Getting Real

“So we’ll take the fucking thing back to the lab,” Kyriades repeated. “And the gals in the white coats will do whatever the hell they do, right? And then they’ll tell us the same thing those sorry suckers tell us every goddamn time.” His baritone rasp—he sounded like a three-pack-a-day guy, though he wasn’t—went falsetto: “‘We can’t analyze what’s in it. We’ve got no clue how it fucks up the assholes who use it.’ Shit.” The last word was in his usual tones again.

“Yeah, yeah.” Shapur Razmara had heard it all before. Hell, he’d said it all before. It was all true. Saying it didn’t do a thousand dollars’ worth of good. The LAPD was screwed. The whole country was screwed, and had been for years. Just the same ... “You have a better idea, Sherlock?”

“I already told you, they don’t pay me enough for that.”

“You tell me all kinds of crap,” Razmara said. “You expect me to keep it sorted out, too?”

“Ahh, your mama,” Kyriades retorted. They grinned at each other. You had to get on with your partner pretty well to be able to give him that kind of grief. Kyriades stirred the Realie with his toe. “We oughta call the meat wagon for this guy.”

“What we oughta do is let him lay there, let his little pals rifle his pockets and maybe smash in his dumb fuckin’ head.” But duty won. Razmara went over to the car and called for an ambulance. “There. Happy now?”

“If I am, how come my face don’t know it?”

Kyriades might have gone on singing that song for some time. He might have, but he didn’t, because a different avatar appeared in front of him and Razmara. Razmara’s service revolver was in his hand before he quite knew how it got there. The avatar—a bare-chested guy, definitely hunky—threw back his head and laughed. Then he threw his arms wide in invitation. “Go ahead, man. Shoot me. Stun me. Whatever gets you off.”

“Bite me,” Razmara said. Talking back to avatars went against doctrine, but sometimes they pissed you off so much you couldn’t help yourself. If he did shoot this one, the bullet would go on through as if the thing were so much air. If he yanked out his stun gun instead, he would be stunning nothing.

But an avatar could touch him. An avatar could hand out things if he wanted to ... things like little cardboard squares, for instance.

How? The cop didn’t know. The LAPD crime lab sure as hell didn’t. Nobody in the USA did.

“Wanna ... get Real?” the avatar asked, holding out a little blue square and a little yellow one.

“No,” Razmara said stonily.

“Fuck off and die,” Kyriades explained.

The avatar only laughed some more. “Shoveling shit against the tide,” he said, and winked out of existence. Shapur wished he would have thought the thing was wrong.

Hu Zhiaoxing dressed with meticulous care for his conference with the American diplomats. As befitted a country living in the past, the United States preferred—indeed, insisted on—formalwear of long-outmoded style. And so Third Minister Hu had had to learn such archaic skills as tying shoelaces and knotting a cravat. That wasn’t quite a hangman’s knot, even if it felt like one with the pale blue shirt’s collar button buttoned. He wondered why people in bygone days had insisted on such uncomfortable clothes.

“Ready, Minister?” his aide asked. Wang Zemin didn’t have to worry about putting on a silly outfit before he went and explained the facts of life to the Americans. He was wearing a pullover with a sensibly loose neckline, elasticated pants, and memory-foam slip-on shoes.

“I suppose so,” Hu said resignedly. The jacket with lapels he shrugged on wasn’t particularly bad to wear. It just looked stupid. Well, no help for it. He grabbed his briefcase—one more bit of flummery. “Yes, let’s go.”

From the harbor at Avalon, Minister Hu could see the American mainland on the eastern horizon. China had taken Catalina and the other Channel Islands a generation earlier, after the USA—again!—found itself unable to pay its bills. Avalon had been a pretty little town before the transfer of sovereignty: Hu had seen old pictures. In his admittedly biased opinion, it was prettier now.

As they got into the boat, Wang Zemin said, “A pity you can’t do this by avatar, and spare the annoyance of real travel.”

“If I’m not there in the flesh, the Americans will think we’re insulting them.” Minister Hu rephrased that for greater precision: “Looking down our noses at them.”

“Well, so what? We do look down our noses at them,” Wang said. “If they want to think so, fine. As for insulting them ... The trouble with them is, they still think these are the old days, when they knew everything worth knowing and could throw their weight around as much as they pleased. It’s not like that any more.”

“No. It’s not,” Hu Zhiaoxing agreed. “But they still have their pride.”