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- Fragments of a hologram Rose -
- by William Gibson -
- Typed in by Sense/Net -
- Released at Fantasia, home of the great guild of Legba -
That summer Parker had trouble sleeping.
There were power droughts; sudden failures of the delta-inducer brought
painfully abrupt returns to consciousness.
To avoid these, he used patch cords, miniature alligator clips, and black
tape to wire the inducer to a battery-operated ASP deck. Power loss in the
inducer would trigger the deck' playback circuit.
He bourght an ASP casette that began with the subject asleep on a quiet
beack. It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an
abnormally acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados for the sole
purpose of taking a nap and his morning's exercise on a brilliant strect of
private beach. The microfiche laminated in the casette's transparent case
explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha to delta without an
inducer. Parker, who hadn't been able to sleep without an inducer for two
years, wonderes if this was possible.
He had been able to sit through the whole thing only once, though by now he
knew every sensation of the first five subjective minutes. He thourght the
most interesting part of the sequence was a slight editing slip at the start
of the elaborate breathing routine: a swift flance downpatrolling a chain
link fence, a black machine pistol slung over his arm.
While Parker slept, power drained from the city's grids. The transition from
delta to delta-ASP was a dark implotion into other flesh. Familiarity
cushioned the shock. He felt the cool sand under his shoulders. The cuffs of
his tattered jeans flapped against his bare ankles in the morning breeze.
Soon the boy would wake fully and begin his Ardha-Matsyendra-something; with
other hands Parker groped in darkness for the ASK deck.
Three in the morning.
Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you
pour the boiling water.
Morning's recorded dream, fading: through other eyes, dark plume of a Cuban
freighter - fading with the horizon it navigates across the mind's gray screen.
Three in the morning.
Let yesterday arrange itself around you in flat schematic images. What you
said - what she said - watching her pack - dialing the cap. However you
shuffle them they form the same printed circuit, heiroglyphs converging on a
central component: you, standing in the rain, screaming at the cabby.
The rain was sour and acid, nearly the color of piss.
The cabby called you an asshole; you still had to pay twice the fare. She
had three pieces of luggage. In his resporator and goggles, the man looked
like an ant. He pedaled away in the rain. She didn't look back.
The last you saw of her was a giang ant, giving you the finger.
Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown called Judy's Jungle. It
was a massive console in ceap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into the
slot bought you fice minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a Swiss orbital spa,
trampolining though twenty-meter perihelions with a sixteen-year-old Vogue
model - heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was simpler to buy a gun than a
hot bath.
He was in New York with forged papers a year later, when two leading firms
had the first portable decks in major theaters that had boomed briefly in
California never recovered.
Holography went too, and the block-wide Fuller domes became multilevel
supermarkets, or housed dusty amousement arcades where you still might find
the old consoles, under faded neon pulsing APPARTMENT SENSORY PERCEPTION
through a blue haze of cigarette smoke.
Now Parker is thirty and writes continuity for broadcast ASP, programming
the eye movements of the industry's human cameras.
The brown-out continues.
In the bedroom, Parker prods the brushed-aluminum face of his Sendai
Sleep-Master. Its pilot light flickers, then lapses into darkness. Coffee in
hand, he crosses the carpet to the closet she emptied the day before. The
flashlight's beam probes the bare shelves for evidence of love, finding a
broken leather sandal strap, an ASP casette, and a postcard. The postcard is
a white light reflected hologram of a rose.
At the kitchen sink, he feeds the sandal strap to the disposal unit.
Sluggish in the brown-out, it complains, but swallows and digest. Holding it
carefully between thumb and forefinger, he lowers the hologram toward the
hidden rotating jaws. The unit emits a thin screan as steel teeth slash
laminated plastic and the rose is shredded into a thousand fragments.
Later he sits on the unmade bed, smoking. Her casette is in the deck ready
for playback. Some women's tapes disorient him, but he doubts this is the
reason he now hesitates to start the machine.
Toughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to comfortably assimilate the
subjective body picture of the opposite sex. Over the years some broadcast
ASP stars have become increasingly androgynous in an attempt to capture this
segment of the audience.
But still Angela's own tape have never intimidated him before. (But what if
she had recorded a lover?) No, that can't be it - it's simply that the
casette is an entirely unknown quantity.
When Parker was fifteen, his parents indentured him to the American
subsidiarity of a Japanese plastics combine. At the time, he felt fortunate;
the radio of applicants to indentured trainees was enormous. For three years
he lived with his cadre in a dormitory, singing the company hymns in
formation each morning and usually managing to go over the compound fence at
least once a month for girls of the holodrome.
The indenture would have terminated on his twentieth birthday, leaving him
eligible for full employee status. A week before his nineteenth birthday,
with two stolen credit cards and a change of clothes, he went over the fence
for the last time. He arrived in California three days before the chaotic New
Seccessionist regive collapsed. In San Francisco, warring splinter groups hit
and ran in the streets. One or another of four different 'provisional' city
governments had done such an eddicient job of stockpiling food that almost
none was available at street level.
Parker spent the last night of the revolution in a burnedout Tucson suburb,
making love to a thin teenager from New Jersey who explained the finer points
of her horoscope between bouts of almost silent weeping that seemed to have
nothing at all to do with anything he did or said.
Years later he realized that he no linger had any idea of his orginal motive
in breaking his indenture
The first three quaters of the casette had been erased; you punch yourself
fast-forward through a static haze of wiped tape, where taste and scent blur
into a single channel. The audio input is white sound - the no-sound of the
first dark sea ... (prolonged input from wiped tape can induce hypnagogic hallucination.)
Parker crouched in the roadside New Mexico brush at midnight, watching a tank
burn on the highway. Flame lit the broken white line he had followed from
Tucson. The explosion had been visible two miles away, a white sheet of heat
lightning that had turned the pale branches of a bare tree against the night
shy into a photographic negative og themselfes: carbon branches against
magnesium sky.
Many of the refugees were armed.
Texas owned the shantytowns that steamed in the warm Gulf rains to the
uneasy neutrality she had maintained in the face of the Coast's attempted
secession.
The towns were built of plywood, cardboard, plastic sheets that billowed in
the wind, and the bodies of dead vehicles. They had names like Jump City and
Sugaree, and loosely defines governments and terrories that shifted
constantly in the covert winds of a black-market economy.
Federal and state troops sent in to sweep the outlaw towns seldom found
anything. But after each search, a few men would fail to report back. Some
had sold their weapons and burned their uniforms, and others had come too
close to the contraband they had been sent to find.
After three months, parker wanted out, but goods were the only safe passage
through the army cordons. His chance came only by accident: Late one
afternoon, skirting the pale of greasy cooking smoke that hung low over the
Jungle, he stumbled and nearly fell on the body of a woman in a dry creek
bed. Flies rose up in an angry cloud, then settled again, ignoring him. She
had a leather jacket, and at night Parker was usually cold. He began to
search the creek bed for a length og brushwood.
In the jacket's back, just below her left shoulder blade, was a round hole
that would have admittet the shaft of a pencil. The jacket's lining had been
red once, but now it was black, stiff and shining with dried flood. Which the
jacket swaying on the end of his stick, he went looking for water.
He never washed the jacket; in its left pocket he found nearly an ounce of
cocain, carefully wrapped in plastic and transparent surgical tape. The right
pocket held fifteen ampules of Megacillin-D and a ten-inch hornhandle
switchblade. The antibiotic was worth twice its weight in cocaine.
He drove the knife hilt-deep into a rotten stump passed over by the Jungle's
wood-gatherers and hung the jacket there, the flies circling it as he walked away.
That night, in a bar with a corrugated iron roof, waiting for one of the
'lawyers' who worked passages through the cordon, he tried his first ASP
machine. It was huge, all chrome and neon, and the owner was very proud of
it; he had helped hijack the truck himself.
If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift in the paradigms of
virsual literacy, the final shift away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg tradition
of a pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this newer
technology, with its promise of discrete encoding and subsequent
reconstrucktion of the full range og sensory perception?
- Rosenbuck and Pierhal, Recent
American History: A systems view.
Fast-forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape - into her body.
European sunlight. Streets of a strange city.
Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust...
- and the smell of dust.
Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasn't met you yet; you're
hardly out of Texas) at the grey monument, horses there in stone, where
pigeons whirl up and circle -
- and static takes love's body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white
sound break along a beach that isn't there. And the tape ends.
The inducer's light is burning now.
Parker lies in darkness, recarling the thousand fragments of the hologram
rose. A hologram has this quality: whole images of the rose. Falling toward
delta, he sees himself the whole rose, each of his scattered fragments
revealing a while he'll never know - stolen credit cards - a burned out
suburb - planetary conjunctions of a stranger - a tank burning on a highway -
a flat packet of drugs - a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
Thinking: We're each other's fragments, and was it always this way? That
instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape - is she
closer now, or more real, for his having been there?
She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that
their history? No, history was the black face of the delta-inducer, the empty
closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect body he
woke in if the jouce dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and her
refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.
But each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered,
but delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that might mean.