Insurance - part 10

[miriam_e]

(1910 words)

total so far:

18,882 / 50,000
(38%)

Yay!! We are into double digits for instalments.

In the rewrite I'm going to have to break up the talk again. I have a very bad habit of doing that. Blah blah blah. I really hope I'm not boring the hell outa everybody... the two or three people reading, that is. :)

Let me know what you think... errors, comments, badly explained parts, good bits, offers of money and sex.... you know, the usual. :)

Note that what follows contains adult concepts.
The love of two females for each other is central to this story so if you are offended by that stop reading now.

10 - visiting

[My bad. Zoe doesn't need to physically visit Rachel and Sally for them to meet her in her virtual world. In the rewrite I'll remove the bit where she says she'll come to their house. They will meet in the virtual world. At Dina and Marc's place she simply gives Rachel the address -- a list of dot-punctuated numbers, very like an internet address.]

Rachel and Sally were near their house strolling along the paths in the crisp morning air, birdsong ringing all around them, lilting currawong calls warbled and were played out near and far. Kookaburra laughs gurgled and broke out into rounds of hilarity in one of the taller trees. The girls wandered around the area looking at plants and marveling at the dew-defined spider webs.

Pausing at one rock outcrop, they looked down across the valley. The mist had already lifted and the only evidence of human habitation that could be seen were the paths and the jetty on the river below. It was hard to believe this area was heavily populated suburbia. Rachel could still remember the dirty, smelly, concrete-and-tar deserts of her childhood. That so much had been moved underground in just 25 years testified to how powerful our technology was now, and how much people really did want to fix the world. There was still a lot to be done, of course. There was no simple solution to the couple of hundred years of salination of Australian land or damage to our river systems, and there were thousands, possibly millions, of species we would never get back -- exterminated forever. But we were moving in the right direction.

Worldwide, nobody starved anymore. There was actually no good reason for anybody to starve for the last hundred years or so, but excess production had been stockpiled or dumped into landfills because market forces meant that selling or giving it away would reduce prices. It had made economic sense to let people die. The advent of replicators brought a good standard of living to everybody and birthrate had consequently plummeted to below replacement levels. With universal access to education and knowledge the insanity of religion died away to tiny fringe groups, largely ignored by everyone else.

With all this, though, we still had problems. It was common for people to fear and even hate veeps. Most people thought of androids as simply menial servants rather than the living, feeling beings they had actually become. Even now there were sick, misguided souls who sought to control other people, who would happily take us back to the dark age of the 20th Century when leaders would lie with impunity and the murderous madness of war was somehow rationalised. We must never return to that, Rachel thought. Zoe was right. We need the veeps and androids to join the human race.

Sally spoke, "You're looking very serious, honey."

Rachel looked at her lover and felt a frown melt away. She hugged her. "Oh, I am so glad I have you with me."

Sally kissed her neck. "Always."

After a moment Sally added, "You know we should probably get back home so we can visit Zoe."

Rachel nodded and they turned and walked back down the grassy path to their house.

---

Sally lay with Rachel on their bed as she made the connections through the net to her own mind and Rachel's cap. Rachel closed her eyes, the better to see. Rachel's cap would send sensations directly to Rachel's brain. Sally would receive it more directly, but the effect would be the same.

And they were suddenly in the virtual world. They appeared to be standing on a white, sandy beach. The sand was soft and hot under their feet and moved in that subtle resisting way sand does. The sun was bright and warm in a blue sky with only a few white, puffy clouds. A gentle breeze blew from the sea onto the shore. Rachel was surprised to smell the salty tang of the ocean. The waves lazily washing the beach were not more than a handspan tall. On the landward side of the beach were tall palms and smaller bushes with bright red, large petaled flowers.

Zoe waved, stepped off a path from between the trees and was walking toward them over the white sand. She wore a very long dress of some kind that stretched from her breasts down to her ankles. It was bright red and had white flower designs on it. Her hair was light brown and long, reaching her waist. She looked like a willowy teenager, but unmistakably Zoe. Her skin was not green, making her look to Rachel like an android.

"I'm so glad you both came. What do you think of my world so far?"

"It's beautiful," Rachel answered. "Is this place modeled upon anywhere in particular?"

Zoe smiled. "It's an amalgam of a few places, but largely a beach in Queensland from my youth." She guided them up the beach to the path under the trees. Once under the shady canopy on the more solid path, walking was easier. The air was cool and fresh here and they could hear birdsong echoing further back among the taller trees beyond. "The thing I'm most proud of here is the microscopic detail. These plants actually grow and are serviced by insects. The insects also grow and lead individual lives."

Rachel was impressed. "Wow. How big is this world?"

"Infinite."

"Ummm... you mean theoretically infinite."

Zoe grinned, "No. It is actually infinite. When you look at the sky at night the stars you see are real stars and many of them have real planets. Of course calculation is weighted toward people, so that insects on the other side of the island are not as detailed as the ones here... until we walk around to the other side of the island. But you could fly out into space billions of kilometers and all the places you'd find would be as detailed as here, though only when you got there. There is no limit to the size of this world, but there are limitations on the computers that present it to us. Fortunately they only need to show us the parts we are in."

Rachel persisted, "But those other planets, they don't exist when you aren't there."

"Yep, they do. They are the result of formulas. Hmmm... how can I explain it easily? You know the number pi?"

Rachel nodded.

"Pi, as a decimal number is infinitely long. No matter who calculates it the billionth digit will always be the same. Those digits still exist even when nobody is calculating them. Pi existed long before people discovered it. This world exists as a set of many formulas that take into account time. The computers simply display that. This universe exists independently as the formulas themselves."

Rachel shook her head, frowning.

Sally held Rachel's arm and smiled at her. "Don't worry sweetie, I understand what she's saying and it makes perfect sense. Remember those pictures of fractals that were all the rage decades back? One of those, the Mandelbrot set, is a geometric figure like a square or a circle, with a limited area, but with an infinitely long edge... the boundary is infinitely wrinkled. You can magnify parts of it as much as you want and there is always more detail, with swirls and dragon-like shapes and rows of plant-like things, and all that from one incredibly simple formula."

They had walked quite a way from the beach now and were approaching a gully and the sound of a waterfall far ahead. Instead of entering the gully, however, Zoe turned up the hill between large mossy boulders, and there, ahead, was a door in the rockface. It slid aside allowing them entrance. Inside was a very normal-looking house interior. A stocky young woman walked up to them, and gave Zoe a welcoming hug. Zoe introduced her as Viv, her partner.

They all settled in the lounge room. Rachel couldn't get over how real this all felt. She knew that she was really lying on her bed at home, but she felt for all the world like she was in Zoe and Viv's livingroom.

Viv, like Zoe, was not green and was dressed strangely. She wore a white t-shirt and close-fitting, long, blue pants which looked like they were almost worn out. Why ever would someone choose clothing that was faded and worn, Rachel wondered.

It turned out that Viv and Zoe had known each other since they were teens. Zoe had always been confined to a wheelchair and barely able to do anything by herself. Viv became her live-in help.

Viv said, "It was good for me because I found it difficult to work a normal job. I'd had a schizophrenic breakdown. To stop it happening again I had to take medication. The drugs made me tired and I hated using them. But I was so crazy when I went off the air I had to take them. Every night. For years." Zoe rubbed Viv's arm.

Viv smiled at Zoe. "Didn't take long to see Zoe wasn't mindless. She's the smartest person I ever met."

Zoe explained that she managed to work out how to use cap technology to correct the action of the damaged nerves in Viv's brain. It worked and she no longer needed the drugs, but it took years for cap technology to become portable. Eventually Viv gave up hope and suicided. Luckily Zoe had had Viv's brain scanned in the process of working out what was wrong with it. Because of that she was able to bring Viv back as a veep.

"Even better, without the schizophrenia," said Viv. "The stupid thing is if I'd hung on for just a little longer my real brain could have been repaired."

"Controllable nerve growth factors," said Rachel. "Yes."

Viv continued, "The early years were pretty boring, even though Zoe is always with me, but now we often visit other veep universes. We have lots of friends."

Zoe explained, "Even when I'm in the 'real' world" (she made quote marks with her fingers in the air) "I'm still here."

Rachel was interested. "Which takes precedence? Or are you able to quickly flick back and forth?"

"I'm in both simultaneously and conscious of both simultaneously."

Rachel asked, "Is that something that comes with practice?"

"No, I have a lot more brain in the virtual world than in my biological body, but they're closely connected and function as one mind."

"Oh." Rachel realised. "That's what you meant before at the court that you've gone beyond human."

"Actually I said I'd gone beyond what most people understand as human. I still consider myself very much human, but yes, that's what I meant."

Rachel thought for a moment then laughed, "Poor Savannah. She was so scared of you."

Zoe chuckled and shook her head.

Viv looked at Zoe and suggested, "Why don't we show our visitors around instead of boring them with talk?" She stood and asked if they'd like to see the waterfall.

All agreed that would be great. They spent the rest of the day swimming in the pool under the waterfall, exploring the cool, mossy gullies, walking up to the high, windy mountaintop at the center of the island, flying (Peter Pan style) to nearby islands, and diving to the ocean depths (without need of breathing equipment of course).


-------------

Comments

Re: keep it up!

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

:) Thank you.

A lot of my stories feature virtual reality. In this story Zoe and Viv are subsidiary characters but they are primary characters in a few of my other stories (http://miriam-english.org).

Thank you very much for reading this. :)

If this is the first chapter you've read you will be confused about a few things, one of which is why people are usually green. It is because in this near future people have symbiotic algae in their skin that supply them with most of their trace nutritional needs (mainly vitamins).