Great Barrier Reef.
“I’m not a good swimmer,” Amelia said. “Would that make a difference?”
“Me neither; don’t worry. It’s like being a fish.” I’d done this one. “You don’t even think about swimming.”
It was a dollar a minute, cash, or two minutes for three dollars, plastic. Ten minutes up front. I paid cash; keep the plastic for emergencies.
A stern-looking fat lady, black with a springy forest of white hair, led us to the booth. It was a small cubicle just over a meter high, with a padded blue mat on the floor, two jack cables hanging from the low ceiling.
“Time start’ when the first one plug in. You-all want to take your clothes off first, I s’pose. Place been sterilized. You-all have a good time, now.”
She turned abruptly and bustled away. “She thinks you’re a jill,” I said.
“I could use a second income.” We entered the place on our hands and knees and when I shut the door the air conditioner started to whir. Then a white-noise generator added a steady hiss.
“Does the light make a difference?”
“It goes off automatically.” We helped each other undress and she lay down the right way, on her stomach facing the door.
She was rigid and trembling slightly. “Relax,” I said, kneading her shoulders.
“I’m afraid nothing will happen.”
“If nothing happens, we’ll try it again.” I remembered what Marty had said—she really should start off with something like jumping off a cliff. Well, I could tell her that later.
“Here.” I slid over a diamond-shaped pillow that supports your face on the chin, cheekbones, and forehead. “This’ll help your neck relax.” I stroked her back for a minute, and when she seemed looser, I moved the jack interface into place over the metal socket in her head. There was a faint click and the light went out.
Of course after thousands of hours, I didn’t need the pillow; I could jack standing up or hanging upside down. I groped for the cable and stretched out so we were touching, arm and hip. Then I jacked in.
The water was warm as blood and it tasted good, salt and seaweed, on my lips, as I breathed it in. I was in less than two meters of water, bright coral formations all around, tiny fish with brilliant colors ignoring me until I came close enough to be a danger. A small green moray eel, face like a cartoon villain, stared at me from a hole in the coral.
Volition is strange when you’re jacked like this. I “decided” to go off to the left, although there was nothing obvious there, just a plain of white sand. Actually, the person who had recorded the trip had a good reason to check it out, but the customer wasn’t in contact with him or her at that level; nothing but the sensorium, amplified.
Sunlight refracting through the ripples on the surface made a pleasant shimmering pattern on the sand, but that wasn’t why we had come here. I hovered over two eye-stalks that poked out of the sand, twitching, agitated. Suddenly the sand exploded underneath me, and to the left and right, and a tiger-striped manta ray flew out from where it had been hiding, under a few centimeters of sand. It was huge, easily three meters wide. I shot forward and grabbed a wing, before it had time to gather speed.
One powerful flap of the wings and we surged forward; another, and we were going faster than any merely human swimmer, the water churning smoothly down my body . . .
And hers. Amelia was there, definitely but faintly, like a shadow inside me. The turbulence from the fast water made my genitals flutter, but part of me didn’t have that; for that part of me the water flowed smoothly tickling between her legs.
Intellectually, I knew that they’d had to merge two strings to create this, and wondered how hard it had been to find a large manta for both the man and the woman or how they’d gotten around it. But mainly I focused on that particular dual sensation and tried to make contact with Amelia through it.
I couldn’t, quite. No words, no specificity; just a vague “isn’t this thrilling” gestalt that I felt reflected with a different twist, Amelia’s personality. There was also a faint different excitement that must have been her realization that we were in contact.
The sand surface fell away in an underwater cliff and the manta dived, the water suddenly cool and the pressure increasing. We lost our grip and went tumbling