Samantha Strolls in Silver Fields

A demigod of rock thrust his guitar pick down in one final stroke, and the Stratocaster screamed under the arena’s flashing strobes, a thunderous roll of drums finishing behind him. Uproarious applause exploded from the crowd. He gazed out at them, raking sweaty tendrils of hair from his face, letting the applause crash over him in staggered waves. In the light of the strobes, dozens of young women with Hollywood faces screamed at him, their eyes aglow with lust, hands groping at the stage.

BEEP.

He had played perfectly, and in that moment, he owned the crowd. The look on their faces—

A startling silence and a blur of white light stole over the world in an instant.

John Archer blinked up at the sterile white glow of halogen tubes, and for a moment had no idea where he was. He sat reclined in a sleek black lounger, his fingers splayed over warm globes of semisoft blue gel.

“Time’s up,” a cheery voice said. “I’m afraid the demonstration only lasts ten minutes.”

The salesman peeked into Archer’s field of view, a thin man wearing a gray suit and an expectant grin. “Pretty amazing, right?” he said.

“Yes,” Archer heard himself say. The salesman laughed.

By degrees it all came back: He was John Archer, forty-nine, one of several hundred thousand wage slaves for the Kittridge-Hamashiro pharmaceutical zaibatsu. He had lied to his supervisor about an appointment for laser corrective surgery and stolen away from work and into the Dreamscape Neurotech showroom on this Wednesday afternoon. His deception would be discovered and he would be reprimanded; bad liars like Archer were always found out. There would be punishment, yes, but he wouldn’t be let go. He’d find a way to stumble through some excuse about a scheduling mix-up; a problem at the surgeon’s office; whatever. He’d likely be tuning in to the network for a few extra Sundays when everyone else was sleeping in or watching hexeball games or whatever his fellow peons did with their free time.

A sickly wave of dejection washed over him at the realization, something akin to the reliable disappointment of shuffling into the bathroom of his tiny apartment every morning, only to find the reflection of a fat, balding, overworked John Archer staring sleepily at him from the mirror. The man that eyed him disgustedly from that bathroom mirror had never held a real guitar or won a pretty girl’s affection in all his life.

“Yes sir,” the salesman said, “our simulation engineers are the very best in the business.” He gingerly stripped the electrode circlet from Archer’s head. “Now just imagine if you had this lovely little device in your living room, with all the time in the world. The possibilities are endless, Mr. Archer, and that’s no exaggeration.”

It seemed impossible, but there he had been only moments before: the front man, the king of the arena, with long, dark hair and taut muscles and a legion of gorgeous young women shouting his name. It was nothing like the real-def VR goggle sets he'd tried, or even the SensiCast REM-controller hardware suite he'd demoed at the New Frontier expo in Atlanta. This was something special.

Minutes later, Archer stood in an air-conditioned little office staring at the digital contract, a plastic stylus in his hand. The salesman watched him with the practiced patience of a lioness in the high grass, his hands folded in front of him, grinning. Archer couldn’t afford the chair, no question about that. The price tag was obscene; a daunting string of numbers that Archer wouldn’t see in a year. Blinking at it with the stylus in his hand made his stomach turn over. But, he thought, if he could make the minimum payments, maybe sell off the autocar, the air filtration unit—something. Anything.

He remembered the heft of the guitar in his hands, the rapid dance of his fingers up and down the fretboard, the power of controlling the crowd with the Stratocaster's blasts and wails. The hunger for it ballooned in his mind, and his hand had signed on the flashing line almost before he knew he’d done it. And just like that, the contract vanished from the screen and the salesman had taken Archer’s hand and was shaking it heartily. Archer blinked at him, astonished in spite of the simplicity of the gesture. He discovered then that he couldn’t remember the last time that someone had touched him.

“You’ve made a momentous decision, Mr. Archer,” the salesman said, his predator’s eyes softened and satiated now. “This product will change your life. I guarantee it.”

Archer left the soothing A/C of the showroom and stepped into the blaring sun in its sickly sky. He felt drunk, a man awash in the intoxicating glow of grand possibility. Pretty amazing, the salesman had said. That didn’t come close to describing it. It was nirvana.

What had finally sold him on the chair was a transparent fact that both Archer and the salesman understood: Quite simply, John Archer was nobody. He was just a name on a work roster at one of the dozens of dreadnought corporations that lumbered across the world’s economic landscape, stamping out smaller companies and snatching up competitors to devour. He moved numbers, farmed data, generated spreadsheets, analyzed trends. There were millions like him, goggled into their network from home, and he could be plucked out and replaced on a whim. Not a thing in the world would notice his absence. Archer was merely a serial number in a world where social convention and traditional human interaction had become obsolete. This little jaunt over to the showroom had been the first time Archer had had occasion to leave his apartment in weeks—grocery deliveries available day and night—and when the salesman took his hand and shook it without warning, Archer remembered all at once that this is how things used to be: People shook hands and held one another and spoke to each other face to face, like in the movies. Now everyone was plugged in and switched on, network monkeys and keyboard jockeys whose dreams were peopled with blinking cursors and scrolling sprawls of code.

The dreams were the worst. Archer felt cheated enough spending all of his waking hours plugged into the network, but now its little minions were shuttling across the loom of his dreams, and at no cost to corporate.

Archer had no relatives, no friends, no hope for a better station. But for ten minutes, he’d been a goddamn rock star.

When the chair arrived the following evening, a Dreamscape Neurotech rep in a navy coverall gave him the rundown, dragging a forefinger down a checklist on a digital pad as he did so. “Take frequent breaks,” the rep said. “Don’t use the chair for more than three hours at a time. If you let it get away from you on occasion, you’ll be all right, but if you make a habit of going too deep for too long,” he crooked an eyebrow at Archer, “there can be complications.”

“Sure,” Archer said, staring at the chair. It gleamed inside its plastic wrap, brand new, waiting for him to take the reins.

“Now, don’t worry,” the rep said, “there’s a system in place to make sure you’re in and out as you please. The circlet will emit a beeping sound every half hour to remind you that you’re still in the simulation. You probably heard it during the demonstration down at the dealership. It’s built into that one, though it’s on a shorter timer on the demo model. Now just in case the beeping doesn't jostle you out of it after a long enough stretch, the unit has a failsafe that’ll cause it to shut down. It's hard-coded in, and tampering with it’s dangerous. Also voids the warranty, so best not to go poking around in the thing’s guts, no matter how much you come to enjoy yourself. Know what I mean?”

“Understood,” Archer said, and couldn't help a little smirk. It was hardly the rep's business to know that hard-coding was John Archer's wheelhouse, and that he'd bypassed some fairly advanced hardware in his younger days, before honest work had found him and he’d relinquished himself to the hive. “So, is that it then?” he said. He was getting impatient, but on a day like this, when the chair had come into his life, he could deal with a bit of inconvenience and take it in stride. Just not for too much longer.

“You know how to get set up and strap the circlet on already, and you’re acquainted with how to pilot the experience using the globes on the handrests. But there’s a manual included here if you need it, and you can tune into our network anytime with any questions. What you will need to know is this: Each model is assigned a kill phrase to be spoken aloud when you’re ready to exit the simulation. The kill phrase for your chair is, ‘Samantha strolls in silver fields.’”

“Samantha strolls in silver fields,” Archer said, smiling at the chair.

“You got it,” the rep said, returning the smile. “Just need your signature here to confirm delivery, and you’re ready to go.”

Archer signed. The rep patted him on the shoulder and left him alone in his apartment with his new beloved. Archer stared at it for a long moment, wondering at it like a boy might wonder at the contents of a wrapped present, its ribbon gleaming in the colored lights of a Christmas tree.

He moved to the window and regarded the world outside. An arc-sodium lamp buzzed above a crumbling cluster of derelict storefronts across the street. Drug pushers sometimes peddled their deadly wares in the mall’s long shadows, and once he’d heard submachine gun fire rattling off in the street. Screams, the screeching of tires. Some time later, the wail of sirens. His apartment had been awash in the flashing red lights of police cruisers and emergency vehicles shortly thereafter.

It turned out that a neighbor had been gunned down as she stepped out of her apartment to take her son to the hospital. Her name was Lauren Ratzinger. The child was unharmed but for the brain-rattling trauma of seeing his mother shot to death in front of him because he kept complaining about his earache. It got back to Archer that the boy became a ward of the state. The police decided that the murder was likely a gang initiation ritual, and Lauren Ratzinger was killed because she just happened to be there. As far as Archer knew, no suspects were ever apprehended, and the world moved on. Archer had never left his home at night again since.

But that was all over. His new and wondrous apparatus would unlock gateways to countless realities—a skeleton key of the imagination.

Archer sat in the chair and let himself settle in. He ran his fingers over the blue gel globes on the ends of the armrests and squeezed a little. The globes gave willingly enough, then resumed their form. He wrapped the trode circlet around his head, closed his eyes, and switched on.

He was yanked unceremoniously from a deep sea diving expedition three hours later, the trode circlet winding down with a robotic sigh. The beeping sound had come and gone, come and gone, as the rep had said it would. Archer had acknowledged it each time, and then moved on, flying headfirst into bright new fantasies, one after another, with the scatterbrained indecision of a child at an amusement park. Finally the failsafe had triggered as promised, and here he was again, John Archer, professional pawn and consummate failure.

He spent the next several hours poring over the chair’s manual and trawling online forums for information about the failsafe and the code language used to trigger it. He decided that disabling it was well within his area of expertise, and so gathered his tools and got to work performing a bit of impromptu surgery. The chair lost a bit of its sleek showroom glam, having had its side panel ripped open and its guts jostled about, but there would be no more irksome interruptions save for the elusive source of the BEEPs; what Archer would come to think of as “Samantha” announcing herself.

His operation a success, Archer settled back into the chair and switched on.

There were wonders beyond words.

Colors, lovers, banquets, music. He enjoyed them all in turn, and when he'd had his fill, he went soaring into a crystalline sky, infinite worlds above him, all within his reach.

“Samantha strolls in silver fields,” he said at last, and when he emerged, a full fifteen hours had passed. He was struck at once with an acute bout of vertigo, his vision churning and vibrating, a filmmaker’s approximation of some far-out hallucinogen trip.

It was morning. The sun blazed in from a sepia sky, and he would be expected to log into Kittridge-Hamashiro’s network soon, just a name on the roster again. He remembered that he would have some explaining to do about the falsified appointment—bad noise with the bosses. Lots of ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ and ‘It won’t happen again, ma’am,’ and ‘Thank you so much for giving me another chance. I won’t let you down, sir—count on it.’ Archer scoffed at the empty room. He stood and shut the blinds, then went to the bathroom and relieved himself. He filled a jar at the sink and gulped down a quart of water, then ensconced himself amid the smooth curves of the black chair and switched on again. The trode circlet whined to life.

He swam amidst a pod of mermaids in the peerless blue-green of the Aegean.

BEEP.

He made love to women with shifting, swirling faces, each more beautiful than the last.

BEEP.

He ate dates and cheese and wild strawberries and discussed the politics of Rome with a young Octavian, and he commanded legions from atop his warhorse.

***

Archer was terminated from Kittridge-Hamashiro soon afterward, though he could no longer be sure when. The days passed strangely, time zipping by in machine gun bursts. The blinds remained shut and kept out the sun, and the very idea of time seemed not to have any substance or meaning anymore. When Archer wanted daytime, he switched on and found it. He summoned up a brand new sky—blue, like he’d seen in the movies—with a sun that shone not through the poison that he’d known all his life, but on white clouds and on rolling, glittering oceans.

And when the money stopped coming and the payments for the chair came due, John Archer would do just about anything to keep those precious blue skies and those shining seas.

And he did.

***

Within what must have been two months, Archer’s reflection had withered to a mere suggestion of its former self. He was reminded of something he’d seen on a history piece about Nazi concentration camps back in the 20th. There was some elemental thing missing from his eyes, and it frightened him that he didn’t understand what it was, but he was strangely comforted that something new had come to replace it: the wry knowing of a lunatic’s secret.

Grisly purple stitch-wounds glared from where he’d swapped his kidneys with the ghoul-gangers in Lowtown to pay his third bill to Dreamscape Neurotech. The vat-grown replacements jammed rail spikes of pain into his guts when he moved wrong. But none of that mattered, not in that place where he was king, trode-crowned and gel-sceptered on his black throne.

Archer stared at his reflection, dark crescents under his eyes. I’m beginning to love the chair like those junkies outside my window love their chemicals, he thought, and laughed wildly. Twice he’d nearly forgotten the kill phrase and wandered overlong in false reality. The companionable BEEP was fading to a whisper.

Archer sat in the chair and switched on. The electric whine of the trode circlet bloomed. It sounded to John Archer like going home.

He negotiated peace treaties with alien ambassadors from distant worlds.

Beep.

He oversaw the construction of a cyclopean statue in his own likeness in ancient Thebes.

beep.

He was the mad god of his own splintering universe.

***

By the time the kill phrase finally escaped him at the brink of his memory, the gaunt thing that had been John Archer wandered confused and starving, lost in swirling snow and interminable silver fields. The wasteland stretched to the horizon in every direction, a rolling sea of mercurial snow that glimmered like chrome and threw back the blinding sun. Deep in a shadowy corner of his mind, he was vaguely aware that a woman named Samantha was here, somewhere in the wastes, amidst the swirling snow, and that she was the key to his rescue.

beep, Samantha called feebly in her strange, birdlike machine voice. The sound came from everywhere and nowhere, and he spun, looking for her.

For a time uncounted he searched – an hour, an age – wandering the forever-desert.

Finally, when he had forgotten all but her name, he could walk no longer. The woman, whoever she was, had abandoned him, and chirped no more.

“Samantha,” the thin man croaked, and pitched forward into the snow.

***

When Dreamscape Neurotech’s credit enforcers bashed in the apartment door some time later, one of them doubled over and vomited at the smell. The rotting corpse of Client ARCH.J-115 stared from sunken sockets, its emaciated shanks blackened with old waste. The buzz of jiggering flies mingled with the tiny electric whine of the trode circlet, still powered on and projecting the black silence of a corpse’s fantasies.

It was a sound that a dead man named John Archer might once have remembered: a sound like going home.