The strange little glitch that had been popping in and out on him since the entertainment sequence in the French Quarter was gone now. He kept looking around the barn that he and Marly and Caritha had taken shelter in, expecting to see the dark spot suddenly reappear, but apparently it was a problem confined to the visual portion of the original Head-hunters video. Which was a relief; for a while he'd been afraid he'd pushed too hard by putting in Marly and Caritha and overloaded the capacity.
Thunder growled briefly and then suddenly let loose with a crash that shook the barn. "That was prima," said Marly from her post by one of the open windows. A cold wind blew her hair straight back, and she leaned into it with pleasure, letting the shotgun rest against the bale of hay she was sitting on. "One thing you don't get on the Gulf is good thunderstorms. Plenty of hurricanes, but not many thunderstorms. None this good, anyway."
Gabe sat down next to her on the bale. In the distance a large tree was whipping its leaves from side to side furiously.
"Hey," Caritha called from the loft. "It's clean and dry up here. We got a place to spend the night."
"You really want to stay here that long?" Gabe hollered over the thunder.
Caritha appeared at the top of the ladder and climbed down, her rifle slung across her back and the cam dangling from the crook of her arm. "Unless you want to mix it up with the bad guys out here, where there's plenty of land for them to bury our bodies in. We'll be fertilizer for the winter wheat crop if we're not careful."
"They won't come," Marly said confidently. "Too exposed. We could see them approach and pick them off. And no one's going to fly a 'copter out in weather like this. Hello." She lifted her hand and Gabe saw an enormous emerald grasshopper squatting on the back of it, its forelegs resting on the base of her largest knuckle. There was more thunder then and a violent strobe of lightning, reflected in the grasshopper's shiny copper-colored eyes.
"Wow, that's what I call passion," Caritha said, kneeling on the bale next to Gabe. He smiled to himself; in a hotsuit with no genital coverage, thunder and lightning was what he had to call passion, too.
The thunder rolled long and hard, and the barn shuddered again. Far across the rippling grasses, the tree seemed to strain its branches upward, and a thick bolt of lightning arrowed down to strike it. Gabe saw a burst of sparks, and part of the tree blew apart, but it remained standing. Caritha smoothed her hands along his shoulders, rubbing them lightly and firmly.
Marly rested her hand on the rough windowsill, letting the grasshopper stay where it was. Strange eyes, Gabe thought. They were much too shiny for a real grasshopper. He wondered if the insect had been added or just embellished. It hadn't appeared in the preliminary scan. He found he could pick out the reflection of Marly's face in its eyes, and next to that his own and Caritha's, distorted in the bulging lens.
Marly turned her head to look up at him. The lightning was flickering soundlessly now, out there and in the grasshopper's twin copper mirrors. "What do you see?"
"A life I won't live," he said. The words sounded strange- he couldn't imagine what had made him say that, but he felt suddenly sleepy and careless. Caritha kept rubbing his shoulders, and the grasshopper kept staring, and the rain came down, beating on the wooden barn and the land around it so hard, he almost couldn't hear anything else. Even Marly's voice was too faint to hear under the noise, but Gabe was aware of her asking him something else, something about being specific, and of his own voice answering, though his mind felt far away, as if he were half in a dream. It didn't seem to matter.
Sometime later he became aware that the rain had stopped and he was alone by the window.
"Marly? Caritha?"
They appeared at the edge of the loft, smiling down at him. "Come on up, hotwire," Marly said, beckoning to him. There was an emerald green stain on the back of her hand. Had she crushed the grasshopper? Or had the program stuttered when it had sent the thing away?
He put it out of his mind as he climbed the ladder.
He flinched when Rivera clapped him on the shoulder. Rivera didn't seem to notice; he was trying not to grin too widely. Like royalty's displays of emotion were unseemly in front of the serfs, Keely thought sourly. He felt stone-home shitty. Hey, you, with your dick in your hand-say hello to everybody, this is Global News Update, and you're the feature entertainment story of the hour-you and your dick.
Nothing he could do. Rivera was calling the shots, and if Rivera wanted to hack one of his own employees, he didn't have anything to say about it. Who would have believed him?
"I want two copies of that," Rivera said cheerfully, pulling his chair a little closer to the console.
Obediently Keely punched for duplication and then stood up. "Mind if I take a piss?" All over you?
Manny jerked his head toward the doorway. "I think you know where it is by this time."
"Yah. Sure do." Actually, I thought I'd use one across the street, if you don't mind. You do? Well, fuck. If the poor clown he'd just finished tapping had to work for Rivera day in, day out, it was no wonder he was jerking off in the bit bucket with imaginary playmates. Jesus.
There was a lock on the bathroom door. But then, the bathroom had no windows. He could pee, or he could kill himself, those were the choices. Does this picture look familiar?
He had his first on-line Corrections Board meeting in a month. Suppose he actually did try to tell them that Diversifications' reparation program had him doing in-house hacking, breaking into employees' confidential systems to eavesdrop on their work?
Sure, try. If he'd had to report in person, he might have had a chance to make a case. Diversifications wouldn't even let it get as far as his word against Rivera's-they'd pull the plug on him in midsentence and claim technical difficulties, have him back on-line in twenty minutes, grinning like an idiot in drugged-fucking-clothes.
What the fuck. In a month it wouldn't matter. Their little project would be up and running hot in Mexico, probably close to legalization in the States. Diversifications seemed to be more pervasive than Dr. Fish.
He sniffed his shirt collar. The fresh-air smell was long gone; otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to tap into the system-
He could tap into the system again, he thought suddenly. Look for another peripheral item in the sequence, contact the guy again, and feed him the whole story, the real story, and have him call-
Who? Sam? Fez? Jones? What could they do, other than get canned themselves. Maybe just alert the guy-hey, you with your dick in your hand. He went back out to the living room, where Rivera was now rerunning the sequence and enjoying the show. Enjoying it a little too much-maybe Rivera was fooling his bosses, but he knew just by looking at him that Rivera had been turbo'd for days. Working overtime on his big project. Or maybe Rivera found the paranoia useful.
Rivera froze the display and sat back in the chair, drumming his fingers on his thigh. "Is there any way you can run any sequences without his activating them? I'd like to see what else he's been playing with."
It was on the tip of his tongue to say, Yes, if it's in volatile storage, but he caught himself in time. "Sorry. Maybe someone else could, but you've got the security locked up tighter than a rat's ass. The only way I can get in is through a database he's annexed to the simulation, and that's a matter of split-second timing. I have to wait and see which template goes into the simulation. That storm, for example. Then I can get in before the program accepts it. Because, technically, it's not really in his system before it's incorporated into the simulation. It's in the storage area, and that's just a section of a pool common to all the other employees."