Virtually True

True shrugs.

  Powter scratches his chin. “Chasms. There is a chasm between reality and your expectations in life, which are derived from external sources.”

  “Media.”

  “There are many issues you are facing. You feel you lost everything of importance the last time you fell into this electronic addiction. Now you feel you have wasted a second chance. This virtual vacation you took is constructed of symbols. You told me you suspected it was an interactive software program; so it was you, in fact, who made up the whole story, playing out these issues in your mind.”

  “I told you that?” True feels manipulated. Knows there’s more here, although it’s fruitless to argue. The picture is murky now. It will, he hopes, clear up soon. “Why Tokyo? Why Reiner?”

  “Those two elements do not seem to add up, given the nature of your traumas. Then again, didn’t you see your ex-wife—”

  “She’s still my wife.”

  “—excuse me, your wife interviewed on TV after the quake. Yes?”

  True has to hand it to the doctor.

  “But then again, you seem to have so many issues to work out, there are bound to be a few that are not so easily solvable. We can attempt one of two methods. We can try to work through each problem, which would take much time and money, and frankly your insurance would probably run out before we finished.”

  “No discounts for long-term customers?”

  “No.”

  “Or?”

  “Or we can just erase it. Purge you of all of these bad memories and start you on another life.”

  “Sounds like the easy way out. Actually, it sounds like a lobotomy.”

  “Oh, no. You would be more intelligent than you are now. We would have to, of course, create new memories for you, ones not so traumatic. Then you could be a productive member of American society again.”

  And not a drain on the insurance industry, True thinks. “What’s the unemployment rate now in the U.S.?”

  “I’m not sure. Somewhere around thirty percent.”

  “What am I supposed to do with all this free time I’ll have as this productive-unproductive member of American society?”

  “We can deal with that when we come to it.”

  True cups his hands behind his head. “Let’s hold off on any long-term treatment plans for a bit. I need to think about this.”

  “Well, that is your prerogative as patient; however, my professional advice would be to get started as soon as possible.”

  “Afraid the insurance will run out? You are—”

  Powter’s image flickers and sparkles, dissolves, bounces back. “There’s a logjam of data squeezing into Nerula. How do they expect me to do my job in when these third-rate third-world nations can’t even keep up their satellite feeds?”

  “Logjam?” True speaks to the disintegrating image.

  “What are you talking about?” Powter’s image now strong and clear. “You zoned again. I’m going to prescribe more time with these psychotropic patterns. There’s a new one that should ground you better in reality.”

  “Logjam, Dr. Powter. I remember now.”

  “Our session is over. We shall talk tomorrow,” and Powter vanishes, his face edged out by new patterns and colors.

  True stares where Powter was, sees the letters—perhaps the word—p0yiwk, blinking. On. Off.

  p0yiwk. What does it mean?

  * * *

  True wakes up, his arms squeezed by electrical restraints. In a bed across the room is another patient, muttering in gibberese. Peering over True is Rush, who, for the first time True can remember, looks concerned about someone other than himself.

  “Why am I in restraints?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “What?”

  “I left you to get a bite to eat at the cafeteria, and you were wandering the hospital, trying to break into the plague section, screaming you had to escape to Tokyo. Why Tokyo, Ailey?”

  True rifles through his memory. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m no shrink, but judging from what you were ranting about, I’d bet you’re obsessed with Tokyo, Reiner, someone named Eden, and log rolling. You have a thing for Reiner? You wouldn’t be the first.”

  “My subconscious is telling me something’s there.”

  “Listen, headcase, I wouldn’t even trust your conscious if I was you.”

  “How much time passed since the last time you stopped by?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How many times have you visited me and over how long a period of time?”

  “This is the first time.”

  “What about when you first came in and told me how I’d fucked up so much?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  “What about Dr. Powter and his therapy sessions?”

  “You won’t see Powter until you get back to New York. In the meantime, he prescribed more patterns. When this 12-step is done, we’ll fly you home and Powter will do what he can.”

  “Who’s in the bed across the room?”

  “The plague is out of control. The hospital is putting all the psychos together in order to free up rooms for plaguees.”

  “You scared?”

  “I’m inoculated. So are you. WWTV stands by its employees.” Rush stands, cramps up. “My stomach feels like someone’s grabbing at my intestines.” Rotten eggs in Rush’s wake. Not just bilharzia, True realizes.

  Rush plants his thumb on the ID scanner and the door spits open. “Ailey! Think about the Ghetto Tourney deal. It’s good for you, good for me, good for the network.”

  After Rush leaves, the pattern snaps shut, and a familiar face shuffles into the void.

  CHAPTER 20

  Reiner peers down at him from the screen, says, “I know we’ve never met, but I’ve admired your work. I just wanted to offer my sympathies. Addiction can strike anyone. If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”

  She’s the same as in True’s dreams, the same unrepentant toughness barely camouflaged under steroid therapy and plastic surgery; the same voice, mannerisms. True marvels at his imagination, how it picked up on her entire essence.

  He squirms under the restraints. An idea. “You know what you can do? Check into Tokyo land transactions since the quake. Find out who’s been grabbing up the land.”

  “For what possible reason?”

  He’s too aggressive. As well as he feels he knows her, she doesn’t know him. He want to slow down, but the words gush out. “A hunch. Before I ended up here, I interviewed a Japanese refugee at the dock—old guy—told me he’d been forced to sell his land for dirt. Said it’s happening a lot there.”

  “Who’d buy worthless land?”

  “When they rebuild, it’ll be worth trillions.”

  “Only way that’d happen is if they keep the capital here.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Bullshit. That’s American paranoid delusional jingoism presented as a Japanese conspiracy. All due respect? In bed with restraints on, you aren’t what I’d call a reliable source.”

  “Reiner, come on.”

  “You act like you know me. I only called to offer condolences. You were a damned fine journo, and I was sorry to hear this is how you ended up.”

  “I’ll tell you who’s scarfing up the land. It’s a corrupt circuit named Sato. Runs the Sato corp.”

  “Tsuyoshi Sato?” The look on Reiner’s face—like she calls on a good will mission and this poor shit still thinks he’s a reporter instead of a head case.

  “A martial artist,” True continues. “Controls an organization of salary samurai and corporate ninjas.”

  Reiner can’t control herself anymore. “Sato’s a skinny, whiny salaryman who inherited a fortune. He’s harmless. Hasn’t worked a day in his life. Certainly isn’t made of the stuff to pull off what you say he did.”

  True’s desperate. The restraints don’t promote his cause. “Listen, Reiner. Just check into it. Do it for me.”

  “It’s a waste o
f time.”

  “You won’t regret it.”

  “What I regret is calling you, Ailey, sorry to say.”

  “I know I can trust you. Before, I didn’t, but I was wrong.”

  “Before? Before what?” Reiner rubs her eyes, tired of the conversation.

  “There’s so much at stake.”

  “Bye.”

  “Reiner, wait. Please, wait.”

  Her patience is stretched taut. “What?”

  “Check into recent land transactions. If you can get through the screens, you’ll see Sato’s behind it all. He’s exerting intense pressure behind the scenes to get the politicians to keep the capital in Tokyo. You’ll see.”

  Reiner rolls her eyes and the screen zips shut. True looks across the room, sees three more beds, a slumbering log in each. The wall unshuts; more beds are wheeled in.

  The plague rages on. So does True’s mind.

  A new pattern replaces Reiner’s snapshot. Psychotropia, mind candy, min-max: minimum effort, maximum results. True stops fighting. Let it work its numbing magic.

  * * *

  It’s deep night; snores and deep breathing accompany True’s thoughts. Finally he’s unshackled from psychotropia; an opportunity to try and make sense of things.

  “p0yiwk.” He reaches for his wrist-top and plugs in this haunting code.

  No reference in data banks relating to p0yiwk.

  True types it again—the wrist-top responds in kind. He stares at the glowing keyboard. Whispers “Pee zero why eye double-you kay. Pee zero why eye double-you kay. Pee zero why eye double-you kay.”

  It’s important, knows he must decipher it. Pee zero why eye double-you kay. It feels vaguely cryptographic.

  He’s out of step with reality, a little off line. Things aren’t what they seem.

  He stares at the first letter, p. True is out of step. Things aren’t what they seem. P. Step. True looks at the letters on his qwerty touchpad, the steps around the symbol: The letter O is immediately to the left. Diagonally up to the left is 0. Clockwise shows a hyphen or a dash, to the immediate right a bracket. Then quote marks, a colon or semi-colon, the letter L.

  He thinks through the issues that dog him: Tokyo, the earthquake, Reiner, Bong Bong, Rush, Aslam, land transactions, capital and capitol, psychotropia patterns, Dr. Powter. But Pee zero why eye double-you kay seems a world away. He counts up the number of symbols: six. True is out of step. Trust your intuition. Six symbols. Six letters.

  Tokyo, earthquake, Bong Bong, Rush, Aslam, none are constructed from six letters, although Reiner is. So’s Powter. True tries to formulate a cryptogram to solve the puzzle, but no matter what, no matter how many spaces there are or in what order he places the letters, neither Reiner nor Powter equals p0yiwk.

  A step away. He stares at the pattern, starts words beginning with letters surrounding the p key. After minutes, maybe hours, True solves it.

  “p0yiwk.” When True takes each letter down diagonally to the left, the message spells “logjam.” LOGJAM.

  Logjam? He thought about it in his virtual trip, also during imagined sessions with Dr. Powter. It’s more, much more, than too much data piped into too small a space. It means he suffers from mnemonia. He runs a trace on the word, pulls up a number of entries from past newscasts, looks at the name of the reporter who filed them: True Ailey. He watches footage from a year ago, of himself: healthy, capable, not diluted as now. True watches, fascinated, as he breaks a story that ended up breaking him.

  “Shirley Logjam’s nightmare began long before she knew she was living a nightmare,” True begins in his report. “With echoes of Nazi atrocities in last century’s Second World War, Logjam was a human guinea pig. Her company, International Soft Where?, a developer of complex virtual reality systems including the popular Street Ninja, tested its most experimental and dangerous virtual reality systems on her.

  “Now Shirley Logjam is dead, her mind and body destroyed by her devotion to her work—a devotion not even she knew she had.”

  True has no recollection of this report, yet there he is, providing footage and narrating a grisly tale of electric intrigue. He gets to relive a lost part of his life, like finding a dusty journal.

  Shirley Logjam died of liver failure. The autopsy showed she’d been abusing FREEze, a meta-amphetamine commonly used in tandem with virtual reality games, enabling the abuser to be fully absorbed by mirror universes. “At first glance, it’s a typical story of FREEze abuse. Except one major difference: Shirley Logjam was no drug addict. She was murdered.”

  True accesses all the broadcasts, background notes, edited-out portions, footage never aired. What he finds possesses an eerily familiar quality. Three days after the death of Shirley Logjam, her husband turned up at True’s door claiming his wife was murdered. After investigating, True discovered her company had been testing its virtual reality products on unsuspecting employees, drugging them and detailing their responses.

  His report numbed a public already numbed by technology. The trial, in which the American Defense Corporation, among others, stood accused, was an offshoot of True’s report. In his notes, he discovers that International Soft Where? is an ADC affiliate. True searches for a connection to Sato, but there isn’t any apparent one; ADC and Sato Corporation are direct competitors. Enemies.

  True checks the dates: days before he fell into virtual voids. Even his notes from the period are a haze, and the closer to his hospitalization, the hazier they get. He watches, transfixed, as he floats into a court room, watches as the CEOs of the defendant corporations refuse to cooperate, threatening to move their operations abroad, and the American people pressure their representatives to force the special prosecutor to drop the charges. Remembers de Bris told him the charges were dropped.

  He compiles a lengthy list of corporations, including ADC and MedTekton, the plastics company. True asked de Bris whether MedTekton was one of the companies on trial. They weren’t, this is true; but bank data shows ADC and MedTekton have megs of money zapping around one another’s accounts.

  The question sticks. If ADC is behind his latest electronic escapades, what makes True certain Sato’s the key? Why’d his latest elect-trek take him to Japan, to Reiner, Eden, accessing Sato’s chip? He’s about to over-and-out when he hears a familiar voice: “True. It took you long enough.”

  The wrist-top. Aslam, grimy in camouflage. Behind him, barracks for rebel forces on the move. He’s chewing on a straw. “One of the hardest things to manufacture is this drinking straw. It requires near-perfect quality control, which you don’t find in fucked-up places like this.” Aslam in the virtual flesh, talking into a wrist-top, WWTV-issue, pans his jungle locale. Scorched trees and earth, stationed near a cave with an assemblage of bunkers, collapsible aluminum nut-and-bolted together. Aslam knots the straw, holds it to the lens. “This is the last straw, True. The last straw.” He snickers soundlessly. “I told you that computer model was something.” Aslam pops the straw knot in his mouth, chews on it. “So I’m dead, you’re listening to me, and you’re on your way to figuring things out. Least, I hope so. It’s been a hard road, my friend, and for that I’m sorry. If I hadn’t had to include you in this shit, I wouldn’t have. But there was no other way.”

  From fifteen days ago.

  “Besides, you owe me. You know you do. Pay-back time. Brother-to-brother. It’s cast a shadow over our friendship ever since it happened. We never talked about it, though I wish we had. But at least I won’t have to listen to you fuck things up, apologize or something, like that’s what I want, which is total bullshit. You know what I’m talking about. Pakistan, India, the war.” Like Aslam’s right there, bedside; only in memory, really. “A trade. You for Anjou and Imran. Only at the time I don’t know it’s a trade. Just trying to do the right thing, you know? You’re in jail, Anjou and the kid are with her family in Lahore, and I get electric fever: I’ll spring True from jail, have the wife and kid meet me at the border, where you and I’ll be waiting, and we’ll all
flee ever happily into Free Tibet. A good scheme for escaping nuclear war, which was just hours away.”

  Guilt claws at True. He knows the story already. Lets Aslam finish his purge. “But they don’t make it. Rumors of nuclear war were driving people to panic. A lot of traffic accidents. I guess that’s what happened. Maybe she was killed by bandits feasting on the anarchy. All I know is they would have made it if I’d been with them.” Aslam’s complexion turning strawberry rash under his jungle tan. “Except I was with you. And you made it. No offense, True, but it was a bum deal for me. When Anjou and Imran were dissolved into radioactive dust, some of me died with them. Faith is all I got now, True. Which is why I need you.”

  True flashes to this time, the angry mood, the border’s desolation spiraling up to the Himalaya’s breathless peaks, waiting, waiting, waiting for Anjou and Imran. Launch time all keyed in. Ready. 10-9-8-7-. Have to escape, far away from this nuclear MADness. But Anjou and Imran don’t show, and when True and Aslam can’t afford one sec more, True has to coax his wasted friend over the border, away from the war and the ashes of his family.

  Aslam keeps on. “I don’t know how much I will have told you. Some military corp contacted me after my platoon was smoked by a weapon that nullifies everything you do. I can’t explain it, but we were powerless against it. They offered major bucks if I tracked it down. Lots of perks, money. Figured I’d use the corp’s resources to get you to track down the design codes, then take them for myself. I know I can biz with you. You didn’t really believe I’d leave the insurgency? I wanted to smoke those fucking ethnics with a taste of their own. I also needed to take care of biz, in case, you know, I got smoked. So here I am. TCBing. I don’t know who the defense contractor who hired me is. Could be Boeing-Mitsubishi, American Defense, maybe GEC. I didn’t get to pose too many qs.”

  True begins to sift fact from virtual fact. Too much coincidence in all this. Are there things to be learned from his intuition?

  Aslam looks to night’s sky, stars hazed by artillery smoke. Peers into the camera, at True, grins. “Did you catch any of those promos your shitty-assed anchor Rush Gallstone ran?” Aslam mocks Rush’s inflectionless promo voice. “‘Coming next week: I risk my life bringing you a rare live interview with the blood-thirsty leader of the Muslim Insurgency, Aslam Q. Aziz. A WWTV exclusive brought to you by Rush No Balls.’ What a glitch-master. Just to piss him off, I’m not doing the interview. I got what I needed. Which is to leave you this message; a heartfelt request, actually. Find out what this corp technology is all about and share the wealth. A Japanese corporation’s got it. The Sato Corporation. I don’t know how they got it. Maybe it’s in WWTV’s video archives. But you’d have checked that already since you’re here with me now.