She spent a lot of hours scanning images — photographs, movies and videos of Jackie and the grandchildren, a couple of pictures from the walls of her home — onto high-capacity, radiation-toughened discs. She sold everything she owned of value — her apartment, her car, her furniture, her books, her clothes — and what she couldn’t sell she was going to give away to friends, or to charities. She wanted Jackie to have first choice. All she saved for herself was the few pounds of personal items she was going to be able to take to Titan. She had some bits of jewellery, and even a couple of precious paper books, sealed in baggies and wrapped up in her fireproof Beta-cloth Personal Preference Kit.
Benacerraf made out a will. But she tore up the draft. Instead she had her bank draw up authorization for Jackie to become a joint holder of Benacerraf’s accounts.
But she would need to meet Jackie, one last time, to finalize the transfer. And Jackie had refused even to take her calls, for more than a year.
Benacerraf kept trying.
Jackie would only agree to meet her in Green Town, a net Island.
Benacerraf hated the net and she resisted this. It was just another way of Jackie expressing her disapproval. But she had little choice.
Benacerraf had always refused to have any kind of net interface equipment in her home, beyond simple e-mail and browser. But there were plenty of public net cafes in downtown Houston; she found one in the Galleria which — though expensive — had a good variety of up-to-date equipment, and private booths you could lock yourself into.
Inside her booth, she wrapped the sensor mask across her face, and the gloves over the palms of her hands. She stood on the treadmill-like motion simulator, and — fumbling a little with the switch — dimmed the lights.
The mask on her face was soft and damp — like flayed skin, she thought — and, in the first few seconds of the immersion, quite dark. Then the moist contact pads on the surface of her eyes filled with light, blurred shapes of silver, black and green. She forced her vision muscles to relax; the images were set at virtual-infinity, and it did her no good to try to focus on the covers on her eyes.
The image resolved.
She was standing on a lawn of green grass.
Her arms held out for balance, Benacerraf stepped cautiously forward, over the glowing grass. It felt cool and damp under her feet; it was fresh cut, and she could smell the rich domestic scent of the crushed blades. A sprinkler was turning, droplets of water dancing in the sunlight.
She looked up, taking care not to move her head too quickly. Even so there was a characteristic delay between the motion of her head and the change in virtual scene in response; they said you got used to that with time, your sensorium accommodating the built-in delay. Benacerraf wasn’t adapted and sure as hell didn’t want to be, and the delay just made her feel motion-sick.
The lawn she was standing on was a little square, bordered by empty roads. The town was green and still. She could see houses of red brick and white-painted wood, with little white picket fences around their lawns. There were maples, elms and horse chestnut trees, their branches softly rustling in the breeze. There was even a church steeple, with a bell hanging silently. There was some kind of ornament on the lawn, a sculpture; it might have been an iron deer.
The sky was tall and blue, scattered with fluffy clouds. It felt like morning, and the sun was low, its light on her face flat and warm…
The sky wasn’t all that impressive, actually. The color looked pretty-pretty fake and too uniform, and those clouds were lumpy, a fairly obvious application of fractal technology. That lawn sprinkler was actually the most ambitious part of this whole scene, she thought. The motion of the droplets had been modelled realistically, with the effect of the gentle breeze on the shape of the droplet cloud captured well. And when she looked more closely she could see how each droplet splashed and broke up when it hit the grass, and scattered in dew-like beads over the blades.
She could see nothing that looked as if it post-dated, say, 1940. But there was nothing to pin down the time and place here specifically, one way or the other. This was Green Town, probably Illinois, and as far as she was concerned it was just an anal-retentive fantasy, a dream of a middle America that had never existed anyhow, modelled with gigamips of processing power and the most up-to-date VR technology.
Decadent as all hell.
One of the houses seemed to stand out from the rest, its colors and outline a little more vivid. So that was probably where she was supposed to go. It was a tall brown Victorian design, the low sunlight making it look like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. It was elaborately adorned, covered with rococo and scrolls, and its windows were stained, blue and pink, made of diamond-form leaded glass. There was a broad porch at the front, with a swing that rocked gently back and forth in the breeze, creaking.
She walked towards the house. She stumbled once, but recovered easily. The little iron deer was in her way, but she didn’t bother to step around it; she walked right through the deer, and it disappeared in a burst of pixels.
She tramped heavily up the wooden stairs of the house, and onto its porch. The front door was open. She walked in, through a bead curtain. Wind chimes tinkled as she passed.
She entered a parlor. The furniture was old, covered in a maroon fabric, worn with use and obviously comfortable. There was a piano — an acoustic one — its legs covered up Victorian style. There was a piece of sheet music on the stand. Beautiful Dreamer.
Jackie emerged from a door at the back of the room. She was wearing a trim long dress of gingham, that pretty much covered her from neck to toe. Her hair was brushed back, and her face was recognizably her own — though, Benacerraf thought sourly, rather smoothed-over and more symmetrical than the real thing.
“Hi,” Jackie said neutrally. She was carrying a glass pitcher of red lemonade, which moved in viscous waves as she walked. “You want some lemonade?”
“Hell, no. I mean, no thanks.” Eating or drinking in here meant letting the mask push its way into her mouth and throat.
They sat on overstuffed Morris chairs, beside a fireplace, under a framed painting.
Jackie poured herself a glass, and sipped it deliberately, watching her mother. Benacerraf thought she wore the same stubborn look she’d had since she’d learned to be defiant, at the age of five.
“Are the kids here?”
“They’ll be over later,” Jackie said. “It’s a school day. So they’re over on Nintendo Island right now. You have any trouble getting here?”
Benacerraf didn’t much feel like playing this game; she didn’t reply.
Jackie lit up a cigarette. The smoke curled into the air, blue and white, its form another complex application, Benacerraf thought, of fluid-mechanical modelling. And all utterly pointless.
“You know, you’re honored,” Jackie said. “Your fame must have spread. The great Saturn explorer.” Her tone was contemptuous. “They don’t normally let you land in the square; there’s a port on a neighboring island, and you have to get a boat over here, then walk from the coast.”
“So many rules,” Benacerraf said.
Jackie shrugged. “It’s a world in here, Paula. Of course you have to have rules. They underpin the world. Like the physical laws that govern us in RL—”
“Oh, come on,” Benacerraf snapped. “This is virtual reality, for God’s sake. Why the hell shouldn’t I fly like Superman if I want to?”
“You think this is all too cute,” Jackie said sourly. “Well, maybe. It’s pretty much all we’re allowed since the government opened up the net again. You know, police monitoring engines consume twice as many mips as the VR software itself.”