Done everything I could, she thought. Maybe . . . just rest . . . a little.
She did not know if seconds or minutes had passed, but she surfaced from another, even deeper fog to see something moving beside her. Calliope opened her eyes wide, but that was all she could do. Even if it was Dread himself she did not believe she could move a centimeter.
It was another bloody hand. Not her own.
The woman with the face pale as paper was reaching for the pad, fingers walking slowly toward it like a red-and-white spider. Calliope could only watch in dismay as the hand crept onto the screen and began, clumsily but determinedly, to open files, to move things around.
She'll cut off the call. Calliope tried to reach out but her muscles would not respond. What if no one's picked it up yet? What the hell is this idiot woman doing?
The bloody hand slowed, touched again, paused, then slid off the screen, leaving behind a streak of translucent crimson. Through her own swiftly encroaching fog Calliope heard the woman beside her take a deep, gurgling breath.
That's it, thought Calliope. She's dead.
"Send," the woman whispered.
CHAPTER 46
Thoughts Like Smoke
NETFEED/NEWS: UN High Court to Rule on "Lifejack" Case
(visuaclass="underline" excerpt from Svetlana Stringer episode of Lifejack!)
VO: The UN High Court in the Hague has agreed to hear the case of Svetlana Stringer, a woman who claims the netshow Lifejack! had no right to select her for surveillance and create a documentary about her love life and family problems without her permission. Her attorneys argue that unless the High Court makes a stand, continual blurring of the lines of privacy by the media will mean that soon no one will have a right to any private life at all. Attorneys for the American network that makes Lifejack! insist that a waiver Ms. Stringer signed several years ago to allow herself to be filmed for another program—a documentary on music education made when she was a teenager—means she has given up her right to resist surveillance.
(visuaclass="underline" Bling Saberstrop, attorney for ICN)
SABERSTROP: "UN guidelines on privacy are just that—guidelines, not laws. We consider this to be a case where the plaintiff wants to have her cake and eat it, too—privacy only when she wants it."
He watched the dying policewoman squirming in her own blood for a few moments after he reentered the network, but then he had to close the window. It was too distracting. Too entertaining. The problem was, he wanted to do everything at once.
Like a kid in a candy shop, he thought.
He wanted to watch the cop bitch's last moments, but it was one of the things he could set aside for later. He also wanted to drive the operating system out of hiding and break its pseudo-will once and for all, make it abandon this infuriating, pointless resistance and truly yield to him. And he most definitely wanted to hunt down Martine Desroubins and the Sulaweyo woman and all the other escapees, then carry them back to his endless white house in the virtual Outback and give each a magnificently intricate, drawn-out death. The prospects were enchanting: he would imprison them, terrify them, permit a few apparent escapes, even take the place of first one, then another, so he could live each terrifying moment with them just as he had done with the woman Quan Li, playing with alternating hope and despair until they all went almost mad.
But never completely mad, of course. Because then the ending would lose its bite.
And he would record the whole thing. He would watch it over and over after the grand enterprise was complete, edit it to highlight the artistry, add music and effects—hours and hours of the greatest entertainment ever created. Perhaps someday he would even allow others to see it. It would become an object of religious significance, at least among those few people who really understood how the world worked. His name would be spoken in awed whispers long after he was dead.
But I won't be dead, will I? I won't ever die.
No wonder he was so excited. There was so much to do . . . and all eternity in which to do it.
He forced himself down, down into calm. No mistakes, he thought. Soothing music filled his head, a glissando of strings, a gentle shimmer of cymbals. First, the operating system.
He stood on the weird, lunar plane and inspected the barrier the failing system had erected between Dread and his victims. He stroked the insubstantial but unbreachable mist. Where had this thing come from? And how could he best get through it?
It was clear he had pushed the Grail operating system to the breaking point, but although he wanted it subdued and broken he did not want to destroy it completely, jeopardizing the whole network, before he had a chance to install a replacement. That might be a little more difficult now that Dulcie was sprawled gut-shot dead on the floor of the loft, but she had cracked Jongleur's house files for him first: the Old Man would have some kind of system backup in place. So the sensible thing to do would be just to wait until he could bring another system online. But what if doing so not only killed this operating system but destroyed Martine and the rest as well? And what if Jongleur was in there with them? The thought that all his enemies might be stolen right out of his grasp by a mercifully swift death was maddening.
And they're right there. . . ! He prowled along the barrier, trying to make sense of what little he could see. As he walked he let his mind wander through the network infrastructure. It was a strange problem, trying to be two places at once, very strange. Here he stood, with the powers of a god, but he could not actually find his own location in the network: he had followed Martine and the others through into this place, but the place itself did not seem to exist on any of the network's schemata.
It's a damn strange environment, whatever it is, he thought. He had even more power here than he did in other parts of the network—the inhabitants had fled screaming from him even before he did anything—but the operating system had more power here, too.
Bloody hell! The insight was sudden and overwhelming. I must be . . . inside the damn thing.
He laughed and the wall of mist rippled back from him like sensitive tissue being poked by a surgical tool. Of course I'm powerful here. It knows who delivers the pain. It's scared of me.
So if it believes in something, he realized, that something comes true here. That explained why the barrier could hold him out—it represented the system's own faith in its last-ditch defenses. But when the last shred of belief that it could resist him died. . . .
It's all make-believe, he thought. A world of ghosts, magic. Like my bloody mother's stories. It was not a thought that went well with his celebratory mood so he pushed it away.
But where is the bloody thing, then? Where is the system hiding? Dread closed his eyes as he walked along the barrier, examining his internal map of the system. The thing, the part of the operating system that thought, must be close. Again he had the strange sense of being in two places at the same time. It worried him just a little—a lifetime's dislike of exposure and a powerful urge toward control made him uncomfortable about being spread between two spheres of operation—but his pride and assurance were growing with his power and he shrugged it off. But he could not shrug off the essential puzzle.