She'd been ready to give Jones a more final demise when she and Rosa had caught up with him at Forest Lawn, sucking up to one of the kids running a fooler loop. Fortunately Rosa had known the kid, and it had been easy to persuade him he didn't want to take merchandise from someone wanted for questioning. Persuading Jones to come with them hadn't been as easy, but if bis stubbornness hadn't delayed them, she never would have been treated to the sight of her father lying on the ground near Liberace's tomb, being tended to by Gina Aiesi and Visual Mark.
It had almost been worth the risk of sneaking past the cops in the dark, seeing Gabe at a hit-and-run. Rosa had given her hell later for passing him the paper with St. Dismas written on it. But the only St. Dismas the authorities would know of was the long-defunct soup kitchen by the same name that had once operated in Watts, founded by a bright-eyed, Jesus-freaked technophobe with sticky fingers. Or so the old legend had it. Sam wouldn't have been surprised to find that she'd just been another hacker with her name on a warrant that wouldn't expire. Just being wanted for questioning would have been enough to drive her to a nunnery of some kind, if she hadn't already known how much she hated even half-assed communal living on the skids.
But it could have been worse all the way around. She and Rosa might still have been in the tent with Jones stashed in Gator's outhouse; she might have lost more than her shoes that first night on the strip; they might have been canned at the hit-and-run, and Gator's phony IDs might not have held up. As it was, the falling-down ruined inn now had a fancy-schmancy monitor setup to go with the sophisticated if homegrown system spread out among the squatters, bigger and faster than the system Fez had abandoned with his apartment, except for a few items he'd managed to transport to Gator's tent. Like the headmount she'd made for him.
She took the ex-pump unit out of her pocket and turned it over and over in her hand. She had made her own contributions in the way of hardware and programs in the tumble-down shelter, but she wasn't about to toss this out for communal use. Making the specs available was enough.
Of course, having the specs wasn't like having work space to do anything with them. The supply house in the Ozarks that she had made contact with had been well stocked and very accommodating, allowing her to trade scut work on their inventory and beefing up their antiviral routines for a clean, well-lit area with the right kind of equipment for manipulating the protein assemblers. Once she'd had the guts properly configured, she'd been able to make the rest of the modifications on the pump itself in the privacy of her tent. It was really just a hacker toy, stolen just for her own use because she hadn't wanted to wait six months, a year, maybe two years, before it came out on the market so she could buy one, putting more money into Diversifications' well-lined pockets, and strip it down to see how she could dupe it. If indeed the units had become available at all.
All things considered, this should have been the ideal place to use it. Made for inhospitable environments. She remembered the hardware Percy had given her, still in her other hand, and examined it. A little redesign, a little rewiring, and it would adapt perfectly to the pump unit. Then she'd be all set; her own intimately personal computer system with a wireless modem set to Art's iron-guard frequency. The sunglasses weren't as good as a headmount, but they were far better than nothing, and she wouldn't need even solar power to lack it over. Except for the modem, of course. She could have outfitted herself in a few minutes, except her ambition seemed to have deserted her. "Are you okay?"
Rosa was standing at the nominal entrance to her squat space; Sam nodded, beckoning. "Yah. I think I've just got them bad old cozmic Mimosa dead-end blues."
"Come on, it could be worse." Rosa eased down next to her, resting her back against the powdery, cracked wall.
"I know. I've just been telling myself that. I never did want to come here. I thought it would be the first place anyone would look for us. Cops aren't stupid, they could figure that we planted false information that we'd left town." Sam took a long breath. "But then I started softening up to the idea a little. Thinking that it would be kind of… oh, exciting, I guess. Romantic, even. Almost like being in the Ozarks again, except freakier. Laptops in the raw, jammers making music. Horny hardware geniuses making cordless modems for you." She laughed a little and then sighed again. "But mostly it's being dirty and smelly and not having any safe place to stay and not getting enough to eat."
"And getting your shoes stolen," Rosa added.
"Yah. I guess I never bounced back after that one."
"Well, I got them back. Black eye faded pretty quick, too. And you should have seen the other guy."
"I did see him. The scum. I still feel horribly guilty about the whole thing."
Rosa chuckled. "You don't have to feel guilty about that. You're a lover, not a fighter."
"Which means I definitely don't belong here. And I'm not even anybody's lover."
"Come on. If Percy could be bad for three, he could be bad for two. If you believe."
Sam groaned. "Even if I could bring myself to molest a fifteen-year-old-"
"-who probably has more experience than you do," Rosa put in wryly.
"-I'm not sure I could ever get around the language barrier. Half the time when he's talking, I'm winging it."
"And he just went to all the trouble of showing you he could talk like us. But I don't blame you for wanting to wait until his voice changes." Rosa chuckled again, a little sadly. "What else?"
Sam pressed her lips together. She had never mentioned her feelings for Fez to Rosa, but she doubted that she really had to. She was sure Rosa had picked up on plenty and tactfully held her peace, and she was also sure what her friend would say if she invited comment. Why bother bringing it up at all, she thought; if you've run the simulation, and you know how it turns out, there's no point in wasting time living through it all over again.
"I just miss civilization. I miss being able to move around, come and go as I please. Being out there. Maybe at heart I'm just another bourgeois who can't take the heat, and as soon as I turn eighteen, I'll turn in my laptop, look up my social security number, and go get a real job."
Rosa patted her leg carelessly. "Buck up, little soldier. As soon as the dust settles from the Instant Information Revolution, they'll lose interest in us, and we'll all be able to go home."
"You think so?"
"Either then, or when Keely's sentence is up." Sam groaned again, loudly.
"Now-" Rosa pushed herself to her feet and offered her a hand. "It's just about Stupid Headlines time. Let's us old and tired fugitives from justice go see what's on the news and have a few laughs. Unless you'd like to sit and sulk on your own."
Back to Gator's tent. Was she ready for that again? Oh, hell, she thought, and laughed. "Not really."
" 'Post-Millennarist Fundamentalists Claim Sockets Facilitate Demonic Possession via Rock Music' " Art's image, looking a bit purple, beamed from a Percy-supplied monitor at the group in Gator's tent. One of the easel monitors Fez had managed to salvage sat next to it with headline text.
"Stupid, but unimaginative and not one bit original," said Gator, leaning on the back of Fez's chair.
"Yah, but it's too stupid to ignore," said Captain Jasm, on Sam's right. Jasm's deep voice reminded her of an engine slightly and pleasantly out of tune.