Her Parallel Synthesis
All the way back from 2003. I don't really write like this anymore (THANK GOD) but I think this story aged well enough.
Her Parallel Synthesis
The stabs started crawling his neck after he closed the door and his feet were sinking into the dense fibres of the indigo carpet. The oblong brown of the paper bag found itself on the floor, spilling its internals of canned fish (protogenetic salmon meat, delicious), loaves and small flaps of soft-plastic datacards. Feeding into his eyes as he walked through, the apartment was a vivid carousel of poster-gloss, matte-silver appliances and dreams condensed into a holographic node.
Kurt fought it, but this was one against one, and the odds were steep against his favour. Sickness was coming, dropping by to pick up the keys for the very-real home of his head. The process of an eviction. Senadoui must know nothing of this.
He clutched his head, tanned and bony fingers digging into the coarseness of his hair. The apartment's segmented eggshell-blue walls closed in around his perception, growing thorns that caught into his mental eye. Squinting, his hands reached out for the Beijing-made neurodeck next to his bed. His knees connected with an edge. His body crashed onto the made-for-singles bed, cotton sheets crumpling into a webwork around him.
Kurt screamed, with teeth and hazel eyes closing like a vice. A hand gripped the chest of his olive circuit-print T-shirt, and the other clutched into a fist around the apartment key. His body jerked, spasmed, then curled like a spring. The pain ceased being subdermal, became hypocranial. Breaths were hard and fast, oscillating. No, not yet. Please. Senadoui needs me.
On an optiNet, the brighter parts, where the less eloquent roam. Kurt found her there, dressed in gold and silver, in virtual cervine fur. She was small, but she stood on the greenest grass with a plasma heart, wrapped in red vinyl. Kurt watched her, felt an interest that went beyond the kind he had with stripped dog-foxes. She was in conversation with other characters, similarly animal, but never equal, not even the wolves and vulpines in all their commonality.
He approached, wearing the skin of a cougar crossed with a jag, slipping into the stream of discussion on the nature of data-wildlife conservation. Inside the Nets, factors take on sharp lines of imagery, zero-fog. The animals liked his ideas, except for a turquoise tiger who left after a huffed "faggot".
They shared many interests. Senadoui withdrew herself, gradually, out of the web of idea exchange as they spoke and touched, closing into her own origami of perception around Kurt. She knew. He knew. This was common practice anywhere. Bodies are code-based, no dust trail. They made love, in her cabin in the misted mountains in the relative North of the optiNets. Slow and deep.
It was the first night of the eight months between.
Kurt laid on his back, watching the pale ceiling toy with swirling chromatics that didn't exist. His palms were damp with sweat, and they loosened. The key dropped onto the bed, but his T-shirt remained creased. A prayer hovered into the air, a thank-you for the gap of time.
Sunlight, cut by towering arcologies into strips, painted themselves on the body, motionless but for the rise and fall of slowing breaths. His eyes, veined and dry, moved to the edge and stared at the neurodeck sitting on a wall-fixed surface. Its eyes were asleep, flat dark spots on curved shells of brushed metal and verdant matte rubber.
Kurt struggled to move, muscles wrapped in pathological tar. He rolled on the bed, placed the crook of his arm over the edge and tugged himself closer to the side of the bed. His joints stretched out and crackled as he drew out a hand to flip a power tab.
The neurodeck awoke, with electric mumbles and the hum of vibrating organoplastic. The small front display emerged from flat darkness with a lime glow, and system diagnostics made sure all pieces functioned to standard. For a moment his fingers pulled into a clawing gesture, and his teeth bit into themselves.
Realising that graces have limits, he slipped his hand into a pants pocket, and tried to extricate the soft-plastic of a datacard. His fingers dug in, swirled. He cursed, shouted obscenities under his vice-clenched teeth. Clasping an edge, he removed the small flap from his jeans, and looked upon it with half-closed eyes. A translucent square, clouded with lines of monocarbon prints, strands glistening against the sliced rays of the windowed sun.
He gathered effort to move closer to the deck, anchoring himself with his elbow. Kurt squinted as his focus faltered, and saw the open maw of the neurodeck edged with a geometric acuity. With hands that began to shake, he carefully inserted the memory cap into the deck till it replied with a metallic click. The screen on the deck slowly drew a bright line from one end, part by part, till it reached the other.
It was in. A piece of himself, with the chance that it would live on in the womb of the one he loved most.
He produced the sample for her two days before, with the stimulation of a dozen frame-bits flipping across his mental viewfinder. Nude aphrodites with many unclean promises. Copulation of demigods (with other demigods, from behind, deep-hilt and rough, lubricated with greasy data). Even ones of Jan, in her younger brushtail days, rarer images he managed to procure. Even ones of Jez, in the submissive-fox cliche. He loved them all.
Kurt touched himself, in the mess of sensual articulation, with the figures so perfect in their pelted suits. Gazed at their pink, isolated, vibrant with veins. He mind-stroked. When he came, the system was kind enough to change his cycle coeffient into a fraction, drawing the beaded silver moment into a sort of feminine persistence. Senadoui was there, as an emergent mental image without the background reality, holding him all the way through his throbs, tight between her legs.
His sample was collected, packaged, non-lossy compressed, and ready for transmission, by the work of macros. Coded seed was a strange piece of data. Clouded, thick with information, as viscous as bandwidth. Kurt observed these things as he held up the icon of his sample, binary-panting in the pocket of mindspace after his excursion, and turned it every which way, watching the fluid cling and flow.
Kurt knows that he won't last long enough to touch Senadoui with his pelt-naked fingers. He was a victim of a rarity. Meningitis. From an infected subthoraxial interfacer plugged into the "glory holes", as the cruder Netizens liked to call. Worst mistake any seasoned bandrider could do, but he was so much in the moment that weekend. Anticipative euphoria. Senadoui loved him for that, for thinking in the present, like a raft in the density of a ley line.
"I'm sorry, Sennie. My love."
His thumb brushed against a rubber mound on the neurodeck, stencil-printed with Chinese characters. Two more eyes awoke on the machine, both bright turquoise with sharp refractions. His body felt more weak than any time in his life, even while connected to the Nets and outside the life of proteins. But he watched the display, it's rapid ticks of lightpoints, and the completion of a percentage ring.
It was transmitting, preparing for flight. Package for a Senadoui Larsson, a spry, gentle young thing, off the coast of Borneo who cared a lot about civets and manatees. For the first fourteen years she wanted to be a doctor for the animals, then the worlds got to her, and very rarely had this been in a good way. She builds skins now, repairs dreams inside the bounds of the Nets and ley lines of data, and she breeds electronic wildlife in her private wideband enclave.
She sent low-compressed messages to his machine in the early part of the months, telling him she was a man. Born one, will always be, even if she was a Transient, and that it was better that he knew for certain. The transfer she had when she was eighteen was into the synth-organic body of a cervine transgen in gold and snow-electric... a male one, just like the one Kurt made love to during the passing of moons.
But she also bought a tissue-lattice array, planted under her male navel, because it was a reasonably good deal, and she thought she'd like to have a transgenus-type baby someday. Maybe with someone like him. Completely borne of the natural love inside the Nets.
Kurt preferred to think of Senadoui this way, as a woman. As the mother to his yet-unborn child. Carrier of his legacy. Regardless of how she entered him, on nights when he thought it was good to have such warmth deep inside him. God, even online, she was warm.
"I love you, Kurt. Let's do this."
The sickness walked in, uninvited but irrefusable.
Kurt watched as the soft lime glow of the deck flickered, sixty-two gigs of his seed cutting the air as a microwave zephyr. Soon, Senadoui will feel the life growing inside her, and for six months she will wonder why her mate had not answered her messages. She would be asked who the mother was, and she would say it was herself. At present, few would understand what she meant, or what the next question should be. Time will fix that.
With a breath from his parted lips, his hands curled open like a flower, crinum lily, and his soul became feathers on a burning skyline.