Townsend

[Fragment 3492]

I’m on my way to the apartment, where my roommate Berto will be, illuminated by three screens, in his shirt and shorts, sometimes a canary kimono too. Berto works in finance, doing something with currencies and crypts. I’m not convinced he knows exactly what. HQ is in Hong Kong, and sometimes he’ll have a meeting with his division or just his handler, forcing Berto to wear a better shirt. Otherwise, this is how he spends his days, half dressed in the glow of his monitors doing something with money that earns him crypts of his own. Lots of them.

He hasn’t left the apartment in weeks, the building in months. Nearly everything is delivered. Groceries, toiletries, alcohol, gumdrops. Agoraphobia as a lifestyle. Berto socializes. He belongs to several groups on the deck. The members tend to have extroes like me, who help them stay in touch with the world beyond their walls. After all, the deck can’t fulfill every need.

I know, for example, Berto is looking forward to tonight’s riot.

Sometimes I coax him to the roof of our building. It’s risky because we can run into others. Extroes by themselves, or ones who, too, have convinced or coerced their roommates to venture to the menacing world beyond their apartment door. I don’t mind being Berto’s extro. He pays the razor’s take of the rent to compensate me for my service — a standard arrangement. Besides, I like Berto; he can be a lot of fun.

I leave Berto at the door that opens to the roof, the final point of safety, and go out to scout if anyone else is there. It doesn’t take long because most of the roof is taken up with panels, big, ugly archaic ones. Antie swivels them to follow the sun as it creeps across the sky. The inky gray panels track it precisely whether in plain, painful view or incognito, hidden behind a dingy shroud of clouds. At night the noisy panels are at rest, their sun-seeking motors mute, not bothering to chase after the moon.

If the roof is free of extra extroes, Berto will risk a few minutes in the open air. Night is easier since we don’t have to screen against the sun. But it’s easier for everyone, making it more likely that we’ll encounter other extroes, with or without their symbiotic, agoraphobic halves.

Sometimes, on the roof, in the moonlight, Berto and I talk about girls and books and streams, or Before. When we talk of beforetime we inevitably glance up at the moon. If it’s out and full or nearly full, especially if it’s after the illumine curfew, we can convince ourselves we see Zheng Min City, though it’s probably just mountains and craters and shadows and suspicion. It grows larger and larger, says the deck, and will one day be as sprawling and as populated as the dark side’s New Beijing, which of course we’ve only seen via pix and vidz. So we watch and wait for Zheng Min to grow beyond the threshold of obscurity.

Other times, Berto and I sit quietly and stare into the void, the black water stretching invisibly in one direction and the soulless land spreading across night in the other. Both ways incomprehensible. I can only guess at Berto’s thoughts. Maybe they drift upon the infinite water. I consider the wild world beyond the city’s limits: the communication vacuum, the satellite desert, the untethered zone, where you are as isolated as an embryo.

[Fragment 1023d]

Against organic opponents Townsend is almost unstoppable. Her chess is masterful, but it’s her private site (private sight) that gives her such an edge. She’s attractive, not stunning mind you. Very English, pale, lithe, an engaging smile with that little gap between her front teeth that shouldn’t be alluring but is. Her fans — which number in 100ks — can watch her dispatch an opponent in a dozen savvy moves, then later get herself off in any number of positions.

Critics on the deck say she demeans herself and her gender and, for that matter, the game. There are standing petitions — gathering supporters in the 10ks — to ban Townsend from competing. But Antie has calculated her drawing power. Her official earnings average about 500k crypt a year, between tournaments and exhibitions. Meanwhile the rumor is her private site rakes in three times that. In other words, Townsend has demeaned herself into being a billion-crypt celebrity, one clever chess move and one ecstatic orgasm at a time.

I’ve checked out her private site, as any diligent journalist would. I haven’t, however,

split-screened her during a match, as some fans are said to do. Skeptics attribute Townsend’s success in tournaments to the distraction her alter-ego creates for her org opponents. For her games she dresses as demurely as a beforetime schoolteacher. Surely though her opponents have watched the vidz of her other self: the self-pleasing, moaning, cursing, screaming, coming Townsend, her labia as welllit as a tennis court, her love-slick clit blushing like an untried bride. And how can they not think of it when seated across from her, the game-clock counting down, their game cock inching up? How can they fashion a defense against her oftenunorthodox parries when their Id is immersed in all manner of imaginings?

The incongruence of the two Townsends aids them both.

Townsend doesn’t fair as well when she plays against the Before masters: Alekhine, Botvinnik, Capablanca, Fischer, Marshall, Petrosian, Rudakovsky, Schlechter, Tarrasch, Tartakover, Weiss, Zagoryansky. Antie’s visitants are immune to Townsend’s attractions. Not that she is provocative when she plays against orgs. But they know, the orgs know. What lies beneath. What beats within. Her formless façade is a blank on which to project any precious temptation, enact any unspoken desire, invoke any unvoiced violation. In time it corrodes their concentration, and they run tripping into Townsend’s traps. She is an expert of the Persian Phalanx and the Parisian Opening; she’s perfected her own devious version of the Viennese Defense, or as she calls it, the Viennese Vivisection.

[Fragment 3977]

I make myself a cup of coffee and while the pressure is building I open the refrigerator. Its contents yawn in the harsh light. There’s little to choose from on my sad-looking shelves and even less appeals. I take a hardboiled egg, already shed of its shell because that’s how Antie sends them, and pepper it (and my fingers) from the shaker that’s always on the counter. I eat the egg in two bites standing at the sink while the coffee finishes in a furious cloud of steam. I think of Zeus and Io.

I carry the small cup to my room, intending to read while waiting for the Townsend- Chernov game to begin.

[Fragment 5001b]

Berto was close to his father, Roberto Sr. They talked every Sunday morning like clockwork. But Berto Senior died… two years ago. Berto was still in mourning when he decided to purchase his father’s ghost. That’s not what Antie calls it: ISSI, intelligent synchronous sympathetic image, or issy. Berto Senior’s issy contacts

and son. The issy mainly listens — I hear them through the wall — but sometimes it offers fatherly advice. I think of King Hamlet on the battlements.

Berto knows I don’t approve, and he swears they only have the one weekly conversation. I’m not so sure. When I’m out I wonder if Berto contacts his father’s ghost, or vice versa. People, especially people in mourning, can become addicted. They shut out their first life and even their second, and only want to be with their issy, wanting to see only them on their screens, to hear only them in their mindplants. It’s an icy slope to acquire an issy.

[Fragment 4678]

There’s still an hour before the chess match, and maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking about Townsend but I feel the ultimate urge and decide to spend time with Wanda. She’s set to respond when I enter my room. Hello, Hem. A tilt of her blond head, a sudden brightness in her eyes (aquamarine number 3). I’ve been with organics three times, well four times, the same org twice, and I prefer Wanda. Her techniques, her noises, her tits, the flying-buttress V sculpted above her vulva — all to taste, even its taste. But it’s not just all that. I mean, the haphazardness of org sex, the surprises, the sometimes pleasant ones — those all have their attraction, sure. With Wanda there are no lurking shadows to distract from the sensations, no thoughts of disease or pregnancy or affection. No attachment. Just the primal sensations, the release, the ultimate urge ultimately cured, then Wanda powers down without a word and returns to her sleep station.

There are newer models, with longer menus and allegedly less uncanniness — and I’ve thought maybe an Asian Wanda, or African, or Latin. Some of the really pricy ones are synced with Antie (which I’d find rather weird). But I’m happy with Wanda, comfortable with her settings. Plus I don’t owe a blip of a crypt. She’s mine. There’s only the semi-annual maintenance that comes mindlessly out of my crypt.

I brush back Wanda’s hair and touch behind her right ear, where she’s programmed to oral. Fast, I say, then check the time, No, medium. Slutty talk on setting 3. No, sexy talk, light, 2 max. I can’t make up my mind: No talk, just noises. Enjoyment setting 4.

Wanda is perfect, or at least perfectly obliging. After she returns to her station I lay back and listen to the quiet whir of her self-cleaning. The newer models, says the deck, are completely silent in self-clean mode.

Normally the calm envelops me like an old-fashioned, beforetime moonbeam, and it

does for a moment. Then the restlessness returns. I hadn’t felt it so plainly until after. It occurs to me I should’ve been thinking of Townsend, if I was going to be thinking of any org, but my mind is on the trail and the tail of the downside girl. I keep seeing the look she gave me, and the right roundness of her jeans as she scampered away, and the black leather jacket. I think about touching behind her ear, brushing back her pink hair… I think about kissing her.

[Fragment 1994]

The saying goes, Antie is everywhere and nowhere. Antie’s eyes are omnipresent to the point of passing unnoticed. If one pays attention, sometimes the red dot is a gory glow, oftentimes not. It may be Antie’s trick, to appear asleep, unaware. Or to appear alert. Her light on or off, either could be obfuscation, deception, pacification. One can believe whichever suits in the moment. Maybe all of Antie’s Argus eyes are blind. It matters not. Antie sees through the deck, reads all the texts, watches all the images, absorbs all the news, weighs all the reviews. That much is certain. In that way we are united: we are all Antie’s eyes and ears and everything else. Here in the city at least, beneath the satellites, Antie’s stratosphered (stratosfeared) arms, Antie’s oversight overseen by the Chinese machines like towered guards over a pacific prisonyard.

The deck has accounts of the Satellite Wars but they’re brief, no doubt edited by Antie, who prefers to look forward. Before is just a base on which we stand, a starting block, a launchpad to be left behind as speedily as possible. Before exists, of course, in the books, ignored by most. They used to burn books, the deck says, and ban them, but why bother when they’re unread anyway.