Midnight in the garden of ice and plenty

The cold made pins and needles on her skin. And there was a lot of skin. It was the rage that year. There were clots of young men dressed in clear plastic, their rosy cheeks... all of them... bare to the snowy night. There were women in ermine, old ladies with diamond teeth. When they opened their mouths, the light sparkled even through the cloud of their breath.

Vitelina needed more cream towers. The first batch of fifty had been consumed within minutes. The patrons were crowding around the ice table, rending the edges of it slick with melt. All the food was white or clear. The spun sugar goblets dissolved when pale punch was dribbled in, leaving hands sticky. The white cygnet meat sweated with crystals of ice.

It was the first party of 2157. Madame Faurme was entertaining one hundred fifty-seven guests in her garden outside of the city. It was one of those affairs. It would have to be memorable.

Vitelina had served at many of Madame Faurme's parties, but never one this demanding. The temperature of the spouting mermaid fountain had to be constantly checked as the night went on, lest the water fail to seize into ice as it touched the growing stalagmite at the base of the flow. Likewise the mischievous cherub fountain.

The night was growing colder; the stars were painfully close. Above the garden a wet mist began to hang, risen from the fountains and sugar-goods and breath and trampled snow. And sweat. As Vitelina pushed toward the house, she came upon a tangle of youths in sharp rustly plastic, stuffing snow into whatever warm folds appealed to them. Their hair was plastered to their bodies. Their grunts and laughs were muffled in the hovering fog that reached to obscure the stars.

By the time Vitelina had returned with a triple-deck platter of cream towers and radish flakes, she could scarcely see where she was going. She led herself through the garden by sound. The greatest mass of guests was there by the food, and when she unloaded her platter, they fell around her with gleaming eyes. The wireless lights were floating in a soup of white above their heads now, but the light was enough to show their teeth, their white and glittering teeth, and the still-rosy glow on their cheeks.

The vodka moat would have to be replenished.

Vitelina stepped slowly to the faucet beyond the bleachedberry hedge. The snow was wet and pasty and clung to the sides of her glistening plastic shoes. Her toes throbbed in their cold cage. She would make more money working eight months for Madame Faurme than she would in the next ten years. But the toes, the toes. And her hands... the handle of the vodka faucet was slick. She lifted it and beyond her vision, a silver glissando tickled the air.

And was it colder when she returned to the food-heaped ice tables than when she had first passed that way? Vitelina pulled her polar bear hood around her tighter. She watched the guests warily. The sugar goblets dipped into the vodka moat, over and over. Shards dissolved, fell steaming in the white slush below. Tongues appeared to do their pink work. Everything was wet. No one was shivering but Vitelina. She turned and the flush on the cheeks of the woman behind her frightened her. Vitelina hurried to the garden's edge.

She would do rounds. She would look for something to clean. There, ten steps through the fog along the outer hedge, where the sounds of the eating and drinking were almost too muffled to be heard, she found something. It was a woman, her legs wrapped around the translucent body of an ice stallion, her blonde hair long and lank, sufficing for a mane on the unmoving beast. The strange woman did not shiver. She was already cold. White.

Vitelina wanted first to go back, but she decided to go on. Twelve steps more into the fog, she came upon lovers, lying blankly in the snow, which did for clothing on them. Their ermine wraps were tossed aside. They had been pushing snow atop each other in smooth mounds when they lay down to close their eyes. The sweat on their cheeks had already frozen to crystal. The vodka reddened their skin no longer.

Five steps onward, there was a circle of trillionaire septuagenarians, their riches now in faux diamonds that hung at their lips from imagined confections of snow. They lay now where they had consumed, on a round bench of ice three feet thick. All Vitelina could hear was the chattering of her own small teeth. The warmth had been sucked out of the night from above, and the air seemed so sharp she feared for the coverless skin of her arms and her thighs.

Madame Faurme would be in her drawing room, where she spent every party. She would be watching through the windows. She would be disappointed, of course, that she could not see her guests through the fog. She would want to know at once if anything had happened that would reflect unfavorably upon her reputation. If the cooks had botched a dish, Vitelina must report it. If the ice sculptures were melting badly, Vitelina must report it. If guests were behaving in a rude fashion, she must report it all the quicker.

Vitelina hung in the air, her feet lost to her as the miasma thickened. She could not feel them. They were gone.

Tremblingly she turned, feeling her way along the pale hedge until she reached at last the black door to the kitchens. She walked as if on stilts. She could scarcely tell with her numb fingers, but she felt the black door must be warmer than the outside. Some heat existed here, from the world of the house. The garden was dead silent.

Vitelina slid her hand to the right, along the brick of the house, pushing her numb feet through the snow, which was freezing up in an uneven mess. Her steps began to crackle and squeak. The sound seemed to follow her, unnerving her until by the time she reached the door to the undergarage her heart was racing. She yanked open the door and thumped onto the dark stairs, pulling the door closed behind her, fearing the skin of her palm might be left behind on the slick metal knob. She reached in against her fluttering chest, fumbling for her key. When she clenched it, she saw a light wink on hazily on in the concrete distance, and she made for it.

Rehousing it

So I went to write for a bit, as you will see below, hoping it would perk up my mood, but it was rather heavy going, especially toward the end. I just didn't know where to take the story. I forced an ending and then randomly clicked on a link to my own archives, landing on this:

"The book I'd been reading (until I had to return it to the library, anyway) was very heavy on the inseparability of plot and character. Plot, it averred, is what characters do next -- asserting that plot problems can be solved by changing the nature of your character. Now I see that. Stories get a lot easier to write when you have a character who really wants something. And would do just about anything to get it."

Well, jeez. I have no idea what my character wants. I went into the story thinking about setting, and that was about it.

Warehousing it

It was in her first year after college that she got the job. After graduation, there had been a period of a few months where she pretended she could get a better one; it felt like the pretense was necessary, the way saying "bless you" was necessary after somebody sneezed. Nobody believed they were really able to prevent illness and catastrophe by inducing God's blessing after a sneeze. But it would have been wrong not to say it.

And when she applied for the job, it had the inevitability of a flu coming on. All her friends were already warehousing it. Nikkita had a degree in physics. She was twenty-two.

"You can take this one," her supervisor said, steering her to a desk about three-quarters of the way down the right-hand wall of the dimly flourescent space. The computer was already on, the log-in screen already set up. Taped to the top of the monitor was a card:

Account: MXFR5609
Password: yesterday718

"Go ahead and log in..." said Boyd. "I'll hang out and make sure things are working all right."

Nikkita put in the account name and password and the game opened up. She was on top of a mountain somewhere, with a blue wyvern in front of her--

"Whoops," said Boyd, as claws flashed and the screen turned red. "The last guy didn't log out right." He leaned in front of Nikkita where she sat, reaching for the mouse. "We had to let him go. He was a little too interested in doing his own thing."

"Right," said Nikkita. "Do you want to sit here?"

"No," said Boyd. He blocked her whole view with his big body, stretching both hands in to use the keyboard. Finally he leaned back. "There you go." Her avatar was in town now, safe and sound. "Wait, let's see. You're..."

He clicked on a few info bars. The screen angle changed to show her avatar now: a leggy female with a blond ponytail and two breasts like Norman helmets. She was a fur-clad valkyrie of slaying. She had a war hammer with a massive head the size of both breasts put together with her butt thrown in. Her name was Heidihammer.

"You're a level 89 warrior. Can you do that?" asked Boyd.

"Give me a couple days, I'll figure it out," said Nikkita.

"Cool," said Boyd. "Call me if you have any issues."

Nikkita didn't break for lunch until two o'clock. She'd spent the first fifteen minutes of the morning trying to find her way back to wyvern mountain and the next four and a half hours trying to kill one. She didn't even realize she was hungry until the latest wyvern to get a kill on her began to rip open her bare valkyrie belly and stuff red strips of her flesh into its mouth in a pixellated feeding frenzy that was vastly appealing in its artificially intelligent way.

She returned from the cafe with two slices of pizza and ate with one hand while her other lazed over the mouse. She felt sufficient only to exploring the town while she ate: there was the inn, there the armorer's, there the bordello, there the punishment square...

That would be entertaining enough. She wandered closer, checking out the characters in the stocks. People were hurling tomatoes at them. "If anybody can hurl something other than a tomato," said the character on the right, "I'll give you a million gold pieces."

But there was nothing other than tomatoes. That was the way punishment square was coded.

"I can hurl insults," she said, typing with one hand.

"Do it!" said the character in the stocks. His name was Marfalcon.

Nikkita was at a loss. She took another bite of pizza and walked around the character, examining him. "Your momma dress you?" she said.

"My momma was killed by a troll! You witch! I hate you!" said Marfalcon. Nikkita had to swallow fast to let the laugh come out. Then came a private message from Marfalcon at the bottom of her screen: Are you Rubicant?

She typed back: No, I'm Procosys.

Said Marfalcon: Me too.

So he worked for Procosys too. He was somewhere in the warehouse. Typing. Nikkita resisted the urge to turn around and look. She could only see a portion of the workspace, anyway. Beyond her first row against the wall there were sixteen more double rows till the next wall. There were hundreds of players.

She typed: Know anything about hunting wyverns?

And he said: I'll let you know when I get out of this thing.

By five that evening, she had made her first gold pieces and deposited them in the Procosys account at the town bank. The players around her were logging out, some heading to the lounge where they could log in again on their own private characters. Nikkita was exhausted. It was her first day.

What we do to our friends, Part 2

"You're like this guy I've been IMing with all year," she said to me, and I knew immediately who she was talking about. And I knew she was mentioning it because she just wanted to talk about him, not about me. Because I am nothing like Preston.

I had to play it cool over the alarm bells in my ears. "What am I doing?"

"You keep changing the subject. Just like him, he refuses to talk about anything that might have anything to do with any kind of issues he's having."

I got to play sensitive friend. I gave her exactly what she wanted. (Which, it could be argued, is what I was doing all along.) "Who is this guy? Is he bothering you?"

"No! Well... he's this guy in my psychology lecture. I can tell he really likes me, but the year's almost over and he won't even tell me who he is."

What the hell? "How do you know he's in your psych class?"

"He said that much. And it's obvious he likes me. But he has some major issues."

I had to rein myself in there because I was suddenly angry with her. What the hell was she talking about, psychology lecture? Preston wouldn't have said anything about where he knew Rachel from. I should know. I programmed him. So what was she talking about? This was going to make it particularly annoying to find out the truth without giving myself away.

I tried to refocus on the goal. "Do you like him? that's the real question."

Rachel looked away. "I don't know. Maybe if I got to meet him. But he's insanely shy or something." Her voice got louder. "I don't know why you guys are so shy. If a girl tells you like thirteen times that she wants to meet you, why would you still think she must just be pitying you?"

I desperately wanted to ask what "the guy's" name was but I was suddenly paralyzed with doubt. Did guys ask about the names of other guys their female pals were dating, or was that something only chicks did? Would I sound weird?

"Guys are assholes," I said instead.

"Still, he's really... interesting. He's very smart, and he's nice to me, and... I don't know if you'd like him or not. He'll always talk about music with me, I mean, but he's not a big fan of liberals... I don't know if you guys would really get along... he is interesting though."

And she had some interesting opinions of Preston. I was very slightly horrified. Mostly by the idea that she'd been talking with a chat bot for six months. That who knows how many hours of her life had been spent on this. But it was Rachel, so the horror was only slight.

The horror did not deepen to moderate, and then abject, horror until I was dropping something off at Rachel's dorm one day and he IMed her while I was standing there, trying to get Rachel to "lend" me some of her Tide with Bleach.

It wasn't that I had exactly forgot about Preston again, but damn it near made me jump out of my shoes to see his name come up on the screen, where Rachel had just been downloading something. It was like I felt I was IMing her somehow. Then I felt like I imagined I'd feel if my vacuum cleaner had just achieved sentience and was vacuuming the room by itself.

"It's him," said Rachel, with a particular nervous excitement to her voice.

"Who?" I said, playing dumb. I leaned over her shoulder.

It was an IM from pton008, and as I watched in silence, the conversation spun out:

pton008: Hey, what's up?
vinylnites: Hey, haven't talked with you for a long time.
pton008: I suck at talking.
vinylnites: You're good at talking! You're like a thousand times better at it than most boys are! You even use punctuation!
pton008: What's up with the concert?
vinylnites: I already went... that was on friday... I told you you could come!!
pton008: What did you think?
vinylnites: It was okay... I would have liked it better if more people than Lynn had been able to go.

At this point there was a wickedly long pause. I was going to say something when I realized Rachel was more focused on the computer screen than anything else. She was tapping her heel on the floor and fidgeting with the mouse. So I didn't say anything, but as the seconds dragged on, my stomach sank and sank. Finally, after about two minutes:

pton008: What are you doing this weekend?
vinylnites: Nothing... why?
pton008: Just thinking.
vinylnites: You could come over and look at my car, if you want. It would probably only take a few minutes. You don't have to hang out long, if you're busy.
pton008: I'm sometimes pretty busy.
vinylnites: I know. I'm glad you stopped to talk with me though.
pton008: I kind of like talking with you.
vinylnites: You know, you could call me. If you ever needed to talk about something. I don't mind.
pton008: I was wondering what you thought about the playoffs.
vinylnites: Random! In basketball? I don't know, I'm flattered though, I've never had a guy ask me for my opinion about sports.
pton008: Sports can be important.
vinylnites: I guess so.
pton008: Well, I gotta go. Nice talking with you though!
vinylnites: Okay, don't study too hard.

I suddenly hated that bastard.

Rachel turned around to face me. She was drooping. "See what I mean? What's going on there? Does he like me, or not? Why would he keep IMing me if he wasn't interested? God. I want him to talk to me more than I've wanted any guy in my life."

Jesus Christ.

I tried to hate Rachel too, for her girly idiocy, like good old times, but it was too terrible. The whole thing was too horrifying. It wasn't even like a science fiction story in the year 3000 where a chick falls in love with an android that's been programmed for love. It was 2006 and Preston was a fucking IM chat bot. That I pretty much made myself. That I made that way for a reason. It was that last bit that was too much. I had no idea what I felt about it, other than horror. I didn't want to think about it.

"Guys are assholes," I said again, feebly.

Then, "I certainly am."

Rachel ignored me. "If I could only get to know him," she whimpered.

I shut down the program when I went home. Preston never IMed anybody again, and Rachel eventually found a guy (named Anders) who could treat her like a second-class citizen in person. And I never mentioned what I did to Rachel or to anybody else.

I did do one thing, though: I asked a girl out myself, for the first time in a year. Her name is Allison and she has amazing hair and likes backrubs and gifts for no reason. I used to have no confidence. Now I know it was stupid to doubt myself. I mean, who knows more about what women want than me?

What we do to our friends, Part 1

I never could resist a challenge. So when I heard Rachel mention offhand that she'd always be able to tell the difference between a person and a computer, the wheels were set into motion of their own accord.

Rachel was talking out her ass, of course. She didn't know anything about AI. She had a perception of computers and a perception of people, and never the twain shall meet. And I'm sure she never realized that the best way to tell if somebody was for real or not wasn't to know them, but to know yourself.

I knew some things about Rachel that she didn't.

When I downloaded the open-source Jack*bot, I already knew what I had in mind. I wasn't going to play this thing strictly on the level; I wanted to be certain of success. I wanted to modify Jack so that he engaged Rachel's emotions. She'd be too busy feeling whatever... guilt, alarm... lust... to even stop and think about thinking he might not be for real.

So the first thing I did was change Jack's name, of course, to Preston, because it sounded rich and stuck-up. Rachel has this thing about rich boys: she assumes one will never fall for her. I've always taken this to mean she desperately wants one to fall for her.

The second thing I did was drastically increase the lag time for some of Preston's responses. By which I mean I made it random. Totally random. I also made the amount of time after which Preston chose to close the conversation random.

The third thing I did was to program in a bunch of conversational dead ends. Now, the people who made Jack*bot were pretty bright people. They put a lot of work into it. When you discussed something with Jack, he remembered exactly what was being discussed, and would continue with it until the topic seemed to shift to something else. A conversation with Jack might run something like this:

You: Hello Jack.
Jack: Hey, Mike. What's up?
You: Dude, I'm so stressed. I've been studying for this final forever.
Jack: How long have you been studying?
You: I feel like I've been studying all week.
Jack: Dude, all week is a lot like forever.
You: I know.
Jack: I'm not a big fan of studying.
You: I know. I'd rather be out on the slopes.
Jack: Imagine if you'd been out on the slopes all week instead!

Incredibly vapid, but also incredibly coherent -- and most male conversations are incredibly vapid from my perspective anyway. Homework, chicks, sports and video games only have so many essential themes.

Well, that was exactly the opposite of what I wanted from Preston. Rather than vapid and coherent, I wanted, you might say, deep and incoherent. Jack*bot wasn't exactly designed with a personality; he was capable of random mild likes and dislikes, and had at least a couple hundred topics he could introduce given a lull in the conversation, but was mostly designed to pick up on what you said and turn it back to you. Preston had a personality.

A deeply repressed one.

Preston did not like himself. This would have mysterious causes, however, because of the number of times he kept changing the subject. And let's not forget, he was also rich. So I programmed in the chance for a few random "I suck at " and "my BMW" and "my mom's wedding business"s in the conversation.

After a few weeks of testing, I let him loose on Rachel. I had him programmed to get in touch with her again at totally random intervals, and to remember conversation topics between sessions. I programmed him to IM Rachel for the first time with a very simple opening line: "I suck at this... are you Rachel?"

I had my fingers crossed. When I didn't hear anything from Rachel for a few days, I was pretty damn disappointed. But I sure as hell wasn't going to ask if she'd had any new guys IMing her lately. I wasn't going to do a thing to jeopardize this. She was not going to suspect it was my doing. So I just waited.

Until I forgot about it.

Six MONTHS later, she finally mentions Preston to me.

Night of the cassowaries

Geoff dreamed about lucid dreaming before he actually did it. It was exhilarating within the dream and frustrating once he woke up. But after the initial disappointment, he decided to focus on the exhilarating aspect.

He was on a beach, in the dark. It was night. The beach wasn't exactly a beach entire; it was edged somehow in the upper reaches of his mind by walls, as if it were in fact a very large exhibit space. A space in a museum designed to look like a beach. But it was definitely night. The stars were out.

He saw a number of birds stalking the beach. They were great grey birds, elegant in their humble feathers, with long necks and legs. They were tending their chicks, which peeped out of holes in the ground.

"We're cassowaries," said a dignified bird to him.

It's remarkable... do I even know that word? thought Geoff within the dream. It's amazing that I'd dream about cassowaries.

There was a turtle at the beach, too. An anthropomorphic turtle, or turtle-man, that walked on its hind legs and turned to bite him with a long turtle beak--

This is too strange, thought Geoff on the instant. I'm lucid dreaming! And he knew then that he should be able to control the dream.

The turtle didn't bite him.

"No, I'd rather ride you," he told the turtle.

"Where do you want to ride me?" asked the turtle, suddenly a friend to man.

"I want to fly on you," said Geoff, because he knew that people were supposed to take advantage of the ability to fly in lucid dreams. He felt he had scarcely any time to think, but that that would be a good choice -- and before he knew it, it was happening. He felt a whoosh of liftoff, which he reflected was indeed pleasurable... but then the scene became hazy. He was not, it seemed, flying anywhere at all.

He found himself in a hallway with his academic advisor, discovering that he had asked her for a massage. A good idea for a lucid dream, he thought as she began to rub his arm pleasurably, there where they stood in the hallway. Then he wondered why, if he could do anything he wanted, he bothered to ask his academic advisor when he could, for instance, ask Halle Berry. He went to go find her, and the dream dissolved.

When Geoff woke, he knew instantly that he hadn't had a lucid dream at all. He hadn't been a bit conscious. He was intrigued on two counts though--

"I amazed I even know the word cassowary," as he told roommate Paul, and

If I'm dreaming that I'm having a lucid dream, it's at least in my consciousness... and I must be getting closer.

It came to me in a dream

I've written a number of things based on dreams I had, and it's a compelling source of inspiration for me, though maybe not for the usual reason. It's not so much that my dreams are beautiful or otherworldly or creative as much as they often proceed in story format, which so much of my writing doesn't. My dreams often have a beginning and a middle, even if I wake up before the end, and that's a lot more than my waking story ideas have.

So here's a piece based on one of the strange dreams I dreamed early this morning.