What he remembered best, though, was Gina waiting on the courthouse steps for Mark, who had been picked up by the cops on their incoming sweep. He had stood on the sidewalk under the steadily lightening sky, with his receipt and the battered-spouse literature the holding-cell medic had pressed on him while she'd been stapling up the gash in his face, and watched Gina wait.
He'd wanted to go to her. It would have been a much longer walk than the one he'd just finished, through a lot of rough terrain, all of it mined, and a long, nasty trip through all the barbed wire she put up around herself. And it wouldn't have been a simulation. Everything he felt would have been real.
Would have been. He'd still been trying to sort the woulds from the coulds when Mark had come out, settling the matter for everyone.
And then he'd gone off to work and lost Marly and Caritha, too, and then gotten them back, magnanimously restored by Manny who had another little piece of news for him besides. That was supposed to be the real Big One, but he'd already heard about it from Gina. He tried to look impressed for Manny, anyway, especially since Manny was telling him the sockets had saved him. Eight holes in his head had saved his ass, because the Marly and Caritha stuff was so compelling, the sockets just cried out for a product like this, it was the product they'd been looking for. Insty-friends!
Insty-fucking-friends, he thought, putting Gina's intonations on the words. Jesus, Jesus, how did I get here?
"… running the final battery of tests on our people down in Mexico," Manny said cheerfully. "If all goes well, as I'm sure it will, they'll be discharged this week. I'll be going down to oversee it. I would be negligent if I didn't personally make sure that everything was at one hundred percent peak condition for our next star." Manny gave him a satisfied smile. "You know, I'm glad things have turned out this way. I was worried about you, but it's all going to work out. I had no idea that you would have such a feel for that kind of work. It's a gift. And the fact that it came to light just as we were launching this new project is nothing short of miraculous."
Miraculous. The word echoed in Gabe's mind as he stared unseeingly out of the tinted window. And here he'd always thought the miraculous had been strictly confined to Artificial Reality.
"Saint Who of the What?" said Caritha.
Gabe hesitated. He had blurted the name out on impulse, and it seemed as absurd as it had when he'd first read it on the slip Sam had given him.
"The St. Dismas Infirmary for the Incurably Informed," he said again, and peeked over the top of the concrete wall at the zeppelin moored at the other end of the airfield.
"Keep your head down, hotwire," Caritha said, looking at the side of the cam. It had acquired a small screen since the last time he'd been in. He was used to the program embellishing itself as needed, but a screen was more elaborate than he'd thought was possible. "There's activity all over the place here. I've got us shielded, but it won't stick if you insist on wiggling around. You'll break the field."
"St. Dismas was the good thief," Marly whispered to him. He turned to look at her in surprise. Belly-down in the dirt on his other side, she looked up at him with feverishly bright eyes. He almost called for a status report when she went on suddenly. "Though most people think it's just another bulletin board for the discussion of political, cultural, and personal developments, St. Dismas is actually a repository for stolen and sensitive information. You have to have something to offer to access it." She winked at him.
"How do you know that?" Gabe asked.
"We know a lot of things," Caritha said, still studying the screen in the side of the cam. "They're starting to close down the hangar now. It should be empty in ten minutes, everybody going home to supper." She gave him a sidelong glance. "Be real sure you want this zeppelin, hotwire, because once we start for it, there's no going back."
"I still don't understand why you want a goddamn zeppelin," Marly added, giving him a poke.
"It's the last one," he said. "Someone has to take it for a spin, see what it can do in the open sky."
" 'Spin' is a lousy choice of word," Caritha said. "Does the name Hindenburg mean anything to you?"
Gabe sighed, beginning to regret not starting over with fresh copies of their programs. "The Hindenburg has nothing to do with the story line we're supposed to develop. Let's wipe that reference, as well as all mention of St. Dismas, okay?"
"Okay, no St. Dismas steals the Hindenburg," said Caritha. "But if you'd asked me, which you didn't and you should have, I'd have told you going after headhunters is a hell of a lot more useful than stealing zeppelins."
Gabe blinked at her. "Wipe that, too. Status!"
Nothing in the status report indicated he was being hacked, or that the program was drawing on anything but already booted material. He plunged himself back into the simulation. "Resume."
Marly tugged at his sleeve. "You're really going to make us steal that zeppelin and leave all those headhunters running loose?"
"Last time," Gabe said, "we're not doing Headhunters. We can't. House of the Headhunters wasn't a Para-Versal release."
"They're all in on it, I've told you that before, hotwire."
He groaned. "Just steal this zeppelin with me, and then I'll go get headhunters with you later. All right?"
"That's more like it," said Caritha. "Five minutes. Hope you can run like a rabbit."
He took it all the way to the point where they were about to lift off in the zeppelin before he called a halt. The effort of keeping things moving had drained him. Perhaps he was going to have to give in and use fresh copies devoid of most of the headhunters material. The programs wouldn't be as broken in and easy to interact with, but it would be better than tinkering with the present versions.
No, you don't want to tinker with us as we are now, hotwire, said Caritha's voice in his mind suddenly, because we're your best friends, and you're really going to want us after those sockets go in.
Still putting fancy dress on his own thoughts and calling it company. But he wasn't so far gone that he didn't know what he was doing, couldn't tell the difference.
That's why you want to keep us the way we are, hotwire. Because later on, after the sockets go in, telling the difference between us'll be harder. A lot harder.
He wondered about that for days, for weeks, all the way up to the time they put the sockets in. Right downstairs in Medical, as it turned out, not in Mexico.
22
Change for the machines. The groups went crazy for it.
She had missed most of the outgrabe when the story had broken, but there was still plenty of noisemaking going on when she had returned from Mexico. Dog-and-pony shows for the media, for the rock groups, for Concerned Citizens for a Better Tomorrow and the National Council of Implant Clinics and the Mothers' March for Mental Health and Addicts Anonymous. For the National Concerned Marching Addicts of Anonymous Mental Clinics, for all she knew. It was hard to tell the addicts from the mothers and the mothers from the others, and it was a brand new world out there.
Meet the new world. Same as the old world.
That wasn't how the old chorus went, but that was all right, because it wasn't really true, either. But the Beater could pretend it was. Basically. Basically the job's the same. Hear the music, make the pictures.