She stopped laughing then, sat up, studied his face. White, even teeth worried at her lower lip, like she was dragging up something she didn't want to think about. At last she ventured,
"Brainlock?"
"Yeah," he said bitterly. "They told me I'd never go back to D.C. And then the fuckers laughed."
"What did they get you for?" "I'm a thief." He wasn't about to tell her that the actual charge was career shoplifting.
"Lotta old computer hacks spent their lives programming machines. And you know what? The human brain is not a goddamn bit like a machine, no way. They just don't program the same." Deke knew this shrill, desperate rap, this long, circular jive that the lonely string out to the rare listener; knew it from a hundred cold and empty nights spent in the company of strangers. Nance was lost in it, and Deke, nodding and yawning, wondered if he'd even be able to stay awake when they finally hit that bed of hers.
"I built that projection I hit you with myself," she said, hugging her knees up beneath her chin.
"It's for muggers, you know? I just happened to have it on me, and I threw it at you `cause I thought it was so funny, you trying to sell me that shit little Indojavanese programmer." She hunched forward and held out her hand again. "Look here." Deke cringed. "No, no, it's okay, I swear it, this is different." She opened her hand.
A single blue flame danced there, perfect and everchanging. "Look at that," she marveled. "Just look. I programmed that. It's not some diddly little seven image job either. It's a continuous twohour loop, seven thousand, two hundred seconds, never the same twice, each instant as individual as a fucking snowflake!"
The flame's core was glacial crystal, shards and facets flashing up, twisting and gone, leaving behind near-subliminal images so bright and sharp that they cut the eye. Deke winced. People mostly. Pretty little naked people, fucking. "How the hell did you do that?" She rose, bare feet slipping on slick magazines, and melodramatically swept folds of loose printout from a raw plywood shelf. He saw a neat row of small consoles, austere and expensive-looking. Custom work. "This is the real stuff I got here. Image facilitator. Here's my fast-wipe module. This is a brainmap oneto-
one function analyzer." She sang off the names like a litany. "Quantum flicker stabilizer.
Program splicer. An image assembler..."
"You need all that to make one iittle flame?" "You betcha.
This is all state of the art, professional projective wetware gear.
It's years ahead of anything you've seen."
"Hey," he said, "you know anything about SPADS & FOKKERS?"
She laughed. And then, because he sensed the time was right, he reached out to take her hand.
"Don't you touch me, motherfuck, don't you ever touch me!" Nance screamed, and her head slammed against the wall as she recoiled, white and shaking with terror.
"Okay!" He threw up his hands. "Okay! I'm nowhere near you. Okay?"
She cowered from him. Her eyes were round and unblinking; tears built up at the corners, rolled down ashen cheeks. Finally, she shook her head. "Hey. Deke. Sorry. I should've told you."
"Told me what?" But he had a creepy feeling. already knew. The way she clutched her head. The weakly spasmodic way her hands opened and closed. "You got a brainlock, too."
"Yeah." She closed her eyes. "It's a chastity lock. My asshole parents paid for it. So I can't stand to have anybody touch me or even stand too close." Eyes opened in blind hate. "I didn't even do anything. Not a fucking thing. But they've both got jobs and they're so horny for me to have a career that they can't piss straight. They're afraid I'd neglect my studies if I got, you know, involved in sex and stuff. The day the brainlock comes off I am going to fuck the vilest, greasiest, hairiest . .
She was clutching her head again. Deke jumped up and rummaged through the medicine cabinet. He found a jar of B-complex vitamins, pocketed a few against need, and brought two to Nance, with a glass of water. "Here." He was careful to keep his distance. "This'lI take the edge off."
"Yeah, yeah," she said. Then, almost to herself, "You must really think I'm a jerk."
The games room in the Greyhound station was almost empty. A lone, long-jawed fourteen-year-old was bent over a console, maneuvering rainbow fleets of submarines in the murky grid of the North
Atlantic.
Deke sauntered in, wearing his new kicker drag, and leaned against a cinder-block wall made smooth by countless coats of green enamel. He'd washed the dye from his proleboy butch, boosted jeans and
T-shirt from the Goodwill, and found a pair of stompers in the sauna locker of a highstack with cutrate security.
"Seen Tiny around, friend?" The subs darted like neon guppies.
"Depends on who's asking." Deke touched the remote behind his left ear. The Spad snap-rolled over the console, swift and delicate as a dragonfly. It was beautiful; so perfect, so true it made the room seem an illusion. He buzzed the grid, millimeters from the glass, taking advantage of the programmed ground effect.
The kid didn't even bother to look up. "Jackman's," he said. "Down Richmond Road, over by the surplus."
Deke let the Spad fade in midclimb. Jackman's took up most of the third floor of an old brick building. Deke found Best Buy War Surplus first, then a broken neon sign over an unlit lobby. The sidewalk out front was littered with another kind of surplus damaged vets, some of them dating back to Indochina. Old men who'd left their eyes under Asian suns squatted beside twitching boys who'd inhaled mycotoxins in Chile. Deke was glad to have the battered elevator doors sigh shut behind him.
A dusty Dr. Pepper clock at the far side of the long, spectral room told him it was a quarter to eight. Jackman's had been embalmed twenty years before he was born, sealed away behind a yellowish film of nicotine, of polish and hair oil. Directly beneath the clock, the flat eyes of somebody's grandpappy's prize buck regarded Deke from a framed, blown-up snapshot gone the slick sepia of cockroach wings. There was the click and whisper of pool, the squeak of a work boot twisting on linoleum as a player leaned in for a shot. Somewhere high above the green-shaded lamps hung a string of crepe-paper Christmas bells faded to dead rose. Deke looked from one cluttered wall to the next. No facilitator.
"Bring one in, should we need it," someone said. He turned, meeting the mild eyes of a bald man with steel-rimmed glasses. "My name's Cline. Bobby Earl. You don't look like you shoot pool, mister." But there was nothing threatening in Bobby Earl's voice or stance. He pinched the steel frames from his nose and polished the thick lenses with a fold of tissue. He reminded Deke of a shop instructor who'd patiently tried to teach him retrograde biochip installation. "I'm a gambler," he said, smiling. His teeth were white plastic. "I know I don't much look it."
"I'm looking for Tiny," Deke said. "Well," replacing the glasses, "you're not going to find him.
He's gone up to Bethesda to let the V.A. clean his plumbing for him. He wouldn't fly against you any how." "Why not?"
"Well, because you're not on the circuit or I'd know your face. You any good?" When Deke nodded,
Bobby Earl called down the length of Jackman's, "Yo, Clarence! You bring out that facilitator. We got us a flyboy."
Twenty minutes later, having lost his remote and what cash he had left, Deke was striding past the bi soldiers of Best Buy.
"Now you let me tell you, boy," Bobby Earl had said in a fatherly tone as, hand on shoulder, he led Deke back to the elevator, "You're not going to win against a combat vet you listening to me?
I'm not even especially good, just an old grunt who was on hype fifteen. maybe twenty times. 01'
Tiny, he was a pilot. Spent entire enlistment hyped to the gills. He's got memb attenuation real bad ... you ain't never going to him."
It was a cool night. But Deke burned with anger and humiliation.
"Jesus, that's crude," Nance said as the Spad str mounds of pink underwear. Deke, hunched up on couch, yanked her flashy little Braun remote from behind his ear.
"Now don't you get on my case too, Miss richbitch gonna-have-a-job "
"Hey, lighten up! It's nothing to do with you it's just tech. That's a really primitive wafer you got there. I mean, on the street maybe it's fine. But compared to the work I do at school, it's hey. You ought to let me rewrite it for you.''
"Say what?" "Lemme beef it up. These suckers are all written in hexadecimal, see, `cause the industry programmers are all washed-out computer hacks. That's how they think. But let me take it to the reader-analyzer at the department, run a few changes on it, translate it into a modern wetlanguage. Edit out all the redundant intermediaries. That'll goose up your reaction time, cut the feedback loop in half. So you'll fly faster and better. Turn you into a real pro, Ace!" She took a hit off her bong, then doubled over laughing and choking.
"Is that legit?" Deke asked dubiously. "Hey, why do you think people buy gold-wire remotes? For the prestige? Shit. Conductivity's better, cuts a few nanoseconds off the reaction time. And reaction time is the name of the game, kiddo."
"No," Deke said. "If it were that easy, people'd already have it. Tiny Montgomery would have it.
He'd have the best."