—Geoff Ryman
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Geoff Ryman was born in Canada, moved to the USA when he was eleven, and then to England after earning degrees in History and English at UCLA. He currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. His novels include The Unconquered Country, The Child Garden, Was, Lust, Air, The King’s Last Song and the interactive 253 (ryman-novel.com), also printed in 1998.
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It’s first thing and I’m already out Walking and listening for Jinny.
I dream of Jeannie ref Stephen Foster 19th century composer in Minstrel tradition. Jin as in cotton gin, Eli Whitney. Gin, prohibition, speakeasies, the pansy craze, the 18th amendment...
A blizzard of links and none of them from her. Culture bores me, but I added it to my priorities because of Jinny.
She’s a continual stream of beautiful little visual notes, flowers with sheep’s heads or entire false catalogues for museums of anachronisms. Bakelite handsets on Flash Gordon spaceships (produced three serials the first being in 1936 etc, etc ... ) Collab music 2030 craze of different flavours from different eras...
I love it that Jinny wants to share so much with me, with everyone. She shares continually, even when she’s working, sometimes when she’s sleeping, through her Turing. I always have my Turing turned off.
I love Jinny’s teeth. Yes, I know, that’s the bacteria gnawing away—no links, please. I just love her bright white teeth. They protrude and gleam so that Jinny always looks as though she’s smiling.
Her Turing seems to touch my arm and the touch feels like sunlight. Everything out here is brushed by sunlight, still cool, a delicate rose colour, not at all like sunset or the bleaching white light of noon. I’m walking out of our little town through scant agriculture modelled on that of the Mayans ... wide planted corn and beans under shade. I’m going to check our river.
The Turing and I walk together, she in my head. It’s monitored that something’s bothering me, and sends me one of Jinny’s little packages, a history of charitable acts, all folded, crisp and delicious like a spring roll:
the refusal of the UK to retaliate for the bomb
the Bill Gates bequest and its long history
the arrival of Concurrency as a medium of exchange
the abolishing of copyright
If you prioritise charity, caritas and acts of breathtaking neutrality, you also apparently tend to prioritise effectiveness, weightlessness, spoons, weeds, ants and old gramophone recordings. How Jinny gets that I don’t know, but I can see the files weave. It works. She just does it, mixes things, makes things.
I can’t keep up. The packet keeps blossoming out, laced with all kinds of daffy Jinny things. They make me smile; they make me despair because I would like to keep her, like to stay part of her world. But I don’t do this, make all those gifts of info.
“It’s not content, it’s the act that’s important,” I say. It sounds grumpy even to me.
“Of course,” the Turing answers. “But projecting is an act too.” Of a kind, and there is so much of it at so little cost to anyone. Talk is cheap.
“What is she really doing now?” I ask.
“I ... I could wake her if you like,” says the Turing.
“No, no,” I say. I want Jinny to sleep. I can imagine her, all soft and warm and dreamy. I love that image of her; my heart pines, sinking again.
I walk naked in our beautiful desert sun, and I smell sage and dust all around me. Wind sweeps along the arroyo.
For years since my Joey died, I’ve been putting out feelers for other people. An old guy like me. Even to me it’s like I’m peeking out of my snail shell, oozing out soft antennae, hoping to find love. Yuck.
I must have reccied seven hundred people. Jinny was one of the few who reached back. She said our profiles matched. They didn’t, but we kept talking. We kept almost meeting. That ‘almost’ makes my heart sore. It makes me think that she’s just being polite; she’s just being friendly; I’m an embarrassment, she wants me to go away but won’t say so.
The Turing hears me think that. “That’s not true.” The thing touches me again on the arm, invisible, but soothing. “She especially wants me to talk to you.”
It’s a strange situation. Both of us want me to win her love. But neither of us have succeeded. I have this numbing idea that she can’t really respect or like me, but that there is, or may be only at times, something simple about me that she likes, and I feel very lucky and very sad, because this simple something is probably quite fragile. It could blow away.
She’s a Doctor for heaven’s sake. Only Infotechs get more respect and that’s kind of a branch of medicine, and anyway she freelances as one of those as well.
Me, I’m only a Walker. I go places, confirm that reality matches our models, that all our balanced and merged priorities are being met.
I’m following an irrigation canal, the sun growing stronger on my skin. I feel photosynthesis kick in, to power the tech that inhabits me. My body and my tools are fuelled by the same sugars, the same blood. And my feet grow their own shoes.
“Oh,” people say when I tell them who I am, “well you must be strapping fit.” They don’t know what else to say; they’re embarrassed. A necessary task, but not really dazzling is it? It’s not healing people, or advancing the genome. It’s not combining information. The Techs engineer info like mutant DNA. It keeps re-combining. Hi! I’m a mutant idea!
In all the Fictions that whiz by so entertainingly these days, the walking is all done by robots. That’s how automatic people think my work is. Only, guess what, dream on fellow travellers, there is no AI. There are just us Walkers, alone, on our appointed rounds.
A few days ago she said, the real Jinny not her Turing: “I want to go with you on one of your walks.” This was imaginative and sweet and careful of my feelings, as if what I do were interesting, as if we might share insights as we stroll.
“Do you have the right shoes?” I asked her.
She giggled and barraged me with a million files on shoes prioritised by Uselessness.
The most Useless shoes she indexed were made out of chocolate. They melt or crumble and stain the floor.
“You made those up!”
“No, no, they’re real!” she protested. “The Sybarites really made delicious shoes you could eat!”
She kept on linking and projecting and I didn’t know if she was joking or not, a whole range of hopping, useless shoes:
shoes that obey simple heuristics to spin spider webs as you walk
shoes that sing
shoes that know all the constellations shoes that sail the seven seas all by themselves out of interest; sweet except that they love making sea turtles abort their egg sacs shoes with delicious new recipes tickertaping across their soles shoes that calculate values of pi shoes that suck up any thing with a positive charge
shoes that keep scuttling away from you the moment you take them off
“Stop!” I laughed. Creativity scares me. I always think it’s going to run away with us. My real priority is rectitude.
I’m at the edge of our creek, standing on a rock shelf that’s grey with dead lichen.
I try and put it off. I kneel down and sip water from my cupped hand and it’s cool and tastes of granite, and the sensors understand its qualities. The water is just as people want it. The Joshua Trees stand around me like friends, holding up their arms as if to show that they’re honest. I smell sage and dust all around me. Today is the day I scheduled months ago to test levels once again, now when the snows upstream are supposed to melt.
I wade in, my legs reading the depth and flow.
Yep. Welp. Here it is.
The water may be delicious but we’re using too much of it. Current and projected population; water usage average preferred and necessary all rattle past me.
Soon we won’t have enough water. Soon as in say five years.
Nothing is simple, except for reality. Reality is a tiny white stable dot in the middle of all this info. Everything else, all the talk, is piled up sky high, prioritised, processed and offered back. Mr Cranky, my old mean streak, would say that folks could just as easily test the water themselves. They could all take turns confirming.
Later Jinny, the real Jinny, connects to whisper that tomorrow she wants to join me on my Walk.
* * * *
She shows up in reality. I see her coming and I can feel my arms tense up, specifically my arms for some reason. For her I’m wearing shorts, how old fashioned. I worry about the creases age has made across my skinny stomach.
It’s cool dawn. The sunlight catches her sideways. Her skin has a perfect pink glow, her smile is ready on her face like she’s come back from a future where everything works. And she’s wearing serious shoes.
She says hi, I say hi. Our PAs do a quick exchange to look at the day’s tasks. If she was in any doubt before, Jinny will now know for sure that I’m the bottom of the social heap. Everybody sets priorities together and I just check them out. I guess she wants to see what that’s like.
So she’s going to do air quality analysis for me, and keep track of wind direction, humidity, acidity, all that stuff as it changes over time and distance. I’m going to do street semiology, traffic absence, and basic demographics. There’s numbers, and there’s graphs, but what counts is being able to say how all of this will land for people with very different Priorities. Oh, and here’s another thrill: I’m checking for termites.
Me, I’m a Dog man. Really, that’s what I’m now called. People with my nest of Priorities get called Dogs because we value faithfulness, trust, and constant grooming. We like repetition but we want to get to know things too, so we like to go out sniffing and snooping. I’m in the perfect job.
Oops, I’ve been telling her all that. She nods, looking slightly glazed and distracted. “How’s your gout?”
She means the pains in my feet. She remembers stuff.
“Medication. Little critters are eating up those crystals.”
“You should have come to me for that!”
If she can’t love me, then maybe we can still be friends. I can use friends too. I feel an idiot grin on my face, just to have her near me, and I can’t think of anything to say.
She’s not just a doctor. Naw, that wouldn’t occupy her. She runs a business on the side as a Bespoke Prioritiser. She probably needs a whole lake of homeopathic info to store her credits. I want to ask her dumb questions such as: do you rank for anybody who’s well crucial? I don’t ask, but she answers anyway.
“Naw, not really. Most of mine are overseers needing to find balance. One of them wanted every single thing about the Buddha itemised, ranked, and prioritised around something ‘innovative’. He didn’t say what, just something, anything zazzie and chic. Do you know how complicated Buddhism is? All those different Ways? Minayana, Therevada, Zen...”
“Not as big as Hinduism.”
She laughs lazily, and I don’t know if it’s because what I said was charmingly irrelevant or not. I was, of course, being entirely serious. She touches my arm again, grooming. “I gave him a package centred on the need to keep records as the main criteria.” Maybe she sees her job as part of the same hazy joke. “Buddhism as an aid to bureaucracy.”
We’re alone outside, the streets press in close around us. It’s not a particularly nice day and the village is still asleep. Who walks except Walkers?
Our streets wind, houses close together, friendly, with shared doorways between them, rooftop pathways across them, and all around us on the slopes, turbines white as doves that turn in our arroyo winds. On some roofs, fleshsails catch the sun and make sugar.
Folks still have to have things in reality. Paint which adjusts to temperature and heats the rooms. The grafts which grow some of the houses, or the mud bricks baked in kilns, or the wires and circuits that also work like spiders to spin more wires and circuits. Some houses are made of flowers, growing. Some are made of laterite for people who love the miracle of mined dirt oxidising into stone; others are stacked shitcakes dried and sterilised. Those match people who value self-sufficiency. Plenty of those still since the time of the troubles.
“Semiologising,” Jinny says and chuckles.
“We’re about to metastasise,” I say. Our village will split, probably along Predator/Herbivore lines. I guess the Predators will make us poor Herbivores move again.
“Dogs aren’t herbivores,” she reminds me. But there is a glow of agreement coming off her. Like me, she’s clocked this crowding of styles, the closely packed fabric of the town almost not quite on the edge of mismatch, conflict.
Partition they tell us is fun, good. New birth is always good. “Water’s the problem,” she says. And I wonder, how did she get hold of that?
“Didn’t you report that yesterday? We’re running out of water.”
We make our own sugar from the sun; our gut makes a lot of our protein. Our own bodies fuel the information which now lives as part of us. In the right climate, we could live without anything else, for a time at least. Except for water.
“Not run out so much as that it will trigger the break up.”
Our home. It will go.
We walk, I watch her. She’s not just confirming, she’s filtering, scanning her takes through all kinds of priorities from government diaries to chaotic monitors. She’s making something interesting out of my boring job.
“This is fun,” she says. “It’s reassuring. It all works.” The movement of her hands takes in our settlement, the network as a whole, the desert landscape in cool morning. The soft pink light on the ridges, the deep kindly mauve in the canyons.
“For now,” I say.
She looks at the streets that coil about us. “I want to go inside the houses and swap with people.”
“You don’t need to go inside to do that.”
“I mean for real, one-to-one like us now.” She starts to giggle and footnote all kinds of sociologies. “Come on, keep up the semio.”
I riff. “Deeply social creatures needing each other for physical shelter and to keep at bay a sense of threat to their highly complex culture. Being dependent on weather, they are also frightened and resentful of it. Spaces are designed to minimise the impact of sun, wind, rain, cloud, night, day. Needlessly, in some ways, as they are actually more independent of the environment than at any point in human history. They love info, they value preservation of it, but they have a low priority for actual experience, thus the low priority for physical transport. Me, I want to walk through the Rockies. Beyond that, fearful of a loss of a single member, driving a mix of socialisation and isolation caused by the intimacies of info.”
“None of that footnotes.” She looks distracted. I feel inside her that a thesaurus of names from Saussure to Tamagocuchi is flurrying past with no matches.
“None of that was a quote.” She means it’s harder to put in a tree. She blurts out a chuckle. “I’ll just have to quote you!”
That’s why she likes me: because I say new things. I’m flattered.
On a flat roof, sunbathers. Jinny wants to eyeball them. She calls hello. Silence. They remain on their soft roof, naked, sleeping in sunlight.
“Conflicting priorities for communication and independence,” I remind her. It’s a joke. She doesn’t laugh, she grimaces. She waves. She jumps up and down and calls. I just know she’s buzzing them with feelers. She sends them and me a gift of niche priorities, a lovely lavender suggestion for emphasising open plan living and geneswapping as a substitute for reproduction.
The people on the roof behave like plants. I mistake them for Herbivores. One of them finally says aloud, not looking up, “I’m not really here.”
“We’re Dolphins,” murmurs the other and they share a sarky smile. They are both identical, which means they’ve morphed. Into each other. Yuck.
“They’re Sharks,” Jinny says downturning her mouth quickly to mean let’s get out of here. Sharks prioritise winning and making good use of you. This new astrology of priority. It really works.
“What are you?” the two Predators ask in unison.
Jinny bursts out laughing and shakes her head. “I’m a Hamster!” The absurdity of a Hamster facing Sharks. “No, really. I prioritise...” She shakes her head cos it’s all too silly.
“Activity,” I say for her. I’m a bit surprised that she’s something, well, so humble and sweet.
“Running in circles,” she chuckles again. Already we are walking away from the Sharks and talking only for each other.
I list a few other Hamster priorities for her. “Functional feeding only. Clear goals.”
I have to admit it does sound slightly comic, this lean yet nourished looking woman taller than I am calling herself a Hamster. “Hamsters are harmless,” she says. “Harmless and delighted.”
So you like Dogs because we’re harmless too. I’m thinking that maybe Jinny likes old guys, tall lanky old guys because everybody else is round and soft. She’s done comfort, she’s done fast, she’s done young and handsome. She’s lonely. How did she end up lonely? Long story. I hope to hear it.
Next job, we confirm bacteria and virus levels and then spend the rest of the day counting numbers of beneficial insects and useful information retroviruses ... All’s Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque ... I actually start producing footnotes from priorities of my own. I feel like I’m flying.
“We couldn’t do medicine without Walkers,” she says.
* * * *
The next day and there’s nothing from her. I was expecting all kinds of links, packages, even conclusions. I was quite proud of some of the stuff I gave her. Shitcakes as a marker of independence, itself a marker of fear. I really had given of my best. Nothing came of it apparently. She’d been smiling in order to keep a distance, was that it? How nice he is and how desperately dull, really.
Again, it’s happening again.
My stomach sinks, I feel despair. There is no poetry that footnotes when really nice women don’t call back. Was she just pretending then, to be nice? The way you placate an embarrassing link-partner who runs out of material, or a genepooling that bellyflops?
I do get a call from Spotty Derek. He really is terribly spotty, something to do with his mitochondrial communications but he’s deeply sweet. After all we’re both Walkers. He’s skinny as a toothpick, though there’s something sheep-like in his gaze that makes him button-cute so that people forgive his being smart and an overseer at 18.
“Watchinit,” he twerps at me. “You landed one yesterday. FRD. QED. Whoa!” I think he means my date. If that is what it was. He looks pleased for me. I wait, because he’ll have a comment. He starts to chuckle. “Shitcakes as what? A bit tenuous.”
“I thought it was OK.”
“Yeah, but your job is to Confirm, not invent. Whose priorities were those?”
Mine, I realise. My priorities. Nobody gives a shit about those. My priorities might skew the measure. I’m not paid to confirm things that are important to me.
And what do I want to have confirmed?
That I have a heart, have a soul? I really thought she wanted to please me, I really thought she wanted me. Good at faking, I guess. All that bedside manner stuff, all that selling her gift priorities to the higher-ups, I guess it makes you professionally pleasant, effortlessly charming.
Derek is still chuckling, and gives me a hug by feeler. “You can move in with me if you like.” He doesn’t mean it. He’s very kind. And very bossy. The amount of understanding it takes to be like him takes my breath away and intimidates me a bit. His authority creeps up on you. You don’t notice it at first. He looks like Sam out of Pickwick Papers, and please keep the footnote.
He’s a Madonna. Priorities: power and nurturing. And yeah, I’d do a trans for him in a second and have his babies, which he knows, and likes, but will never do anything about, except to use that underlying warmth to make me like him and do what I’m told.
“You—uh—should reconfirm those figures on water,” he says. Before we all panic, he means. We’re all so low key and calm.
“Yeah,” I say as if he’d said, weather’s nice today.
“Ahhh watchinit...” he says, all I get is a strong blast of something hearty, cheerful and dismissive. I give him a blast of something else.
“Just wait till it gets political. Just wait till you try to separate us by priority, by info type. And you lose your wife, or your brother refuses to talk to you, or it all gets tense and nasty, and out of nowhere, suddenly nice-enough people become thugs. Very quiet, very smiling, neighbourly thugs, and if it’s not you who move out, it will be over your dead body. Not theirs!”
“Sorry,” he says and something gentle and distant like the sound of surf washes out from him.
“You weren’t there!” I relent a bit. “You’re too young.”
So I head out again to the creek. Today I’ll check downstream as well. But I’m all unwanted downloads, spam, reccies like wasps. Everybody else is scattered. Water, we can’t do without water. Is that Walker nuts or something? I just don’t care.
So I do what I promised myself I would not do. I send out feelers again to Jinny.
Where are you, what system you in? Did you enjoy reality? Nice Walk, wasn’t it? Did you think so? Did it measure up, or was it all a bit dull and lifeless?
Nothing.
Oh for heaven’s sake, I tell myself, give it a rest.
I really am a Dog, I really do need to be petted and stroked. I promised myself I’d let potential lovers come to me. Only if they wanted to and when they wanted to, so I would know they meant it. Just let someone else do the chasing and the chancing for a change.
But I really thought yesterday had been good. It felt so good to be with her, just to talk or not to talk, just to walk, see some bricks, taste some air and let her prattle on, dumping all this wonderful stuff. She’s fine for me. She’ll do. I don’t want anything else. I just want her to touch me back. I just want her to want me.
So I’m walking through the village and at that exact moment, I see her, outside for real. She’s on that flat roof. She’s huddled under a blanket with the two Sharks, smoking weed.
I’m angry.
I stomp on ahead. I project something-anything and for some reason all that comes out is: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds ... What am I doing? Pony Express? Do I really have a major priority to make an idiot of myself?
“Faithful,” Jinny says, aloud. She smiles hazily to her predator friends, shrugs off the blanket, and crouches down on the edge of the roof. “As you see, I connected.” She means with the Sharks.
“Yeah, I can see.”
“It was a lot of work.” I think she means she went back and spent a lot of time eyeballing them. She either has a lot to share with me or a lot she can’t be arsed to share.
“More of a challenge than someone it’s easy to connect with.” I’m trying not to look disappointed. No, I’m trying not to look hurt.
No, I am trying not to cry. In the street. If there is a single particle of cruelty in her, it will come out now.
Those gnawing teeth highlight the downturning of her mouth. Somehow she’s suddenly flipped down from the roof onto the ground. “Don’t be like that,” she says.
“Like how?” The words swell out of my throat like knocked elbows.
“Angry,” she says. “Look, come on, let’s walk.”
Mr Cranky says, “You’re not wearing anything, it’s early, it’s windy.”
“Well, yeah, so we better walk to warm up. Come on.” She flicks her fingers towards herself. “Come here.” She puts an arm around me, and pulls. “The Sharks don’t want to push the Herbivores out this time. They want to move. After all they’re Sharks, they have to keep moving to breathe.”
I taste our dust in the air; it’s spicy, the taste of home.
She gives me a little shake. “They’re the kind of people who wanted to go to the stars. The Bears, the Pumas, the domestic Cats...”
Then she footnotes how Dogs are really Wolves, noble beasts who care for their own and live in packs, the most sociable of creatures, how they keep each other warm. Jinny’s arms are cold, so I hold her and her shoulders and arms feel smooth and soft. I chafe them a bit, and we start to walk, bouncing files back and forth between us. And all around us, the fleshsails fill with sunlight, the windmills turn, our purple skins seethe with sugars fuelling the eyes, the implants, the GMs, the receiving bones, all that information babbling powered away.
“Anyway we’re not Herbivores or Predators any more. That’s just leftover emotional garbage.” She smiles again. “We’re more like plants.”
Sometimes it all comes right. Sometimes something like love is possible. We come to the edge of the town.
I feel humorous. “I’d just like to confirm that rampant fancying combined with a kind heart are possible.”
“Then,” she says, “the future’s good.”