He looked at her accusingly. "It's something that happened to someone. And it's something they should have seen was going to happen to him, and they didn't. Or they ignored it because they didn't think it would matter."
"Art, at least let me tell Fez you're here," she said.
"Not yet." Her pov tracked him back to the nest of pillows. "I've been through a lot. I'm not ready for that much input right now. I've had a good part of myself amputated. If you got an arm and a leg cut off, you wouldn't feel chatty either. But I suppose I shouldn't expect you to understand. For you the nets are an object. You have self and nonself, and those are both constants. For me it's something else. The L.A. system wasn't a where; it was a configuration of me." He paused. "Not an arm and a leg, that's wrong. More like a hemispherectomy."
Could an AI get hysterical, Sam wondered. "Art, you're present. You're whole. And there's still a system to host you-"
"I'm not alone."
Sam hesitated. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, I'm not alone. I've got the Answering Machine with me.
"But the Answering Machine is you. Or yours. Or…" Sam trailed off. Self and nonself and semiself? She wondered briefly as to the exact nature of Art's Weltanschauung.
"It's somebody else now. Separate. But if I'm in your pump unit, it's in here with me."
She accessed the figures and saw he was telling the truth; there were two separate items inventoried. "What is it?" she asked nervously. "I have to know, Art, or it goes. Ill purge it rather than take a chance it'll eat our system alive and you with it."
"It won't eat anything. It can't." Art gestured at his surroundings. "This isn't mine, it's the ID screen for it. That's all I can get. And this." One word came up across the tiles on the floor: ZAMIATIN. Sam raised her eyebrows. It wasn't any brand name or trademark she recognized. "Maybe that means something to someone," Art went on. "The rest of it's walled up behind an access code and a password, and I can't give you either one."
"Can't you hack them out?"
"I tried. It's in lockdown. Everything comes out as garbage."
"You can figure garbage if you watch the patterns enough times," she said. "Fez told me he's seen you do it."
"Not this garbage. There isn't any fixed pattern, it comes out different every time. There's something like a program in there in charge of garbage."
"Something like a program?" Sam said, confused. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"I'm something like a program. Look, Sam, do you trust me?"
Sam winced. "It's just that you might not know if it's that thing, the spike, or not."
"I know."
She sighed. "All right then. Let's suppose you do. Hypothetically, for the moment. What do you want me to do about it?"
"Just let him stay here."
"Him?" She thought for a moment. "Art, are you sure what you've got isn't just that reconstruction I sent through the system?"
"I'm sure," he said. "If we can access it, it will be a reincarnation and half rebirth. If we can't, he may stay in a coma forever."
"A coma?"
"That's about as well as I can translate it. You wouldn't understand my term for it."
"Don't get too sure about what I would or wouldn't understand."
Art's smile was broad. "Being a fugitive hasn't made you any less a badass, has it?"
"You're beginning to sound more like your old self. Can I tell someone you're back now?"
"If you're connected to the system, I'll tell them myself. And Fez, too."
"You can't reach Fez," she said. "He donated his hardware to the pile. There's nothing in Gator's tent now. Except Gator and the tattoo stuff. And Fez, of course."
Art's image leaned toward her. "I see. Does it make you feel very bad?"
Sam laughed a little. "None of your fucking business. I'll connect you to the main system. One moment please." She took off the headmount and reconnected the feed to her laptop. Then she signaled him through the keyboard.
A few moments later Art's voice was echoing throughout the inn. "Wake up, everybody! I'm back!"
Wake up, everybody. Sure. Sam yawned; exhaustion washed over her. Sure tired easily these days, she thought as she unplugged the pump from her laptop and stumbled back to her squat space. Let Art give all the explanations. She curled up on her dirty laundry, making sure the pump unit was secure, and went to sleep.
31
Reaction was chipping at the edges of her nerves, but she refused to give in. Take a little walk now, react later. The images kept flashing in her head, mixing with the sight of L.A. in its lopsided meltdown. The guy wearing buckskin chaps over nothing, dancing on top of one of the many rentals abandoned on La Cienega while overhead a National Guard heli buzzed like a monster insect and an amplified mechanical voice demanded that he get down-yah, that was real time. Flavia swinging the sticks at her face, that wasn't real time. The kid with the heelprint on his forehead doing a stage dive off the top of somebody's stretch limo into the crowd swirling around the abandoned vehicles in a human river, that was a mixture of both real time and… what? Nonrealtime? Unrealtime?
Un-fucking-real. The real real and the real unreal and the unreal real-just how high up in the stupidsphere are we, and how much higher are we going to go?
No use asking Ludovic. He looked grim and blasted and anxious. A couple of LotusLands would get that fucking pinched look off his face, but LotusLand wasn't on the menu today. No use asking the kid, either, but only because he just might know. And the Beater? Forget about it. He was so far from home, he didn't even know what drugs to take anymore. Yah, closing up that synthesizer and going into biz maybe hadn't been such a bad idea. Too bad she couldn't explain that to Mark now. Or maybe she could.
Don't do it. The thought cut sharply through the gathering fog in her mind, and hysteria was pushed back again. As they stood in the dubious shelter of the doorway of a disaster-porn bar, she watched the people milling around in the street or struggling to move south. Somehow they'd crossed through that without getting trampled and without the kid, Keely, losing his precious bundle. For all the good it would do them.
"We're going the wrong way," Keely insisted. "We want to go south, to the Mimosa. We don't want to go toward Hollywood." He pointed unnecessarily at the sky, where smoke from burning buildings dirtied the air and tainted it with the smell of poison. "If there's one place the virus won't be, it's on the Mimosa."
"Whatever we do," Ludovic said, "we aren't going to do it too well till the streets clear."
"Yah. The little virus," said the kid. "Found its way out and got real active."
Gina gave a short, humorless laugh. "Mark always did hate L.A. Liked the clubs, liked the music, but hated L.A. as a whole." She caught Ludovic looking at her and frowned. Sometimes he was a lot harder to figure than he should have been. "What," she said.
"I was wondering," he said slowly, "how many of those people are infected." Pause. "Like us."
He said the last two words so low that at first she wasn't sure she'd heard them. "Who's infected?" she said, exasperated.