Myopia In A Popular Culture Of Ascension
an excerpt

"Where do you think this will all be 3,000 years from now?"

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow:
They toil not, neither do they spin;
And yet I say unto you,
That even Solomon in all his glory
Was not arrayed like one of these…"

From Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut ("… not a book about what is, but a book about what could be."), who was in turn quoting from Matthew 6:28.

People like Ballein and Sally accepted their world as-is, no returns and no complaints. Mars didn't suddenly spring up around them with trumpets blaring, in a big surprise. For them, it had always been there since their lives had begun.

Sally was half Ballein's age, but had seen many times as much as he had, not including her copies. Though, Ballein had the impression that her copies didn't get out very much.

Ballein had been touring the world for nearly fifty years, but was just about the reach the peak of his fame, and he knew it. Mordecai, an indispensable piece of software and his personal agent for the past nine years, had been running pattern analyses on the one cultural quantifier that you was guaranteed in large bulks every passing moment. Mordecai had picked up from where Onelook40 had left off after decades of service. The years of research into cultural vibrations and swings were shaping up almost as expected.

From the world's perspective, Ballein's style was little different from his contemporaries fifty years ago, when giving a nod to the social agendas of the old, dying establishment was becoming the new anti-establishment thing to do. It contributed to their mystique, until a small, disorganized band of tweak-descendant datapunks hit the scene and made sensational nuisances of their selves, and for a long time thereafter, supporting environmental co-habitability developed a stigma that was like supporting illiteracy and bad taste.

Many of Ballein's contemporaries were in fine places to throw in their cards and walk away from the table. Others wisely packed and took flight above Mars to the planet's orbitals. Onelook40 insisted that Ballein had struck just above a rich vein of gold, and that he needed to keep digging, and not change his style one bit.

Oh, and to stay on the surface; on Mars, in cities like Port Robinson and Olympus. The surface was where at least 38 million tweaks still eked out a living, and could afford to live in close proximity to modern civilization. Entertainment was cheap, and used more effectively than anything else to spread ideas around the populace. What cost a lot of Red, especially for the tweaks, was the close proximity. As the atmosphere became increasingly gaian, and more and more oxygenated according to one of the longest-terms plans ever devised by a group of regular Earthlings (everyone who had attended those first meetings were dead, and so were all of their great, great, great, great, great grandchildren except for that guy, Dunsmuir Specialedition, and yes that's a changed last name), well there was a lot of tweaks, then, who had figured they'd be dead by now, and their descendants, and their descendant's-descendant's-descendants, were often as pissed at them as they were at the upper echelons who still were sticking to the plan that the solar system needed another planet just exactly like Earth.

Meanwhile, in the long march of time and progress, the marchers had been walking faster and in larger leaps. Before long, you ended up with the 61st district. Like the magic kingdom, every major city had a 61st district. And in every city, the magic kingdom was overshadowed by it.

That was life on Mars. If you were a normal nearbaseline, then you lived your life in the shadow of progress… in the shadow of the iceberg. The orbitals were a good deal worse, and yet better. Architecture had its options in space, and yet its hazards. One thing for sure though is that you could fit more people in space than you could on Mars… roughly 150 million more, right around in orbit. There was still a lot of room to spare. Space would be hard pressed to run out of space. But a great deal of these people hadn't started out their lives as people, and then also a great deal had gone there as people, but were now living in small, cramped servers that felt like wide-open worlds, while they were playing, living, fighting, working, and forgetting about the real rest of the universe.

You almost had to do that. You almost had to get a ticket and upload yourself into some la-la land if you really wanted to work your ass off, or feel like you did anyway, in order to make due. People like Sally had it worse than Ballein. If Ballein ended up somewhere out in the middle of some barren desert, which there were still plenty of on Mars, then he would eventually die of starvation, heat, or suffocation in some altitudes. Tweaks were suffocating and starting all the time. But in the cities, you could live a comfortable life, well-fed, entertained, nice apartment…. That's not to say that you didn't work on Mars. If you were a biological person, especially, then you wanted to work. But you worked for things like self-improvement, and something to do, and reputation. You didn't have to, but you may find it surprising, then, that unemployment rates in almost every city were minimal. Why were they minimal? What on Mars was wrong with these people?

So the iceberg, like the creative downtown area on the 61st district's edge, was kind of upside down and pointing at Mars. The further out you went, the weirder it got. Great deals of the entities living in orbitals around Mars were A.I. Some of them had not interacted very much with biologicals, some had. Some didn't even like them very much.

Meanwhile, The Magic Kingdom was surround by blocks of businesses and neighborhoods designed to resemble the good old days of Old Earth, which it hardly did, but few knew any better.

The elevator door opened and Ballein was asking Sally if she was sure that she was still in the mood to go out. She seemed to understand the intention behind such questions, but they probably bore little relevance to the way she operated.

She pushed him out of the elevator onto the cracked concrete sidewalk of Main Street. Immediately, he was less concerned. He smelled the smells of some of the only food left in the world that was so real that it could make you sick. He heard the sounds of dark bars with hard drinks, proto-fetishistic club-beats; he heard a note from an old epoch, like way back vintage, The Scholarly Genome by The Intelligent Time of Intelligence. And he thought to himself… 'Where are they now?'

The sidewalks were imperfect. They were used, scuffed, broken and irregular. Street signs, once bent, were likely to stay that way. At community meetings, people would talk about the broken stop sign on Main Street, for instance. Unanimously, people would want it to stay that way.

Ballein turned around and smiled at his first new android friend. He wasn't going to ask her about anything if she didn't bring it up. He figured they were here to avoid the world around and above them for a little while. But she did offer something in the way of explaining her experience on the elevator just minutes previous. "I'll show you something at the first store we come across," she said, and left it at that.

They walked away from the elevator, which disappeared into a beat up brick wall next to an alley way and a few garbage cans, and she directed him down the street a few yards to a glass storefront with old-style advertising painted across the windows.

The next time he turned around, though, he noticed how far back she was trailing him. He spun up his peripheral infolayer, which was the spot in the corner of his vision where his optic nerves spit time, temp, distance, etc, after consulting with the outdated, oversimplified calculator tucked somewhere in his gray matter. "What's this nine feet crap?"

She glanced, in an exaggerated manner, toward the other side of the street, where the side of another brick building towered over other pedestrians, and then directed her stare in front of him. The streets were dotted with urbanites and the first arrivals of after-work, weekday warriors. Some of them had an android, too.

In all such cases, the androids always followed behind, never alongside.

"Oh, good grief… oh geez, spare me?" Ballein half-skipped backward, and bumped into Sally. He locked her arm around his, and started walking forward again. A few people began staring or whispering with each other and he even heard his name in some of the whispers (which felt kind of nice), and a few other people didn't notice or didn't care. Ballein let his optics group the two camps and show him a statistic, which was about half-and-half. He figured that sort of statistic was always a good time to set the trend down whichever side felt like a better way to go. It was a hobby.

Sally let out a nervous laugh and whispered in his ear, "Okay, you're embarrassing me, show-off."

Ballein looked at her as if she ought to know what he was doing.

She groaned, but with a half smile. "Okay, you like me. The whole world doesn't have to know."

Ballein let go of her and made a sort of half-laugh, half-gasp. "Look at that guy over there, look at the woman following him. I mean come on." But it was an android that was following.

"Um, but that other woman beside him, she's probably--"

"Yeah, probably, I don't care maybe he's married. She's probably in on it too."

Sally rolled her eyes and sighed, "You sound like a creep, it's not about sex; but for all we know, she, or it, is incapable." She lowered her brows at the blank look on his face. "The world down here isn't used to people like me, okay?" She watched his face another moment, then, "You know, unbridled consciousness, or worse, the lack of an off-switch?"

Ballein put his hands in his pockets with an "Ah-ha" acknowledgement.

It's not that people like Sally were news to anyone. It's that she represented, in some people's minds, the antithesis of their broken stop sign. And, there were millions of places on Mars for people like Sally, and fewer and fewer places on Mars for people like people.

Sally added, "I mean it's not like there's a big club with meetings, but I think it's generally agreed upon that we shouldn't make a scene."

Instead of agreeing with her, he offered her his arm again. "What are they going to do, get us for misbehaving? You're not anyone's property. So, that means, it's okay to act like you're no one's property."

A flinch shot across Sally's face, it was gone as quickly as it arrived.

"I'm Ballein Ceux," he said with a self-mocking, self-important tone, "And I'm bringing tweaks and robot girlfriends into style."

Sally took his arm, reluctantly.

There were a bunch of mannequins at the first storefront they came across. The least convincing ones wore clothes. The most convincing ones were rarely completely convincing all over. Rather, you could tell what sort of body part they were showing off, because it would look more convincing than the rest of it.

"Been here before?" Asked Sally.

"Yeah but it's been a long while," answered Ballein. Those were hot dogs he smelled. The sensations within him at that moment, the competing bodily reactions of hunger cravings and nausea, tipped him off that he was in a small slice of heaven.

"Got a catalogue? If you got a catalogue, I'm going to show you something." She walked near the window.

Ballein looked around. He let his mind open up to the city and its local net services, and pretty soon he saw a little flashing indicator in his peripheral that let him know that he'd downloaded a current shopping catalogue for the few blocks that surrounded them. In Olympus, this crap was free. Pretty much everything else you had to work for, if you lived in the 62nd and 63rd and several other districts in and around Olympus. But the advertising was freeeee.

When you downloaded something like that off the local net services, you couldn't just start spouting off everything in it. You didn't even know what you'd just downloaded. It wasn't that the catalogue couldn't have worked like that; instead, it's that the human brain doesn't process stuff like that. It doesn't altogether know everything it knows, but it can remember and recollect a memory that's readily available. Ballein's artificial nervous system did little to tamper with that ages-old process.

But, if you instead wanted to know everything you knew, and know it all at the very same time…

"Okay, check out this sweater." Sally directed him toward a sweater, and the little red line from her finger disappeared when it was obvious that he was checking out the sweater. It was some kind of gray and brown-striped thing with a heraldic design on either side of the chest.

"Do they know where those birds are going to be when they put on the shirt?" Asked Ballein. "Like, shit like that is just asking people to stare at your chest."

"And I think they're nice birds, and that you could look at the birds without staring at someone's chest." Said Sally. "Anyway, are you reading?"

Ballein was reading the text that floated in the air about the sweater outside the window, just for him, just in his new Magic Kingdom catalogue, just in his head. "Quality nanonit, genuine 100% very best in quality blah, blah… Okay, it's 25 RD, good deal, so what. If you buy this, it's the end of us." He reached out with his fingers and squinted his eyes, and stretched the font out a bit and said a word in Martian that was the name of another font that he preferred. Then, he was reading it in Zombie Takeover font.

Sally asked to see what Ballein was seeing, and then they were both looking at the sweater's catalogue entry in Zombie Takeover font, laid over the real world like a projector transparency.

She pointed at another mannequin's hips. "Check those out."

Ballein rattled off a bunch of stuff under his breath. "Higher waist, good for flat tummies, non-aging, calcium-reinforced for extra abs support, compressive for beautiful body contours…. Okay I have GOT TO HAVE ONE."

"The end of us!" Sally pushed him to the next storefront window. "This is better. Look at all that stuff."

It was a candy and toy store named Doctor Everything's.

"Wait-wait, don't drop it," said Sally. "Leave it all up. Grab every catalogue entry. Just start looking at stuff. Look at all of it…."

So Ballein walked into the store. He let a little catalogue entry pop up as his optics sent carrier signals to each and every item that he glanced at for long enough for the request to get an acknowledgment from a little embedded chip in each toy (and piece of candy, welcome to edible electronics), and bounce back into his brain.

Plastic toy soldiers, airplanes and tanks that took orders from ecstatic young generals, bent and crawled and fought right there on the living room floor… holographic orangutans and whales (not as real as the Opportunity Heritage Museum's, of course) that shot right off your belt or cuff and followed you around like an imaginary friend that all your friends could see… and speaking of friends, there were funny magic wands to set fire to them with, right before the city's utility fog of nanites snuffed it out (banned in districts without utility fog).

Toys! Toys! Toys with names like bouncy bombs, genie lamps, and prank products like Anatoly's Empathic Interference, Attention Deficit Disorder, Tourette's syndrome, and whoopee cushions. And candy with names like General Relative Tea, Superconductor Soda, and Helluva Hyperintelligence for that special superbright kid that's so hard to please, so hard to shop for, and so hard to earn more than.

Then it was on to a small music store. Old post-biopunk, Microstate, Static (which Ballein abhorred), SMI²LE, bands like FemtoReplica, Audio Multi-Curse, and Unknown Sender. Unknown Sender had two programmers that worked on the design and fashion of Ballein's group, Genomenclature. His eyes were filling up with bands and little snippets of songs went on and off in his ears as he darted around the store looking at everything. You could fit a lot of music into a little store, because storing a bit of data on a single molecule of an element meant that you could fit every band and song on Mars on a rice-grain-sized piece of storage media if you wanted. A lot of people downloaded the song from the store and let the banks do their money trades while you listened, and then you'd have a bunch of cool music in your head, and maybe some packaging you could print out later, or upload to a tat, or spin around in the air like it was real.

Sally pulled and navigated Ballein out of the store an hour later, as if he had gone blind. People turned and looked. Ballein waved his arms around, complaining about what was in front of his eyes, but Sally insisted that he keep every item listed that they had passed since they landed on Main Street.

When they got outside, she directed him carefully, by the arm, to a jutting shelf of brick outside the music store window, where he sat down. "What do you see?" She asked.

"Uh… I see three stores worth of catalogue entries filling up the sky. I don't see anything, in other words."

"Let me see," she said, sitting down next to him. A moment later, her sky filled up with hundreds of entries too, and her vision went white with layers and layers of Zombie Takeover font. There wasn't anything but catalogue entries.

Ballein popped a piece of candy into his mouth. "Mmmm, good-- okay, but promise you'll tell me what this whole exercise was for… that music store was totally crap. They have it where all my old shit pops up first. Wow, this is really good. Want one? Let's go eat a hotdog next."

Sally craned her head from side to side, watching the extreme data dump before them try to arrange its letters and sentences for readability, but failing miserably. There wasn't a centimeter of space left. They couldn't see each other or anything else, now. "Look at it."

"I'm looking." Said Ballein, happily chewing away. "Man this is REALLY good. I probably haven't eaten in days. I get so busy." Then, he turned to look at her. He saw her face for just a moment before all the floating catalogue entries swung over and covered his view up again. "You know, this is kind of like a vacation, hanging out with you." He put his hand in the air for a moment and made a hole to see through in all the piles and piles of Zombie Takeover. When he put his hand back down, the words spilled back in.

Sally said, "Take one of those pieces of candy, and turn it around in your fingers." She paused, and asked, "Okay?"

"Okay, it's candy."

"Are you really doing it?"

"Yeah."

"Then tell me about it, describe it."

"Well it's a flattened sphere, smooth, tiny imperfections…."

"Now imagine if you could grasp all of this, three stores worth of The Magic Kingdom's catalogue entries, with that same, casual ease."

Ballein stopped chewing; it was an interesting thought experiment. "All at once?" He didn't have to be told that it had real-world relevance. He just wasn't sure how far the thought experiment could go and still retain its relevance.

Sally continued. "Now imagine if the entire catalogue was as easy to hold and turn round in your mind as your piece of candy."

Ballein laughed. That was a ridiculous request. There were several blocks, and several dozen stores, cafes, restaurants, bars, and fuel stops for air cars near them.

Sally said, "If it makes it easier, imagine that your field of vision has expanded, like a panoramic view, so your zombie takeover had more room to arrange itself."

"I suppose I can imagine it better when I think about it like that; but you know… either I'm reading Jonathan Rogue's song list or I'm reading about a stupid sweater. If you're asking me to do both, well I can't. Can you?"

He could hear Sally sighing, a sigh that had 'you moron' written all over it. "No, Captain Future, I'm not a superturing." After a moment she added, "Well I can take a bunch of items on a list, queue them, and walk away; but that's something you could have taught an ordinary baseline to do, if they were willing to apply their self."

Ballein thought about himself. He did that with songs, bands, sound artists and other contacts. He supposed he could do it with other stuff, too, but it was easier to just hand a brain dump to Mordecai and ask to have it tidied up. He guessed that Sally probably had some shit going on for her that was something like what Mordecai had; but he guessed that Sally's speed and breadth of thought was watered down purposefully, maybe for the same reason Ballein hadn't had any work done on his fundamental mental processes. For one thing, he had heard music composed by high-level A.I. for other high-level A.I….

Then, Sally dropped the bomb. "Now, okay, think of yourself as the piece of candy; and imagine someone turning you, and everything you are, round their mind, with such casual ease that it can even border on disaffectedness."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Solsys, Mars, 63rd district, The Magic Kingdom, Main Street, a small music store

Ballein felt of the small, simple object between his fingers, while gazing into the white space. He said, "Sally, is this how casually that thing in the 61st can sniff around in your mind?"

"Well it isn't meant to be an exact example. It's not that she thinks of people like candy. But when she wants to know something, she just looks at my brain and she knows."

Ballein knew it wasn't about the candy, but he couldn't help but think of his little piece of candy differently, then.

Sally said, "Okay, we can end the experiment now." A moment later, Ballein felt her touching his arm. "Ballein."

"Hmm?" Ballein watched as hundreds of little catalogue entries began disappearing out of the sky. Normally any entries in front of him would have disappeared as soon as he thought them away. But there were so many of them that it slowed the processes down.

Slowly, though, he began to see why she had said his name. A small group of onlookers had collected on the other side of the street, near an intersection and an old cyberware store. Sally said they might have to explain their thought experiment now, but Ballein shrugged it off: "We don't know them, why should we have to explain anything?"

Still, some of the men gave Ballein the impression of an unstoppable pack of cyber-augmented hunting dogs. Their forms were muscular, their large eyes were silver, and their long hair was the exact color of obsidian.

"How can we possibly be offending kids that run around looking like that?" Asked Ballein.

Sally smirked at him, which he found surprising. Had she decided it wasn't a big deal after all? Then she called him old, and informed him that those were only just pouting stares. She said, "I know that fashion. They're on their way to a trendy club now, with their expensive bodies, to dance to music that's about being rejected and having their feelings hurt by women."

Ballein laughed and turned to look at her, and past the curve of her face, in the distance, he saw the child from the elevator, from the forest. He was wearing a big, puffy orange vest that looked like it was made for floating almost. His shirt was horrid, with patterns of intersecting lines of brown, white and black. It was tucked into his pants, which were horrid too. They were blue. Then, the boy walked around a corner, into the alleyway next to the wall where a holographic bricklayer covered up the Lawrence Lessig elevator.

Ballein pointed. "Hey…."

Sally turned to look, but Ballein was already getting up and walking in that direction to investigate. He called out, louder, "Hey, kid!"

Sally picked up Ballein's candy and glanced at the small group of gawkers on the other side of the street. They were the kind of people you would expect to see in The Magic Kingdom. The suave, sophisticated static rocker with a sculpted, elegant form and straight hair the color of milk; the perfect art snob with pointed ears and drooping eyes the color of blooming violets; there was a tweak, too, a thin, hard-skinned tweak covered by a burnoose of irregular light-bending designs like a thief, wearing a respirator too big for his beady-eyed, narrow face. Tweaks like that had been gengineered to live in and mine away the nooks and crannies of places like the northeast Thelomene, in the very early days before people like Sally existed. This one looking at her was just a kid, though. She scooted off the brick window shelf to follow after Ballein.

She asked him what he was doing.

"It's that kid!" He said. "Hey kid!" He yelled louder.

"Ballein--people already think we're weird, or at least that you're weird."

Ballein kept walking, past the music store, past Doctor Everything's, past the ugly sweater… "Weird, me?" He mock-scoffed.

She caught up to him. "Flirting with automatons is generally the domain of the anti-social. Did you hear about that guy up on one of Dausmenenia's rings who had to go to therapy? I thought he was creepy, too."

"Those weren't robots, they were dolls. And no, I didn't hear about it, except from you, last night of all times--I don't pay attention to what goes on up there, it's a different world."

"It's still Mars." Argued Sally.

"No, this here is Mars, where one more sicko isn't going to… you know, Port Robinson at least would fine him and get something out of it. Dausmenenia just gives you a new personality and pronounces you all better now."

Then Ballein turned the corner and saw nothing but trash, and the brief thought occurred to him that the trash was probably decorative.

Sally said, "Okay, anyway, that's way too close to Cis-Martian politics for me. But did you ever read 'The Duchess Who Was Destined to Become the Whisperer'?"

Ballein wheeled around and gave her a dirty look. It was another 28th Century literary reference; a classic tale of a bitter, vengeful ghost who wanted to haunt her killer forever, but discovered, in the end, that she had only just been a harmless and fictitious hologram all along; her 'killer' was an amused programmer--SmartneedWT.75, one of the first popular A.I. authors. Anyway, mentioning the title or calling someone The Whisperer had, through the curious way of semantics, become a funny way to tell someone that the hologram they had seen might really in fact be a bitter, vengeful ghost hell-bent on haunting them. You really had to be there.

Ballein said, "Then you know what kid I meant?"

"I remember you said something about a kid."

Ballein walked up to the brick wall and put his hand on it. It was real brick, at least in that spot.

Sally walked up to a trashcan on the other side of the alley, and tapped it with her boot. "Come out of there!"

Ballein was feeling further down the wall, "I'm being serious."

Sally picked up a half-wrinkled flyer. "Hmmm--Darwin Biotopics - genmods for every evolutionary eventuality… Hey, d'you know, I bet that's a reference to Darwinism. Do you know what Darwinism was?"

She let it drop back to the ground, and watched him for a few moments. Then, "Okay, if there are any doors that you can't uncover with public access, then they're private and you shouldn't be feeling around, anyway."

He stopped and looked at her. He was halfway down the long alleyway now. "Hey, you know, what the hell has gotten into me?"

"I don't know. If you think you saw someone you know, I guess that's not so weird."

Ballein came back over. "What do you think I saw? I saw a kid on the elevator. When I--oh, hell." He didn't want to explain, because it would mean brining up his embarrassing episode, and there was no good reason to keep reminding her about that.

Sally did it for him. "You mean you saw someone in Doctor Chou's Europa simulation? I don't think so. I've had that one come up lots of times. That's silly, why would he put some kid in his Europa simulation?"

Ballein kicked at the concrete with his shoe. "Fuck--you know, you know what? I think I may have something viral, like mnemonic or a stupid advertisement."

"Well, if you're seeing it down here, too, then that nixes Chou's Europa." Sally reached over with both hands and felt the sides of his neck, while staring studiously into his eyes. He stuck out his tongue for her. She said, "Well okay if it's pharmaceutical advertising, it's got no physical side effects in the regular places."

"It's got to be pharmaceutical. You should see the computer I've got--I mean, it's nothing. I got time, temperature, I can do math and stuff. I have lists, and communications and that's it. There's nothing to do with madverts on it, trust me."

Sally cringed and frowned. "You're behind. How do you get the net?"

By this, she meant web surfing, rather than stuff like local catalogues that got downloaded straight to memory for access-by-association.

He held up his arm, and she saw his four-staged tattoo of a completely terraformed Mars.

She said, "Isn't that a little counter to what you're all about, rock star?"

He held up his other arm, which was covered in a tattoo depicting all the names of consequential, environmentally related illnesses foisted onto a great deal of the tweak population by over-pressurization in the atmosphere.

She gave the contrast a nod of approval. "Well this can only mean you're having the visions of a haunted man, I suppose… you should write a song, a tribute to the enduring legacy of SmartneedWT.75 on creative geniuses everywhere. E discontinued emself, you know."

Ballein cocked his head, "You just said emself."

"All the Smartneeds were sexless. You've got to pick up on the lingo if you're going to start hanging out with the rest of your species."

References to modern society and culture are always full of context, for which Ballein, like most city-dwellers, wasn't lacking. But standing there, listening in on his own conversation with her, he began to realize and admit to himself that he had experienced contextual gaps in the past couple of days that he shouldn't have.

Like, why would she refer to her kind as the rest of the species? She had done that once before, too, that morning in her bedroom. She referred to A.I. kind as human kind's other half. At the time, it seemed like just a stray remark with nothing amiss. Now, it sounded erroneous. Not in any way that mattered very much to Ballein--what did he care? But it was like if she'd referred to Core Slave or System Partial as having any relation to the return of Classic Maximalism in the superscrapers that surrounded The Magic Kingdom like pillars holding up the sky. But, then, he could be rather elitist deep down, couldn't he….

He asked her what she'd do if she were he.

Sally said, "Unless you're seeing ghosts around every corner, I wouldn't worry about it. I got some stuff at home that you could check yourself with."

"Do you think it's contagious?"

That was a pointless question, which she ignored. But she had slipped a cue back to her place in there without any help except from her own sophisticated wits. She asked, "You been wanting anything lately, out of the usual? Drinks, candy? Been wanting to take trips?"

The thing about pharmaceutical advertising was, you could have it slipped in your drink, or it could be airborne, and often immediately, but sometimes later, you'd start getting an urge for something. Usually, it was something that you had to buy. Stuff like this came in different forms for different kinds of recipients. A chemical variety would be best for someone like Ballein, who wasn't heavily augmented and still had a lot of old-school biology inside him. There were software-based varieties for people like Sally. There were even nanotechnological cross-species varieties, but those hadn't hit Mars yet, and wouldn't for a good long while if a bunch of interstellar interests, such as the Solar Organization, had anything to do with it; which they did.

"Uh…" Ballein looked at her, like the answer was obvious.

Sally rolled her eyes. "I seriously doubt there's a go-have-relations-with-Sally ad-drug."

Ballein took a deep breath and looked around. He heard the same protofetish-punk beats, off in the distance of the streets and buildings, as when they'd arrived. So unoriginal, those people, he thought.

Sally said, "I don't think you should care as much as you do. Let's go find a place with decent music, haven't you realized I'm giving you a chance to endear yourself before you have to jet back off to Port Robinson?"

Ballein didn't want to think about Port Robinson, just yet. As soon as they walked back around the corner on to the sidewalk, he smelled hotdogs again. They crossed the street and followed Ballein's nose. That was one thing that wasn't old school about Ballein, so they weren't about to take a wrong turn.

It was tempting to, though. The streets and shops of The Magic Kingdom were all bitter and jaded and rough around the edges, but there was a modest sarcasm underneath all that, even when it was unintentional. The tough looking, silver-eyed cyberpunks were just one example, heading off for their depressing music club.

On the way to the hot dog stand, they passed a Dirt Mall. The whole point was that you couldn't find a dirt mall anywhere, but you could here, in The Magic Kingdom. It was located on a street named Astral, which was supposed to be like an Old Earthy name for a street, or whatever. Someone had painted the words "Chihuahua of the" before Astral, and the word "Plane" after it. And someone had also stuck a little hologram projector on the street sign's post, and turned it up to its fasted speed, and an iridescent sloth was going round and round in the air so fast that Sally, whose eyes were better, had to tell Ballein that it was a sloth going around that fast.

When Ballein walked up to the holographic projector, he saw that it was just a thin, disposable little computer, torn and rolling at the edges in places. It was stuck to the signpost with gum. When he was a kid, you could get these in vending machines outside stores, they were everywhere back then. You never knew what animal you were going to get, because the computer would come out all rolled up. They stopped working after a certain amount of uses. Ballein learned during his pre-rock star years, as a gadgeteer at Soto Telecommunications Apparel, that the little batteries could have run for a couple hundred years at least… but toy companies like Guzman, they just wanted you to keep popping another RD into the vending machine.

Ballein looked at the name of the next street. It said New York Avenue, but it was a dead language, and he couldn't read it. There was a gadget stand on New York Avenue. Someone had left a service android there to run it. The model was sexless--all of its determining features were suppressed like Sally's orchestra of Sally--but the model resembled Sally.

"Hey, look at that." Ballein directed her attention to the stand. Its sign was written in one of Old Earth's old languages as well. Since Old Anglish and SolOrg (and therefore Martian) were pretty strong derivatives, it looked familiar… but not familiar enough. No one new it, including the stand's owner probably, but the translation was close to something like "Leasing of New York". It was probably not the intended meaning, but who was the wiser?

Sally told Ballein that her model was vintage. It was made, like a lot of places down here, to resemble Old Earth styles. In Sally's case, and thousands of other models just like her, a compromise was made for the sake of flattering features--or the capacity for them, anyway.

"Ha-ha," said Ballein. "Old Earth. Bah. One thing you learn after going all over is that every district planning commission has its own ideas. Sometimes, they actually try to find someone who is into history."

Sally picked up a gadget and rattled it at Ballein. The name on its package was Explosive Slapper.

Ballein surveyed the stand. It was built for virtual media, he could tell, so half the packages didn't fit right and were piled and stacked precariously. You had to dig around. "Hmmm--what's an automated prankeroid do?" He put it back in its pile of little packages, and looked around the streets and shops, starting to grow busier. "Where's the hotdogs?"

Suddenly, he looked at Sally with a paranoid expression. "You do smell hotdogs, right?"

"You're not hallucinating hotdogs." Sally was handing the service android a few Red Dollars. She was buying a Complaining Bioadapter.

After some more poking around, they did some more walking around; they were much less the spectacle now that more people had started filling the streets. There was a fortuneteller shop named the Hideaway of Truthiness. A fetish shop named Garden of Altars, with a section downstairs named Spire of Puzzles and Torture. Sally was unimpressed by everything, until they came upon the Tunnel of Machines and Voices.

"Where on Mars do they come up with all these names?" Said Ballein, opening the door.

"It's a company owned and staffed by a vec and eir copies, believe it or not."

Ballein winced, realized she'd just led him into a virtual entertainment shop. "You--what? An A.I.?"

"That so strange?" Sally walked around, disinterestedly picking and poking at small, flat packages.

Ballein frowned, "Well, no. It's just that, this place, I mean it's the original Magic Kingdom."

"Yeah, but a lot of the original store owners have been dead a while. We're talking refugee generations, you know. A company named Seventh Sanctum got hired out collectively by the tenants to help keep things fresh. Look em up. My favorite slogan is Chew Toys For Your Mind."

"They have multiple slogans?"

"Entrepreneurial A.I. always has multiple slogans."

Sally picked up a thin black box with elegant Martian lettering. She ran her thumb over a circle on the packaging and said, "Why wasn't Aeon the publisher this time?"

A video square rolled across the cover of the box. A man smiled, and said, "One of the reasons I wasn't interested is Aeon just didn't give a shit about my game. I think if Aeon got hold of it, it would have been just another end-of-the-world scenario with a big space monster at the end. They didn't take my theories seriously and I didn't want the uphill battle. Nanofab is cheap, and Future Shock is a recognizable name, so I published it myself." Then the square rolled up and all they saw was the black box.

Ballein got Sally out of the virtual entertainment shop, and the next thing they found, around another corner, was the hotdog stand. So Ballein ordered the cheddarwurst, which was what the hotdog stand's toy-like palatability meter suggested. A lot of the meters and gadgets in the Magic Kingdom were just gimmicks. But they were running a two-for-one special on the cheddarwurst today.

Time-lapse sequence from the approach of Voyager I to Jupiter

The city in the 1927 film Metropolis