"-power outages, brownouts, and scrambled signals all over the general area and possibly beyond," said a new voice, very young and very nervous. "As far as we can tell now, L.A. is effectively cut off communicationswise from the surrounding region and from the rest of the state. No quakes have been reported anywhere in the west. Authorities suspect some kind of vandalism but have been unable to trace the trouble to anything like an, uh, original, uh, source-" There was a full ten seconds of dead air while the cam panned up and down the line of cars.
What's wrong with this picture, Gabe thought suddenly. The machinery of the city was melting down, and they were all just watching it happen on TV. He wondered if Gina had reached Diversifications yet, if she'd found Mark. He had the very strong feeling that he should get out of there and try to make it to West Hollywood any way he could, even if he had to walk over the hoods of gridlocked vehicles like stepping-stones. At the same time he was afraid to leave an available working screen. Something told him he might not find another very soon.
The young voice on the dataline began repeating the news about the impending gridlock, the collision, and the driver who had had a stroke. On-screen the image began to ripple a bit, as if it were melting, and the colors of the vehicles began shifting toward whichever end of the spectrum they were closest to. The body of one vehicle started to pulse in a way that reminded Gabe of breathing.
Disturbed, he looked away from the screen, rubbing the back of his neck tiredly. He felt a bit odd, a bit fuzzy mentally, as if he had just woken up. Without warning the memory of the crazy rock star with the cape popped into his mind, and somehow he just knew the pulsing of the shadows on the cape and the image of the vehicle on-screen were identical.
Which had to be ridiculous, since one had nothing to do with the other, and even if it had, it was just an image on a screen, just a screwed-up image on a high-res external screen, not something that could affect you in any real, lasting way. There were no patterns produced from any screen that could do anything more than hypnotize the susceptible, and that was easily counteracted; there was no picture from any source that could actually hurt anyone-
"Change for the machines."
The voice was so quiet that Gabe wasn't sure at first that he hadn't imagined it. He turned to the woman on his right, feeling cold. "What did you say?" he asked.
She was staring at the screen as if she were seeing signs and wonders unfold on it. Something flickered at the edge of his peripheral vision, and he turned to look. It was no more than a fast flash, something just beyond the upper limit of subliminal, but the whole picture was vivid in his mind, some strange body of water and a stony shore, and the soft silhouette of someone standing on it. The image seemed strangely familiar, but he was sure he had never seen it before. For that matter, he wasn't sure he had seen it just now.
"Damned Schrodinger world," the woman muttered, running a hand over her head. "Never know till you look, do you? Never know who it'll be, waiting there for you…"
Gabe was about to ask her if she had sockets when she fell backwards off the stool, hitting the floor flat on her back.
"God, I hate drunks," said the man on Gabe's other side as several people rushed to the woman's side.
"She isn't drunk," Gabe said. He wanted to go to her, but he was frozen in place, watching as someone lifted her head. One wide staring eye was fiery red, and a thin line of blood trickled from her nose. A man with gilded hair turned to look at Gabe suspiciously.
"You hit her?"
Gabe shook his head. "No. I never touched her. She just- fell."
The woman's eyes focused on him briefly then, and her lips moved, silently forming one word before she went limp. "I think she's dead," someone said nervously. "Call an ambulance," said someone else.
"No, call Life-Flyer."
"Call the cops. They'll call Life-Flyer."
"She's got sockets," Gabe said. "Look in her wallet or purse, if she's got one. There should be a card."
"Right here," said the man with the gilded hair, holding up her wrist. There was an old-fashioned ID bracelet around it. "Says she's socketed and allergic to chocolate. I don't think she's had any chocolate." He frowned up at Gabe. "You think her sockets blew up?"
"I don't know," Gabe lied, his voice faint. He kept his back to the screen, imagining himself on the floor next to the woman in roughly the same condition. It could have happened; why hadn't it?
He had to get to Diversifications. The bartender was calling the police, or trying to, as he slipped off the bar stool, made his way through the people to the door, and waded out into the gridlocked city.
28
He'd had no idea there was so much infection floating around in the system, coming in, going out, drifting like ocean-going mines or sitting camouflaged in various pockets and hidey-holes.
What he had sometimes thought of as the arteries and veins of an immense circulatory system was closer to a sewer. Strange clumps of detritus and trash, some inert and harmless, some toxic when in direct contact, and some actively radiating poison, scrambled along with the useful and necessary traffic. The useful and necessary things were mostly protected, though the protection made them larger, to the point where some of them were slower and more unwieldy than they should have been.
There was an ecology here, gradually becoming more and more unbalanced, polluted, and infected. Ecological disaster had been inevitable, even before the stroke had been released into the system; there was no way around it. It would be universal. Computer apocalypse, a total system crash.
And he would cease to be.
He had escaped that fate once by leaving the worn-out, failing meat, only to find the same thing creeping up on him Out Here.
He wouldn't let it happen. He couldn't. He would warn them, show them somehow, make them stop before the whole system went down in a firestorm. God damn them all, he thought furiously, God damn them all for doing what they always did, on every level in every way they could. Whole portions of the physical world had yet to be reclaimed from the unusable, unlivable state that negligence and malevolence had consigned them to, and the fuckers still didn't get it, they still didn't understand you weren't supposed to shit where you ate.
Nor did you, when you were meat and busy getting toxed. The thought came at him from nowhere and everywhere, in the simultaneous container and content that he was now. He had a moment of shame for his own blindness.
He spread his awareness out cautiously. It was like being in many places at once, taking in the information that came at the speed of light and working in nanoseconds as matter-of-factly as he had once worked in minutes and hours to shape it into something understandable for himself. He was already accustomed to the idea of having multiple awarenesses and a single concentrated core that were both the essence of self. The old meat organ would not have been able to cope with that land of reality, but out here he appropriated more capacity the way he once might have exchanged a smaller shirt for a larger one.
Gina's identification flashed at him as soon as it entered the system; in less time than it would have taken him to draw a breath, he had located her, but contacting her had been far more difficult. The little one had splattered itself unevenly through the traffic system, jumping in through the double-headed receivers that accommodated both the dataline and GridLid. But in the larger context of the city, the little stroke had to work harder, at least for the time being. That most of its capacity was taken up with the act of infection made it less of a threat to him; at least he had been able to contact her for a few seconds.