Kinji felt the edge of anticipation that always came from starting a new project. Usually she liked that sensation, the tension of the unknown, but today it was accompanied by a cloud of foreboding. Interesting or not, Bexie wouldn’t be able to extract himself from the link she’d left him. If she was going to help, she was going to have to get into that segment of True Space, and to do that she needed a friend.
Kinji entered her Think Space, ignoring a strong info stream filled with rhetoric about the latest candidates running for CIO reps, and opened the link for Tania to join.
While she waited, she jumped channels to find herself in an ad for a sex club in the old Haight area.
“Hey, I knew this was a good idea,” Tania said, reaching out to touch the ad.
“You say that to everyone who lets you slip into their space.”
“Just the girls.”
“Okay,” Kinji replied. “Enough of the sideshow. Let’s do this.”
Yet, still she hesitated, telling herself she was taking time to let Tania’s essence fully attach. Would Bexie Montgomery even make it to the bubble she had shown him? If he didn’t, and if the medical staff had found traces of her link, she might be stepping into a trap of her own making. The anxiety made her want to jump straight to the safe zone and find out, but she had a pattern of usage built over years of operation and to deviate from it was to increase the risk of the Central Inspector’s Office taking note of what she was doing.
As Tania said, unless you were placed on a priority list for oversight, the CIO was a dope most of the time — not terribly difficult to operate around if you went about it with just a little prudence. But sometimes, waiting was more difficult than other times.
She dipped a mental finger into an info pod she frequented, noting that Ferdu, a high-profile designer, had released the new multitech mobile she had been promising for the past fifteen weeks.
It was a seat that flew over a six-dimensional rendition of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Tania chortled with giggly glee as Kinji took a pass at the promotional release and zoomed through a hazy sun surrounded by vivid indigo.
“Whee!” Tania screamed as they went. “This is just like taking a spike of U-ba, and then going on sense-dep.”
“Ferdu is like that,” Kinji said.
“Then I’ve got to meet her.”
“I don’t think she’s your type.”
“Jealous much?”
“If reports are to be believed, Ferdu spends half her time locked up in stasis. The two of you together would probably just explode.”
Tania laughed, and wiggled her toes as they faded back into Kinji’s zone.
“Why do artists have to be so weird?”
“Just strange, I guess,” Kinji said.
“Yeah, I know. Life is art and all that crap.”
Kinji laughed at her friend’s sullen tone. She pictured a cat with her head stretched down over her front paws. Cute, but sad.
“I admit I’ve never really appreciated Ferdu’s sense of the absurd,” Kinji said, “but I love the feeling of Now that I get from falling into her work.”
Tania’s shrug rubbed against her shoulders.
With a deep breath, Kinji collected herself.
“It’s time,” she said.
Her True Space was a small piece of memory that revealed more of herself than she was comfortable with. She’d learned how to make it a decade back, when she was a ten-year-old, just beginning to understand what it meant to live through art. “If you’re going to make real art,” her mentor said, “you have to be free to think whatever you want.” At the time, she thought the advice was about isolation and focus — that the safe zone she’d given Kinji was a place she could go to when others were chasing her down, a place she could shove her mind into to hide it from her friends or her parents, who were supportive, but obtuse.
She didn’t understand the other ramifications.
Her mentor taught her how to set up the rudimentary firewall that led to the entry level she and Tania were in now. How to set values in the security fields to deflect the most prevalent of the Central Inspector’s Office’s watchdogs. Later, when she had come to understand the deeper need for this place, she’d customized it in her own way, built levels and layers, twists and turns.
There was art, and there was art.
Now her True Space was a bona fide place where her mind could explore ideas without exposing herself.
It was also a place where she could do more.
“You’re only the third person I’ve let in here,” Kinji said.
Tania’s reply was a gentle touch. That was the thing about her. Yes, her wildness was unpredictable, and, yes, her enjoyment of all things carnal could go over the top, but Tania Brae was the kind of person who understood what it meant to be a friend.
“Who were the first two?” Tania said.
“My mom, for one.”
“And the other?”
“Less said the better.”
“A guy, right?”
Kinji dumped a bucket of sarcasm as she replied. “I was seventeen.”
“And you thought you were in love.”
Tania’s response carried just the right amount of deadpan to make Kinji happy with the revelation. “We’d been living in Guam,” she said. “I still love both my mom and Guam. The guy, not so much.”
Stepping further into her space, she came across an old piece of hers that she’d stored here some time ago.
A collection of intertwined links comprised a huge puzzle that could only be solved with multidimensional math, but whose eigenvectors released unique fractal patterns that mimicked the viewer’s mood. It was her first major work, done when she was seven years old.
She smiled at the memories it brought.
The thing had gotten her noticed by several major critics, and essentially launched her career. Her mother’s response to it had been enthusiastic confusion, though. It was clear she loved that her daughter had done something unique and wonderful, but Kinji was equally certain she had absolutely no context for what that unique and wonderful might be.
It was the first time, but not the last, she had felt separation from her mother.
“Come on,” she said to Tania.
Tania followed until finally she came to the core bubble.
The safest place she had.
“Fucking incredible,” Tania said as she probed the security shell from the inside. “Can anything get out of here?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“So, you could tie me up in here and leave me forever and no one would know.”
Kinji laughed. “In your dreams.”
“You know me too well.”
Kinji pulled another block of code to create the switch gate she knew would take her there. It loomed in her mind, hence in Tania’s, too. This was it. Take the switch, and there was no turning back. She felt the query with an acid clarity that sizzled across her tongue and down the whole of her back.
“All right,” she said. “It’s time. If Bexie’s in the pod I left for him, we’ll be able to contact him through this next portal.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do.”
Tania was right.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Tania said with a wistful flavor. “To care so much about a person you barely know?”
Her friend’s presence was strong on the wire. Warm. Vibrant. In close, Tania wasn’t nearly as carefree as she appeared. Kinji felt something firmly here that she’d known in her heart since the moment she’d first met Tania, that, while, to some, her brief affairs might look like whirlwind dalliances of the moment, Tania was not a simple butterfly absorbing nectar from one flower before flitting to the next. Instead, Kinji saw now that her friend was a perpetual mayfly. That while her linkups might last for only a few hours, for those hours Tania Brae felt in the deepest fashion that close connection some call love.
The revelation made Kinji want to wrap herself around Tania. Her friend was truly something special.
“It’s his story,” Kinji said. “I think I love his story.”
“I understand, baby.”
Kinji stood there with the code block in her virtual hand.
“Are we going to do this?” Tania asked.
“Yes.”
She placed the block into a scanning module. The wall of her bubble faded into dark.