Fez would have told her to accept it as an unexpected opportunity to unwind. An L.A. clog is just Natures way of saying it's break time. But then, Fez had told her that trying to reconcile with her parents was a good idea, too.
She sighed and looked at the nav screen. The map display vanished, to be replaced with a basic, abbreviated dataline menu. Good old GridLid. Gosh, folks, sorry we didn't warn vou about the clog, but since you're already sitting in it, you can enjoy some minor diversion, courtesy of the city.
The offerings were limited to the most popular items off several of the networks, text and/or sound only, including, she saw with some amusement, The Stars, Crystals, and You Show and Dear Mrs. Troubles from FolkNet. If you couldn't pre-guess GridLid with stars and crystals, maybe Mrs. Troubles could help you change your miserable life at two miles an hour.
She pressed the scroll button on the keyboard between the seats, and the categories began a slow roll upward. Business: Local, Regional, National, International; Sporting Events; Lunar Installation Report; Peccadillo Update-that was tempting; famous people throw up in public and other gossip to die for-CrimeTime; The World of Medicine; L.A. Rox, Including!Latest! Video Releases.
She pressed for the last, feeling slightly mollified. She wouldn't be able to see any videos on the cheap-assed monitor, but at least she'd be able to listen to some new music, maybe find a few good encryption vehicles. Encryption was fun; play this sideways, kiddies, and hear a message from the devil. Keely would certainly have approved.
Keely hated speed-thrash.
Unbidden, the thought came to her and sat in her mind, waiting for her to make something of it. Keely had sent her the information encrypted in speed-thrash, and he hated speed-thrash. If the Good Lord had really meant speed-thrash to exist, he would have made me deaf.
Well, so what? He knew she liked speed-thrash; he'd probably figured he'd zap her something she could appreciate.
She made a face. That didn't feel right. Keely had been in a hurry; he'd had plenty of other encryption vehicles to choose from, anything from the Brandenburg Concertos to one of those Edgar Varese things he was so crazy about, and any of those probably far more available to him than a piece of speed-thrash. A new piece of speed-thrash.
She pushed for the new speed-thrash listings, tapping the steering wheel impatiently while GridLid's access to the dataline pondered her choice and made a laborious search. The Age of Fast Information, sure, she thought sourly.
A full ten seconds later, the screen delivered the page. For once she was lucky; it was the very first item she selected for audio excerpt. Mechanists Run Loco, by Scattershot. The credit line for the video made her blink: created by Aiesil EyeTraxx, acq. by Diversifications, Inc.
EyeTraxx acquired by Diversifications? Since when, and how had that gotten by her? She topped back to the L.A. Rox general menu and selected the news.
There was nothing but the usual collection of gossipy items on which artists were doing what outrageous or dull things. (General Industry News, sub-subheading Rock Videos gave her nothing but snippets on rights reversions, what artists were signing with what video companies, who had died, and who wasn't doing anything at all.
Rock Video: Acquisitions was just a rerun of who was signing with who, nothing she hadn't been getting in her edition of The Daily You back in the Ozarks.
She slid back the sunroof panel and stood up on the seat carefully. There was nothing but an unbroken sea of rentals interspersed with a few private cars in all directions, and no sign of movement. Sam clambered down behind the wheel again and blew out a disgusted breath. "Shit."
"It's awful, isn't it?"
The driver in the car on her left was smiling at her sympathetically. She nodded. "It's worse than that."
"I think we all ought to file a class-action suit against GridLid, force them to clean up their program," he went on. "Or at least provide full dataline access for the rentals. I can't get anything I want."
"Me, neither." Sam looked at him speculatively. "Say, you wouldn't happen to follow rock-video news, would you?"
He managed to look apologetic and bored at the same time. "Sorry. I get Casting Call and Daily Variety, and the rest of the world can go hang as far as I'm concerned." He looked around at the clog. "Right now I really wish it would. Why aren't all these people home with their families?"
"'Scuse me? Hey, you there?" A woman about her own age was waving at her from another rental directly behind the man. "I follow rock video."
Except for the long pink hair, she looked more like a folkie than a thrasher, but Sam wasn't feeling choosy. "I just saw this item on the dataline," she called to the woman, twisting around to lean out the window. "It said EyeTraxx had been acquired by Diversifications, Inc. You know anything about that?"
Now the woman stared at her as if she were crazy. "God, no. That sounds like biz news to me. Snore, snore."
"Oh. Yah," Sam said faintly, pulling her head back in. Business news. Christ, business-fucking-news, what in hell else would it have been. Feeling sheepish, she topped all the way back to the main menu and selected Business News. Then she stared at the screen while it asked her which subheading she wanted, Local, Regional, National, or International? There was nothing more specific. Which figured. Hard-core biz types didn't register as a target market for GridLid; they wouldn't be in a clog like this. They'd be in their offices doing everything by net and email. Like her mother. Give up, she told herself. At least until you light somewhere with halfway decent capability.
Fifteen minutes later traffic had moved forward a good fifty feet only to halt again, but she finally had something, a small item under Markets-at-a-Glance/NYSE Most Active. The listing for Diversifications was footnoted with a comparison box, giving the trading before and after its acquisition of EyeTraxx. The date given was roughly two weeks before; nothing about a topic thread to follow.
Frustrated, Sam sat back, stretching her arms overhead through the open sunroof. She still didn't know what it meant, if anything. If it don't mean a thing, it ain't information, as Fez would say.
"Fez, you talk too much," she muttered. She went back to listening to excerpts from new speed-thrash releases as the sun climbed higher in the sky.
GridLid finally saw fit to deliver a bulletin about an accident half a mile from where she was; by then traffic was advancing regularly in twenty-foot spurts. A few food vendors had materialized to work the clog until the cops appeared and chased them out. Couldn't redirect traffic fast enough to avoid a clog, Sam thought sourly, but moved at the speed of light if someone was out making a profit. Her stomach growled. The cops had jogged back from the site of the wreck just before one of the vendors would have reached her.
She had meant to head straight for the Mimosa from the airport, but she knew if she didn't get something to eat, she was going to faint. Feeling shaky, she detoured onto Artesia and cruised until she found a quickie with fewer than five cars in the drive-thru lane. Quickies were not her cuisine of choice, but at least she'd had the luck to find one with a decent vegetarian offering.
The big menu screen was just out of her reach, and she had to hang out the window to touch the square next to "Sushi rice in seaweed cone." Her order appeared in red letters in the middle section of the screen; a moment later the words !Good Choice! flashed on and off. Cute, she thought. What else would it say-!Lousy Choice! or !No Good For You!? Maybe the burger-gobblers got !Slow Death!