Analog SF, January 2003 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors [Authors, Dell Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Magazine, 2012
Publisher: www.Fictionwise.com
Published: 2001-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Background Noise by Daniel M. Hoyt

Difficulty in distinguishing reality and illusion can be a problem—or a solution.

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Once, a man loved a woman...

...but what if she weren't really a woman?

Someone once told me you had to learn to love yourself before you could love someone else. That we all had basically the same desires and needs and you had to understand them in yourself before you could deal with them effectively in others.

Well, I missed that class on understanding myself, but I was okay. I still grew into a perfectly healthy, normal twenty-something American guy in love with a perfectly healthy, normal twenty-something American girl.

Or at least I thought she was. Rachel, I mean.

But she wasn't. And I'd really believed I loved her. Which was impossible, of course, because she wasn't real. So her desires and needs couldn't possibly have been the same as mine; it couldn't have been love. Could it?

It was all very confusing.

Which was why I found myself sitting up on the scaffolding below a billboard, three stories high, legs dangling off the edge, pretending to read an old-style paper comic book, but actually trying to think of a good reason not to plunge off. Of course, I came up with one reason right off the bat: jumping from only three stories probably would break my legs, but might not actually kill me—why bother? But a good swan dive would solve that problem, so I was still thinking, staring at Dogies from three stories up, trying to wrap my mind around Rachel.

Rachel waited tables at Dogies. The place was practically invisible, wedged between a rib house and a bar, east of downtown Denver on Colfax, past the Greek diner that had been there forever, but before the block of thrift stores. You probably passed it a million times without even noticing it.

I bet you saw the Diver, though. It was one of the first of those holographic billboards that you see everywhere now. One of the first batch was right here, next to Dogies—okay, it wasn't Dogies back then in 2017, but the billboard was right there where Dogies is now. Remember the Diver? The Mexican travel authority did those cliff diver billboards all around the States, a blatant grab for the almighty tourist dollar. There was a trim, muscular guy in a teensy little swimsuit standing dead still on a rocky outcrop, all of it framed by a flawless blue sky. Then the guy stepped right out of the middle of the billboard—as if it had been a real person that was just standing there, instead of a painting—and leapt, in a perfect swan dive, splashing into a little pond on the ground beneath the billboard.

It looked almost real, like some guy who was trying to commit suicide. Almost, but not quite. If you paid attention, you'd notice that the pond wasn't there until the Diver jumped, and then it'd evaporate after the Diver disappeared beneath its phantom surface.

Nobody had seen billboards like that before.

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