The uneven sound of rainwater pouring from the guttering onto the plastic sill of her bedroom window woke Jade from her sleep. Irritably she half turned over and mumbling about breakfast tried to push Andrew her lover, who wasn't there, out of bed.
After checking under the rest of the duvet with wide sweeps of her limbs she swiped at a panel of annotated coloured patches on the wall above the bed. The room lights flashed on and her body tensed against the sudden brightness, she repeated the blow and the near-darkness returned. More cautiously her fingers walked to the next pressure pad, which she pressed. It glowed soft amber and initiated a restful androgenous voice.
"The time is a quarter past five a.m."
Jade had underslept again and she knew exactly why: anticipation. Only four days previously she had downloaded a new solid-hologram program from the net. It was a good one, probably the best she had ever run; after four days solid of playing with it she still could not wait for more. It was free too, it was public domain.
Solid-holograms were a compromise between total emersion in a virtual reality and the rejection of VR by the government as a potentially lethal drug. The projections look and feel genuine enough and could exist in the "real" world. A limited range prevents people having permanent unreal additions in their lives.
Initially the generators were used to provide cheap interiors for buildings: the most dilapidated of offices could hang rare art treasures on their pine paneled walls and offer executives a lunchtime of relaxation on a deserted tropical beach. One or two cases of completely fictitious factories being sold were reported.
The next step was into consumer products, from ever healthy plants to open-fire microwaves, and from apparently expensive ornaments to deep-pile floor-boards. Keeping up with the Jones' accelerated exponentially when just the press of a button outdid all the neighbours.
After the first wave of sometimes tasteless euphoria, law and fashion almost erased the practice with their insistence on actually existent items. Only the introduction of animation saved it from the technology museums. Dogs that did not foul the carpet and children that sat quietly doing jigsaws were a sufficiently large improvement on their corresponding realities that fad and fashion were overruled.
No information had come with Jade's new program but her contact had said that Eastern Europe was the likely source. Apparently there were hoards of talented hologram sculptors there, but no market structure, so they gave away what they made as a sort of advertisement to the rest of the world. Not that it mattered, it could have come from Outer Space for all she cared - it was too much fun to worry about.
Smiling gently to herself in the dawn light she decided to make an early start and switched Andrew on, as the alarm would have had she slept long enough. She allowed her pillow cushioned head to roll to the side as a new presence indented the mattress. A brawny tanned arm moved sensuously across Jade's torso and Andrew began to kiss,
beginning with her eyelids, eventually covering every inch of naked flesh.
Jade Wrinston was twenty three. Her heavy dark eyebrows above green-grey eyes, her long straight hair and full pale lips had attracted a multitude of potential partners. Any one of them would have given everything to be as close to Jade as she felt to the hologram. The generated man showed a becoming level of gratitude for his position.
When Andrew arrived Jade was dating a tall and moderately wealthy lawyer but his phone calls had ceased in recent days, perhaps because she had told him to go away, she was busy. He didn't seem to mind too much.
Her apartment was two thirds of the way up an angular modern block. The four rooms offered everything that was necessary: a microwave in the kitchen with a supply of ready meals to heat in it, a settee in the lounge, a shower and toilet in the bathroom and a bed in the final room. All the furniture was real.
The bedroom was decorated in cyan and blue. It had cushions and cuddly toys scatted around and more recently it had developed a few small but growing piles of dirty plastic plates and empty soft drinks bottles. Like a disease the trash crept in from the edges, building up slowly unnoticed, waiting.
At work the following Monday Jade spent her lunch hour showing off Andrew to captivated colleagues. Each of his complements and meaningful lingering eye contacts increased the excitement, causing the women to crowd closer and closer until they practically mobbed him, but still he retained the calmness and confidence that so charmed them.
Like a powerful magnet loose in a mass of iron filings, everywhere he moved female patterns formed around him; heads turned and conversations stopped - a piece of coloured magic accidentally dropped into a grey world.
During the afternoon most found an excuse to return at some point. Andrew talked quietly and intimately with them, making them laugh or cry - whatever they wanted, occasionally a casual touch transformed into a passionate embrace. None, it seemed, were immune.
Many took home copies of Andrew. They altered his physical features slightly, deepened his voice or coloured his skin or did whatever made the man most attractive to them but the result was always stunning, always flawless.
The hologram Andrew spread over the following weeks. He became David, Stephen, Jason and a thousand other men. Across seas and over continents the program found its way into millions of homes. Often he was a closely guarded secret but sometimes a party piece. Whoever and wherever he was found though, he went home with everybody.
At the same time Julie appeared. Julie was blonde haired and blue eyed, she was ginger with a cat green gaze, she was a brooding brunette. Julie was also known as Rachel, Michelle, Trudy and Suzi. She seduced men by playing out their fantasies, creating new dreams to be enacted and resurrecting old, even the forgotten ones.
Faithful husbands turned secretive at her touch, finding hiding places at work or at home for their new portable hologram generators. Gangs of pubescent schoolboys giggled in playing field bushes but their teachers did not catch them; they were too busy in the staff room.
Around the world couples began to separate and single men and women stopped their eternal search. Numbers at social events dwindled as more and more people stayed in seven evenings a week, they felt no need to venture into the complex and dangerous social world when Andrew and Julie were everything they had ever dreamed of.
Places that really shouldn't have been affected found their devoted followings shrinking. Even with religion, social intercourse attracts its percentage.
Amid this divorce of society and reality a calm contentment permeated other spheres of life. Like a cool silk sheet draped over a fevered body the dream lovers pacified war-makers and took fire from the hearts of soldiers. Sounds of gunfire echoed into the distance as mercenaries and common people made love, not war.
On February the fourteenth, a few minutes after midnight people began to get ill. Stabbing pains and nausea swept across the wealthy nations of the world and scant hours later the first deaths occurred. Initially it pursued only the weak and the old but the symptoms overtook almost everyone eventually.
Inside the agony the body's organ systems malfunctioned into a seemingly random breakdown. A lucky few suffered cardiac arrest and went quickly, for others the liver's stored toxins were released into the bloodstream sending them crawling into the realm of death. Most commonly violent muscle spasms starting at the extremities and working unstoppably towards the heart shook energy away until none was left.
Most sought sanctuary with their hologram partners and died in the arms of illusions. Those who made it to the hospitals could not be helped as all the medical staff were suffering the same torment. It seemed entire countries would perish overnight. First World politics ground to a trembling halt as diplomats and businessmen shrivelled into a horrifying death.
In a small damp bedroom in Romania a teenager laughed at the pained face of a Western newscaster as he tried in vain to read his autocue through the haze that swam across his vision. The boy thought of those he had missed the first time and hoped he would catch them the next as he launched his new virus onto the net: "Mother".
