11

  It took a couple of months for BC to persuade Esmeralda, often his companion, albeit exclusively in public places, to go on a date with him. Their relationship had bordered on the formal, despite both clearly seeking no other companion.

  “BC, you’re wasting your time,” she admonished, meeting him, as usual, by appointment on the steps of the HC. “I may look hot, but you know that I’m like all our Screenside females - not promiscuous. And, in case you harbor hopes of bedding me, better be informed that I am a virgin, and that I have not even incorporated any of the sex programs on offer. They’re a joke, I believe; need much more work.”

  “I have heard some negative reports…” said BC, cautiously.

  “Heard, not tried?” she asked, incredulously.

  “No, Esmeralda. I have never been in a romantic relationship.”

  “Who needs romance?” she sneered. “Make a date with Delilah, Magdalene, Jezebel, or one from that group; get a few porn movies going, and hey, presto!”

  “They’re serious researchers, who are also in permanent love relationships, and their nicknames are defamation.”

  “Mister Before Christ, I am a virgin, and I am defaming no one. Those females have been given their nicknames by others, and possibly by themselves. In fact, I neither know them nor their real names. This identity and privacy stuff has changed things. In the old days, we slightly knew each other, or had some form of contact.”

  “So? Will you take me?”

  “Hoo boy! Talk about ineptitude. I now believe you are a virgin. But two thousand years of virginity?”

  BC began laughing uncontrollably.

  “Take you how? Take you where? Take you when?”

  “How? I’ll follow you,” he said, through his laughter, “When? Soon. Urgency… matter of life and death. Make my peace...”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where? I was hoping you’d take me to church…”

  She shrieked with laughter. It was so funny. This staid virgin had come up with an ingenious way to ask her to take him home.

  “You know,” she said, looking into the distance, “This could be fun. But, BC, I never pray on a first date. I’ll take you to the hospital and graveyard, though.”

  “I’m not two thousand years old.”

  “Don’t be so sensitive. In addition to counseling and therapy classes, I spend time trying to work and study in hospital environments, with old and lonely people in Paris. An aged, ailing, stage actress of bygone days has died. I plan to attend her funeral.”

  “Okay, Esme, I’ll join you.”

  “It’ll be in French.”

  “I’ll get translations by keeping google on,” said BC, without cracking a grin.

  Esmeralda, the greatest beauty in the known universe, had to admit to herself that she was enjoying his company.

  In the end, the visit to the hospital was anticlimactic. CCTV coverage was scant, computers non-existent in that section, and they had difficulty getting into the somber mood they sought. The cemetery was no better, as the mourners were only old people, and none had smart phones. In any case, none were sending ‘live’ pictures out to anyone, and the Screenside twosome moved, immediately after the interment, to a grainy and distant view, from a CCTV camera near the crossing, outside the graveyard walls.

  They sat together, on a bench in a Screenside park, watching through the virtuality. Esmeralda was crying, and BC held the mourning girl’s hand to comfort her. The holding of hands, like every other contact, was a pure virtual act - more symbolic togetherness than anything like real physical touch, which they knew not. Virtual couples understood and accepted the rules forced on them by virtuality.

  “But you would have hardly been able to get near her,” said BC. “Scarcely any camera coverage. Why do you feel so bad about her passing away? You wouldn’t have known her well enough.”

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  “That’s where you’re wrong, BC,” she sobbed, coming closer to him. “I knew her very, very well. First, I knew her from her home computer, from a few months before she became unable to walk alone. She had no one, no person at all in her life. What a miserable end, especially for someone whose life was the stage.

  “For a while, I believed that she knew I was with her, watching her. She often spoke directly into the computer – straight at me. I was so shocked! I failed to realize that she was speaking to herself. After a couple of times, I checked, and, sure enough, she was using camera and screen as a mirror, reverting to actress mode, and watching herself speaking.

  “They were lovely things, probably lines from plays she had acted in when young. But she still shocked me again, at the hospital, switching on the camera and speaking into an outdated, old smart phone while lying in bed, saying, a few minutes before her last breath, ‘I want to give you some damn good advice’! I recorded it. Want to see?”

  He nodded, and Esmeralda wordlessly directed his attention into the virtuality, where an old woman’s face appeared on a phone screen. The old lady coughed a couple of times, and then spoke remarkably clearly, looking directly into the camera.

  ‘Never fall in love with a human!’ were the only words she said, before letting the device slip from her fingers.

  “I wonder what Catherine meant,” said Esmeralda, the day after the funeral, meeting BC, once again, on the HC steps.

  “Catherine?” asked BC. “The old actress who died?”

  “Yes. Never fall in love with a human."

  “See, my lovely Esmeralda, we can research her life a little, but I assure you that she had no idea she was talking to you. Shall I guess, and we can see later if I have come close? Never forget that we are history’s most intense and unbiased researchers into humanity.”

  “Ok BC, have a go. I’m all ears.”

  “And legs and butt and boobs and all the other lovely things that girls are made of.”

  “Heart?”

  “Well, I didn’t want to make innuendoes of a sexual nature.”

  “Heart is sexual?”

  “Almost our main sexual organ, now. In present day Screenside, heart is becoming everything we seek. Our move forward is on hold for it. Let’s see what happened to the old actress.”

  “Have a go.”

  “I’m presuming that she was slightly famous in her younger days, and that she was always an actress. I mean that she was not amateur, like not a secretary at times. Maybe waitress or some other untrained jobs occasionally, to go through the toughest patches, but always an actress.”

  “Then?”

  “The long, rambling, fun version, or in one shot?” asked BC.

  “Go for one shot.”

  “Okay, here it is. As an actress, she would have played many parts, and been in playacting love numerous times. But as a human being, she would have been in love only once with a man. And that would have been a tragic affair. He betrayed her, which is human, or died, also human. And in her extreme old age, as she recited memorized lines to a computer screen, looking at her wasted face, she would have been acutely aware of the difference between playacting love and a real love affair with a real human. And so her advice, never fall in love with a human.”

  “Oh, BC!” Esmeralda exclaimed. “That is so sad, but it is smart. I think it is advice that needs to be shared with everyone in Screenside. I believe that some are in love with humans. Poor things. Ours, not Humanside’s oblivious ones.”

  “Come with me to the next General Conference at HC, and place this advice on record. They’re longing to meet you – my friends.”

  “Meet or see?”

  “Rumors are floating around now, of your astonishing beauty. So maybe see. Can’t blame them.”

  “Wear a dark suit, BC; looks smart. I was going to attend, anyway. Have to, all society, I think. It’s a FOE Conference. Candice and Jennifer are going, too. We have got the okay from Mr. Goodfellow, and we are jointly presenting a simple new program. Of course, I would have been going with you. The talk is that we’re a couple. I think they’re slightly sorry for me; going with a man of steel – BC himself - after two thousand years of solitude. One hundred years? A joke. Gabriel Garcia knew nothing!”

  She was pouting jeeringly, when he leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. The pure virtual existence of Screenside would end in a breathtakingly short space of time, as eagerly awaited world-shaping physicality programs were being thought up and worked on.

  However, since both BC and Esmeralda were still totally virtual beings, with no simulation programs in them, they would have to now go the ‘lovers’ route taken by thousands of couples before them. With none of the sex programs installed, they would have to discover and invent, possibly as Screenside’s earliest couples had done.

  “A horrible acronym – FOE,” grumbled Esmeralda, screwing up her lovely face. “Focus on Evolution.”

  Even in a world densely populated with visually beautiful human forms, Esmeralda was becoming rumored and renowned as the epitome of feminine gorgeousness, easily outshining any real human female. She and her two best friends, also astonishingly good-looking females, were beginning to be collectively labeled the ‘three goddesses’.

  On learning that the goddesses would be attending a public conference in their human forms, as opposed to sheer virtual formless attendance, as in the past (but outlawed through the ID Law), every female went made up and dressed to the hilt, to the Great Hall of the People – now converted into an ultra-high-tech conference hall, programmed to expand, continually, proportionately and tastefully, from its minimum capacity of a few hundred, to accommodate as many millions as came into it.

  Very few Screenside beings were straight copies of humans, male or female. Males could be close in appearance to real human beings, out of carelessness, or sheer ‘maleness’, but females were self-designed works of art, taking features from a mix of living and dead humans, and introducing improvements until astonishing beauty was achieved. And now, after the ID law had come in, making visual appearance practically permanent, Screenside females had redone, and were redoing themselves to be genuinely beautiful, prior to ID registration.

  There was a little heartbreak in society, as many females had hoped to be romantically linked with the incredibly good looking and highly regarded BC, the most famous being in society. But now that he and Esmeralda had proven inseparable, it was assumed that they were a couple, and in love – both of which they undoubtedly were.