I shook my head sadly. “Strike three, Giz. Look, you’re here now. You’ve made the effort. You might as well tell me what you came to tell me because we’re both so busy it could be weeks before there’s another window of opportunity.” I felt like a detective inspector pushing for a confession. I hoped it wasn’t going to be another murder.
Gizmo ran a finger up and down the side of the beer bottle, his eyes following its movement. “There’s this …” He stopped. He looked up at me like dogs do when they’re trying to tell you where it hurts. “I’ve met … well, not actually met …”
Light dawned. “The flowers,” I said.
The blush climbed from the polo neck of his black sweater, rising unevenly like the level of poured champagne in a glass. He nodded.
“‘www gets real.’ The cyberbabe,” I said, trying to sound sensitive and supportive. The effort nearly killed me.
“Don’t call her that,” Gizmo said, a plea on his face. “She’s not some bimbo. And she’s not a saddo Nethead who hasn’t got a life. She’s really interesting. I’ve never met a woman who can talk about computer code, politics, sociology, music, all of those things.”
All of those things I never knew Gizmo knew anything about. Except computer code, of course. “You’ve never met this one,” I said drily.
“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“A meeting? Getting together for real?” I checked my voice for skepticism and thought I’d probably got away with it.
“What do you think?”
What did I think? What I really thought was that Gizmo was probably typical of the people who spent their nights chattering to strangers in Siberia and São Paolo and Salinas, weird computer geeks telling lies about themselves in a pathetic attempt to appear interesting. A blind date with Gizmo would probably have turned me celibate at sixteen. On the other hand, if I’d been a geek too — and there were one or two female nerds out there, most of them inevitably working for Microsoft — I might have been charmed, especially since my efforts at grooming had rendered Gizmo almost indistinguishable from the human species. “Does she work for Microsoft?” I asked.
He gave me a very peculiar look. “That’s sick. That’s like asking a member of CND if he fancies someone who works for MOD procurement.”
“Has she got a name?”
His smile was curiously tender. “Jan,” he said. “She has her own consultancy business. She does training packages for the computer industry.”
“So how did you … meet?”
“Remember when Gianni Versace got shot? Well, there was a lot of discussion on the Net about it, how the FBI were using the on-line community to warn people about the suspect, and how far the federal agencies should go in trying to exploit the Net to catch criminals. I was checking out one of the newsgroups and I saw Jan had said some interesting things, and we started exchanging private mail.” Oh great, I thought. A mutual interest in serial killers.
“And?”
“And we really hit it off. Loads of stuff in common. Lately, it’s been getting more and more intense between us. I…I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this before,” he mumbled.
“And now you want to do a reality check by getting together in the flesh?”
He nodded. “Why not? Pen friends have been doing it for years.”
This wasn’t the time to remind him that pen friends had one or two little safeguards like knowing where each other lived. It also wasn’t the time to remind him that it was somehow easier to lie in cyberspace than in meatspace, since right from the beginning the hackers and computer freaks who had hung out on the very first bulletin boards had always hidden behind nicknames. The first time I’d been confronted with Gizmo’s real name was years into our acquaintance, when he’d signed his initial consultancy contract with Brannigan & Co. I sipped my drink and raised my eyebrows. “And sometimes it’s a big disappointment. Why is it so important that you meet? If things are so excellent between you, maybe it’s better to keep it cyber.”
He squirmed in his seat. “Sometimes it’s too slow, the Net. Even in a private conference room in a newsgroup, you can still only communicate as fast as you can type, so it’s never as spontaneous as conversation.”
“I thought that was the charm.”
“It is, to an extent. You can structure your dialogue much more than you can in a meatspace conversation where you tend to go off at tangents. But we’ve been doing this for a while now. We need to move on to the next stage, and that’s got to be a face-to-face. Hasn’t it?”
I wasn’t cut out for this. If I’d been an agony aunt, my column would have invariably read, “For God’s sake, get a grip.” But Gizmo was more than just another contractor. Less than a friend,
“London. But she comes up to Manchester every two or three weeks on business. I was thinking about suggesting we got together for a beer next time she’s up.”
It would be a beer, too. Somehow I didn’t have this woman pegged as a white-wine-spritzer drinker. “You don’t think it might destroy what you’ve already built up?”
He shrugged, a difficult feat given that he was impersonating a human pretzel. “Better we find that out now, don’t you think?”
“I honestly don’t know. Maybe the cyber relationship is the shape of things to come. Communication with strangers, all of us hiding behind a façade, having virtual sex in front of our terminals. Not as replacement for face-to-face stuff, but as another dimension. Adultery without the guilt, maybe?” I hazarded.
“No,” Gizmo said, unravelling his limbs and straightening up. “I think it’s just another kind of courtship. If you don’t take it out of virtuality into reality, it’s ultimately sterile because you’ve no objective standards to measure it against.”
Profound stuff from a man I’d never suspected of being capable of love for a sentient being without microchips. “Sounds to me like you’ve already made your decision,” I said gently.
He took a deep breath. His shoulders dropped from round his ears. “I suppose I have.”
“So go with your instincts.”
I’d said what he wanted to hear. The relief flowed off him like radiation. “Thanks for listening, Kate. I really appreciate it.”
“So show me how much, and dig me some dirt on Harry Thompson and the mystery baby.”
Chapter 14
JUPITER TRINE SATURN
Cheerful Jupiter tempers the stern, hard-working nature of Saturn. She is a visionary, but one firmly rooted in the practicalities. She is a good organizer and seldom feels overwhelmed by her responsibilities. She is good at coordinating people to collaborate with her. She has the self-discipline to achieve her goals without getting wound up about it.
From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson
I’d set off early enough to follow the snowplow down the main road from Oldham through Greenfield. Getting down Gloria’s alley was out of the question, but the hacks had moved on to the next big thing, so the only threat to Gloria’s wellbeing was the possibility of wet feet. I should have known better.
She emerged in knee-high snow boots and a scarlet ski suit with royal-blue chevrons and matching earmuffs. “Hiya, chuck,” she greeted me. “I’ve never been skiing in my life, but they do great gear, don’t they?” she enthused. As usual, I felt underdressed. Wellies over jeans topped with my favorite leather jacket had seemed fine in Ardwick, but somehow they just didn’t cut it in the country.