Telepresence

The car alarm chirped twice as she locked the car. They turned and walked through the parking garage. She started to make a mental note of the huge number five against a red background indicating which floor they were on, but then realized it was the one straight across from the mall’s movie theaters and so easy to remember.

It was Sunday morning, and they had both had coffee and she felt too much energy to be just going to the mall. She thought about breaking into a run, past the elvators and stairwell and across the concrete pedestrian bridge. She started a step and grinned over at him, and then took off with him a step behind, trying to run with one hand holding his opened watch band, the case smacking against the underside of his wrist. They thundered past a young family who was safely off to the side, waiting for the elevator. He turned his head slightly to nod in apology at the commotion but she smiled and hardly glanced back. He tried to catch up with her as they thundered across the bridge.

They slowed to a walk as the neared the doors.

“I didn’t mean that in a bad way, I really don’t. I have ninety-nine examples I can think of times I personally, or someone in my field, has criticized a user unjustly. Oddly, even though I have heard gripes about users that I’ve had to offer counterpoint to, I’ve never heard even those most bitter information-technology-wars veteran encapsulate the issues we are all facing quite that succinctly.”, he said.

She sighed. They took turns ‘getting things hooked into their lip’ which was a harsh metaphor that they said aloud as a last resort. Today, there had been something with him that morning. He had been happy enough at the launch party on Friday night, though it had been an awkward semi-mandatory when-is-it-polite-to-leave affairs. Yesterday, he had revealed the truth of the sting of suceeding, a software launch of a program that was now buried in features. Everyone who wasn’t qualified to understand the basic realities of computing were adding features like they were packing a suitcase for the airport. As if they could just keep going, adding whatever they thought of, until they hit some illusory and arbitrary weight limit that was news to the coders coding the thing.

“Bad way? When you said that the majority of people, ninety-nine and five nines, I think you said, just suck at computers?”

“Yeah.”

“You keep liking that number, ninety-nine. Are you going to start trying to become the next Kanwheat again?”

“Hah. No. Hey, why do I have to emulate him of all people?”

“Sensitive. You’re a mutt anyhow. I think your family likes fucking more than they let on. I think your grandmothers on both sides kept a few secrets, maybe took a c-note into the delivery room so they’d fudge the blood test.”

“Nice try, spouse.”

She smiled, a little satisfied she had accomplished a little bit of ‘huss’ training of her husband. A friend of hers would always ask ‘is he huss-buh-roken yet?’ and laugh at her own semi-annual joke.

“So you were saying that everyone should have to get computer ‘driver’s licenses, even for smart phones?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Think you’d pass the test?”

“Well, not for my phone, but for operating systems that move around less moment-to-moment, sure.”

“Any chance you could stop going on about this for the weekend? I’ll take you to that wind tunnel place later.”

“Hmmm. Hanging face first in a hundred and twenty miles at two dollars a minute. let me think. OK, deal. Well, I can try.”

“You say that a lot. “

“Sometimes I mean it.”

He held the big quiet glass door open for her and to let a different family pass on their way back across the flying walkway back to the parking lot. Rather than remind them both about their meaning to park on the bottom floor this time, so they could run up all five flights of the parking lot’s mostly empty stairs (everyone used the elevators nowadays), he closed his mouth and just made a mental note to do that next time.

It was getting near the holidays, and people still got excited for that even if everyone seemed to have faced the truth that there really wasn’t as much money in the World as everyone thought there was. The weather had delivered a snowy backdrop criss-crossed with the oily dark lines of the highways and six-lane routes through the built-up complex of office high-rises, condo high-rises, and of course, the bastion-like indoor mall which used to be one of the original focuses of the area.

As the tags and banners called from every corner of the huge fifth-floor of the five story department store about savings to be had on gifts for everyone (especially oneself, lately) they both smiled tightly at each other, as if to challenge each other to make it all the way through the store, and to the main concourse to head to the movie theaters. She always noticed the smiling children and young people, but the incongrous way the parents eyes were sad, maybe a little, even as they smiled. The one great thing about the gifiting holidays was that there was usually no need to say ‘no’ right then, for those children young enough that they would not have expected the purchase ot be made right then, or even necessarily by their parents as opposed to the wondrous angles who may or not be bringing those presents every year.

Thirty was actually a good age, she thought. She had been really surprised by that, after twenty-nine years or so of jokes about women ‘stopping the clock’ and having a twenty-ninth, twenty-ninth, twenty-ninth, and then suddenly the unexpected thirty-ninth birthday, with the cycle repeating. She felt his hand on his arm, not the usual guidance he would offer on her arm if she was on the phone and about to head towards a stairwell, or a wall. He did it to, but wouldn’t admit it. Perhaps he was a little better at it, but then again he never really gave the people on the other end of the phone the proper attention, so perhaps a balance.

That was the thought she was able to complete as she looked at him and noticed he was looking at her and down at one of the cross-over areas of the concourse that hugged the sides of the huge open area which all of the stores faced in towards. Normally, there would be a gaming system set-up for kids to play dance games or whatever least-offensive but most-popular game was being launched that season. It would always draw a crowd, and people laughed and really seemed to genuinely enjoy it. Beyond that, though, was something new. She thought it had been one of those phone repair or perhaps jewlery kiosks that dotted the center areas on every floor, with more of course on the bottom that you could look down to from up here.

“What is that?”, he asked, stopping off to the side of the railing where it widened. Fellow shoppers moved past, none showing any special notice of what his eyes could not reconcile.

“Well it’s just…”, she stopped, but then finished what she was saying, “…a new display for the holidays, or something?”

She hadn’t meant to finish it as a question, but the question would not stay out of her voice. She hadn’t ever seen him like this, and then she blushed and had a strange deja vu at the suddenly realization. She hadn’t ever seen him like this, not scared, but suddenly very aware of everything around them. It was contagious, and she consicously began to echo with her eyes the way he was looking not only at the new sales display taking up a piece of prime holday-season mall real estate, but the people around it. They walked past and glanced over and smiled, obvisouly puzzled at what they were seeing, yet so used to seeing amazing things revealed with every passing shopping year, that they just looked vaguely troubled, but still they would quickly smile again and shake their heads a little to each other, and then move on.

She looked at him, at the way his eyes almost seemed to vibrate as he looked at the display, which was nothing more than a small conference table with a business-attired man and woman standing, while three other people sat at the table, two talking to each other with the third paying her attention to the two standing. The woman standing was gesturing to a small polished-metal rectangle the size of a credit card with a softly-glowing green circle that seemed a button, probably, but the fascinating thing was that by some trick of display magic the rectangle that the woman’s fingers were pointing at seemed to just be hanging there in the air, with no visible means of support.

“Yeah.”, she said, “That’s a little odd. How?”, she trailed off.

Now she had her head cocked a little to one side, and so the two of there stood looking across the empty five story distance to the landing, to the kids and parents facing them and focused on the game, which seemed to have evolved since last year and now involved a skateboard deck with no turcks or wheels, but lumps of plastic in their place to allow the player to tilt and change the angle of the board. They couldn’t see the game itself, only the back of the large display screen that everyone looking their way was watching. No one seemed to notice them looking past them.

He rubbed his face for a few seconds, and then opened that hand away from his face in gesture to the engimatic whatever-it-was-advertising. As he spoke he was shaking his head as if he didn’t really believe his own words.

“It’s a hologram?”, he tried.

She rolled her eyes, knowing that he knew what she’d say. While her husband was fascinated by such things, she was the one who had to take physics and engineering classes, and kept up with the state of things. She was already shaking her head but let him finish, and then said what both of them were thinking.

“It’s too real. All of it, the people there, the way it’s hanging. It’s just mannequins, and some clever expensive magic trick. They just want it to look…”

That wasn’t right either. However they had done it, the seven in the scene … hadn’t there been six a minute ago? wearing the immaculate business attire if anything, looked even more real than the people walking past them, as if the lines separating the edges of their clothes, of the strands and tops of their hair, the outstretched hand gesturing toward the control, all seemed somehow much sharper than the fuzzy edges their eyes usually saw.
They kept staring at the scene, but the people sitting at the table didn’t move. The man standing next to the gesturing woman kept a half-spoken, smiling observation frozen in time with his silent, open mouth and his perpetual smile. The woman’s hand, the fingertips pointing at the suspended button, had the presence of a cast-bronze statue, as if it there were no moving it for all time. She shook her head, puzzled at the stong reaction to nothing more than some clever new trick of lighting or material she just hand’t read up on yet.

“Let’s go see”, she said.

She didn’t wait, but fell into the crowd circulating in that direction. Her left hand trailed behind her expectantly, waiting for him to start after her and take it in his right. He winced and thought for a moment, and then caught up with her to cover the three storefront-lengths between them and the strange display.

“It’s too bright in here for it to be a hologram, isn’t it?”, he asked.

“Right. Last I checked the only way they could do something like this is with some kind of silk or background, or at least something like a projector we would see? I could be wrong… they do amazing things so quickly.”

“Eh, it’s just not right, somehow.”

“There’s no way we won’t be able to figure out something out when we get closer.”

He didn’t say anything, but inhaled deeply in what was almost a yawn. She raised an eyebrow and cocked her head at him.

“Don’t get excited or anything”, she said and let the last ‘or anything’ trail off into a muttering grumble that sounded like a complaining puppy. He laughed.

“Sure.”

As they came around the crowd he was surprised to see an actual green velvet rope surrounding the diorama of ‘people in a meeting’. It was suspended between heavy-footed bronze posts that were waist-high and set perhaps two meters apart, giving the effect of an exhibit in a museum. The green was almost like a light-stick, the kind you bend until a capsule of glass breaks and you shake it, and the obvious quality reflected in the way the light glittered off of the crushed-velvet surface. As they approached, a couple, married he guessed from the way he carried more bags than her and how she led the way, speaking back over her shoulder to him. He heard them speaking Mandarin in what sounded like a Singapore accent, and so he started to greet them but then they were past him. He was at the rope, putting his hand on it and staring at it closely. It should be a red velvet rope, he thought. He couldn’t remember ever seeing one in green, but then thought that maybe old black and white movies and photos were where he had seen them, so perhaps there were some green ones after all.

She was standing with her hands behind her back, turned ninety degrees to the ‘exhibit’ or whatever it was. Both eyebrows were raised at him now. She kept her face blank except for the obvious query her eyebrows conveyed. he thought he knew her well enough that the expression must be saying ‘Well, here we are. You first.’ He always ended up playing the tank in the types of online games they played, the player in a team that would put on all the armor and pick up the big shield and try to have the ‘bad guys’ (always kind of relative in those situations) beat on him, rather than his teammates.

He realized he was having the same feeling as when the two of them had gone to Chicago, and gone up in the Willis Tower which used to be the Sears Tower, he has read. It had seemed odd that Sears was ever big enough to have the tallest skyscraper in the world, as it had been for so many decades. They had dared each other to, and did, go out on the glass floor that extended from one of the top floors. Others had walked out with their own phones in full arm-upraised selfie-mode, their eyes wide and not looking down.

Instead, they had started walking out hand-in-hand but then she had stopped at the last step before the glass, and laughingly snapped her hand out of his so that he had to step down firmly on the glass of the observation platform to keep from tripping. He stood out there, forcing himself to look not only all around, out at the whole city, but then down, straight down 1,353 feet all the way down to the street as seen through the glass underneath his feet. She had come out a second later and they had stood, holding hands, looking at the city together, but she hadn’t let go of his hand. He hadn’t wanted her too, but after a few minutes it was much more amazing than scary. he wasn’t there yet on this one.

Lifting his head, he looked directly at the man in the diorama who was standing as if he might be jokingly arguing with the woman pointing at the button. He had the perfect salt-and-pepper gray hair of a man who spent a lot on his appearance. Looking closer, the man, who he thought of as ‘the smiling man’, wasn’t really that happy. Although his whole face was done up in a clothing model’s practiced joy, his eyes looked angry, perhaps. The edges of his nostrils were incongruous with the smile and the tilt of his head, flared slightly. His right arm, the farthest away, had its elbow tucked tight against his side with his forearm extended and palm upraised in gentle complaint. The other, closer arm, though, gripped the edge of the desk tightly it looked like. The man’s hand was too tan to see ‘white knuckles’, but he was obvisouly gripping it tightly for no good reason, except perhaps to control himself.

Still, the ‘smiling man’ didn’t move but was so much more real and alive than any manequin could be. Was it a trick of the light, that he seemed brighter and more defined somehow than the shoppers who walked on past behind him?

He dragged his eyes away from the man, to look at the button in the brushed steel credit-card sized rectangle. It was just to the left of smiling man. Now he could see why they had chosen that bright green for the rope, as it was a close match to the ‘button’. Now that he was closer, just the small conference table away, he could see it could have as easily been a decoration, a shallowly rounded cabochan in green such as a piece of jade, but more transparent and with subtle flares of light rolling across it like an opal’s flashes of color all in shades of green. And it just hung there in mid-air at eye-level, suspended by nothing he could see.

“Blue.”, she said suddenly. “I’ve never seen a shade of blue like that.”

The following sentence is Choice 1 for the first sentence in Chapter 2.

“<his name>”, she said.

The following sentence is Choice 2 for the first sentence in Chapter 2.