Fez seemed to be making better progress with Adrian's Mandarin translation program. Privately she felt much the same as Rosa did: Spoken Text wasn't so bad. She'd been known to use it herself when she wanted the illusion of Company. But Fez was adamant that the boy should be able to read, and the kid wasn't averse to the idea. What the hell; it wasn't her worry. Not that she knew of, anyway.
But then, up until she'd come back from the Ozarks, she wouldn't have thought Jones would have been her worry.
"How can he go on like that?" she said. "How can his system lake it? He should be in massive failure of everything."
"Fuck if I know," Rosa said grimly. She gripped the wheel of the cramped rental hard with both hands, glancing at the nav-unit screen bolted into the dash, and made a sudden hard right turn. "He's not continually comatose, just sleeping a lot. Regular sleep, I mean. Depressed people do that, sleep like it's gonna be outlawed. But he was up last night for a while."
"He was? I must have been dead myself."
Rosa made a left that threw her against the door. "Sorry. GridLid says bad clog, we'll have to go around it." She nipped around a bullet-shaped tour bus that was obviously lost and slipped into the gap just ahead of it, almost kissing the bumper of the old-style stretch limo in front of them. "Conspicuous consuming pigs," she said. "Who do they think they're impressing?-Yah, he got up, drank all the milk, checked the dataline for mail, futzed around, and then went back to his lying-in spot. I'd've gotten up except I was more asleep than awake myself. I don't think he's actually been dead for quite a while."
"He looks stone-home dead to me all the time now," Sam said. "He looks like the Grim Reaper's no-account brother."
Rosa stomped the brake, slamming the steering wheel with one hand. "Goddammit, a clog." She flicked a finger against the screen. "Damn you, GridLid."
Sam craned her neck out the window. "It's just a little one. We'll be out the other side in ten minutes."
"Who're you trying to shit? More like twenty. Fucking GridLid's so stuffed with viruses that someday the viruses are just gonna take over. Probably do a better job, too." She leaned an arm on her open window and rested her cheek on her fist. "Wake me when we're totaled."
"Don't go to sleep now, this is the fun part. Listen, what else do you know about this program Fez is running Keely's stuff through?"
"Only what I told you," Rosa sighed, running her right index finger around the circle of the steering wheel. "It's some kind of hyperutility embedded in an AI assembly."
"With viral aspects, something to do with Dr. Fish routines."
"That's the one."
"And you're going to keep giving me variations of that answer until I drop deader'n Jones."
Rosa looked over at her wearily. "Look, I've had my hands full trying to keep up with the gypsy jobs I'm on the wire for so I can keep paying that extortion they call rent, while making sure the resident deader is still warm, and running docket searches to find out if Keely's a fugitive or in custody, and if our names're on warrants as his known associates. You want the stone-home honest God's truth, I don't know what the fuck it is. I don't know where Fez got it, and I don't understand it. It's a program. It's a virus. It's an AI. It's a breath mint. It's a dessert topping. It's the greatest thing since sliced toothpaste."
Sam shrugged. "Jesus, just tell me how you feel, okay?'
"What, and lose my mystery? Sorry, I'm tense as fuck-all. I've seen a lot of people get canned, and I've seen a lot o people fade out so they wouldn't get canned, and I've dodged a couple of warrants myself in the past, and I don't like hanging around waiting for the ax to fall."
"We don't know anything for sure-'
"I know," Rosa said firmly. "If Keely weren't canned, we'd have heard from him by now, and Jones wouldn't be cluttering up my floor. If they've got a gag on it so hard that I can't even find Keely's name on the public record, it's got to be bad enough to send us all down the black hole."
" 'Dive, dive,' " Sam said.
"Damnsure." The traffic broke, and they sped toward East Hollywood.
They arrived at Fez's just in time to catch him coming out the front door of the building with Adrian.
"Doctor's appointment," Fez told them. "It's a condition of Adrian's emancipation that he keep regular in-person appointments with a neurologist. Since he's underage and technically brain damaged."
"That could describe half the hackers in town and almost everyone on the Mimosa," Rosa said. "No offense." She flipped the keycard to her rental at him. "Take mine. There's a line at the lot up the block."
Fez flipped it back. "I don't drive."
"I knew that." She looked at Adrian.
"Underage and brain damaged," Adrian said miserably. "No license."
"Okay, I'll take you," Rosa said. "Don't argue. If you go looking for a bus, you won't get back till Adrian can vote. But my rental won't take four."
Fez passed his keystrip to Sam. "Don't hack the Pentagon on a traceable line."
She let herself in and flopped down on the couch, feeling slightly annoyed that Fez was conveniently out when he knew she wanted to question him about the program. Viral aspects-what the hell was that supposed to mean? And why was it taking days?
On the other hand, it felt great to be in an empty apartment. The last time she'd spent any amount of time alone had been in the Ozarks, and she hadn't realized just how much she'd missed having some solitude.
Of all the things Catherine had always hammered on her about, being solitary had not been one of them. If anything, Catherine was even more solitary than she was, which had always made her wonder how her mother could have even considered getting married. And hooking up with someone like Gabe seemed completely out of character.
Not that her father had the soul of a game-show host, exactly. He spent hours alone doing his loathsome job, but he minded it more. Or maybe that was just the job itself-
Fuck it. With at least two hours guaranteed to herself, she wasn't going to piss it all away playing that bad old tape in her head. She'd left some chips in Fez's desk with a few games sketched out; she could fool around assembling those for a while.
As she was reaching for the power button to one of the screens, it popped on all by itself.
INFORMATION YOU REQUESTED
NOW AVAILABLE
(THE DOCTOR IS IN)
Sam sat down very slowly, keeping her hands away from the console, and waited to see what was going to happen next.
It was a magnificent thunderstorm, captured in its entirety on the central Kansas plains, where there was nothing to obstruct the view from horizon to horizon. Little had been done to it, except for added detail in the billowing grass and the shapes of the clouds. And the lightning. The lightning had undergone a little minor orchestration for more dramatic timing. It was possibly one of the best environmental sequences of any kind, and Gabe wasn't sure it really fit in the Head-hunters scenario, but the space was there in the program to add an optional environment, and he had popped it in just because he'd gotten tired of swampland and voodoo. The Head-hunters program had accepted it easily, but if it didn't work, he could always take it out again.