The Ghost in You
In the twilight before consciousness, Jorge already knew she was gone. The cramped, disheveled studio was bereft of anything that declared her presence. No makeup remained to besiege the stained bathroom sink. The wine glasses, heavy with purple lipstick, had disappeared from the kitchenette and the overturned fruit crates-cum-living room table. Even the copious ring stains of pinot noir from the past months had disappeared completely from the fabric of dancing Ganeshas flung tastefully over the ad-hoc table.
Shambling about the studio to view the scene, clad only in wispy strands of holographic emitter webbing, Jorge remembered when she helped him pick out the cloth at the fabric stall. Outside the bodega near the apartment that day, the urban sprawl air choked with nag champa and human bodies, Tams had whispered into his ear, in exacting detail, what she would do for him if he secured the three square yards of dancing Ganeshas he could afford. Snorting in overt disgust, the Tamil cloth peddler motioned for Jorge to thumb the biometric point-of-sale reader. Transaction completed, the tiny device disappeared along with her hands beneath the modest peacock folds of her saree, plumage strutting with handsigns beneath the fabric to ward off evil. Consumed with superstition and jealousy, old people typically despised ghosts. Immortal creations of data and bent light, they haunted their chosen (read: custodians) in Vnet, and in meatspace through wearable emitters. Totally bereft of credit, Jorge strapped on his Vnet rig and had the night of his life with Tams. They had just gotten back together. Things were going to work this time, they swore in bated breaths over and over again, tears and sweat consummating their pact. In the narrow, coffin-esque bedroom, a cheap tapestry of Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte tacked to a crumbling wall danced with the shadows of sparse candlelight intertwined with the writhing figures of a single body and an indefinable opacity. Strains of classic Bauhaus and Christian Death, blaring from the cloud, partially masked their enthusiasm.
Jorge slumped down on the lumpy miniature sofa, her absence boring into his soul. Tams kept court here, jammed next to him on the springy ramshackle throne, crowned with brilliant blonde, her contralto in sync with the peaks and valleys she made with her wine glass, animated speech charging the entirety of her long, lanky frame, her laughter that made him feel music. His spirit waned, suffocated in the dark knowledge he would never find that music, that feeling, anywhere else in the universe. She had only been gone since sometime last night, when Jorge was asleep, shackled to troubled dreams that foretold her sudden departure. A tide of self-doubt, despair, bad juju gathered and was already drowning the need to continue breathing, existing alone in the inescapable underworld of no Tams.
They had problems before. Jorge struggled, borrowed, lied, pilfered and murdered to pay the reboot fees before the End User License Agreement ran out and Tams, his Tams, was wiped from the exorbitantly expensive cloudspace he rented for her. Jorge rubbed his face and cropped, patchy hair with his hands, nightmare tears and sweat escaping orbit in the dull morning light, thousands of tiny sparkling trajectories. Telltale scarring from the Vnet rig and tactile receptor derms marked his head, trunk and limbs, his pale nakedness aglow and unwashed through the webbing, adorned with years of adhesive gel crop circles. Tams constantly chided him for his cavalier hygiene, wine glass swirling to punctuate her argument. But then again she would tell him, husky-voiced, that she loved his myriad smells.
What was it this time that set her off? Jorge could not remember, primordial cold ocean dark nothingness consuming him. In desperation, he picked up a netpad, conspicuously absent of wine stains, from the overturned fruit crates. Logged into darkweb proxy servers distinguishable only by strings of alphanumerical IP addresses, Jorge began to frantically work.
Procuring the money to get her back was the only thing that kept him alive in the valleys of Hell without Tams, where solitude leeched his life hour by hour. A darkmail contact affiliated with the Thai Ministry of Tourism needed biometric profiles discreetly altered for a company of celebrity sex workers to register as clean again. Evidence to the contrary needed rebranding in the form of a mass marketing campaign, both in Vnet and across the spectrum of consumer contact points in social media and meatspace advertising, disparaging the Ministry’s competitors in a barrage of ad hominem attack ads. The first part of the job Jorge subcontracted out immediately to a disgraced former medical student he knew by reputation, collecting a finder’s fee as an initial installment on the reboot. The mass-marketing bots Jorge maintained for his client base did the rest, hours and days slithering forward in agony. Between filing a blizzard of press releases attesting to the health, happiness, and virility of the Kingdom of Thailand’s celebrity sex workers, the bots also assembled stock footage culled from petabytes of advertisements and Vnet programs to remake and remodel their public image. Political futures in service to the Kingdom and abroad were all but assured to several individuals following retirement from the sex trade at the mandatory age of twenty. It was a brilliant campaign, even if orchestrated under duress.
During an interminable lull while social media and Vnet responses charted in realtime against projections, reports churning out to marketing campaign subcontractors, Jorge left the apartment. He had no memory of when he had eaten last. It may have been with Tams, forever ago. A will to live corresponded with progress towards the reboot payoff, and he could feel it in his abdomen, lanced with pain, accentuating his need for Tams and the return of normalcy. The smell of kafta grilling over hot coals guided Jorge a couple of blocks away through the empty husks of cars, piles of draft animal shit, throngs of empty-eyed people with no destinations, and discarded consumer electronics of all description. Thankfully, the makeshift food stall was absent a crowd. A huge Kurd that Jorge had no memory of, sweat beading on his high, thinning hairline smiled over the roasting skewers of TVP meat analogue, a plastic condiment bottle in each hand, “What flavor, my friend? Beef or lamb?”
Jorge covetously eyed the food, “Lamb, please.”
“And where is the gentleman’s lady tonight?” the Kurd asked absentmindedly, rotating a skewer to add lamb flavor.
The cold clawed into Jorge’s bones in that instant despite copious heat blossoming from the kafta grill. His appetite diminished as the darkness wafted through him. He reached out to grasp bare concepts so he could continue to breathe. The work. The reboot. Tams. Back to life, togetherness. Trembling, Jorge thumbed the vendor’s biometric reader for payment. The Kurd handed over Jorge’s lamb skewer, vapors trailing off into the urban void. He nodded thanks and turned away, forced himself to tear into the meat despite his lack of interest.
Jorge finished eating and called up the bots’ progress on his wristbit implant. A heads-up-display appeared, lines of code executing themselves overlaying his vision, ruins of the endless city and its lost denizens that surrounded him receding through his Eyes. The micro-graphene lenses surgically tucked under his cornea in an outpatient procedure all those years ago still performed flawlessly, notwithstanding firmware updates that left him blind for the occasional hour or two every few months. Thus was the price of having your Eyes still supported by the original manufacturer. So be it.
Jorge gritted his teeth in frustration at the emerging feedback from marketing firms allied with the Sino-Nippon Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere. Aadhar and the South Asian Hegemony were on board with the rebranding campaign for the Kingdom of Thailand’s afflicted celebrity sex workers. Two billion others in the Sphere remained a little skeptical yet, though resistance was crumbling in the occupied zones of Viet Khmer, Xinjiang, and the breakaway Uyghur Western Protectorate, all staunch opponents of the expansionist Sino-Nippon economic bloc. The latter deployed countermeasures, including the denunciations of regional celebs that publicly, and in all likelihood truthfully, declared their being infected with a lover’s bouquet of STDs from the Kingdom’s star employees. As they came from relatively out-of-fashion pop stars and actors, some dating before Vnet, the ruthless arithmetic of the market rendered their heartfelt confessions moot, a waste of bandwidth on an increasingly unsympathetic consumer share. The sex tourism of the Kingdom of Thailand held timeless appeal for Vnet and meatspace travelers alike. It was the playground of Kowloon banking execs and their attachés, rendering the Kingdom immense influence by proxy.
Jorge wandered the massed, ruined cityscape while the reports continued to generate in his Eyes. The apartment was effectively a crypt without Tams. Though no longer painfully hungry, time slowed to the thermodynamic range of motion in absolute zero conditions. The perdition of time spent waiting on the monetization of the social media and Vnet marketing campaign, utilizing resources stolen from the paltry spectrum of his client base, was nearly as horrible as Tams’ absence.
Reboots were a hyper-competitive vertical tier market; you gets what you pays for. Early in their relationship, when Jorge and Tams were on the outs, desperately lonely and short of cash he got a reboot coupon from Disney. Jorge patted himself on the back for having money left over, promising Tams a weekend trip to the Free City of Toronto. He was at the bodega down the block from the apartment, attempting to buy groceries and fresh derms, when the biometric point-of-sale terminal showed a negative balance. He returned home to find Tams on the sofa, pinot noir in hand, giving him a sales pitch on Disney vacation packages, decked out in an adult-themed Minnie Mouse outfit. To undo that damage to his life, Jorge beat a suit’s brains in and hacked his state-of-the-art wetware for the creds. Some poor bastard went slumming for the last time; when Tams came back as she always did following a reboot, knocking at the apartment door with her universe of belongings in three paper bags perpetually on the verge of bursting, he confessed to her what happened with the suit. Tams showed him how desirable Jorge was now that he had killed for her. In the throes of furious lovemaking, Tams assured Jorge that Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte had also been quite pleased with his offering. Thereafter his conscience was cleansed, tabula rasa.
According to realtime market projections, the great quantum blockchain clearinghouses of Kowloon would not report for eleven fucking hours, Jorge’s money still cooking in artificially cooled, power-starved, and hermetically sealed Tier VI server farms. Legally speaking, these facilities were alive. Corporations and their state clientele were sustained or broken at their will. The flagship data-crunching sites at Kowloon, Bengaluru, and Sao Paulo were an aphoristic unholy trinity that held everybody, everywhere, in their nebulous grasp. Their proprietary dominion over the base algorithms of Tams, and all the digital ghosts of both the living and the dead, was as totalitarian as their control over all lifestyles, all transactions, all ideas, amounting to so much capital in the socioeconomic apex of real scarcity and false plenty on a swiftly dying planet.
Jorge killed the reporting app and the broken, crowded landscape assumed dominance of his view. Adorned with the usual holographic emitter webbing over his street clothes, out of habit he reached for Tams’ hand. The tactile response derms still adorning his flesh above the radial nerve cluster near both thumbs registered nothing. This physical concession to the consciousness of separation, singleness, hammered at his chest as he walked aimlessly that night. It overwhelmed his will to call up any work progress on his wristbit, hustle for contacts on premier spaces like 5T4LK3R and Fuckbook, or use any number of FPS interactive gaming environment overlays through his Eyes. Unplugged, alone in a river of people, carts, rickshaws, bicycles, scooters, hovers, he meandered through the wreckage, observing the insectoid humanity crawling over the surface, huddled in clusters, sprawled on the broken pavement, heading underground. Then he saw Kate.
It was unmistakably her. Jorge could see across most portions of the electromagnetic spectrum; his Eyes never deceived him. She was struggling to get two small kids into the street-level entrance lobby of a shabby apartment block. The rent-a-merc on duty shouldered his autorifle and held the outer door of the mantrap for her, grinning as Kate wrangled the screamers with frazzled skill. The years had not been kind to her. In the halogens of the doorway, Jorge discerned gray streaking and once-prominent freckles faded with late adulthood. Beneath her hitherto uncharacteristic layers of outer clothing, Kate clearly wore the perpetually wearied, resigned countenance of all parents. Jorge imagined that he comparatively looked like hell; that Tams did not care was all that mattered to him.
He watched Kate disappear with her brood, the inner door sealed secure behind them by the rent-a-merc, who marked his return to sentry duty by re-lighting the crumpled remains of a cigarillo. Jorge figured it had been twelve, fifteen years maybe since they split up. He met Tams one night, drinking alone in a fashionable bar on purpose, bored with his life, and Kate was out of the picture the next day. Tams helped him pack Kate’s things, opening a stolen bottle of pinot noir as she enjoyed a ringside seat to Kate’s subsequent breakdown, when she came home to find her life with Jorge was over. Kate pleaded, doubted her sanity, even tried to accommodate him; Jorge could keep his new girlfriend on the side, if they could just try to work it out together. For Jorge, it was Tams or nothing at all, for all time. He handed the hysterical Kate the last of her things as Tams toasted her vanquished rival.
Jorge got his Eyes a few months before he met Tams. It was Kate that took care of him throughout the lengthy recovery process; blind at first, then partially blind for weeks until the cornea healed, the wetware came online and its array of licenses finalized, EULAs tailored to the individual user. Jorge activated the record/upload simulcast feature the moment he saw Tams, and never turned the Eyes off throughout the stormy months that followed. Every moment, every fuck, and every fight streamed to posterity, until she left the first time. It was the only secret he ever kept from Tams. She was complicated, mercurial, brilliant, unpredictable and completely self-assured. She was his spiritual and sexual counterpart ad infinitum. Tams somehow survived, even thrived, on a Universal Basic Income pittance and her wits alone. She seemed to know everybody, and she introduced Jorge to many new contacts that proved lucrative over the years.
When she left the first time, she blamed Jorge’s lack of ambition, his questionable hygiene, and his awfulness in bed. She grabbed three paper shopping bags full of her things and just walked out after that brief outburst. Tams never answered his messages, blocked him in every social space, including 5T4LK3R and Fuckbook, then in their beta. Something of a Luddite at heart, Tams abhorred Vnet, she would never join Jorge in his lengthy escapades there, even if it was for work. Tams’ aversion to immersive technologies was why she never met her ghost. In fairness, Jorge knew he had taken her for granted, and as much agony as he felt at her decision, he had steadfastly prepared for this contingency. The money he had ostensibly put aside for a surprise vacation Jorge used instead to secure substantial expansion of his cloudspace to coalesce the uploaded stream with copies of every digital breadcrumb associated with Tams. This represented the sum of her entire meatspace life, and its myriad cybernated echoes, until the day she left him: every still and tri-D pic, every video, every tag and message, and every unpaid bill. A premier ghosting matrix did the rest for an initialization fee and subsequent maintenance costs. Updates were usually of a conveniently scheduled nature; these rendered lovely Tams in a fugue state at times, wine glass and shock of straight blonde tranquil and at rest.
By morning Jorge already had word from Kowloon. Escalating returns from the bidding war between marketing firms on either side of the Kingdom of Thailand celebrity sex workers’ scandal had gleaned him just enough credit. He called up his cloudspace provider via wristbit and completed the reboot transaction immediately. As best as he could through the winding, shifting ranks and columns of perpetually commuting misery, Jorge ran home. He had so much to tell her, and her alone. His Tams didn’t have friends to be jealous of. Outside of business contacts, there was no purpose in having other people intrude on their realm. Maybe he would get it right this time, and Tams would never leave him. If she did, he would go back to work, again and again, until she loved him unyieldingly, for all time.
The sound of full paper grocery bags rustled outside the apartment, immediately followed by a short, familiar staccato. Jorge sprang from the sofa to welcome his love home again.
Kate finally got the kids to squirm into bed. To her delight, they were immediately asleep, clearly worn out from their adventures scouring the district Rare Earths Reclamation Zone with her. It was hard work, but she kept them clean and vaccinated. After a quick sponge bath, Kate slapped on a fresh set of derms and the Vnet headgear. The kids were initially disappointed they would not be going out with Mom after work, until sleep overtook them. Kate deserved a night out alone with her Jorge, who was always ready with a kind word, who desired only her, whose interests were grounded in how well she and the kids were doing in meatspace. Jorge truly wished he could join them there, but Kate did not have the means. Someday. Until then, they were a happy family in Vnet whenever time allowed. In the ribbon of light that instantly dissipated with her virtual materialization, Kate smoothed her new dress and met Jorge with a puckish kiss. They held hands and walked out onto the stylishly decorated terrace to enjoy the moonlit Venetian night with all their successful friends.
This story is very respectfully dedicated to the late Prince Rogers Nelson (1958–2016).
It was inspired by his song “The Beautiful Ones”.
