Okay, I didn't say it. But you knew what I meant, didn't you, you stupid fuck-up. Yah, you did. I could tell. So don't you fucking try to lie to me, because I know you did.
She had a vague sense of time passing, but it was unimportant. Let it pass, let it go around me and him now. We been racing for the last twenty-some-odd, fuck it, we're taking a break now. Taking a break.
Sometime later the lights flickered. She thought at first she had imagined it, but they flickered again. Annoyance began to fill the void in her mind. Christ, did everything have to fuck up at once, did she have to put up with stupid shit like brownouts when she had more important things to think about, like how she was going to get through the rest of her life?
When she felt the touch on her shoulder, she lashed out with a snarl.
"I'm sorry," the kid said quietly. "I'm really sorry, but we got a big problem here."
He was pulling at her arms, gently but firmly, trying to make her let go of Mark.
"Jump back," she snarled, and he let go of her.
"We didn't do it," the kid said. "It's out."
The lights flickered again.
It came as a small tremor followed by an instantaneous jump in the level of every infection. As if a loose infestation of rats had suddenly been transformed into a battalion of terrorists. The intelligence that drove it was different from his own, brutish in some ways but with the sophistication of an evolved mechanism capable of adapting itself at will.
There was nothing he could do now, he could never stand against something like that. It had been made for him in the first place, and he would draw it to himself just by continuing to be.
New instincts took over for him, in lieu of fight-or-flight. He backed far off, damped down before it could sense all of him, retreating to a level of activity that might have been the equivalent of a camouflaged soldier melting into the surrounding jungle. It did not pursue; as far as it was concerned, he was not there, but only for the time being. Eventually it would achieve a level where it could sense him in his new state, but at the moment it still had its limits, it was still on the other side of a certain threshold, the side called Finite.
And he still had a rabbit hole; a little altered for the new circumstances of his existence, but there. It was the last exit, the way out where there was no way out. If he took it, the result would be pretty much the same as a systemwide crash-and-burn, from his perspective-he would cease to exist on this level. Undoubtedly he would continue to be as traveled through the rabbit hole, but the hole itself would be winking out of existence one step behind him. As if he'd swallowed himself and continued to swallow himself forever.
If that was really existence, what kind was it?
Meanwhile the thing was moving through the system, lashing out, absorbing, growing. Once he might have wanted to think of a fancy word for it, but in the system a thing was what it was, or it was not anymore, and this thing did not alter in nature. It was a virus, but with a most important difference: this one knew where it was, and what it was, and that it was. This one was alive.
So the problem was to keep from getting sick. Or rather, sicker. It still amazed him how sick he was-how sick the system was-and yet everything could continue to operate. He remembered his old existence as meat. Weren't there certain kinds of infections-bacteria, rather-that were useful, even vital?
He would not have thought of this at all if he hadn't come across some old notebooks Dr. Fish had left behind when he'd bailed out. He knew Art Fish must have sensed him there, at least in a passing way. Now and then he could feel a vibration or an echo of a sympathetic nature, a resonance, but no acknowledgment as such. Dr. Fish was no longer making house calls, but he could see where Dr. Fish had gone, approximately. Going there himself had been an option lodged inactively at the rear of his thoughts, unconsidered until the last message from the meat came through to him.
Suddenly he was there with her in the pit, looking up into her face while she held the wires in both hands and tried to yank them out. If he had been there, he might have made some effort to tell her she had arrived just that little bit too late, because it had already begun in his brain, the Big One. In a way he had been there with her, just enough of him to constitute a definite presence. Not unlike the way he had been during his last days as meat.
What surprised him, looking at her face now, was how visible her thoughts were, and always had been. He'd just never seen before, never comprehended. Her desire for him was not just in her face, it formed her face, was formed of her face, and he knew she'd been thinking of how it had been in Mexico, and she was sitting on him not just to do what he'd asked her to do, but because she wanted to touch him as much as possible.
He found the idea repellent now, her meat pressing his own. They could have been two gutted sides of beef brushing against each other on their way through a processing plant, for all the real contact it afforded. And she didn't understand, he realized. That was a first; she'd always understood him, or so he'd thought from the way she'd always been there to catch him when he fell. But maybe the fall had been what she'd understood, the only thing she'd understood, and he hadn't fallen this time.
It would have broken his heart if there'd been any heart to break.
If he could have gone back to those moments and reactivated the meat, if the brain hadn't been too small and too worn to accommodate more than mere presence, he would have done it long enough to beg her to join him in the system, just for a little while, just to try it and see how far apart incarnation had kept them.
And then he was looking at Gina with what felt like a universe of knowledge within him, everything from every part of the system, databases that outlined every face of human behavior, delineated every emotion, defined every word by tone of human voice, and told every story, all scanned from the countless thousands that had passed through to be simulated, packaged in incidents called commercials and releases and videos, and more, sequences called news, talk shows, episodes. One picture could not tell all the stories, but every picture told a story. Every bit of it converged on him, enlarged the context of his vision, and suddenly it was as if he were looking into Gina as much as at her.
Joy surged within his configuration, to see so deeply into her, even though she was not on-line with him, even if it was after the fact. Moments later he seemed to plummet, out of balance because she wasn't there and there could be no reciprocation. The unfairness of it was truer pain than anything he'd ever felt incarnate.
Then he realized that giving such energy to his feelings would take him back into the virus's visible spectrum, and he damped down again, holding Gina's last moments in deep reserve (You stupid fuck-up; even the merest shade of his own presence could translate that with ease now) as he searched out the buried areas he might not have noticed at a higher energy level. They were deceptively small, nothing more than blips unless he moved carefully along a certain pathway in a particular point of view, and then they opened up like sudden blossoms.
Eventually he came upon Dr. Fish's Answering Machine and knew it was the thing he wanted, the exit Dr. Fish had taken, but the way out was barred to him as he was now. Still holding tight to Gina, he worked himself around, mimicking the form of the Answering Machine itself, and left himself as a message, hanging fire in camouflage.