"I wish we could have tapped a full visual for this instead of just a status line," Sam said.
"We couldn't tax their capacity that much," Keely told her. "They'd have to cooperate in the transmission, even if I bugged their povs. Too much of a drain on their concentration."
"Could you crack in while this was in progress?" Fez asked.
Keely shrugged. "Maybe. Why?"
"If we lose contact with them, we could see what happened."
"If we lose contact with them, we wouldn't see much for long."
A new message appeared on the screen, just above the status line. ›Loading Headhunter programs. ‹
"Headhunter programs?" Sam said. "A B-feature?"
"One hell of a surprise for your father," Keely said, smiling at the screen.
On the mattress Gabe looked jarringly peaceful, as if he were asleep and having the best dream of his life.
For Gabe it was like crouching at the base of an enormous generator, the vibrations shuddering all the way through to his bones. He could feel Gina's presence as well, an energetic mix of anger, fear, and ready aggression that spoke to his own apprehension and uncertainty. On the outside he had believed a little more in the idea of joining forces with Mark and Art -Markt, now-than he did on the inside in this ragged landscape of what seemed to be enormous shadows of almost-things.
"You think we can synthesize something?" The words came from Gina, but he recognized them as his own. "Really synthesize something," she added. "Something of us, to use against it."
He started to reach out to her and then hesitated. Actually touch anyone this closely? Suddenly the idea of that kind of contact was a hard, wordless fright.
"Part my brain and part yours," Gina said. "Doesn't get much more fucking intimate than that. If I can stand it, you can. What've you got?"
He tried to think. What did he have?
– -
The house looked quiet enough, but then the whole street was quiet, and Gabe knew that was all wrong. All wrong- they were gone, a pile of dead chips on a cellar floor in Fairfax.
"Not quite." Marly grinned down at him and then threw a muscular arm around his shoulders. On his other side Caritha slipped an arm around his waist and nudged him with the handcam. "Hope you don't mind about all the modifications. Been a shitload since you last saw us. You thought it was a glitch in the program, but it was him all along. Art. Only I guess he's calling himself Markt now. More to him."
"More to everything," Marly added.
Gabe was too stunned to speak. There was no doubt they were real, or as real as they ever had been, not just phantoms pulled from his memory but the programs themselves, saved or restored, he wasn't sure which.
Programs?
"Try again, hotwire," said Marly.
The kid sitting at the laptop: Stone the fucking crows at home! This stuff s infected!
You thought it was a glitch in the program, but it was him all along.
Even after? Gabe wondered. Even after the sockets? He turned his attention inward, and there, deep in his mind, he found it, a little bit of a glow, the same glow that he saw in Marly's eyes, in Caritha's. It was like looking into an enormous dark box and discovering a very tiny, very perfect diamond. Incurably informed?
There was a pull outward like the one he'd felt when Gina had yanked him out out of a chair one night a lifetime ago. Her touch was unmistakable.
"Hate to interrupt you when you're contemplating the fucking jewel in the lotus," she said, "but it's here. The fucking program director's back."
"Good," Caritha said, hefting the cam. "I want that spike. I don't like programs that go around blowing up people's brains."
"Then let's go do a little damage," Marly said, and made a move toward the house, pulling Caritha and Gabe with her.
From within the new configuration of Markt, Art reconvened and watched with real fondness. He'd always liked the first part of the Headhunters scenario, where Gabe went barging in with the women, a reluctant hero fast losing his reluctance for the sake of people he loved, and then developing a taste for heroics as he went along. That was the way he'd always read it in Marly and Caritha, anyway.
Besides, it would help Ludovic if he just went to it as though it were the enemy he had always faced in House of the Head-hunters. Perhaps there really wasn't any other enemy for him anyway.
Gina's enemy would be more difficult to articulate. He would have to leave that to the Mark part of his new self.
Who do you love?
The only thing nastier than forty-seven miles of barbed wire was forty-eight, and she hadn't had to go that far yet. Just through this crowd of bangers on the tiny little dance floor to a likely-looking head nodding up and down, and déjà vu shuddering through her like inner thunder, more than déjà vu. Déjà-voodoo: had happened because she was reliving it now.
Who do you love?
Say again, doll, I didn't hear you that time.
She went through the door, stopped, looked at someone pounding it out with two sticks on the hood of an abandoned limo.
Who abandons limos this time of night on this street at the outer edge of Hollywood, land of the lost?
She went over and peered into the back window, cupping her hands around her eyes. The dark glass de-opaqued, and she saw herself and Ludovic lying side by side with connections trailing from their heads.
Disturbed, she stepped back, and Quilmar threw an arm around her shoulders, drawing her into Valjean's long, narrow kitchen. "Fucking right there's nothing fucking wrong with porn," he said. "Porn is the fucking secret of life, sister-mine. If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away. That's the fucking order of the universe, and I'm at the fucking top of the food-fuck-and-dance chain. And I don't know what that is"-he gestured at the limo, which was now on one of the screens in Valjean's living room-"but it makes me horny, and that's all that matters."
Easy one; she left Quilmar in the kitchen again, turned away from the grotesque sight of him attempting the forcible seduction of a major appliance, and found herself back outside.
!! U B THE ASS TO RISK!!
Many Main-Run Features Starring U!
COMPLETE ROCK VIDEO CATALOG, TOO!
Gina nodded. It wasn't going to waste its energy trying to fool her with little things. Which didn't mean she wouldn't have to be any less careful.
Know you once, know you always.
Who do you love?
Doll, why do you keep on askin me that? You must be seeing something I didn't say.
Right; stone-fucking-home exactly. She could always see what he didn't say. With a fever in her chest. Nasty bridge, running from the top all the way down, hammering every step of the way, and she went, chased by her own growling need, but déjà -voodoo told her it was his, too. Her need and his, but hers had gone east, and his had gone west, hers had gone out, and his had gone in, and wasn't that always the fucking way of it?
Who do you love?
Oh, doll, wouldn't you like to know?
Sticks beating it out on golden garbage cans, a roadmark to tell her she was going in the right direction. Move.
The Mimosa was empty. She turned around and around, looking, but they weren't there now. They weren't hiding under the piers, they weren't watching from the shadows, they weren't anywhere. And then the ball of fire came anyway, and she started to walk through it.