“Okay to run this?” She pulled a zip and showed him her Sand-benders, stuffed in between four pairs of rolled-up tights.
“You can’t port back here; only in business or first,” he said. “But you can access wha: You’ve got. Cable to the seatback display, if you want.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Got gogs.” He moved on.
The blond’s snore faltered in mid-buzz as they jolted over a pocket of turbulence. Chia dug her glasses and tip-sets from their nests of clean underwear, putting them beside her, between her hip 32 William Gibson and the armrest. She pulled the Sandbenders out, zipped the bag shut, and used her free hand and both feet to wedge the bag under the seat in front of her. She wanted out of here so bad.
With the Sandbenders across her thighs, she thumbed a battery check. Eight hours on miser mode, if she was lucky. But right now she didn’t care. She uncoiled the lead from around the bridge of her glasses and jacked it. The tip-sets were tangled, like they always were. Take your time, she told herself. A torn sensor-band and she’d be here all night with an Ashleigh Modine Carter clone. Little silver thimbles, flexy framework fingers; easy did it.. . . Plug for each one. Jack and jack…
The blond said something in her sleep. If sleep was what you called it.
Chia picked up her glasses, slid them on, and hit big red.
-My ass out of here.
And it was.
There on the edge of her bed, looking at the Lo Rez Skyline poster. Until Lo noticed. He stroked his half-grown mustache and grinned at .her.
“Hey, Chia.”
“Hey.” Experience kept it subvocal, for privacy’s sake.
“What’s up, girl?”
“I’m on an airplane. I’m on my way to Japan.”
“Japan? Kicky. You do our Budokan disk?”
“I don’t feel like talking, Lo.” Not to a software agent, anyway, sweet as he might be.
“Easy.” He shot her that catlike grin, his eyes wrinkling at the corners, and became a still image. Chia looked around, feeling disappointed. Things weren’t quite the right size, somehow, or maybe she should’ve used those fractal packets that messed it all up a little, put dust in the corners and smudges around the light switch. Zona Rosa swore by them. When she was home, Chia liked it that the construct was cleaner than her room ever was. Now it made her homesick; made her miss the real thing. 0 2 33 1 She gestured for the living room, phasing past what would’ve been the door to her mother’s bedroom. She’d barely wireframed it, here, and there was no there there, no interiority. The living room had its sketchy angles as well, and furniture she’d imported from a Playmobil system that predated her Sandbenders. Wonkily bitmapped fish swam monotonously around in a glass coffee table she’d built when she was nine. The trees through the front window were older still: perfectly cylindrical Crayola-brown trunks, each supporting an acid-green cotton ball of undifferentiated foliage. If she looked at these long enough, the Mumphalumphagus would appear outside, wanting to play, so she didn’t.
She positioned herself on the Playmobil couch and looked at the programs scattered across the top of the coffee table. The Sandbenders system software looked like an old-fashioned canvas water bag, a sort of canteen (she’d had to consult What Things Are, her icon dictionary, to figure that out). It was worn and spectacularly organic, with tiny beads of water bulging through the tight weave of fabric. If you got in super close you saw things reflected in the individual droplets: circuitry that was like beadwork or the skin on a lizard’s throat, a long empty beach under a gray sky, mountains in the rain, creek water over different-colored stones. She loved Sandbenders; they were the best. THE SANDBENDERS, OREGON, was screened faintly across the sweating canvas, as though it had almost faded away under a desert sun. SYSTEM 5.9. (She had all the upgrades, to 6.3. People said 6.4 was buggy.)
Beside the water bag lay her schoolwork, represented by a three-ring binder suffering the indignities of artificial bit-rot, its wire-frame cover festered with digital mung. She’d have to reformat that before she started her new school, she reminded herself. Too juvenile.