"Thank you, I know," Fez said grimly. "Secondary swelling after a stroke."
"Who?" she asked.
"A rather disturbing number of people who have sockets. And not just strokes. Other neurological disorders, too. Seizures, sudden onset of multiple sclerosis, Huntington's chorea, Parkinson's-" Fez frowned. "Not enough Parkinson's cases, actually, to be significant." He blew out a breath. "The vast majority seem to be strokes of varying severity, and seizures. But the number of brain tumors ought to be ringing somebody's fire bell, and I don't think it is."
"All from sockets?" Sam asked, feeling her stomach turn over.
"They say there's absolutely no physical evidence connecting sockets to any of this," he said, scrolling the dense text forward several lines. "If you can believe them. They're calling it a 'statistically correct sampling of the populace,' unquote, mentioning other factors such as the effects of mutagens from environmental poisoning in the last century."
"We didn't kick you in the head, your grandparents did," Sam said.
Fez gave her shoulders a squeeze. "That's my Sam-I-Am."
"I'm not yours," she snapped.
He blinked at her in surprise for a moment, and then his face took on a wary look. "This is not the time to be mad at me, Sam."
"I know." She could feel her face getting warm. Great; she was blushing. She only did that maybe once in two or three blue moons, and it had to be now. She gave an awkward shrug. "Hey, I'm trying to be a grown-up. I don't do so bad most of the time."
He was looking back and forth, from the screen to her, caught between the two, and she wanted to kick herself. Something big and bad was happening, and she had to give herself away by getting pissy over a casual remark she'd heard from him a hundred times before.
"Anything I say to you is going to sound lame," he said after a few moments. "I can tell you, 'Sam, you're very young, and I'm a broken-down old wreck' or 'Jesus, Sam, why, you're young enough to be my granddaughter, it's too indecent,' and we both know the meanest Hollywood hack could probably write better dialogue."
She laughed a little in spite of everything. "Forget about it. I'm sorry. I make a shitty fugitive, and I make a shitty Mimosan, and sometimes I'm a shitty friend, too."
"It's a shitty world," Fez said lightly, and they laughed together.
"I'm sorry," she said again, sobering. "It is a shitty world. What about this? Is anyone doing anything?"
"Not as far as I can tell. They're slowing down doing the procedure in some places, and a new clinic in Schenectady that was supposed to open has been delayed. Every single case was reported to be neurologically sound before and after the sockets were put in."
"Then it's something going into the sockets," Sam said. "I mean, assuming it isn't twentieth-century mutagens."
"Well, you're not a shitty thinker, whatever else you may be. But according to this nothing like neurotransmitter is going into anyone's sockets. It's all just entertainment stuff-rock videos, Hollywood releases. Commercials."
"Commercials would do it-" She stopped. "Art told me way back when that Visual Mark could possibly have a stroke in the future. If he's among the cases, that's stone-home evidence they knowingly implanted sockets into the head of someone who was already manifesting a problem."
Fez went back several screens and scanned a list of names. "Not here," he said after a moment. "Even if he was, we'd go to jail proving it. Receiving stolen meds."
"I'd cut a deal. It would be worth it." She looked at him. "Hell, I'll go to jail. You stay here, have fun." She paused. "I mean, this is not my favorite place I've ever lived."
"I knew what you meant," Fez said serenely, going back to the screen he'd been looking at. "The thing to do right now, I think, is give this to Art and let him run with it. If it means anything at all, he'll figure it out."
"You have a lot of faith in him." Sam sighed. "Actually, that's what I was going to suggest. Art can get around the system, find out all kinds of things. Between him and us we may be able to figure it out. It sure worked before. I just don't know where we'll hide out this time."
Fez gave her a puzzled frown. "Pardon?"
"It just seems like every time Art makes some kind of big discovery, we end up wanted for questioning."
"Only once, Sam."
"See? A definite pattern." She wiped a hand over her face. "Shit, I'm tired." Fatigue had suddenly resettled itself on her like some tremendous roosting animal. "And I have to go to the bathroom. Pardon me while I go get my little pail and shovel to play in the sand. Don't worry, I'll bury it deep so it won't kill anybody." She got up clumsily and started away.
Fez caught her hand. "Maybe sometime we can sit down in my apartment-my new apartment, wherever and whenever that may be-and I can try to explain some of the things I want. And if things had broken just a little bit differently, who's to say? But I've always taken you seriously, Sam. In case you had any doubt."
She nodded tiredly. "That's okay. Just-" she shrugged. "Next lifetime, let's get it right." She staggered off in search of toilet paper.
He was in a sort of rest/sleep mode when he first sensed it.
A presence and not a presence, it seemed as if it were calling to him in a way, signaling, beckoning, from somewhere within the Diversifications system.
At first he thought it was Gina, coming on-line to be with him after all, but as he sensed more of it, he realized there was nothing of her in it. Abruptly he flashed on the idle meat, still in the pit. The records said it had disconnected and taken itself home, but it was really still there. Records were easy to manipulate, and he'd tried to keep them as normal looking as possible, so as not to let anyone know he wasn't actually disconnecting at all. The prospect of returning to the meat, of being weighted down, was less appealing all the time.
He wished he had some way of getting the meat to operate at least briefly on its own, without him right there to control it. Then it could disconnect, walk around, go home, and come back. The doctors would accept such a performance as normal, just as they had accepted the little show he had put on for them earlier. After all, they were still busy processing the hordes of Diversifications employees, the social-expression composers, the hardware designers, the administrative people, and the fabled Upstairs Team. Meat was easy to bamboozle. It had to expend so much energy and attention just dragging itself around that it tended to miss a lot.
In the midst of his ruminations on the meat problem, he felt the thing again, no closer but somehow stronger. From Rivera's area, he realized. His attention blinked into existence there, and without warning it went for him.
It was a voracious thing, mindless under a facade that was vaguely like himself; impressions of old sensations, pain, compulsion, the old drive toward oblivion. Juggernaut, wanting to devour and to infiltrate, rape, merge. There was a blip of consciousness or near consciousness to it, a shadow of consciousness all destructive in its makeup, and yet no more deliberately evil than cobra venom. It knew nothing else, and in a way it knew nothing at all, except that it would do what it would do.
He almost got away; it almost got him.
Both, for some infinitesimal measure of time (damned Schrodinger world)-he was feeling himself being reeled into it and watching from a safe distance as it moved along each new item in the review queue, sowing itself in little flashes of yellow, in a driving beat-
He flickered away to the meat and tuned in the brain like a small, feeble radio.
The brain was still running, but it had a new balkiness. He could not have depended on it to work a routine; it would have garbled each line in the act of reading it.
Abrupdy he realized that if he could have removed this new shell of garbled operation, he would have something very similar to the thing sitting in Manny Rivera's area working away on the items in the frozen release queue.