He could hear, pitched over her voice, the line-ghost’s shrill Fuck you! Fuck you!, his own hand glowing mottled red as the face’s infantile passion seeped through. “Ree… please. Come on -”
Then it struck him. His head filled with light. The insubstantial body grafted onto his thoughts seemed to float equidistant from every corridor surface. “Fuck this,” said Axxter. “And fuck you.” (Yeah! Yeah! shouted the ghost.) For a moment the corridor, the door with Ree standing in it, all became insubstantial; he felt the narrow confines of the bivouac sling against his shoulders, his cramped muscles swelling with the pulse of his anger. Ree gaped at him as he continued to shout. “I spend all this money to come see you, and this is the crap you lay on me? Forget it. Just forget it. You – and all your goddamn fucking horizontal thought processes – you can just go fuck yourself.” (Eeee! Yeah!) He swung his gaze away from the door, a dizzying sweep across the square-edged vectors. Even before the perspective sightlines settled down, he was striding away, the impact of his boots now loud enough to cross the hearing threshold. “See you in the funny pages, bitch.” He shouted it ahead of himself, ahead of the carrier-image, and was gratified to see doorways all along the hallway snap fearfully shut.
“Way to go, ace! Yah! Yah!” The line ghost babbled happily.
“Shut up.” He gritted his teeth – or tried to; the carrier-image fed back no corresponding pressure inside the skull.
The face swung in a short arc as Axxter strode on. “You really told her! It was great!” The rolling eyes filled with delight and admiration.
“Yeah – great.” Never again. He shook the image’s head. Absolutely promise yourself – no more of this shit.
“I can get her for you! Fix her little red wagon but good!” The face on Axxter’s arm glowed, feverish in its excitement. “Come on – you and me – it’ll be a gas!”
“Goddamn it. Get off me.” He scrabbled at the face with the fingernails of his other hand. A pain signal traveled up the carrier-image’s arm, triggered by the self-inflicted violation.
“You’re no fun.” The face, sulky now, slid off and wavered in space. The grating voice called from behind him: “You stink, and your edges are all blurry… and… and…”
Alone with his own thoughts at last, and the anger still simmering in his guts. Or whatever’s in that place when you’re on hollow time; nothing, I guess. Nothing at all. Here or back in the flesh.
He looked up and saw himself.
A mirror, he thought at first. Right in the middle of the goddamn corridor. But different, he realized; as if it were made of some finer glass that had drawn the fuzzy low-resolution image into sharper focus, the outline razor-edged where it stood facing him. As he stared at it, the image turned its head, leaning a three-quarter profile toward him. Smiling; the centers of its eyes dark, nothing behind.
Ny – It lifted its hand toward him.
I – He heard the echo at his ear. The corridor filled with cold, and he felt afraid. “Okay! HoloDays!” He tilted his face up to the ceiling and shouted, all the while aware of the mirror-image’s hand reaching on a line level with his chest. The odd notion struck him that the more solid image might be able to reach right inside his insubstantial one, to pluck out some luminous fiber that was his heart. “That’s it – terminate the call.”
Don’t go -
O - “Did you hear me?” An edge of panic filtered into his voice.
The corridor disappeared. On his back, lying in the sling out on the wall, he looked up at the agency’s smiling clock centered in the terminal. He pulled himself upright, his spine unkinking with little stabs at each vertebra.
The clock face swam ahead of him, hanging in the dark night. A woman’s voice, a different one, sounded. “We hope you enjoyed your time with us. And that we may again be of service to you in meeting all your recreational needs. Remember: absence may make hearts grow fonder, but with HoloDays -”
“Cut it.” Axxter rubbed his brow; the time spent walking around in the carrier-image had left him hung over, as it had the last time and every time before.
Stiffly: “Will there be anything else?”
He gazed at the totaled charges in the corner of the terminal, and beyond them to the Small Moon in the distance off the building, relaying the signal from the transceiver. Away from the spooky mirror-image – whatever the hell that had been; more line-ghost shit, he supposed; but genuinely spookier – and back out here in his cheerless bivouac, the fear had dissipated. But not the anger; that remained, a dull rock under his breastbone.
That’s a fuck of a lot to pay for no fun at all. As he watched, the total went up another few cents, for keeping the HoloDays agency waiting on the line. A lot, just to have walked into more of that stupid Ree’s shit.
He brooded a moment longer before speaking. “Yeah, there’s something more.” He rubbed his hands across his knees. “First off, I want a guarded line this time…”
† † †
Guyer looked up from the book in her hands when he appeared. “That’s sweet.” Smiling. “You came all this way.”
HoloDays had put his image floating in space, a meter away from the wall. He reached out and grasped the edge of her sling. Somewhere farther away on the vertical metal, the gentle snuffling sounds of her grazing motorcycle came sharp and distinct to his synthed ear.
“I just wanted to see you again.”
She kept her finger in the book to mark her place. “Must’ve cost you.”
He let the carrier-image shrug for him. “They put on a surcharge for having Ask & Receive figure out your location. That’s all.”
The smile saddened. “I don’t usually do anything except real flesh, Ny. Just one of my little preferences. If that’s what you came here for.” She laid the book down on a pillow at the sling’s narrow end. “You know there’s places you could go for that; I could give you some recommendations.”
He shook his head. “No; it’s not important. But… if you wanted to give it a try… I paid for the complete sensory package. With on-line enhancements. I could respond very well.”
Her eyes widened a bit. “Really? You must be feeling pretty flush.”
Tilting the image’s head back, he looked up the dark height of the building, all the way to the distant top, the same black as the surrounding night. “No -” He looked back at her. “No, I just don’t give a shit.”
“Well… in that case…” Guyer reached out and brushed aside his shirt, a film of smoke over his skin. “It’ll cost you a little bit more still. Just on principle, you know.”
“Sure.” He closed his eyes. Her hand felt like fire as it moved down his ribs. “I understand everything.”
† † †
He laid his head on her breast. Lying together in the sling; she held him in her arms, a circle carefully held around the image. “I saw myself.” He tilted his face to look up at her. “Before. Before I came here.”
She made a motion to stroke his hair, the dark strands unreachable beneath her fingertips. “Really?”
“It was like a mirror. Only it moved when I didn’t.”
He could almost feel her stiffen against him. “Ny -” Her gaze was level and no longer playful. “If you see something like that again – and if it says anything to you – don’t listen. Okay? Just don’t. I know about these things.”