"Very fancy," she said, which was understating it; it should have been impossible. "But why don't you just call him on the phone?"
"Call him on the phone," he mused, the smooth forehead wrinkling slightly. He seemed to taste the idea, as if she had suggested something rare and exotic and perhaps a little improper in some way. The expression made him look suddenly more female than male, and she felt her mild confusion return.
"Don't you trust the telephone? Or aren't you local?" Maybe, she thought uneasily, he was a total paraplegic and incapable of speech. "Or, uh, I mean, if there's a problem…" She winced, glad he couldn't actually see it.
He grinned. "Don't make faces, it's okay. I probably could do that now. Wouldn't Fez just go wild if he heard me on the phone. Where is the phone, anyway?" He froze; after a few moments a phantom twin rose up out of his image and walked around behind her. She followed with her eyes, and the view on the screen shifted as if she were turning her head. There was a moment of vertigo; it felt a little as if her eyes had suddenly floated around the side of her head, a feature of headmount screens that she could never get used to. Through a small gap between some India-print curtains, she could see there was another room beyond.
She turned back to Art. "Are you still here?"
"Absolutely." He grinned again. "Complete multitasking capabilities, you know."
"Do you always expend that much on pyrotechnics, or is this a special occasion?"
"Well, I like to believe that I'm achieving self-expression. But then, that's the whole raison d'etre for art." He winked.
"I'm not going to groan. It'll just encourage you."
"But all conscious creatures need encouragement to thrive. Wouldn't you agree, Sam-I-Am?"
Fez's nickname for her was a fast cold shock running up the back of her neck. "Ah… excuse me?"
"Your technique is very characteristic," he said. "I've sampled some of your game simulations, tasted them inside out. If you input on a keyboard, I can tell it's you by your touch, the patterns of your input, the amount of time between one symbol and the next." He shrugged. "I can tell the difference between you and Rosa, or Fez, or Keely. Or anybody else."
The shock had turned to an unpleasant wave of creepiness. "Sorry, I find that a little hard to believe."
He shrugged again. "I knew it was you this time, didn't I? Even though you wouldn't identify yourself."
She hesitated. "Lucky guess. Or you recognized my voice."
"Have you ever spoken to me before?"
Sam suppressed the urge to hang up on him. (Him, she thought, definitely him.) She shifted uncomfortably in the chair, conscious of the headmount; suddenly it seemed very heavy. "You enjoy toying with other people, don't you?"
"I'm sorry." He looked so sincere that for a moment she almost forgot she was watching a simulated image and not an actual person. "But I really can distinguish between you. I know, for example, that the data Fez showed me was encrypted by Keely and decrypted by you."
She was sure now that her hair would have stood on end if she hadn't been wearing the headmount. "Fez showed you that?"
"Oh, yes. The missing information wasn't completely salvageable. The whole idea behind a sleeping load is destroy-and-notify, and it destroyed with gusto. By the way, Keely never spotted the flare because it was the data, in part. But I think I've restored enough."
Sam frowned to herself. Fez had said he'd had a program working on it. Why would he hide the fact that he'd brought someone else in on it? The idea of Fez lying to her made her feel more than a bit ill.
"Are you going to tell me about it?" she asked slowly. "Or is this only for Fez?"
He tilted his head and looked at her curiously. "Why would it be only for him? Keely sent you the sockets."
"The what?"
"The sockets. The schematic for the sockets." He dragged a large white pillow over and stood it up on one knee, yanking one of the tassels. A dark rectangular area appeared on the pebbly material; he touched one side of the rectangle, and the schematic Keely had zapped to her in the Ozarks came up just as it would have on an ordinary monitor. Art grinned at her, obviously pleased with himself. "I don't waste any part of a simulation; everything you see is fully functional as well as ornamental."
"Uh-huh," Sam said faintly. Christ, how was he doing it? He had to be either a handicap with a lot of time on his hands or obsessed beyond redemption.
He touched the other side of the rectangle, and the graphic of Visual Mark's brain appeared as Fez had first shown it to her. "When you decrypted this, you didn't notice that you had eight and not just one, did you?"
Sam blinked. "I noticed a lot of redundancy, but I thought it was the error safeguard from the transmission program-"
"Easily missed. It is just one until you put the two separate fragments together." The brain slid to the center of the screen as the other graphic of what Sam had thought was a neuron shrank in size and made a countermove to a spot above it. A moment later there were eight instead of one; the graphic of the brain increased in size as each of the eight things swooped to one of the highlighted areas on the cortex.
The image gave a sudden flicker and faded out, like badly spliced film. "One of the bad spots," Art told her. "It'll come back shortly. Ah, here we are."
The brain graphic reappeared, now with a network of red filaments radiating from each of the eight highlighted areas, from the points where each one had inserted itself.
"I was right. They're implants," Sam said, more to herself. "But why would a corporation like the Dive decide to move into therapeutic implants?"
Art held up a finger. "Not implants. I told you, sockets. They're receptor sockets that will accommodate a certain kind of input device-" He touched a finger to the highlighted area on the right frontal lobe. A window blossomed at the spot and zoomed out, showing a detailed line drawing of the socket. The channel Sam had noted as being too large for an axon was now filled with a pronged device.
"No explanatory call-outs," Art told her. "I'm afraid those were permanently obliterated."
"But what's it for?" Sam asked. "Either they're going to do this, or they've already done it, to Visual Mark-"
"Well, they're going to make rock videos, to start with," Art said casually. "I could show you some specs on the visual cortex of this brain-it's pretty fascinating. Apparently this visual cortex enjoys a particularly strong link with the visualizing center. You'd have to be a neurosurgeon to read it with any understanding, but it's an unusual brain. Has some problems, too, some weakened areas. A lot of the activity's been channeled away from those areas by the brain itself, to take the stress off. Whoever's working on this must have faith that the brain is going to continue doing that-"
"What kind of problems are you talking about?"
"I'm no authority. Stroke, maybe, or an aneurysm." He paused, looking thoughtful. "I'll have to access some new databases if I'm going to be that kind of doctor."
Sam, wasn't listening. "Wait a minute. Are you saying this guy, Visual Mark, is on the verge of a stroke? Are those sockets supposed to help him?"
"No, they don't have anything to do with that. There's a note here somewhere about antistroke medications already given. The sockets are an interface." Art smiled brightly. "I thought that was clear. They're a direct interface for input-output with manufactured neural nets. Computers."
Sam gave a short, incredulous laugh. "Damn. Somebody did it. Somebody finally did it! I want it!" She cut off. "God, what am I saying? The Dive did it, I don't want them putting holes in my head."