Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [21]
“It’s so neat and clean here,” Brett said, sweeping through Mia’s front room almost on tiptoe. “Does it always look like this?”
Mia was busying herself in her kitchen. She had never been a tidy person by nature, but during her seventies, the habit of untidiness had left her. She’d simply grown out of messiness, the way a child might shed a tooth. After that, Mia always washed the dishes, always made her bed, always picked up loose objects and filed them away. Living that way was quicker and simpler and made every kind of sense to her. Litter and disorder no longer gave her any sense of relaxation or freedom or spontaneity. It had taken her seventy years to learn how to clean up after herself, but once she had learned the trick of it, it was impossible to go back.
She had no simple way to tell Brett about this. The profundity of this change in her personality would never seem natural to a nineteen-year-old. A half-truth was simpler. “I have a civil-support woman who comes in twice a week.”
“Boy, that must be a real pain.” Brett peered at a framed piece of paper ephemera. “What is this thing?”
“Part of my paper collection. It’s the cover of a twentieth-century computer game.”
“What, this giant silver thing with fangs and muscles and all these war machines and stuff?”
Mia nodded. “It was a kind of virtuality but it was flat and slow and it came in a glass box.”
“Why do you collect stuff like that?”
“I just like it.”
Brett was skeptical.
Mia smiled. “I do like it! I like the way it’s hopelessly stuck between pretending to be high-tech ultra-advanced design, and actually being crude and violent and crass. It cost a lot to design and market, because people were very impressed when you spent a lot of money back then. But it still looks botched and clunky. There used to be thousands of copies of this game, but now they’re forgotten. I like it, because not many people are interested in that kind of old-fashioned schlock, but I am. When I look at that picture and think about it—where it came from and what it means—well, it always makes me feel more like my real self, somehow.”
“Is it worth a lot of money? It sure is ugly.”
“That box top might be worth money if it still had the game inside. There’s a few people still alive who used to play these games when they were kids. Some of them are museum fanatics, they own the antique computers, disks, cartridges, the cathode-ray tubes, everything. They all know each other through the net, and they sell each other copies of games that are still mint-in-the-box. For big-collector sums of money. But just the paper cover? No. The paper’s not worth much to anybody.”
“You don’t play the games?”
“Oh, heavens no. It’s really hard to get them to work, and besides the games are all awful.”
They ate high-fiber fettucine with protein blocks in gravy, and flaked green carbohydrate. “This is really delicious,” said Brett, shoveling it in. “I don’t know why anybody ever complains about medical diets. The way you do it, it tastes really good. The flavors are so subtle. Lots better than plants and animals.”
“Thanks.”
“I ate nothing but infant formula until I was five,” Brett bragged. “I was strong as a horse as a little kid, I was never sick a day in my life. I could do chin-ups, I could run all day, I could beat up all the kids who were still eating stuff like milk! And vegetables! Wow, that ought to be a crime, feeding little kids vegetables. Did you ever eat vegetables?”
“Not in about fifty years. I think it is a crime to feed vegetables to children now, actually. In California, anyway.”
“They’re really nasty. Especially spinach. And corn is disgusting. This big lumpy yellow cob with all these little seeds on it …” Brett shuddered.
“Do you ever eat eggs? Eggs are a good source of cholesterol.”
“Really? I dunno, I might eat an egg if I found it in a nest somewhere.” Brett smiled beatifically and shoved her empty plate aside. “You’re a really good cook, Maya. I wish I could cook. I’m better at tinctures. You have a really big bathroom, right? Do you think