Bonnie smirks at him and does a cat stretch on the tile before climbing to her feet. She shakes herself and tosses her fringe and gives him another smirk. “Really? I could have sworn you wanted it,” she says, and leaves him alone.
Huw pulls himself to his feet and staggers for the door, his throat no longer itching, but wriggling. He pushes weakly against the door and steps out into the corridor, where he confronts the entire court, which has apparently adjourned to follow him. The Vulture’s fists are fiercely planted on her hips.
“You’re infected,” the Vulture says. Her voice is ominously calm. “That’s unfortunate. We’ve got a nanocontainment box for you until we sort it out. We’ll pull an alternate juror from the pool.” Sandra, Bonnie, Dagbjört, the caveman, and the centenarian are all staring at him like he’s a sideshow curiosity. “Come along now, the guardsmen will take you to your box.” The guardsmen are a pair of hulking golems, stony-faced and brutal-looking. They advance on him with a thunderous tread, brandishing manacles like B-movie Inquisitors.
Huw’s mind blanks with fear and rage. Bastards! he tries to scream, and what comes out is an eerie howl that makes the jurors wince and probably terrifies every dog within a ten-kilometer radius. He feints toward them, then spins on his heel and dashes for the front doors. Curare darts spang off the rubber walls and rebound around him, but none hit him. He leaps off the courtroom steps and runs headlong into the humanswarm, plowing into its midst.
He runs without any particular direction, but his feet take him back to the hacker’s egg-shaped clinic of their own accord. He turns his head and scans the crowd for jurors or officers of the court. Seeing none, he thumps the egg until the door irises open, then dives through it.
The hacker is laid out on her table, encased in the instrument bush. Her fingers and toes work its tendrils in response to unknowable feedback from its goggles and earphones. Huw coughs in three-part harmony, and she gives her fingers a decisive waggle that causes the bush to contract into a fist near the ceiling.
She looks at him, takes in Huw’s watermarked throat and two-part snoring drone. “Right,” she says. “Looks like you’re about done, then.” The teapot at his belt translates efficiently, giving her a thick Brummie accent for no reason Huw understands.
“What the fuck is this shit?” Huw says, over his drone.
“No need for that sort of language,” she says primly. She gets up off her table and gestures toward it. “Up you go.”
Reluctantly, Huw climbs up, then watches the bush descend on him and encase him in a quintillion smart gossamer fingers.
“I uploaded your opportunistic code to a mailing list,” explains the hacker. “It was a big hit with the Euros—lucky for you it’s their waking hours, or it could have been another twelve hours before we heard back. You’ve solved quite a little mystery, you know.
“The betaware you’re infected with has been floating around the North Sea for about a month now, but it has failed to land a single successful somatic infection—until now. Lots of carriers but no afflicted. Best guess at its origin is a cometary mass extruded from the cloud that burned away protecting its payload.
“So it was quite the mystery until I pasted your genome into a followup. Then it was obvious—it’s looking for specific T helper lymphocytes. Welsh ones. Which begs another question: Why Welsh?
“And here we have the answer.” The bush’s tendrils stroked Huw’s growling voice box. “All those grotty Welsh vowel sounds and glottals. It needed a trained larynx to manifest.”
“Aaaagh,” Huw gargles, tensing angrily and trying to argue. The bush takes the opportunity to shove what feels like a wad of cotton wool into his mouth and extrude exploring wisps to brush samples from his epiglottis.
A histogram scrolls across the egg’s wall in time with Huw’s groan, spiking ferociously. “Oh, very nice,” she says. “You’re modulating a megabit a second over a spread-spectrum short-range audio link. Pushing the limits of info-sci, you are!”
Huw stutters another groan, then vomits a flood of obscenities: They’re enveloped in his di-vocal drone, and the histogram spikes in sympathy.
“No easy way to know what you’re spewing, of course. Lots of activity in your language and vision centers, though.” The bush firmly grips the sides of his head. “Do that again, will you? I’m going to run a PET scan.”
“I don’t think I can—,” he begins; then he bursts into Welsh profanity so foul, it triggers his old flinch reflex, some part of his limbic system certain that this sort of display will necessarily be accompanied by a ringing slap from his mother, however uploaded she might be these past fifty years.
“Right,” she says. “Right. Here’s my guess, then. You’re transmitting your sensoria—visual, auditory, olfactory, even tactile. Somewhere out there there’s a complementary bit of receiving equipment that can demodulate the signal. You’re a remote sensing apparatus.”
“Fuck,” Huw says. The histogram is still. He is voluntarily cursing.
“It’s kinky, yes?” she says. “Too kinky for you. One second.” Tentacles slither down his throat briskly, curl around inside his stomach, then come back out. It feels like he’s vomiting, except his guts are limp, and a big bolus of something or other is trying to stick in his throat on the way out. For a panicky moment he feels as if he’s choking—then the lump tears away with a bright stabbing pain, and he can breathe through his nose again.
“Ah, that’s better,” he hears distantly. “A beautiful little whistle! Easy to fence to some out-of-body perv, I think. Oh dear, did I say that aloud?” A fuzzy mat of bush tendrils peel away from his face to reveal an unsympathetic face peering down at him. “You did hear that, didn’t you? Hmm, what a pity. Well, your left kidney is in good shape—”
There’s a loud crash from outside the operating theater, followed by a wail from his belt. “In here!” screams his teapot. “Help, please come quickly!”
More crashing. The hacker straightens up, cursing under her breath. Casting around, her gaze falls on Huw’s biohazard burka. She grabs it and dives for the back door, sending a gleaming operating cart skidding across the floor. She dives out the back as something large batters at the entrance. The door bulges inward. Huw struggles to sit up, pushing back the suddenly quiescent instrument bush—it feels like wrestling with a half ton of candy floss. What now? he thinks wildly.
“In here!” shrieks the djinni, standing in holographic miniature on top of the teapot and waving its arms like a stranded sailor.
“You shut up,” Huw grunts. He manages to get his legs off the side of the chair and stumbles against the trolley. Another crash from the front door, and he sees something on the floor—something silvery and cylindrical, about ten centimeters long and one in diameter, for all the world like a pocket recorder covered in slime. That’s it? he puzzles, and thoughtlessly picks it up and pockets it just as the door gives up the uneven struggle and slams open to admit the two court golems, followed by an extremely irrate hanging judge.
“Arretez-vous!” yells his djinni. “He’s over here! Don’t let him get away this time!” With a sense of horror, Huw realizes that the little snitch is jumping up and down and pointing at him.
“No chance,” says Judge
Giuliani. “Get him!” she tells the golems, and they lurch toward him. “Your palanquin is outside, waiting to take you to the People’s Second Revolutionary Memorial Teaching Hospital. It’s quite secure,” she adds with an ugly grin. “Asshole. Do you want to spread it around? Have you any idea how much trouble you’re in already, breaking biocontainment?”