"Actually, Dr. Lindel Joslin did it during her tenure at EyeTraxx," Art said mildly. "Diversifications took EyeTraxx over just in time to claim the patent."
And somehow Keely had known about it, Sam thought. Somehow he'd been hacking around, or something, and he'd come up with the biggest thing since the transistor, and they'd caught him and made him disappear. What had he been going to do with the data? More important, what had he been expecting her and Fez to do with the data- now? They could post it untraceably, she supposed, but what would that accomplish, besides spoiling the Dive's surprise? The Dive already had the patent-
Art's phantom twin suddenly reappeared, coming around from behind her on the left, carrying a small handset. Art froze again, allowing the phantom to sink down and superimpose itself on him.
"Well," he said, when the two of them had merged, "here's the phone." He flipped the handset open and examined it. "Complicated in its way, but hardly impossible. I hadn't thought about this. Of course, I'm more than I used to be."
She felt a touch on her shoulder and jumped. He leaned forward, looking anxious (and female again). "Is something wrong? Your vitals just went pop."
"They're back, I think. Fez and Rosa and-" She shut up.
"Good! Then I can call him right now. Don't tell him, okay? Let me surprise him." The eyes were definitely glowing.
"It's your party," she said, resigned. "What about Keely's data?"
"He's got it. I copied you on it, too. Now you go distract him while I figure out how to dial."
She started to protest, but the screen went dark as he hung on her. Sam called for disconnect and worked the monitor off her head.
Fez was standing over her, curious. "Keeping busy?"
"Yah," she said. "Your friend Art with the program popped in for a chat." She gestured at the easel monitor. "Cute trick with the on-off. Scared me out of a year's growth."
"Yes, well, I'll have to tell you all about that later. It's rather a long story." Fez started to turn away, and she caught his arm.
"Art salvaged the data." Why didn't you tell me you'd let someone else in on it? she asked him silently.
"Are you going to tell me about it, or is this a secret between you two?" he asked.
"Maybe I should let Art tell you. In the comfort of the tent."
"Yes, that's a bit much, isn't it? Art's a grandstander of the first order. Did I get a copy?"
Sam nodded, and he reached over to flip the easel monitor on. He brought up a file directory, tapping a box at the bottom of the screen to page ahead. "Here we are," he said, as the heading New Files: 12 Hours appeared at the top of the screen. There were three entries. Just as he tapped the last one, the phone rang.
"Can you get that for me, Rosa?" he asked, pulling a chair over and sitting down in front of the screen.
Rosa picked up the handset on the desk. "Yes? Uh-huh." She held the phone out. "For you, Fez."
He didn't look away from the data rolling out on the screen. "Who is it? Will they leave a message?"
"It's Art," she said.
He frowned at her. "Art who?"
Sam laughed. "Art who, he wants to know." Fez gave her a look.
"Art who?" Rosa asked the phone. Her eyebrows went up. "Art Fish."
Fez pushed his chair back from the desk and looked from Rosa to Sam. "Are you two in this somehow, is this some kind of joke you cooked up together?"
Sam barely heard him. "Art Fish? He calls himself Art Fish?"
"Actually, you get it faster if you say Artie Fish,' Adrian said, coming out of the kitchenette with a large piece of dry matzo.
"Adrian." Fez turned to him sharply.
Adrian shrugged. "Come on, you were gonna tell them."
"Fez, are you gonna talk to this person or not?" Rosa said, still holding the phone out.
Fez took the phone from Rosa. "Hello," he said cautiously. He listened for a long time without saying anything.
Adrian came over to the desk, nibbling the matzo and holding a hand under it to catch the crumbs. "I know he was gonna tell you when the data came through."
"Tell us what?" Rosa asked.
Fez closed the handset and sat holding it, his face blank. "That was Art Fish." He sounded amazed. "I'd said we were going to be out. Shouldn't have bothered popping on."
"It was just after you left," Sam told him. "Maybe he figured he could catch you." She leaned an elbow on the desk. "You mind telling us why he calls himself Fish? Not to mention who he is and if he is a he, and while you're at it, maybe you'll explain why you said you had a program working on Keely's data when you really gave it to someone-" She stopped and looked up at Adrian. "Artie Fish?"
Adrian chuckled. "Stone-home kick, ain't it?"
"Artie Fish?" She made a pained face at Fez. "Not really."
Light dawned for Rosa at the same time. "Well, it was bound to happen someday. But, Jesus, Art Fish? What's wrong with the good old names, like Frankenstein?"
"Actually," Fez said, sitting back in the easy chair and putting his feet on the coffee table, "we all did it, all of us together."
Curled up on the couch next to Rosa, Sam squeezed her twined fingers against each other. The revelation seemed to be playing on a loop in her head, making her heart leap each time it hit her.
"The net system was complicated to begin with," Fez was saying, with a faraway look on his face. "I suppose consolidating everything into the generic commodity we know as the dataline was the start of it. But nothing might have really come of it if it hadn't been for the input that exceeded. So to speak."
"Like what?" Rosa asked.
"Like the viruses, and the piggybacks, the floating boards that pop in and out wherever there's space to accommodate them. All the hackers who found a little capacity here and there and squeezed in compressed data and programs. The hackers who made capacity where there technically wasn't any by using the virtual spaces between bits, and then the spaces between those bits, and the spaces between those."
"Between one point and another, there's always another point," said Rosa. "That's elementary geometry. Even I learned that, and I hated geometry. I liked that paradox, though. Whatsisbod's Paradox, proving forward motion is impossible. Like, lay back, relax, you can't go anywhere anyway."
Fez smiled. "It also has to do with fractals. Take a line, bend it in half. Then bend each half in half. Then bend all the segments in half, ad infinitum. You get fantasy snowflakes and baroque seacoasts-"
"-and great paisleys," murmured Adrian.
"-and if you look several levels down into a fractal, you'll find that a larger pattern's been duplicated. Which means that the fractal several levels down from the area of the fractal you're looking into contains all the information of the larger fractal. Worlds within worlds."
Rosa laughed a little. "You're approaching my threshold for that kinda talk. I'm a hacker, not a philosopher."
Fez turned to look at her. "Good choice of word, threshold. The way we all kept adding to the nets did exactly that, passed a threshold. It got to the point where the net should have collapsed in chaos, but it didn't. Or rather, it did, but the collapse was not a collapse in the conventional sense. Because the net kept accommodating the demands we put on it-that was its purpose, after all, to accommodate data. When it reached the point where it was burdened to the limit, it had two choices-crash, or accommodate. It did both.
"Going over the brink of catastrophe was the first stage. The second was recovery-since it was programmed to accommodate, it did. But the only way it could accommodate was to exceed the limit. Institute a new limit, and when that was reached, go over the brink of catastrophe again, recover and institute a new limit beyond that. And so forth."