She had both arms around him from behind, steering him through the chaos. A transparent blimp the size of a watermelon was sailing toward him, diverting up over his head at the last moment. He stopped to watch it; tiny dots of light danced over the side, spelling out MORE DRUGS. He laughed a little and leaned back against Gina, putting his hands over hers. "I don't think so," he murmured. Gina said something, but not to him. It didn't matter; he was enjoying the feel of her arms around him. He had forgotten exactly how good it felt, for real, not in a hotsuit.
Your whole body's a hotsuit, said Caritha's voice in his mind.
That would make his brain the headmount, he thought dreamily, and looked around. In another part of the room, on a raised platform, a woman was holding a strange piece of machinery that looked like the bastard offspring of a shovel and a keyboard and screaming something at the top of her lungs. Periodically she slammed the wide part of the machine down on the stage. After the third time he started seeing sparks flying up from the point of impact.
Yah, his body was the hotsuit, and his brain was the head-mount, but the program seemed to have gone a little crazy.
MORE DRUGS.
He understood percussionist right away, but it took him a while to grab the idea that her last name was Something. The gold tone of her skin had a stronger yellow in it than Catherine's, but on her it looked good. On her it was Something. She wasn't impressed with his Something jokes, but she didn't hit him with the sticks, either. She tortured the table with them.
Maybe he needed some sticks, he thought. He could have used them in Manny's office. Bing, bang, bap, flip-flip, tap. She wouldn't let him handle them, so he used his fingers, trying to find a way through her rhythm. A little later she told him he'd made a game try, and if he wanted to get into music, she could show him the way. But right then Gina lifted him out of the chair by the back of his neck, and he could only watch the table recede in the distance. The sticks tapped good-bye before a sudden glittering population fell into the space between him and them, blotting them out. He must be leaving.
– -
He had gone away for a little while, but there was a dim recording in his mind of a blimp, a far more vivid memory of a yellow gold woman with dancing sticks, and somewhere in there a brick wall with snakes crawling on it-or was that a brick floor? A brick ceiling?-and now here he was in the open night air and someone was saying, "AR is a big, big concept. Wraps around a lotta stuff. A whole lotta stuff."
His vision cleared again, and he was looking at a monitor screen running in split-mode, with what might have been identical sets of figures scrolling up either side at different rates.
"On the right here," the voice went on, "are the readings for the area under normal conditions, when there'd be nobody here. On the left are the real readings that we're intercepting on the way to the security-system sensors-"
Marly's voice spoke casually in his head. Try to say that five times real fast. No, not her voice, just his own, he decided. Suddenly he no longer wanted to disown his thoughts and stick false names on them. He didn't have to do that right now, he didn't have to cut pieces of himself off and dress them up in masks and costumes to keep himself company-
"-tents and purposes a facade simulation at the point of input to the security system, where we alter the readings, change the figures going in to be those you'd get if there was nobody here. See, there's air pressure, wind velocity-now the sound and vision's trickier because we have to get between what the cams see and hear and what they tell the system they see and hear. So we run a real facade simulation there in a loop. That's the fooler loop. You just have to sit on top of it and make sure nothing gets jiggled out of place-"
He drifted away again, unsure if he was moving physically. It felt as though he might be. The lights and colors were shot through with large pockets of darkness, and he couldn't seem to get oriented.
"Yah, well, we're all corks on this ocean." A kid raised up from the synthesizer he had been bending over. "I've got a real feel for the sound of guitars, myself. All kinds. I don't need anybody else. Hear me, and you'd swear you were hearing four-five people-"
Someone interrupted him. He shoved a hand at Gabe, and Gabe took it. "Remember me," he said, pumping Gabe's hand up and down. "My name's Dexter, and I'm a whole fucking group in one body, I swear I am. Tell her that. Please? Tell her."
Gabe nodded, dazed, and wandered off. A whole fucking group in one body. He could sympathize. That wasn't really so hard. Just pull them out and make them into individuals, the group, make good guys and bad guys and stick them in a simulation, and you'd never have to be alone-
Deadline ‹ month.
The memory was a fist in the face. He knew just how a fist in the face felt, too; if he ever had to program a hotsuit with facial coverage for a fast shot to the head, he was ready. What he ought to do now, he thought, was take a blow to the stomach and then program that into one of his commercials and persuade Manny to test-drive it 'suited up. Wouldn't that give old Manny a surprise, would that just give him something to think over? It wouldn't actually hurt him, it would just be unpleasant. After all, it wasn't like the hotsuit was anything but skin-deep.
But he needed the experience, so he'd know he'd gotten the hotsuit settings right. Faking it was out of the question.
Manny hated faked material; he could tell immediately when the sensation wasn't authentic.
He put his arms over his stomach. The feel of Gina's arms was long gone, and he wanted them back. Absurdly tall pink feathers growing up from what seemed to be a flamingo face sailed through his field of vision, leaving a hot pink trail behind. He became aware of the music, then, lots of guitar sounds, sounds like lots of guitars.
He felt himself walking, but it was distant, as if he were wearing a good hotsuit with the tactile damped down. The colors parted around him, and he found himself looking at hundreds of strange humps. They grew up out of the ground (or whatever this surface was-he smelled grass and dirt, so he was calling it ground) in sharply regular rows. Information, he thought. Regimentation. On the whole he preferred the idea of the Byzantine orchard. That was long gone, too, but if he could have Gina put her arms around him again, who knew but that it would come back? And if he had to get her to punch him in the stomach to do that, then he would do that.
"Gina?" he asked timidly.
Scattered voices came through the darkness over the humps.
"… fucking furious with you, asshole."
"Fury is what made rock'n'roll great."
"When was I ever not there for you?"
"Well," Gabe murmured, maneuvering between two of the humps, "where was 'there,' and what was I doing at the time?"
"… twenty years on your case, what does it fucking take?" That was Gina's voice, he'd know it forever. The first time he'd ever heard it, he'd known he would remember it forever, and not just because she'd punched his lights out. It was a voice with texture, a voice that you could touch as much as hear. It had been in his ears all night, and he hadn't realized how much he wanted to keep it there until it had gone away and come back just now.
"Gina," he said, moving forward. Something banged into his hip. He reached out to touch it and was startled by the feel of cold stone. One of those humps.
"It's complicated," said the other voice. Not as textured, a voice from someone who seemed to be receding in the distance, not faint but fading out all the same. "I wanted to tell you. It's a rope out of a hole."