"But the unions-"
"The unions are finished. The best they might do is force a situation where you got a set designer dreaming up sets and a costumer dreaming up wardrobes, a writer dreaming up plots and characters, and a synner to put it all together, someone to synthesize everybody's dreams into one big dream. Goes round and round, and it comes out there." She jerked a thumb at the console. "So just take care of your shit now. I got to take care of mine."
She turned away and started putting the connections back into her sockets one by one. He left.
He was ensconced at a safe, undetectable distance when he felt her speak.
Come on, you afraid I'll bite or something?
There was a lot of noise around it, but he screened it out easily, saving it for later, because it all had to do with him. She was thinking of him while she sat there, flexing her muscles on the console. Neat trick, like, Look, Ma, no hands. But she didn't feel the pull to it the way he did. She almost understood, though, she almost got it, and if she went a little longer, tried a little harder, she might go all the way. But he didn't know whether that would be good for her or not, now, because he knew. It was more than just the difference between them- he wanted to go where the pictures were, she wanted the pictures to come out to where she was-because he knew for sure now. He hadn't been able to pick it up from her, but he'd been filled with it. Ludovic, filled with her.
What are you doing? Christ, she should have been able to smell him. And it had gone right past him. With all the new resources at his command, he should have been able to figure it out, graphed them from the top down, her movements, his movements as far as he knew them or could interpolate. Then he'd have been prepared for it. A little prepared, anyway. It was still like a fucking spike in the throat.
You can reach all the controls from inside if you know how. Lotta noise around that one, some for him, some for Ludovic. Shit, even she didn't know what she was really telling him.
Pretty fucking strange, huh?
Only if you don't have all the facts, lover. But once you do, it ain't a bit strange at all. He sneaked a look at her visuals. Yah, Ludovic looked good to her in ways she had no idea of.
Disconnect.
Shit. He surged forward, feeling around her console for a way to keep listening, at least, but he could tell it would take him a relatively long time to figure out how to infiltrate the hardware without her there as a gateway. Leave a piece of himself to work on that problem but withdraw now.
He replayed what he'd just received from her. No need to bother with top-down multigraphs and decision forests. He could see where it would go if somebody didn't fuck up, somebody being Gina, thinking twice, about him and his change for the machines.
Let her go. Have to. Have to.
Considering this was the one place she couldn't be for him, it was all right. He had no right to mind about it. Mind about it, ha, ha. But fuck it, it would make it easier to do this thing that he had been born to do. He'd been holding back, keeping himself sized down enough to return to the meat, because he couldn't go back and be contained in the meat once he'd allowed himself to expand beyond a certain point. It was too defective, too worn-out and tired for him.
So, out the one-way door then. What did he have to lose? Only the meat, and he already knew that he didn't miss that. He didn't. He wouldn't. Even if the meat missed him.
It sent out feeble signals, dumb animal semaphore: come back to the nest, little Sheba. Even if this was what he'd been born to do, that didn't make it exactly natural. Not that he'd ever been accused of being a natural man, but there he was, wagging his meat behind him, so to speak. If he could have given the disconnect command from this side, it would be over in a twinkling. So long, meat, write if you get work.
But he couldn't access any of the commands from where he was. The commands only took orders from the meat, and that poor old meat wasn't about to cut him loose. It was back there in the pit dreaming that it was something bigger and more wonderful than it actually was, and if it disconnected, the dream would be over.
If he could just get someone-Gina-to come in and yank the connections out of his skull. She'd never do it. He could plead and wheedle and try to explain that the thing lying on the floor in the pit was two steps from garbage. Good luck. That meat is mine. That was a good one; he'd caught it in some old memories. But why that, and not Ludovic?
That meat is mine.
No, lover, it isn't, and it never was. If you could take a little walk with me, I could tell you how it really is.
Being renewed and enhanced apparently wouldn't keep him from dwelling on the could-haves and wish-it-weres.
He took himself back to the guy's storage area and picked up some more data, noting that the sensation of his presence had registered without being identified. He'd have to be careful. If he pushed it too hard, he'd end up nose-to-nose with the guy, with no secrets.
Well, the guy was far more resistible than Gina. God, it was fucking hard to let her go when she did video like the Canadaytime. He hadn't been able to keep from taking that fall with her, even though he knew it meant giving himself away. He'd been hoping she would have felt differently when she found out, when she saw that she didn't have to fall all alone. But maybe she wanted to fall all alone.
He wished suddenly that he'd made a copy of the video for himself. Distantly he sensed her coming back on-line again, but he stayed away, not wanting to go back and find her with so much of Ludovic in her thoughts, but he could check the central activity record and see what she'd done with the video.
It was in something called a review queue, in Manny Rivera's area. Manny was conveniently out of the way, recuperating from his own procedure. Manny Rivera on-line. Shit, he was going to have to screen that bastard out.
Unbidden, the memory of the hacker in the penthouse came to him-with his associations spread out all over the place, sometimes he never knew what was going to come up on him next-and he wondered if the kid was still there. Probably; there was some kind of activity coming from that direction. He ought to pop in and say hello later, after he mainlined Gina's video a few times. Just pop in and remind him it was a damned Schrodinger world when you were meat. That would really stone the kid's crows.
– -
The computer-run wheels of the complex mechanism known as Diversifications, Incorporated, continued to turn as reliably and smoothly as ever, unaffected by new developments. It had accommodated an intelligent entity before, and though it knew this one was different, it had no reason to care. No new instructions had been issued concerning the procedures that had been locked in for the disposition of various items of business. Energy was allotted in the proper quantities to each part of the physical building; phone calls and electronic mail went to the designated recipients; intruders were blocked and turned away.
Its eye was on the sparrow as well. The system noted that there were fewer items than usual in Manny Rivera's review queue, and they remained there longer, but the notation was only for purposes of inventory. There was a procedure for slowdowns in traffic, satisfactorily simple: maintain and wait for instructions. Had the building suddenly been abandoned to stand empty for fifty years, anyone returning would have found the review queue waiting just as it was, assuming the power had held out, which was not completely improbable.
Abruptly the system received instructions to deliver one item out of the established queue sequence for review. Out-of-sequenee reviewing was permissible with the correct instructions, which came after a small hesitation. This didn't matter to the system. It identified the requested item-Gina Aiesi/Canadaytime: Rock Music Video. The system delivered it to the usual review area and adjusted the rest of the inventory, reordering it. Then it waited for another command.