off for the trip.”

“Of course you’ll be cut off,” the man said. “Hurry up, we haven’t got all day.”

Maybe he should just go home. This grand gesture was stupid. What a buffoon he was. Ilse could work out her grief on her own. What could he do for her anyway? Oh, step up and grab the bull by the balls, you pussy, this is where the sheep and the goats eat with different forks, where the metal meets the road or the pedal or whatever, where you could be a naked man or a mouse with automatic weapons and a jet skateboard.

Ilse smiled at him and turned her eyes down and busied herself with her tacos.

The Princess, the Dragon, the Rescue.

Everyone was watching. What would Sir Tyler do now? Was he all talk? When a real obstacle arose did he simply fold?

“Bye, Ilse,” he said.

He entered the sequence to clear local memory and kill his cloud connection, and then pulled the mobile out of his ears and from behind his head and popped the contacts.

A single sharp and chilly aspect of the Multiverse seized him as if he’d been tossed into a cell and someone had slammed the door behind him.

“See you soon,” he said, a pointless follow up remark since she was now truly more than a thousand miles away.

He was a naked man in this one place at this one time. The world was so quiet! Death must be like this, he thought. One place, one time, just you, and then nothing at all.

The airport guy held out his hand for Tyler’s mobile equipment and said, “You can go back and start over, pay to ship this, probably miss your flight. Or you can recycle and replace at your destination.”

Tyler knew if he didn’t go now, he probably never would. “Recycle,” he said.

The man took his stuff. “Get up on the gurney.”

Tyler climbed up and stretched out on the gurney. The man shackled his left ankle to a bar at the bottom end.

“You’ll feel a small poke.” He gave Tyler a shot in his upper arm almost before he finished the sentence.

The guard stepped forward and walked along ahead of them as the man pushed Tyler toward the loading dock. Tyler could feel the sedative dragging him down. So much for the hope of getting a day’s work done on the way to Phoenix.

They slid his gurney sideways into a slot with a metallic bang, leaving the legs and wheels behind. There was the whir and grind of gears, and he felt himself move up and into a tight dark space. Making room for the next passenger to be slid in under him, he realized. He could smell metal and oil and himself. He closed his eyes and ran for the light at the end of the tunnel.

2

Her Grandmother’s Fish Cakes

3 cups instant mashed potatoes

1 teaspoon salt

3 drops seafood flavor

As much of the Secret Ingredient as the occasion merits

Prepare the potatoes as per the instructions on the box.

Mix in salt, seafood flavor, and the Secret Ingredient.

Form as many little cakes as possible and fry them in a neutral oil.

At the other end, Tyler was unshackled, given a thin paper robe and temp ID, and pointed toward the exit of the secure area of Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. He thought Ilse would be there when he came out into the public spaces, but he didn’t see her. She might be somewhere in the crowd, but he figured she’d be watching for him if she had really come to meet him—maybe bouncing up and down and waving to get his attention. Most of the people not in paper robes wore shorts and T-shirts and sandals. Even at only a fifth of its pre-migration size, Phoenix was much bigger than Eugene. Most of the many terminals had been closed down, but what was left was a little overwhelming. Dim hallways extended like spokes from the hub of a wheel. Long narrow black treadmills, moving sidewalks, he thought, ran in double rows down the hallways. When he got closer, he discovered the sidewalks weren’t actually moving.

He spotted a purple and green glow to one side of the huge room and set off in that direction guessing correctly that it was a bank of vending machines.

He was in a strange city wearing nothing but a paper robe that didn’t even reach his knees, and his feet were bare, but nonetheless, his first priority was to replace his mobile augs and get back to the real worlds.

He keyed in his financial info and put his face into the machine that would fit his new contacts. He took several minutes pushing buttons for the features he wanted. Nothing fancy since he’d probably recycle them on the way home.

He switched on and was swept back into the Multiverse.

“Hi there,” Ilse said. “Welcome to Phoenix.”

Tyler leaped to his left arming his shields and activating his jet skateboard. He landed fully locked and loaded and made a quick circle scanning for incoming enemies to shoot.

“No, no!” she laughed. “I mean welcome to Phoenix, Arizona.”

She’d been teasing him with the phrase you always heard when you first came into the Phoenix of
Still Burning.
She had come to meet him, after all, but not in the flesh. Who could blame her?

She was wearing her tall, slender, curvy look with the shocking cloud of red hair and sparkling green eyes. Long black boots with high heels. Short skirt. Crossed bandoliers of bullets.

“Hi,” he said. “It’s wonderful to see you again.”

“You should dress.”

He would still be projecting the default of his new augs which was Any Man. He switched on his rugged desert warrior look and moved to a pants machine for light canvas shorts. Then he got a white T-shirt and flip-flops.

“You better get a hat, too,” Ilse said.

“An actual hat? Cool.”

She pointed at a machine that said “Punctuation Caps.”

“All the rage.”

Tyler bought a white cap with a red question mark for a logo.

“And a water bottle!” she said.

He bought a reusable bottle of water with the “full” option and stepped behind the changing screen and got dressed.

Sky Harbor was not so dreary with the overlays Ilse projected for him. There were big yellow flowers on the walls. The travelers now wore business suits and bright tourist outfits. There was music.