Helix dialed Night Hag’s number. Her page circuit was open, but she didn’t answer until the seventh beep. “Helix, hi.” The holographic image of a slender woman with long, straight dark hair and olive toned skin appeared before Helix. She was reclining on a white vat leather chair. She wore black jeans, a black leather jacket, and round, opaque sunglasses.
“How do you like it?”
Oh, Helix liked it. A lot. “It’s cool.”
Night Hag grinned. “Cool would be what? Menacing? Dangerous? Chilled?”
“Dangerous, tough.”
“Oh good. Tough is good.”
The last time Helix had “seen” Night Hag, she was blond and dressed in leopard skins and white silk. The time before that she was a man in spats and a fedora. Night Hag changed constructs a lot. A lot of people did. It was easy, just pick out an image from the zillions of pictures in warehouses all over the net. There were even clubs you could join, Face of the Month, Columbia House, Backgrounds R Us. What you saw when you talked to someone on the net was no indication of what that person actually looked like. Some people felt it set them free to express who they really were. Helix had used constructs a few times, but she hadn’t felt that way. She’d felt as if she were hiding, which of course she was. She was always hiding. Kind of takes the entertainment value out of it, and so she preferred a blank mask. Let them use their imaginations; she could be secure in the knowledge that whatever they dreamed up, it would not be the truth.
“So what’s up?” asked Helix.
“That’s what I was going to ask you. I haven’t heard from you in days. You don’t write, you don’t call. What, you can’t pick up the transceiver?”
“There just hasn’t been much to say. Nothing’s going on, that’s all.”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk. A young woman like you, with nothing to do. That’s too bad. You oughta get out more.”
“I don’t like out.”
“How do you know? When was the last time you actually left that apartment?”
“This morning, actually.”
“Really?” Night Hag’s construct raised its eyebrows in surprise. “Where did you go?”
Helix pursed her lips. “I went down to the first floor lobby to buy danishes.”
Night Hag’s construct shook its head and rolled its eyes. “Oh, Helix. Dear. You have got to get over this. I know you have a good relationship with your father and all, but, you’re a grown woman. Get out of there! Get some independence.”
“Why should I go anywhere? I’ve got the whole world right here in my living room.”
“No, no you don’t. The net, it’s lies and illusions, mostly. You think you know me. You think we’re friends. But you have no idea what I really look like, and for all you know, I’ve made up everything I’ve ever told you about myself. If we were in the same room together talking, there’d be a whole second conversation going on. One that we can’t have, not even with the constructs, maybe not even with true visual contact. The conversation between our bodies and our faces, the sensation of sharing space and time. That’s what’s out there, Helix. That’s why you have to go, because that’s where the truth is.”
Helix laughed ruefully. “You sound like my father. He was just this morning talking about me going to school on an actual campus.”
Night Hag’s construct tilted its head thoughtfully. “School, hmm. Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know,” Helix sighed with exasperation. “I don’t know what I want.”
“But you want something, don’t you?”
“Y-yes,” Helix admitted, “only I don’t know what.”
“That’s why you should get out of there. You’ll never know as long as you remain dependent on Hector. Maybe you should get a job. Live independently for a while.”
“Oh yeah, jobs are just falling from the sky out there. You checked the unemployment rate lately? It’s still holding steady at fifty percent.”
“What about vatdiving? They’re always hiring people for that. And you live in Detroit, where most of the plants are. I bet you could get a job diving without even using Dr. Martin’s influence.”
“He wouldn’t like it. He probably wants me to do something more, you know, cerebral.”
“But the point is not what he wants, it’s what you want.”
“I don’t -”
“Know what you want. I know. So don’t look at it as a career, look at it as a stepping stone.”
Helix thought about it. Actually, it had a certain appeal. Of course the drawback was that she’d have to be around people, but Night Hag was right, she needed to get over that, too. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life in this apartment, living off the generosity of a man who had already given her more than anyone could expect. Helix imagined herself floating in a great vat of growth medium, swimming through the viscous liquid, scooping out impurities and gently harvesting sheets of living polymer. It was dangerous work. Tales of vatsickness were detailed and grotesque, but it was practically the only unskilled labor you could get paid for, these days, and if she just did it for a little while, until she figured out what she wanted to do with herself, then she’d probably be okay. Vatsickness mostly struck people who’d been diving for ten years or more. “But you know,” she said, giving voice to her fears, “I don’t like people to see me.”
“I know. But you shouldn’t care. There’s nothing wrong with you. That bad time you had, before, when you were younger, that was kids, Helix. Grown people aren’t that bad, and besides, fuck them. You have to live your life.”
“You’re probably right,” she said with more conviction than she felt, “I’ve got to go now.” Helix switched off her holotransceiver and paced the living room floor, absently scratching her ribs. She went into her bedroom, threw herself onto her unmade bed and stared at the ceiling. She was bored, she realized, bored and itchy, her skin acting up again like it did when she got this way. Maybe she should go to school, as Hector suggested, but the thought of sitting in a classroom made her blood run cold. Besides, there was nothing she really wanted to do. She took the tax law seminars because Hector had suggested it, and she felt she owed him something. He had been more than kind to her, opening his home to her, becoming her father. She could never repay that, but she could, at least, refrain from being a burden to him for the rest of her life. She got up, went into the bathroom and started running a bath, but the rushing water was not what she wanted either. She turned off the taps and wandered into the living room again, switched on the holotransceiver again, but this time she opened Hector's directory, instead of her own. She accessed his personal records, called up the adoption files, and opened her birth certificate. The document hung in the air roughly two feet from her face. She was born at 10:19 AM on March 12, 2022, in Harper Hospital. Her biological parents were Mabel and Owen Harvey. Of course she'd heard the story. Hector had told her. She was the child of vatdivers. But Owen had died in an industrial accident while Mabel was pregnant, and economic necessity had forced her to give up her daughter. Helix knew all about that, but somehow, it didn’t answer the question of who she was. That was when she left. She switched off the transceiver, took Hector’s coat from the hook by the door, and went out.
oOo
By afternoon, the weather had soured, and Chango, who had dallied the sunshine away at the Russell and in Palmer Field, found herself driving her old Chevy down to the hectic, gaudy streets of Greektown, where she parked under an overpass to protect the eternally top-down convertible from the rain. She stood under the awning of a pachinco parlor, studying the street from beneath the rim of her second-hand biopolymer rain hat. It was bad weather for scanning, but she was out of cash, and Mavi had just yesterday mentioned how she was running out of food. She planned to crash there tonight, and she felt like something a little better than peanut butter and rice for dinner. Besides, as often as she was over there, Mavi could charge her rent, but she never did, never hassled her to get a real job either. They’d known each other forever, ever since she was a kid, and Mavi was her big sister’s lover. But this street-corner hanging was getting nowhere. With the rain, people were just moving too damn fast to scan them. She'd have to go inside somewhere and hope that the swiper in her coat pocket would go unnoticed.