The house was right on the beach, with the wire about thirty feet out from the deck. Nobody knew exactly what it was that had spilled, because the government wasn’t telling. Something off a freighter, some people said, and some said it was a bulklifter that had come down in a 32 storm. The government was using nanobots to clean it up though; everybody agreed on that, and that was why they said you shouldn’t walk out there.
Chevette had found the trainer her second day here, and she’d ride two or three times a day or, like now, late at night. Nobody else seemed to be interested in it or ever to come into this little room off the garage, next to the laundry room, and that was fine with her. Living on the bridge, she’d been used to people being around, but everybody had always had something to do up there. The sharehouse was full of USC media sciences students, and they got on her nerves. They sat around accessing media all day and talking about it, and nothing ever seemed to get done.
She felt sweat run between the headband of the interface visor and her forehead, then down the side of her nose. She was getting a good bum on now; she could feel groups of muscles working in her back, ones that didn’t usually get it.
The trainer did a better job on the bike’s chartreuse lacquer than on the shift levers, she noticed. They were sort of cartoony, with road surface blurring past beneath them in generic texture map. The clouds would be generic too, if she looked up; just basic fractal stuff.
She was definitely not too happy with being here, or with her life in general at this point. She’d been talking with Tessa about that after dinner. Well, arguing about it.
Tessa wanted to make this documentary. Chevette knew what a documentary was because Carson had worked for a channel, Real One, that only just ran those, and Chevette had had to watch about a thousand of them. As a result, she thought, she now knew a whole lot about nothing in particular, and nothing in particular about whatever it was she was actually supposed to know. Like what to do now that her life had gotten her to this place.
Tessa wanted to take her back up to San Francisco, but Chevette had mixed feelings. The documentary Tessa wanted to make was about interstitial communities, and Tessa said Chevette had lived in one, because Chevette had lived on the bridge. Interstitial meant in between things, and Chevette figured that that made a kind of sense, anyway. 33 And she did miss it up there, miss the people, but she didn’t like thinking about it. Because of how things had gone since she’d come down here, and because she hadn’t kept in touch.
Just pump, she told herself, cresting the illusion of a rise. Shift again. Pump harder. The road surface started to look glassy in places, because she was overtaking the simulator’s refresh rate.
“Zoom in.” Tessa’s voice, in miniature.
“Shit,” Chevette said. Flipping up the visor.
The camera platform, like a helium-filled cushion of silver Mylar, at eye level in the open doorway. Kid’s toy with little caged propellers, controlled from Tessa’s bedroom. Ring of light reflected in the lens housing as it extruded, zooming.
The propellers blurred to gray, brought it forward through the door, stopped; blurred to gray again, reversing. Rocked there, till it steadied on the ballast of the underslung camera. God’s Little Toy, Tessa called her silver balloon. Disembodied eye. She sent it on slow cruises through the house, mining for image fragments. Everyone who lived here was constantly taping everyone else, except lain, and lain wore a motion-capture suit, even slept in it, and was recording every move he ever made.
The trainer, performance machine that it was, sensed Chevette’s loss of focus and sighed, slowing, complex hydraulics beginning to deconfigure. The narrow wedge of seat between her thighs widened, spreading to support her butt in beach-bike mode. The handlebars unfolded, upward, raising her hands. She kept on pedaling, but the trainer was winding her down now.