That wasn't now. The music was now, the music lighting up the inside of her head, coming from somewhere else, the sound of sticks on metal, on glass, on wood, striking sparks in her mind.
She could feel Flavia's smile, the stretch of her mouth, the warmth, the teeth digging into her lower lip just a bit, and a little harder on the beat.
Claudio's magic fingers, manipulating the bass line. She could remember a time, just barely, but it had happened. She'd been even more toxed that night than she was now, and it seemed that he hadn't been so close that night, nowhere nearly so close, not inside her skin that way.
Sparks to lightning, white and otherwise; a glimpse of towers in each flash, minarets, monoliths, obelisks. Gina smiled to herself; what Claudio lacked in subtlety he made up in pure heat.
Dorcas's first chord came through, shaking the world all the way up to the moon, and they were off, all of them, charging down the line Tom was making on the keyboard, mystery tracks for the phantom night-train.
Here it comes. She let it. That was all she had to do, all she could do; it was right there, and she was right there, and they were all right there with her.
Be there for you.
There was a man with a different world in his eyes, still real, made of noise and light.
Be there for you.
There was a man, real, taking the long way home, walking a strip that had once been by the ocean, and she was running across a bridge, chased by her own growling need, but the harder she ran, the farther away he was.
Be there for you.
There was a man in a room, changed for the machines, not real now, and a stranger, real, on a stony shore standing under a grey sky, turning slowly to her, but the music split the sky and shattered it, and she was gone again.
The music wailing from the Fender hit a sober part of her brain, but there was no time to consider what she was doing because it sent her off again, gone again, running down a long road with a fever in her chest, and the trees on either side bowed, branches like fingers, reaching, and when they touched, they were like mist, like smoke, and she was gone again.
Gone again… gone all night, one of those endless nights, don't look for the sun this time, and hell, you don't need it anyway.
Here it comes…
Endless night; flesh on flesh, not a furnished room but a place to live for a little while. She turned and ran again, but it overtook her, flung her down, and opened her up.
All right, admit it then, just one time. She could do that before it let her go.
Flying; hurtling like a meteor, alive and burning. Scorched air, and then the whole sky was on fire, and what the hell, if a thing's on fire, then let it burn, let it all burn down and burn back up again.
Burn back up, and up, and up, and over the top.
Flavia was leaning over her, mopping her face with something soft. "And that's what we call video," she said seriously. "If your sanitized bosses can't handle that, we can all walk, and walk tall, you with us. What's the Dive got to put up against what we just did? Not a fucking thing."
She couldn't even nod. She had sweated through her clothes. Flavia put the mason jar to her lips; burned all the way down. Burn… Gina raised up on one elbow and twisted around on the mattress. The connections hung limply near the console, harmless now. Tom was just disconnecting his own; he looked over at her, breathing hard.
"What did we just do?" she asked thickly.
Flavia grinned; it made her golden features look sharp enough to cut. "We made a video the new way. The real way. What's the fucking point of sockets if you don't do it the real way?" She looked over her shoulder. "We're done. He can see her now."
Gina let herself fall back on the mattress, throwing one arm over her eyes. Christ, that anyone would see her now. Footsteps came across the cellar floor and stopped next to her, and the hope flared in her, brand-new fire that he might have changed so much for the machines that he would come and find her now, instead of the other way around. She took a deep breath and lowered her arm.
There he was, big as life and possibly more real.
"How the fuck did you find me?" she asked.
"It wasn't easy," Gabe said.
He felt better than he had in years. Never mind better. He felt fantastic. He felt more than fantastic. He felt unreal. Un-fucking-real.
Visual Mark. That's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
He lost all awareness of the meat that had been his prison for close to fifty years, and the relief he felt at having laid his burden down was as great as himself. His self. And his self was getting greater all the time, both ways, greater as in more wonderful and greater as in bigger.
The sense of having so much space to spread out in-a baby emerging from the womb after nine months must have felt the same thing, he thought. Stone-home true enough for himself. After the initial trauma, hey, it's party-time!
All those years in meat hell, he marveled. All those years of getting toxed, getting crazy, thrashing, banging, going from one thing to another until he couldn't hold himself upright anymore, and never understanding that what he'd really been trying to do all along was drill a few holes in his head and get out of meat-jail.
And into… what?
His own context. It went little by little with him, a little more every time he took the wire. That was what he called it, taking the wire.
What time he spent off-line faded into dull stretches he waited out until he could take the wire again and get a little bit greater. The wire was good to him, helped him along, showed him how he could spread out a little more each time, easing himself into his context. Like going home.
He stopped bothering to disconnect to use the little bathroom in the pit. What the hell, the wires were long enough. They weren't long enough to stretch all the way out the door, but he found out they'd let him use the in-house delivery staff to run food up to him just like they did for the big shots on the fabled Upstairs Team when they worked overtime. He didn't bother disconnecting to eat, either; it only took a few minutes.
With all that there didn't seem to be much sense in disconnecting and going back to his apartment. The pit was bigger, he had everything he needed, and the program director was always cranking on high.
He knew the time was coming when he would try to slip back into the meat-jail and find out it was too small for him. Once he had been sure his brain held a rabbit hole, a pocket of infinity where no limits applied, no boundary conditions were enforced, and he could fly through the universe if he wanted to. Maybe he'd just been fooling himself. Maybe the rabbit hole, for all its depth and breadth, had been finite after all. Or maybe it was closing up a little more every time he stepped out of the meat, because soon he wasn't going to need it anymore. Like the brain itself, and the rest of the warm meat.
Deciding to stick with the wire was better than anything he'd done before. His mobility, was virtually unlimited, along with his vision-the Dive was surveillance heavy, he'd known that already. He'd seen the cams back when he'd been in meat. But there were a number of cams he hadn't seen, quite a number. In his previous incarnation the discovery might have dismayed or angered him. Now he was just glad to have so many eyes.
And to shut those eyes, he withdrew and looked inward, though he could continue to capture anything that came in through a lens, storing it for later viewing. Little caches of information could fit almost anywhere he wanted them to; there were extensive stretches within the system that went unused. He minimized the possibility of the extra information being detected by nesting as much of it as possible, making one association carry double, triple, quadruple referents, more if he angled his pov all around the information space.