He had spent a good hour bringing the platform-and-slide arrangement up in the freight elevator and then assembling it for the trapdoor-chute sequence. Looking at it divested of the simulation, he felt embarrassed, even though there was no one to feel embarrassed in front of.
What's the matter, hotwire-too much like kid stuff for you? He could hear Marly's deep, slightly hoarse laughter in his mind.
He looked down at the monitor lying open in his hands like a giant prayerbook, twice the size of his head. Most of the inside front was taken up by the screen, which enclosed the eye area like a diver's mask, surrounded by a multitude of tiny lasers. The beam coverage was particularly effective, better than the previous model's. He could look in any direction, and the laser beams bouncing off his corneas responded instantly, with a screen view-shift so smooth that it was exactly like looking around at a real environment. Which made it more possible than ever to lose himself in the simulation, and he'd been doing a pretty fair job of that before the alarm had gone off.
He took the monitor to the desk and set it down. The desktop screen told him the simulation was running along nicely without him. Not that Marly and Caritha would know the difference if he stopped everything. Hell, they weren't even being imaged anymore; they were just twinklings in the system now.
Now and ever, he thought, feeling suddenly weary beyond what his exertions could account for. Twinklings; fantasies; imaginary playmates.
Well, not totally imaginary. The templates had been assembled from two real, living people who had since vanished into the mass of faces that had failed to raise an appreciable blip in the test-audience ratings. He couldn't fathom that, himself. The Marly and Caritha templates had hit him between the eyes when he'd called them up from Central Filing. Perhaps the original programmer had just had a particularly good day, or maybe he'd been having a particularly bad one. Or maybe he'd just been losing his mind piece by piece all along, and when he had summoned up the Marly and Caritha simulations in tandem, it had been enough to blow out what fragments of sanity he'd still had.
Diversifications had voided their contracts before he got around to requisitioning official usage. His unofficial usage, however, was already extensive; buried in the back of a drawer in his console were chip-copies of the original templates. Every so often, when the running copies got too cluttered up with decision branches, he refocused the programs with the originals-originals once removed, he reminded himself. Or twice removed, if you wanted to count the actual people as the true originals. Normally he didn't; he'd never met the two women in person and didn't know anything about them, except if they'd known that for the last two years someone at Diversifications had been enjoying the benefit of their simulated selves without contract or recompense, they'd be into a sizable financial settlement, and he'd be out of a job.
Jesus, two years? That long? He felt silly. Like some teenager nursing a crush by playing wannabee-format simulations over and over. In the beginning he'd pretended activating their simulations and merging them with some scenario was actually an elaborate warm-up exercise, something to prime the old idea pump, jump start the creative generator. After fifteen years of cranking out commercial spots for body armor and pharmaceuticals, clinic-spas and body-carvers, dataline modules and spray-for-chrissakes-cleanser, you needed the extra stimulation, or you ran completely dry.
Even after he'd gone through half of the stock scenarios and started raiding the wannabee files, he'd kept telling himself it was all for the sake of the old idea pump. His output had been dropping gradually but steadily, and he was spending longer periods of time on the commercials he did complete, or so the automatic log in his system said. He kept spreading the time he spent evenly among his assignments, and the times grew longer and longer, and Manny started making noises about lowered productivity, and still he'd been unable to go a day without spending at least an hour in simulation with Marly and Caritha. An hour? More like four hours; it was so easy to lose track of the time.
He unzipped the hotsuit, peeling it away from himself. Underneath, his skin bore the impression of a baroque pattern of snaky lines punctuated by the sharp geometric variations of the numerous sensors. The coverage was twice as thorough as all but the most expensive 'suits sold to the public. Except for-ahem-genitalia. Only the employees who worked on refining Hollywood feature releases got the complete hotsuits.
Gabe rubbed at the marks, imagining a day when they wouldn't fade after an hour or so-he'd have a permanent tattoo, and when he died (or was fired), Diversifications, Inc., would have him skinned and use his hide as a pattern for new hotsuits.
Great people leave their marks. Everyone else is left with marks. He stripped the top part of the suit off and examined himself. There were cases of hysterics who hallucinated being grabbed and managed to produce fingermarks on their flesh like stigmata. Without hotsuits, too.
There was a sudden sensation in his still-gloved left hand, as if someone had taken it gently. Residual flashes of fading energy. It happened sometimes. He took off the rest of the suit in a hurry and changed into his street clothes.
The timer in the bottom right-hand corner of the console flatscreen caught his eye. Somewhere in the computer-in an alternate universe-Marly and Caritha were fighting off a squad of shadowy thugs in a dark alley with a program phantom standing in for himself. He knew how it would come out; the simulation he had merged them with was an old Hollywood B-release-House of the Headhunters' a B-title if there ever was one-that had been converted to wannabee format. As a regular feature release, it had done barely modest business, but in wannabee format it had been an over-the-top hit. Apparently it had had more appeal as something to be in than to watch. When even that had faded, it had gone into the files as something to be cannibalized for commercial spots.
Gabe had told himself he was accessing it for the sake of the body-armor spot. It would certainly appear more plausible on the quarterly time and productivity audit, which, he didn't need to remind himself, was coming up as quickly as the deadline on the body-armor spot that he hadn't even started on yet. Well, he would replay the whole thing this afternoon and mark the sequences with the best possibilities, assuming Marly and Caritha hadn't wrought more changes in it than was technically legal. They were smart programs, capable of learning and manipulating certain portions of other programs they were merged with. House of the Headhunters had a high manipulation quotient; you could die at the end if you wanted to, or even blind-select so you wouldn't know whether you would survive or not.
He toyed with the idea of working that into a finished commercial. Gilding Body shields Can Save Your Life… Or Can They? The Gilding people would shit pears.
Or maybe he should just work up a simulation of his upcoming lunch with Manny Rivera and turn Marly and Caritha loose on that. Then, instead of having to go through it himself, he could just view it later. He knew exactly what Manny would say: We're facing another quarterly audit of our productivity, Gabe, and you know that for the Upstairs Team, it's all a matter of numbers. How much you're producing and how long it takes. That's all the Upstairs Team understands. The Upstairs Team was Diversifications-speak for upper management; Gabe imagined it was supposed to make them sound less batch-processed, more like co-workers or something. Sure.