Karl Taro Greenfeld
According to Edwin, when true love is requited, every other aspect of your being, even those unrelated to the object of your desire, such as an inefficient respiratory system or unreliable transportation, will seem satisfactory, improved or even remedied. The measure of such true love must be this simultaneous upward reappraisal of all these disparate parts of being, and so for a time, during the giddy flushes of this genuine, shared love, it feels real.
It is real.
But subsequent to that, I am made to understand, it is the gradual downward reappraisal of all these facets—perhaps your cough recurs or your ambulation becomes unreliable—that alerts you you are no longer in love. That perhaps you were never in love. We are reminded of the many shortcomings of our life, and so the relative ease and bliss of true love retracts and those small irritations now can't be ignored. The table at the restaurant is too noisy. The parking space too far from the office.
Priya, I would notice, has a patch of eczema on her neck. Her eyes are set widely apart.
There is no perfection in the world, only brief stretches of delusion.
I never knew parents. I have no well of happy memories to draw from, no sense of warmth and unquestioning acceptance. I never felt as though there was a door that, should I knock in a time of need, would always open for me. I believe this informs my every thought. My every interaction. For me, to move back in time is as void and empty as to move forward.
That doesn't bother me. How could it? It is an attribute, like height or shoe size. What can I do about it?
I don't remember my dreams. I have them. I am sure I do.
For a while, even at technical department, I pretended to dream. I manufactured brief sketches or scenes and claimed they were dreams. But my associates detected my prevaricating. They looked at each other while I spoke and fell silent.
My sorrow then is not to have never fallen in love, but to have never dreamt.
Are they related?
Old weavers possess a talent we have never successfully inculcated in younger, more attractive weavers. They wake, evacuate into a receptacle, fall back asleep and continue the same nocturnus, picking the story up, as it were, right where they woke. It's perhaps the only attribute that aging enhances—unless you count those platitudes about wisdom—but it's wasted on the gerontocratic. Even though we seldom appear in our own dreams, somehow, catchers are more titilated by nocturnae of the firm and fit. The auction pricing model doesn't lie, and the highest bids are for exclusive access to the attractive and relatively nubile, eloquent in a large market language—Mandarin, English, Hindi, Java. Catchers pay a fortune for young weaves.
Take Priya, she's honey-skinned, with large eyes, a chin reduced by cosmetic surgery, and she speaks English in a clipped, Oxbridge accent. She has filled in the application with the usual claims of long, uninterrupted weaves, frequently of sexual nature, infrequently incestuous or of academic panic (the too-late discovery she's been enrolled in a class all semester or of sitting for an exam for which she hasn't studied). She doesn't need to tell me, but she is self-aware enough to know that if she becomes a weaver, that most common nocturnus, of appearing without clothing in a public place, would be highly sought after. A potential catcher considering her via the lattice won't notice her too-eager eyes, the way she lowers her head but keeps her gaze trained, betraying some insecurity or doubt. She's fine featured, but somehow damaged, diffident. As I make my notations, I can see her trying to discern my keystrokes.
There is commotion outside my compartment. Flora is being input, several dozen mature plants, only they are, for some reason, unpotted, roots dangling. dirt clods and soil falling from the tendrils, soiling the carpet. This isn't acceptable. I check the hallway, looking for the buildings and grounds crew.
"I'm sorry," I tell Priya. "For the mess."
She shakes her head. "Not a problem."
I look down at her documents.
"How many hours?" I ask. "You wrote nine. Uninterrupted?"
She nods.
"Supplements?" I ask. Sleep medication cuts down resolution and scope, renders audio choppy. We tried synthetic opioids, MAO+StillNX, and other artificials for a while, but those weren't real weaves, they transmitted more like hallucinations, cheap, mass produced substitutes for the real thing. There is a market, supplied by narcotic sleep laboratories in Bangladesh and Fujian, but that's product that sells in developing countries. "We want the real thing," I tell her. "Real dreams."
Priya nods. "Very vivid. I've always had them."
I nod. We can stimulate the recticular system, brain stem through thalamus to cortex. We go in percutaneously, an incision behind the ear, branches of microscopic fiber-optics, some to sow, others to harvest. It's impossible to predict the quality, the resolution, the deltaic synaptic connections that make for audio clarity, visual acuity, until we go in there and start prodding, releasing i7-hydroxytryptamine or d-idoleamine, depending on the desired nocturnus.
"Are you willing to do, um, dark material?"
She blinks. "You mean nightmares?"
"They can be more renumerating," I tell her.
"You mean nightmares, like, all night?"
I smile. "Nothing is all night. Even under optimal conditions, with perfect calibration, you can only produce, six, maybe eight, nocturnae of an eve."
"I'd rather not do the nightmares."
I smile. "I understand. Completely."
Besides this common aversion—and almost every weaver eventually overcomes this initial hesitation—Priya is an ideal candidate, articulate, attractive—with the above described caveats—and an academic history that suggests potential. The historic narrative framework references: Biblical, Shakespearian, Bhagavadian, those old stories still pack a wallop. Aparasim, a young Kolkatti who was an early subject, wove a Ganesha with female orifices that is still generating revenue on the public lattice, 1550 dpi, +64 kb/s audio and all. In person, Priya has that whiff of defeat about her. She knows what she's getting into. You'd be surprised how many would-be weavers arrive and seem to view this business as a more cereberal version of donating plasma or doing porn. They don't realize that they are giving so much more than blood or ejaculate.
I lace her images and send them upstairs, along with an intake evaluation and a suggestion that we fast-track. I also lace her manager, Yuri, who sent her over.
"You like, huh? Right? I told you." He says.
"There's potential."
"That's a 1000 BTC first night. Easy."
"We'll see. Where did you find her?"
"You know I'm right." He dissolves.
I do a quick lattice pattern search just to make sure she's never weaved. She's quite a few fractals of resolution higher than Yuri's usual clients. He started as a nursing home skimmer, enlisting the elderly in weaving schemes to help them pay for their health care. Those weaves, the longer nocturnae of the aged, are a commodity item, rarely auctionable, but damn those old fuckers can dream. The period pieces are an acquired taste, however, and most catchers who pay for premium material will only exclusive famous old people, the aging starlets especially. But with so many centenarians struggling to pay for chemotherapy or laboratory grown livers, we are overwhelmed with content, especially the low resolution imagery that the older mind tends to produce, and there is always the risk that you make the cut, insert the filigree, calibrate and stimulate, and then the old bastard dies on you. The hardware and all those hours are sunk costs, irretrievable. But some of them just keep on going. We have an old lady, one of Yuri's clients actually, a Persian lady, who lives suspended in a bath of hormonal saline, weaving sixteen hours a day, her family of two dozen living off her nocturnae. She's a unique talent, able to build running weaves over multiple evenings, nocturnus intersecting with other nocturnus, recurring characters, surprisingly crispy images, and not just for an old lady, I mean, she's weaving at 680 megapixels, amazing stuff, hanging gardens, a genie with huge phallus who grants wishes. She's made her family very wealthy in her dotage.
I go out on the metal stairwell and climb up the exterior ladder which has a circular safety frame around it, like something you'd find on a ship. I like it out here, even with the roof retracted, despite the blazing heat, the hot wind with fiery motes like warm snowflakes. You can smell the perpetual conflagrations from here, the circular firestorms that whip around outside the walled city like angry djinnis, touching down in the unprotected urban swell and setting fire to the remaining wooden structures like so much kindling. I like to imagine the walled city back when they had movie sets and costumes. When there were scrims being carried around. When hundreds of craftsmen made things that looked like real things. I enter through Edwin's window. He hates it when I do this. He'll be latticed and I'll just flesh up.
His office is empty. I climb inside. He has his awards on the shelf across from his desk. He used to work in television, back when the first weaves were broadcast. He said if you watched those first images, grainy, fragmentary, distant, glitchy, you would never have guessed that within a decade weaves would replace scripted as premium content. All we wanted to do was watch each other's dreams. The monetization was as predictable as it was inevitable. There were the usual bromides about how this represented the true democratization of content, that we were finally transitioning to user generated, that AI could never compete with human. Only the latter turned out to be true. Machines don't dream. Don't have to.
"Bring her back," Edwin says when he walks in, trailing his oxygen and fluid tanks, nasal cannulae and IV lines in place. He's a large man, ageless, his internal organs replaced with synthetics decades ago, prone to shirts that ride up his mid-section as he sits back in his chair, revealing a soft, white belly and the thick scars of numerous transplants. "Why'd you let her go? Let's get in there. Her labs are perfect."
He's right. I hesitated. I do this sometimes. Surrendering to my misgivings. Aren't we like big tobacco in that we know exactly how dangerous our product is yet we keep making it and selling it? Edwin will insist the studies are inconclusive, that it's what the brain does naturally, and human beings have always sold the contents of their brain? After all, what is art? How is this any different from what Leo Tolstoy or George Lucas were doing? These people are just asleep.
But instead of instigating this familiar circular conversation, I sit down on his couch and attach his guest mask, sucking in the clear, pure 0. On the VDT wall are 78 active weaves—it's prime weaving time in the Far East—and we have some of our premium weavers at work. The Ultra-premiums, those that were auctioned and purchased for an exclusive, are blacked out on Ed's VDT. It took only a few months for the Weaver-Catcher auction economy to emerge. But it turned out that the most lucrative market was for exclusive access to a weaver, and there were some catchers who would buy up every nocturnus certain weavers produced, for hundreds of thousands of BTC, and consume them in a state of personal gluttony. The IP was then owned not by the weaver but by the catcher, with our cut as distributor taken off the top. Of course.
They almost all end up in the lattice, eventually, though a few exclusives have lasted for years, until the weaver is depleted or the catcher is broke or loses interest. There is no communication possible between the two. There is only the initial interview, which we will conduct here, before the surgeons get to cutting, and then the lace alert the catcher receives when the weaver descends into REM state.
Edwin resolves in one of his VDTs, a young man lies naked in a kind of a futon at the edge of a precipice, behind him is what appears to be a classroom of some kind, the resolution disintegrating badly in the middle-distance—it's a nice touch, allowing for this smudge— and he is being told something in Japanese by a young Asiatic woman. A simultaneous translator subtitles it: she is saying he is brave, because he makes his bed here, in such a treacherous spot, but the precipice actually only drops off only a few meters into an indoor swimming pool with a granite patio. This area is rendered pixel-perfect, down to the rolled up towels awaiting swimmers. The weaver, or his avatar, is in no danger. Regardless, the woman, who is fine featured, slender, rouge-lipped—possibly under-aged?—takes his erection in her mouth and performs a passionate and eager fellatio.
"I love this job," Edwin says.
We both watch the weave, a non-excusive streamer. "He's talented," I say.
Edwin nods. "Kid from Japan. Usually non-verbal weaving. Hey, it's always nighttime somewhere."
"Don't you ever wonder? I mean, like with this new kid. Priya, that they're not the same, after. I mean, they say, once the filigree is removed, they don't—"
"Bullshit," Edwin says. "They said television would rot children's minds. Then it was the internet. Then lattice. We're still here, right?"
"But would you let your own daughter, your daughter's daughters—"
"My kids' kids?" He shrugs. "They're in their 50s. I don't know. But if they did, I would want them to use the safest, highest quality clinics in the world. Right here in the Walled City. I do know that."
He resolves in on another weave. This is high resolution, barely pixelating even at the edges. We don't like to admit how much of the image is enhanced or even created by the filigree, but if you've ever watched a weave, chances are the background was a simulation, our fiber optics stimulating richer imagery. This weave is a woman in a fur coat snowboarding down a city street, slaloming in and out of traffic, doing aerials off of trucks and cars, jibbing off of stairway railings. How much of her weave is synthetic and how much organic? We pride ourselves in providing organic weaves, but there is always some simulation. That was the problem with the earliest dreamcasting. It was pixelated and the peripheral gapping was too distracting. It was only with the enhancement technology that the business really took off.
That's also why it's controversial. Too much weaving is reputedly bad for your health. But I know better. I go back down to my compartment and lace Priya, telling her to come in first thing to begin the scans.
There is an evening, I can't recall if it is in the past or the future, when I stop in at an izakaya outside the Walled City. Some of us still enjoy the old entertainments, the holographic mini horses that run on indoor tracks in the center of revolving conveyer belts of sushi-style synthetic protein platters. I'm old enough to remember the animatronic greyhounds ridden by miniature monkeys, complete with helmets and goggles, the little canines making their way around the fake dirt track. There was a little monkey king and queen in fancy hats who sat in a kind of royal box above which was written, in cursive script, The Barkmont. Those were replaced by the holograms as soon as I was old enough to walk, just as the real fish gave way to the synthetic. I still find these arcade diversions amusing. And despite all the money I've lost in years past wagering on these fixed little contests, I still feel like that little monkey king when I can pay for my meal with the BTCs won from a well-placed bet. I order a beer and select a few plates.
While I am eating—or was eating—as the holographic ponies made their way into their gates, a woman approaches me. I don't recognize her, but she knows me. She looks hollowed out, cheeks scalloped, eyes sunken, makeup hastily applied, and she holds a clear drink with ice in it. She had been selected, auctioned, and had a very lucrative 90-day contract with a catcher in Dubai. Or so she reminds me. It's enough to live on, she says, shaking her glass of liquor, ice tinkling, as though that were proof.
"But you know what?"
I shrug.
"It's true, all that stuff, about the after."
She then mentions the torment of no longer dreaming.
"Once you share them, like that, in that way, with, with the wires, you lose something."
I was, am, about to tell her the studies were, are, inconclusive. The FDA and FCC had, because of many new health implications of each iteration of communications technology, merged into one entity a decade ago. And we, of course, funded most of the studies. We paid for the public service announcements saying that weaving was unsafe for children, and that anyone catching a minor's weave should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We control all the stories, of ships in international waters, beyond regulatory reach, with thousands of sleepers weaving in shifts, being depleted and then dumped in neutral ports when they run out of dreams. There are the rogue sleep states where war lords cycle through their entire populations, doing cut-rate incisions, reusing worn filigree, robbing their people of their dreams. Hey, we condemn all that stuff. It's bad for business.
I wanted to tell her it was all in the disclaimer. That she made a choice, took the payment, auctioned her nocturnae. I ask her, How is it any different from giving blood? Or doing a clinical trial?
"Well, you give blood, but you can make more blood. With this. I don't know. It feels like I'm in a dessert and there's no water. For miles."
I pressed my thumb into the payment screen and input my numerator.
"Many people, most people, have very positive experiences," I said. "I'm sorry you didn't have a better experience."
I looked at her again. I won't forget her eyes. They have a worn quality, like old coins I found in Edward's desk drawer one evening while I was waiting for him. Dull metal, reflecting nothing.
I sometimes imagine being the kind of dreamer whose weaves are auctioned for thousands of BTC, but I know the sleep-workings of my mind are disappointingly predictable. When I have a good one, I record it on my personal lace, so that I can analyze it in comparison to the high-end weavers, and even my most interesting reveries, at least to me, they are commonplace. I just don't dream big. Or not big enough. I've seen enough to know that I should be grateful to be lacking in this area. That to become a weaver, while lucrative at the highest levels, exacts an awful price. That old lady betting on the toy ponies was right. And we know it. We all know it. That we have a finite number of dreams, and to sell them is to sell part of our selves, is to sell our soul.
I have heard a weaver describe the experience, of the incision and then the filigree, that you are left feeling like you are less of yourself than you were, that you have gone from a strong cocktail to non-alcoholic beer or that your skull is like a giant goblet and the catcher is sucking through a straw that has been inserted into your brain, and all that's left is the ice and the lemon rind. Perhaps that's why the elderly seem to respond less negatively to the insertion. They have less to lose. Their minds already muddied. The resolution already in decline.
I like to lattice and watch the weaves, just like everyone else. I'm bored by the mass market stuff, and I've never bought an exclusive, so I use a few subscription services, and I have my favorites, a few weavers whose REM-schedules I try to keep. It's while I'm latticed that I received a lace from Priya.
She says she's having second thoughts. She knows she already signed the contract and the waiver, and has received the first of her BTC payments, but now she's been looking around the lattice and reading some of the negative testimonials.
I know I should lace in Edwin, that he's better at playing the bad cop and enforcing signed agreements. It's perfectly natural to have doubts, I tell her, but those stories, those aren't reputable firms. We're the best, she knows that, that's why she came to us.
Can I meet with her? she asks. She can come to the walled city. Can I leave her a gate-pass?
Now I know I am making a mistake when I tell her I'll meet her at a bar near the walled city, at the old Izakaya-style place with the holographic ponies.
The place has changed. Or perhaps I just haven't been here yet. There are still the holographic ponies, but there is no longer a conveyer belt of sushi-style protein, instead there are men and women in cowboy outfits, with pistols in their holsters with respirator masks attached to the barrels that will hit you with a shot of dinitrogen monoxide or THC-laced oxygen. You pay by the hit. The intoxicated patrons make silly wagers. The house wins. The servers don't speak any language I can recognize. They only make gestures, do I want a hit? I shake my head, pressing on the screen for a spirit, which is deposited by a cowgirl who gives me a flat "yeeehaw" delivered without a smile.
Priya enters and walks over to me. She lives in a cluster by one of the old regulation-free cities of commerce where shipping containers have been stacked and then coated in snowy layers of flame retardant. She's the oldest daughter. Her own mother and father were deported and Priya was left to raise her two younger brothers. Her accent is fake, but I already knew that, it's an insert, and her labs revealed more neurological implanting than she admitted to in her application. She looks different in the evening, her eyes changing color, but still retaining that same appraising, circumspect quality they demonstrated in my office.
Would she like a drink? I ask. I signal for one of the cowpokes. Or some laughing gas?
She shakes her head.
"I think this place used to be different," I say. "They used to have simians riding canines."
She shrugs. "I've never been here before. Have you?"
I nod. "I think so."
I'm lying: I don't think so.
"I liked that. The monkeys riding dogs," she says. "Can you tell me the truth?"
"That depends."
"I'm frightened. I'm worried that what they say, about the after, that it's true."
"What do they say?"
"On the lats. There are so many stories. If it was harmless, as you insist, then—"
"Come with me," I tell her. I press my thumb into the scan. Input my numerator. Yeeeehaw! Appears on the screen.
It's been a long time since I've walked around outside the Walled City. At night, the temperature drops to an almost bearable level. And if the wind is onshore, we can safely spend up to 20 minutes outdoors.
Priya tells me her dream is to get out of the clusters and into the Walled City, or any of the oxygenated communities. I've spent my whole life in them, I tell her, and there are drawbacks. You feel disconnected.
"That sounds wonderful," she says. "Can I see it? Your place?"
"You already have."
"I don't understand."
"I stay there."
"Oh," she says. "I just thought—"
"The Walled City is expensive. Space is at a premium."
"Oh, I know that, and your office—space?— is beautiful," she says. "But they have those huge old buildings—"
"Sound stages."
"What?"
"They're called sound stages."
"Oh," she says. "Why is that?"
"I don't know." I tell her that inside they are divided and then divided again, into living quarters and terminal farms where the supplemental imagery for the weaves can be created and uploaded. There are surgical suites where the incisions can be made and the filigree inserted.
"It sounds so glamorous."
"Thank you. Would you like to see it at night?"
We enter through the old, stone arches, where in the previous century movie stars' chauffeurs drove long-nosed vehicles past the manned gates. Some of the buildings still bear names, Garbo, Poitier, Gaga, that I don't recognize but through the lattice I've discerned were influential figures, preeminent weavers, in a sense, of their time. We walk along the artificial grass, as above us, because of the relatively benign air quality index rating, the retractable glass roof is partially open. There are the bats making their sonically-guided flights above the campus, bobbing and weaving to consume the moths attracted by the lamplight. I press my thumb against the scanner and enter my numerator and the doors swing open. I'm pleased the hallway has been tidied up and the plants have now been potted and stand sentry outside each doorway, the dragonflies and beetles consumed by the prowling caracals.
"These were weaves?" She asks, pointing to a poster for an old celluloid product, still occasionally latticed. A man in a black hat and mustache chomps on a carrot with dangling stems and leaves while a women in a geometrically severe blouse looks on longingly. A Frank Capra Production is written in a jaunty angle above them. "She must be hungry. Is that the whole weave, a man eats a carrot while a woman watches?"
I nod. "I believe so. It was a simpler time."
"Carrots are a good source of Vitamin A," Priya says. "The root is the most commonly eaten part of the plant, however, the entire stem and leaves are all edible. Perhaps he will leave her the stem and the leaves?"
"One would hope," I say.
"Where is everyone?" Priya asks.
"Latticed," I say. "Watching the weaves. Life here is no different than anywhere else."
"If I lived here I would never go anywhere else. I would eat carrots. Lattice. What else is there?"
We are back in my office. I sit in my chair. I offer Priya guest oxygen, which she takes gladly, her eyes over the mask giving her a slightly villainous air, as she watches me walk around the room as I change into a naval officer's uniform, with tight white trousers, a brass-buttoned waistcoat with long tails, and a blue bicorne. I have a sword in a scabbard upon which I've inscribed runes that tell the story of my life. I remove the sword and show it to Priya.
She breathes in deeply, and then pulls the mask off her face. "Thank you. Very refreshing." She studies the sword.
"You've met me before?"
"I should tell you, this is very unusual. I mean, it would be frowned upon—if my elders knew about this."
"Wait, I don't understand what is going—"
"I feel some kind of connection."
"But how can you have my name, I mean, on a sword?"
I look at the runes, they are written in sanskrit, and they tell the story of Priya, of her arrival here this afternoon, of our meeting this evening, of how she will become a successful weaver, will take care of her brothers, will be able to send for her parents, will live in a Walled City like this one.
"I only want the best for you. You should only do this if this is what you want. But you see. You will get what you want."
"My younger brothers depend on me—and you said there is no risk."
"That's a relative term. With any surgical procedure, no matter how routine, there is always some small risk."
I approach her slowly, and take her face in my hands. It is her vulnerability, her discomfort, her insecurity about her own appearance, that makes her so attractive. Her skin is dry in my hand, and when I remove my hand, there is a residue of bronze powder, her make-up, which I rub between my fingers.
I put my hands against her cheeks again, and with more force, remove more of this cover-up.
"Stop," she says, "without my makeup, I'm nothing."
I smile. "No, you're worth more."
"Not us, the darker races. They expect blemish free skin."
I consider this. It's true; the auctions confirm it.
"How much," she asks, "how much can I get?"
"Oh, a bounty," I say, opening my arms, "a handsome bounty."
Edwin inhales through his cannula and considers my request. It's a first, he says, the first time any of us have shown an interest in an exclusive. I'll pre-emptively bid my savings. Our elders must grant me that. But why? He asks. What's so special about her?
"Nothing in particular," I say, "but I want to see what all the excitement is about. With so many weaves, why do people want exclusives?"
"Exactly," he says, "just forget about her. Go back to your work station, and screen the next applicant."
"Why can't I do this?"
"Because why would you? You don't even have dreams."
I try not to act hurt, but this is so dismissive. Perhaps I don't have dreams, but I have aspirations. And aren't those like dreams?
I disregard Edwin's admonitions, and my bid wins Priya's exclusivity. My instructions to interview without makeup, her skin appearing slightly oily in the hot lights, discouraged some action. Edwin laces me. "This will prompt an investigation," Edwin says, "conflict of interest: It's a real problem."
I dissolve. I walk out into the Walled City, to the canal that bisects the northern from the southern district. There are men with arms folded balancing on metal barrels with their bare feet, spinning them in place as they wait for a gondola to pole upstream. The current takes the barrels slowly to a channel where they soon disappear beneath a stone cupola atop an arched tunnel.
I receive a lace that Priya is descending into REM sleep and hurry back to my workspace. I lattice and am pleasantly surprised at Priya's appearance. She is dressed in royal attire, a grand gown with fleur-de-lis pattern and Elizabethan collar. I study her closely, she has a tail. In fact, she has largely simian features, her face, while attractive, has a puckered quality and her nostrils are wide and flat and flaring. And there I am, standing beside her, dressed in my own royal finery. Around us, other monkeys in attendant costume present us with tea from elaborate settings. The resolution is stunning, everything, down to the eagle's talons clutching globes at the base of the thrones on which we are seated, is rendered in 680+ dpi. There is a race soon to get underway, the spirited greyhounds yapping as they are prodded into their gates. Around us, the stands are full of monkeys dressed for a day at the races, some gazing through opera glasses at the hounds, attempting to ascertain the best wager. Priya takes my paw in her own, she looks down at it, the narrow fingers, the cupped palm, they are more like the hands of a child than of a monkey. But no matter the inconsistencies—the simulators don't catch everything— we are the monkey king and queen, and the races are about to begin.
There is no imperfection. For that is true love: a quick scan, so glancing and superficial we miss the flaws.