Sam blinked at him. "Huh?"
"I should have known you wouldn't get it." Fez sighed. "The one time I make a dirty joke with you, and you don't get it." She started to say something else, and he stuck the spoon in her mouth. "Eat up. We want you to stay comfortable."
She swallowed and pushed the spoon aside. "No more. I'm fortified and banana-mashed to the gills. If you want to see to anyone's comfort, take care of my dad and Gina. I don't have to be anything more than a potato."
Fez regarded her solemnly. "You're still against it."
"Yah, I am. I don't think they can bring it off. It sounds like a computer game I once wrote. Or a bad B-feature that did well in the wannabees. Ever hear of something called House of the Headhunters?"
"No. But the title could belong to a good many of all the computer games ever written. The rest being variations on Parcheesi."
"Really?"
"No." Fez sighed again. "Truthfully, I don't really like it, either. I think there's a good chance we could lose them all. And if it were just Art alone in there with them, I'd never allow it. Art's always been viral at heart. Figurative heart. If he were a flesh-person, I'd watch him for sociopathic tendencies."
Sam raised her eyebrows. "Why? I never found him particularly antisocial."
"Not lately you haven't. But what's more antisocial than a virus? Besides, he never had to be antisocial by the time you came along. By then we were all at his beck and call. But didn't you find him just a little bit stuck on himself?"
"Yah. When I thought he was a person. Flesh-person, I mean."
"The addition of Mark makes me more optimistic," Fez said. "Not very much more, but some. Humans have always been smarter than viruses. Humans drive, viruses are driven. Even the intelligent ones. Three-plus humans ought to have a fighting chance against one intelligent virus."
"But it's not a virus," Sam said.
"An intelligent spike, then." Fez let out a long breath. "No matter what it is, it's still driven. No initiative-the big human advantage. I hope."
Gina and Gabe came over then with Keely, who was carrying the cape and the connections. "All clear," Keely said. "The diagnostic says the connections are free of all infection. But I still don't know if four each are enough."
"Mark says it will work with four apiece," Gabe said. "My left hemisphere and Gina's right."
Fez started to say something, but Gina turned to Gabe.
"You sure you want to run at this thing?"
Sam met her father's gaze evenly. They'd hardly spoken since he and Gina had decided to do it. She wanted to tell him not to, that the risks were too great, that he didn't know what he was getting into, but something in his expression stopped her. He was looking for her support, she realized suddenly. Not her help, or even her approval, but just for her not to discourage him. He'd had enough of that with Catherine. She looked down at the pump unit resting on her lap and cradled it protectively in both hands before she looked up at her father again.
"Yah," he said to Gina. "Yah, I do."
Gina shook her head. "You're a stone-home crazy fucker."
In spite of everything Sam smiled. It was the nicest thing she'd ever heard anyone say to her father.
– -
They were lying side by side on a couple of narrow mattresses donated by Jasm and Graziella. Keely checked and rechecked the boot program before he divided the connections from the cape between them.
"When you connect," he told them, "the transmission and stealth programs will boot with you, and they'll stick by you till you disconnect. You can't accidentally disable them, but you might not always recognize them, and I'm afraid you won't be able to get a status reading whenever you need one. But whatever kind of controls you need, you ask-"
"Are you gonna fucking let us do this?" Gina demanded. "Or are you gonna fuck around till the fucking lights go out?"
Sam felt Rosa squeeze her hand, and she squeezed back. Keely looked up at her from where he was kneeling next to Gina.
"Sam, if you have to go to the bathroom, go now."
"If I have to go to the bathroom," she said with a nervous laugh, "you can bring me a saucepan, and everyone can look the other way."
"Let's just fucking go" Gina said, staring up at the ceiling. She reached over and took Gabe's hand.
"Okay," he said. Sam winced as he twisted his neck to take a last look at her. Suddenly she wished she'd thought to give him a hug or a kiss. Then his eyes were closed, and the program was running.
He was looking at a strange, half-finished room with black and white tiles and roofless walls against a backdrop of swiftly moving clouds. Or rather, he was trying to look at it. There was something very bright in the center of the room, undulating like a reflection of the sun on a ripply lake surface. It blinded him, blotting out most of the scene so that he would have to look away and readjust. He could sense Gina nearby. Her energy simmered like continuous, contained explosions. After a bit he turned toward her, and her visual was Gina as he knew her, but coming through strangely, the textures and colors shifting like a painting in flux.
She said something, but he couldn't understand it.
"Everything will be in phase shortly," said a voice from the bright light. "We're a little ways from full synthesis." And then: "Some trip, hey, Gina?"
The brightness became less blinding, not because it was fading, but because he was becoming adjusted to it. Gradually he came to distinguish a figure within the light, one figure but with two images superimposed on it, each image waxing and waning, sometimes in fragments so that it was a shifting composite rather than two separate images trading full dominance.
"Loads of room in here," the voice went on, and Gabe realized that it, too, was a composite. He turned to Gina again, and her image was smoothing out, the painting transmuting from impressionistic to photographic realism. And then it was like seeing her come through some transparent barrier, glass or water, before something gave, and he was perceiving her with total clarity.
The figure in the light moved aside to show them a four-paned window floating in midair against the backdrop of clouds. It put its hand on the windowsill; everything contained within the frame vanished, leaving a rectangle of darkness.
"Ipseorama," the composite voice said. " 'See distantly.' It's the word television would have been if the Latin and Greek roots had been reversed."
"Thanks," Gina said sarcastically. "I really needed to know that."
The figure was amused. "Just testing out the synthesis." It put one leg over the sill and paused, sitting half in and half out of the room. "You can see as distantly as you want to see. We're opening the line to the Phoenix node now." It climbed the rest of the way through the window.
Before he could think about it, Gabe's pov zoomed forward, through the frame and into the black.
A status line winked into being and marched across the bottom of the screen. "They're on-line to Phoenix," Sam said, and then felt foolish. The only person present who couldn't read a status line was Adrian. But nobody made any smart remarks. Maybe it was only natural to have someone call the action, so to speak.
Fez was hunched forward in the chair next to her, hands gripping his knees, staring at the screen intently. Rosa was still holding her hand, and Percy was camped next to Keely with his entire inventory of tools, hardware, and fragments of hardware. Gator had parked a supply of fresh batteries next to the screen, along with a couple of laptops. Everyone else -Jasm, Graziella, Kazin, Rodriguez, a few of Percy's merry little brigands, that drummer Flavia Something, and the Beater, looking old, tired, and anxious-hovered nervously. Another monitor nearby displayed the continuous diagnostic running on the big system while the patterns on the cape gyrated and squirmed like something live.