Solaris Rising 2 (12 page)

Claie envisions Shelby curled up, sleepy and kittenish, in a nest of blankets. He imagines waking her and regaling her with his tale of the glitch and how her lilac eyes will round and her dove-wing hands flutter to her mouth, and also how she’ll fly into his arms.

He sets out for home, his pace brisk.

Along the way, he witnesses more evidence of the ragged restart. Mu Shu’s dragon is unwell, its normally kaleidoscopic scales a subdued peach. And it has rezed several feet from its normal post, lodging halfway in the eatery’s entrance. It opens its mouth as he passes, and disembodied flames gout from a half meter away.

The local first responders are out in their opalescent skins, HUDs blinking emergency clearances in high contrast letters. At the corner, one is tending an auto hail 911: a man bleeding from a head wound, and Claie goes over to see if they need assistance.

“Can I help?” he asks.

Medic and injured glance up.

“No, but thanks,” the responder says. “Just a minor laceration.”

“What happened?”

“GPS wonked out,” the bleeding man says ruefully. He’s quite chipper despite his injury. “One second I’m scootering full speed down the sidewalk, the next I’m on a tundra, all permafrost, polar bears, and yeti. I probably would’ve been okay except the phantom-physicals screwed up.”

“Ouch.” Claie winces sympathetically.

“Tell me about it. Rolled into a snow curtain displaying as phantom and discovered it was a physical brick wall in RL. Bakayarou griefers.”

Claie makes more sympathetic noises. He doesn’t want to get in the way so takes his leave. But the conversation has made him apprehensive. He doesn’t want to walk into any brick walls. Claie pauses to launch an app from his handheld. As it loads, he realizes that he has been a fool. He curses, furious that in the whole seven minutes, 48 seconds, and some decimal of milliseconds it never occurred to him to run this app.

Claie’s job requires that he be able to drill down to raw code, reducing scripts, textures, bots, and animations to their basic syntax in order to mold LivIT’s landscape: the prims which are his livelihood. Every structure developer and sim architect, anyone who wishes to manipulate the fundament of LivIT has a view source app. But Claie’s isn’t a run-of-the-mill third-party app. He coded it himself, personalized to accommodate and correct his optical deficiencies. And, like the Blip mod with her status feed, Claie has lifelined it.

Claie exhales. He is not in the habit of unduly beating himself up over his mistakes. The truth of the matter is that the glitch – being denuded of his skin, isolated among strangers, and unable to see – rattled him. Badly. Bad enough to affect his reason and to make him miss an obvious and elementary solution. He makes a mental note to do some brainstorming for an emergency scenarios app.

Up and running, his view source app transforms his surroundings into strata of densely packed text, coursing letters, symbols, and numbers stacked one atop another, onionskin fashion. Each layer represents some aspect of the world – its appearance, textures, sounds, even smells — all the myriad information broadcast through LivIT’s network reduced to purest form.

It is much more congested than Claie is accustomed to. He doesn’t develop his prims on public thoroughfares, and his office is much quieter.

He brushes aside layers of code until he reaches LivIT’s bedrock. Now he knows for sure what is solid RL and what is phantom. But even after he locks onto the script he wants, a mishmash of overlays, animations, and other sensory snippets continue to rush in, defying his efforts to keep everything stacked into orderly piles. It is a bit like trying to stem a cascade of sand with his bare hands. Claie considers the problem, then wades in, sweeping aside only the code he needs to in order to take his next footstep. It’s fun, exhilarating even, and he’s breathless, a little dizzy too, by the time he gets home.

Claie shuts down his view source app as he unlocks his apartment’s door. It was an enjoyable game, but he’s glad to end it.

There is a longer interval between the switchover to the apartment’s server than usual. He is through the door and in the foyer before his apartment recognizes his login.

Unlike most people’s domiciles, his home is a self-contained sim, loaded and running from its own server box. It’s another occupational necessity, like his view source app. But he also likes the added security against poorly wrought, malicious, or mischievous scripts.

His home finally acknowledges him. However, where there should be familiar furnishings and visions of domestic coziness, there is only darkness.

Claie isn’t troubled. The illumination app just needs to be prompted. He calls for lights.

The darkness remains darkness.

Claie’s heart quickens.

“Lights!” he says again. Louder.

“Claie? Is that you?”

A coil of tension releases in Claie’s stomach. The voice is deeper than usual, husky instead of dulcet, but he recognizes Shelby’s china doll lisp.

“Who else would it be?” His reply comes out sharper than he intended. He moderates his tone as he takes a tentative step, hands outstretched, in what he hopes is a Shelby-ward direction. “What happened to the lights?”

“Don’t be mad, okay? I passworded them.”

Claie trips over a shin-high object and lurches to a stop. He swears. “What possessed you to do that?” His groping hands identify the obstacle as their velvet ottoman.

“Can you come back later? Please? I’ll call you, okay?”

“Oh for the love of –” Claie rubs his bruised shin. “Lights! Override login Shelby, password Yusuke Ono.”

“Nooo –”

There is a tempestuous flurry and clatter. The override successful chime peals. “Yusuke Ono” is both Shelby’s favorite anime character and default password. The lights come up at their daytime settings: overhead, half illumination; standup lamp, white.

Hands on hips, Claie storms over to the Shelby-shaped lump huddled on the chaise. Shelby is bundled and buried beneath a rose-pink afghan – hand crocheted by Claie’s grandmother – and the downed burgundy curtain that normally separates Claie’s office from the dining room, complete with unmoored curtain rod hardware.

“What the hell is going on?” he demands.

“G-go away.” The reply is a muffled sob.

Claie has a weakness for tears, especially Shelby’s. He sighs, gathers his frayed composure, and plops down on the chaise next to the Shelby-lump.

“Kitten, don’t cry. I’m not mad. Come out and tell me what’s wrong, okay?”

“No. You can’t see me. Something h-happened. My skin went poof and I’m n-naked!” The last is a despairing wail.

Claie rolls his eyes, exasperated, and also relieved that it’s only this. Shelby is a vain little thing.

“LivIT experienced a major glitch today, kitten,” Claie explains. “It took out bots and overlays, all the commuters got knocked off, and everyone lost their skins. That’s why your skin went poof. But a restart’s restored everything. Have you tried rebaking?”

“Of c-course I have.”

Claie recalls that Shelby also uses Badger. “The restart set a lot of apps to their defaults. One of them might be interfering with your rebake. Come out so I can help you restore your settings.”

“I don’t want you to see me naked.”

Claie is about to force the issue with some ruthless tickling (Shelby is quite ticklish), but then he stops. His brow furrows.

Claie often works from home, and he frequently doesn’t bother hibernating his view source app if he’s only popping to the bathroom or getting a snack from the kitchen. Third-party view source apps don’t reveal RL identities beneath privacy locked skins. But Claie’s viewer isn’t a third-party app. When Claie developed it, he set it to override all overlays at home. It is more convenient that way. But it means that every time he exchanged a quick kiss with Shelby in passing or a moment of chit-chat, Claie was kissing Shelby’s RL lips, seeing Shelby’s RL face, and feeling the RL shape of Shelby’s body.

But Shelby doesn’t know that.

Claie swallows against the sudden knot in his throat. He’s not sure what he feels worse about, that in four years of living together, waking in each others’ arms, sharing meals and jokes and laughter, having fights and making love, Shelby has never wanted Claie to see anything but an AV skin. Or that he has unintentionally violated Shelby’s trust.

“Claie?” Shelby’s voice is petulant. Beneath the layers of cloth, Shelby interprets Claie’s silence as a rebuke.

Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe it’s something else altogether. “Is it nakedness that bothers you, kitten?” Claie ventures. “I’m sorry if I’ve been insensitive. I can go skinned all the time if you want.”

“Dummy. Why would I want that? Besides, your usual skin’s just you in RL with some highlights.”

It’s actually more than that, but Claie is flattered that Shelby thinks so. Claie can be vain too.

“Kitten –”

“Can’t you just go away for a bit? I can ask Hammie to come over to help me rebake, and then you can come back.”

“You don’t mind Hammie seeing you naked but not me?” That stings a little.

“Well, duh. Why would I care if Hammie sees my RL?”

It stings more than a little. “I think I’m jealous.”

The Shelby-lump shifts impatiently. “Are you being dense on purpose? You’re special, of course.”

“I am?” He’s fishing and he knows it, but Claie’s feelings are still hurt.

“You bakayarou, why would I care about being beautiful for anyone
but
you? I don’t want
you
to see my ugly, stupid RL because you’re the only one that matters. I can’t bear the idea of you thinking my RL is me. It’s not me. It’s not!”

Claie wraps his arms around the Shelby-lump and gives it a squeeze. “Silly thing. Of course it’s not. Your RL is only another skin, just a hardcoded one.”

“I don’t like it.” The Shelby-lump crosses its arms.

Claie shakes his head, amused, tender, contemplative. Shelby can be unreasonable sometimes, but he’s at fault too and needs to confess the truth. But he very much does not want to distress his lover.

“You know I had a conference meeting today, right?” he says. “I was in the green space with Buneh and Devi testing our new prim design when the glitch happened. One second we’re evaluating structural integrity, the next they’re gone and it’s just RL folks in the green space, all of us completely naked.”

The Shelby-lump shivers. “Was everyone completely hideous?”

“To tell you the truth, I couldn’t see very well ’cause my clear sight app went poof same as the skins. But what I could see did shake me. All the chubbies and the scrawnies, the wrinklies and the shorties. Made me feel guilty, kind of pervy, like I was peeping at something private that I shouldn’t.

“There was this woman, a Blip mod, actually, and her RL body was dumpy with age lines all over her face. She came over to talk about the glitch, and I could barely look at her. And there was also an underage there, scared, never even knew LivIT could glitch like that. But as soon as he heard who the woman was, he got excited about talking to a real, live Blip mod and forgot to be afraid. So you see, that kid really showed me up.”

“He did?”

“Yep. The kid didn’t care that the Blip mod wasn’t beautiful and young, only that she was a Blip mod. Didn’t even occur to him to flinch. He would’ve been the same if she were an eight-tentacled cyborg alien or a giant aardvark.”

“Well, duh. Aardvarks are cute.”

Claie pokes the Shelby-lump, and it squeals and bats at him. “I’m saying outsides don’t matter, kitten, AV or RL. Whatever skin you wear, I will love
you
, the inside Shelby.”

Shelby emerges from the folds of afghan and curtain, timid and blushing, unable to meet Claie’s eyes. In RL, Shelby is a slight man with pale, thinning hair and close-set eyes, red from crying, in a long face with rough features – except for the nose, which is disproportionately delicate, a pixie-button of a nose.

Claie cups Shelby’s cheek, tips it so his lover must look at him. “You’re beautiful, kitten. How could you think you could be anything but beautiful to me?”

Shelby searches for subterfuge or artifice in Claie’s eyes. She is terrified. A hint of either will devastate her, but she must look anyway.

Claie’s eyes are suns alight with adoration and devotion, their brilliance proclaiming Shelby lovely and loved. Claie’s eyes are the only mirror Shelby needs to feel precious and special, and yes, beautiful, and what she is most afraid of losing. But they burn for her the same as they always have, and her fear melts away. Shelby smiles shyly and lifts her mouth for Claie’s kiss.

The kiss is soft, tender at first. But Claie, as he always does, finds Shelby’s sweetness – the way she offers herself to him – adorable and charming, and very arousing. The kiss deepens, and Claie tugs away afghan and curtain, pressing Shelby deeper into the chaise.

Shelby’s face is flushed, eyes unfocused, but she pushes at Claie’s shoulders. “Hold on. Wait.”

“Don’t want to,” Claie growls. “Want to fuck my kitten into the couch.” He feels Shelby grow harder at his words, her breath quick and a little ragged.

Shelby laughs, throaty, shaky. “Fix my skin, first. I don’t think any of my coupling apps are working either.”

Claie nibbles Shelby’s neck. “You’re beautiful as you are. And it might be fun doing it without the apps. Just you and me, naked.”

Shelby grabs Claie’s face, pulling him away until they’re eye-to-eye. “When you make love to me, I want to be who I am inside on the outside too, the true me, not the one random genetics stuck me with.”

Claie shuts his eyes, conjuring forth images of icy showers and utterly unsexy progress reports and tax tables, and prays that whatever is wrong with Shelby’s skin can be easily and swiftly remedied.

When Claie can trust himself not to devour Shelby whole, he opens his eyes. “Okay, kitten, let me see your display.”

F
ORTUNATELY, THE FIX
is relatively simple. In her panic, Shelby managed to trigger a shutdown sequence in her smartdev. Because of the glitch, instead of the apps resetting when the smartdev came back, the whole thing remained in standby mode, unresponsive.