Getting Real

GETTING REAL Harry Turtledove

Pablo Ramirez ambled along the streets of East Los Angeles. He was looking for work, looking for love, looking for drugs, looking for whatever the hell he could find. He knew too well he didn’t have much now.

For that matter, neither did East L.A.—or any other part of the huge, sprawling city. Somebody online had called Los Angeles a town with a fine future behind it. Like so many jokes with too much truth in them, that one had spread virally. It must have, if a loser like Pablo had heard it.

He almost tripped on cracked concrete. Nobody’d fixed these sidewalks for a long, long time. A line of shopfronts were boarded up. The ones that weren’t had signs in Spanish, English, Chinese, Hindi, Korean....

You could still find anybody from anywhere in Los Angeles. Anybody who was poor and didn’t have the sense to go someplace else, anyhow. No, Los Angeles wasn’t much different from anywhere else in the United States these days.

Swarms of bicycles and pedicabs executed intricate dances on the streets. The asphalt between the sidewalks was in crappy shape, too. A few hydrogen- and electric-powered cars tried to pick their way through the people-powered traffic. The drivers leaned on their horns. Not that it did them much good—bicyclists and pedicab operators grabbed horn tones off the Net the way everybody else grabbed ring tones. And little tiny speakers could make a hell of a lot of noise.

Speaking of noise ... Pablo stared in mixed awe and horror. Damned if that wasn’t a genuine, no-shit, chrome-dripping Harley hog thundering up the road toward him. Hydrocarbon fumes belched from the monster’s tailpipe. School and the Net and TV and vidgames and priests and even most avatars declared adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere was a crime or a sin or both at once. But oh my God! Wasn’t that Harley awesome? Everybody on the sidewalks—whites, goldens, several shades of browns, blacks—stopped in her or his tracks to gape at the motorcycle. The black dude on it grinned from under his gleaming Fritz hat. Just to add to the general effect, he’d dyed his beard in red, white, and blue stripes. He’d also chromed the metalwork on the folding-stock AK slung on his back.

Two cops walked toward and then past Pablo. Their helmets gave much more serious protection than the cycle jockey’s brain bucket. They wore full body armor under their urban-camo tunics, too. And the minichain guns they carried could chew up that ancient AK and spit it out.

Cops were the enemy till proved otherwise. They knew it, too—why else travel in threes? Two of them were white. The power structure still worked the way it always had.

All the same, what the taller white guy said to his partners was exactly—exactly!—what Pablo was thinking: “Man, that is one fuckin’ amazing ride!”

“Bet your ass,” agreed the cop who wasn’t white. He was an Indian—brown variety, not red.

A woman screeched. A guy took off with her purse. He ran like an Olympic sprinter marinated in steroids. The woman pounded after him in hot but hopeless pursuit.

“Hold it right there, dipshit!” the Indian cop yelled, raising his piece.

If he opened up with that mother, he could depopulate a block’s worth of jam-packed sidewalk—with no guarantee he’d take out the purse snatcher. Nobody in his right mind would start shooting under conditions like that. Of course, who in his right mind wanted to be a cop?

Pablo wasn’t the only one making that street-smart calculation. Oh, no, baby—not even close! People of all different colors screamed and ducked and scattered and got the hell out of there. Pablo did his best to disappear like an avatar. He ducked around corners and ended up in a little maze of side streets he was liable to need GPS to escape from.

He looked around. Somebody sitting under a dying tree looked back—or, more likely, just looked through him—with dead eyes. A fat Hispanic woman and an even fatter red Indian gal passed a bottle of wine back and forth and giggled. It wasn’t even 1100 yet, but they’d already got the morning off to a hell of a start. A pack of brown Indian kids played field hockey in the street ... or maybe they just got off on whaling one another with sticks.

And then an avatar appeared out of nowhere in front of Pablo, as avatars had a way of doing. This one was an improbably beautiful, impossibly stacked Hispanic girl—woman. Definitely woman. Her perfume promised everything, or whatever was bigger than everything.

Her smile ... How could you not almost come in your jeans if a woman like that smiled at you that way? And her voice ... A voice like that should’ve been illegal. It sure as hell was immoral.

“English?” she purred seductively. “O español?”

“Uh, either way.” Pablo’s voice was hoarse. The answer came out in English.

“Okay, big boy.” The avatar used English, too. She definitely left you dissatisfied with the local talent. Hell, she made you think the local talent wasn’t talent. “Wanna get ... Real?”