“Holy shit,” Deke said, “this is real cheese. . . He was sitting on a gutsprung sofa, wedged between a four-foot teddy bear and a loose stack of floppies. The room was ankle-deep in books and clothes and papers. But the food she magicked up Gouda cheese and tinned beef and honest-to-God greenhouse wheat wafers was straight out of the Arabian Nights. “Hey,” she said. “We know how to treat a prole- boy right, huh?” Her name was Nance Bettendorf. She was seventeen. Both her parents had jobs greedy bug- gers and she was an engineering major at William and Mary. She got top marks except in English. “I guess you must really have a thing about rats. You got some kind of phobia about rats?” He glanced sidelong at her bed. You couldn’t see it, really; it was just a swell in the ground cover. “It’s not like that. It just reminded me of something else, is all.” “Like what?” She squatted in front of him, the big shirt riding high up one smooth thigh. “Well . . . did you ever see the ” his voice invol- untarily rose and rushed past the words “Washington Monument? Like at night? It’s got these two little red lights on top, aviation markers or something, and I, and I…” He started to shake. “You’re afraid of the Washington Monument?” Nance whooped and rolled over with laughter, long tanned legs kicking. She was wearing crimson bikini panties. “I would die rather than look at it again,” he said levelly. She stopped laughing then, sat up, studied his face. White, even teeth worried at her lower lip, like she was dragging up sommething she didn’t want to think about. At last she ventured, “Brainlock?” “Yeah,” he said bitterly. “They told me I’d never go back to D.C. And then the fuckers laughed.” “What did they get you for?” “I’m a thief.” He wasn’t about to tell her that the actual charge was career shoplifting.
“Lotta old computer hacks spent their lives program- ming machines. And you know what? The human brain is not a goddamn bit like a machine, no way. They just don’t program the same.” Deke knew this shrill, desperate rap, this long, circular jive that the lonely string out to the rare listener; knew it from a hundred cold and empty nights spent in the company of strangers. Nance was lost in it, and Deke, nodding and yawning, wondered if he’d even be able to stay awake when they finally hit that bed of hers. “I built that projection I hit you with myself,” she said, hugging her knees up beneath her chin. “It’s for muggers, you know? I just happened to have it on me, and I threw it at you `cause I thought it was so funny, you trying to sell me that shit little Indojavanese pro- grammer.” She hunched forward and held out her hand again. “Look here.” Deke cringed. “No, no, it’s okay, I swear it, this is different.” She opened her hand. A single blue flame danced there, perfect and ever- changing. “Look at that,” she marveled. “Just look. I programmed that. It’s not some diddly little seven- image job either. It’s a continuous two-hour loop, seven thousand, two hundred seconds, never the same twice, each instant as individual as a fucking snowflake!” The flame’s core was glacial crystal, shards and facets flashing up, twisting and gone, leaving behind near-subliminal images so bright and sharp that they cut the eye. Deke winced. People mostly. Pretty little naked people, fucking. “How the hell did you do that?” She rose, bare feet slipping on slick magazines, and melodramatically swept folds of loose printout from a raw plywood shelf. He saw a neat row of small consoles, austere and expensive-looking. Custom work. “This is the real stuff I got here. Image facilitator. Here’s my fast-wipe module. This is a brainmap one-to-one func- tion analyzer.” She sang off the names like a litany. “Quantum flicker stabilizer. Program splicer. An image assembler…” “You need all that to make one iittle flame?” “You betcha. This is all state of the art, profes- sional projective wetware gear. It’s years ahead of any- thing you’ve seen.” “Hey,” he said, “you know anything about SPADS & FOKKERS?” She laughed. And then, because he sensed the time was right, he reached out to take her hand. “Don’t you touch me, motherfuck, don’t you ever touch me!” Nance screamed, and her head slammed against the wall as she recoiled, white and shaking with terror. “Okay!” He threw up his hands. “Okay! I’m nowhere near you. Okay?” She cowered from him. Her eyes were round and unblinking; tears built up at the corners, rolled down ashen cheeks. Finally, she shook her head. “Hey. Deke. Sorry. I should’ve told you.” “Told me what?” But he had a creepy feeling. already knew. The way she clutched her head. The weakly spasmodic way her hands opened and closed. “You got a brainlock, too.” “Yeah.” She closed her eyes. “It’s a chastity lock. My asshole parents paid for it. So I can’t stand to have anybody touch me or even stand too close.” Eyes opened in blind hate. “I didn’t even do anything. Not a fucking thing. But they’ve both got jobs and they’re so horny for me to have a career that they can’t piss straight. They’re afraid I’d neglect my studies if I got, you know, involved in sex and stuff. The day the brain- lock comes off I am going to fuck the vilest, greasiest, hairiest . . She was clutching her head again. Deke jumped up and rummaged through the medicine cabinet. He found a jar of B-complex vitamins, pocketed a few against need, and brought two to Nance, with a glass of water. “Here.” He was careful to keep his distance. “This’lI take the edge off.” “Yeah, yeah,” she said. Then, almost to herself, “You must really think I’m a jerk.”