Mytholumina

Immaculate

Donna can feel computers dreaming; they reach out and touch her mind, or so she says. In the dark of her room, as the white noise tide of day goes out, and the sky rises dark and glowing, the machines begin to meditate, or so she says. It makes Reeb think of dogs twitching in their sleep, the tongues of slumbering cats licking at invisible bowls of milk; human signs.

‘You always have to look for human signs in everything,’ says Donna. She’s a star, she’s a nobody. She sells things.

Reeb is a director, a creative of sufficient reputation to currently work for Say! Play!, a company specialising in leisure software. This is the man who configured the footage that sold the product that juiced the data-suit that excited the customer who paid the cash that went into the accounts of Say! Play! He would not dare to call himself an artist, although his previous campaigns have done much to increase the sales of Say! Play!; his mind is the company’s, he can find no other.

Donna is their hot package of the moment. In studio, she is a child, innocent and trusting. As a warming light image on your retina, a sound effect between your ears, a grind and stroke of vibro-fabric, she can be your unforbidden lover. Is there such a thing as the girl next door nowadays? Who lives next door, or next floor, another tuned-up commodity? Marketing-wise, Donna is perfection. How young is she: thirteen? Sixteen? Twenty? She also hears voices; there’s a market for that, but is she the right product? She can hardly be termed normal. Once, she had a strange pain in her side and when the medics examined her, they found a tiny six-sided die in her liver. Donna was not surprised; she said the People had put it there. The People advise her often, although fortunately for everyone concerned they appear to have a fairly favourable view of her occupation. Neither does Donna punish herself. She has no conscience that Reeb can detect.

Today, she is pouting and blinking at the scanners, sighing softly in a provocative and exciting way. ‘Oh! Oh!’

Reeb supervises laconically. Later, he will tinker with the footage and, combined with a graphics package, will produce some hard-core delight for the consumer. Donna doesn’t have to be too explicit, not like it’s the real thing. Reeb can shoot a few limb movements tomorrow, some dildonics the next day; the software overdubs stock effects. Donna puts her tiny hands on either side of her face and grimaces. It is not part of the script.

‘What is it?’ Reeb asks from the other side of the observation panel.

‘Oh, they are speaking to me,’ Donna says, putting shaking fingers to her forehead, where the skin is almost translucent and has a damp sheen to it. Today, that suggestion of delicacy repulses Reeb; on other days, it has seemed attractive. She is a child, in mind if not in flesh. Reeb has a desire to tweak her smug piety with a burst of power; he can do that, but he doesn’t.

‘Who is speaking to you?’ He adjusts one of the scan controls, still shooting.

She shrugs, hand flopping into her lap. ‘My People. They’re gone now.’

‘What did they say?’

‘Something about an elevator.’

She’s making this up; she has to be. ‘What?’

‘I don’t remember.’

She can be convincing when she wants to be. That’s why she’s here in his studio. Dice and elevators, computers dreaming. Young lips wetted with the tip of a nervous tongue, wide eyes. Donna lives in another world.

If Donna has her aspects of freakishness, Reeb has his own too. Nearly two years ago, he lost half of his body. The accident itself was freakish, like getting hit by lightning. Relaxing in his data-suit at home, living out a hi-res dream, the suit had suddenly turned on him like a swarm of vicious insects, cooking his right side to a frazzle, eating away at his groin and gut. The prostheticians had been delighted by him. (We can redesign this man, they had announced proudly, and proceeded to do so. Reeb could see the humour in it now, but at the time, their eagerness had sickened him). Medics could not rebuild his apartment though or resurrect the other victim of the accident, his dog.

‘You called it to you, that power,’ Donna once said. He hated her the day she said that, the very first time he worked with her. For a while, after his therapy had proved so successful, he’d been a reluctant media star him¬self. Donna had recognised him instantly. ‘Electricity is alive too; it’s what makes the machines dream,’ she told him. His prosthetics are more sensi¬tive than his meat ever was, but there is still a seam, a sense of unreality, a sense that outsiders have moved into his body and might, one day, take over.

‘The machines are alive,’ Donna says, casting a meaningful glance at Reeb’s right side. He puts his hand on his leg; squeezes. It feels like flesh, but slightly rubbery; perhaps like some kind of tough mollusc. This is his first commission since he came out of therapy.

Donna has been one of the company’s products for six months; her face is burned into a million consumers’ dreams. She might have been a little crazy for years and kept it quiet, only now she wants to tell people about her Voices and Visions, her People. She has mentioned them in interviews. People have conjectured whether her peculiarities are the result of how she was conceived. Donna was one of the first of the home-grown ‘virgin births’. This fact must be significant, surely? Some people are not only prepared to believe it, but desperate to do so. These people are a cult the media tagged The Immaculates. To Reeb, they are a sad group of crazies that grew up around the virgin birth kick, desperate under-achievers trying to populate the steamed- up, fucked-up world with little messiahs. At the end of the twentieth century the Goddess of Love had tended to stride around with a scythe in her hand, more often than not, and the fear of fatal disease had not only launched the suddenly-respectable software porn industry, but had also estranged many people from the desire for human contact. Through artificial insemination, women gave birth who had never known a man’s touch, or indeed a woman’s. At first, it was just the single women, then the gay women; later, the cult of the Immaculates grew up. Men can be Immaculate too.

Reeb thinks the Immaculates should all be locked up, even though he knows the phenomenon is merely a reaction against the fear of death, the de-lustifying of sexuality. There’s no need for that anymore, but the vein runs deep in human consensus. Too many died back then. The Immaculates were a fringe group wanting to turn it all into a religion. Mercifully, they had never progressed beyond a minority, but they still gushed warmly about Donna in their cult magazines.

The company have kept an eye on the media and now wonder whether this is an angle of Donna worth exploiting. After all, if the rumours circulating on the networks are true, Donna is not unique. Many people, whatever their background, are stepping forward to talk about Voices and Visions. Donna, being public property, could very easily be turned into a spearhead for this movement. Her family is totally devoid of fevered religion-mongers looking for a place to hang their beliefs, but she does have two mothers; hers was a conception of convenience rather than conviction. Alexis, the woman who carried her, is now her agent and manager. Alexis is probably the opposite of anyone’s vision of a Madonna. It is doubtful whether her hands have ever met beneath her chin in prayer. She is an eternal teenager, lankily attractive with razor-cut hair and slept-in-look anti-fashion gear. That she could have spawned an angel like Donna is in itself, Reeb supposes, a kind of miracle. And, if your child really does look like an angel, and fulfils everybody’s dreams, then you exploit it; in the best possible sense. Especially when your girlfriend is obsessed by graffiti art and the photographic medium; nobody’s into anything less than 3D nowadays, so somebody has to see to the family income. Alexis brings Donna over to the studio four days a week, for Reeb to record her.

Reeb is also interviewing the girl about her Visions and Voices. Donna is pleased to comply, because she likes to talk. She is one of those pale, tiny people who sometimes become attractive under the right lighting, the right conditions of the mind. Sometimes Reeb likes her very much and is convinced she has a startling clear-sightedness. Sometimes, she irritates him and he thinks she’s stupid. He used to feel the same way about his dog, when he had one.

Reeb went back to live with his mother after the accident. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement - he’s still paying rent on his own apartment - but somehow he doesn’t have the will to move back home yet. He knows there couldn’t be a smell of burning flesh there anymore, and the block domestics would have cleaned everything up but... His mother’s apartment is spacious, she’s never there, she never bothers him. He likes the view, and it’s nearer to the studio than his old place. Occasionally, he thinks about ending his lease with the property agency, although it seems a little ungrateful, seeing as they compensated him so heavily for the accident.

Sometimes, he goes over to Alexis and Meriel’s for dinner; he has become friendly with them since working with Donna.

‘When are you going to let go of Mommy’s apron strings,’ Alexis says, smiling. They are worried about him.

Meriel points a camera at him. ‘And when are you going to strip for me,’ she says.

He’s not sure whether that’s an offer or a request.

He goes to the studio early. Alexis and Donna are late today. The trains were down again.

‘Someone died, I expect,’ Alexis says when she finally arrives, scraping back her artfully ragged black hair. ‘Jumpers! I hate ‘em. Why do I have to be inconvenienced by their inadequacy? It’s so self-ish!’ Her eyes skitter nervously away from Reeb’s body as if she wonders whether she’s touched on taboo. ‘I can’t bear to be held up!’ she says.

In the office, after her mother has left, Donna leans against the desk-top demurely. Reeb cannot imagine her living with Alexis and Meriel; she is an anachronism, a time-child from years past. She wears a white dress, but that is part of her costume wardrobe. The primness exists in the fabric of the dress, but is it a part of Donna? Reeb doesn’t know yet. Is she an example of her mothers’ artistic experiments? He would not put it past them. They never talk about Donna to him, and neither is she ever present at the dim-lit, smoky evenings Reeb enjoys in their company. It is as if the women lock her away in a cupboard when she’s not working. Once, he tried to talk to Alexis about Donna’s problem.

‘She’s imaginative,’ Alexis said. ‘That’s all. She makes things up.’

‘She believes it,’ Reeb said.

Alexis rolled her eyes. ‘You think so?’

He hadn’t meant the voices and visions; the problem, in his opinion, was that Donna had a reality all to herself. Her home, the studio, A to B, and anything in between, like other people, her parents, street bums, commuters, interviewers, even himself, seemed only to touch her awareness on a superficial level. Her only contact with the world outside her own was through performance. And in her room, what did she do in her room? Reeb cannot ask Alexis questions like that; she is clearly not maternal material. The procedure was all the rage back then, of course. New legislation meant women could claim it as a right. Perhaps all Alexis’ friends were having children that way. A public statement about her chosen way of life, her chosen lover.

Over the past two weeks, Reeb has been studying the phenomenon that is Donna. There has to be a new angle on her as a product, something the company can use; that’s his brief. Has she always heard the voices, had these experiences, and not spoken about them, or are they a more recent phenomenon? Donna cannot remember. She wrinkles her nose, pulls a face. ‘One night Merry’s laptop dreamed to me,’ she says, ‘but I don’t remember when.’

And what does a computer’s dream look like?

She doesn’t have the words to describe it; she has grown up that much. ‘I could think it to you,’ she says, ‘but that’s all.’

He would dismiss it as fantasy, if it wasn’t for the die. The slap-marks which had appeared instantaneously on her arm one day could be explained away as being psychologically self- induced. At the time, when it happened, Donna had told him one of the People had got angry with her.

‘So, what are you going to do with this material?’ Alexis asks him, through the cloud of marihuana smoke she has just exhaled. He is over for dinner again, but has only Alexis’ company because Meriel’s been called out; a rare offer of work, she can’t refuse. Alexis never talks to Reeb about his work with Donna, so he is surprised she wants to discuss it now. Usually, she talks to him about himself.

‘Donna is not unique,’ he says, ‘there are others like her, increasing all the time. They make a market. Understand?’

‘A market for what?’ Alexis swings her booted feet up on the table, kicking a plate out of the way.

‘I’m supposed to be thinking that one up.’ He considers the next question before he speaks. ‘Aren’t you worried about her?’

‘She’s quite happy,’ Alexis says. ‘She’s always been happy. Completely alien to me, of course, but always happy. I think she gets on better with Merry.’ She pulls a face and hands him her joint.

‘I tried to be specific about what kind of donor I wanted when she was conceived. I think they lied to me, don’t you?’ She grins. ‘Sometimes I wonder whether anything of mine went into her at all.’ If she feels wistful about that, she hides it.

‘Where is Donna?’ Reeb asks. ‘She’s never around when I call.’

‘She’s in her playroom. All the things she likes are in there.’

Reeb thinks Donna is too old to have a playroom. She should be hanging out with kids her own age, learning to live. Is that discouraged? He can’t believe so. Alex and Merry wouldn’t be that into Donna fooling around with guys, he thinks, but they would never force their lifestyle on someone else, not even if that someone was their daughter.

‘What’s she get up to in there, anyway?’ Reeb asks, jerking his head in the direction of the closed door that is Donna’s.

Alexis shrugs. ‘Who knows? She doesn’t like us going in there, so we don’t. We all respect each other’s privacy.’

Reeb frowns at the door. Hasn’t Donna any friends at all?

‘Donna will be OK,’ Alexis says. ‘Don’t you worry about her; she’s a survivor. Now you -’ She stabs a finger in his direction. ‘- you, I worry about.’

She hardly knows him. He’s been working with Donna for maybe six weeks and hadn’t met Alexis before then. He ought to be annoyed at her interference, and would be, if he didn’t enjoy it so much. Is that what he wants, motherly concern? Becka, his own mother, doesn’t know how to deal with emotional crises; she organised his life and then butted out to leave him with the burned-out mess of his self-image and feelings. Perhaps that’s why he hardly ever sees her. She isn’t busy exactly; just busy avoiding him.

‘I ought to find myself a place,’ he says.

‘What’s wrong with the one you’ve got?’

‘It’s my mother’s. I cramp her style.’

‘I meant the one you pay for, stupid. Are you never going to go back there?’

He shrugs.

‘What reason is there not to?’ Alexis demands. ‘Your body probably performs now better than it ever did...’ She drops her eyes, actually blushes. ‘Oh, I’m sorry...’

More than an arm and leg had been burned away. But they can fix that. They can fix everything. He didn’t believe it.

‘It’s o.k.,’ he says. ‘You’re right. I just feel... I don’t know. It’s as if someone died in there.’

‘You had a dog, didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t mean him. Someone else.’

‘Oh.’ Alexis shrugs awkwardly. ‘I think I understand that. It’s terrible.’ She brightens and pours him another glass of wine. ‘Tell you what. We’ll look for a new apartment for you this week, shall we? Somewhere near here, so we can keep an eye on you.’

Reeb is glad he has met these women. He is happy to lean on them. ‘Yeah. Fine.’

‘I heard you talking to Alexis last night,’ Donna says, when she arrives at Reeb’s studio the following day.

‘Oh?’ Reeb tries to recall what he said, what Alexis might have said. But Donna isn’t interested in what she might have heard about herself.

‘You’ve never been back to your apartment?’ she asks, round-eyed.

Reeb is taken aback. He smiles, laughs unconvincingly. ‘Not yet.’

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘Nothing. Just, well, bad memories.’ I lost half my life there, he thinks, half myself, perhaps more than half. A bad thing in the walls had swarmed into his data-suit and sucked away his juice. He feels the place is haunted, perhaps by himself.

‘Your dog died there,’ Donna says.

‘Yeah. Now, tell me what you’ve been experiencing since I last spoke with you.’

Donna reaches out and puts a delicate hand on his arm, the right arm. ‘I want to experience your old apartment,’ she says.

‘Why? What for?’

She smiles an adult smile. ‘The People want me to.’

‘And what do they want to do that for?’ He smiles back at her, although he feels nervous. He is thinking about the place, his collection of old books, his wall paintings, the way the morning light comes into the main living space, the colour of the floor. He sees himself standing in the kitch¬enette, mixing an old-style Martini for a shadowy ghost sitting on the couch, out by the hearth. The whole apartment is lit by the flicker of holographic flames. He can hear a body shifting impatiently. The air is full of perfume. The owner of these shadows, these subtle noises, this perfume was, in Reeb’s memory, nothing but a human template. Later, he recreated this person as Elna, creature of dreams, modified to his taste. Elna never had to go home, live its own life, but the dream had existed only in the artificial world of recreation and had burned out along with his datasuit.

Donna’s small, pale fingers dig into his artificial flesh. He winces a little, brought back to the present. ‘When are you going to confront this problem, Reeb?’ she asks, in a voice very much like Meriel’s. ‘Until you confront the dark things inside you, they make you helpless. They are your weaknesses.’ She stands up straight, arms folded, and, for a moment, she is a young woman wearing a child’s dress. ‘Please, take me there.’

He doesn’t want to go, even though he’s sure the place will be cleaned up. He doesn’t want to see that place again and yet, at the same time, he does. Some of his life is still there.

Donna seems to sense his indecision. She doesn’t argue with him as Alexis would. She simply breathes some words at him. ‘Please, oh pleeeese, Reeb. I have to go there. I have to see. Let me help you. I can do that. Really I can. Take me there.’

The door is familiar yet strange. He puts his lock-card in the slot and, as if he’s never been away, the door opens. Donna steps past, steps inside. He stands on the threshold staring, his right side tingling, his heart beating quickly. He can’t go in. He can’t. It stinks too much. The smell comes out in a wave of sharp remembrance. Blinking, he watches as Donna goes to the far side of the living room and raises the blind, opens the window. The city comes inside; noise below. The only smell is of disuse, a kind of staleness, harbouring memories, but not reeking.

The girl turns round, a silhouette against the light. ‘I like it,’ she says.

The walls have been repainted in a creamy colour. The sofa has been replaced, an inoffensive yet nondescript piece of furniture. Reeb would not have chosen it himself, but he can see Becka hurriedly and distastefully ordering it from the mail order channel. As he looks at it, a memory resurfaces: frantic barking, teeth closing on the fabric of his suit, pulling desperately, the deadly current passed on. He looks away quickly. Everything else is just the same. His equipment, surprisingly, doesn’t even look slightly damaged, although the data-suit has gone. Most of it was burned into him; the medics removed it along with his ruined flesh. Reeb feels sick, yet detached.

Donna crosses the room on light feet and puts her child-like hands on his arms. ‘You must come inside,’ she says.

‘I don’t think I...’

She pulls him over the threshold. ‘You think it’s haunted here?’ she says, breathlessly.

He doesn’t answer. Now he’s here, he might as well pack some of his stuff together. The kid can poke around if she wants to. He can see into the small bedroom, the disarray which was caused by his mother throwing things around, looking for the items he asked her to bring him. It isn’t too bad for him here. He should have come before. He feels he’s been trying to spray plastic skin over a rotten wound. He might as well face reality.

Donna stands in the middle of the room with her eyes closed, humming to herself. One hand is held out towards the far wall, against which the couch rests. Her face is frowning in concentration.

Reeb shakes his head and goes into his bedroom. This is where the ghosts would lie, not back in the other room, or splayed out on the floor, but here, healthy and whole. He looks at himself in the smoky mirror behind the bed, pulls down the collar of his shirt, scrapes back his hair. It is impossible to see the join between what is human and what is not human. The two materials have meshed invisibly. He has been told by the medics that his synthetic cells are no less part of him than the cells he had before; if anything, the new ones are more efficient and durable. There is no reason why he shouldn’t simply forget half of him is synthetic. He wishes he could. Turning away from the mirror, he opens a wall cupboard, but finds it difficult to summon any interest for his possessions inside. Perhaps he should throw everything away. Begin again.

‘Reeb?’ Donna is standing in the doorway. ‘You’re still in the wires.’ She looks small, hugging herself.

Her words make his spine crawl with unease. Why did he let her talk him into bringing her here? What was the point? There’s nothing left for him here. ‘Let’s go, then.’

She shakes her head. ‘No. You need that part of yourself. You need to connect with it again.’

Alexis and Meriel should have done something about her a long time ago. Computers dreaming? She’s out of her mind.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she says. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but it’s true. Part of you is in the wires here.’

‘We’re going, Donna,’ he says. ‘Come on. Don’t scare yourself.’

‘I’m not scared.’ She submits passively as he tries to lead her out of the apartment. Before they reach the door, she says, ‘You were in a dark red room, like a womb. The light was red. Someone was with you. They were very dark. Their hair felt like feathers under your hands. They were like a shell-fish, like a cat, like a bird. The name was Elna.’

Reeb drops the girl’s arm as if it has burned him. A hi-res dream, a ghost’s dream. How can she know the last thing that was playing in his mind before the swarm came down the line?

Donna looks troubled. ‘I don’t want to invade you,’ she says, ‘but I have to make you see I know what I’m talking about. I’m not mad.’

‘How do you know that?’

She shrugs. ‘It’s in the walls, your leisure-station, the heating ducts. It’s all there, and the People thought it all to me.’

‘What are the people, Donna?’ He wonders whether they could actually be real. Has she been telling the truth?

Donna turns away from him. ‘Oh, the People are only parts of me, that’s all. I call them People because I want it to be like a movie, or, like having friends. I’m friends with all the parts of myself, and they speak to me. Some are smarter than others.’ She holds out her hands to him, as if she wants to touch him. ‘Your data-suit’s been replaced, Reeb. It’s in the drawer under the monitor. You can take back what you lost, if you want to.’

‘I can’t take back the flesh,’ he says sharply.

‘That is replaceable, it doesn’t matter about that,’ Donna replies. ‘You’ve left stuff behind though that does matter. Feedback.’

He feels awkward putting the suit on in front of Donna, he feels vulnerable. She is quite familiar with the equipment, which surprises him. ‘I have stuff like this in my room at home,’ she says.

Is that all? Reeb hadn’t imagined her secret playthings would be anything as mundane as data-suits.

‘There are two suits here,’ she says.

‘There shouldn’t be.’

Donna pulls a face and shakes out the wired fabric. ‘But here it is. For me. I need it, so here it is.’ She smiles. ‘You see?’

It’s only further compensation, Reeb thinks. Two suits left in the apartment to replace the one that fried him. Most people would never think of putting one of the damn things on again. If the suits are a gift from the property agency, it’s in the worst taste.

‘Ready?’ says Donna. For a moment, Reeb wonders whether he is afraid. Not of being hurt again, but of Donna herself. There’s something too eager about her. The hood goes over his eyes.

‘Relax,’ Donna murmurs. ‘You’re on your way.’

He feels claustrophobic for a few seconds until Donna connects him. At first, it is all fuzzy; black and white static, noise-sight. He is hooked into nothing but the main power system. The program they are running is the day-time purr of appliances ticking over, the nowhere hiss of mindless, directionless, formless energy. This is crazy. The girl is crazy. There’s nothing here. Nothing.

Then, out of nowhen, he is aware but dreaming, jacking into a tactile visualisation. The light is red around him. His body throbs in anticipation and there are feathers beneath his hand. For the first time since the accident, he senses a feeling of desire, his body is waking up, but this is only a dream, isn’t it? He is in a dark place, surrounded by a sense of breathing, perhaps his own. There is also a feeling of confinement. Reeb flexes his arms, his fingers, breathes in through his nose. He does not know where he is.

‘In the wires,’ says Donna, close by, yet far away.

This is not real, Reeb thinks and attempts to extend his awareness. He feels the presence of Elna, his animal-human companion, but cannot see it. Part of him can sense the touch, but it is incomplete. There is no sound, no chirrup of welcome, no sensuous brush of fur. Red light pulses swiftly round him, and for an instant, he is back fully in the old dream; that of feathers and sex, warmth and envelopment. He sees Elna’s slanted slitted eyes, open mouth, small, pointed teeth. The eyes blink in greeting, the velvety throat purrs. Then, it has flashed past him, just a fragment, like an echo of a cry.