What's wrong with this picture?
Echoes of phantom sounds bounced oft the low clouds above the stony shore. Gabe stared up at the sky, wincing at the feel of the stones pressing into his back. In a moment the shadowed areas of the clouds would begin to shift and throb, and he didn't want to see that. Stones scraped the back of his head as he turned to look across the water.
The surface of the lake rippled as something began to fade in on the part of the shore directly in his line of sight. He could feel the pressure of its gathering, an unpleasant tightening sensation behind his eyes. With an effort he rolled over and sat up, keeping his back to the lake. The stones dug into him harder. When your whole body was a hotsuit, he thought, there were definite disadvantages. He pushed himself to his feet.
Something pulled at him from behind, trying to make him turn around. Caught off balance, he did a little staggering dance on the stones and managed to stay upright and still keep his back to the lake. "Gina?" he asked.
Her absence was a hole in the air.
The patterns on the cape weren't just unusual, Sam thought, watching them. There was something different about them. Sometimes she thought she could almost see pictures in them, not just shadowy shapes but real pictures, as if her mind were being teased into projecting images, or filling in color and detail. The longer she watched, the more tangible the pull on her mind felt, as if the patterns were somehow touching her in a very personal way. She wasn't sure that she liked it, but she wasn't prepared to say that she didn't like it, either. She wasn't prepared to say anything at all or, for that matter, listen to anyone else say anything, either. Good thing it had grown so quiet in the big room; no distractions. She could continue to meditate on the patterns shifting and reforming on the material.
But, God, she had to concentrate so hard. It was worse than when she'd been doping out the sympathetic vibration technique. Her thoughts kept nipping away, slipping out from under her almost before she could even make sense of them. It was like trying to catch sight of a number of very quick and elusive creatures that would dive into hiding places the moment she turned to them, so that all she ever saw was the very tail-end bits of them as they vanished. And that was the part she wasn't sure she liked at all, because it was like her mind was being emptied out, cleaned, sterilized in preparation for something else to come fill it up.
Something stirred on the fringes of her outer vision, disturbing her meditative state. She felt a surge of wordless, reflexive irritation that quickened to a flash/roar of blind rage.
Then she was blinking her watering eyes at the sight of Adrian standing in front of the cape, hands on his hips, looking bewildered.
"Are you all completely fucked?" he said.
"Not anymore," Keely said wearily. Wiping her eyes, Sam turned to look at him. He was rubbing his face with both hands as if he'd just woken up from a long, deep sleep. Which wasn't too far from the way she felt at the moment. "Thanks, Adrian. How'd you do it?"
"How'd I do what?" Adrian took a step forward.
"No, don't!" Keely said. "First, find some way to cover that goddamn thing up, or turn it inside out, or something."
Obediently Adrian turned the cape so that the plain, unpatterning side faced out and then rejoined the group. "That's the weirdest thing I ever saw," he said conversationally. "I kept trying to talk to you all, and you all just kept staring at those patterns-" He shrugged.
"I know," Keely said, watching the screen again. "Something similar happened to me the first time I saw it, but I pulled out of it on my own. It must be a lot stronger now. What makes you immune, I wonder?"
"He can't read," Sam said slowly. "Brain lesion in the visual center." Amazed, she looked at Adrian, who shrugged again.
"Then maybe he ought to be in there instead of Gabe and Gina," Keely said grimly. "A whole lot's happened since we all went under for a while, and none of it's good."
"What is it?" Sam said, craning to look at the screen. The figures on it still told her little.
Keely shook his head. "We're gonna lose them."
"All of them?" Fez said. He sounded as dazed as he looked.
"Oh, no. Just Gabe and Gina," Keely told him sourly. "Markt's just fine. At worst he'll stand the thing off, but it looks like he'll end up neutralizing the thing. But not before he sacrifices Gabe and Gina to it. Shit."
"I should have known," Fez said bleakly. "Art's always been viral at heart. Make that core. He's never had a heart."
"But Mark's part of him now," Sam said. "He wouldn't do that. Would he?" Her gaze fell on the Beater, standing silently on Keely's other side.
The Beater's face was expressionless. "I don't know anymore. 'Talent drives out sense.' Gina always said that about him. He's pure information, now. What does that drive out?"
"We've got to help them," Sam said, grabbing Keely's arm. "We've got to reach them."
"Sure," Keely said. "We might even be able to do it, we've got another person here with sockets. But we're fresh out of connections, and if we try to pull any from either Gina or Gabe, we'll finish them off. Sending in another fooler loop isn't going to do it, we need something conscious. A human. Any ideas?"
Sam was staring past him, at the pile of hardware he'd brought from Diversifications. "Yah," she said. "What kind of power do we have left, and how long will it last?"
Keely followed her gaze and then looked back at her with astonishment. "Sam, you am a genius."
"Yah, but will it work?" she said.
" 'Will it work,' the genius wants to know." He beckoned to Adrian. "C'mere, kid-"
"No." Sam stood up, holding the pump unit.
"But he's the only one who's immune-"
"They don't know him." She looked around. "Could someone else be a potato for a while?"
34
"Gina?" Gabe turned under the grey sky. "Marly? Caritha? Markt? Anybody?" Echoes of his voice danced all over, counterpointing each other. He took a few stumbling steps, fighting to keep his footing.
Why don't you look over here.
It was less a voice than a strong articulated urge. He refused to give in to it. "Somebody answer!"
Over here. Look over here.
At his feet the stones stretched away in a long, wide curve of shore, millions, billions, an infinity of stones, too many, and they were in there somewhere, he just had to find the right one. Except he wasn't going to live long enough to search them all, not even a fraction of them.
… died not of starvation but of old age looking for a way out… So why don't you just just look over here?
His pov began to move toward the source of the compulsion. He could feel it quite clearly, pulling at him. Not Gina's pull. With an effort he jerked his pov back to the stones as he stumbled along, but it slid away again, down to the water line, to the lake and the dark trees on the other side, past the trees to the stranger waiting on the other part of the stony shore.
"Gina?" he said without much hope as he turned all the way around.
There was a sudden bright light, and he was suddenly facing in a different direction entirely. "Guess again, Dad."
He could have believed it was another of Mark's apparitions (another of those visual marks, his mind whispered) except she was so obviously patched in, like a rough cut from the old days of hotsuits and head-mounted monitors. Old days… as if it had really been so very long ago.