Walking the Virtch
by J. Steven York
Illustration by Dell Harris
Everything I know about flying I learned from Superman. Take three steps, extend your arms, push off with your toes. It’s so natural, so easy, I’m surprised nobody thought of it before some early twentieth century comic hacks.
I netted somewhere that when Superman first launched the Real, little kids would tie towels around their necks and jump off the roofs of buildings. This was out in the Real, connect? Of course, the todds went flat mode. See, they thought it was the cape that let him fly? I could have told them. It’s not the cape, it’s the body language. The wiring is there in the human brain. You’ve just got to call the subroutine and do it.
Everybody flies in the Virtch. I guess they didn’t connect that early on, when the Virtch was just a flash in someone’s pan, and a few kludges in a laboratory somewhere. They figured everyone would be walking around the Virtch like regular old Real-morts. They should have vizzed at dreams. People have always flown in their dreams, like they’d been doing it all their lives, like they were born to fly. Maybe it’s a womb thing, but they say all healthy humans fly.
But healthy is the operative word. When the Virtch started to come online big, the Brains found out that everybody wanted to fly, but not everyone could. Hey, the Virtch program was there, but some people were inhibited. Almost everyone flies when they’re a todd, but back then they figured most people “grew out of it.” But what was really happening was everyone’s head was getting screwed up. Maybe in the Real it didn’t show, but their pans weren’t quite straight, and in the Virtch, it was plain for everyone to gog. So people got straight quick. The pshrinks worked mass bandwidth for a few years, because everyone wanted to do the Virtch, and everyone wanted to fly. And the world lived happily ever after.
But gog my theory. There’s flying, and then there’s flying. Most people fly the Virtch with a prop. Not a propeller; a gimmick, a crutch. Like, some people use skis, or a surfboard, or skates, or a sled. They never gogged Superman like I did. They think their pan is straight, but they don’t know the true channel. They’re almost as bad as those ancient todds with the towels around their neck. Like I said, there’s flying, and then there’s flying.
Yeah, I’m kind of an arrogant ass about it, but I don’t fly the Virtch standing on a board. I don’t have to pretend my feet are on the ground when they aren’t. Three steps, arms out, push with toes. That’s how long I was grounded. Three seconds, max. Crash, I’d have virtched into the sky, but the programs don’t work that way. You start grounded out, then make for the sky. I think the software was designed by board addicts. Afraid to start with their feet off the ground. Crash ’em, I thought. Still do. Even when I walk the Virtch, I start from the sky. But that’s getting ahead of the gog.
The First Time. Yeah, there had to be a first time. I’d had a hard day in the Real. I broker seafood extracts, mostly with the Japanblock Corp-Lords and the rest of the Pacific rim. You probably never gogged the business before, but we turn three trillion Commons a year in the Pacific trade alone. The stuff shows up in just about everything you eat, perfumes, sublimscents for adverts, and even the nose-phone of your Virtch-glove. It’s a tough biz, even for the Real, fast and cutthroat. I’m good at what I do. It’s like flying, except flying boosts, and the Real-biz tears you down.
So, I came home after turning 260 percent profit on eight-point-five-million Common, in only six hours. Good deal, but I was crashed. I nuked a shrimp-noodle bowl, pulled a cold-caff from the fridge, downloaded without tasting it, skinned on the glove, and Virtched it.
I needed to fly, bad. I did the thing, pushed off with my toes, and I was airborne. I went skydiving in the Real, once. Scared the crash out of me but it was great. Nothing like the Virtch though. Yeah, the clouds are there, and the feeling of height and infinite space. But skydiving is cold, and the wind tears at you, and your stomach is trying to come out your mouth.
But the Virtch is always comfortable. The air is like a warm bath, and the wind strokes your body like a lover’s fingers. You can shoot through the sky like a bullet, or float like a balloon. You can go as high as you want, and you can always breathe even if you head out into space. You fling though a sea of pastel-colored clouds a hundred miles deep, each with its own smelclass="underline" orange, or honey, or fresh-mowed grass.
If that’s not enough, you look for the towering, black anvil of a thunderhead, and ride the updrafts, plummet with the hailstones, or dance with the lightning. Even in the middle of the thunderhead, there is just the hint of a chill, and the wind will clutch and toss, but never batter.
It started one day when Jace, Laddo, Buc and me were storm chasing. The three of them are all free-flyers like me, so we used to zoom together a lot. We spent hours chasing each other through the big anvils, riding the jet streams in tight formation. But that day, even as I chased the bolts between clouds and gogged a curtain of dancing Saint Elmo’s fire ten thousand feet tall, it wasn’t enough.
I peeled off the group and headed out without a word. They waved good-bye, but I didn’t wave back. I whipped myself into a fast barrel roll and blazed out of the thundercloud like a powerdrill. Above, the purple edge of space gogged down like the eye of Allah, and below, the ground spread out like a fuzzy green carpet, so far down that the details were lost in the haze. I jackknifed my body like a diver and headed straight down. I must have been 20K meters off the deck, and it wasn’t coming up fast enough to suit me. I posed myself faster, gogging in my mind that I was an arrow; a rocket, blazing toward the ground on a tail of flame. The ground was growing visibly closer now. I could gog more and more details: the blue varicose vein of a river, dark green scabs of forest, square patches of cultivated fields, jagged scars of roads, and occasional buildings like pockmarks.
I picked from my pan something I once gogged about people falling in dreams; that if they hit the bottom, they’ll die of fright, and I wondered if that’s how it happens in the Virtch. I’d never heard of it happening, but who’d be off their pan enough to try? So that’s when I think I’m crazy enough to try. I posed like a knife, trying for a little more speed.
I saw the ground coming up at me and wondered what would happen. Would I crater? Would I flat mode? This was the Virtch. What happens when the unstoppable force wangs the immovable object?
I saw the ground coming up at me and admired the programming on the trees and rivers and buildings. As I spun I caught glimpses of oaks and alder, rapids bubbling over rocks, stucco and marble. A few people like to hug the deck when they fly. They like the sensation of speed it gives them. Somebody went to a lot of trouble for people who gog everything in a blur.
What happens when the unstoppable force wangs the immovable object? I’ll tell you. The rules change. One second I’m maching down out of the sky like a meteor, then the next, it’s like I hit a wall of syrup. I pose like a razor, but it’s no good, I touch the ground like a snowflake.
So, I sat curled up on the ground, face buried in my knees, my pan totally crashed. What the crash was I doing? What the crash was wrong with me? Was I trying to die?
But after a while, I glommed that dying isn’t my channel. What is was that my spiritual buffer was empty. The Real was—well, the Real wasn’t real. I’d lived in the Virtch since I was sixteen, when my mom gratefully bought me my first glove, a bottom-of-the-line Sony model with no spensors and only a one-K nose phone. But I was glad to have it, and she was glad to have me out of the way. No more dragging her back from the Virtch (we lived in a one bedroom shack, but she had a high-end Apple glove with all the options) for any of that silly kid crash. Jodd had a new babysitter now, and mom cut her time in the Real back to a min. She did her nine to three at the bank, gloved in, and was gone.