Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

houseless plain: then, as the demons stalked, they were glad of each other’s company. Next dawn, the mountains seemed as distant as ever. Again, they met no living creature all day, spoke little to each other and made the same comfortless camp. There was no moon. The stars were almost bright enough to cast shadow; the cold was intense. Sleep was impossible, but they were not tempted to ride on. Few travellers attempt the passage over the high plains to Zimiamvia. Of those few most turn back, defeated. Some wander among the ruins forever, tearing at their own flesh. Those who survive are the ones who do not defy the terrors of darkness. They crouched shoulder to shoulder, each wrapped in a single blanket, to endure. Evil emanations of the death-steeped plain rose from the soil and bred phantoms. The sweat of fear was cold as ice-melt on Sonja’s cheeks. Horrors made of nothingness prowled and muttered in her mind.

“How long,” she whispered.” How long do we have to bear this —?”

The man’s shoulder lifted against hers. “Until we get well, I suppose.”

The warrior woman turned to face him, green eyes flashing in appalled outrage —

“Sonja” discussed this group member’s felony with the therapist. Dr Hamilton — he wanted them to call him Jim, but “Sonja” found this impossible — monitored everything that went on in the virtual environment; but he never appeared there. They only met him in the one-to-one consultations that virtual-therapy buffs called the meat sessions.

“He’s not supposed to do that,” she protested, from the foam couch in the doctor’s office. He was sitting beside her, his notebook on his knee. “He damaged my experience.”

Dr Hamilton nodded. “Okay. Let’s take a step back. Leave aside the risk of disease or pregnancy: because we can leave those bogeys aside, forever if you like. Would you agree that sex is essentially an innocent and playful social behaviour? Something you’d offer to or take from a friend, in an ideal world, as easily as food or drink?”

“Sonja” recalled certain dreams, meat dreams, not the computer-assisted kind. She blushed. But the man was a doctor after all. “That’s what I do feel,” she agreed. “That’s why I’m here. I want to get back to the pure pleasure, to get rid of the baggage.”

“The sexual experience offered in therapy is readily available on the nets. You know that. You could find an agency that would vet your partners for you. You chose to join this group because you need to feel that you’re taking medicine, so you don’t have to feel ashamed. And because you need to feel that you’re interacting with people who, like yourself, perceive sex as a problem.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“You and another group member went off into your own private world. That’s good. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Let me tell you, it doesn’t always. The software gives you access to a vast multisensual library, all the sexual fantasy ever committed to media. But you and your partner, or partners, have to customise the information and use it to create and maintain what we call the consensual perceptual plenum. Success in holding a shared dreamland together is a knack. It depends on something in the neural make-up that no one has yet fully analysed. Some have it, some don’t. You two are really in sync.”

“That’s exactly what I’m complaining about — ”

“You think he’s damaging the pocket universe you two built up. But he isn’t, not from his character’s point of view. It’s part of Lessingham’s thing, to be conscious that he’s in a fantasy world.”

She started, accusingly. “I don’t want to know his name.”

“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t tell you. ‘Lessingham’ is the name of his virtuality persona. I’m surprised you don’t recognise it. He’s a character from a series of classic fantasy novels by E. R. Eddison…. In Eddison’s glorious cosmos ‘Lessingham’ is a splendidly endowed English gentleman, who visits fantastic realms of ultra- masculine adventure as a lucid dreamer: though an actor in the drama, he is partly conscious of another existence, while the characters around him are more or less explicitly puppets of the dream…”

He sounded as if he was quoting from a reference book. He probably was: reading from an autocue that had popped up in the lenses of those doctorish hornrims. She knew that the old-fashioned trappings were there to reassure her. She rather despised them: but it was like the virtuality itself. The buttons were pushed, the mechanism responded. She was reassured.

Of course she knew the Eddison stories. She recalled “Lessingham” perfectly: the tall, strong, handsome, cultured millionaire jock who has magic journeys to another world, where he is a tall, strong, handsome cultured jock in Elizabethan costume, with a big sword. The whole thing was an absolutely typical male power-fantasy, she thought, without rancour. Fantasy means never having to say you’re sorry. The women in those books, she remembered, were drenched in sex, but they had no part in the action. They stayed at home being princesses, occasionally allowing the millionaire jocks to get them into bed. She could understand why “Lessingham” would be interested in “Sonja”… for a change.

“You think he goosed you, psychically. What do you expect? You can’t dress the way ‘Sonja’ dresses, and hope to be treated like the Queen of the May.”

Dr Hamilton was only doing his job. He was supposed to be provocative, so they could react against him. That was his excuse, anyway… On the contrary, she thought. “Sonja” dresses the way she does because she can dress anyway she likes. “Sonja” doesn’t have to hope for respect, and she doesn’t have to demand it. She just gets it. “It’s dominance display,” she said, enjoying the theft of his jargon. “Females do that too, you know. The way ‘Sonja’ dresses is not an invitation. It’s a warning. Or a challenge, to anyone who can measure up.”

He laughed, but he sounded irritated. “Frankly, I’m amazed that you two work together. I’d have expected “Lessingham” to go for an ultrafeminine — ”

“I am…‘Sonja’ is ultrafeminine. Isn’t a tigress feminine?”

“Well, okay. But I guess you’ve found out his little weakness. He likes to be a teeny bit in control, even when he’s letting his hair down in dreamland.”

She remembered the secret mockery lurking in those blue eyes. “That’s the problem. That’s exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want either of us to be in control.”

“I can’t interfere with his persona. So, it’s up to you. Do you want to carry on?”

“Something works,” she muttered. She was unwilling to admit that there’d been no one else, in the text- interface phase of the group, that she found remotely attractive. It was “Lessingham,” or drop out and start again. “I just want him to stop spoiling things. ”

“You can’t expect your masturbation fantasies to mesh completely. This is about getting beyond solitary sex. Go with it: where’s the harm? One day you’ll want to face a sexual partner in the real, and then you’ll be well. Meanwhile, you could be passing ‘Lessingham’ in reception — he comes to his meat-sessions around your time — and not know it. That’s safety, and you never have to breach it. You two have proved that you can sustain an imaginary world together: it’s almost like being in love. I could argue that lucid-dreaming, being in the fantasy world but not of it, is the next big step. Think about that.”

The clinic room had mirrored walls: more deliberate provocation. How much reality can you take? the reflections asked. But she felt only a vague distaste for the woman she saw, at once hollow-cheeked and bloated, lying on the doctor’s foam couch. He was glancing over her records on his desk screen: which meant the session was almost up.

“Still no overt sexual contact?”

“I’m not ready…” She stirred restlessly. “Is it a man or a woman?”

“Ah!” smiled Dr Hamilton, waving a finger at her. “Naughty, naughty!”

He was the one who’d started taunting her, with his hints that the meat “Lessingham” might be near. She hated herself for asking a genuine question. It was her rule to give him no entry to her real thoughts. A flimsy reserve, Dr Jim knew everything, without being told: every change in her brain chemistry, every effect on her body: sweaty palms, racing heart, damp underwear… The telltales on his damned autocue left her little dignity. Why do I subject myself to this? she wondered, disgusted. But in the virtuality she forgot utterly about Dr Jim. She didn’t care who was watching. She had her brazen-hilted sword. She had the piercing intensity of dusk on the high plains, the snowlight on the mountains; the hard, warm silk of her own perfect limbs. She felt a brief complicity with “Lessingham.” She had a conviction that Dr Jim didn’t play favourites. He despised all his patients equally… You get your kicks, doctor. But we have the