Mona Lisa Overdrive (18 page)

“Gerald Chin, Dentist.”

“You said he was a plastic surgeon.”

“He is.”

“Why can’t we just go to a boutique like everybody else?”

He didn’t answer.

She couldn’t really feel much now, and part of her knew that she wasn’t as scared
as she should be. Maybe that was okay, though, because if she got scared enough she
wouldn’t be able to do anything, and definitely she wanted to get out of the whole
deal, whatever it was. On the drive over, she’d discovered this lump in the pocket
of Michael’s jacket. It had taken her ten minutes to figure out it was a shockrod,
like nervous suits carried. It felt like a screwdriver handle with a pair of blunt
metal horns where the shaft should be. It probably charged off wall current; she just
hoped Michael had kept up the charge. She figured Prior didn’t know it was there.
They were legal, most places, because they weren’t supposed to do much permanent damage,
but Lanette had known a girl who’d gotten worked over real bad with one and never
got much better.

If Prior didn’t know it was in her pocket, it meant he didn’t know everything, and
he had a stake in having her think he did. But then he hadn’t known how much Eddy
hated gambling.

She couldn’t feel much about Eddy, either, except
she still figured he was dead. No matter how much they’d given him, he still wouldn’t
walk out without those cases. Even if he was going for a whole new wardrobe he’d need
to get all dressed up to go shopping for it. Eddy cared about clothes more than almost
anything. And those gator cases were special; he’d got ’em off a hotel thief in Orlando,
and they were the closest thing he had to a home. And anyway, now that she thought
about it, she couldn’t see him going for a buy-out bid, because what he wanted most
in the whole world was to be part of some big deal. Once he was, he figured, people
would start to take him seriously.

So somebody finally took him seriously, she thought, as Prior carried her bag into
Gerald’s clinic. But not the way Eddy wanted.

She looked around at the twenty-year-old plastic furniture, the stacks of stim-star
magazines with Jap writing. It looked like a Cleveland haircut place. There was nobody
there, nobody behind the reception desk.

Then Gerald came through a white door, wearing the kind of crinkled foil suit that
paramedics wore for traffic accidents. “Lock the door,” he said to Prior, through
a blue paper mask that hid his nose, mouth, and chin. “Hello, Mona. If you’ll step
this way …” He gestured toward the white door.

She had her hand around the shockrod now, but she didn’t know how to turn it on.

She followed Gerald, Prior taking up the rear.

“Have a seat,” Gerald said. She sat on a white enamel chair. He came close, looked
at her eyes. “You need to rest, Mona. You’re exhausted.”

There was a serrated stud on the shockrod’s handle. Press it? Forward? Back?

Gerald went to a white box with drawers, got something out.

“Here,” he said, extending a little tube thing with writing on the side, “this will
help you.…” She barely
felt the tiny, measured spray; there was a black blot on the aerosol tube, just where
her eyes tried to focus, growing.…

She remembered the old man showing her how you kill a catfish. Catfish has a hole
in its skull, covered with skin; you take something stiff and skinny, a wire, even
a broomstraw did it, and you just slip it in.…

She remembered Cleveland, ordinary kind of day before it was time to get working,
sitting up in Lanette’s, looking at a magazine. Found this picture of Angie laughing
in a restaurant with some other people, everybody pretty but beyond that it was like
they had this
glow
, not really in the photograph but it was there anyway, something you feel. Look,
she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow.

It’s called money, Lanette said.

It’s called money. You just slip it in.

He arrived unannounced, as he always did, and alone, the Net helicopter settling like
a solitary wasp, stirring strands of seaweed across the damp sand.

She watched from the rust-eaten railing as he jumped down, something boyish, almost
bumbling, in his apparent eagerness. He wore a long topcoat of brown tweed; unbuttoned,
it showed the immaculate front of one of his candystriped shirts, the propwash stirring
his brown-blond hair and fluttering his Sense/Net tie. Robin was right, she decided:
he did look as though his mother dressed him.

Perhaps it was deliberate, she thought, as he came striding up the beach, a feigned
naïveté. She remembered Porphyre once maintaining that major corporations were entirely
independent of the human beings who composed the body corporate. This had seemed patently
obvious to Angie, but the hairdresser had insisted that she’d failed to grasp his
basic premise. Swift was Sense/Net’s most important human decision-maker.

The thought of Porphyre made her smile; Swift, taking it as a greeting, beamed back
at her.

He offered her lunch in San Francisco; the helicopter was extremely fast. She countered
by insisting on preparing him a bowl of dehydrated Swiss soup and microwaving a frozen
brick of sourdough rye.

She wondered, watching him eat, about his sexuality. In his late thirties, he somehow
conveyed the sense of an extraordinarily bright teenager in whom the onset of puberty
had been subtly delayed. Rumor, at one time or another, had supplied him with every
known sexual preference, and with several that she assumed were entirely imaginary.
None of them seemed at all likely to Angie. She’d known him since she’d come to Sense/Net;
he’d been well established in the upper echelons of production when she’d arrived,
one of the top people in Tally Isham’s team, and he’d taken an immediate professional
interest in her. Looking back, she assumed that Legba had steered her into his path:
he’d been so obviously on his way up, though she might not have seen it herself, then,
dazzled by the glitter and constant movement of the scene.

Bobby had taken an instant dislike to him, bristling with a Barrytowner’s inbred hostility
to authority, but had generally managed to conceal it for the sake of her career.
The dislike had been mutual, Swift greeting their split and Bobby’s departure with
obvious relief.

“Hilton,” she said, as she poured him a cup of the herbal tea he preferred to coffee,
“what is it that’s keeping Robin in London?”

He looked up from the steaming cup. “Something personal, I think. Perhaps he’s found
a new friend.” Bobby had always been Angie’s
friend
, to Hilton. Robin’s friends tended to be young, male, and athletic; the muted erotic
sequences in her stims with Robin were assembled from stock footage provided by Continuity
and heavily treated by Raebel and his effects team. She remembered the one night they’d
spent together, in a windblown house in southern Madagascar, his passivity and his
patience. They’d
never tried again, and she’d suspected that he feared that intimacy would undermine
the illusion their stims projected so perfectly.

“What did he think of me going into the clinic, Hilton? Did he tell you?”

“I think he admired you for it.”

“Someone told me recently that he’s been telling people I’m crazy.”

He’d rolled up his striped shirtsleeves and loosened his tie. “I can’t imagine Robin
thinking that, let alone saying it. I know what he thinks of you. You know what gossip
is, in the Net.…”

“Hilton, where’s Bobby?”

His brown eyes, very still. “Isn’t that over, Angie?”

“Hilton, you know. You must know. You know where he is. Tell me.”

“We lost him.”

“Lost him?”

“Security lost him. You’re right, of course; we kept the closest possible track of
him after he left you. He reverted to type.” There was an edge of satisfaction in
his voice.

“And what type was that?”

“I’ve never asked what brought you together,” he said. “Security investigated both
of you, of course. He was a petty criminal.”

She laughed. “He wasn’t even that.…”

“You were unusually well represented, Angie, for an unknown. You know that your agents
made it a key condition of your contract that we take Bobby Newmark on as well.”

“Contracts have had stranger conditions, Hilton.”

“And he went on salary as your … companion.”

“My ‘friend.’ ”

Was Swift actually blushing? He broke eye contact, looked down at his hands. “When
he left you, he went to Mexico, Mexico City. Security was tracing him, of course;
we don’t like to lose track of anyone who knows that much about the personal life
of one of our stars. Mexico City is a very … 
complicated
place.… We do know that he seemed to be trying to continue his previous … career.”

“He was hustling cyberspace?”

He met her eyes again. “He was seeing people in the business, known criminals.”

“And? Go on.”

“He … faded out. Vanished. Do you have any idea what Mexico City is like, if you slip
below the poverty line?”

“And he was poor?”

“He’d become an addict. According to our best sources.”

“An addict? Addicted to what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Continuity!”

He almost spilled his tea.

“Hello, Angie.”

“Bobby, Continuity. Bobby Newmark, my
friend
,” glaring at Swift. “He went to Mexico City. Hilton says he became addicted to something.
A drug, Continuity?”

“I’m sorry, Angie. That’s classified data.”

“Hilton …”

“Continuity,” he began, and coughed.

“Hello, Hilton.”

“Executive override, Continuity. Do we have that information?”

“Security’s sources described Newmark’s addiction as neuroelectronic.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Some sort of, um, ‘wirehead’ business,” Swift offered.

She felt an impulse to tell him how she’d found the drug, the charger.

Hush, child
. Her head was full of the sound of bees, a building pressure.

“Angie? What is it?” He was half up from his chair, reaching for her.

“Nothing. I’m … upset. I’m sorry. Nerves. It isn’t your fault. I was going to tell
you about finding Bobby’s cyberspace deck. But you already know about that, don’t
you?”

“Can I get you anything? Water?”

“No, thanks, but I’ll lie down for a while, if you don’t mind. But stay, please. I
have some ideas for orbital sequences that I’d like your advice on.…”

“Of course. Have a nap, I’ll have a walk on the beach, and then we’ll talk.”

She watched him from the bedroom window, watched his brown figure recede in the direction
of the Colony, followed by the patient little Dornier.

He looked like a child on the empty beach; he looked as lost as she felt.

As the sun rose, still no power for the 100-watt bulbs, Gentry’s loft filled with
a new light. Winter sunlight softened the outlines of the consoles and the holo table,
brought out the texture of the ancient books that lined sagging chipboard shelves
along the west wall. As Gentry paced and talked, his blond roostertail bobbing each
time he spun on a black bootheel, his excitement seemed to counter the lingering effects
of Cherry’s sleep-derms. Cherry sat on the edge of the bed, watching Gentry but glancing
occasionally at the battery telltale on the stretcher’s superstructure. Slick sat
in a broken-down chair scrounged from the Solitude and recushioned with transparent
plastic over wadded pads of discarded clothing.

To Slick’s relief, Gentry had skipped the whole business of the Shape and launched
straight into his theory about the aleph thing. As always, once Gentry got going,
he used words and constructions that Slick had trouble understanding, but Slick knew
from experience that it was easier not to interrupt him; the trick was in pulling
some kind of meaning out of the overall flow, skipping over the parts you didn’t understand.

Gentry said that the Count was jacked into what amounted to a mother-huge microsoft;
he thought the slab was a single solid lump of biochip. If that was true, the thing’s
storage capacity was virtually infinite; it would’ve been unthinkably expensive to
manufacture. It was, Gentry said, a fairly strange thing for anyone to have built
at all, although such things were rumored to exist and to have their uses, most particularly
in the storage of vast amounts of confidential data. With no link to the global matrix,
the data was immune to every kind of attack via cyberspace. The catch, of course,
was that you couldn’t access it via the matrix; it was dead storage.

“He could have anything in there,” Gentry said, pausing to look down at the unconscious
face. He spun on his heel and began his pacing again. “A world. Worlds. Any number
of personality-constructs …”

“Like he’s living a stim?” Cherry asked. “That why he’s always in REM?”

“No,” Gentry said, “it’s not simstim. It’s completely interactive. And it’s a matter
of scale. If this is aleph-class biosoft, he literally could have anything at all
in there. In a sense, he could have an
approximation of everything.…
”