To have come so far only to find him so changed. It was almost more than I could stand. A tear slipped down my cheek, and I touched his back lovingly. I could feel his shoulder blades tremble beneath my fingers. He looked up at me, finally, his eyes so full of pain that I pulled away.
He looked up at me, his face puzzled, lost. "I thought you would understand."
"I'm sorry."
"I know I fucked up your life," Daniel said. "Believe me, where I've been I've had just as much time to think about it as you have – maybe more. But, I'm trying to talk about what really happened that night."
Daniel's eyes danced with that same excitement he used to have when we cracked cases together. His mood was infectious. He shifted his body to address me directly. I found myself mirroring his posture. "It was tech-telepathy, Dee," he said. "Don't you see? It was me doing all that stuff, but it was Them pulling the strings. I was a puppet."
"Except there's one big hitch," I said, articulating my biggest stumbling block to completely believing that the LINK-angels were man-made. "Tech-telepathy is fool's gold, Danny, and you know it. And what you're talking about is not just mind-to-mind communication– – it's much bigger. Even if it were possible to send a mental image through the LINK, there's no way anyone could control your actions – make sure you do it."
"True. Okay, let's back up a second," Daniel said, waving his hand. "Maybe I used the wrong word. What I'm talking about isn't exactly tech-telepathy. It's more like sending an emotional command over the LINK. Hate ... Rage ..." – He dropped his eyes – "Lust ... blinding emotions. As if someone could electronically transmit that very moment you 'see red' and lose all rational thought."
"Like the Jordan Institute's tech," I agreed, suddenly excited. "I've been thinking about all this. I thought, maybe ... well, until recently, I never really connected it with what happened to you. Do you remember what we were working on, the tech-theft from the mental health biotech people?"
He blushed. "Not well. When they pulled the strings on the LINK I lost a lot of my memory files. I guess my brain wasn't used to storing things the old-fashioned way anymore."
I nodded. It was true for me as well. "Well, I've been piecing it back together. Jordan Institute was developing emotion-manipulating software – it was supposed to help people with chronic pain, or other emotional problems. Something that could touch those parts of the brain – pain, pleasure – who knows what else. But, I don't know, Danny." I shook my head. "It's a big leap from masking the pain centers to killing the Pope."
"Have you ever had an out-of-body experience, Dee?" Daniel said suddenly.
I gaped at him.
"Neither have I," he said to my stunned silence. "And, that's what makes me so certain that I was possessed by something."
My mouth still hung open, but now for a different reason: it made a kind of twisted sense.
"Okay," I said hesitantly. "Go on."
Danny's eyes watched mine intently. "Both times that it happened, there was a brief moment, before the emotion overwhelmed me, when I felt separated, floating."
"Separated from what? From yourself?"
Daniel nodded, then frowned in disgust. "Of course, the doctor at the psych ward told me that was just me disassociating from the horror of the event, but, Dee, it wasn't that."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Just before I ..." He fumbled for the right word, then settled on, "... attacked you, and just before I shot the Pope, I was LINKed."
"LINKed where?"
"Nowhere in particular, I think I was just taking a call."
"From whom?"
Daniel shook his head. "I don't remember."
"You said hello to the 'big guy,' that night we were together."
"Did I?" He looked genuinely puzzled. "Who the hell would that be?"
Considering Daniel's earlier assertion of being chosen, I feared suggesting what I suspected: that the big guy was either God or Satan. Instead, I said, "Probably whoever stole the tech from Jordan Institute. Letourneau? Mouse?"
"You and Mouse are the ones in phone contact, not me. And I think I'd remember a call from the presidential candidate."
"True." I rubbed the back of my neck and took a deep breath. "So, what happened after the phone call? You said you thought you were LINKed during the entire time?"
"It was the strangest thing, Dee. I could see everything I did. Hurting you ... shooting the Pope, but it felt like my consciousness was projected somewhere else. Somewhere surreal. I have the vaguest memories of it – a blank space, wide and open like the prairie, yet confined. I was certain I was on the LINK ... but not ... I exactly."
"Mouse.nest," I whispered.
"Sorry?" Daniel looked expectantly. "What did you say?"
Glancing into his green eyes, I decided to trust him. I took a deep breath. "What you're describing sounds like Mouse's hub."
"You've been there?"
I nodded.
He laughed out loud and clapped me on the back. "Ah, Dee. Good thing I'm crazy, because otherwise I'd suspect it's you who's gone off the deep end. I thought Mouse's hub was pure fiction."
"It's not. And, he's got angels there."
"LINK-angels?" He asked, and when I nodded, he said. "So, aren't the LINK-angels everywhere on the web?"
"That's just it," I explained. "Mouse.nest isn't on the net, it's under it."
"Now you do sound crazy," Daniel said with a smile.
"Yeah, it's amazing, kind of far-out, but Mouse's house exists inside the old hardware that's supporting the LINK. Seems Mouse built himself a cozy little nest inside the nodes, the hardware, deep in the walls of the LINK – just like a real mouse would."
Daniel's face grew serious. "No shit?"
"I always wondered how mouse.net got its power," I said, "He really is just a parallel operation."
"Cool." Danny nodded. "But what does this have to do with the LINK-angels?"
"I don't know yet, not one hundred percent, anyway. All I know is that I ran into Phanuel inside Mouse's house," I said.
"My God," Daniel whispered. "Do you think he's the one ..."
I shook my head. "I don't know. Mouse isn't really big enough for this; he doesn't have the tech. Not even all the nodes on the LINK are big enough to hold the code it would take to do all that. I mean, what you're suggesting is that someone took over your body, moving your consciousness out of it. No one knows how to separate the mind from the body ... or even if such a thing is possible."
Daniel shrugged. "What if what I felt was pure unadulterated emotion, something so strong it blotted out everything else and gave the impression of pushing me out?"
"I suppose if Jordan Institute had found the pain centers, maybe our emotions are constructed the same way ... or whoever stole the tech figured out some way to augment it. Still, it would take a lot of power."
"But the LINK-angels do exist. They can manipulate emotion. It's clearly possible, don't you think?" The way Daniel asked, it sounded more like a statement than a question. Inwardly, I smiled, his old cop-talk was coming back to him.
I shook my head. "Everyone says the LINK-angels are a miracle."
"You don't really believe that."
I swallowed a laugh. I didn't, but I still couldn't reconcile what I knew about tech with what the LINK-angels had done. Plus, I felt the need to play devil's advocate; I was enjoying the sense of our interplay too much.
"Let's say for the sake of argument they were miracles? You're the one who's born-again. Are you telling me you don't believe in the LINK-angels?"