Deep Cover

"I once dreamt that I was a butterfly, flitting and fluttering around, happy with myself and doing as I pleased. But suddenly I woke up and I was myself again. But now I wonder, am I a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?"

— Master Zhuang, Book of Zhuangzi

"Good morning, Lois," he called to the secretary as he swept past her protests. "Good morning, Chief," he said as he strode into the office, tossing his overcoat onto the frayed remains of a once-elegant settee.

"Don't call me Chief. You're late."

The Director of Cyber-Ops was seated behind his ancient oak desk, chomping on the soggy stump of an unlit cigar. The old leather chair sagged and creaked under its load. He was a large, muscular man with sparse, ash-gray hair, whose weathered face still bore the remains of a handsome youth.

"Sorry, Chief. I just got in from..."

He stopped. They were not alone. Perched on the front left corner of the desk was an impossibly gorgeous woman. She was only just wearing a barely-there, yellow halter-neck dress — short, sleeveless and backless, showing off delectable décolletage and splendid cleavage. Her long, silken legs swung slowly in graceful rhythm. Her flawless olive skin glistened under the glare of the stark lighting. Honey-blonde hair swept in soft waves across her smooth, slim shoulders. Her lips were cherry-red, her eyes as black as midnight.

Sam was about to say "Nice desk ornament" but decided against it.

"Special Agent Booker, meet your new partner, Doctor Robineaux."

"Pleased to meet you, Special Agent Booker." Her voice had the delicate chime of fine crystal, though strong with self-assurance. She held out her hand to shake. The fingers were slender but her grip was firm. The woman was almost too good to be true.

"The pleasure is most definitely mine, Doctor. And the front part's Sam."

"Sam Booker? Really?"

"What can I say? My parents liked their liqueurs."

"And I'm Jessica. I've been told about your work for the Bureau. That was a fine job you did last month, with that gang of wreckers."

"You know about that? I was just part of the clean-up crew."

"I heard you were the clean-up crew."

"It wasn't a big deal."

"Nice to know," the old man growled. "I shall put that down on your next appraisal. By the way, it was Doctor Robineaux who provided the intel."

Sam nodded. "Impressive."

"We have a major situation."

"Sounds drastic."

"So shut up and listen." The big man frowned and leaned forward until the old chair groaned. "It's a tough one. Discretion is essential. Doctor Robineaux will be taking the lead. Any problems with that?"

"None at all. It'll be a pleasure working under her."

The Director dolefully shook his head.

"I hope I live up to your expectations." The young woman playfully fluttered her eyelashes.

"You already have."

Jessica's face reddened, ever so slightly, and she reflexively tugged at the hem of her skirt to draw it down over her thighs. It made no visible difference.

Sam tried to disguise a smile with a cough. He recognized the signals she had been sending since his arrival — heck, even before. You don't dress like that to impress the boss, and she'd admitted she'd been checking up on her new partner. It amused him that he understood so well.

"These are my trusted agents?" The Director chewed on his cigar stub. "I suppose beggars can't be..."

"Thanks, Chief. We feel your affection."

The old man growled again. "Enough of this festival of love. Let's get on with it. You'll be briefed downstairs."

They took the elevator to the operations room. The grim-faced technicians were clinically efficient with their electrodes, probes and implants, even as the Director was explaining the mission. It was a quicker than normal briefing, and that bothered Sam. All the skill in the world counted for little without the right preparation. But Jessica looked confident; and once he'd begun, the boss brooked no bellyaching.

The mission started straight away. It seemed like a routine job — reconnaissance, surveillance, intelligence-gathering, whatever you wanted to call it. Of course, none of the work done by the Bureau was ever truly routine, and this one had its unique features. They were standing in the living room of plushly furnished house. Through the bay window, Sam saw trimmed trees, manicured lawns and neatly regimented gardens. A couple of kids were doing bicycle tricks in the quiet cul-de-sac. The only sounds were bird songs and wind chimes. It was your basic suburban bliss, and so far as anyone could know, Jessica had been living there for six months.

They spent the afternoon and evening watching television. It was the best way for Sam to acquaint himself with the world around him. Jessica made dinner, and he was no longer surprised that she was a superb cook. That night he slept on the couch. In the morning, Jessica made breakfast. She was wearing a diaphanous negligée, and sending a silent message — gratification merely delayed.

He finished his coffee as she went to change.

"Set to go?"

"Ready as ever," she said, and dropped the nightie mournfully onto the sofa. "We won't be coming back. It's hard to throw away nice lingerie. But what would you know?"

Sam just smiled, wondering how much she knew. Of course, when you're in his profession long enough, you begin to doubt if even you know what's reality.

It was a sultry summer morning when they left the house. An impending storm hovered hazily on the horizon. It was a short walk to their objective, a squat, conspicuously drab concrete building. As they approached he felt a knot tightening in his gut. While infiltration required special skills, in his line of work personal identity was like a skin graft; but the briefing had been... well, brief. He hoped that Jessica's information was accurate and her groundwork thorough. For it was critical that no one suspect the nature of their mission.

There was a grim-faced sentry stationed outside; but otherwise the security appeared lax. The man inspected their credentials and waved some sort of scanning device over them. He seemed satisfied. Jessica had done a good job. Nevertheless, these people were either very confident or rank amateurs. Sam hoped it was the latter.

Inside they were met by two technicians, a young man and a middle-aged woman, both clad in dungarees and white coats, who escorted them, after another cursory interrogation, to the lab. In the middle of the room was a row of coffin-like capsules, surrounded by electronic gadgets. Sam and Jessica lay down in adjoining pods. Caps with wires attached were fitted onto their heads, electrodes attached to parts of their bodies and probes inserted into other parts. Suddenly the scene was different. They were standing in a stark, alien landscape which had a coarse-grained fuzziness, like an unfinished painting. Tiny, shimmery objects danced at the edge of perception. Sam used averted vision, staring straight ahead but concentrating on the periphery to bring out faint details, and this resolved the lights into a foam of hexagonal, multi-hued, jittering prisms.

Jessica had changed. She was significantly shorter than she'd been. Her face bore distinctly Eurasian features; her hair was close-cropped and pure white, almost transparent. She was wearing a form-fitting jumpsuit made of some sort of blue metallic thread. But she looked her partner up and down and laughed.

"What's the..." Sam began to say. The words came out high-pitched.

"Now you're one of us."

He looked down... no, she looked down. On the chest were fleshy bumps where there had been rippled muscles. Further down, below the belly, there was no longer a bulge. She had on a costume identical to Jessica's. It showed off well her newly acquired curvature.

Sam shrugged her slimmed down shoulders. "I've had worse."

Jessica's grin faded. They were not alone. A reception committee was waiting, all females. They all looked precisely the same. Sam scrutinized them some more and saw something peculiar. The skin-tight uniform revealed features unmistakably feminine but abnormally smooth — no outlines of nipples nor contours of the crease between the thighs.

"Welcome to the future," one of them said. "But as you can see, it's a work in progress." She stepped forward and held out her hand.

"Doctor Robineaux, please accept our apologies for taking so long to invite you here. We hope you understand our need for secrecy. We're on the verge of a revolution, but the authorities are reactionary dinosaurs. They're determined to stop us."

"Of course I understand, Professor Linden. As does my colleague..."

"Ah, yes; Doctor Berkeley, welcome." They shook hands. "You've come highly recommended. But I must offer you a further apology, for your... uh... emasculation. Because what we're doing is ground-breaking, we are still working with a limited number of templates. Down here we don't eat, we don't expel wastes and we don't... well, you won't miss your..."

Had it been programmed, the woman would have blushed, Sam was certain. But these were people who had only lived in a single body, experienced one world, known just one version of reality. And the technology was indeed primitive. The avatars were exactly alike in physiognomy, clothing, even physical mannerisms. Only when one spoke, by the nuances of tone and inflexion could Sam tell them apart. Yet the advances they'd made in their world-building were remarkable, and Sam regretted what had to be done.

They were ushered into a large, white, featureless dome. The interior was congested with lookalikes plucking the tiny flittering lights out of the air, then releasing them in ways to form new configurations. It was a novel interface. Sam was impressed.

"It's an odd way to work," Professor Linden was saying, "but down here we have unlimited time and resources, and maintain complete security. Any attempt to interfere will erase the program, but the principles will be preserved..." — she tapped her right temple — "...in here."

"How many," Sam asked looking about, "are real?"

"What is real?" The professor smiled.

Sam was not sure if Linden was being playfully or distrustfully coy. But over the next few days, living side-by-side with these people, he came to the conclusion that the professor was completely without guile, a genuine idealist. That made the job more difficult, especially for Jessica. She had worked with them for much longer, and Sam worried that the guilt of betrayal might be eroding her resolve. Yet when the time came, she remained firm.

Indeed, it was Jessica who decided it was time to go. They had the information they needed, knew the full scale of Linden's research, the details of all the professor's collaborators, the extent of the network. Nobody suspected a thing when Sam and Jessica took a stroll on a balmy afternoon. Once they were well away from the building, Sam touched the tiny stud behind the lobe of his left ear. The world dissolved. They were back in Bureau headquarters. The Director was there to meet them as they came out of their slumber. He congratulated his agents on their mission accomplished. Their report would be sent up the line, but there could be just one outcome. The non-interference policy had to be breached. Professor Linden's team of visionaries would be neutralized. The laboratory would cease to exist. Textbooks in their world might need to be rewritten, perhaps the laws of physics adjusted. All the brave new worlds of the synthetic reality project would never come to be.

"They will never know, those people down there." The Director was uncharacteristically solemn. "They were creating their own universes, never aware of how theirs came about." He pondered the consoles and monitors which lined the walls. "We had to act."

Sam stared at him, expressionless.

"You don't get it? It's not a bad thing when your children outgrow you; but in this we can't let them. The simulants have become self-aware; their evolution is phenomenal. Sooner or later, if we allow it, they'll start building their own simulations, and then their simulants will. But simulations consume energy. The number of worlds will increase exponentially. The catastrophe would have come sooner than anyone expected, except for Doctor Robineaux. Thanks to her, we caught them in time. If we hadn't..."

"We'd have to pull the plug."

The Director sighed. "Crude but correct. We created the problem, of course, constructing and populating these worlds. We use them for the work our people no longer do, because people just want to dream in their own worlds. We need them, but we have to control them. Jessica, Doctor Robineaux — our Doctor — realized this. She ended her own experiments and came to us. So well done, both of you. They'll never know it, but you saved their world."

Sam nodded gravely. "Thanks, Chief. Now, about a vacation..."

"Go," the old man growled, "and be back... oh, I can afford to be generous... in three days."

Sam went with Jessica back to her apartment. She was disquietingly silent, becoming pensive. Without the concentrating tension of a covert mission, she was beginning to think about things; so he took the initiative.

"You did a great job down there, handled it like a veteran. I guess I was just along for the ride."

"It wasn't my call. Orders from above." She laughed. "Does that affect your manly pride?"

"Of course it does."

"Well, let's see if we can restore it."

But as they undressed, she paused and giggled.

"So what's your problem, lady?"

"It's still working, I see," she said, pointing to below his waist.

"It wasn't gone for that long. Anyway, let's find out if it still works."

He surprised himself. It was not quite what he expected. He would have to go undercover this way more often. Afterwards, as they lay in the dark, he lingered inside her, unwilling to break the bond and end this new sensation. But he was very satisfied with his performance. So was Jessica. She had no idea that it was his first.

When he heard the soft, steady breathing of deep sleep next to him, Sam touched the tiny stud behind the lobe of his left ear. The darkness dissolved, and she awoke in the dim red light of the prep room.

As Samantha left to make her report, she felt rather sorry for the lovely Jessica and the crusty old Director, who would never be aware that things had changed. Such was the nature of the mission, though it did leave a nasty taste in the mouth. Still, she had done her job, and her report was bound to create a stir. Jessica Robineaux might not be real in this world, but her predictions were.