Sensory Transfer
Spinning the pen in her right hand, she turned the mechanical, rotating chair to her left in one smooth motion, reaching towards a muddled dresser. Flicking aside a pile of discarded electronic minutiae, seeking, her small fingers latched onto a cassette tape: black, glossy and smooth, around the size of her palm, with a grey ridge protruding from the bottom half, allowing access to a tiny central compartment. A coil of reflective tape cascaded gently down her crossed legs, trailing from the bottom of the plastic shell. Rotating the pen in her right hand in a swift, relaxed action between her fingers, she found and placed the end into the compartment, turned it, and rewound the contents. The room was small with a dark, messy mattress hidden in one corner, large enough for one occupant, and in an alcove just barely wide enough sat a desk strewn with keyboards, monitors and bulky electronic equipment emblazoned with the names of cheap electronics manufacturers from the Far East. Most of the space was taken up by a large CRT monitor, black, punctuated by the recurring flash of a green cursor on screen — the only source of light in the room aside from the weak, failing light of a blue-tinted desk lamp on the dresser behind her chair. A key on the main board of the desk began to flash, just inside of her peripheral vision, milky white and offset against the black case of a decades old Zenith tape deck, hooked into the side of the monitor with a thick cable. She hastily recoiled the remaining tape in response and sighed, lamenting the intrusion on her work. Placing the tape to one side on a pile of depleted software cards, she started typing; the keys of the board clicked and clacked as she composed a quick, frustrated response, brushing the blinking white LED with the edge of her middle finger as she went, disabling it.
R: WHAT NOW, MARTIN?
Only the green glow of the on-screen text as it filled highlighted her facial features: smooth, contoured and pale. Retrieving the tape once more, now restored and ready to play, she flicked open the lid of the Zenith and slotted it neatly inside, closed the lid and locked the device in position.
M: 2 MINUTES AND 38 SECONDS BEFORE WE HAVE A GAP.
The tape deck began to whine as it booted the program from it’s enclosed cassette. Rotating in her flimsy office chair, she fumbled below the piles of electronics on the dresser for a second time, this time pulling free an elastic hair tie, with which she gathered a bundle of blonde, patchy hair in a tight ponytail, waving stray strands away from her eyes in the process. Returning her gaze to the screen, a vast collection of 3D nets and cubes formulated as they were individually loaded in from the tape, forming a line matrix image of a beach adorned with reclining chairs, trees and tourists. All of them merely outlines of green data, punctuated in turn by the soft glow of the blue lamp across the room. They moved awkwardly and digitally, anything but organic in their motions, a result of the cheap imaging hardware in the machine. Reaching above the monitor, she deftly raised a white headset with a bulbous eyepiece up and over her head and secured a number of dull leather straps to keep it in place over her eyes and ears, clasping shut two plastic brackets. For a brief moment in time, pure silence and darkness enveloped her entire being, muting the sound of the tape deck and nullifying the mixed coloured ambience of the room’s light sources. Text began to scroll directly across her entire field of vision.
M: ROSE, WE CAN TRANSFER NOW. I’LL SEE YOU ON THE BEACH.
Raising her hands to the sides of the visor, Rose simultaneously depressed two stud switches to push the tape program building on the monitor outside onto the headset display. What surrounded her moments before — a dark, cramped bedroom with the collective electronic clutter of a sheltered existence, flashed into view for a moment and then formulaically faded away line by line, oozing through her senses like a dripping viscous liquid — away, gradually, into an incomprehensible mess at the base of her consciousness. For a frightened and disorienting series of seconds, she flailed phantom limbs into the void and twitched her retina back and forth in search of a light source, but found nothing tangible to comprehend. After spending a moment overcoming the terrifying loss of control, she relaxed her limbs and accepted the sensation, like falling into an enveloping blanket of warmth and safety as if curled tightly and comfortably in bed watching the sunrise. A familiar pink neon outline generated by her re-entry to the world of consciousness formed slowly, in a fashion very similar to the green outline of the monitor screen in her basement bedroom, taking the shape first of arms and hands and legs and feet, then a full body extending out below her, punctuated by tattoos in swirling Chinese characters around her right leg. Almost certainly Triad markings of some kind, she thought. She reached down with an uncertain hand and scratched the markings with painted black fingernails, outlined still with the faint pink glow of the residual transfer effect caused by a long distance sensory takeover. Blinking, the utter blackness of the world outside of her unfamiliar body was suddenly and violently replaced, as if she had been woken from a deep yet confusingly fleeting dream state. As expected, and as always brain-crushingly quickly, the full sensory suite of Rose’s analogue body became active, as though a tidal wave had appeared and washed over the beach she now sat on, starting her awake. She reflexively kneaded the sand underfoot as an exercise in testing her new extremities.
‘Welcome to Vietnam, Rose. Vung Tau — nice this time of year huh? A little different from your basement in Philadelphia.’
The voice, in English, was measured and deep with a thick south asian accent. It came from a sun lounger a few feet away. Martin, or at least his typecast South East Asian analogue body, sat reclined half naked sporting a pair of designer sunglasses. His upper body was also covered in tattoos, but they seemed to be in a different script to hers, something more familiar. She found it difficult to take the man seriously presented with such a caricature of alpha male traits: a strong chest, slick styled black hair and a confident aura. It was all a little sickeningly constructed. Private citizens around the globe willing to put the time and effort into cultivating their bodies into athletic and attractive analogues now made sizable amounts renting their bodies out to wealthy tourists, businessmen and, in the case of Rose and Martin, contractors with access to sensory takeover technology.
‘You know, having your analogue look like a catwalk model only makes me even less impressed with the real version of you back in the States,’ Rose replied, looking disdainfully again across the phrases adorning her own figure, ‘These tattoos aren’t even in Vietnamese, I’ll have to cover them up before we leave. Otherwise I’ll stick out like a sore thumb in Saigon.’ Springing to her feet, she examined a dainty silver wristwatch on her left arm. ‘Let’s move already. We hit an earlier window; we can be cruising through downtown within the hour. Plenty of time to recon the joint before we make a move.’
Credit to JonasDeRo on DeviantArt for the header image.
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