Sam bent to look. "It sure as hell does. It tells you whose brain this is. Which makes this a medical record. Shit, no wonder Keely jumped. They fucking clobber you for busting meds." She straightened up and turned to Fez again. "You don't follow any rock video, do you?"
"Not if I can possibly help it."
"Visual Mark is a guy who works-worked-for EyeTraxx. I guess he's at the Dive now. And either he's got implants, or they're going to give him implants."
"So what?" said Rosa from the couch. "Half the world's got implants. Maybe he's some kind of addict, maybe he's burning Out. Wouldn't surprise me."
"But what about my neuron?" Sam moved to the other screen again. "Where does that fit in with this? And where's Keely? Did he get away, or did they can him?"
"All good questions," Fez said. "We can do a docket search for Keely, and I'll make some copies of this and turn the doctor loose on them."
Sam stared at him. "You're gonna infect Keely's zap with a Virus?"
"Not exactly. Let's take a break. You didn't eat your soup." He herded her away from the desk so that she had her back to both screens when the images vanished.
6
Big mistake, Manny thought, putting a few hours sleep between night court and Mexico. He'd boarded the jumper groggy and out of sorts, no better than if he'd decided to tough it out on stimulants, hit Mexico in the middle of the afternoon still groggy, and had to gobble more stimulants anyway.
The stupidities were piling up: the hacker managing to download before the trace-and-freeze kicked in, the goddamn feel-good mill, of all places, and then that obstreperous judge. Then coming face-to-face with the EyeTraxx bitch who'd been dodging him. Four-five visits to the EyeTraxx building, and he'd never seen her in person; one lousy trip into night court, and there she was.
At first he'd thought she might have been in it somehow with the hacker. The whole thing could have blown up then, but her appearance at the courthouse had just been a stupid coincidence. He wasn't completely convinced that she'd been too toxed to recognize him, but he was sure she didn't know anything. And now the hacker was taken care of, and the clinic gang was buried so deep in custody and procedures that by the time they saw daylight again, it wouldn't make any difference.
Sitting in the front passenger seat of the land-cruiser with his eyes half-closed, he managed perfect, if temporary, isolation in which to collect himself. The only time he'd had to move was to shut off the radio when the driver had turned on some gaudy mariachi music. The driver was a blond, pimply-faced kid who had done too much Guadalajara Pink in his short life. He was definitely detoxed today; Manny had done the drug test himself.
Even so, by the time Manny was boarding the jumper back to L.A., the kid would barely remember the drive, or him, or anything else. Pink messed up the transfer from short-term to long-term memory permanently, which was why Manny had okayed him. Fortunately, he'd learned to drive before he'd learned the joy of forgetting.
Manny wouldn't have minded forgetting the previous few hours, or the prize pair sitting in the backseat. Galen and Joslin made a good argument for Pink. Galen was one of those pampered rich boys who liked to play at seeing what his money could do. Joslin was a bonafide twitch-case, thin as a promise, with the hint of a mentality Manny had always associated with the torture of small animals for amusement.
They were probably holding hands back there. They did a lot of that, hand-holding, and whispering and giggling. Reports on their previous stay in Mexico during the installation setup had said they'd spent their downtime holed up in their hotel room, watching videos, chowing down on polyester, and engaging in what they thought of as sex, a routine that never varied.
Picturing that was an exercise in comic thinking. Galen was small, almost boy-sized, flabby without being fat, with a head like a block and an always-grinning face. Joslin was downright spooky looking, pale in a way that suggested she'd never been exposed to natural light. Her hair was the yellow of something gone sour, and her enormous eyes always seemed on the verge of popping out of her head, as if she were perpetually startled. Or revolted. Her thinness implied she found vomiting erotic.
How in God's name could two such people find each other attractive? Manny filed that one under minor mysteries no one really wanted to solve. The EyeTraxx buy-out and subsequent developments would keep them in all the videos and edible polyester they wanted, and out of his sight. Considering their known behavior, they might never come up for air. Hell, when it came time to tell them they were shut out, they might barely notice.
"Here," the driver said abruptly.
Manny roused himself and sat up straight. The low white prefab had appeared on the scrubby landscape like trick holography. With the hurricane fence around it, the place looked more like a warehouse than a hospital.
"After you take us through the gate," Manny said to the driver, "you wait in front till we come out. I'll have a little refreshment brought to you."
The kid giggled.
"Some apple juice," Manny went on, "unless you would prefer milk. Any other refreshment will be handed over back at the hotel."
The kid giggled again and downshifted, working the floor stick with an expertise that belied his mental condition. Manny resisted the urge to shake his head. Implants could have alleviated the kid's condition, at least to a certain extent. Oh, the kid was almost certainly uninsured, which would make his getting help tremendously difficult, but not impossible. As a hardship case, he could have had hot-and-cold-running social workers filing petitions, begging grants, digging up sponsors. But he chose to stay the way he was, illustrating what Manny thought of as General World Rule Number One: some people liked the squirrel cage. Which reminded him-
He twisted around in his seat. Galen and Joslin were fast asleep, his head on her shoulder. Manny reached over and gave each of them a rough shake. "We're here."
Joslin came to with a jump, her big pop-eyes blinking in alarm while Galen floundered clumsily, grabbing at her shirt and inadvertently exposing more of her skin than Manny had ever wanted to see. He had a glimpse of a lattice pattern of thin scars across her chest.
"You are prepared to show me the start-up, aren't you?" he said, staring hard at Galen.
"Right, right. Of course." Blinking, he elbowed his twitch and motioned for her to cover herself up. She did so, staring at him as if she didn't know who he was or how she had come to be sitting next to him.
"You told me everything was ready," Manny said.
Joslin turned her head slowly from Galen to look at him. "Everything's ready," she said in her high-pitched monotone. "We've got everything except the heads."
"You'll be getting those soon." Manny turned away from her as they approached the gate. The heads, he thought. Jesus wept.
"We've got everything except the heads," she said again.
"Manny says we'll be getting those soon," Galen told her soothingly.
"Well, I know," she snapped. "I heard him."
Manny took a long breath and let it out slowly. The doctors Diversifications had recruited were all experienced in implantation. The assistant chief of surgery, Travis, had assured him there would be no problem learning the technique Joslin had developed; a socket wasn't really so different from the more usual kind of therapeutic implant. Which meant it would be easy for Travis to take over after they squeezed Joslin out, possibly with the help of her own procedure. He would have to ask Travis how it could be engineered.