Brian Stableford - Inherit the Earth

Illustration by Mike Aspengren

Damon Hart never found it easy to get three boxes of groceries from the trunk of his car to his thirteenth floor apartment; it was a logistical problem with no easy solution, given that both his parking-slot and his apartment door were so far from the elevator. Some day, he supposed, he would have to invest in a collapsible electric cart, but such a purchase still seemed like another step in the long march to conformismperhaps the one which would finally seal his fate.

By the time he opened the apartment door he felt distinctly ragged. He could have done without the carving-knife that slammed into the doorjamb ten centimeters away from his ducking head and stuck there, quivering.

You bastard! Diana said, rushing forward to meet him.

It didnt take much imagination to figure out what had offended her so deeply. He should have tidied the work away, concealing it behind some gnomic password.

Its not a final cut, he told her, setting the first box down and raising his arms with the palms flat in a placatory gesture. Its just a first draft. It wont be you in the finished productit wont be anything like you.

Thats bullshit, she said, her voice still taut with pent-up anger. First draft, final cutI dont give a damn about that. Its sick, Damon.

He knew that it might add further fuel to her wrath but he deliberately turned his back on her and went back into the corridor to fetch the second box of groceries. This is it, he thought, as he picked it up. This is really it. In a ideal world there ought to be a more civilized way of breaking up, but theirs had always been a combative affair, whose every stress and strain became manifest in explosive anger. In the beginning, that had added excitement, but things had now reached the stage when all the storm and stress was a burden he could do without.

My fighting days are over, Damon thought. I cant do it any more.

Once the last box was inside and the door was safely closed behind him, he felt that he was ready to face her. Her tremulous rage was already dissolving into tears and she was digging her fingernails into her palms so deeply that they were drawing blood. With Diana, violence always shifted abruptly into a masochistic phase; real pain was sometimes the only thing that could block out the kinds of distress with which her internal technology was not equipped to deal.

You dont want me at all, she complained. You dont want any living partner. You only want my virtual shadow. You want a programmed slave, so you can be absolute master of your paltry sensations. Thats all youve ever wanted.

Its a commission, he retorted, bluntly. Its not a composition for arts sake, or for my own gratification. Its not even technically challenging. Its just a piece of work. Im using your body-template because its the only one I have thats pre-programmed to a suitable level of complexity. Once Ive got the basic script in place Ill modify it out of all recognitionevery feature, every contour, every dimension. Im doing it this way because its the easiest way to do it. All Im doing is constructing a pattern of appearances; its not real.

You dont have any sensitivity at all, do you? she came back. To you, the templates you made of me are just something to be used in petty pornography. Theyre just something convenient. It wouldnt make any difference what kind of tape you were making, would it? Youve got my image worked out to a higher degree of digital definition than any other, so you put it to whatever use you can: sex tapes, horror shows ... anything. It really doesnt matter to you whether youre making training tapes for surgeons or masturbation-aids for freaks, does it?

As she spoke she struck out with her fists at various parts of his imaging system: the console, the screens andmost frequentlythe dark helmet within whose inner surface a clever programmer could inscribe an infinite range of imaginary worlds.

I cant turn down commissions, said Damon, as patiently as he could. I need connections in the marketplace and I need to be given problems to solve. Yes, I want to do it all: sex tapes and training tapes, abstracts and dramas, games and repros and stupid ads. I want to be master of it all, because if I dont have all the skills, anything I devise for myself will be tied down by the limits of my own idiosyncrasy.

And templating me was just another exercise. Building me into your machinery was just a way to practise.

Its not you, Di, he said, wishing that he could make her understand. Its not your shadow, certainly not your soul. Its just an appearance. When I use it in my work Im not using you.

Oh no? she said. When you stick your head into that black hole and put that plastic suit on, you leave this world behind and you enter another. When youre thereand you sure as hell arent here very oftenthe only contact you have with me is with my appearance, and what you do to that appearance is what you do to me. When you put my image through the kind of motions youre building into that sleazy fantasy its me youre doing it to, and no one else.

When its finished, he said, doggedly, it wont look or feel anything like you. Would you rather I paid a copyright fee to reproduce some stock character? Would you rather I sealed myself away for hours on end with a hired model?

Id rather you spent some time with me, she told him. Id rather you lived in the actual world instead of devoting yourself entirely to substitutes. I never realised that giving up fighting meant giving up life.

You had no right to put the hood on, Damon told her, coldly. I cant work properly if I feel that youre looking over my shoulder all the time. Thats worse than knowing that I might have to duck when I come through the door because you could be waiting for me with a deadly weapon.

Its only a kitchen-knife. At the worst it would have put your eye out.

I cant afford to take a week off work while I grow a new eyeand I dont find experiences like that amusing or instructive.

You were always too much of a coward to be a first-rate fighter, she told him, trying hard to be scornful. You switched to the technical side of the business because you couldnt take the cuts. Damon had never been a reckless fighter, all flamboyance and devil-my-care; he had always fought to win with the minimum of effort and the minimum of personal injury. Because most of his opponents hadnt cared much about skill, or art, or even sensible self-preservation, he had won four out of five of his fights. He didnt consider that to be evidence of stupidity or stubbornnessand hed switched to tape-doctoring because it was more challenging and more interesting than carving people up.

If you want the sound and fury of the streets, he said, tiredly, you know where they are.

You dont need me any more, do you? she complained. All you ever wanted of me is in that template. As long as you have my appearance programmed into your private world you can do anything you like with me, without ever having to worry whether Ill step out of line. Youd rather have virtual image than a real person, wouldnt you? You wouldnt even take that helmet off to eat and drink if you didnt have to. If you had any idea how much youve changed since...

It was probably truer than she thought, but he didnt see any need to be ashamed of it. The whole point about the world inside a VR hood, backed up by the full panoply of suit-induced tactile sensation, was that it was better than the real world: brighter, cleaner and more controllable. Earth wasnt hell any more, thanks to the New Reproductive System and the wonders of internal technology, but it wasnt heaven either. Heaven was something a man could only hope to find on the other side of experience, in the virtuous world of virtual imagery.