name="Wang's App for Blue Balls" by A. R. Gregory

Wang's App for Blue Balls

Astra kisses Blade one last time as his tall, muscular body fades away. Blade, so sure of himself, sure of everything, and now, so sure about them. Is his decisiveness even the thing about him that best complements her? Except for her work — well, maybe her work — is she that sure about anything?

She glances back around Xanadelia, at its babbling brooks and lush vegetation and the bluest skies imaginable, and all realer-than-real. So now their private mindworld isn’t enough for Blade? He wants to meet her realworld? Meet in physical, imperfect, chancy realworld?

Her parents used to talk about the early twenty-first century, how they lived in only realworld when they were her age. Their minds imprisoned and isolated in their biobods, hauling their biomasses to physical “workplaces,” no brainlinks or thought sharing or mindworlds, none of the things that define human existence today. Trapped in their own thoughts and feelings, only the dim images of their unaided imaginations to give them a secondhand feel for what was going on in the minds of others. Realworld talking and seeing and touching, and the primitive electronics of the time, their only means of interacting.

And sex... She cringes. Biosex, the only option. Physical biobodies clutching each other, writhing together, even... Yet her own parents did that. It was how they had her. Grank!

Their Internet was only two-dimensional, second-hand realworld experiences. What they called “virtual reality” just primitive sensory delusion. None of it anything like the full-sensory mindworlds of World Mindspace today. Could anything realworld ever compare with realer-than-real World Mindspace?

Their “computers” were mere logic engines, devoid of mind, awareness, personality, feelings of any kind. Even their “artificial intelligence” was like a stunted child, till synthetic intelligent mind technology changed everything. Now Glim, her personal mindprocessor, is her most trusted friend of all.

She gives Xanadelia a last, sweeping glaze, then opens her eyes, sits up in her sleeping pod. Everything’s comfortable and peaceful in her living unit, all softly lit and nanoclean. Of course her mind has to spend time here in realworld taking care of her biobod needs. But why waste more time here than she has to? People used to have to exercise their biobods in realworld. “Working out,” they called it. Now Glim keeps her muscles subconsciously toned. Even when she knows it’s happening, no strain. She hardly feels a thing.

Maybe Blade’s right. They’ve known each other five years. Maybe it is time to take the next step. But meet realworld? They already know each other in all the ways that count. With all she and Blade have seen and done together in the mindworlds, and all of it realer-than-real, with senses far more acute and nuanced than unaided biobod senses, how could meeting realworld be anything but a monumental letdown? And what in realworld could top their mutual mindgasms?
When Glim plugged their specs in the future simulations, she and Blade together realworld someday, married, even with kids, seemed almost too good to be true. Blade Hampton, super-successful mind properties trader at thirty. Astra Frost, Dreamstream Global’s top American dreamseed ad designer at only twenty-eight, winner of this year’s Morpheus Award, its youngest winner yet! She’s even been nominated for Dreamgirl of the Year! And now realworld with Blade?

She calls up her memory archives to see and hear it again, Blade in Xanadelia, so sure of everything. “You gotta check out my new Vector Viper, Astra, cruise the central megacity realworld with me. Gotta do it just so you can say you did it. Flying biobod through realworld streets, how mind-blowing is that?”

But in realworld, in his Viper, would they stare at each other’s biobodies, count their realworld imperfections? How long would it be before they zoomed back to the mindworlds? There people can have any body, even any kind of body. And why not? People’s minds are the real them. Why accept all the realworld limitations, the idiosyncrasies of biobodies?

But Blade seemed as confident as ever, as if realworld will be as accommodating to his will as any mindworld. And for Blade — she smiles to herself — maybe it would be. How many other guys does she know who have the cash creds it takes to own a realworld car? Blade said his Vector Viper even has a pop-up steering wheel for manual override. He can steer it himself, with his biobod hands, like cars of the last century. But even Blade, with all his audacity, can’t defy the rigid bounds of material reality. Wouldn’t he be frustrated, unable to make his realworld car leap into space or burrow into the Earth’s mantle or morph into a wormhole rover?

Funny it’s even still called realworld. Even scientists today, especially the physicists, talk about realworld matter and energy being manifestations of consciousness rather than vice versa. Like the chicken and the egg, which came first, mind or the world? So maybe realworld is just another mindworld, a cosmic mindworld, whether God’s or a product of collective consciousness. She shakes her head. She’ll leave it to those who enjoy going around in infinite circles. Meanwhile, she’ll live her reality, whatever it is, be satisfied with being an infinitesimal part of it all. And if that includes realworld with Blade, well, maybe that too.