Machine dreams hold a special vertigo. Turner lay down on a virgin slab of green temperfoam in the makeshift dorm and jacked Mitchell’s dossier. It came on slow; he had time to close his eyes.
Ten seconds later, his eyes were open. He clutched the green foam and fought his nausea. Again, he closed his eyes… It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, nonlinear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative conveyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, at-tack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol system. The data had never been intended for human input.
Eyes open, he pulled the thing from his socket and held it, his palm slick with sweat. It was like waking from a night-mare. Not a screamer, where impacted fears took on simple, terrible shapes, but the sort of dream, infinitely more disturbing, where everything is perfectly and horribly normal, and where everything is utterly wrong…
The intimacy of the thing was hideous He fought down waves of raw transference, bringing all his will to bear on crushing a feeling that was akin to love, the obsessive tender-ness a watcher comes to feel for the subject of prolonged surveillance. Days or hours later, he knew, the most minute details of Mitchell’s academic record might bob to the surface of his mind, or the name of a mistress, the scent of her heavy red hair in the sunlight through -
He sat up quickly, the plastic soles of his shoes smacking the rusted deck. He still wore the parka, and the Smith & Wesson, in a side pocket, swung painfully against his hip.
It would pass. Mitchell’s psychic odor would fade, as surely as the Spanish grammar in the lexicon evaporated after each use. What he had experienced was a Maas security dossier compiled by a sentient computer, nothing more He replaced the biosoft in Conroy’s little black wallet, smoothed the Velcro seal with his thumb, and put the cord around his neck.
He became aware of the sound of waves lapping the flanks of the rig.
“Hey, boss,” someone said, from beyond the brown military blanket that screened the entrance to the dorm area, “Conroy says it’s time for you to inspect the troops, then you and him depart for other parts.” Oakey’s bearded face slid from behind the blanket “Otherwise, I wouldn’t wake you up, right?”
“I wasn’t sleeping,” Turner said, and stood, fingers reflexively kneading the skin around the implanted socket.
“Too bad,” Oakey said. “I got derms’ll put you under all the way, one hour on the button, then kick in some kind of righteous upper, get you up and on the case, no lie…”
Turner shook his head. “Take me to Conroy”
5 - The Job
MARLY CHECKED into a small hotel with green plants in heavy brass pots, the corridors tiled like worn marble chessboards. The elevator was a scrolled gilt cage with rosewood panels smelling of lemon oil and small cigars.
Her room was on the fifth floor. A single tall window overlooked the avenue, the kind of window you could actually open. When the smiling bellman had gone, she collapsed into an armchair whose plush fabric contrasted comfortably with the muted Belgian carpet. She undid the zips on her old Paris boots for the last time, kicked them off, and stared at the dozen glossy carrier bags the bellman had arranged on the bed. Tomorrow, she thought, she’d buy luggage. And a toothbrush.
“I’m in shock,” she said to the bags on the bed. “I must take care. Nothing seems real now.” She looked down and saw that her hose were both out at the toe. She shook her head. Her new purse lay on the white marble table beside the bed; it was black, cut from cowhide tanned thick and soft as Flemish butter. It had cost more than she would have owed Andrea for her share of a month’s rent, but that was also true of a single night’s stay in this hotel. The purse contained her passport and the credit chip she’d been issued in the Galerie Duperey, drawn on an account held in her name by an orbital branch of the Nederlands Algemeen Bank.
She went into the bathroom and worked the smooth brass levers of the big white tub. Hot, aerated water hissed out through a Japanese filtration device. The hotel provided packets of bath salts, tubes of creams and scented oils. She emptied a tube of oil into the filling tub and began to remove her clothes, feeling a pang of loss when she tossed the Sally Stanley behind her. Until an hour before, the year-old jacket had been her favorite garment and perhaps the single most expensive thing she’d ever owned. Now it was something for the cleaners to take away; perhaps it would find its way to one of the city’s flea markets, the sort of place where she’d hunted bargains as an art-school girl.
The mirrors misted and ran, as the room filled with scented steam, blurring the reflection of her nakedness. Was it really this easy? Had Virek’s slim gold credit chip checked her out of her misery and into this hotel, where the towels were white and thick and scratchy? She was aware of a certain spiritual vertigo, as though she trembled at the edge of some precipice. She wondered how powerful money could actually be, if one had enough of it, really enough. She supposed that only the Vireks of the world could really know, and very likely they were functionally incapable of knowing; asking Virek would be like interrogating a fish in order to learn more about water. Yes, my dear, it’s wet; yes, my child, it’s certainly warm, scented, scratchy-toweled. She stepped into the tub and lay down.
Tomorrow she would have her hair cut. In Paris.
Andrea’s phone rang sixteen times before Marly remembered the special program. It would still be in place, and this expensive little Brussels hotel would not be listed. She leaned out to replace the handset on the marble-topped table and it chimed once, softly.
“A courier has delivered a parcel, from the Galerie Duperey.”
When the bellman, a younger man this time, dark and possibly Spanish had gone, she took the package to the window and turned it over in her hands. It was wrapped in a single sheet of handmade paper, dark gray, folded and tucked in that mysterious Japanese way that required neither glue nor string, but she knew that once she’d opened it, she’d never get it folded again. The name and address of the Galerie were embossed in one corner, and her name and the name of her hotel were handwritten across the center in perfect italic script.
She unfolded the paper and found herself holding a new Braun holoprojector and a flat envelope of clear plastic. The envelope contained seven numbered tabs of holofiche. Beyond the miniature iron balcony, the sun was going down, painting the Old Town gold. She heard car horns and the cries of children. She closed the window and crossed to a writing desk. The Braun was a smooth black rectangle powered by solar cells. She checked the charge, then took the first holo-fiche from the envelope and slotted it.
The box she’d seen in Virek’s simulation of the Güell Park blossomed above the Braun, glowing with the crystal resolution of the finest museum-grade holograms. Bone and circuit-gold, dead lace, and a dull white marble rolled from clay. Marly shook her head. How could anyone have arranged these bits, this garbage, in such a way that it caught at the heart, snagged in the soul like a fishhook? But then she nodded. It could be done, she knew; it had been done many years ago by a man named Cornell, who’d also made boxes.
Then she glanced to the left, where the elegant gray paper lay on the desktop. She’d chosen this hotel at random, when she’d grown tired of shopping. She’d told no one she was here, and certainly no one from the Galerie Duperey.
6 - Barrytown
HE STAYED OUT FOR something like eight hours, by the clock on his mother’s Hitachi. Came to staring at Its dusty face, some hard thing wedged under his thigh. The Ono-Sendai. He rolled over. Stale puke smell.
Then he was in the shower, not sure quite how he’d gotten there, spinning the taps with his clothes still on. He clawed and dug and pulled at his face. It felt like a rubber mask.
“Something happened.” Something bad, big, he wasn’t sure what.
His wet clothes gradually mounded up on the tile floor of the shower. Finally he stepped out, went to the sink and flicked wet hair back from his eyes, peered at the face in the mirror. Bobby Newmark, no problem.
“No, Bobby, problem. Gotta problem…
Towel around his shoulders, dripping water, he followed the narrow hallway to his bedroom, a tiny, wedge-shaped space at the very back of the condo. His holoporn unit lit as he stepped in, half a dozen girls grinning, eyeing him with evident delight. They seemed to be standing beyond the walls of the room, in hazy vistas of powder-blue space, their white smiles and taut young bodies bright as neon. Two of them edged forward and began to touch themselves.
“Stop it,” he said.
The projection unit shut itself down at his command; the dreamgirls vanished. The thing had originally belonged to Ling Warren’s older brother; the girls’ hair and clothes were dated and vaguely ridiculous. You could talk with them and get them to do things with themselves and each other. Bobby remembered being thirteen and in love with Brandi, the one with the blue rubber pants. Now he valued the projections mainly for the illusion of space they could provide in the makeshift bedroom.
“Something fucking happened,” he said, pulling on black jeans and an almost-clean shirt. He shook his head. “What? Fucking what?” Some kind of power surge on the line? Some flukey action down at the Fission Authority? Maybe the base he’d tried to invade had suffered some strange breakdown, or been attacked from another quarter… But he was left with the sense of having met someone, someone who… He’d unconsciously extended his right hand, fingers spread, beseechingly. “Fuck,” he said. The fingers balled into a fist. Then it came back: first, the sense of the big thing, the really big thing, reaching for him across cyberspace, and then the girl-impression. Someone brown, slender, crouching somewhere in a strange bright dark full of stars and wind. But it slid away as his mind went for it.
Hungry, he got into sandals and headed back toward the kitchen, rubbing at his hair with a damp towel. On his way through the living room, he noticed the ON telltale of the Ono-Sendai glaring at him from the carpet. “0 shit.” He stood there and sucked at his teeth. It was still jacked in. Was it possible that it was still linked with the base he’d tried to run? Could they tell he wasn’t dead? He had no idea. One thing he did know, though, was that they’d have his number and good. He hadn’t bothered with the cutouts and frills that would’ve kept them from running a backtrack.
They had his address.
Hunger forgotten, he spun into the bathroom and rooted through the soggy clothing until he found his credit chip.
He had two hundred and ten New Yen stashed in the hollow plastic handle of a multibit screwdriver. Screwdriver and credit chip secure in his jeans, he pulled on his oldest, heaviest pair of boots, then clawed unwashed clothing from beneath the bed. He came up with a black canvas jacket with at least a dozen pockets, one of them a single huge pouch across the small of the back, a kind of integral rucksack. There was a Japanese gravity knife with orange handles beneath his pillow; that went into a narrow pocket on the jacket’s left sleeve, near the cuff.
The dreamgirls clicked in as he was leaving: “Bobby, Bobb-y, come back and play…”
In his living room, he yanked the Ono-Sendai’s jack from the face of the Hitachi, coiling the fiber optic lead and tucking it into a pocket. He did the same with the trode set, then slid the Ono-Sendai into the jacket’s pack-pocket.
The curtains were still drawn. He felt a surge of some new exhilaration. He was leaving. He had to leave. Already he’d forgotten the pathetic fondness that his brush with death had generated. He parted the curtains carefully, a thumb-wide gap, and peered out.
It was late afternoon. In a few hours, the first lights would start blinking on in the dark bulks of the Projects. Big Playground swept away like a concrete sea; the Projects rose beyond the opposite shore, vast rectilinear structures softened by a random overlay of retrofitted greenhouse balconies, catfish tanks, solar heating systems, and the ubiquitous chickenwire dishes.
Two-a-Day would be up there now, sleeping, in a world Bobby had never seen, the world of a mincome arcology. Two-a-Day came down to do business, mostly with the hotdoggers in Barrytown, and then he climbed back up. It had always looked good to Bobby, up there, so much happening on the balconies at night, amid red smudges of charcoal, little kids in their underwear swarming like monkeys, so small you could barely see them. Sometimes the wind would shift, and the smell of cooking would settle over Big Playground, and sometimes you’d see an ultralight glide out from some secret country of rooftop so high up there. And always the mingled beat from a million speakers, waves of music that pulsed and faded in and out of the wind.
Two-a-Day never talked about his life, where he lived. Two-a-Day talked biz, or, to be more social, women. What Two-a-Day said about women made Bobby want to get out of Barrytown worse than ever, and Bobby knew that biz would be his only ticket out. But now he needed the dealer in a different way, because now he was entirely out of his depth.
Maybe Two-a-Day could tell him what was happening. There wasn’t supposed to be any lethal stuff around that base Two-a-Day had picked it out for him, then rented him the software he’d need to get in. And Two-a-Day was ready to fence anything he could’ve gotten out with. So Two-a-Day had to know. Know something, anyway.
“I don’t even have your number, man,” he said to the Projects, letting the curtains fall shut. Should he leave some-thing for his mother? A note? “My ass,” he said to the room behind him, “out of here,” and then he was out the door and down the hall, headed for the stairs. “Forever,” he added, kicking open an exit door.
Big Playground looked safe enough, except for a lone shirtless duster deep in some furious conversation with God. Bobby cut the duster a wide circle; he was shouting and jumping and karate-chopping the air. The duster had dried blood on his bare feet and the remnants of what had probably been a Lobe haircut.
Big Playground was neutral territory, at least in theory, and the Lobes were loosely confederated with the Gothicks; Bobby had fairly solid affiliations with the Gothicks, but retained his indie status. Barrytown was a dicey place to be an indie. At least, he thought, as the duster’s angry gibberish faded behind him, the gangs gave you some structure. If you were Gothick and the Kasuals chopped you out, it made sense. Maybe the ultimate reasons behind it were crazy, but there were rules But indies got chopped out by dusters running on brainstem, by roaming predatory loonies from as far away as New York like that Penis Collector character last summer, kept the goods in his pocket in a plastic bag…
