Except it was better. It wasn't just hearing the music, it was being in the music, and the images coming up on the screen of her mind, forming as she looked at them. As soon as she thought it, there it was, and if she thought to change it, it changed, growing from her like a live thing. She suddenly found it hard to remember that she had worked any other way. At least, while she was doing it. It felt so natural, so right, to send a dream out of the inner darkness into raw daylight, where anyone could see it. Once you'd done that, you wanted to keep on doing it, and the more you did it, the easier it became.
For the first time she had a real understanding of Mark's nature, of what had been happening behind those eyes for so many years. Change for the machines? Nah, the machines had finally changed for him, and he was just doing what he'd always done.
Not everyone could do it. That was the strange part, that not all of them could change for the machines. Ecklestone vanished from the Canadaytime lineup, leaving Valjean and Moray hooked up and rocking through the wire.
"You want to hear something?" Valjean asked her in the studio at the top of his house. "You want to really hear something?" A few quick hits off the oxy, the cape flickering and winking, and Moray looking like she was going to jump out of her skin if it didn't happen soon. They played it for her, beginning to end and from the first note; the pictures came up in her mind just the way they were supposed to. Except she wasn't plugged into the hardware, and the images boiled like a fever, looking for the way out, pressing to be released, until she thought her head had to explode.
And then Valjean and Moray stopped, and her vision cleared. She barely registered that Valjean's synthesizer had remained closed and silent, that Moray hadn't touched her keyboard, they'd played it all the way through with only their minds, but she was already out, ripping down Topanga, needing her own machine. Change for the machines. Everything changed for the machines.
– -
U B the Ass to Risk was gone, and in its place was a joint that said it sold dreams.
**SOCKET-FRESH**
MODULES AVAILABLE FOR
**FLATSCREEN** **HEADMOUNTS **
!!!COMING SOON-SOCKET HARDWARE!!!
WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FURTHER DETAILS
Hadn't taken them long to catch on. The new clinics were open, and they were lined up around the block for them. Whether the dream joint actually had real dreams or just warmed-over clips from old wannabee releases almost didn't matter. Sockets were hot, sockets were it, sockets were the new sexual preference. The hardware was out there, and the merchandise was out there side by side with the stuff pretending to be the merchandise. Hadn't taken hardly any time at all for everyone to get into the spirit of the thing.
She paused in front of the Chinese Theatre. COMING SOON-THE LAST ZEPPELIN! trumpeted the holo arching over the entrance. A PARA-VERSAL/DIVERSIFICATIONS PRODUCTION! The holo blinked. AN ADVENTURE BORN IN THE MIND, DIRECT TO YOU! YOU WILL BELIEVE
YOU ARE THERE… blink… BECAUSE YOU WILL BE THERE!!!!
Good old Hollywood. Start with a great big flatscreen debut and work inward. Show it to them in gargantuan ultra-HDF: Wouldn't you like to be inside this? Well, you can! Here it comes!
"Thou shalt not fear!"
He was at her elbow as suddenly as if he had congealed out of the noisy air on the boulevard, a skinny hype in a dirty gray jumpsuit that might have been silver once. One hand thrust a glittery blue square at her face. "And with this stuff you ain't gonna fear no-goddamn-body, not nohow, not no-time, not nowhere!"
"Not any body I'm afraid of," she told him, moving on.
"Would you like to be?" He caught her arm and stuck a yellow lozenge under her nose. "I can handle that for you, too. Pure terror, it's the way to go. Hey, take 'em both at once, send your nerves to the playground of the gods!"
She pulled away from him.
"Hey, how about an ego trip, wanna go on an ego trip?" he called after her. "Fuckin' sockets've sent the drug trade right into the fuckin' toilet."
Already? You betcha. Hadn't taken long for everything to change for the machines. Pretty soon it would all be happening at the speed of thought, before it could actually happen, so that nothing would ever have to happen again. You'd only think things had happened, and if anything ever did happen, you wouldn't know the difference.
Take a little walk with me.
Here it comes.
White Lightning in a mason jar. It wasn't terribly visual, but when you'd been struck by lightning, you didn't need a passport to LotusLand. Zzzzzt! Hope you like your barbecue extra-crispy.
She was making the level in the jar go down little by little all by herself for what seemed like a long time while the music pounded. Without the usual excuse, because tonight she knew where Mark was, she knew exactly where to find him, and she would always know from now on.
But old habits sure died hard, she thought, and though being struck by White Lightning had left her movements kind of gluey and slow, her mind was running hot, full of pictures, ready to stand and deliver any time she put her request through the wire.
She let the music wash over her, speed-thrash, cruise-metal, bang-rock, hard-core soul. It was almost like being back in one of those bad old Boston bars, Babe's Beantown, Harborville, Kathye's Klown, in the before-days, putting on a plain old tox-getting shitfaced, smashed, blasted, hammered-and then jumping all night to some group so hungry you got to starving yourself.
The sticks were rapping away on the table, stealing a few licks on the side of the jar. Little Flavia, letting her sticks do the talking, and the sticks were saying all there was to say. Gina peered through the White Lightning haze at her. Here it comes.
The rest of Loophead melted out of the crowd of tables around her, out of the throbbing mass on the dance floor, where a kid with a heelprint tattooed on his forehead was climbing onto the stage again. Flavia was talking now, but the sticks had already said it all. Here it comes. Take a little walk with me.
"Because we have to catch it now," Flavia added. "You can. We can."
Loophead's bass boy Claudio lifted her up out of her chair nice and easy. He knew how, he'd done it before, more than once. He could really play, too, he wasn't just a keyboard cheater, the boy had real magic in his fingers. Real magic, real fingers.
A little traveling music, please.
Loophead worked out of a cellar studio on the outskirts of demolished Fairfax, where the property values had joined the drug trade in the toilet. Had to be one pretty big toilet, Gina reflected, the way they were flushing the world down, piece by piece.
The Fender was definitely not in the toilet. Dorcas slipped it on the way another person might have slipped on a diamond necklace. Dorcas was big, black, and old enough to know what a Fender meant. Tom was smaller, wiry, out of the Mimosa and numerous other places east and north, and you called him a keyboard cheater at your peril, because he knew, too, he knew what a keyboard was supposed to be.
Flavia leaned over her, still holding the sticks, smiling. No hard feelings from that night a million years ago, when Gina had pulled a likely-looking body out of a chair by the back of his neck. "It cost us a fortune to pry an extra box out of the supplier. Everyone in the world wants them. Make it be worth it."
Someone else gave her another hit off the mason jar before sinking the wires into her skull.
She went down fast, longer and harder than any fall she'd ever done for Valjean. She remembered that Claudio had cleaned Valjean's clock for him once. Called him a cheater and a fake.