{"id":235,"date":"2021-01-06T14:02:30","date_gmt":"2021-01-06T14:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=235"},"modified":"2021-01-29T13:20:06","modified_gmt":"2021-01-29T13:20:06","slug":"downloading-midnight-by-william-browning-spencer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=235","title":{"rendered":"Downloading Midnight by William Browning Spencer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Downloading Midnight<\/em><\/strong> by William Browning Spencer (Tomorrow Speculative Fiction<\/em>, December 1995) is a noir detective\/cyberpunk mashup that starts with Captain Armageddon, a hologram from a virtual reality show called American Midnight<\/em>, going amok on the \u201cHighway\u201d. Initially Marty, the narrator, hires a young hacker called Bloom to go in and delete the \u201cghosts\u201d but several days pass and nothing happens. This leads him to go and check on Bloom, who he finds floating in a tank and wired up to VR. Marty\u2019s subsequent exchange with the VR technician supervising Bloom gives a taste of the strangeness of this future world and the wit of the story:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Techs always tell you everything is under control. That\u2019s what this one said.
\u201cSave it for a gawker\u2019s tour,\u201d I told her. \u201cI\u2019ve been doing maintenance for fourteen years now. I know how it goes. You\u2019re fine, and then you\u2019re dead.\u201d
\u201cThis is poor personal interaction,\u201d the tech said. \u201cYou are questioning my professional skills and consequently devaluing my self-image.\u201d
I shrugged. Facts are facts: in over eighty percent of the cases where neural trauma shows on a monitor, the floater is already too blasted to make it back alive.
I thanked the tech and apologized if I had offended her or caused an esteem devaluation. She accepted my apology, but with a coolness that told me I\u2019d have another civility demerit in my file.  p. 173 (Year\u2019s Best SF<\/em>, edited by David Hartwell)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Later Marty has an unsuccessful date with Gloria, an event that shows us another aspect of this strange future world (his relationship is subject to a tangle of restrictive contracts and conditions which, presumably, satirise what actually goes on in real life). After this he goes into the VR Highway to find Bloom, buying information from a tout in the under-Highway which eventually leads him to Bloom, who he finds talking to a woman in a bar in a seedy part of the Bin:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The woman looked at me. She was a guy named Jim Havana, a gossip leak for the Harmonium tabloids. Havana always projected a woman on the Highway. In the Big R he was a bald suit, a white, dead-fish kind of guy with a sickly sheen of excess fat and sweat. Down here, Havana was a stocky fem\u2014you might have guessed trans\u2014with dated cosmetics and a big thicket of black hair. She was an improvement, but only by comparison to the upside version.
\u201cThis is wonderful,\u201d Havana said, glaring at Bloom. \u201cI said private, remember?
\u201cIt\u2019s good to see you,\u201d Bloom said to me.
\u201cDon\u2019t let me interfere with this reunion. I\u2019m out of here,\u201d Havana said. \u201cI don\u2019t need a crowd right now, you know?\u201d Havana shook her curls and stood up. She headed toward the door.
\u201cWait,\u201d Bloom said. He got up and ran after her.
I followed.
The street was wet and low-res, every highlight skewed. The shimmering asphalt buckled as I ran. An odor like oily, burning rags lingered in the V. Bloom and Havana were ahead of me, both moving fast.
I heard Havana scream.
Something detached from the shadows, rising wildly from an unthought alley full of cast-off formulae, dirty bulletin skreeds, trashed fantasies. An angry clot of flies hovered over the form. It roared\u2014the famous roar of Defiance, rallying cry of Captain Armageddon!  pp. 178-179 (Year\u2019s Best SF<\/em>, edited by David Hartwell)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Bloom fires an encrypted burst that destroys the creature, but we later find that this doesn\u2019t fix the Highway\u2019s problems. The rest of the story sees further adventures that eventually (spoiler) lead to Captain Armageddon\u2019s sidekick and sex star, Zera Terminal; Bloom\u2019s subsequent relationship with her; and how the source for her character (the human that was \u201cmapped\u201d as a starting point) was \u201craped\u201d. This latter event refers, I think (this is the story\u2019s weakest point), to the illegal mapping of a nine year old child as the source for Zera Terminal:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve seen her, those big eyes and the fullness of her mouth. Her features are almost too lush for the chiseled oval of her face, but somehow it works, probably because of the innocence. This is a woman, you think, who trusts. This is a woman who finds everything new and good.
There is usually some chill to a holo, some glint of the non-human intelligence that runs the programs. Zera almost transcended that. There was a human here, lodged in that sweet, surprised voice, that gawky grace, that wow in her eyes.
It came down to a single quality, always rare, rarer in a land of artifice: Innocence<\/em>.  p. 187 (Year\u2019s Best SF<\/em>, edited by David Hartwell)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This is quite a convoluted (and at times dark) story, and it is occasionally hard to work out what is going on (it would have benefited from another draft). On the other hand it is engrossing, and convincingly depicts both of its colourful worlds, the real and the virtual. This latter effect is partly achieved by a skilful use of altered social customs, and also by an extensive invented vocabulary (\u201cHighway,\u201d \u201cBig R,\u201d \u201cgo flat,\u201d etc.), none of which the author explains to the readers but leaves to be understood from context or repeated use.
I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s an entirely successful story, but its mix of ambition and what it does achieve makes it my second favourite story in the Hartwell volume so far.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 9,000 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Downloading Midnight by William Browning Spencer (Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, December 1995) is a noir detective\/cyberpunk mashup that starts with Captain Armageddon, a hologram from a virtual reality show called American Midnight, going amok on the \u201cHighway\u201d. Initially Marty, the narrator, hires a young hacker called Bloom to go in and delete the \u201cghosts\u201d but several […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[5,46,7,68,67],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-william-browning-spencer","tag-5","tag-3-3","tag-novelette","tag-tomorrow","tag-william-browning-spencer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":440,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions\/440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}