STARBLOOD                "Process hadn't allowed itself to be
                                        benchmarked in nine quarters. Not
           by Steven Schuldt            that the other IM players were
                                        complaining too loudly, Process
           Copyright(c)1990             Publishing Industries had always
                                        taken the benchmarks by light-years."

      "Don't you move." said Einstein, the semi-automatic handgun
      trembling in his hands, his thick accent still failing to
      conceal his terror. The sky was boiling overhead; dark, restless
      geometric shapes sliding above and behind each other. The wind
      had started to kick up again and Ursula's long hair danced
      across her pale white face.  "Raise your arms."

         She slowly raised her arms above her head.  "That's good. Now
      walk."

         "You're crazy, you old bastard." she hissed, taking a step
      towards the ledge. A distant crack of thunder was heard and a
      swirling choir of voices began to rise ominously.  "Crazy! Cr-"

                             ____________________

Phyllis took an outlet. "How much longer?"

"Fifteen minutes." said the shell. She was going to die in here. Ursula's wedding was only four days away, and Phyllis felt obligated to try another print if she died. She was annoyed, feeling too much pressure to contemplate this noir spy mess that the VanGehr Group engine had spit up. She looked out of the rain-spattered bullet train window. Quebec's streets were skidding by like wet black cat hairs through her dim reflection in the glass. It looked very different than she remembered it. Phyllis closed the shell, settled back in the deep white folds of her seat and thought about Process.

Process hadn't allowed itself to be benchmarked in nine quarters. Not that the other IM players were complaining too loudly, Process Publishing Industries had always taken the benchmarks by light-years. Most were content to let CEO Paul Reuters and the PPI network of enigmacrats thrash and twist in a web of what was beginning to appear as its over-cultivated mystique. Besides, other corporate prime movers in Image Manipulation were tired of tumbling vats of capital into the black hole of random number benchmarking. Now, at last, a certain parity seemed reachable and majors like ClimeLight/Fissure and Junee-July could concentrate on the more pressing but no less challenging craft of star-making.

How Process tested so well was pretty widely known. The entropic harrier it was only half-jokingly called. Their variant of seed value generation based on the interference tier-contours created by 4D graphs of radioactive decay and simple Lorenz attractors had proven a ruthlessly effective, if somewhat quasi-mystical approach to the problem. The variant was Process' ace card, however, and would have remained a standard for years.

The house was old and pathologically gothic, all odd angles, bleak corners and towering cloisters. Set near the edge of the Gaspe' peninsula, the place was about as far away from civilization as this ancient province allowed. Phyllis found herself waiting in a sparse antechamber after having been buzzed through wrought iron gates she would have guessed to be fourteen feet high. She had been led by a smallish bespectacled man of fifty or so down six-hundred feet of winding private road. He had spoken with a harsh French-Canadian accent. Despite all her preparation and determination, she felt extremely nervous. This shoot had to be good; she wouldn't get another chance. The rain had stopped on the taxi ride in from the station but the gray sky and cool autumn weather seemed to mirror her feelings of unease. The little man had taken her coat and addressed her as "Miss Cope". For some reason she was reminded of the teasings of an ex-boyfriend, "Miss can't Cope".

"I am terribly sorry, madam," said the man, "but Mr. Nareid is preoccupied at the moment and has advised me to show you in. If you please." Phyllis nodded politely and, lifting her gearbag, followed his gesturing hand into a large, skylit circular room. There was a disused marble water fountain at its center. The man followed her in. "Mr. Nareid informs me that you are a photographer." Phyllis was looking absently up at the grimy, stained-glass dome.

"Yes, of sorts" she half laughed. "I'm a cam-tech really."

"Oh, I am sorry," he was looking up at her and Phyllis felt that he was standing uncomfortably close. "There is a difference?"

"No! No, not really," said Phyllis, instantly regretting her nervous response. "it's just not a term I've ever used."

"I see," he said slowly, and there was an awkward moment of silence before he gestured, "Make yourself comfortable." She thanked him and accepted his offer of tea, hoping to redeem herself somewhat. He left and Phyllis perceived for the first time the place's dead air and unsettling feeling of perversity, the decayed lavishness of the entire estate. Whatever sort of person this James Nareid turned out to be, he was not, she guessed, going to be an average shoot. Even by Process' standards.

Image manipulation was the inevitable resonating phenomenon of a media mad world. A miracle of style becoming substance. Every icon, every movement in art, music, video, holography, and film, captured, treated and distorted by the latest computer rendering gear. Hyper-real storylines cropped, spliced and juxtaposed, culled from every source old and new, from Homer through Messiana/Hologramic slasher vids. The latest in rotational dissolving and recombinant overlay-tracing applied to the bulk of the flotsam of the human information system. After so many years now it had become reality's feedback loop. The gather and distort technique had been born out of necessity, of course, in the years before automatic royalties, with the standing copyright laws taxed to the limit and straining to hold back the dike. Process had been there from the start. The vast bulk of Process' profits still came from the quaint black octagonal boxes found at every HDHF local, the IMAGER. Inside where girl and boy could tumble their way down a hierarchy of silly menus packed with time-frames, icons and double entendres - to leave with their own "Totally unique!" little chunk of the zeitgeist. A fine time for all concerned as PPI had years earlier licensed off its IMAGER to the Fissure corporation, pretensions to high art intact as well as safe gliding distance above the red.

Things had changed since then and the better IMs, like Process, had learned almost unconsciously to play to the last and all inclusive human gallery. They had realized that at the end of the day people wanted something to hold on to, invariably, an intelligibly convoluted mirror.

As a child growing up in Montreal, Phyllis would spend most nights alone. Her grisette mother worked and slowly grew more unsound, acting ambitions fading out year by year. At the age of nine Phyllis was sent to Paris to live with her cousins. Her only truly enduring memories of early childhood: a collage of neon, white light and pain. That light had stayed with her, had kept her straight through the shooting of some of the most bizarre imagery a jaded world could come up with.

Things had gone better in Europe, later on. She had returned to the Americas to attend film school in Cote-Saint-Luc and had done her cam-tech grunt work in LA. It got pretty ugly for awhile, months of shooting warehouses and dockyards for the truly sleazy Estienne and Finch. She guessed her couples work for respected independent Lemaitre! had gotten her the Process call. Phyllis hated that idea, however, because couples made for some of the worst subject matter. Most of them got drunk or bent on some analog first so they could get loose enough to screw in front of a stranger, but somehow the returns had always been okay. Shooting Process, however, was every cam-tech's grail, and when they flew two reps to Vienna to watch her shoot an industrio-demolition sponsored by some bored Austrian art fags, she had felt that white light rising in her head.

"Ms. Cope, isn't it?" said a voice behind her. Phyllis turned to see a thin, almost emaciated looking young man of twenty or so approaching her and smiling. He wore an oversize half-buttoned white shirt and pastel red baggy silk pants. He had a shoulder-length mop of wispy black hair. Phyllis' first impression was that of some nineteenth century lion tamer's apprentice.

"Yes," she smiled and shook his small, bird-like hand. He grinned widely. "James Nareid."

"You can call me Phyllis." she said, assuming her best friendly-but-professional tone.

"Yes. Phyllis. I see Ryeland has forced his tea upon you." He was looking fixedly at her with wide hazel eyes that suggested no depth at all.

"Hardly," she said uncomfortably, his apparent pomposity and atrocious hawk's gaze distracting her, "it's very good actually." There was a brief pause before James spoke.

"Well, I've never done anything like this before so...do I pose?" he said, looking hopeful.

"Oh, its nothing like that at all," she said laughing and beginning to root through her bag. "I'll be shooting almost continuously for as long or as briefly as you like. Obviously," she began pulling out several objects and resting them carefully on the floor "the more variegated," she continued fastening a lens and new cartridge on her Leico TiarraShot "-this is my favorite camera- the more variegated the shots the more chance we have of obtaining interesting results. Most random Image engines work best with diverse shots of the main subject." She raised the camera and began shooting, slowly and reflexively circling her subject. James was looking right at her with an amused smile. "So just move around and pretend I'm not even here. Try to do whatever it is you'd normally be doing."

"What if I'd be masturbating?" he said, with the same fixed grin.

This is going to be cake thought Phyllis.

"By all means, makes for some great stuff, semen. Nothing beats the old money shot."

"Well," he said "I wouldn't be, but just checking. Maybe I'd have some tea." He poured himself a cup from the pot Ryeland had left on the tray and stared in profile at the fountain. Phyllis was now shooting from a crouched position.

"Do I understand correctly, that in this deal I have you for as long as I like?" he asked, looking now up at the skylight and taking a small sip of tea. "Or while the optic medium holds out, maybe thirty hours worth of straight shooting." she slowly rose from her crouch. James was now looking intently into his china cup.

"This is good isn't it. A lovely blend." he smiled at her, "I do have a little something planned..."

Every IM had by definition a huge database of countless portrayals, delineations, and distortions of almost everything and everyone worth capturing ever. These catalogs were more or less interchangeable, as there were only so many sources for interesting material and the rate at which the new became the old had almost achieved real-time. Stars of course were IM's lifeblood and the majors spent vast amounts of resources farming out difference and intrigue. Icons were routinely erected overnight only to have their electronic exoskeletons ground into image-gristle weeks later. Manufactured stars were not, however, the lifeblood of Process. They always let you be the star, for the right price. An extravagant one. That any IM could command the compensation for a location shoot, random engine recombination, and print that PPI could was partially attributable to their quality but mainly to their reputation. The finished product was good, this was undeniable, the Process engine seemed to be able to make intuitive and often otherworldly connections to attenuated and rarely used perceptions of cultural totems disused by more mainstream IM's, but it wasn't that good. Yet to own a Process episode of your own Process shoot was a status symbol the monied worldwide coveted. Guaranteed only one original to exist, generated at the Process labs with no human intervention. As their infrequent advertisements claimed, two things in life are certain, only one isn't. Even the daughter of the CEO of Junee-July had provoked no end of embarrassment at corporate headquarters when she boasted of her Process shoot in an interview with CRUEL.

Playing pool turned out to be the little something that James had spoken about. He had led her upstairs into an oak paneled room with a huge table and deep maroon carpeting. The room was dank with the smell of mold. For nearly an hour he quietly racked, broke and cleared. Phyllis was doing her best to make this look interesting, she guessed he wasn't half bad as a player, but this would undoubtedly make for poor source material and she knew who would have to carry the can for that. Occasionally he would light a cigarette and Phyllis would frantically try every trick she knew to make it look dramatic. Ryeland came in and offered another round of tea, which was declined, and informed James that he would be leaving for the afternoon. "Is this okay?" he asked Phyllis a few minutes later, after clearing the table and beginning to set up a new break.

"Fine, sure." she said, trying to sound intrigued.

"If not, then there is something else I might be doing."

Phyllis followed James down a long, winding, semi-lit hallway that sloped for maybe forty-five yards, shooting the entire way.

"I've always wanted to record my dreams," said James with a hint of resignation, "but you people have made that desire obsolete, haven't you?"

"I'd like to think we augment peoples dreams." said Phyllis, shooting now at close range, nearly over his shoulders. James stopped suddenly, maybe ten meters from what appeared to Phyllis to be the end of the corridor. "Oh wait, one thing I have got to have first, those inner lights? Do they still do that?" It took Phyllis a few moments to understand what it was he wanted.

"Like in Goelsann's Deduche' Jar" said James.

"Micro-machines?"

"Yes! Can you do that?" He seemed almost childishly enthused by the idea.

"Sure." Phyllis said, halting the shoot. Micro-machines. Oh brother. How hackneyed can he make this? She knelt again to root through her equipment bag. "I have to tell you though, they do require you to sign a waiver authorizing a hypodermic injection. Also," and suddenly the thought of injecting a syringe full of little paddling chemo-phosphorescent machines into this fey man struck her as too repulsive for words, "also, you may experience some after-effects until they are completely flushed out of your system."

"Like?"

"Like headaches and diarrhea."

"That doesn't sound too terrible," he said, the smile fixed on his face. Phyllis carefully unwrapped a new needle and handed both a pen and the needle's paper jacket, which doubled as both waiver and warning, to James. He signed it with short quick stabs.

"What density?" asked Phyllis.

"Pardon?"

"Do you want a few or a lot?" She was crouching and holding the needle carefully, with both hands.

"Oh, light me up like a Christmas tree, by all means." She took his arm and slowly administered the machine injection.

He was leaning against a brick wall of the corridor and looking at her with half-lidded eyes as she fastened a chemo-sensitive lens to the TiarraShot.

"How long have you been doing this?" he asked. Phyllis stood up and noticed, oddly and for the first time, that she was considerably taller than James.

"Almost ten years, professionally four." She smiled and raised the camera.

"An old hand. You've seen some weird stuff, I bet." He was smiling and walking slowly towards the corridors' end.

"Nothing's shocking." She said, following closely.

"That's good because some people might not feel up to recording something I really want in this." And the room opened up behind him. Phyllis did not feel well at that moment. Not at all.

She was naked and tied to a rusted metal table with red stockings. Her eyes were open but un-focused and her hair was a matted brown. She was covered with scars and uttered streams of non-words, like someone speaking in tongues, every few moments. "This is a friend of mine, Phyllis. Her name is Alice," said James. He circled around the table and looked down at the woman with an adoring glare. Phyllis had let her bag fall to the floor and the Leico drop to her chest upon entering the large room but had now raised the camera again, almost in self defense. The room at the end of the corridor turned out to be large and rectangular, maybe twelve by twenty meters. One wall was completely framed glass with a view out into what Phyllis guessed to be the rear quadrangle of the estate. The ceiling was high, maybe twenty feet. The room was dimly illuminated on the near side by an arc lamp that stretched from one wall out over the table. There were several small wooden deck chairs scattered around the table. It was nearly dark outside and the rain had begun again. Through the camera James was beginning to glow with the tiny red, blue and green lights of the micro-machines.

"I'm sort of a medical enthusiast, Phyllis." said James. She noticed, as she circled around to his side of the table, the small tray of surgical implements. "I've got some radical ideas in the area."

"So she needs an operation?" said Phyllis, getting weak in the knees, her voice unsteady.

"Yes, very desperately." He smiled fixedly and looked at Phyllis.

"James," she said lowering the TiarraShot, "there was something in the tea." She felt the rising edge of panic in her voice. The room seemed to be the culmination of some deliberate and insidious chain of events. The implements, her camera, the table and its babbling girl, all felt like props in a game that was about to end.

"There was something in the tea, yes. Can I begin now?" He ventured a quick glance at the camera dangling at her neck. Phyllis raised the camera and un-halted. James was now almost a blazing sheet of white through the lens, so she reflexively keyed the shutter speed down to avoid retinal burn. He slowly raised a small cutting tool and leaned over Alice. The first incision extended along her left side from her neck to just below her ribcage, a tiny thread of blood following his hand. The girl on the table let out a low moan and then uttered a small stream of sibilant non-words. Phyllis struggled to hold the Leico steady, shooting now over James' shoulder. He cut her again, more deeply this time, a small jet of blood leaping out of her neck and onto the table. Phyllis let the camera fall and backed quickly away from the table. "James, this-" she couldn't seem to form words and in her eyes she still saw the faint ghost of James' blazing silhouette leaning over the table. "I have to go," she turned, stumbled, and hit glass. The rain was coming down hard and cold, running down her face. Phyllis felt dizzy, burning with confusion and slicing pain.

"This thing I'm doing here," James said softly, kneeling in the broken glass and firmly holding her bleeding arm, "is a dedication." He let go of her and she watched in fear and bemusement as he ran the scalpel along his wrist. He took her arm again and pressed his wrist to it.

Phyllis got up unsteadily and walked into the room. Her vision was swimming and she felt an unbearable nausea. Alice was looking mutely at her from the table, unblinking.

"If you are feeling ill," said James "we could finish some other time." Phyllis had spilled her equipment bag by the entrance and was clumsily packing.

"Yes," she muttered, speech feeling alien and unnatural to her mouth. She got up, walked over to the glass wall, gave James a half-nod and ducked out of the broken portion of the window into the rain. She found herself choking back a sob as she stumbled around the outside of the house through the downpour, fighting an urge to run. The rain felt like molasses running down her face. The words and glances of peers reverberated in her head. A cam-tech was a go-between for star and fanatic, a mere tool of the truly famous, the elite. They couldn't know that Phyllis had wanted very much to opt out of the loop. She could scarcely admit it to herself. She remembered her mother's eyes, the curse that fame denied can really be. She just didn't have it. She would fail this audition, there was no doubt. "Miss can't Cope..."

He was sitting in a deck chair by the illuminated end of the room, smoking a cigarette. The girl and the table were gone. Phyllis breathed deeply and tried to calm the speeding sensation her body was experiencing. D-Lysergic acid, she told herself, kid's stuff. She silently pressed the camera to the glass and un-halted. Momentarily James turned and looked at her. She had the momentary thought that he looked like a vulture but resisted an urge to run and kept shooting. A smile slowly spread across his thin face.

Welcome aboard. You handle yourself very professionally. I like your technique. My son is my favorite camera by the way, and he likes you as well. We'll be in touch. P. Reuters

There were two prints in the package, the first being Ursula's wedding gift. Phyllis realized she must have left it behind when her bag had spilled. An attached note chided her for her taste in IM's. Phyllis couldn't seem to care about that at the moment, and took an immediate inlet into the other episode. For many minutes the thing made very little sense indeed. A montage of beautiful, wavering portraits, all vaguely familiar, all with the strangely vast more real than reality edge every Process episode seemed to possess, but no evidence of James at all. The thing then segued into a minimal children's story of a farm girl who loved cats and had a cruel grandmother. The whole thing somehow was the most astonishing episode she had ever seen but she couldn't figure out why until the final few moments when the engine seemed to power down from a spectral, idealized shot of a gigantic urban skyline into the episode's source material. The final shot was a ghostly, skeletal treatment of a woman soaked in rain, seen through glass and holding a camera, treated with some sort of hyper-trophied ray tracing algorithm. The micro-machines circulating beneath her skin tiny, red sparks.

         She spun with grace and impossible quickness. The gun
      skittered across the tar and arched in slow motion off the roof.

         "- crazy if you thought you could kill me, Al." said Ursula.
      Albert Einstein fell to his knees. He began to cry.  "You're
      pathetic. I knew your game from the first, and I waited too long
      for this, but its going to be a different world from here on
      out."  Einstein looked slowly up into her eyes and nodded.

Steven Schuldt is an undergraduate at the Sterling school of post-cyberpunk fiction. He is currently majoring in Slipstream studies and working on his first novel, tentatively titled "Transmission and Grace". He lives in Boston with his fiance, three cats and a computer.

steve@ma.neavs.com