He looked at the stone in his hand and let it go. That was the bad news about the sympathetic vibration program. There was a sympathetic vibration in all of them, something that rang a response in him one way or another, but no way to tell which was the right one.
Who says it has to be the right one? Will you just look over here?
The name of the law… He searched, grabbing as many stones as he could, but the name wasn't in any of them. There might as well have been nothing at all. He felt like a fool.
Fool.
Fooler loop.
He raised his head to the grey sky and laughed aloud.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up.
U B the Ass to Risk.
Yah, we're already clear on that, thank you one fuck of a lot.
Who you wannabee?
Gina laughed. Have you got the wrong number, fucker.
Really, Gina? Really? A very old room; surprising, this close to the center, but nothing should have surprised her anymore.
… because the larger pattern is contained in the smaller … She brushed the thought away, not even wondering who it belonged to.
Dylan's nasal, tuneful whine. I want you.
Who you wannabee?
But she had her own music with her, her own sound and her own vision. Nasty bridge, hammering all the way, the growl of her own need. Colors pouring down the bowl of the sky.
U B the Ass to Risk.
Lover, I always was. I'm lucky I can dance. Can you top this?
It was the real head of the food-fuck-dance-and-be chain, and it was going to try. She didn't run from it. I hit him, but what can he do for me?
– -
"I can find you," Gabe said.
– and the other ten percent is being there on time. It was time then, and it's time now.
"Bravo, hotwire," they all said. "All right, this won't hurt a bit. -Well, not much," Caritha's voice added.
It was like being tumbled in an enormous barrel rolling along a bumpy road, but somehow it wasn't unpleasant.
Got all the associations now, Gabe. One voice.
Was that what this was all about-associations? Just to find her? he asked.
Only in part. You were the fooler loop, she's the mirror. There she is. Better help her. She's strong enough to let you do that now.
There was a sensation of being shoved through some kind of thin but tough barrier, like a sheet of plastic. He landed on two feet in the pit. Gina was already straddling Mark with her hands on the connections.
The common eye-shaped area that was their life.
"But what do you think will happen?" asked the Mark-thing under her. "What do you think this is?"
A hard wave of dizziness hit her between the eyes, and she was staring up at herself holding the wires, ready to jerk them out.
Should've known it wouldn't be so fucking simple. U B the ass to risk, that's me. What did I wannabee, yah, how can you wannabee something and not know?
"There was a little bit of him left, then, do you remember? He opened his eyes and begged you to do it. Because the little of him that stayed with the body then, that was from the last time, in Mexico. Do you remember?"
The surprise of her own urgency, and his, and the overwhelming familiarity, as if they'd never had any secrets from each other. Because he'd already taken her there, to the lake with the stony shore. The doctors had fed the image into her brain to find out if she could see it as he'd meant it, but what he'd meant was not what they'd thought. He'd taken her there, and she'd been there for him.
"If you do it now, that goes, too.
"Can you do that, really? Can you end it, not just him but that bit of yourself he kept with the part that stayed with the body, that is here now? Can you die a little and live through it?"
She tried to force her pov back home, but it was jammed there, gazing up at her own face. Who had been there, looking out of his eyes and begging her to yank the wires? Mark? Or herself?
"If you don't believe you can be in two places at once, you've forgotten everything you've learned. You, Ludovic, his simulated playmates, Mark-me. Do it, and everyone dies a little, and can you do that, really?"
She could see herself waver at whatever she was seeing in those eyes, her/Mark's eyes; the surge of brute hope she felt from the thing at the sight was not as far removed from herself as she would have wished.
That'll teach you to glory in your separateness, your precious aloneness.
Ludovic reached around from behind and put his hands over hers on the wires.
"Oh, it'll be even harder for you, Mr. Noble Gesture. Do it, and you'll kill your taste for it, and you'll kill your last link to them, your simulated playmates, and that's something you might not be able to get back, ever. Can you do that, really?"
Ludovic's expression changed, and she knew that he was seeing them.
"You gave up what you had of them, but see, here is what I took from the volatile memory of your system when I ran through, and it's every bit of them. Can you end it for them? Wouldn't you rather do just about anything else but lose them again, wouldn't you rather come and live with them and go back to the way it was, not having to do anything, least of all make Noble Gestures?"
"Last thing they'd expect, hotwire."
It should have been easy, but the desire for them was still there. The desire for them and the way things had been, for no good reason, just because-
"Because you can," Gina said. "But it's not the only thing you can do."
But it's different when you think you have no choice, and then suddenly you do after all.
"I simply do not fucking believe we have to do this again," Gina said, and her fist was coming at him. "There ain't nothing to them you didn't have in the first place, hotwire. And you know what you got."
"But how do you know whatever's right?" he asked, confused.
"You don't," she said. Realization came simultaneously with the words. "It's a damned Schrodinger world." The name of the law.
On the stony shore he turned not because it was pulling at him but all on his own power. And she was there, just having turned around herself to look at him.
Her fist pushed through the air. This time he ducked, and it sailed past him to strike Mark.
Their hands came up together, and the wires pulled free.
The chain reaction went at the speed of light, unfeeling and unstoppable. It unraveled the pit around them, moved on to the lake with the stony shore, the common room, Mexico, Manny's office, Hollywood Boulevard, everything dissolving, running to nothing, and they were pulled along with it.
"I didn't even know for sure sometimes you were there," Gina told him.
"Likewise," Gabe said, feeling tired and exhilarated all at once. "You never know until you turn and look."
Abruptly he found himself back in the strange half room. Right; no need to go any further with it now, it was all happening by itself. He could sense it retracing every step the Big One had taken, undoing itself as it spread out in every direction, a starburst whose points touched Phoenix, Sacramento, Seattle, Japan, Mexico, London, Bangkok-