The infinity cure, p.2
The Infinity Cure, page 2
The cavernous room rang with conversation and laughter. Hiroe hadn’t been sure if she’d have an opportunity to change and was glad she’d worn semi-formal clothing on her journey; just black slacks and a navy sequined top, but she wouldn’t look too out of place. The other guests were dressed in an array of styles, from gaudy color-shifting illuminated gowns to understated traditional suits and ties.
As she scanned the room, recognizable figures were everywhere. To her left, several scientists she’d learned about in her background research clustered together, deep in heated conversation. They were joined by someone everyone in the room likely knew on sight, Neko Ives. One of the most popular and prolific actors of the past decade, he was also known for his dedication to social causes.
Hiroe watched him passionately gesturing as he spoke to the scientists, seemingly unaware of the stunningly gorgeous woman in a silver minidress who hovered by his side, looking bored at the conversation but possessive of him.
Ives wasn’t the only celebrity in the room. Actors, models, athletes, singers, and socialites dotted the room. Some of them stood out immediately; others blended in surprisingly well with the other guests, causing Hiroe to do a double take when she recognized them.
She also saw a few journalists from rival news services; while many people probably wouldn’t recognize them right away, they were as familiar to her as any famous actor. Her mouth twisted cynically as she noted how few aqueans there were in the room, given the reason they were all there. The crowd was more than ninety percent human.
Many of the attendees, even though they weren’t celebrities Hiroe recognized, seemed accustomed to being in the same room with some of the biggest names in pop culture. Other guests, however, were clearly starstruck, huddling together trying to mask excited whispers and glances across the room at Ives and other famous faces.
Hiroe made her way to the refreshment area, where she gazed admiringly on—then dug shamelessly into—trays of delicate seafood canapes, glistening slices of fresh fruit, light crisp pastries stuffed with dried fruit and sharp cheese, and more. It all tasted real and impossibly fresh, and she saw from the looks on several guests’ faces that they may have been experiencing non-laboratory food for the first time in years, or decades. Or ever.
She moved to a bar area where one aquean attendant poured champagne into slender cylindrical glasses and another mixed colorful drinks using unidentifiable ingredients. She accepted a flute of sparkling wine and returned the courteous smile of the girl who handed it to her.
“Can you fucking believe this?” A voice on her left, low but tight with barely suppressed excitement, caused Hiroe to turn. A woman not much younger than her—maybe in her mid-forties—in a tacky ruffled dress gripped a bright pink cocktail and looked hungrily out at the crowd, then back to Hiroe. “That’s Mirielle. Like, literally five feet away from us. I cannot. Believe this is happening!” Her voice rose to a squeak at the end.
“Yeah, amazing,” Hiroe agreed politely. She sipped her drink and the two of them stood together, scanning the room. The other woman listed out the names of other celebrity attendees in a reverent whisper, Hiroe nodding and making impressed noises.
When the woman stopped for breath, or ran out of people she recognized, she introduced herself as Lottie Wineman. Her hair looked freshly colored in a rainbow of hues, segments of it painstakingly twisted and fastened to her head in looping patterns. It was obviously an amateur job, but the woman must have spent hours, maybe the entire day, putting it up. It didn’t flatter her careworn face, but the amount of effort that had to have gone into it was impressive. “What do you do, Lottie?” Hiroe asked.
“Mostly just on UBI,” the woman said distractedly, her eyes ceaselessly roaming from one star to another. “And you know, whatever little tasks I can find to pick up extra money. Some errand-running gigs, some companionship stuff for lonely old people, that kind of thing. My husband’s around here somewhere—oh, he’s right over there, man-crushing on Ken Byers.”
She gestured toward the tall muscular ballplayer, leaning down to listen to a young woman who was talking animatedly to him, and Hiroe saw a considerably shorter, stockier man in a cheap-looking suit, clutching a tumbler of green liquid and standing a few feet away from the athlete, stealing glances at him. “He hasn’t found much work lately so he’s been kind of depressed, and following his team’s literally the only thing that makes him happy. Or keeps him sane at least.”
Lottie smiled at Hiroe, her eyes shining with what could have been tears. “You have no idea how much winning this trip means to us. This is like the best thing that’s ever happened to me, ever, by a long shot. And it came at a good time. Shit, we’ve been talking about splitting up—I mean, we’re never gonna make enough money to have kids, so I kinda figure what’s the point—but how could we separate? We can barely afford one tiny little apartment together.
“So this just feels like our luck is maybe gonna turn around, you know? This is the most unbelievable thing—I still can’t fucking believe I’m looking at all these people in real life. And it’s just started, you know? There’s all day tomorrow too. It’s like—it’s like I’m on a vacation with—” she gestured again in another direction “—with Gable Carie. In a fucking underwater mansion that’s like a luxury hotel. I mean, what the fuck?”
Hiroe kept nodding as Lottie rambled breathlessly before eventually sputtering to a halt. She’d known several guests would be randomly chosen in a sweepstakes—whether to get more everyday citizens involved in the cause or just to make it seem like a less elitist event, she couldn’t say, though she was leaning toward the latter.
Lottery-style contests were more and more common these days; universal basic income kept most people from living in starvation-level poverty (or taking to the streets in protest), but it didn’t leave room for anything extra. There wasn’t enough work to go around, or free forms of entertainment. Contests and randomly awarded prizes added an element of hope and potential that was missing from many people’s lives, and studies had tied them to slowing the growth of the so-called “suicide pandemic.” So it wasn’t exactly surprising that this event had a lottery aspect. It made for good press.
Lottie spoke again, a welcome interruption from Hiroe’s current train of thought. “And you know, where we live, in Montana, we don’t really see many, or any, you know—” the woman’s voice lowered slightly as she glanced back at the bar “—aqueans up close, outside of shows and stuff like that. So that’s kind of exciting too. They’re so … I don’t know, smooth-looking in real life.”
She laughed nervously. “I mean, they’re great. Great, um, people. This is a really, really … great thing that Faith Benedict is doing for them. Poor things.”
Hiroe cringed inwardly at the fumbling, stilted words but politely agreed with the woman. She introduced herself at last, revealing she worked for Global Media, and asked if she could quote Lottie in her reporting about the event.
Lottie’s eyes widened and she agreed eagerly. “Maybe not the stuff about Bennie being depressed though, huh? I wouldn’t of said that if I’d known it would be in the news!” She giggled some more. “In the news! For real never thought I’d be saying that about myself!”
Aloud, Hiroe agreed readily, but privately she reserved the option to include the detail if it served her story. Unfortunately for Lottie, there wouldn’t be much recourse if Hiroe reported something she didn’t like. Lawsuits were prohibitively expensive for most people, and viral outrage campaigns were easy to start on social media but always petered out quickly before effecting any real change, the public’s attention captured by some new conflict or drama.
Hiroe felt a twinge of pity for the woman. She thought about her returning to her largely directionless life after this weekend and wondered if, in the long run, it would end up making her and her husband’s situation feel all the more grim.
CHAPTER THREE
Hiroe got a refill of champagne, said a few parting words to Lottie, and moved away, as if she could escape the depressing vision of her future by putting physical distance between them. The woman barely acknowledged her anyway; she was back to sipping her garishly colored cocktail and drinking in the array of famous guests scattered throughout the crowd.
Hiroe pulled her device from her pocket and quickly typed some of what Lottie had said, along with a few observations about the woman’s hair and outfit, her husband, and the couple’s excitement about the star-studded crowd.
She roughly sketched the pattern that Lottie’s twisted, pinned hair made on her head, the ruffles on her dress, the shape of the cocktail glass she clutched. She was already envisioning the animated recreation of Lottie spouting the quotes. She could feel the familiar irresistible pull toward a good story as it started to take shape in her mind.
Across the vast hall, Hiroe noticed guests milling around a virtual reality chamber with multiple stations. She crossed the room toward it, draining her glass and handing it to an aquean waiter with a tray.
The surfaces of the structure, white with a shimmering pearlescent finish, gave way to holographic images and immersive sounds that came to life around Hiroe as she entered. In the closest station right inside the entrance, she settled onto a seat that looked hard but encased her in customized comfort as soon as it sensed her weight and body shape.
Around her the real world dissolved, replaced by green rippling water. The VR was top quality, realistic to the point of her skin feeling a sensation of cool wetness from the water, although her clothing felt dry. She was submerged in the ocean.
Hiroe’s heart jolted unpleasantly and her breath caught in her throat. She closed her eyes, practiced her breathing, and pressed her fingers to her wrist, counting the beats of her pulse until it started to slow to a more normal pace. Then she opened her eyes.
The virtual reality experience had paused when her eyes had shut, but now it resumed. An aquean man swam next to her as she descended into the water, relating the history of human-aquean relations.
The two species had coexisted for eons on the planet, largely unaware of one another. They did encounter one another from time to time, but sightings were brushed off by both sides as legend or hallucinations. Humans developed the myth of mermaids, and some aqueans believed humans were visitors from another planet—if they believed in their existence at all.
Then humans had started deep sea exploration in earnest. The first official contact between the species had sent shockwaves through both their worlds. A joint French and American expedition in the 1970s encountered an aquean village in the Atlantic Ocean and, after exchanging gifts and other friendly gestures, the groups began trying to learn one another’s languages. Aquean languages proved impossible for most humans to understand or replicate, but aqueans were able to learn and speak human tongues.
Humans were unable to sustain long visits to the deep ocean, and aqueans couldn’t stay healthy for long on land, so even then, relations between them remained limited until technology and medicine advanced enough for humans to exist underwater indefinitely and for aqueans to live on land without suffering adverse side effects.
The virtual reality display went on to focus on the positive influences and contributions aqueans had brought to human society and the ways human technology had aided aqueans, leaving out the most problematic aspects of human-aquean relations.
Some of it was common knowledge, and Hiroe had done background research before she came, so she could fill in the blanks left by the holographic narrator. Because aqueans lived harmoniously with their habitat rather than manipulating it to suit their species, many humans thought of them as primitive and intellectually inferior.
Those perceptions lingered among humans. Aquean societal structures, which eschewed monogamy and contained levels of shared commitments and emotional bonds that transcended the human concepts of blood relations, marriage, and borders, struck many humans as immoral, confusing, or ridiculous.
Relations between the species, while never overtly hostile to the extent of war or invasion, had always been fraught with tensions and conflict. As soon as humans could live underwater, they began trying to purchase land from aqueans. Attempts to impose human concepts of ownership were met with confusion and sometimes outright resistance from aqueans.
And when aqueans became able to survive on land, those who wanted to assimilate into human societies were met with appalling hostility and prejudice by human citizens, media, and political figures alike. It was unsurprising that the VR display avoided such topics, but it also decreased its credibility in Hiroe’s mind.
Still, now that she felt calmer, she was enjoying herself. Watching the aquean hologram swim, feeling like she was floating along beside him, gave her a pang of nostalgia. His easy movements reminded her how much she had once loved it herself; the momentum of it, how the water seemed to help her along. After a long day of swimming, being back on land with its gravity and ground and air would feel like something she had to struggle against and through by contrast. She knew he was only a hologram, but the figure beside her radiated that same pleasure and comfort.
The aquean wore only a silvery pair of trunks and she felt hypnotized by his smooth, sea-foam-green skin and the rippling muscles underneath as he took long, unhurried strokes. Curious, she reached out, expecting her hand to go through him as it would with standard quality virtual reality, but instead she felt as if she touched actual skin, smooth and wet, and felt almost embarrassed that she’d touched him. Worse, the hologram responded, glancing at her with a half-smile. She pulled her hand back self-consciously.
The visuals shifted and another ocean vista appeared before them. Hiroe felt more acclimated and her stomach didn’t rebel as she was whisked along the seabed through the manicured gardens of Faith Benedict’s estate.
Then the plants and fish fell away and she was soaring out over a black fault in the ocean floor, then down into it. Her chest tightened and her breathing became shallow as she fought back panic, trying to listen to the hologram’s voice telling her about the spot.
The Infinite Water Trench, as the aquean name for it roughly translated to, was, in their lore, the source of aquean life, the start of their species. Hiroe knew from her research that Faith’s decision to build her lavish home close to the trench, essentially making it a feature of her estate, was controversial among many aqueans as well as humans well-versed in their culture. The narration made no mention of that controversy, Hiroe noted wryly even in her nervous state.
Until the emergence of aquamycosis, coming-of-age rites of passage used to be performed at the trench by any aqueans who lived within a month’s swim. Every few years, the entire populations of several aquean villages would congregate at Infinite Water.
Aqueans who had turned twenty since the last gathering would travel down together into the trench for a period of fasting and prayer while their communities celebrated above, performing ceremonies to summon health, prosperity, and love for their new adult members.
Participants would forever be considered linked to those they’d dwelt in the trench with, a cohort that, regardless of what village they were from, protected and supported one another for life. It was one of many kinds of community bonds that aqueans considered sacred lifelong commitments.
The exhibit spent a minute or two in total darkness, the whispered prayers in aquean language the only sound Hiroe could hear, the virtual water cold and still around her.
She wrapped her arms around herself, felt her wrist, tried to breathe. Eventually light returned around her as she was brought back out of the trench, and she was in the midst of an aquean ceremony, watching swirling dancers in bright costumes swim in perfect sync as others chanted around them, the distorted sound of their voices traveling through water eerily beautiful.
Hiroe was still relieved when the exhibit ended. She left it wobbling slightly.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hiroe made her way gradually through the room in the other direction, introducing herself to some of the scientists and asking for their thoughts about the gala and aquamycosis.
She jotted notes on her tablet; it captured her scrawls and transcribed them into type, saving them for later. She’d tried the device’s touch-screen keyboard but found she was equally slow, if not slower, at typing, having little need to practice either writing or typing in her day-to-day life.
Everything the scientists said on record was predictable and rehearsed. Hiroe was more interested in what she overheard when they weren’t talking to her. “Glad to see Faith Benedict only invited real scientists to this thing,” one said sarcastically.
His colleague agreed, and they spent a few minutes complaining about her scattershot approach to funding research, which included giving money (and by extension an air of legitimacy) to unethical or ignorant public figures who’d been espousing dangerous theories based on bad science.
Hiroe gathered quotes from lottery winners too, as well as a few of the well-known personalities. She wasn’t starstruck but attempted to appear deferential, even when models or athletes tangled their words together and revealed their ignorance of the nature of aquamycosis. She wasn’t interested in skewering celebrities. She’d decode and improve their ramblings later during her reporting.
She heard someone shout her name and suppressed annoyance to see two journalists from rival news services waving at her. She pasted on a smile that might have looked genuine enough from across the room, swearing inwardly as they beckoned her.
The three of them chatted politely at first, mainly about the novelty, and constraints, of covering a story without any recording devices.
“Is anyone from Static coming?” asked Perth Roberts, a note of condescension in his voice. A veteran BBC Jazeera reporter, his was the longest-standing and most highly regarded of the four largest worldwide news services. Static was a decade old but still considered an upstart by many in the news business, though it was founded by respected journalists and had attracted many more.
