@Expectations Read online

  Melamanana [to Zan] At work I keep StElene in a window? Boss thinks I’m busy even when I’m not.

  Zan [To Melamanana] But it’s Saturday night.

  Melamanana [to Zan] You got it! Cute guys!

  Freebaser [to Zan] Takes mymind off heavy things, OK?

  If Bruno Bettelheim was right and we all have to tell ourselves stories about our lives just so we can make it through our lives, the stories players on StElene tell about themselves are as varied and complicated as the people telling them.

  Furioso [to Zan] I may be alone but I never have to be lonely.

  Lark [to Zan] Fun. Fun and games! There’s always a party going on.

  page Lark Sweetie, what about your dad?

  Lark has received your page.

  You sense that Lark is looking for you in the grand ballroom.

  Lark pages you “Dad? What dad? Don’t worry. I’m cool.”

  Earthworm [to Zan] You’ve got to know as well as anybody that the MOO is very interesting ground politically. I think the two most interesting things in the world are sex and politics, don’t you?

  Zan [to Earthworm] I’m just asking the questions today.

  Earthworm [to Zan] Studying democracy in the MOO.

  It’s the future!

  Zan goes through the logs, deleting extra lines. Regular players are so used to the duplications that they hardly notice, but an outsider reading the logs would be confused. To direct her response to Earthworm, she typed:

  :looks only slightly skeptical

  —earthworm Are you sure that’s all you’re doing here?

  On her screen those lines show up immediately followed by what Earthworm sees:

  Zan looks only slightly skeptical.

  Zan [to Earthworm] Are you sure that’s all you’re doing here?

  Earthworm laughs. “Like, you think I’m really here for the sex?”

  Imelda [to Zan] Anonymity=freedom. We can do

  *anything we want.*

  Implied: act without consequences. If this is action. She doesn’t know. This fact, or belief about life on StElene has so many ramifications that she can’t begin to analyze it until she has a big enough sample to determine the norm—if there is a norm.

  At the edge of a chasm. In the room at the top of Charlie’s house Jenny says aloud, “What are norms?” With a pang she remembers Reverdy in one of their early conversations—at the beginning, before she let herself fall into love.

  “No guilt,” Reverdy said; she could tell by what he said that he had a dazzling smile. “That’s the great thing about here. We can do anything we want. What are we anyway? Minds meeting in a void.”

  She said uncertainly, “Real people.”

  “Committing text, not sins. Whatever we do, we’re not hurting anybody.” This is the path Reverdy laid down for Zan to follow into their consuming love: “Think of the power. Here, we can do anything!”

  “Power,” she said, and did not add, and this is what bothers her: without responsibility.

  Is that why Reverdy spends his life on StElene? To do whatever he wants and not be held accountable? What about Zan? She doesn’t know. She thought it was the company. Unending conversation about everything—smart, dumb, witty, banal. On good days, she sits down to a feast of ideas because people smart enough to function in a big, complicated virtual space like this one are more intuitive than the average, more adventuresome. More exciting. On bad days, she thinks it’s all about Reverdy. No. It’s only about Reverdy.

  With Charlie perpetually on duty, she thinks she’s here to save her life. And if the compression is killing her? Fine. Pushed to the limit, forlorn and exhausted, Jenny is ready to admit that a part of her is starving, helpless in love.

  The more she knows Reverdy, all she wants to know is Reverdy, and the mad, compelled part of her wants to log off and get in the car and fan out over the country in growing arcs, looking for him.

  She’ll just keep driving until she finds his home town wherever it is and locates Reverdy’s house and knocks on his front door. If he doesn’t answer she’ll just go in. She will find the room where Tom is typing and stand there until he turns and sees her and for the first time ever she and her lover will be together in physical space. She doesn’t know what they’ll do then, but she does know she can’t go on like this. She wants to damn well find Tom and see him and feel him and touch him, because the partial, unseen Reverdy that Zan knows so well loves her more powerfully and persuasively than the whole of handsome, physical Charlie Wilder. For the first time ever she understands what true love is, and if her inner sentinel warns that what Zan and her lover have together on StElene is perfect precisely because it sits firmly in the vestibule of the uncreated, never mind. She’s beaten that reserved, judgmental self to death and shoved the remains into the garbage and closed the lid.

  And with Reverdy nowhere around she does what you do. Keep busy. Keep busy, whatever you do. Posting to *lark. Editing her logs. Keeping watch like the wife of a sea captain lying awake in the night, waiting for the floor to shift under the weight of his first step.

  Winston [to Zan] You know what life is for me now, like how they told me the operation would work and it didn’t, or how much it hurts. On StElene I can walk again. It’s the one place where I’m as free as I was before I got hurt. Thank God I can still type.

  So there’s that.

  Fearsome [to Zan] <<<grinnnn!>>> Sex. It’s the sex.

  At least Fearsome is funny about it. Others—Domnita, Sadissimus, for instance—are dead earnest. Enhanced experience. Unbelievable sex. And the sex, whatever sex means to this group of players that Zan treats so gingerly, covers the spectrum. Player descriptions range from Playboy and Cosmo fantasies to heavy leather to BDSM regalia complete with cock rings and nipple clamps. Fastidious Zan avoids them all as if they’re carrying impetigo. She is resolutely above all that. What we have is different.

  Articular [to Zan] You know where I’m coming from.

  It’s the roleplaying games. There’s no roleplaying game I can’t eventually dope out, so. I have fun writing bigger, stronger games.

  Zan [to Articular] So your role here is game master?

  Articular [to Zan]:) Sure. But how about you?

  What’s your role?

  Zan [to Articular] Role? I’m not playing any role.

  I’m me!

  Articular [to Zan] Yeah, right you are. You’re like me, describing the dragon. You’re choosing which parts of yourself to show.

  Zan [to Articular] You mean, like not telling you that I have greasy hair and weigh eight hundred pounds? Articular [to Zan] OK, you got me. I’m laughing RL, but I’m not. You know what I mean. See,

  I think we’re all in costume here.

  Zan [to Articular] Embarrassing, isn’t it. We are!

  Articular [to Zan] So I admit it, this is one place in my life where I can totally be in charge. That’s my reason. What’s yours?

  Zan [to Articular] Good thing he couldn’t see her face clench or her hands tremble. That’s what I’m trying to figure out!

  Smart man, Articular, running away from life so fast that all he sees is the game. But he’s put his finger on the question. If they are all playing roles—is Jenny really only typing in the character of Zan the beloved? Is this ache that possesses her real, or is it something she and Reverdy have confected to pass the nights?

  Zan [to Solomon] You’ve been here since the beginning. What do you think we’re doing here? Is StElene life or is it only a simulacrum of life? Solomon laughs.

  Solomon is too famous here to direct speech to you. He knows he has your attention no matter who else is in the room.

  “My, you really *are* young in the game, aren’t you? This isn’t life, it’s an act of creation.”

  Zan [to Solomon] For the log, if you’ll please just clarify.

  “It’s a collaborative effort. Creative.”

  Zan [to Solomon] For the log. By creative, you mean the programming,
designing all these new spaces for players? Objects they can use? Features so they can express themselves?

  “That? That’s nothing. Beyond the database, the programming that goes on here is mostly baby steps.”

  Zan [to Solomon] Then what are we doing?

  “My dear, we’re writing a collective novel about ourselves.”

  Zan [to Solomon] This is nothing like a novel.

  It’s …

  “Text. We’re creating text.”

  “No.” Why is this so disturbing? “This isn’t text, it’s life!”

  “It’s just typing, everything we do is considered.

  A literary act.”

  “Solomon, we’re talking! We’re all together here.”

  She doesn’t know why this is so important to her, but it is. “And we’re really here.”

  “In the greatest collaboration since Greek drama.”

  “Thank you, Sol. I’m so grateful for your time.”

  Funny how chronological age is eclipsed by age in the game. Solomon’s been around so long that he is one of StElene’s famous wise men, but age on StElene is never physical. @about reveals that Solomon just turned twenty; he first logged on in the dawn of the community, when he was fifteen. This is another oddity: unlike life in the real world, in this virtual life, age equals wisdom … It’s—

  Oh hell why can’t she stop typing @find reverdy

  And then suddenly, unaccountably, he’s back.

  Reverdy Connected The Dak Bungalow

  In the next second, he is in her room. And, God, she’s so relieved! In Brevert, Jenny hears her own voice. “My love. You’re here!” It may be relief, it may be compression of three days of waiting for Reverdy, maybe it’s a premonition that this is the beginning of the end. Whatever it is that prompts her, emotion blows up in Zan like a line storm and sweeps through her, cleaning her out and leaving her flattened in its wake like a desert ghost town.

  But Reverdy can’t know what Jenny Wilder is thinking because Zan hasn’t entered a response. “Zan?”

  My God, what to say? Even though Zan knows she is tempting fate or the devil or threatening Tom Dearden’s profound solitude IRL she does not stop to ask her best love, “Where were you?” or, “What happened?”

  She doesn’t even ask, “Are you all right?”

  Instead Zan, who has never really been anybody but Jenny Wilder, really, stays silent, wide open and temporarily exhausted; she is just burned out.

  “Zan?”

  And, crazy with love and loss, foolish Jenny leapfrogs into the next dimension, inadvertently sending this message. She drives it like an arrow directly into Tom Dearden’s secret, unknowable heart. She types:

  “DEAREST I HAVE TO MEET YOU. REAL LIFE. NOW!”

  It is Reverdy who falls silent now.

  When her lover does not respond, Jenny types, “Oh my God, Tom, I love you so much please don’t let’s us ever be separated again.”

  He does not respond.

  “I’ll find you. We have to be together. We do!”

  Still nothing.

  Her hands are trembling. Her breath hangs in front of her like a tropical mist. Jenny knows she is pushing where she ought to hang back but she can’t stop herself. No. She can, but she won’t. She’s been torn apart for too long and she has to solve this. She has to solve her life!

  “I love you, Tom. It’s time. I want us to find a place we can meet so we’ll always be together. We have to really be together and really touch each other and never, ever have to come apart!”

  And if Reverdy hangs there without responding, Jenny won’t know it. If he groans aloud and disconnects she won’t know that, either. She’ll be spared the embarrassment if he disconnects and the misery if he stays logged on long enough to refuse her. She won’t have to face the fact that she has just stripped naked without knowing whether Tom wants that, because if Reverdy is back home at last on StElene—

  —God. Charlie is back home too, RL!

  She may have heard the front door open, maybe she heard him speak to the kids but deep in love, Zan is deep in denial. She heard Charlie on the stairs but she has Reverdy here, he’s finally here. She’s typing blindly, thinking not yet not yet. She hates the intrusion. Now. Just when she and Reverdy are …

  Words pop up. On the screen she sees, “Zan!”

  Behind her in the room, Charlie says, “Babe?”

  “No!” Shattered, Jenny switches off the computer so Charlie won’t see the afterburn of her infidelity. So he can’t see the desperate, incriminating demands she typed, her crazy love for Tom Dearden a.k.a. Reverdy etched on her screen.

  Zan disconnects before she can see or begin to grasp what this loving threat has done to Reverdy. Torn between this and Charlie, she cries, “How did it get so real?”

  @twenty-four

  REVERDY

  Zan, what are you doing? I WANT TO BE WITH YOU. RL. NOW.

  In both kingdoms, Tom Dearden shudders. Too many threats, he thinks, shaken. First the corporation. Now this. For too many reasons, his days here are numbered now.

  Never let the people know what you’re thinking.

  To survive your life, you have to barricade the city. Close your gates. Let nothing show. If your enemies even guessed what was inside you they would crack you wide open. They could ride into you like The Wild Bunch and lay you waste, blasting away until nothing is left standing, not even the shell.

  Nobody knows what’s going on inside the self that Reverdy protects. Not Zan, not Suntum International, not the Directors with their Saint-names. To a man who keeps himself locked tighter than the Forbidden City, privacy is everything. Containment is essential, Reverdy thinks, and is surprised to find Tom Dearden’s jaw clenched like a bear trap as his spirit hangs in space, cut loose from its moorings. In her mad rush to broach the perimeter, Zan overturned his expectations. Arm the battlements!

  When he first found rich, fluid StElene, where souls come together in the dark and everything you do is secret, he was joyful. Excited. The new Eden! Alone on StElene last Thursday night he found bugs everywhere. In Zan’s Place. In the Dak Bungalow. On the Suntum server, which he has cracked. They’ve been listening!

  When your world is threatened on all sides you do what you have to. You keep busy. Reverdy knew Suntum was ripping off the players and now he can prove it, so there’s that. The bastards have been pirating applications developed here and selling to the highest bidder. That, he could handle. In the freemasonry of life online, the best things are shared.

  But that isn’t the worst. StElene is a voyeurs’ paradise. After he found the bugs he prowled through the corporation server until he unearthed proof. High-end customers have been paying Suntum untold amounts to log on and spy on the intimacies unfolding here. His intimacies! So everything Reverdy has said and done here is readable, for a price. Suntum’s customers tap into private lives here as cynically as they turn on the TV. But not for long. He’s sent them mails from behind his powerful firewall. More. He’s inserted a few strings of code that’ll make Suntum rue the day the corporation tangled with him. Tom Dearden is very good at what he does. They’ll never trace it to him.

  Listen, at some level he always knew. The “expectations” Suntum laid out without calling them laws came with a warning from the Saints. Death to any player who says or does anything to attract the attention of the Feds. Do what you want as long as you don’t bring scandal on StElene and the Corporation, or enable a Federal Indecency Act. But people are people. We fall in love, he thinks. We say and do things the physical world wants to make us sorry for.

  Things that they can only do here.

  Reverdy thinks about it every time he and Zan make love, but he’s more in love with her than he’s ever been with anyone, and StElene is the only place where they can meet. Their imaginations join and fuse in love in this rich, perpetual night, and Reverdy knows the best, the only eternal love is the kind that blooms in the imagination like a jungle flower.

  Spies? Al
l right, he can live with it.

  He was going to tell her some of it tonight, but she didn’t give him a chance. Instead she knocked him off his foundation with one line. “I HAVE TO MEET YOU.” It is like a violation. And disconnected before they could straighten it out.

  It has thrown him into a transport of reflection.

  If Reverdy is alone in

  Zan’s Place Zan (sleeping) is here,

  if an infernal machine at the back of his mind was dislodged by his lover’s shocking threat to step out of the box and into his arms, it is rolling downhill fast. It gathers speed as it careens into the forefront of his consciousness like an engine of destruction. Nobody outside the fortress can know. Lover and beloved, adventurer and enemy, typist and avatar, man and ideal, with real and virtual characters and lives so inextricably mingled that he can no longer separate them, Tom Dearden a.k.a. Reverdy is profoundly disturbed.

  I can’t!

  Stay here.

  Can’t leave.

  It would kill me.

  Distress makes him reckless. Movement may not be action but if you keep moving fast enough you don’t have to think.

  Reverdy types @join azeath

  It is a bizarrely self-destructive act.

  Azeath’s Little Hell is wallpapered with the scalps of his enemies. You are standing ankle deep in their bones. If you come here, you can be destroyed here, but hell is never secured. Hell is wide open to all comers. Make one wrong move and you’ll never get out alive. Azeath is here.

  “What the fuck!”

  Reverdy grins. “It’s time.”

  “Time for me to tear you apart IVR?”

  “Reality isn’t virtual. It’s real.”

  “I thought you said it was only a game.”

  “Oh, me.” Reverdy grins. “I’ll say anything.”

  “Smartass with your smart mouth. What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “There are a couple of things you should know. Real things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  So deep in the game that he’s almost happy, Reverdy grins. “Things about here.”

  “I thought you said this wasn’t real.”

  “No, I said it was real.” He has confused Azeath and this is a delight and a pleasure. Now it’s time to drive in the stake. “At least it’s for real. So.”