"You'd think so, wouldn't you," Sam murmured, more to herself. The socket-people. It reminded her of an expression Fez used from time to time: pod-people. Pod-people with sockets, the information going in and going out, while in their cocoons they mutated-
She pushed the thought away. "If you say so. You have more information about this than I do."
"Would you like more information? I can gather some for you."
"No, thanks. I've got enough to think about."
"I know," Art said, suddenly solemn. "When the beams look into your eyes, they see you are troubled."
"They don't look into my eyes," she said, somewhat dryly. "They bounce off my corneas. You'd be doing too well to pick up anything from my corneas."
"I know you by every move," Art said, unperturbed. "I know the pattern of your fingers on a keyboard, I know the movements of your eyes. The movements tell me a great deal about you."
"So. Remind me to stare straight ahead next time I come in." She sighed. "I've got a lot on my mind these days. I just wasn't cut out to be a fugitive, I don't think. At you later, okay?"
The screen faded to black, and she worked the monitor off her head. Behind her in the tent, Gator and Fez were studying something on Gator's laptop. The headmount had blocked the sound of their voices from her as well as the sound of her own voice from them; a way not to be in the same room with them while being in the same room with them, if you wanted to call Gator's tent a room. Like a bedroom, say.
The sleeping bags were rolled up and tucked away somewhere out of sight, as they always were during the day, so she had no idea how they were arranged when in use. Mostly she pictured them side by side, but that was as far as she would let the picture go. It was only surmise, really, even after all these weeks; she knew nothing for sure, and she hadn't asked.
Gator looked over her shoulder at her then and smiled. "How's the doctor?"
Sam shrugged. "He showed me one of the new videos. There's something funny in it."
"I'll bet there is," Fez said, without taking his eyes from the screen. Some kind of complicated graphic was rotating on it; another of Gator's tattoo designs. Sam caught a glimpse of something like paisleys surrounding some sort of shifting polygon.
"I'm going back to St. Diz. See you later," Sam said, and slipped out of the tent without waiting to hear Fez's usual admonishment to be careful.
The air was a bit cooler on the Mimosa today. A calling card from October, as Rosa put it, a little reminder that summer would be ending soon. Already the Mimosa population seemed a bit sparser, people taking off for warmer hideouts, or going wherever it was they had to go when they weren't camping on the strip. The ones who stayed behind had a case-hardened look to them, weathered and more than a little bit hopeless. You had to be pretty much resigned from the world to stay on a permanent basis; Sam doubted she was one of them.
If she and Rosa had not found squat space in the ruins of the old inn or restaurant or whatever it was, she doubted that she would have stayed this long. However long that was; in spite of regular visits with Art and managing to keep up with the news off the net, she had pretty much lost track of the days. One week had blended into another in a strange stasis (or stagnation, she thought bitterly), each day bearing few distinguishing marks. And now summer was coming to an end, and they were no closer to any answers. They were all still wanted for questioning-it seemed to be a standing order- and Keely was still wherever he was. Legalization of the socket procedure had come about, and the world seemed no different for it, except most of the implant clinics were in the process of either changing to socket implantation or adding the procedure to their repertoires.
She passed a stand where a couple of kids were running graphics of dolphins and exotic birds on a matched pair of jerry-rigged monitors. The resolution was perfect, but the hardware looked like something from rewiring hell.
"Hey," one of the kids called to her. "I know you."
Sam gave her a one-finger salute. The kid beckoned, and she went over.
"You whack to AR?" the kid asked. The smaller one standing next to her had to be her brother, Sam thought. She shrugged noncommittally.
"Run with this, you see and be." The kid tapped the monitor on the counter in front of her. An impossible parrot was flowering into existence on the screen, neon-colored, luminous. "Fly like an eagle."
"Fly like a parrot," Sam corrected her, a little amused. Fly like a parrot and talk like an eagle, probably. So far there was no law against stupid Artificial Reality.
"Grown from the egg," the kid said. "Transform and believe."
Believe was a word that seemed to figure heavily in all the subgroups of Mimosa slang. That had to mean something, but Sam felt too weary to theorize.
"I 'll believe later," she said, waving a hand at the kids, and went on. Over on her right two cases were having an altercation over who owned a particular spot under the Hermosa Pier. One ragged figure was trying to haul the other one out by a leg while the latter tossed up a lot of sand and made hooting noises.
"There go the property values," Sam muttered. Just beyond was the half-falling-down building she and Rosa shared with the loose, semiorganized group of hackers that had taken it over and shored it up against further collapse. The big attractions of the place were an actual roof and a mostly regular power source, supplemented with what they could collect and store from the solars. The roof had a lot of holes, most of which were covered with any available material, none of it leak-proof, but hey, that's what we on the Mimosa call home, sweet home. She'd have cried, except she'd cried herself out during the first week.
Where the front door had been was a ragged hole and a lopsided gate where they all took turns doing a kind of half-assed sentry duty. Percy was sitting on the gate today, leisurely poking at a piece of hardware with one of his homemade tools (Homemade without a real home? Never mind.) while he held another between his teeth. He was big for fifteen, with thick, straight black hair he chopped off himself whenever it got long enough to dangle in the hardware he was always bent over, and a little bit of soft black fuzz on his upper lip that was trying to be a mustache. Sam had thought he was Spanish until Gator had told her he was part Filipino. He had a genius for hardware, and he was more competent and self-possessed than Sam remembered being at the same age. All of two years ago, she reminded herself. No, closer to three; she would be eighteen in October.
Eighteen on the Mimosa. "Are we ready for that?" she murmured to herself. "We don't think so."
Percy looked up then, spotted her, and waved her over. What the hell; where else was she going to go?
"Age of wireless," Percy said, showing her the piece he'd been working on. Her eyes widened.
"If that works as good as it looks, I'll pay you to make one for me. Better yet, walk me through it." She took the piece from him, a palm-sized card with an array of silvery receptors studding the surface.
"Whack to hardware, dontcha." Percy grinned and pushed her hand away as she tried to give it back to him. "Yours. Believe it."
She felt awkward under his friendly grin. "That's nice, Perce, but-"
"Believe it and forget about it. Whack to something new?" He jumped down from the gate and let out a bellow. "Ritz!"
A slightly older kid popped his head up from behind a pile of boards and junk. "What, this minute?"
"Now and now," Percy confirmed, nodding at the gate. The other kid took his place. "Come on."
Sam followed him, pausing to take a look at her own squat space. Most of her own belongings were hidden under some loose boards in the floor, which were in turn piled with what debris she had scrounged. Not that there was a debris shortage. Her spot was in what had possibly been part of a dining room, and there were still plenty of dismembered tables and chairs that had gone unsalvaged. The culture back at the turn of the millennium had been even more wasteful than the one she presently lived in-lived on the outskirts of, rather.