Disconnect, he thought. There was a fleeting acknowledgment deep within, a feeling he had tried to describe to himself without success. Without success seemed to fit the situation in general. He reached up and removed each connection carefully. There was never any sensation of the connections going in or coming out again, it was all as painless as they'd promised, but the association he always made was voodoo. Sticking long pins in a doll and pulling them out again. Perhaps because he didn't want to think about the ward sequence in House of the Headhunters. If he did, he'd have to look at it.
He shook his head as if to clear it, even though he wasn't the least bit groggy. That was the interesting thing about using the new interface-he never came out of it feeling drained and hung over the way he sometimes had with the old system. No eyestrain, no muscle strain, no strain of any kind.
He should have felt groggy, though, considering the sleep he hadn't gotten the night before, but rest wasn't what he'd needed, not then, and not now.
C-word, Ludovic. It takes more fucking nerve than most of us have to say the whole thing right out. Because there's nothing worse than having lead in your pencil and nobody to write to.
He laughed aloud at the memory. He could hear her voice so clearly in his head. The sockets had given him that-all his thoughts ran as big and vivid and sharp as any high-definition monitor screen, seeming so real he could almost reach out and touch them.
What the sockets hadn't given him, though, was control over what came into his head. No strain, but nothing to show for his efforts, either. He couldn't seem to get out of his own way long enough to produce a coherent sequence.
He got up, ejected the chip from the console, and held it up to the light on the tip of his forefinger before he pushed it into the erasure/reformat slot above the keyboard. Manny had had his implants four days before, which meant Medical would keep him for another three, leaving him three more days to come up with a feature-length zeppelin adventure for Para-Versal. And he couldn't even get five minutes of conversation without his mind skittering all over the place. Maybe he could divert Copperthwait with another story conference. Sure, come on over, shoot the-ahem-shit. Love for you creative types to talk.-Excuse me. What are you doing? If he could stand it.
His gaze came to rest on the hotsuit folded neatly on the shelf above the desk with the head-mounted monitor on top of it. He'd have been better off with the old system and the old chips. Wouldn't take any longer than, oh, two weeks. Then he could run it through with the new interface, which would probably reduce it to video confetti in a matter of two minutes, the way his mind was wandering. Pop it into Manny's electronic review queue and wait for him to watch it. He would know when Manny screened it, because he'd be able to hear Manny screaming from here. Or maybe Manny would just drop in via some spyhole-
Maybe he already had.
The memory of the other presence coming up on him hit him like a shot to the head. He knew for certain. It was the same sensation he'd felt during the visualization exercises the day after he'd had the procedure, a sense of pressure like someone leaning or pushing against him.
The hacker, maybe. But wouldn't the hacker have tried to talk to him?
Gabe ran a hand through his hair. He couldn't think about the hacker, or he'd have that coming out on chip along with the rest of the extraneous images. Maybe he should run down to Medical, see if they had a program for extracting unrelated and unwanted ideas.
He realized he was digging his fingers into his hair as if he could yank out his anxieties by the roots. He looked at the hotsuit and headmount, the console, the connections now coiled on the desk, the whole pit, and suddenly he felt as if he were sealed off in a small, airless box. He banged the console's door-open panel and ran for the ladder to the catwalk.
Across the hall the indicator light on the door to Gina's pit said it was occupied. Slowly he went over and raised his hand to the buzzer. Would this ruin it, somehow, was she all tied up with the music and the videos again, trying to make them do something, be something to her in place of something else? Or would she want to see him now as badly as he wanted to see her?
He pressed the buzzer. After a moment the door swung open silently. He hesitated again, unsure of what he would say to her, and the door started to swing shut again. He nipped around it quickly, wincing as the edge brushed his chest, tearing off a shirt button.
The lift whined softly as she sent it up to the catwalk for him. She was sitting at the desk with her feet up, staring at one of the console flatscreens as if she were unaware of him.
He took the lift down, waited briefly for her to look up and acknowledge him. Suddenly the lift started to rise again, and he jumped off. "Jesus," he said.
"Sorry. Thought maybe you'd changed your mind." There was a distracted, forced quality in her voice. A few moments later he saw the wires trailing among the dreadlocks. Hooked in. He took a step backward, toward the ladder.
"Come on, you afraid I'll bite or something?" She turned her head slowly and looked at him, her eyes seeming to go in and out of focus, as if she were having trouble picking him out of the surroundings.
He approached uncertainly. "What are you doing?"
"Checking my brain wave." She lifted a finger in the general direction of the screen.
The three rows of lines moving up and down on the monitor meant nothing to him. Abruptly they stopped and reversed themselves, flowing backwards to several explosively jagged interruptions in the otherwise semiregular patterns.
"Those bursts are where I opened the door, closed it, sent the lift up, and then started to send it up again. In case you're wondering." The screen blanked, flickered, and then he was looking at himself standing outside at the door. "You can reach all the controls from inside, if you know how." The screen blanked again. "Disconnect," she said.
He found himself looking anywhere but at her while she removed the wires from her head and set them aside.
"Pretty fucking strange, huh? Just wanted to see if I could do it. I can. You could, too, if you wanted." She yawned, rotated her head while she rubbed her neck, and then looked at him expectantly.
Once again words failed him. Like some kind of bad joke. He had goddamn sockets in his head to send out any thought at the drop of an inhibition, and he couldn't manage to tell the person he'd just spent the night with what he was doing there.
She nodded. "Look, it's all right. It's all all right. Just take care of your shit now. You got your Para-Versal deal with your complete artistic control. That's more than a lot of us end up with, count yourself lucky to've landed jam side up this time. You could make enough to buy out your ex-wife, hang onto your condo. Maybe you'll get real lucky, and Para-Versa'll decide they want you working directly for them, not this place."
He blinked at her. "Why?"
She laughed a little. "Christ, you think now that there's a fucking direct interface to the brain, studios like Para-Versal are gonna keep jobbing shit out to mills like the Dive? They don't need the Dive anymore, they just don't know it yet. But when they do, they'll get their own interface hardware, hire writers to sit around all day and all night dreaming up features right outa their brains, no production work necessary."