"You're not going to find a ride on this road any time soon," Perreault remarked. "You should've stuck with the main drag."
"I like walking alone. Avoids pointless small-talk."
Perreault took the hint.
She accessed the botfly's flight recorder, fearful of just how much incriminating information the device had stored. But its entire memory had been purged—an act of sabotage well beyond Perreault's capabilities. Even now, the black box somehow failed to retain the routine data stream the 'fly's sensors were sending it.
She was relieved, but not particularly surprised.
"Still there?" Clarke said.
"Uh-huh. Link's still up."
"They're getting better with practice."
Perreault remembered Clarke's reflexive glance at her bare wrist, back in the dome. "What happened to your watch?"
"Smashed it."
"Why?"
"Your friends figured out how to override the off switch."
"They're not—" Not friends. Not even contacts. She didn’t know what they were.
"And now you're getting in through my visor. If I had any brains I'd lose that, too."
"So others have made contact?" Of course they had—why would Sou-Hon Perreault be the only person in the world to be given an audience with the Meltdown Madonna?
"Oh, right. I forgot," the mermaid said wryly. "You don't know anything."
"Have they? Others like me?"
"Worse," Clarke said, and kept walking.
Don't push it.
A stand of skeletal birch separated them for a few minutes. The port camera caught Lenie Clarke in fragments, through a vertical jumble of white slashes.
"I went into Maelstrom," she said. "People are—talking about me."
"Yeah. I know."
"Do you believe it? The stuff they're saying?"
Perreault tried for a light touch, not believing it herself: "So you're not carrying the end of the world around inside you?"
"If I am," Clarke said, "it doesn't show up on a blood panel."
"You can't believe most of the stuff you read in Maelstrom anyway," Perreault said. "Half of it contradicts the other half."
"It's all just crazy. I don't know how it got started." A few seconds of silence. Then: "I saw someone that looked like me the other day."
"I told you. You've got friends."
"No. It's not me you want. It's something in the wires. It just…stole my name for some reason."
Beep.
A sudden luminous rectangle, framing a flicker of motion. The stern camera zoomed reflexively.
"Hold on," Perreault said. "I've got a—Lenie."
"What?"
"You might want to get off the road. I think it's that psycho from the shelter."
It was. Hunched over the handlebars of an ancient mountain bike, he resolved in the zoom window like a grainy nightmare. He pumped, straining, all his weight on the pedals. The vehicle had no seat. It didn't have any tires, either; it rattled along the road on bare rims. It was a skeleton ridden by a monster. The monster's jacket was dark and wet, and missing one sleeve; it was not the one he'd been wearing before.
He kept his eyes on the road; only once did he spare a glance back over his shoulder. Eventually he faded in the murk.
"Lenie?"
"Here." She rose from a drainage ditch.
"He's gone," Perreault said. "The things you see when you don't have your gun. Asshole."
"No worse than anyone else back there." Clarke climbed back onto the road.
"Except for the fact that he beat someone to death."
"And a hundred people stood around and watched. Or didn't you notice?"
"Well—"
"People do that, you know. Just stand around and do nothing. They're fucking complicit, they're no better than—they're worse. At least he took a little initiative."
"I didn't notice you standing up to him," Perreault snapped, and instantly regretted her own defensiveness.
Clarke turned to face the botfly and said nothing. After a moment she resumed walking.
"They're not all—complicit, Lenie," Perreault said, more gently. "People want to act, they're just—afraid. And sometimes, experience teaches you that the only way to cope is to just—shut down…"
"Oh yeah, we're all just victims of our past. Don't you dare trot out that subroutine."
"What subroutine?"
"The poor little abuse victim. You know what abuse is, really? It's an excuse."
"Lenie, I'm not—"
"So some asshole grabs your cunt in daycare. So someone rams his cock up your ass. So what? Bruises, maybe. A bit of bleeding. You suffer more injury if you fall off the swings and break your arm, so how come you don't hear anyone wailing about abuse then?"
A thousand kilometers away, Perreault reeled in the surge of Clarke's vehemence. "I didn't say— and anyway, the physical injury's only part of it. The emotional damage—"
"Crap. You think we aren't built to withstand a little childhood trauma? You know how many of the higher mammals eat their own young? We wouldn't have lasted ten generations if a couple of childhood shit-kickings was enough to take us out for the count."
"Lenie—"
"You think all those armies and gangs and cops would be so keen on rape if we just didn't make such a big deal about it? If we didn't get all weak-kneed and trembly at the thought of being violated? Fuck that. I've been attacked by things straight out of nightmares. I've nearly been boiled and buried alive more times than I can count. I know all about the ways you can push a body to the breaking point, and sexual abuse doesn't even make the top ten."
She stopped and glared across at Perreault's distant teleop. Perreault zoomed: the rifter was shaking.
"Or do you have some basis for disagreement? Some personal experience to back up all your trendy platitudes?"
Sure I had experience. I watched. For years I watched, and felt nothing.
It was my job…
But of course she couldn't say that. "I—no. Not really."
"Course not. You're just a fucking tourist, aren't you? You're safe and comfy in some glass tower somewhere, and you stick a periscope into the real world every now and then and tell yourself you're experiencing life or some such shit. You're pathetic."
"Lenie—"
"Stop feeding off me."
She wouldn't say anything more. She stalked silently along that road in the dirty rain, refusing entreaty or apology. Brown sky faded to black. Visible light failed, infra kicked in. Lenie Clarke was a white-hot speck of anger at fixed range, endlessly moving.
In all that time she only spoke once. The words were barely more than a growl, and Sou-Hon Perreault did not believe they were intended for her ears. But the fly's enhanced senses had little regard for range and none for privacy: filter and gain turned Clarke's words from distant static to ugly, unmistakable truth:
"Everybody pays."
Vision Quest
There were two reasons Achilles Desjardins didn't indulge in sex with real partners. The second was, simulations gave him much more latitude.