White World – Steve Stanton

White World

by Steve Stanton

Viki staged a party for their last night together. The food was catered but the drinks were bring-your-own. She had planned the details for weeks in advance, her fifth-floor apartment immaculate, completely sterile. All the guests had been instructed to be free of animal dander and scrubbed clean with disinfectant. Her young man Danny could not risk any contamination this late in his regime.

Viki had pushed her meager furniture against the walls to create a dance floor in her parqueted living room where high heels clicked like castanets to the throbbing beat of a rented amplifier. The crowd quickly filled her apartment and spilled out onto the balcony enclosure and down the carpeted hallway. The airlock supervisor on the ground floor was cutting her some slack for the occasion, safely ensconced in his office nursing a bottle of imported peach schnapps at her expense. Viki wanted everything to be perfect for this going-away party. She wanted a lasting image of the good times, an indelible memory that she could take out and examine during the lonely nights stretching out on the horizon. At the height of festivities her young man Danny looked like an angel, a clean and sexy androgyne, and Viki corralled him away to the bedroom for a quickie. His naked body was hairless and beautiful. His smile was radiant above her. She called upon deity in a moment of transcendence.

Danny was scheduled for final chemo and irradiation in the morning and would be in strict quarantine for the next thirty days as the nanite scrubbers were implanted in his body. Once he passed statutory testing he would be released on the other side of the hospital, on the other side of a perpetual airlock, into White World. He would be hardwired for health with defense in depth and cellular firewalls, as close to invincible as expanding science would allow. Viki might never see him again, not in the flesh. She might never qualify to touch his face, to kiss his lips. She was unclean by birth.

“You guys okay in there?” Someone rapped politely on the bedroom door. Music thumped on the other side and voices mingled with boisterous animation.

“Be right out,” Danny shouted over his shoulder. He turned back to his lover. “You okay?”

She hugged him close, not wanting to let him go this last time, not wanting him to slip away like smoke in the night. She had rehearsed this evening in her mind a hundred times. They had talked it over for months. “Just fine. Let’s get back to the party. This is your big night.” She patted his bare ass to signal him to move, marveling at the simple nuance of tactile communication—how much she would miss feeling his skin!

Danny rose from bed and dressed quickly while she hunted for her underwear.

“I’ll call you tomorrow at eight,” he said. “We’ll have sex on the webcam, just like old times.”

Viki smiled as she jostled her breasts into black lace hangers. They had met oncam during the spinal pandemic two years ago, housebound and frightened while impoverished people around the globe died on dirt streets. Danny had chatted about making the transition to White World even then, the opportunity for an enhanced life in a sterile paradise, a one-way ticket to heaven with an impossible price tag. How quickly the dream of immortality had drawn her closer to the nightmare of separation.

Viki straightened her red dress in the mirror with a frown and rubbed at ruined mascara around her eyes. She had dolled herself up for her man and now looked like a harlot in disarray. She needed a quick patch-up in the washroom, if she could get in past the steady stream of revellers she had invited to the celebration—her personal support group, the safety net that would catch her when she fell. “If you’re feeling up for it after chemo. No pressure.”

“Nah.” He waved a hand dismissively. “I’ll just be topping up tomorrow. I’m good to go.” He nodded toward the door. “You ready?”

She gave him a kiss on the cheek in passing but felt cold discomfort blossom in her windpipe. This was their last night together. A bass vibration hit her in the midriff as the door opened. A digital rock guitarist screamed to a foot-pounding rhythm, neo-punk pagan: life sucks and the future is shit! The smell of tobacco and cannabis drifted in from the balcony enclosure and Danny wrinkled his face as he caught the scent. He moved toward an air exchanger as Viki went to close the patio door. She chatted with a gang of friends and offered to fetch drinks.

By the time she got back to Danny he was surrounded by groupies, young kids with wide eyes who had never imagined White World so close. “A sealed-off society with monorails and airports,” he told the enthralled onlookers, “a city above the city. The air is purified and the water distilled by tabletop dispensers. Everything is sterile, everything is clean. No one ever gets sick.” His eyes gleamed with veracity, with the surety of science.

“You guys should come along,” he told the crowd. “Dig down and work three jobs for awhile. It’s not that hard.” Danny looked up as she approached. “Viki’s gonna make the jump,” he said as he accepted a bottle of beer from her hand, “as soon as we scrape together the cash.” He inspected the bottle cap carefully before breaking the seal with a reassuring hiss.

No one offered a reply. No one dared touch him. No one could possibly afford a ticket to White World.

Viki held her own bottle up for a toast. “To the future,” she said and the crowd echoed halting approval as they tipped up their drinks. Her chest felt like a tightly coiled spring. Her lover’s semen was dripping into her panties. She felt like a peasant whore, a soiled and smelly rag.

Danny guzzled half his beer and put it on the floor behind his chair. He stood up and wrapped a powerful arm around Viki’s waist to steer her toward a gyrating mass of humanity in the living room where the music dictated all order. Viki shuffled mechanically and failed to keep the beat.

“You look great,” he told her, and she realized with a start that she hadn’t fixed her botched makeup. She brushed her fingers through her hair and grimaced a smile.

“It’s a new beginning, Vik,” he told her, sotto voce, “not the end. I’ll find a place for you.”

“Of course, honey,” she said and gave a sexy upthrust with her hips. “Don’t be silly.”

Something caught his attention behind her and he stumbled mid-step to a halt. He gaped in horror. “There’s an animal in your kitchen.”

Viki whirled in alarm. Oh, god, no. She saw a tall blond guy leaning against her stove with his arm around one of her best friends, Delaney Harris. A silver ferret perched on his shoulder and sniffed his neck.

Viki turned and grabbed Danny’s arm, her eyes intent.

“I’ll get rid of it,” she told him. “Stay right here.”

“An animal in the kitchen,” he repeated vacantly. “That’s just sick.”

“I’ll handle it, Danny.”

He shook his head. “Don’t bother. I was never here.” His eyes focused over her shoulder, measuring his trajectory to the exit. “I could lose my passport for this,” he whispered.

He ducked away from her and strode with great care through the cavorting crowd, spinning away from any bodily contact, from any trace of contamination. He grabbed his filter mask from a selection hanging on pegs by the front door and sprinted down the hall.

Viki’s legs gave out under her as tension broke in her chest with a sob of pain. She swayed on her knees and buried her face in her palms. Oh, god, no. Her body convulsed with anguish as she vomited up beer and bile on the polished wooden floor. She had lost Danny forever.

Friends gathered her under her armpits and dragged her out to the balcony enclosure where an air exchanger pumped in filtered freshness five stories up above a teeming city of light. Someone pressed an icy washcloth to her forehead and cold water dripped over her ruined makeup. She vomited again and fell to her knees weeping beside a row of potted vegetation. All the houseplants had been moved out here months ago, filled as they were with uncontrolled organisms and germs.

Viki reached her hands into the moist, black earth. This was life, the source of all life. This was where she came from. Her forefathers had tilled the soil for their daily bread as their ancestors had for untold generations. She clenched her fingers and filled her palms. With deliberate care she rubbed dirt up her arms like pasty black paint. She rubbed her cheeks and smeared black around her neck and down the front of her red party dress. She was unclean, unworthy. She wanted to die with shame. How could she ever get to White World?

Sorry I missed our appointment the other day. The hardware here is all locked on a private network. Took me awhile to find an outside line. My schedule is intense. Twelve hours of classes every day. Lots to learn. It’s really a great opportunity for me.

No reply at this IP addy. I will keep in touch.

Love you.

Danny.

Viki read the text message until her eyes blurred with tears as memories of intimacy haunted her heart. Danny might as well be on another planet. How could he possibly love her from White World? She was a dayshift grunt with a factory job at Indigo Plastics where the motherboard in her punch press likely had a higher IQ than the operator. She wore greasy coveralls eight hours a day and carried her lunch in a dented metal bucket. Danny had an eternal destiny, a higher calling in a germ-free sanctuary. There were probably thousands of bright, intellectual women ready to steal him away, classmates, co-workers, angelic women with long, painted fingernails and chilled glasses of sparkling champagne.

Days stretched into weeks without another email. He was too busy, she told herself. He had found someone else and their relationship was over. She began surfing camsites for singles late at night on her laptop, looking for a substitute for love, any hint of infatuation—she spilled her guts to online anonyms in the hope of finding a moment of solace. She joined the after-work party crowd from the factory and began to bar hop on the boulevard, Charlie-hunting for free drinks. She stumbled to bed alone at night, drunk and weepy. Her friends all told her she was not handling this well.

Graduated from 30-day Q and started my first job today as a lab tech. I can’t believe I made it to White World! I really miss you, Viki. We’ve got to get together on a cam sometime soon. My balls are bursting. In the meantime I will check this email addy. It’s not secure, so don’t say anything bad about me. Love, Danny.

Viki scanned the message with dread, her abdomen tight with anxiety. It was official now. Danny was not coming back. White World had claimed him forever. He could not return without giving up his expensive nanites, without sacrificing everything he had worked for all those years. He was immortal now, or close to it, a sterile superman looking down from Mount Olympus. She stood and paced her small apartment, trying to compose her thoughts. What could she say from the wrong side of a perpetual barricade? What brave pledge could she offer up to such lofty height?

Finally she forced herself to the keyboard and typed a string of platitudes about love and personal relationships. She punched the send button, feeling morose, wondering if Danny would understand the deep feelings crouching behind her words. She stayed awake that night, sweaty in her twisted bedsheets, staring at the ceiling and pining for her lost lover like a starstruck teenager.

She had to get a life. What was the point in hanging on to monthly emails for sustenance? What did Danny expect from her? A virtual girlfriend? A cybersex whore? She needed to touch him. She needed to hold his hand and look in his eyes. She wanted to feel the weight of his body.

In a fit of exuberance Viki spent all her savings redecorating her apartment. She painted the walls deep cranberry with beige wallpaper borders and bought gaudy native art prints with bear claws and eagle heads and archetypal males in feather headdress. She had her hair dyed auburn and cut spiky and got a tattoo on her bikini-line that she regretted the next morning—a tiny hummingbird pointing to a fluted orchid, too suggestive by far in retrospect.

She was reading a romance novel on a Wednesday night, curled up in her favorite chair with a steaming cup of chocolate, when the webcam icon chimed on her flatscreen. She eyed it warily and rose with hesitance. She didn’t take cam from just anyone.

It was Danny.

Her body stiffened with the electrochemical spice of life. She dashed to the washroom to check her face. Oh god, what a mess. She applied some slap and a dab of mascara, brushed her hair. She had no time. Her heart raced as she flew back to her computer and swivelled into her chair. She took a tantric breath and signed on.

His smiling face lit up her screen. “Viki, you look great.”

She reached out a hand to touch him. The screen was warm, slightly resilient, almost like skin. “Danny,” she said. Her throat felt like a rock had lodged inside it.

“I finally got vidi access from my team leader. You have to work hard for every privilege around here. Wow, you look great. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“Sorry. . .” He brought his hand to his chin. “. . .it’s been so long. I don’t know where to begin. So much has happened.”

Viki smiled. It was all she could manage.

Danny looked away as though distracted by something outside camera view. He turned back. “There’s a reason for my call, Vik. We’ve been tracking a new variant, a bronchial virus coming up from the south. It looks like a bad one. I think you should lock down, honey. Get some water and supplies and stay off the street.”

Fear whispered in her spine. “Is it that serious?”

Danny winced. “It’s a killer, Vik. Airborne in close proximity. They’re calling it Air-353. Lungs just fill up with fluid, death by asphyxiation, sometimes cardiac arrest. It’s moving fast. Our data is trailing a relatively long incubation period. We’re doing everything we can up here. Look, I don’t want to scare you. ”

Too late for that. “There’s always another bug in town, Danny,” Viki said with false confidence.

Danny nodded, his lips grim. “Just be careful, Vik. I gotta go. People are lining up at the public terminals. We’re not generally allowed to chat outside the box. I love you, Viki.”

His words stabbed at her carefully constructed defences. She could not accept them, not at face value. Will I ever touch you again, Danny?

She dared not speak. It took all her effort to keep her lips from trembling.

“You look great, Vik. I’ll see you soon.”

Her monitor went bluescreen and she cried.

Air-353 bloomed quickly within her despite belated precautions, and she suffered for two days with daggers in her throat, chewing acetaminophen tablets like chiclets and hoping it was a common streptococcus. She decided to get to a hospital while she still had some strength, but dared not call a cab or contaminate metro transit, so she donned her filter mask and went outside in the poisonous air, ten minutes on her feet, fifteen minutes dozing on the sidewalk, ten minutes on her feet. . .

The Emergency Room was crowded with patients. Portable cots had been laid end to end down both sides of every hallway and all were taken, all seats and wheelchairs full, so Viki found a quiet corner near a doorway and slouched against a painted block wall. She began to cough with steady rhythm as congestion gathered in her trachea. A nurse in a full body condom with nasal filters took a swab from her throat and gave her pills to cut her fever. Air-353 was confirmed and she received a pillow and a blanket and a bottle of water. She felt like shit.

Twelve people died that first night and a nurse helped Viki crawl to a newly vacated cot. She stretched out aching muscles, heedless of the smell of death. A doctor visited on his morning rounds and told her she had a good chance, that she was young and strong and could beat this bug. She felt old and weak and helpless but she thanked him anyway with her last trace of civilized decorum. All the staff wore clear plastic body condoms like zip-lock bags with white filter masks. They moved about like caricatures in a cartoon world.

A euthanasiast came in every afternoon to separate the wheat from the chaff with a silver syringe of mercy. He became known as the Preacher because he carried a Bible and read it aloud to the huddled masses. Viki was afraid to look him in the eye for fear that he would single her out. She dreamt of him at night and woke sweaty and choking with a scream stuck in her throat behind a wall of pain and inflammation. Death by bronchial pneumonia had no sound, no drama, no apology, just an absence of breath, a pause that lingered.

Reality slipped away like a friend on vacation. A feverish delirium took its place, a disembodied voice begging for water, a body voiding itself at both ends. Air-353.

“You’re a fighter, girl. Don’t give up. You can beat this bug,” a cartoon body condom told her.

Viki wanted to laugh at such absurdity. What was she fighting for? What did she have left to lose? A factory job and a one-bedroom apartment? A future? She was too sick to care any more. She wondered what they did with all the dead bodies that were carted by her day after day. Did they stack them like cordwood in mass graves outside the city? Did they cremate them and send the component parts of Air-353 back up into the ecosystem to reassemble themselves into a new and more virulent strain? What hope did humanity have in an environment gone wild with mutagenic toxins?

She saw the Preacher coming for her finally with a needle raised in his right hand.

She tensed with what feeble strength she could muster. “No,” she choked.

“It’s okay. Everything will be fine,” he said.

The needle came closer. She squirmed back. “No.”

His voice came from faraway, foreign. “It’s a Phase Three trial, honey. It’s safe for human use.”

She tried to turn aside, to move a muscle. “I’m not ready to die.”

The Preacher pulled his mask down to expose his face to virulence. “Can you understand me, Vik? I’ve got the antivirus. You’re going to make it.”

“Danny?”

The Preacher smiled and slid the needle home.

Viki stared up at him, too weak to blink. She puzzled a great paradox on the edge of her consciousness and fought momentarily against the eager darkness that enveloped her.

She heard chanting from heaven, a dreamlike rhapsody, low at first, gathering strength and volume as new voices joined the babbling chorus in a language she could not understand. An illumination grew in the distance, a lingering vision of candlelight on fine church draperies. The eerie light came closer as the chanting reached crescendo, growing red and angry, a hellish curtain, and Viki broke through to harsh fluorescence overhead.

Danny looked down at her from behind a white filter mask and held her hand in his latex glove. “Just rest, honey. You’re doing fine.” The sound seemed so ordinary, the edges sharp and detailed and clearly decipherable, so out of place in a cartoon world.

“Here, have some nutrient water.” Danny slid his hand under her neck and tipped her up a fraction. He poured cool liquid past swollen and cracked lips. Elixir of life.

A figure approached with a databoard and Danny stood to greet him.

“You’re Daniel. . .” He scanned his records. “. . .Whitlock?”

“Yes, sir.” Danny held out a hand and the man gripped it firmly.

“And this is your sister?”

“Fiancée, I hope.”

“Ahh.” The man nodded and arched his eyebrows above his mask and glasses. He tapped a notation. “I’m Doctor Tim Harbridge, Chief of Staff.” He scrolled pages on his tablet. “So the story I’ve got so far is that you dropped out of White World with four doses of an experimental antivirus for Air-353.”

“I filed all the necessary documentation. It’s a Phase Three trial. We pushed it up a notch due to the urgency of the situation.”

Doctor Harbridge fingered his screen with diligence. “I see that. Some of these signatures must have been difficult to obtain. I’m very impressed. You guys just whip up miracles on demand?”

“I’m no designer, sir. Our team simply brings the schematics to life. Recombinant DNA. Everybody works hard. I’d like to go back someday. . .” He paused. “. . . if it’s possible.”

Doctor Harbridge squinted at him. “Your nanites have been purged of course.”

Danny nodded grimly. “Clean slate.”

“You’ll be immune deficient for months here on ground level. You’ll get every common sickness in the book, two and three at a time. There’s a good chance you may not survive.” He tapped another notation.

“I’m young and strong. I know the drill.”

“I like your attitude, son. She must be one fine woman.”

Viki gazed up in wonder. What were these men talking about? She must look like a witch and smell even worse. She had lost control of her bowels days ago.

“The antivirus works,” Danny said.

The doctor lowered his databoard to his hip. “Indeed, and I have two hundred ampules coming in by courier for tomorrow morning, thanks to you. Are you a doctor?”

Danny shook his head. “Just a lab rat.”

“Well, Mister Whitlock, I’m very impressed, and I’d like to get you on staff here at the hospital while you requalify your status for White World. Something in Purchasing perhaps. Medical Liaison or Supply Management. Whatever suits your interest, frankly. Can we work something out?”

Danny’s eyes beamed with vitality. He looked up and down the hallway at the apparent war zone. “Looks more like crisis management to me, but I’ll give it my best shot.”

A business card flicked in latex fingers. “We don’t ask for any more than that. Call my office as soon as you get your girl safely back home.”

Doctor Harbridge turned again to Viki. “We are all fortunate to have made your acquaintance, miss, even in such unholy circumstance.” He clasped Danny’s shoulder beside him. “Keep a good hold on this fine fellow and get well soon.” He nodded to her with gentle deference, then walked away with a deliberate but unhurried pace.

Danny sat down near her and dropped his filter mask as Viki struggled with burgeoning truth. Could he really have given up White World for such a faithless and hideous wretch? Did he love her that much?

Danny smiled and picked up her feeble hand. “You look great, honey.”

Steve Stanton serves as the vice-president of SF Canada. His science-fiction stories have been published in twelve countries and nine languages, and his debut novel is now available from ECW Press in Toronto, The Bloodlight Chronicles: Reconciliation.

 

UPDATE, 5/5/2011: Steve was appointed President of SF Canada at the AGM last weekend.  Congratulations, Steve!

White World - Steve Stanton, 4.2 out of 5 based on 9 ratings