I wouldn't normally participate in any of these let's-all-get-together-and-do-the-same-thing viral meme extravaganzas. I don't like group-think activity and these events smack of chain-letterage to me.

I'm making an exception for this, though.

So here's my contribution: it's the beginning of the novella that, if you know me, you've heard me bitching about for, oh, about 3 years now? No, it's not finished yet, and, no, I don't know when it will be finished. So don't ask.


Passaic Man
by Andrea Kail


NEW JERSEY

That's what Jack liked about her: she didn't do fuck scenes like all the other whores in Hollywood. Not his Gwyneth, oh no. She was a real lady, a class act. From the top of her soft, blond head to the tips of her pink-painted toes, class. No, Gwyneth was different: Gwyneth never fucked, Gwyneth made love.

That's what she called it, anyway: making love. And he must have made love to her, oh, hundreds of times now, almost like they were married, except he wasn't bored with her like he'd gotten with all the other girls, like he knew his father was bored with his mother. Gwyneth never bored him, no matter how plain she looked when he changed her eyes to brown or took her makeup off or added a few pounds to her hips. (Anyone who stuck to default settings was just plain lazy.) And even in the cut scenes, when they wandered off plot and he let Gwyneth just be Gwyneth, she always smiled for him and never argued, and her conversations, when they had them, were always interesting.

He'd even simmed a fight with her once, just once, just to see what it would be like. But Gwyneth, being Gwyneth, always knew the right things to say, and Jack could never get really angry with her. Not really.

No, Jack didn’t think he'd ever get bored with Gwyneth. She even smelled fresh, pure, like magnolias and springtime, and that wasn't any of his optioning or tweaking or even his occasional hack. Gwyneth just came that way: clean, fresh--new.

Of course, ENT programs were supposed to be like that: new and fresh and exciting, especially the immies. A new star every week, a new exotic locale, a great new story. Buy Them All and Adventure The World!

And Jack certainly had: Brittany in Lanarca, Courtney in Karachi, Alexandra in Cairo; he couldn't even remember them all. But then along came Gwyneth, and that, as they say, was that.

Oh, she'd started out the way they all had, of course. A hot, young starlet, she acted while Jack watched from the sidelines. Then he joined in: the male lead (predictable and sooo boring,) the supporting friend (he never made it the whole running time in this role and wondered why he always tried,) the extra at the other end of the table with the one line about cheese (damn, he loved the challenge of getting them to fuck the random guy.) But his favorite part, without any doubt, was playing Director and watching from up on high while all the characters crawled about for his amusement.

But with Gwyneth, things were different. With Gwyneth, he was content to play the leading man: rescuing her, kissing her, making love to her like she was some precious little doll. His little doll. And of course, after a while, she was. His. She pampered him and crooned to him and called him John in that special way she had. John, never Jack, like his parents and everyone else called him. Gwyneth knew he was special; she told him so. Gwyneth knew that deep inside he was a John, not a Jack.

#

"You need to pick a VOC, Jack."

Jack cringed. He hated dinnertime, but mother insisted on it. She spent all her time in the Home and Garden SOCs and had lots of crazy ideas about keeping family close. Like every night, they'd all have to unplug from their hookups, troop into the small, white kitchen and eat what his mother called a "family meal." And it wasn't like she actually cooked or anything. She just zapped the regular ration packs they always ate, and Jack could do that just as well all by himself. But the worst part was being forced to squeeze in around that teeny, tiny table and sit in the uncomfortable, plastic chairs and eat together and blah, blah, blah together, and oh jeez, he knew this particular rant of hers a little too well. Jack hung his head and mouthed the words his mother spoke.

"You've been done with EDUs for almost a year, now, Jack. Don’t you think you ought to be taking on some responsibilities of your own?"

It sounded like a question, but, really, it wasn't.

"Your father and I work hard to afford this home, to give you everything you need, everything you want. Like all those immies you love so much, hmmm? Your father and I have decided it's time you began to contribute. When the Corporation has another opening, I'm submitting your resume, Jack."

Mother wanted him to become an Ellingson Corp marketing researcher like her and dad and get his own apartment in the Complex and plug into work and spend the whole day, everyday in a VOC office like they did and lose the best years of his life to the absolute, fucking boredom of pushing paper. Jack didn’t want that. Why would anyone want that?

"Uh huh," Jack said.

No, Jack wanted to travel, see the world. Not in real life, of course. To travel in RL, he'd have to have as much credit as a Corpexec, and that wasn't ever likely to happen. Nope, travel didn't come cheap. Fortunately, ENT programs did.

But mother just blathered on, oblivious.

"And it's not healthy," she was saying now. "It's not healthy at all being inside those immies all the time like you are."

Well, this was a new one. Jack looked up from shifting his vegetable ration around the white, plastic plate just in time to see her slice a pea in half. Fucking weirdo.

"Mrs. Parker in building nine says there's a Realtime Party in the commons next week. Her daughter Junie's going, and I said you'd go, too."

Jack groaned. Oh no, not the RT parties, not the awkward, over-produced mixers thrown specifically to get plugged-in young Complexers to meet and match. Jack avoided them like a virus. Not that he had anything against parties. He didn't. He'd been to the Complex-sponsored digi-raves a time or two--before Gwyneth, of course. Decent parties where everyone could avatar in their best immiestar perfection. But the idea of actually seeing these people in the flesh--Jack shuddered. Bad enough he had to look at his mother's doughy, white arms and legs with their network of pale, purple veins, but to have to see that on someone his own age, someone he was expected to, like, fuck for the rest of his life? Nuh uh, no way.

"No fucking way," he told his mother.

She rolled her eyes. "You're going, damn it. Even if I have to drag you myself."

Jack appealed to his father, but dad wasn't paying attention. He just ate his ration and stared at the freezer. No help at all. As usual, Jack was on his own.

#

Come be with me, John.

Jack didn’t think he'd ever forget that day. He and Gwyneth had wandered off the plot of "Smuggler's Gold" and laid a blanket down on a soft, grassy hill just above the Indian Ocean. They made love all afternoon, and Gwyneth fed him sweets that he sucked off the tips of her fingers. Then he nestled his head in her lap to watch the sun set.

"Just like a mandarin sundae," Gwyneth said, stroking the hair back from his forehead.

Jack laughed. "Yeah," he said, although he really didn't know what a mandarin sundae was. But the sunset was pretty enough, all orangey-gold layered sky and puffy, pink clouds sinking into deep, blue waters. Jack felt happy, peaceful.

And that's when Gwyneth said it.

"Come be with me, John." She stopped stroking his hair, and Jack was suddenly cold as her shadow fell across him. "Come and spend the rest of your life with me," she said.

Jack arched his neck to look at her, to see if she was serious, but her face was upside down and her normal, happy smile looked like a crazy frown. The setting sun shone through her loose hair, casting daggers of light across her eyes. She did have such beautiful, blue eyes.

"Huh?" he said.

"Please come to me, John. I love you." She tickled her fingers across his cheek.

"You mean, like, come to L.A.? Live with you? Be your, you know, your boyfriend?"

Gwyneth turned her face to the horizon, closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she smiled like he'd never seen her smile before.

"Yes," she said.

Jack didn't quite know what to say to that. "But…uh…how?"

Gwyneth's hands drifted across his chest and down his abs to grab his dick. Jack sucked in his breath.

"You'll find a way, John," she said. "I know you will."

The sun collapsed below the water line and all the world went dark.

#

It could happen, Jack reasoned. Rumor'd always had it that stars regularly plugged into their immies to watch the players and hadn't Thatcher Martin himself plugged in to tell Angie Jurnot she won the lottery while she was inside his immie "Bridges to Love?" Jack remembered reading about it in the pushtrades he regularly combed for stills of Gwyneth. (See, he did do things other than play immies.) Yeah, Jack could swear that he'd heard that this sort of thing happened all the time. So why not Gwyneth? Why not him?

He imagined himself out there, in L.A., at one of those fancy Hollywood RL parties that Gwyneth was always having. Jack knew her house as well as he knew his own, from all the pictures of her he'd copied from the trades: her pool, her elegant, spacious living room (she had a living room!,) all her guestrooms. And of course, he knew her bedroom best of all, and, god, if he could make love to Gwyneth in the flesh, in her home, in their home. Jack shivered. Could it really happen?

"Are you really her?" Jack whispered as they cuddled beneath an acacia tree, offplot of "Safari Hunters."

Gwyneth leaned a hand against his chest. Her big, baby blues were all hurt innocence itself. "Of course I am," she said.

Well, that was good enough for Jack.

#

What he needed were maps, but Jack certainly couldn't afford to pay for them. So he burrowed deep into the Read Only stacks, hustled the underground boards, and sure, broke one or two laws, but finally, after two days of permaplugged searching, he emerged, hungry and tired, with four pages of road routes smuggled out to the printer into RL format. A bit of a sweaty-palm operation, if he did say so himself, and not much to look at, really. When all was said and done, what he held in his hand was a solid-paper, scrolled picture of the old, spider webbed Eisenhower Highway System, coast to coast, in standard eight by eleven printouts, pieced together with tape salvaged from old delivery boxes. A map, if a bit makeshift.

And Jack was rather proud of it, in an odd sort of way. He'd never done anything even remotely illegal before, so illicit infogathering was a completely new challenge for him. Course, he could understand why the Corps didn’t want route info or Complex locations getting out to the masses, what with the crazy Cappers running around and all.

Jack wondered, briefly, whether he should worry about that terrorism thing while he was out there on the road. According to the news releases, Cappers frequently tried to blow up the supply systems and poison the reservoirs. He'd even heard of a case where a group of Cappers forced some regular, law-abiding folks to blow up a Complex in Wisconsin. Jack shuddered at the thought. Still, he doubted he'd run into any of them. What would they want with him anyway? As long as he minded his own business, he'd be just fine.

Now all he had to do was to find his way out of the Complex.

But leaving was surprisingly easy, for all he'd never done it before. He packed some rations and a water bottle up in a blanket and slung the bundle over his shoulder, then he took the lift down from his parent's sixty-eighth floor flat, walked past the commons, across the square, through the metal gate, then one, two, three steps…and there he was, farther than he'd ever been from home in all his life. Jack took one long, slow, deep breath.

Behind him, the twenty-five buildings of the Ellingson Corp Complex #5 towered like a shiny fortress, but in front of him lay nothing but open roads. To his left, the sky hovered a deep, purpley blue and to his right, orange, glowing layers spread across the horizon, just like Gwyneth's mandarin sundae. Jack took that as a very good sign, like nature itself was showing him where to go. That way, it said, pointing with a puff-powdery hand.

That way lay west. That way lay Hollywood. That way lay Gwyneth.

#