Few of the walls between rooms had remained standing, and the second floor had collapsed completely, except for a few beams. Some of the more daring souls in residence had crawled out on them to decorate them with impromptu hanging sculptures made of junk-old hardware, broken pieces of kitsch that some interior decorator had probably agonized over, never thinking that an earthquake would reduce it all to detritus.
At the very back of the building was an area that had been some kind of gathering hall or ballroom. There were no squatters here; it served as a common storage and work area. Sam had finally met the elusive Captain Jasm in person back here, a lanky black Japanese woman of some indeterminate age- twenty? thirty? Older didn't seem likely-who was always tinkering with exoskeletons. At first Sam had thought she used exos in lieu of hotsuits, but apparently Jasm didn't really care for hotsuits, at least for her own purposes, which seemed mainly to transfer arcane patterns of movement to programs. One of the exos was a twelve-foot monstrosity, vaguely humanoid in shape, burdened with whatever hardware Jasm wasn't using. Sam found the thing rather spooky looking, like a robot in progress. She could imagine it coming spontaneously to life and crunching through the building all of its own accord like a high-tech Frankenstein's monster.
At the moment it stood off to one side with the rest of Jasm's equipment piled around it, all cleared away to make room for an enormous metal framework bearing sixteen monitors. Sam's mouth dropped open, and she turned to Percy.
"Whack to a little TV?" he said, amused.
She spotted Rosa doing something with a cam on a tripod a little ways away from the monitor setup.
"Here," said Percy, and went over to her. Rosa looked up and smiled as Percy examined the connections on the cam. They led into the framework of monitors.
"Is this something?" Rosa said. "Sixteen monitors, no waiting."
"Where did they all come from?" Sam asked.
Rosa shrugged. "Here and there."
"TV and more TV. It looks like something out of an old movie," Sam said. "Forty, fifty years ago, they were always dragging out the TV screens when they wanted to show what the glorious future would look like. As if the future was just going to be more TV."
"And, as it turned out, it is," Rosa said.
"Now," Percy said, stepping back from the cam. "Whack it."
Rosa turned on the cam. Sam saw the monitors flicker to life, all of them showing broken-up images of something that might have been her and Rosa standing together.
"Still lousy, Perce," Rosa said.
"Whack it," he said again.
"It is turned on," Rosa said, frowning.
He shook his head, reached over, and slapped the top of the cam's plastic case. The images jumped, steadied, and then cleared.
"Perfect," said Art's voice, from a speaker somewhere up on the scaffolding. "Hey, don't look at the monitors, look at the cam so I can see you."
Percy came around and stood between Rosa and Sam with his arms around their shoulders. "Bad for three?"
Art chuckled. "No. Fool with Rosa, I saw Sam first."
Sam rolled her eyes. It would just figure. The first real, possibly conscious AI, and it postured. She would have to wait for the memory of their recent conversation to catch up with Art's current manifestation.
Percy gave her and Rosa a hard squeeze, pulling them both close. "Really bad for three, if you believe."
Sam nodded a little wearily, extricating herself from him. "I heard you."
The bottom row of screens went blank; a moment later four different dataline channels came up on them.
"See there," said Percy. "Ain't just flash. Tap the channels, whack to each. Billions and billions."
Sam's expression was even more cynical on the other twelve monitors. "That'd make kind of a big bulge in the node, don't you think, when we're trying not to advertise our existence?"
"Shit-man, capability," Percy said, exasperated. "Capability rules. The one thing. The one. You don't know what's gonna float in on you."
"Stone-fuckin'-A," Art agreed cheerily. The image on the monitor changed, showing him sitting in a comfortable nest of pillows with a laptop resting on his thighs, but the tent had been replaced by a background that didn't look terribly different from the ruins of the inn. Art Fish doing his human solidarity thing, Sam thought. At the moment he was probably more into the human experience than she was.
She sighed. "I agree we need all the capability we can get. But we can't watch billions and billions of channels at once. We can't even watch sixteen at once."
"I can," Art said smugly.
"Good for you." She looked around. "Wouldn't it be more practical to have monitors all around? That way there'd be one handy everywhere, and we wouldn't lose them all if the roof goes."
Percy wrinkled his nose. "Wouldn't look so glam-bam."
"Oh, of course." Sam gave him a sidelong glance. "I forgot." It did look impressive, she had to admit that. But it was strictly show-off stuff, and she wasn't even sure who they were supposed to be showing off for-themselves? Hardly necessary. Maybe it was all for Art's benefit. As he had made his presence known gradually over the weeks since they'd taken up residence on the Mimosa, all the hackers seemed to have shifted into high gear in a way that reminded Sam of the way her father had talked about everyone at Diversifications trying to look busy in front of their supervisors or whoever. As if Art were some kind of superhacker they all wanted to impress.
"Hey, speak up a little," Art said, cupping a hand around his ear. "I'm working with cheap audio. Maybe you can get Percy to fiddle with the mikes now."
"Nada," Percy told the cam. "Run with the one. Could kill it trying to thrill it."
"Well, there must be some kind of adjustment you can make," Art said. "Give me a schematic of the guts, let me figure it out."
"I don't have any schematics," Percy said. The sudden shift from Mimosa slang was mildly shocking. "It's all second- or third- or ninth-hand stuff that's been rewired and re-rewired. I'd have to take each one apart, run a scanner over it for the CAD, and then reassemble. It'd take for-fucking-ever to do that kind of close work. You gotta live with what you got till we get something better." He looked over at Rosa and Sam, who were staring at him. "Just wanted you to know I can talk like you if I want to." He stepped back and looked at the cam again.
"Hey, you got vocal, and you got high-res. Two outa three'll getcha good night."
Art's image made a put-out face. "You talk that way when you're getting frying-meat sounds on your hearing aid, Sonny-Jim."
" 'Sonny-Jim'?" said Rosa.
Percy launched into a long explanation or defense, now heavily salted with slang. Sam drifted away, leaving them to argue it out. You could spend all of an afternoon and most of an evening arguing with Art if he really got involved.
She went back to her squat space, squeezing between the piles of broken boards and plaster that sectioned it off, and flopped down on the narrow pad she had bartered from one of the junk collectors in Rude Boy turf. This was definitely better than the small tent she and Rosa had spent the first few days putting up, taking down, and lugging around with them along with the rest of their stuff. But something about all those monitors on the scaffolding had deepened her funk. There was something permanent in feel about it, as if it meant they were all settling in forever, Art included.
Her hand fell on the modified insulin-pump system in her pocket. In the midst of the rigors of life underground, or whatever it was called, she hadn't done anything with it lately. She hadn't done much at all except wander around in a daze. That wasn't a whole lot more than what Jones had been doing; he was even now laid out in a far dark corner, stuporous for sixteen hours a day. Too much death too often, Gator had said. The body's protecting itself the best way it knows how, by keeping him off-line, so to speak. It was as good a theory as any, Sam supposed.