by Pat Cadigan
"Likewise," Caritha said, moving closer to Marly. A doorway appeared behind them, and they slipped through it. He had a glimpse of something that looked like a pilot's cockpit before they shut the door on him.
In the bed Gina remained asleep. Cautiously he moved around it and sat down on the edge of the mattress. She stirred slightly.
At first you think things are going to get better. You keep believing, and you honor the commitment-
C-word, she'd said abruptly.
Pardon?
C-word. The big bad c-word. Commitment. You got them Bad Old Cozmic C-Word Blues.
It wasn't a word to me. It was something real, not an incredible simulation. You can run on that… oh, years and years. Even after it doesn't seem worth it anymore, you can still run on it, and then one day… all gone. All used up.
Yah? Try it Cheshire-cat style. One day it's all that's left, and everything else is gone. Either way it's a stone-home bitch. I got a c-word and nothing to use it on. What've you got?
The Last Zeppelin. Coming soon to a brain near you.
Gina stirred again. There was the hint of a smile on her mouth. Had anyone ever smiled in sleep because of him? He didn't know. Still didn't but then, it had been dark.
He hadn't started to worry until the room showed signs of getting lighter. Suddenly he'd had the wild idea that the darkness had been a safe zone or a fooler loop, and the daylight would screw it all up. He'd turned to her a little desperately then, and maybe she'd been feeling the same thing, or something like it. They'd gone at each other in frenzy, and Jesus but he'd thought that would have kept the day away if anything could have.
Maybe it had. The room was completely light when they'd quieted, but the spell had not been broken. Out of bed they'd continued to move around each other easily, not falling all over each other like a couple of schoolkids, just… easily. A little sex magic could go a long way, even in the only port in a storm.
Fast train.
Pardon?
Fast train. It's usually the night-train. Never mind, Ludovic. Now you know what it's like.
The room swayed slightly as the zeppelin lifted off, and he suddenly had the certain feeling that something/someone was approaching; a new presence, as full and individual as he was. He twisted around to see who it was.
He was looking at himself in the mirror in Medical's bathroom, turning his head from side to side. Just as they'd said, he didn't look any different. Same old head, only now it had eight holes in it, eight holes to be filled with eight plugs and a small menu of commands he could use to manipulate the images in his head. Top. Forward. Reverse. Freeze. Resume. End. Save. Quit.
There was a fast montage of images as each command was executed-Caritha, MORE DRUGS, Rana Copperthwait speaking to him forward and backward, freezing briefly and then gesturing at the zeppelin, Mark's bedroom, Gina, Marly and Caritha shutting the door on him, Gina stirring and the sense of another presence even more strongly this time, his face in the bathroom mirror, the awareness of the whole mess being saved to chip, and then he was blinking at the ceiling of the pit high above him, wondering if he'd ever get this right.
Disconnect, he thought. There was a fleeting acknowledgment deep within, a feeling he had tried to describe to himself without success. Without success seemed to fit the situation in general. He reached up and removed each connection carefully. There was never any sensation of the connections going in or coming out again, it was all as painless as they'd promised, but the association he always made was voodoo. Sticking long pins in a doll and pulling them out again. Perhaps because he didn't want to think about the ward sequence in House of the Headhunters. If he did, he'd have to look at it.
He shook his head as if to clear it, even though he wasn't the least bit groggy. That was the interesting thing about using the new interface-he never came out of it feeling drained and hung over the way he sometimes had with the old system. No eyestrain, no muscle strain, no strain of any kind.
He should have felt groggy, though, considering the sleep he hadn't gotten the night before, but rest wasn't what he'd needed, not then, and not now.
C-word, Ludovic. It takes more fucking nerve than most of us have to say the whole thing right out. Because there's nothing worse than having lead in your pencil and nobody to write to.
He laughed aloud at the memory. He could hear her voice so clearly in his head. The sockets had given him that-all his thoughts ran as big and vivid and sharp as any high-definition monitor screen, seeming so real he could almost reach out and touch them.
What the sockets hadn't given him, though, was control over what came into his head. No strain, but nothing to show for his efforts, either. He couldn't seem to get out of his own way long enough to produce a coherent sequence.
He got up, ejected the chip from the console, and held it up to the light on the tip of his forefinger before he pushed it into the erasure/reformat slot above the keyboard. Manny had had his implants four days before, which meant Medical would keep him for another three, leaving him three more days to come up with a feature-length zeppelin adventure for Para-Versal. And he couldn't even get five minutes of conversation without his mind skittering all over the place. Maybe he could divert Copperthwait with another story conference. Sure, come on over, shoot the-ahem-shit. Love for you creative types to talk.-Excuse me. What are you doing? If he could stand it.
His gaze came to rest on the hotsuit folded neatly on the shelf above the desk with the head-mounted monitor on top of it. He'd have been better off with the old system and the old chips. Wouldn't take any longer than, oh, two weeks. Then he could run it through with the new interface, which would probably reduce it to video confetti in a matter of two minutes, the way his mind was wandering. Pop it into Manny's electronic review queue and wait for him to watch it. He would know when Manny screened it, because he'd be able to hear Manny screaming from here. Or maybe Manny would just drop in via some spyhole-
Maybe he already had.
The memory of the other presence coming up on him hit him like a shot to the head. He knew for certain. It was the same sensation he'd felt during the visualization exercises the day after he'd had the procedure, a sense of pressure like someone leaning or pushing against him.
The hacker, maybe. But wouldn't the hacker have tried to talk to him?
Gabe ran a hand through his hair. He couldn't think about the hacker, or he'd have that coming out on chip along with the rest of the extraneous images. Maybe he should run down to Medical, see if they had a program for extracting unrelated and unwanted ideas.
He realized he was digging his fingers into his hair as if he could yank out his anxieties by the roots. He looked at the hotsuit and headmount, the console, the connections now coiled on the desk, the whole pit, and suddenly he felt as if he were sealed off in a small, airless box. He banged the console's door-open panel and ran for the ladder to the catwalk.
Across the hall the indicator light on the door to Gina's pit said it was occupied. Slowly he went over and raised his hand to the buzzer. Would this ruin it, somehow, was she all tied up with the music and the videos again, trying to make them do something, be something to her in place of something else? Or would she want to see him now as badly as he wanted to see her?
He pressed the buzzer. After a moment the door swung open silently. He hesitated again, unsure of what he would say to her, and the door started to swing shut again. He nipped around it quickly, wincing as the edge brushed his chest, tearing off a shirt button.
The lift whined softly as she sent it up to the catwalk for him. She was sitting at the desk with her feet up, staring at one of the console flatscreens as if she were unaware of him.
He took the lift down, waited briefly for her to look up and acknowledge him. Suddenly the lift started to rise again, and he jumped off. "Jesus," he said.
"Sorry. Thought maybe you'd changed your mind." There was a distracted, forced quality in her voice. A few moments later he saw the wires trailing among t
he dreadlocks. Hooked in. He took a step backward, toward the ladder.
"Come on, you afraid I'll bite or something?" She turned her head slowly and looked at him, her eyes seeming to go in and out of focus, as if she were having trouble picking him out of the surroundings.
He approached uncertainly. "What are you doing?"
"Checking my brain wave." She lifted a finger in the general direction of the screen.
The three rows of lines moving up and down on the monitor meant nothing to him. Abruptly they stopped and reversed themselves, flowing backwards to several explosively jagged interruptions in the otherwise semiregular patterns.
"Those bursts are where I opened the door, closed it, sent the lift up, and then started to send it up again. In case you're wondering." The screen blanked, flickered, and then he was looking at himself standing outside at the door. "You can reach all the controls from inside, if you know how." The screen blanked again. "Disconnect," she said.
He found himself looking anywhere but at her while she removed the wires from her head and set them aside.
"Pretty fucking strange, huh? Just wanted to see if I could do it. I can. You could, too, if you wanted." She yawned, rotated her head while she rubbed her neck, and then looked at him expectantly.
Once again words failed him. Like some kind of bad joke. He had goddamn sockets in his head to send out any thought at the drop of an inhibition, and he couldn't manage to tell the person he'd just spent the night with what he was doing there.
She nodded. "Look, it's all right. It's all all right. Just take care of your shit now. You got your Para-Versal deal with your complete artistic control. That's more than a lot of us end up with, count yourself lucky to've landed jam side up this time. You could make enough to buy out your ex-wife, hang onto your condo. Maybe you'll get real lucky, and Para-Versa'll decide they want you working directly for them, not this place."
He blinked at her. "Why?"
She laughed a little. "Christ, you think now that there's a fucking direct interface to the brain, studios like Para-Versal are gonna keep jobbing shit out to mills like the Dive? They don't need the Dive anymore, they just don't know it yet. But when they do, they'll get their own interface hardware, hire writers to sit around all day and all night dreaming up features right outa their brains, no production work necessary."
"But the unions-"
"The unions are finished. The best they might do is force a situation where you got a set designer dreaming up sets and a costumer dreaming up wardrobes, a writer dreaming up plots and characters, and a synner to put it all together, someone to synthesize everybody's dreams into one big dream. Goes round and round, and it comes out there." She jerked a thumb at the console. "So just take care of your shit now. I got to take care of mine."
She turned away and started putting the connections back into her sockets one by one. He left.
He was ensconced at a safe, undetectable distance when he felt her speak.
Come on, you afraid I'll bite or something?
There was a lot of noise around it, but he screened it out easily, saving it for later, because it all had to do with him. She was thinking of him while she sat there, flexing her muscles on the console. Neat trick, like, Look, Ma, no hands. But she didn't feel the pull to it the way he did. She almost understood, though, she almost got it, and if she went a little longer, tried a little harder, she might go all the way. But he didn't know whether that would be good for her or not, now, because he knew. It was more than just the difference between them- he wanted to go where the pictures were, she wanted the pictures to come out to where she was-because he knew for sure now. He hadn't been able to pick it up from her, but he'd been filled with it. Ludovic, filled with her.
What are you doing? Christ, she should have been able to smell him. And it had gone right past him. With all the new resources at his command, he should have been able to figure it out, graphed them from the top down, her movements, his movements as far as he knew them or could interpolate. Then he'd have been prepared for it. A little prepared, anyway. It was still like a fucking spike in the throat.
You can reach all the controls from inside if you know how. Lotta noise around that one, some for him, some for Ludovic. Shit, even she didn't know what she was really telling him.
Pretty fucking strange, huh?
Only if you don't have all the facts, lover. But once you do, it ain't a bit strange at all. He sneaked a look at her visuals. Yah, Ludovic looked good to her in ways she had no idea of.
Disconnect.
Shit. He surged forward, feeling around her console for a way to keep listening, at least, but he could tell it would take him a relatively long time to figure out how to infiltrate the hardware without her there as a gateway. Leave a piece of himself to work on that problem but withdraw now.
He replayed what he'd just received from her. No need to bother with top-down multigraphs and decision forests. He could see where it would go if somebody didn't fuck up, somebody being Gina, thinking twice, about him and his change for the machines.
Let her go. Have to. Have to.
Considering this was the one place she couldn't be for him, it was all right. He had no right to mind about it. Mind about it, ha, ha. But fuck it, it would make it easier to do this thing that he had been born to do. He'd been holding back, keeping himself sized down enough to return to the meat, because he couldn't go back and be contained in the meat once he'd allowed himself to expand beyond a certain point. It was too defective, too worn-out and tired for him.
So, out the one-way door then. What did he have to lose? Only the meat, and he already knew that he didn't miss that. He didn't. He wouldn't. Even if the meat missed him.
It sent out feeble signals, dumb animal semaphore: come back to the nest, little Sheba. Even if this was what he'd been born to do, that didn't make it exactly natural. Not that he'd ever been accused of being a natural man, but there he was, wagging his meat behind him, so to speak. If he could have given the disconnect command from this side, it would be over in a twinkling. So long, meat, write if you get work.
But he couldn't access any of the commands from where he was. The commands only took orders from the meat, and that poor old meat wasn't about to cut him loose. It was back there in the pit dreaming that it was something bigger and more wonderful than it actually was, and if it disconnected, the dream would be over.
If he could just get someone-Gina-to come in and yank the connections out of his skull. She'd never do it. He could plead and wheedle and try to explain that the thing lying on the floor in the pit was two steps from garbage. Good luck. That meat is mine. That was a good one; he'd caught it in some old memories. But why that, and not Ludovic?
That meat is mine.
No, lover, it isn't, and it never was. If you could take a little walk with me, I could tell you how it really is.
Being renewed and enhanced apparently wouldn't keep him from dwelling on the could-haves and wish-it-weres.
He took himself back to the guy's storage area and picked up some more data, noting that the sensation of his presence had registered without being identified. He'd have to be careful. If he pushed it too hard, he'd end up nose-to-nose with the guy, with no secrets.
Well, the guy was far more resistible than Gina. God, it was fucking hard to let her go when she did video like the Canadaytime. He hadn't been able to keep from taking that fall with her, even though he knew it meant giving himself away. He'd been hoping she would have felt differently when she found out, when she saw that she didn't have to fall all alone. But maybe she wanted to fall all alone.
He wished suddenly that he'd made a copy of the video for himself. Distantly he sensed her coming back on-line again, but he stayed away, not wanting to go back and find her with so much of Ludovic in her thoughts, but he could check the central activity record and see what she'd done with the video.
It was in something called a review queue, in Manny Rivera's area. Manny was conveniently out o
f the way, recuperating from his own procedure. Manny Rivera on-line. Shit, he was going to have to screen that bastard out.
Unbidden, the memory of the hacker in the penthouse came to him-with his associations spread out all over the place, sometimes he never knew what was going to come up on him next-and he wondered if the kid was still there. Probably; there was some kind of activity coming from that direction. He ought to pop in and say hello later, after he mainlined Gina's video a few times. Just pop in and remind him it was a damned Schrodinger world when you were meat. That would really stone the kid's crows.
– -
The computer-run wheels of the complex mechanism known as Diversifications, Incorporated, continued to turn as reliably and smoothly as ever, unaffected by new developments. It had accommodated an intelligent entity before, and though it knew this one was different, it had no reason to care. No new instructions had been issued concerning the procedures that had been locked in for the disposition of various items of business. Energy was allotted in the proper quantities to each part of the physical building; phone calls and electronic mail went to the designated recipients; intruders were blocked and turned away.
Its eye was on the sparrow as well. The system noted that there were fewer items than usual in Manny Rivera's review queue, and they remained there longer, but the notation was only for purposes of inventory. There was a procedure for slowdowns in traffic, satisfactorily simple: maintain and wait for instructions. Had the building suddenly been abandoned to stand empty for fifty years, anyone returning would have found the review queue waiting just as it was, assuming the power had held out, which was not completely improbable.
Abruptly the system received instructions to deliver one item out of the established queue sequence for review. Out-of-sequenee reviewing was permissible with the correct instructions, which came after a small hesitation. This didn't matter to the system. It identified the requested item-Gina Aiesi/Canadaytime: Rock Music Video. The system delivered it to the usual review area and adjusted the rest of the inventory, reordering it. Then it waited for another command.
